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Whimsical Animations

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1•bluehatbrit•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Online Photo Gallery

https://www.newurgency.art
1•Stepanchykov•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A decentralized command line key-value store on Nostr

https://github.com/chr15m/nkv
2•chr15m•5m ago•0 comments

Huawei's Pura 80 roll-out in Dubai is latest move in global smartphone push

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1•outrunner•12m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How do I get traffic and distribution for my app cheaply?

2•notlemon•13m ago•1 comments

Apache Fory Serialization Framework 0.11.2 Released

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Data Over Time – some tips on dealing with the challenges of temporal data

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1•julik•16m ago•0 comments

Ultra-thin bendy solar panels are so light you can wear them

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Convert a GitHub Markdown file to a pretty HTML CV

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Awesome Fresh Developer Tools

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6•dariubs•30m ago•1 comments

Hertz and Other Rental Car Agencies Turn to AI for Damage Detection

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2•perihelions•30m ago•0 comments

Woman takes 10x dose of turmeric, gets hospitalized for liver damage

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12•burnt-resistor•35m ago•7 comments

One Company Poisoned the Planet

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A Stroke of Genius: Striving for Greatness in All You Do by R.W. Hamming

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Slack's 57MB 404 page

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A Mind Is Born: 256 byte Commodore 64 demo

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Navigating AI in translation: Why human expertise still matters

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Exploiting Public App_key Leaks to Achieve RCE in Laravel Applications

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Kimi-Dev-72B

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1•jruohonen•52m ago•0 comments

Google strikes deal to buy fusion power from MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Sys

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Claude Code/Cursor is using grep? Are we devolving

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Guess a random number between 1 and 50

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3•vlaaad•55m ago•1 comments

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7GUIs in Mint

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Self-imposed ban – a lightweight bash script to block commands

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1•alex-moon•58m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The Lumina Probiotic May Cause Blindness in the Same Way as Methanol

https://substack.com/home/post/p-168042147
60•exolymph•5h ago

Comments

trhway•5h ago
>The Lumina Probiotic aka BCS3-L1 is a genetically modified strain of Streptococcus Mutans that was originally billed as producing ethanol and acetoin instead of lactic acid, outcompeting the wild type upon inoculation and thus dramatically reducing incidence of caries caused by acid buildup on the teeth.

i'm yet to see an alcoholic whose regular "mouth washing" by ethanol leads to good teeth (despite ethanol being very powerful antiseptic) .

jostmey•5h ago
According to the article as I understand it, the bacteria in question directly produces formate, the suspected culprit behind the vision loss. Ethanol being produced by the bacteria is not the relevant information here
trhway•5h ago
my point is about selling proposition of that probiotic - production of ethanol which i'd not expect to be long term healthy on its own merits, even without formate.
3eb7988a1663•4h ago
Various metabolic processes in the body already produce methanol and ethanol. Now as to the relative quantities involved, I have no idea what can be produced by bacteria in the mouth.
jostmey•4h ago
Yeah, that is the big question here... how much is being produced. Also, how variable is the product from batch to batch? Could one batch be producing byproducts at much higher quantities than another batch?
floren•4h ago
The idea is that the wild-type Streptococcus that already lives in your mouth produces lactic acid, which is bad for your teeth. The modified bacteria produces ethanol instead, which is neutral for your teeth. I don't believe there's any assertion that the ethanol is helpful to your teeth, just that you're going to have some bacterial colony in your mouth, so they are trying to change the byproducts of that colony to something less bad.
rfl890•5h ago
If you want to learn more about this Lumina probiotic stuff, read this article: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-...
brendanfinan•5h ago
Wait, you're telling me I can get clean teeth AND free booze
hlieberman•5h ago
n=1 isn't necessarily data, and I have other questions (the formate concentration of the probiotic variant is 4x over JH1140, but JH1140 is itself a mutant; what's the formate production of an average wildtype strain?). Methanol can cause blindness in as little as 4mL, so the amounts we're talking about are relatively small; 4mL of methanol ≅ 99mmol.
refurb•5h ago
I doubt an oral colony could produce enough formate to be an issue.

Methanol toxicity hits in the range of grams of methanol over a short period.

I have no idea how the bacteria are applied (oral rinse) but maybe enough got ingested to colonize the intestines? That could produce enough formate.

gleenn•4h ago
Stuff like this is pretty horrifying and sad after we are deregulating the FDA as we speak so this stuff will be harder to catch and also as we are killing all the science research to help fix this poor soul's eyes after the damage was done. Sad and horrifying.
readthenotes1•4h ago
Did the FDA ever regulate stuff like this?
palmfacehn•4h ago
It is marketed as a cosmetic to avoid clinical trials. However, the FDA has approved other dangerous drugs, like Vioxx. Notably, Lumina was brought to market in 2024, before any "cuts to science".

https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/060924/brushing-w-...

kstrauser•4h ago
My wife’s a doctor, and she had patients begging her for leftover samples of Vioxx after it was pulled from the market. Lots of people with rheumatoid arthritis were willing to take the heart trouble risk in exchange for stopping the pain.

I don’t intend to argue we should kept Vioxx around, just to point out that the calculus can get complicated. I would vastly rather protect my heart than get rid of the insignificant amount of pain I experience. Turn that dial up far enough and people could rationally make the other choice.

striking•4h ago
Yes and no.

> Around that time, the patent they had for this bacterial strain expired. Aaron Silverbook, who founded a company called Lantern Bioworks, saw a way to rescue this technology from the regulatory red tape: what if it wasn’t filed as a drug but as a probiotic? He made a deal with Oragenics to acquire the recipe and aimed to get it approved by the FDA through its much less stringent probiotic pathway. He first sold it in Próspera, a libertarian charter city on a Central American island where any biotech product can be sold as long as the buyer signs a waiver, and now the product, renamed Lumina, is gaining hype on social media among cryptocurrency enthusiasts and DIY experimenters. You can even preorder the product for USD 250, to be shipped in June of this year.

from https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-...

jostmey•4h ago
I wonder how much variability there is in the product from batch-to-batch. Could one batch be producing unwanted by products at a much higher quantity than another batch?
bpodgursky•4h ago
It's a bacteria that's meant to colonize your mouth, the concern isn't byproducts in the initial dose, it's whether the bacteria after colonization produce harmful byproducts.
6177c40f•4h ago
Very unfortunate situation, but I'm doubtful that it's the bacteria causing it. As far as I can tell, it just doesn't produce enough formate. The body is pretty good at metabolizing formate, so it really only causes blindness from large, acute exposures, not smaller chronic exposure, AFAIK. Combine that with no other reports of blindness from other users of the Lumina probiotic, nor any similar issues appearing in rodent studies, and the bar for evidence is pretty high.
palmotea•4h ago
> nor any similar issues appearing in rodent studies

That's addressed in the OP:

> And in case you were wondering, this wouldn’t have shown up in the original BCS3-L1 rodent toxicity studies either as most non-primate animals metabolize formate much more efficiently, including rats. This has led to difficulties creating a rodent model of methanol toxicity, in fact.

6177c40f•4h ago
I'm not certain they're correct there, as various studies seem to quote different numbers. Either way, I'm not sure rats are so much more efficient that it would matter: e.g. if the half-life in rats was a few tens of minutes vs the hour or so half-life in humans, would that make the difference between no toxicity and toxicity? Still, I haven't seen other people report vision loss, so maybe the point is moot anyway.

Although, it doesn't preclude some kind of uncommon impairment to formate metabolism, which would explain why it doesn't happen to other people.

spoaceman7777•4h ago
This article is entirely wild medical speculation, with a sample size of one, from someone who claims to have given away all of this Lumina product, and only using a bit of "residue". They also mention using a narcotic supplement with a history of contamination, which creates pretty good odds of other supplement and/or substance use.

The article is also from a blog that was only created 2 hours ago, and has this one post.

I'm not sure why this is all the way up the front page, but it seems very unwarranted.

ghostly_s•4h ago
They also seem to be relying on DIY medical treatment even after apparently having this serious condition diagnosed by a professional.
pazimzadeh•4h ago
yeah very weird article

> At best it seems that I’ll likely never see a bright light or vibrant color ever again for the rest of my life, unless we get an aligned AGI that can fix me (<1%) or we start funding the NIH again and the scientists actually come back (0%).

I understand they are upset because of the symptoms involved but the lack of logic and knowledge here is something else. They mentioned they have used Kratom, which can apparently cause eye issues. Have they used anything else?

I do agree that vendors of genetically modified bacteria need some kind of plan or kill-switch for getting rid of their living therapeutics from your body.

If you are desperate then the Streptococcus mutans should respond to oral antibiotics penicillin, amoxicillin, erythromycin, and cephalosporins.

m3kw9•4h ago
Could be some sort of vitamin or mineral deficiency if I was to give you a positive angle, you really should check that as this >1% vs your other hypothesis. Check out nutritional optic neuropathy. Let us know
MichaelBosworth•4h ago
He did check that out. His test results ruled it out.
misuzu•3h ago
My guess would be that it's migrated to the gut or something