this one is in mice. I guess we're running in circles now.
hahahaa · 2026-07-01 13:47:04 UTC
"in mice" as a non-perjorative, wow ;)
cheschire · 2026-07-01 11:45:56 UTC
Mice tumors, the scourge of humanity.
boxed · 2026-07-01 11:52:18 UTC
Not really the same in this situation though.
drcongo · 2026-07-01 12:28:49 UTC
As in 99.9% of cases of people who rush to the comments desperate to post a link to xkcd because, erm, actually I dunno. Why the hell do half the threads on HN have someone desperately posting an unrelated xkcd?
hootz · 2026-07-01 12:38:12 UTC
It's our Nostradamus Prophecies, just like having an old Star Trek episode for everything that is happening today.
hahahaa · 2026-07-01 13:47:47 UTC
no idea as there is always a relevant xkcd to be had instead.
NetMageSCW · 2026-07-01 14:21:26 UTC
Because they aren’t unrelated.
plasticeagle · 2026-07-01 12:22:59 UTC
The paper states that the results are in vivo, not in vitro. The bacteria seemed to literally have cured colorectal cancer in mice. Mice are apparently strikingly similar to human beings in ways that matter, and so this research is very encouraging.
Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.
aa-jv · 2026-07-01 11:50:45 UTC
Wow, this is humorous .. whats next, the eye of the newt cures wistfulness? I sure hope so.
Seriously though, we are living in an era where the more the science broadens its horizons, the more it just looks like plain ol' witchcraft.
I'm hoping there'll be some uses for figs we haven't thought of, next ..
vixen99 · 2026-07-01 12:15:16 UTC
Sure thing! Plenty of possibilities here for instance: 'Bioactive Compounds in Ficus Fruits, Their Bioactivities, and Associated Health Benefits: A Review'. (It's a pretty extensive list).
Bryan Johnson might be interested in IV’ing frog gut bacteria.
N_Lens · 2026-07-01 12:19:12 UTC
How rude! Bryan is no labrat /j
VladVladikoff · 2026-07-01 12:24:31 UTC
Is Bryan Johnson a mouse with cancer?
cedws · 2026-07-01 12:48:43 UTC
Not yet.
playerm1 · 2026-07-01 14:30:53 UTC
Vampire, I think
functionmouse · 2026-07-01 11:54:59 UTC
Mice are having a great year
N_Lens · 2026-07-01 12:18:33 UTC
Century*
psychoslave · 2026-07-01 12:31:23 UTC
Hmm, mice get much impressive medical results to be linked to here and there, but overall it’s not certain the species benefit that much in happiness and fulfilment.
hack1312 · 2026-07-01 12:39:53 UTC
They told me they’re happy enough when I was delivering them cookies.
eks391 · 2026-07-01 13:45:26 UTC
Did you have milk too? If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for a glass of milk.
jagaerglad · 2026-07-01 12:46:26 UTC
The pride and sense of achievement they ought to feel that members of their kind did something should be enough to feel superior though
hootz · 2026-07-01 12:39:06 UTC
To be honest, they are pretty cute, they don't deserve cancer.
tclancy · 2026-07-01 13:25:55 UTC
Spoken like someone who has never had to rebuild a generator or find out the hard way car wiring is mainly soy-based nowadays.
anticorporate · 2026-07-01 13:40:58 UTC
Wrapping your wiring harness in capsaicin tape works pretty well. Unfortunately, this is a discovery I made after multiple annoying and expensive repairs.
hedora · 2026-07-01 14:43:12 UTC
Chickens ate our environmentally friendly AC line insulator wrap. They won’t touch the cheap gray stuff, at least not after I wrapped it in foil tape.
(They can’t taste capsaicin, though now that I know that exists, I’ll pick some up for other projects!)
giglamesh · 2026-07-01 13:41:52 UTC
I owned a riding mower once. Mice built nests in the engine, blocking enough of the air cooling to result in overheating and blowing the main seal. After fixing that twice I got in the habit of removing enough of the shroudy bits to expose and remove the nests. That took as long as actually mowing the lawn. After a season of that I gave the mower away and now we pay a neighbor to cut the grass. We did consider trying to mouseproof the shed or the mower itself, but we are either too busy or too lazy, depending on who you ask. My long term (probably fantasy) solution is a robotic mower - but we have not much budget for it, are chronically absentee and the property has a lot of odd strips of discontinuous turf.
EDIT: we did revert about 50% of the lawn to native wetland/prairie and we aim to raise that number over time.
hedora · 2026-07-01 14:39:11 UTC
Not sure where you are, but thanks to climate change, the Bay Area and parts of the UK are suffering a massive influx of rodents (breeding season is now 12 months). So, now I’m a bit of an expert.
You’ll find it’s less effort to mouseproof sheds than pretty much any other option.
Bucket traps with water are a good option. They auto-reset. They don’t maim and are no threat to cats/dogs like spring traps, do not kill predators and increase mouse populations like poison does. They’re more humane than glue, for sure.
We use a combination of those, spring traps (if we can put them in the path the mice take) and electrocution traps (in the house). We’ve killed 100’s of mice.
The other important thing to do is remove all piles of anything within 100 ft of all structures. Wetland/prairie is a good plan if you have a buffer zone.
Under no circumstances call Orkin. Complete waste of time. This comment contains more training than their technicians get, and they don’t do their jobs anyway.
rich_sasha · 2026-07-01 13:00:09 UTC
The ones genetically engineered to get Alzheimer's or the ones engineered to get cancer?
vitally3643 · 2026-07-01 13:03:11 UTC
Trick question, all lab rodents are so inbred that they get cancer anyway
CuriouslyC · 2026-07-01 13:10:14 UTC
Plot twist, doesn't matter, even the control group is going to be dead soon if it's not already.
pennomi · 2026-07-01 11:57:43 UTC
The AI- generated diagram is plausible but horribly wrong the more you look at it. Thank goodness the original paper didn’t use that, it’s just this awful blog post that makes the research look like slop.
therobots927 · 2026-07-01 12:10:25 UTC
AGI is clearly right around the corner. It might not be able to make an accurate diagram of a cancer research study but it’s gonna cure cancer in no time…
xingped · 2026-07-01 12:17:15 UTC
~~I wouldn't be so sure about "clearly". We're still very squarely in the "fancy auto-complete" stage of "AI", the name of which I still consider more branding than reality.~~
Edit: Ignore me, I'm sleepy and can't read, lol
hack1312 · 2026-07-01 12:45:44 UTC
The person you’re replying to was being glib
xingped · 2026-07-01 12:57:31 UTC
Lol! Yep, that's my bad. Too sleepy right now.
TaupeRanger · 2026-07-01 12:49:29 UTC
How in the world did you miss such obvious sarcasm?
xingped · 2026-07-01 12:59:25 UTC
Whoops, lack of sleep, haha.
jimnotgym · 2026-07-01 12:07:28 UTC
100 years of trying everything to kill bacteria, and we find they can be jolly useful
gpderetta · 2026-07-01 12:13:55 UTC
humanity has been producing useful things from bacteria for thousands of things already.
degamad · 2026-07-01 12:15:26 UTC
Cheese!
pestatije · 2026-07-01 12:17:04 UTC
lager
usrnm · 2026-07-01 12:18:06 UTC
Yeast are not bacteria, though
VladVladikoff · 2026-07-01 12:21:53 UTC
Most beer until quite recently was sour from bacteria.
usrnm · 2026-07-01 15:04:52 UTC
But not lagers, I think
nephihaha · 2026-07-01 14:05:36 UTC
Just wait til people learn that viruses have some positive uses after decades of being told how awful they are.
rimworld · 2026-07-01 12:14:47 UTC
lol
ballenf · 2026-07-01 12:17:41 UTC
I wonder if animals have always seen frogs as unpleasant medicine they need to eat occasionally. My dog would happily scarf them down if I let him. Or does it have to be IV administered?
Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"?
There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.
cyanydeez · 2026-07-01 12:26:25 UTC
maybe your dog is chasing a high from some rare toad mutation...
psychoslave · 2026-07-01 12:29:18 UTC
Humans can go very far in exploring all kind of variation in whatever craze they get addicted to, all the more if they get all the room and resources to do so.
micromacrofoot · 2026-07-01 12:57:45 UTC
> unpleasant
> happily
I think you answered your own question really, a lot of animals just enjoy eating them (humans included!)
petesergeant · 2026-07-01 12:23:11 UTC
The blog articles (6 weeks old) describes this as new, but the linked paper is closer to 6 months old. Random report of the same bacteria giving a chemo patient sepsis: https://www.cureus.com/articles/342789-sepsis-caused-by-ewin... which seems unfortunate
degamad · 2026-07-01 12:31:45 UTC
Yep, I found that one too - this paper <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/> assumes immunocompetent mice, while the sepsis one was in a patient who was immunocompromised (both by the cancer and by chemo).
Given that many cancer sufferers are immunocompromised, this isn't necessarily a silver bullet, although it is an interesting result.
BigTTYGothGF · 2026-07-01 12:25:26 UTC
Before anybody gets too excited they should check out some of the other reporting on that site, such as "COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection" and "Trump Signed a Directive to Accelerate 6G Deployment to Operate "Implantable Technologies"
VMG · 2026-07-01 12:27:49 UTC
Crank blog, very skeptical
tiffanyh · 2026-07-01 12:40:06 UTC
To give more credit to this blog post, the NIH published findings on this same subject last year.
OP submitted a Substack newsletter as a source with recent posts including such topics as vaccine “deaths” during COVID, their link to autism, and Fauci bioweapon conspiracy theories implicating the entire scientific establishment.
With comments on the current post agreeing that the shadowy cabal will suppress yet another miracle treatment to keep for themselves, so the “goyim” can be sold poison.
oofbey · 2026-07-01 12:41:36 UTC
The blog is highly suspect, but the study is real. That said it’s not a big deal.
Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.
So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.
algoth1 · 2026-07-01 12:49:03 UTC
When my mother was fighting cancer, I recall the many disappointments of finding research shrinking tumours in animal models, only to find out the human research showing it didnt work in humans. This was in the 2010s, before llms, but when google search actually searched the web. Then, once you found something that seemed to work in humans, you were hit with the realization that ‘cancer’ is an umbrella term, and you need to account for cell type, and its numerous mutations.. I think the best approach is to collect a sample of the cancer, genotype it, test it against all known anticancer compounds, similar to how you’d deal with a bacterial infection sample, and then hope that the compound that worked for that specific cancer cell will work inside the human
bcjdjsndon · 2026-07-01 14:12:28 UTC
> Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation
If it never works as well if at all in humans, maybe mice are too different?
jmorenoamor · 2026-07-01 12:42:24 UTC
Sorry but the site looks too sensationalist for me.
Is there any other source?
romx-cell · 2026-07-01 12:44:53 UTC
We are destroying ecosystems so fast that there will be no frogs and we will regret it. The same with all the nature
sevenzero · 2026-07-01 12:48:43 UTC
We get what we deserve. We let the top 1% destroy our planet and also let them live the longest in their bunkers, while we deal with the repercussions of not having done enough.
But I've noticed that folks on HN are very very fond of capitalism, so it's no point arguing against it on here and on the effects of wealth accumulation and greed.
vrganj · 2026-07-01 12:51:24 UTC
People here strive to be the ones hiding in the bunkers as the world burns.
bell-cot · 2026-07-01 13:14:44 UTC
Most humans would prefer hiding in a bunker to burning.
And far better to be hiding, than watching and playing a fiddle from atop some convenient high wall. Or plotting how to destroy your fellow alpha arsonists next.
someonebaggy · 2026-07-01 13:22:16 UTC
It would be even better if the world didn't burn.
1234letshaveatw · 2026-07-01 13:31:01 UTC
Ban AC!
ajkjk · 2026-07-01 12:53:27 UTC
people are very fond of it here -> there's no point arguing against it here?
Backwards logic. If they're fond of it then they're the people to be arguing against, no?
sevenzero · 2026-07-01 13:03:10 UTC
Resource exploitation and destruction of ecosystems are direct results of capitalism and greed and neglect. I stopped bringing up arguments against capitalism on here generally due to the sheer amount of people in privileged circumstances that wouldn't change a thing about their ways. Also doesn't help that people in tech often times have no sense of empathy whatsoever, so its no use to argue about this on here.
Yes yes socialism also made mistakes so capitalism must be better!!
theultdev · 2026-07-01 13:22:43 UTC
so if it's socialism/communism destroying the environment it's a mistake. but if it's capitalism it's by design?
nothing other than the prosperity that capitalism generates is inherently bad for the environment. yeah if you pull people out of poverty their carbon footprint will probably increase. but the alternative is them living in poverty and starving under a communist system (like always)
the amount of goods and services capitalism has generated has saved so many lives. we have huge amounts of excess food we send across the world.
inglor_cz · 2026-07-01 13:43:58 UTC
I lived under both systems.
Yeah, socialism was abandoned precisely because capitalism was better. By the 1980s, residents of Central Europe could quite clearly compare and saw that their western neighbours were richer, healthier and enjoyed cleaner air and water than those of the "Camp of Progress".
Market economy + democracy beats top-down enforced utopian intellectual projects like a Marxist-Leninist state by a difference of a league.
We tried that on our own people so that you don't have to.
someonebaggy · 2026-07-01 13:22:38 UTC
There are many things that are not either capitalism or Russia.
buellerbueller · 2026-07-01 13:34:02 UTC
The grandparent of your post, however, blamed capitalism for the destruction of the environment, as though other economic systems would not do the same. So your comment isn't really that relevant if the parent to your post is just offering a counterexample. I get it, you don't like capitalism, but jumping every time capitalism is mentioned--particularly when your point isn't really relevant--doesn't really win others to your side.
someonebaggy · 2026-07-01 14:22:44 UTC
The destruction of the environment that has actually occurred in our capitalist countries has been because of capitalism.
It's like saying desktop enshittification has been caused by Microsoft. This is true in our timeline, even though if Apple had owned the desktop for 30 years they also would have enshittified it.
adrian_b · 2026-07-01 13:24:58 UTC
The so-called socialist economies were just the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
As a child, I experienced the reality of "socialism", where every word used by the ruling elites meant something very different from what it was claimed to mean.
Unfortunately, already for more than a quarter of century USA and most "capitalistic" countries every year become more and more alike to the former socialist countries, from all points of view, like great wealth inequality, markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, non-existent political opposition, mass surveillance of the population, confusing propaganda in all mass-media, less and less chances to afford to truly be the owner of many kinds of things, like houses, cars or computers. If your car or your computer or your smartphone or your TV set do whatever their vendor or the government want, instead of doing what you want, then obviously you are not their owner.
theultdev · 2026-07-01 13:26:14 UTC
fancy way of saying "communism has never been done properly before."
yeah well that's because the execution matters and turns out when you give people power to choose who gets what, they abuse it. go figure.
KronisLV · 2026-07-01 13:45:26 UTC
Maybe it’s never been done properly cause human nature will never allow it to be, e.g. it’s an ideology that’s incompatible with humanity.
But surely there’s a more sane option than under regulated capitalism with a problematic wealth distribution and fucked up incentives that encourage short term profit at the expense of society, environment and all else?
theultdev · 2026-07-01 13:53:57 UTC
then it's a terrible system to govern humans under.
your system should work with human nature or it will never work.
capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity. socialism falls under greed.
and no there's not a better solution, or at least it hasn't been found yet. if it was it'd still be a form of capitalism, not the other side of the spectrum.
but we disagree on the effects of the current system. capitalism has not been at the expense of society, the opposite in fact. we've had so much prosperity due to it.
same with the environment really. communist countries don't really have better air quality, worse in fact! US has the money from capitalism to develop clean tech.
ImPostingOnHN · 2026-07-01 14:06:10 UTC
I agree with both of y'all: Humans are inherently tribal, greedy, and selfish, and seek to better themselves and their kin at the expense of others.
Communism seeks to mitigate or avoid this human instinct, often failing.
Capitalism throws its hands in the air and says "ok, be greedy and selfish, ignore others and society, and if we're lucky, and it sometimes provides any societal benefit, that's purely incidental and secondary to you making money".
adrian_b · 2026-07-01 14:02:11 UTC
Communism has never been done properly, because it cannot be done properly.
Communism is an erroneous idea. It starts from a correct premise, that humans who have accumulated much wealth are able to use it abusively for accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the others, and this positive feedback cannot be stopped without some kind of regulation.
However, the solution proposed by communism is an illusion that cannot work with real humans. The communist solution is to confiscate everything valuable from all citizens and put it under the management of the state bureaucrats, who supposedly will administrate it efficiently and in such a manner as to produce maximum benefits for all citizens.
The reality is that of course the communist bureaucrats are composed of the same people who succeed to become politicians or managers everywhere, i.e. those for whom the priority is to satisfy their own interests and greed, and not the interests of the entire society.
Therefore in all socialist/communist countries, those who were supposed to manage resources in the name of the "entire society" behaved exactly like the owners of those resources, so they lived like US millionaires or even billionaires, while most of the population lived in poverty, because all what their parents or grand-parents had in the past had been confiscated and now they were at the mercy of their managers, who decided unilaterally what they should be allowed to work and what they should receive to be able to live.
The only solution that could work would be the exact opposite of communism. Instead of centralizing everything, the production of at least all the things strictly necessary for living should be as distributed as possible, done by numerous small local companies, not by a few huge global monopolies.
Instead of having 3 producers of memory chips for the entire Earth, there should be at least 3 or 4 in every country. Similarly for any other industrial product.
Unfortunately that is extremely unlikely to happen because during the last decades everything has evolved in the opposite direction.
To continue with the same example, when I was young a large fraction of the European countries were still able to make integrated circuits and computer memories, even many of the East-European countries. But then one-by-one most electronics or computing companies have been bought or closed, until none survived. An important role in the disappearance of the electronics industries in most countries had been that of USA, who used various means of pressure and blackmailing to prevent other countries to enact protectionist measures favoring their internal producers against US companies, i.e. exactly what now USA itself uses against China.
ImPostingOnHN · 2026-07-01 13:40:17 UTC
This line from your article really stood out to me: "It was typical to use natural resources extensively without considering the effects on the environment."
Because, per the article, the environmental disasters under "Socialist Russia" seem to match many of the ones in "Capitalist America". The thing in common between the two seems to be rich oligarchs controlling government, and leveraging their power to extract profits, with little regard given to the proles or the environment.
Crazy how much the supposedly "pro-capitalist" right wing mirrors the supposedly "Socialist Russia" sometimes.
inkcapmushroom · 2026-07-01 13:16:00 UTC
Those things have also happened under other forms of economic structure, such as feudalism and communism. In fact there's no point in human history when we weren't manipulating the environment for our gain, destroying some species and promoting others in the process, we just got better at it over time. It's sort of an inevitability given we are megafauna who take a lot of resources per human to live, and there are an awful lot of us.
Rather than blaming "capitalism" as a whole, I would more put the blame on our ability to ignore negative externalities when pricing things in. That occurs just as much in any other economic system.
Leonard_of_Q · 2026-07-01 13:01:15 UTC
Yeah, sure, capitalism, 1%, etc. Spoken like a 15yo who just saw some DSA- agitprop on TikTok and is now ready to solve the world's problems.
sevenzero · 2026-07-01 13:03:42 UTC
Just proves my point :)
buellerbueller · 2026-07-01 13:29:59 UTC
Solving the world's problems is certainly a more laudable goal than the accumulation of wealth, don't you think?
Comments
Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.
Seriously though, we are living in an era where the more the science broadens its horizons, the more it just looks like plain ol' witchcraft.
I'm hoping there'll be some uses for figs we haven't thought of, next ..
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/06ab/f83d30ec00bb902bb1aa37...
https://radiolab.org/podcast/best-medicine
They followed a 1100 year old medicine recipe and found the resulting salve was effective against MRSA in their test.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6261618/
(They can’t taste capsaicin, though now that I know that exists, I’ll pick some up for other projects!)
EDIT: we did revert about 50% of the lawn to native wetland/prairie and we aim to raise that number over time.
You’ll find it’s less effort to mouseproof sheds than pretty much any other option.
Bucket traps with water are a good option. They auto-reset. They don’t maim and are no threat to cats/dogs like spring traps, do not kill predators and increase mouse populations like poison does. They’re more humane than glue, for sure.
We use a combination of those, spring traps (if we can put them in the path the mice take) and electrocution traps (in the house). We’ve killed 100’s of mice.
The other important thing to do is remove all piles of anything within 100 ft of all structures. Wetland/prairie is a good plan if you have a buffer zone.
Under no circumstances call Orkin. Complete waste of time. This comment contains more training than their technicians get, and they don’t do their jobs anyway.
Edit: Ignore me, I'm sleepy and can't read, lol
Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"?
There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.
> happily
I think you answered your own question really, a lot of animals just enjoy eating them (humans included!)
Given that many cancer sufferers are immunocompromised, this isn't necessarily a silver bullet, although it is an interesting result.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/
With comments on the current post agreeing that the shadowy cabal will suppress yet another miracle treatment to keep for themselves, so the “goyim” can be sold poison.
Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.
So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.
If it never works as well if at all in humans, maybe mice are too different?
Is there any other source?
And far better to be hiding, than watching and playing a fiddle from atop some convenient high wall. Or plotting how to destroy your fellow alpha arsonists next.
Backwards logic. If they're fond of it then they're the people to be arguing against, no?
nothing other than the prosperity that capitalism generates is inherently bad for the environment. yeah if you pull people out of poverty their carbon footprint will probably increase. but the alternative is them living in poverty and starving under a communist system (like always)
the amount of goods and services capitalism has generated has saved so many lives. we have huge amounts of excess food we send across the world.
Yeah, socialism was abandoned precisely because capitalism was better. By the 1980s, residents of Central Europe could quite clearly compare and saw that their western neighbours were richer, healthier and enjoyed cleaner air and water than those of the "Camp of Progress".
Market economy + democracy beats top-down enforced utopian intellectual projects like a Marxist-Leninist state by a difference of a league.
We tried that on our own people so that you don't have to.
It's like saying desktop enshittification has been caused by Microsoft. This is true in our timeline, even though if Apple had owned the desktop for 30 years they also would have enshittified it.
As a child, I experienced the reality of "socialism", where every word used by the ruling elites meant something very different from what it was claimed to mean.
Unfortunately, already for more than a quarter of century USA and most "capitalistic" countries every year become more and more alike to the former socialist countries, from all points of view, like great wealth inequality, markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, non-existent political opposition, mass surveillance of the population, confusing propaganda in all mass-media, less and less chances to afford to truly be the owner of many kinds of things, like houses, cars or computers. If your car or your computer or your smartphone or your TV set do whatever their vendor or the government want, instead of doing what you want, then obviously you are not their owner.
yeah well that's because the execution matters and turns out when you give people power to choose who gets what, they abuse it. go figure.
But surely there’s a more sane option than under regulated capitalism with a problematic wealth distribution and fucked up incentives that encourage short term profit at the expense of society, environment and all else?
your system should work with human nature or it will never work.
capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity. socialism falls under greed.
and no there's not a better solution, or at least it hasn't been found yet. if it was it'd still be a form of capitalism, not the other side of the spectrum.
but we disagree on the effects of the current system. capitalism has not been at the expense of society, the opposite in fact. we've had so much prosperity due to it.
same with the environment really. communist countries don't really have better air quality, worse in fact! US has the money from capitalism to develop clean tech.
Communism seeks to mitigate or avoid this human instinct, often failing.
Capitalism throws its hands in the air and says "ok, be greedy and selfish, ignore others and society, and if we're lucky, and it sometimes provides any societal benefit, that's purely incidental and secondary to you making money".
Communism is an erroneous idea. It starts from a correct premise, that humans who have accumulated much wealth are able to use it abusively for accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the others, and this positive feedback cannot be stopped without some kind of regulation.
However, the solution proposed by communism is an illusion that cannot work with real humans. The communist solution is to confiscate everything valuable from all citizens and put it under the management of the state bureaucrats, who supposedly will administrate it efficiently and in such a manner as to produce maximum benefits for all citizens.
The reality is that of course the communist bureaucrats are composed of the same people who succeed to become politicians or managers everywhere, i.e. those for whom the priority is to satisfy their own interests and greed, and not the interests of the entire society.
Therefore in all socialist/communist countries, those who were supposed to manage resources in the name of the "entire society" behaved exactly like the owners of those resources, so they lived like US millionaires or even billionaires, while most of the population lived in poverty, because all what their parents or grand-parents had in the past had been confiscated and now they were at the mercy of their managers, who decided unilaterally what they should be allowed to work and what they should receive to be able to live.
The only solution that could work would be the exact opposite of communism. Instead of centralizing everything, the production of at least all the things strictly necessary for living should be as distributed as possible, done by numerous small local companies, not by a few huge global monopolies.
Instead of having 3 producers of memory chips for the entire Earth, there should be at least 3 or 4 in every country. Similarly for any other industrial product.
Unfortunately that is extremely unlikely to happen because during the last decades everything has evolved in the opposite direction.
To continue with the same example, when I was young a large fraction of the European countries were still able to make integrated circuits and computer memories, even many of the East-European countries. But then one-by-one most electronics or computing companies have been bought or closed, until none survived. An important role in the disappearance of the electronics industries in most countries had been that of USA, who used various means of pressure and blackmailing to prevent other countries to enact protectionist measures favoring their internal producers against US companies, i.e. exactly what now USA itself uses against China.
Because, per the article, the environmental disasters under "Socialist Russia" seem to match many of the ones in "Capitalist America". The thing in common between the two seems to be rich oligarchs controlling government, and leveraging their power to extract profits, with little regard given to the proles or the environment.
Crazy how much the supposedly "pro-capitalist" right wing mirrors the supposedly "Socialist Russia" sometimes.
Rather than blaming "capitalism" as a whole, I would more put the blame on our ability to ignore negative externalities when pricing things in. That occurs just as much in any other economic system.