I don't know that you'll be able to get anywhere close to 1.8g of R-ALA without supplementing.

I don't remember the three dosage levels that they tested but it was probably factors of two. If that's true, then the lowest dosage was 450mg a day, divided into three doses. And that wasn't as successful as higher doses.

Does an 8% patch hurt?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3755533/

> Patients were prepared for the patch with 4% lidocaine cream that was applied for 1 h prior to treatment. The capsaicin 8% patch (NGX-4010) was applied for 60 min to a maximum area of 1000 cm2. In the dose-ranging study, it was applied for 30, 60 and 90 min [Webster et al. 2010]. Treatment-related pain was dealt with by local cooling methods and oral oxycodone (1 mg/ml). In the first week after treatment, hydrocodone bitartrate/acetaminophen (5 mg/500 mg) was allowed as rescue medication up to day 5 only.

If you're not familiar with analgesics, stacking hydrocodone with acetaminophen is a common practice.

Is 5mg of hydrocodone a lot? Let me put it this way, 10 mg every 12 hours is for 'severe pain',

https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/hydrocodone-oral-route/proper-use/drg-20084881

I can't imagine that there's any chemical difference between the capsaicin in the patches and the capsaicin in OTC products.

Here's a link to a paper discussing the 8% patches,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3755533/

In relation to pain from the patch, this part might be what people are looking for,

> Patients were prepared for the patch with 4% lidocaine cream that was applied for 1 h prior to treatment. The capsaicin 8% patch (NGX-4010) was applied for 60 min to a maximum area of 1000 cm2. In the dose-ranging study, it was applied for 30, 60 and 90 min [Webster et al. 2010]. Treatment-related pain was dealt with by local cooling methods and oral oxycodone (1 mg/ml). In the first week after treatment, hydrocodone bitartrate/acetaminophen (5 mg/500 mg) was allowed as rescue medication up to day 5 only.

I can't find the link right now but there was a very high quality study done a few years ago (IIRC it involved 20 hospitals and several thousand patients) using R-Alpha Lipoic Acid and L-Acetyl Carnitine.

Roughly 40% of the patients reported dramatic reduction in foot pain with a large fraction showing reinervation.

Both ALA and Carnitine have been used individually to teat diabetic neuropathy with mixed results. This study concluded that the trick was to combine them. IIRC they tried three different dosages and found a dose dependent response for the two lowest dosages and little/no benefit at the highest dosage (600mg R-ALA plus 1g L-Acetyl Carnitine, 3x a day).

It's important to use R-ALA. When ALA is synthesized, you get a mix of both isomers (R and S) but R is the only one that seems to be useful to the mitochondria. If you're buying ALA and it doesn't say R-ALA, you're buying a mix of both R-ALA and S-ALA.

https://geronova.com/consumers/different-forms-of-lipoic-acid/

FWIW, my experience (N=1) is that this eliminated my partner's unmanageable foot pain. She's seen all the various specialists at both Stanford and UCSF, done all the tests, and was told that the next (very painful) step was to the pain management clinic.

She told them what she was doing in later follow-ups with Stanford and UCSF Neurologists. They all said, 'Yeah, we use ALA for diabetic neuropathy'.

So, this isn't a guarantee, but it's got about a 40% success rate.

I imagine that what you're saying is that just the multi-branched portion of the axion that's near the surface of the skin is what atrophies and then regenerates. Kind of like if I were to sever an axion and then regenerate from the stub.

Min was a god long before Rome. We're talking predynastic, 6000 years ago,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min_(god)

^ The one right answer in this thread so far.

Yes, this is indeed Min

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min_(god)

Two orders of magnitude, and that's for a pulse reptation rate that you can measure with a calander.

1997? I was getting power from Ed's CVLs back in 1982 and that was an upgraded incarnation of the previous Laser Fusion facility.

I understand the need to show Physics Breakeven before Engineering breakeven, but there needs to be a lot of parallelism in those two efforts. I think that we all remember how Ed was promising to a working laser fusion facility online in a decade.

Ed is a fantastic guy. I have huge respect for him, but Ed's long gone from the NIF (and from the Great Magellanic Telescope), and NIF is nowhere near Engineering Breakeven, let alone a working fusion facility.

In a world where people are deeply upset about the environmental health effects of fragments of shells made out depleted uranium, I don't think that scattering highly enriched uranium is going to fly.

Yes, spent fuel rods are a lot more dangerous but the cost of mass to orbit is very high. Every plan that I've heard of calls minimizing the size of the reactor and the fuel load. So we're looking at highly enriched uranium or other possible designs. These are more of a problem than what we normally use in fission reactors.

I find that hard to believe.

Why in the world would they be using the enormous old system if they have one that fits in a small room?

Still a very long way away from Engineering Breakeven.

Hmm, reading more about this, it looks like it's possible for the blanket to have a net power gain.

https://irp.fas.org/agency/dod/jason/tritium.pdf

That's encouraging.

I haven't seen the calculations for when Engineering Breakeven happens.

It's not self perpetuating. You need to thwack each pellet with a laser pulse.

The laser pulse creates an X-ray cascade from the jacket of the pellet. The X-ray pressure is what compresses the fuel.

I suspect that the mass of the fuel is a very small portion of the mass of the engine.

Yup, heat-is-heat, but I think that there's about as much overlap between a laser fusion or a tokamak, and a fission plant as there is between a coal fired plant and a fission plant.

There's interesting physics that you can learn from NIF and (aside from all that bomb design we didn, LLNL was ( is ?) mostly a research lab.

We agreed to stop blowing holes into the Nevada desert. I wouldn't be surprised if NIF is an important contributor to designing bombs. And unlike the Nevada Test Site, you can watch the reaction up close and in detail.

We may have overlapped.

I left the Lab in '89. I was working for Jeff Paisner in the AVLIS Process Physics group at that time and Ed Moses was Mr. Laser. Ed provided the laser power for both NIF and AVLIS.

Jeff went on to lead NIF and then went to Los Alamos. Ed replaced Jeff at NIF.

People are kind of allergic to launching radioactive materials. You're one RUD away from dirty bombing yourself or your neighbors.

I can't see nuclear rockets happening anytime soon. It's hard enough to get small thermoelectric generators approved.

I'm not so sure that there's a conversion from fission to fusion. I don't see much commonality in the designs.

I was thinking laser fusion when I wrote that.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty dubious about fusion in general. We had a second fusion project at the Lab, MFE (Magnetic Fusion Energy). That was defunded in the 80's IIRC.

I don't understand projects like ITER. The machine is huge, and it uses a Beryllium jacket to increase the neutron flux because most of the energy in the fusion reaction is carried away by the neutron, but the neutrons get used up in the reaction, which means that they're not available to boil the water for the steam plant.

I've heard it said that ITER's jacket will use one year's worth of the World's production of beryllium. And beryllium is nasty to work with.

There are other groups working on alternative designs, some of them are very interesting but I don't know enough about them to make definitive comparisons.

With an input of about 2 MJ of laser energy they got about 3 MJ of energy out.

They required about 300 MJ of electrical energy to create those 2 MJ of laser energy.

IOW, the system is operating at about 1% efficiency.

Currently, there is no obvious path to improving the efficiency of the laser system to the point where this would be practical.

FWIW, I worked at LLNL. I worked for the guy who ran the NIF in the 90's and I worked with the guy who took over from him. They're each brilliant people and I have the greatest respect for them. But I don't see how this technology is ever going to be a practical means of producing power.

'Converted to Christianity' means that he wasn't a Christian before becoming a Baptist. I know that some Christians believe that if you're not a member of their church then you're not a Christian. But that doesn't fit with the standards that Wiki is supposed to be applying.

And what a fine specimen he was,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Emmett_Bledsoe_Baylor

> During the Civil War, Baylor supported the Confederacy and the grounds of Baylor University, then in Independence, were used as a training and staging ground for the Confederate Army.[8][9] Baylor's nephew, John R. Baylor, was a prominent leader in the Confederacy serving as both a governor and later as a member of the Confederate Congress. > >

> In his role as a judge, he once punished an abolitionist harboring an escaped slave. Another man was punished for not returning a borrowed slave promptly. In 1854, Judge Baylor sentenced a slave to hang for arson. In 1856, he ordered the execution of yet another slave. In 1857, he levied a heavy fine on a white person who bought some bacon from a slave. And in 1862, as the Civil War raged, he ordered the execution of a slave for “intent to rape a white female.”[8]

Baylor was a slave owner. A report commissioned by Baylor University found that of 1856, he owned four slaves; the 1860 Census records him as owning 33 slaves.[10]

In addition to the disgusting aspect of his history, there's the odd reference,

> In 1839, he converted to Christianity and was ordained a Baptist minister.[1]

'Converted'?