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The difference is that CFS HAS for a long time been treated as a psychological illness. It took years for anyone outside of the sufferers to even consider the possibility that it might not be psychological. Notably, people weren't getting better with a psychological approach. Sharpe's PACE study has been strongly rebutted already by other researchers.

In the case of back pain, the various forms of fusion surgery have been a complete failure. For years, surgical centers didn't let that stop them from promising miracles even as research demonstrated that the "abnormalities" on MRI claimed to be the source of the pain were equally likely to show up in pain free control subjects. However, there is still a strong belief that there is a physical basis for back pain, psychology (and anti-depressants) are considered a useful adjunct to physical therapy.

Here is some relevant background on CFS treatment and why patients are so vehemently against any claim that CBT and especially "graded exercise" is at all useful for CFS.

... are you sure? https://jfootankleres.biomedce...

No idea why you were downmodded.

Key in these cases is always what the researches corrected for. In this case they are:
"age, sex, race/ethnicity, parental education, Spanish questionnaire, and later childhood near-road NOx exposure"
( https://ehjournal.biomedcentra... )

That is a pretty paltry list of possible other causes.

WE HAVE THE ANSWER NOW! type articles

They are the bane of science. Note that 'linked to' just implies the correlation, not the causation. It goes south when the retarded 'science reporters' say things such as 'High levels of nitrogen dioxide, which is emitted by diesel engines, in the first year of life led to significantly faster weight gain later, the scientists found'.
That implies causation, something never done in the original paper ( https://ehjournal.biomedcentra... ).

It reminds me how many times they flipped their stance on eggs.

Who flipped their stance, exactly?
It wasn't the scientists. It was the reporters, dietary advisory boards, health blogs and other people who benefit from bending the truth.

When it comes to (food) science news, always look at the primary research. The rest is almost certain to be a misrepresentation of the truth.

https://blogs.biomedcentral.co...

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

Really I'm more inclined towards the systems that apply tactile stimulation to a patch on the user's skin, instead of crowding out their already overtaxed auditory spectrum. https://jneuroengrehab.biomedc...

I don't think we're anywhere near close enough to understanding the underlying principles behind societal or altruistic behaviour, for you to make simplistic, blanket statements about its net, as well as intended, outcomes.

There's evidence to suggest that behaviour that we might normally consider as altruistic is, in fact, ultimately selfish, when you look at organisms from the slightly more sophisticated point of view as a carrier of genes, rather than just a selfish individual: https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcent...

Certainly, when we look at recent social history, we can see that there's many examples where individuals who have purported to act in altruistic, or otherwise unselfish ways, for the benefit of others, have, in the long run, gone on to disproportionately benefit themselves, to the extreme detriment of everyone else i.e every successful Communist leader in the last century.

Interestingly, this kind of deceptive exploitation that relies on the better character (or naivety) of others might be a behaviour that develops in a subset of psychopathic individuals who, rather than simply callously acting in their own self-interest to the detriment of others, actually genuinely believe that they know what is best for other people, better than them themselves. In this way, they 'unknowingly' deceive others into thinking they are altruistic, whilst ultimately only acting selfishly, to the detriment of others, as all psychopaths do. When you look at successful Communist leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc. it's almost certain that they must have been psychopaths in order to lack the empathy that enabled them to do what they did. In this sense, the success of the Communist regimes may, ironically, have been the result of evolutionary competition itself, where having a certain expression of psychopathic traits resulted in an enormous evolutionary advantage.

Is graphene safe?

"We do not yet know whether graphene flakes can become airborne and inhaled in a form that is dangerous during use."

Are carbon nanotubes the next asbestos?

"The difference with asbestos was that the hazards were not known or ignored; large-scale use meant large-scale production, resulting in emissions that weren't properly controlled, which in turn caused exposure at unsafe levels and then widespread disease. This should never have happened and should never again happen."

I'm sure someone will provide me with evidence if I'm wrong, but to date I am unaware of any actual peer reviewed reports documenting that "cell phone addition" is harmful or even exists.

Err not again... Well here you go with a list of studies. It is worse than you think or believe...

The Conceptual Model on Smart Phone Addiction among Early Childhood

Children with smart phone addiction show problems in mental and physical development. In other words, a child addicted to smart phone has higher possibility of having problems in mental development such as emotional instability, attention deficit, depression, anger, and lack of control. Also, physical problems such as impairments in visual and hearing senses, obesity, body imbalance, and lack of brain development are found.

Parenting approaches and digital technology use of preschool age children in a Chinese community

Preschool children are not cognitively mature enough to be responsible for self-determining the content of DTs. This is supported by the findings that parent-child DT use with content of aggressive behavior and antisocial behaviors are found to have a higher tendency to behavioral problems than those who did not

Psychological disorders and their correlates in an Australian community sample of preadolescent children (pay wall)

And the list can go on but you should try to do the search yourself.

Excel is an existential threat to quality of data in the sciences. Just to scratch the surface, in the bioinformatics domain it's known to corrupt gene identifiers. If that doesn't seem like a big deal, you should realize that pretty much every researcher in big pharma and academia is using Excel to help find cancer treatments you might be taking some day.

Excel is eager to reformat and reinterpret data according to its own bizarre rules, but it's treated as some kind of standard data interchange format. I've seen it cause countless problems where I work.

Eliminating Excel by fiat would force real solutions to be created instead of leaning on tools that were never intended for the purpose.

Remember, the brain is mostly fat. Some inspiration of what may be possible: https://nutritionandmetabolism...
"We report the unexpected resolution of longstanding schizophrenic symptoms after starting a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet. After a review of the literature, possible reasons for this include the metabolic consequences from the elimination of gluten from the diet, and the modulation of the disease of schizophrenia at the cellular level."

And:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear...
"Depression doesnâ(TM)t have one specific cause; environmental and genetic factors may be at play, as well as psychosocial stressors, however, a major factor causing depression is unhealthy dietary factors. Fast-food and commercial baked goods are linked to depression in a dose dependent manner, and dietary excellence can be the solution for many suffering individuals. A feeling of a depressed mood can also be a symptom of other medical conditions or a side effect from a medication, so to be sure of what is causing your symptoms, you may need to discuss your depression with your doctor."

Search also on "The UltraMind Solution: The Simple Way to Defeat Depression, Overcome Anxiety, and Sharpen Your Mind" by Dr.Mark Hyman, again focusing on nutrition.

Water-only fasting helps in some cases of mental illness too (especially if brain inflammation is caused by some food allergy). The Russians did a lot of research and practice on that.

Obviously, good mood is more complex than just nutrition. Look at Dr. Andrew Weil for a broader perspective.

Or see this quoting Philip Hickey, Ph.D:
http://www.eqi.org/p1/depressi... Is Not An Illness: It is an Adaptive Mechanism
"In order to feel good, the following eight factors must be present in our lives.
* good nutrition
* fresh air
* sunshine (in moderation)
* physical activity
* purposeful activity with regular experiences of success
* good relationships
* adequate and regular sleep
* ability to avoid destructive social entanglements, while remaining receptive to positive encounters"

Also, check out:"The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time Paperback" by Alex Korb PhD.

There are lots more resources like that. There are lots of alternatives to placebo-like mental drugs...

Our society is also all too quick to label a "spiritual crisis" as mental illness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, when all else fails,consider: "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore for finding meaning and even personal growth in the darkness (might be of some help to you too as it is a difficult journey you are on together).

Good luck to you and your wife!

One of the interesting things about all (or almost all) ``Clinical Scales'' is that they are all equally weighted when the scale/test is being scored. The difficulty and discrimination differences of each item are completely scrapped in favour of the a constant scaling of sum_{i=1}^{p}1*response_{i}. This is unfortunate, and seeing the ``clinically validated'' bit got me thinking about a fun study I could do. A very quick review however found this: An item response theory evaluation of three depression assessment instruments in a clinical sample Mats Adler, Jerker Hetta, Göran Isacsson and Ulf Brodin[0] an open access and from a quick glance, fairly well done, demonstrating that the conventional scaling is wrong. I have some personal differences I would have applied, but it happens.

[0] https://bmcmedresmethodol.biom...

Actually, I did caveat that:
"...according to the /general/ development of humans, not the last 70 years of extended fertility and 'modern' prioritization of career over family..."

Pre modern medicine (actually, frightfully recently in my view) the death rate for women in childbirth was atrocious generally.
(http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/death_in_childbirth_doctors_increased_maternal_mortality_in_the_20th_century.html - note 'medical professionals' actually made it tick UP in the early 20thC)

However, it seems to be clear that maternal death rates from childbirth are high for early teens, drop for later teens, and drop to their lowest for women in early 20s before climbing again steadily.

https://bmcpregnancychildbirth...

If ever a profession was ripe for automation it was "Primary Care Doctor."

In many countries this has already happened. When you "see the doctor" you are actually seeing a nurse with a flowchart. You only see a real doctor if your case is non-routine.

Studies have shown that a nurse with a flowchart or checklist is actually less likely to make a misdiagnosis than a doctor not using one. So the result is better healthcare at lower cost.

Also, slashdot had a great posting maybe a year ago that I've lost track of and dont have time to look up about a huge Israeli study in regards to nutrition that was showing some interesting results in regards to how relative to the individual how the body processes food is.

Yes, this is also an area of research I am very interested in. I think I know the study you are referring to.
https://genie.weizmann.ac.il/p...

Here is another nice review,
https://genomemedicine.biomedc...

And this one was on Slashdot a few months ago,
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

This is common knowledge to anyone who has worked in the field - it's like asking for a citation for the claim that eating too much junk food leads to obesity. But here are two data points:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So that's less than 20% of approved drugs that are discovered in academia to begin with. Academic labs aren't large-scale operations - a single-investigator R01 grant from the NIH might be $5 million over 5 years, and most investigators won't have more than a handful of these. For the really big superstar labs, let's assume a very generous upper bounds of $10 million per year (not all of which is necessarily from the government). If it's a big multi-investigator project, maybe double that. Except for a handful of big centers (like the NIH itself, or genome sequencing centers), academia just doesn't operate at a large scale - a typical university research department is just an aggregation of many smaller units that are largely autonomous. The hidden advantage to these organizational limitations is that failed projects usually fail before anyone spends too much money on them. So let's hypothesize at the extreme, academics spent no more than $50 million per drug candidate. Compare to the numbers in the Wikipedia article.

Now, you could of course argue that because drug development is informed by the public-domain knowledge generated by taxpayer-funded researchers, drug companies are leaching off the public in that way too. I guess that's technically true (albeit difficult-to-impossible to quantify), but you might as well argue that because the government invented digital computers, companies like IBM and Intel should have been nationalized. (Note that the difference in salary between academia and big pharma is relatively large - to shift more drug development to academia, you'll need to raise salaries, or find a lot of scientists willing to work for academic salary while doing grunt work on massive projects that will mostly likely fail.)

To pick a more specific example, the NIH spends approximately $1.2 billion per year on aging-related research (including but not limited to Alzheimer's):

https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/...

Most of that will be single-investigator grants, and as anyone who has worked in basic research can tell you, the majority of the grants that are funded won't lead to any immediate treatments, although they may provide useful information in the long term. In contrast, here is an estimate of the total cost per Alzheimer's drug being $5.7 billion (including failures, and keep in mind the overwhelming bulk of that is spent by drug companies):

https://alzres.biomedcentral.c...

This isn't to argue that taxpayer funding of basic research isn't valuable - it's absolutely essential IMHO. But most of what it produces isn't going to lead directly to new drugs or treatments.

Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for a drug company, but I did receive funding from them as a government scientist, and receive a small bonus from IP licensing fees every year. Frankly it was far more trouble than it was worth; drug companies are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, even if you only talk to the scientists.

The real question here is who is being more immature, the researcher or the publisher.

The researcher has decided to act like a childish asshole.

The publisher has said "unfortunately, due to your stupid manifesto we can no longer carry this paper because it violates our policy".

This guy is perfectly allowed to go all crazy and issue his manifesto of "you can't use my stuff". That doesn't mean that other entities are required to keep hosting his stuff.

The publisher is following a policy, and the people who wrote the paper agree.

This breaches the journalâ(TM)s editorial policy on software availability [2] which has been in effect since the time of publication. The other authors of the article, Arndt von Haeseler and Korbinian Strimmer, have no control over the licensing of the software and support the retraction of this article.

So, really, the only one acting immature is the childish idiot who has decided he's taking his ball and going home, and making up random rules about who can use his software.

But he can own that decision and the consequences.

This isn't two wrongs making a right, this is an idiot living with the real world consequences of being an idiot.

According to this 2008 biomed paper: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1..., Naegleria fowleri is likely vulnerable to Mimivirus (possibly Mamavirus too?) infection.

Given that Naegleria fowleri is close to 100% fatal, why not try infecting the Naegleria fowleri infection with Mimivirus?

Mimivirus is only speciously associated with Pneumonia in humans, and Pneumonia has a much better survivability rate. Worst case scenario it does nothing and the patient dies (which was going to happen anyways), best case scenario the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri and the patient survives with no pathology. Middle road scenario, the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri, the patient survives but has Pneumonia.

Personally, I would choose having a bout of Pneumonia over having my brain eaten by an amoeba any day.

Dr. House, is that you?

According to this 2008 biomed paper: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1..., Naegleria fowleri is likely vulnerable to Mimivirus (possibly Mamavirus too?) infection.

Given that Naegleria fowleri is close to 100% fatal, why not try infecting the Naegleria fowleri infection with Mimivirus?

Mimivirus is only speciously associated with Pneumonia in humans, and Pneumonia has a much better survivability rate. Worst case scenario it does nothing and the patient dies (which was going to happen anyways), best case scenario the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri and the patient survives with no pathology. Middle road scenario, the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri, the patient survives but has Pneumonia.

Personally, I would choose having a bout of Pneumonia over having my brain eaten by an amoeba any day.

Well, here's one - Note "sham".
and another.

The study I'm remembering was slightly different, but I'm being drowned out by different studies.

Here: Homeopathic medical practice: Long-term results of a cohort study with 3981 patients or here: Efficacy, effectiveness, safety and costs of acupuncture for chronic pain – results of a large research initiative.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...

Wearing a seatbelt does in fact increase risk to you of serious harm in certain kinds of accidents. It also protects those around you, as you are held into the driving position in your vehicle, so are less likely to lose/be unable to regain control of your car.

Yep, and making people wear a helmet causes more and worse head injuries than if you don't require them. Sometimes things are not the way you would think they should be.

Vaccines protect the herd -- this is not "random people" but the people you come into contact with each day.

Why should I care about "the herd"? I am not a cow or sheep. I will do what is right for me and my family. They used to tell you to use all the anti-bacterial solutions in you soap and sanitizers also. Only we now find out it is causing much worse bacteria that we can't kill off. Some studies show that being too clean makes your immune system overreact to things causing allergies and autoimmune diseases. I put vaccines into that category. Getting the disease does something different from getting the vaccine as is evident from the different length of immunity given. I'm not saying people should be getting the polio disease. But go on and ask all your older relatives how many people they knew as a kid that died of Measles and I bet you don't find any. Everyone got it, but they make it sound so scary today in the news and it's not.

You do indeed have the right to get the flu instead of a shot.

Only until people like you get the law changed to make it mandatory that everyone get every vaccine that the government mandates and get the flu vaccine added to the list. California is getting rid of the religious exception for vaccines for school children. I guess we just have to get fake medical records made up then. The situation does not really get better, does it. Plus, when you see these outbreaks in the news, they always fail to tell you how big a percentage of the outbreak is among vaccinated people. The Measles outbreak at Disney Land was mostly among unvaccinated people, but there were five vaccinated people that got it anyway. In New York in 2011 an outbreak was traced to a vaccinated 22 year old that gave it to 4 other fully vaccinated people. Did you know that getting the vaccine can cause you to shed fully contagious Measles virus and you can then make other people sick. You probably didn't know that either, did you.

We keep learning about the companies that make these and how the effectiveness is way lower than they have been telling us, or it turns out to cause cancer.

Who is we? I haven't been hearing these things.

They have nothing to do with chicken pox, nor with the flu virus, nor MMR

It seem to me that you people that want to be part of the herd of Sheeple always claim that us "anti-vaxxers" don't know how to think clearly and use scientific methodology and instead just listen to the wackos out there. I find the opposite is true. The people questioning the vaccines we are told to get are always a part of the highly educated demographic and some of the more intelligent people in the population. second paragraph in conclusion In this case you state you haven't heard about something that was discovered back in 2010. I can't help it if you choose to believe the lies spread by vaccine makers and the media, perhaps you need to read up more on the subject before you tell people they should do something when you are flat out wrong. It is in fact the MMR that lack the effectiveness. In particular it is the Mumps part of the MMR. Merk states it is 95% effective. If they don't meet that rate they loose their licence to be the only maker of the Mumps vaccine. So they just lie about it. When challenged and taken to court, their response is that the safety is fine, they don't even try to answer the actual accusation, rather they redirect.

This work has none of the key features of a heart that would make the platform attractive for drug testing. Cardiomyocytes will spontaneously contract if grown on basically anything. The true value of on a chip platforms is in implementations that can recapitulate higher order function or structure like the Bhatia lab's livers or the Allbritton lab's colons.

Somehow these journals need to be paid for their work. Peer review is not free, publishing is not free. Just putting it all out on the Internet for free is not a viable business model, as is proven by the many pay-to-publish crap journals discussed here many times recently.

You mean the crap journals published by e.g. PLOS and BMC?

The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article. There we find this plot of the mortality rate as a function of ingested radioactivity for the pale green butterfly larvae. The changes in mortality are large, from 20% to 80%. The trend is positive, but noisy. The significance of a positive trend is about 3 sigma.

The word "outlier" is used only once in the whole study. It is in the section on mortality.

Show this graph to anybody and let them point out which of the 6 data points is the "outlier". I highly doubt that they would pick the data point labeled "Motomiya".

Spreadsheets tend to mess with strings that look somewhat like a date, it will automatically convert it to a date when it sees things like that. You need to be really careful about spreadsheets automatically reformatting your data, make sure you properly indicate whether a field is Text or not.

e.g. the infamous 'Excel genes', when a gene name like SEPT1 is silently converted to numerical date format:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...

http://nsaunders.wordpress.com...

Excel makes it far too easy for this to happen (just opening and saving a .csv file with Excel will silently corrupt it instead of invoking the data import wizard that would give you a chance to set data types per column - a great design decision!), and it's hard to spot corrupted cells if you have a list of hundreds or thousands of genes. Some of these have made their way into major online genetic databases:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...

Excel in bioimformatics? - just say no, kids.

Spreadsheets tend to mess with strings that look somewhat like a date, it will automatically convert it to a date when it sees things like that. You need to be really careful about spreadsheets automatically reformatting your data, make sure you properly indicate whether a field is Text or not.

e.g. the infamous 'Excel genes', when a gene name like SEPT1 is silently converted to numerical date format:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...

http://nsaunders.wordpress.com...

Excel makes it far too easy for this to happen (just opening and saving a .csv file with Excel will silently corrupt it instead of invoking the data import wizard that would give you a chance to set data types per column - a great design decision!), and it's hard to spot corrupted cells if you have a list of hundreds or thousands of genes. Some of these have made their way into major online genetic databases:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...

Excel in bioimformatics? - just say no, kids.

http://news.sciencemag.org/hea...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://thebulletin.org/threate...
http://armscontrolcenter.org/E...
http://thebulletin.org/unaccep...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.pathobiologics.org/...
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...
http://news.sciencemag.org/sit...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/n...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://thebulletin.org/threate...
http://armscontrolcenter.org/E...
http://thebulletin.org/unaccep...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.pathobiologics.org/...
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1...
http://news.sciencemag.org/sit...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/n...
http://news.sciencemag.org/hea...

When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered

Well, there's this one, but by "multitasking" one generally means "switching between multiple tasks is progress" rather than "simultaneous attention to different tasks," and the study indicates women may be better at the former.

Sometimes people die. It's tragic. And just because SIDS happen, does not mean that you can prevent it. You can only remove known hazards (like pillows), and that's it.

But we know that people that helicopter around their kids are the ones that really screw them up. And I'm not talking about psychological damage. Allergies and related autoimmune disorders. Autism is probably related to it too.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/1/5

and plenty of others.

it takes more effort to be antibiotic resistant than not. That means, absent the use of antibiotics, the resistance will naturally be selected against and fade from the population over time.

Actually, this (often) isn't the case.

It's obvious in theory that antibiotic resistance may or may not have a cost associated - but without any selection pressure, whether the resistance evolves is down to luck. Add the antibiotic and the selection is driven but remove the antibiotic again and the selection pressure doesn't need to be back towards the original state.

What is perhaps more surprising is that reversion to antibiotic susceptibility in the absence of the antibiotic is relatively rare - what actually tends to happen is that there are other mutations driven by the absence of the antibiotic rather than loss of the resistance.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/13/163
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12158/abstract
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/14

The third one is interesting in that it says that sometimes antibiotic resistance can evolve due to a selection pressure unrelated to the antibiotic. If antibiotic resistance was very costly then you wouldn't expect to see this.

it takes more effort to be antibiotic resistant than not. That means, absent the use of antibiotics, the resistance will naturally be selected against and fade from the population over time.

Actually, this (often) isn't the case.

It's obvious in theory that antibiotic resistance may or may not have a cost associated - but without any selection pressure, whether the resistance evolves is down to luck. Add the antibiotic and the selection is driven but remove the antibiotic again and the selection pressure doesn't need to be back towards the original state.

What is perhaps more surprising is that reversion to antibiotic susceptibility in the absence of the antibiotic is relatively rare - what actually tends to happen is that there are other mutations driven by the absence of the antibiotic rather than loss of the resistance.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/13/163
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12158/abstract
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/14

The third one is interesting in that it says that sometimes antibiotic resistance can evolve due to a selection pressure unrelated to the antibiotic. If antibiotic resistance was very costly then you wouldn't expect to see this.

The information is the journal is fixed and static.

That depends on the journal, e.g. this journal Source Code for Biology and Medicine offers the option to comment on articles, just like all the other Biomed central journals, or the PLoS journals.

Now, if you want to test for something other than the efficacy, then you are free to include what ever groups you want, but if your goal is test for how effective once course of action is versus another, then you have to test for those who actually follow that course of action.

Nah, you only have to test for those who actually start that course of action. And guess what? A week of basically any treatment program is just as effective as sticking to the entire program.

What does that mean? Seems to mean that the treatment program doesn't matter, all that matters is the conscious decision to get better. Which include spontaneous quitters.

Put that in your peer and smoke it.

I just checked, and it looks like BMC is still owned by Springer.

Go and dig out a legitimate proof positive placebo publication from a reputable medical journal. I'm waiting...

Good thing you didn't have to wait too long: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/5/3

This study concluded:

The results suggest that placebo interventions can improve physical disease processes of peripheral organs more easily and effectively than biochemical processes. This differential response offers a good starting point for theoretical considerations on possible mediating mechanisms, and for future investigations in this field.

Not "warm fuzzy subjective feelings." "Physical disease processes" - such as blood pressure, and expiratory volume - measurable, quanitifiable improvements were demonstrated in many of these treatments. As opposed to biochemical processes - e.g., cortisol levels - in which much smaller improvements were demonstrated in the small number of cases where any improvements were noted at all.

In other words: placebo treatment may help you manage your blood pressure, but it won't magically make your cholesterol levels go down.

Dismissing placebos out of hand as bunk is just as foolish as saying they're an effective treatment for everything.

But is there really a difference between office in 2013, and office in 2002? It's been ten years of crazy awesome features that just don't matter.

I can now use more rows in Excel, but that's about the only change I've liked since Office 2000. Lots of irritating interface changes since then, but the fundamental annoyances are never addressed - Excel's auto conversion of any text that looks vaguely like a date into date format, silently corrupting the data unless you go out of your way to format the column as text only, is my absolute favourite:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80

No, in other words diversity doesn't happen equally fast at all possible levels. Perhaps a better example would be DNA coding. How the DNA is read stays very consistent. I don't believe there's any chemical reason why AUG MUST be translated as methionine. You could have AUG read as any other amino acid. But if you made that change suddenly, none of your existing protein sequences would work, and you would go extinct immediately.

Gould calls these things constraints on evolution. There are a number of them, one is historical: nature doesn't reinvent the wheel when it doesn't have to. If it can modify something instead, it will tend to do that rather than create a new feature out of nothing.

You seem to know about this field. Can you translate this part for me?

Separate logistic regression for RhD-negative subjects showed a 2.53 times higher risk of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected than Toxoplasma-free subjects (CI95: 1.12–5.7, t = 2.23, P = 0.026). http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/9/72

Are they really saying that this is causing "2.53 times higher risk of traffic accidents" among their infected population of Czech male military draftees???

Imagine the repercussions if this is found to be also true in other populations (not that it will be, and not that correlation equals causation, but...):

Car Insurance rates (or driver licenses) could start depending on the results of those blood tests. Criminal sentencing could be affected by the results of those tests. And at the very minimum, the next time you'd fill out a questionnaire for getting car insurance, or filling out an application for becoming a truck driver or operating heavy machinery, or applying to get into the military, you'd be asked all kinds of questions about your history with cats (whether you owned one, your significant other owned one, or whether your family ever owned one while you were growing up).

Wholly agreed—but it should be emphasized that the mere existence of BAliBASE asserts that the trickiest part still requires direct intervention. There are precious few things in the universe that a computer can do that a human can't do more slowly or in smaller chunks, after all—and most of those are comparatively silly things like set voltages. I could, for example, implement ClustalW by hand, no sweat—just give me your favourite BLOSUM table, a few other parameters for gap size, a stack of paper, and enough time: it's a pairwise alignment followed by a series of careful compromises to approximate something that looks fairly right. In general this approach achieves 96-97% accuracy on BAliBASE tests. Approaching the challenge blindly certainly looks daunting, but like using synthetic division to solve higher-order polynomials, it's actually not that bad in terms of memory consumption or effort. Of course, there are some really heinously complex algorithms on that chart, like Mafft, which uses a Fourier transform to do something I still completely don't understand, but even the first FFT implementation required unit tests.

That giant tangent aside? The day Slashdot posts an accurate story about bioinformatics is the day I get tenure. :)

Real men have slower reaction times? Or Real Men are Rh+ too? ;)
Toxoplasma and reaction time: role of toxoplasmosis in the origin, preservation and geographical distribution of Rh blood group polymorphism.:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18752708
Increased incidence of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective effect RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/9/72
Toxoplasma gondii: from animals to humans.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/11113252?dopt=Abstract&holding=f1000,f1000m,isrctn

Who you tryin to get crazy with, doctor? Don't you know I'm loco?

Chinese medicine has always included acupressure as an effective treatment. Indeed, it predates acupuncture -- not surprisingly, people noticed "it feels better if I press and rub here" before they thought, "hey, what if I stick a bamboo splinter into my skin so I can stimulate that point but free up my hands?" Pick up an acupuncture products catalog and you'll find a variety of "pellets" which can be taped to the skin to stimulate the points without puncturing the skin.

So at best, "sham" needles -- i.e., acupressure -- as a control for acupuncture is like using aspirin as a control while investigating a new painkiller.

The study that Yong (not "Tong") mentions also featured treatment via a set of points determined in advance by one therapist, and delivered by another. But when I see my acupuncturist (or even when I give a shiatsu treatment including the use of acupressure points), point selection is determined in part by the response to earlier points. So this is rather different than acupuncture as practiced by knowledgeable practitioners.

That study also excluded patients with previous acupuncture treatment for any condition; based on my experience, however, it seems that it takes some experience with acupuncture to learn how to give feedback to the practitioner, to recognize and report the de qi sensation, so the effectiveness of the treatment increases with experience. (Perhaps there is also something like the habituation required for a cannabis "high" at work here, with the patient learning to interpret and respond to new sensations.) And the study also excluded those with "specific causes of back pain", so would seem to likely include a high proportion of those whose complaints had a strong psychosomatic component, and so would be poorly suited to investigating the physiological mechanisms involved.

This is all too representative of the problems with much acupuncture research: what gets tested often has little to do with Chinese medicine as it is applied by knowledgeable practitioners.

Despite these problems, this study found that "Compared with usual care, individualized acupuncture, standardized acupuncture, and simulated acupuncture [i.e., acupressure] had beneficial and persisting effects on chronic back pain." Nor does the study's comparison of individualized acupuncture vs. standardized acupuncture justify Yong's claim that it did not matter where the needles were placed. It takes some twisting to interpret this study the way that Yong would like to.

And of course the placebo effect plays a role -- as it does in any treatment, including surgery. If my acupuncturist is doing nothing beyond triggering a placebo response in me, the results are still real, and what I pay her for the little show she puts on that lets whatever part of brain is responsible do its thing, is a bargain.

(My bias: I'm and NCCAOM Diplomate in Asian Bodywork Therapy; my practice is a small sideline to my computer geek day job.)

The summary discusses an article which is talking about an abstract of the provisional paper available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1741-7007-8-30.pdf .

There are other articles with more coverage -- Live Science, BMC Biology (PDF of 20-page article with pictures available), New Scientist, Nature, and others. The provisional PDF available at BMC Biology is the full article as it was accepted, and details the experimental procedure that confirmed that these were completely anaerobic organisms.

I have not seen ANY studies that suggest that OCCASIONAL exposure to second hand smoke is a hazard.

I just spent 20 seconds with Google and found several. Why do you post bullshit assumptions and expect others to invest their time and energy to set you right?

So I'll post just one and invite you to do some research yourself:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/2/9

from the conclusions:
"Consequently, this study supports the hypothesis that even occasional secondhand smoke increases the risk of developing acute coronary syndromes"