golden bubble posted:

He's just a fat, stressed-out alcoholic smoker who doesn't shower regularly and suffers from erectile dysfunction. It's not good, but you can find worse horror stories in the Goon Doctor subforum.

Also TIL that Neutrophils have three ways to attack intruders. We all know about phagocytosis and the secretion of anti-microbial proteins. But I just found out about neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). NETs a created when a neutrophil weaponizes its own DNA by covering it with anti-microbial compounds. It proceeds to shoot its DNA at the intruder, like some sort of 12 gage Net shell. Sometimes the neutrophil dies, and weighs down the intruder with its own dead body. But other times, the neutrophil continues to function and fight bacteria with an empty nucleus.

Captain Cappy posted:

Based on some intense google research, I don't think Macrophages are as big as these memes suggest, except in the case that they're combining to eat something huge. They should be around ~20 micrometer. I also find it strange how varied different sources list the sizes of the different cells. Scientists need to get their acts together imo.

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TIL when you get a sunburn, it’s not your skin cells being damaged by the sun and dying, it’s your skin cells’ DNA being damaged by the sun and them killing themselves so they don’t turn into cancer.

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That’s going to be a really heavy Cells at Work! episode

TerminusEst13 posted:

They've said the body's immune system is compromised, too, so that could also point at a variety of factors.
The two most obvious being AIDS, which would be pretty dark for an edutainment show, and old age.

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Well I'd imagine it to be something more dramatic than that. You see, you see, the body doesn't take HIV infection lying down. During HIV-1 infection, every day for the better part of a decade, the immune system destroy billions of HIV particles while the virus infect billions of CD4 until eventually, years later, the Virus finally out “we have reserves” your body.

It's basically the war against the flood or the war in heaven by the Xeelee against the photino Birds (or any one of those insanely long attrition hopeless forever war in sci-fi).

Imagine this; on the outskirt of the empire, urgent reports are coming in of an invasion by a new enemy. Vast fleets are mustered to meet this new threat and for a time, it seems that the enemy advance might be halted.

But the enemy is crafty, targeting your most experienced commanders. For every battle won or lost, millions of your CD-4 T commanders lies dead or corrupted, even as billions of enemy units are destroyed. But the enemies’ numbers seem limitless and yours… not so much.

In desperation, new commanders are rushed out of officer training schools and thrown into the battlefield to stem the tide. But with every memory cells lost, every native CD4+ T-cells in thymus destroyed, your manpower reserves are slowly but surely drying up.

That was generations ago.

Sectors goes dark due to lack of commanders and even what in sectors you hold, your fellow helper Ts are stretch dangerously thin.

And worse, enemies both old and new have taken noticed of the empire’s weakness and are invading, taking advantage of your decimated fleets to rampage in your thinly defended sectors.

You are one of the few remaining Helper-Ts. All projections predicts that within the next few generations, there would be literally no-one left to fight the enemy, even if the other opportunistic invasions doesn’t get you first.
But you fight on. Because there is no other choice.

El Burbo posted: