Slashdot Mirror

Instead of mowing your lawn every week or so to cut it to a preferred length, why not use a GM grass seed that only grows to your preferred height, and then stays there? It can be modified to require less water, as well. Imagine how much money that'd save golfing institutions. It could even be made Roundup-ready to make it easier to kill weeds. Seems Scotts DID test a Roundup-ready grass for golf courses, but the USDA refused to allow its sale; European/Asian customers scoffed at the idea and they decided to kill it. A discovery suggests that set-height grass is possible, but apparently noone has gone forward with making it.

NASA in 2013 had planned to launch pretty much this same exact experiment by 2015: http://blogs.discovermagazine....

NASA's version was far more of a publicity stunt, since it was all about involving kids in classrooms around the country. But apparently NASA didn't accomplish the mission. China did. Good for China.

This is one of the more cyberpunk tidbits I've heard within the last 3 months, but some tattoos were really throwing off facial recognition. And they found that you could paint your face and effectively fool the system into no longer recognizing your face as a face. So all that really weird face makeup you see in Blade-runner, cyberpunk2020, and Shadowrun could retro-actively be argued as a means to avoid being tagged and identified.

Give us a hundred years and maybe we could grow crops in Antarctica. Dinosaurs once roamed Antarctica.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.... Basically, yeah.

Or just sit down and step up again.

And it will remain that way unless we start building nuclear reactors.

You'll get a perpetual motion machine before you get a safe, cost-effective nuclear power plant. You can go ahead and say we'll never have another Chernobyl or Fukushima again, but the Achilles heel of nuclear power is that the cost can never be justified. It costs far too much to build, far to much to run, far too much to decommission, and far too much to deal with the waste.

It's quite amazing this hypocrisy on nuclear power vs. solar and wind.

That word, hypocrisy. It doesn't mean whatever it is you think it means. Unless you have some breaking news on wind farms causing hurricanes, or solar farms accidentally forming an Archimedes mirror and burning down a city, and people are ignoring that.

Right, let's just ignore that there are currently over 400 nuclear power reactors working on the planet right now.

Like you're ignoring the hundreds of billions it will cost to decommission all those plants, and trillions to store the waste for thousands of years. Costs that no wind or solar farm will have to worry about.

Ever.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Wonder if anyone has researched the parasites left in the latrines to see where people came from when they went?

Generating electricity from wave energy is much harder than you think. The prototype projects in Scotland have all been canceled. It seems that the fundamental challenge of building a device that "rocks around" in the waves yet can withstand the brutal relentless onslaught of the ocean is simply impossible.

One sauce.

I suspect it is reversed to a large extent.

That is, the super-centagarians are not healthy because of genetics, but instead it is impossible to become a supercetagarian unless you are lucky enough to be healthy.

If for example you get infected with pneumonia and survive, it would not surprise me that it would weaken your lungs by say 4% and you end up dying at 80. If you never got the pneumonia you might have lived to 101 merely because you had 100% lung functionality.

Being healthy makes you live longer, it is not always a sign of lack of bad mutations..

In fact, sometimes bad genetic mutations can make you live longer.

Good example are the dwarfs of Ecuador that have Laron Syndrome http://discovermagazine.com/20.... They are basically immune to cancer and diabetes, but suffer convulsive disorders (and also are short).

There's another important sense that this isn't tautological. Sputnik 1 had no scientific instruments- it really was just a beeping sphere. This was because of delays in the originally planned Soviet satellite which was proving too heavy and too complicated http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/vintagespace/2017/10/04/sputnik-was-the-soviets-backup-satellite/#.WdfwV8iGOUk. After the bugs were worked out, that became Sputnik 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_3 which was launched after Vanguard, so the oldest satellite with scientific instruments ever launched was Vanguard, and it is still up there.

The same thing happened to nursing. Originally, the salaries were high enough to qualify as middle-class wage earners. But the government claimed there was going to be a nursing shortage. Dozens new nursing colleges opened everywhere. Then suddenly, there was an oversupply of nurses; salaries fell through the floor, the hospitals soaked up the savings.

Of course, there are two big differences here:

• A larger percentage of the public are capable of being successful at nursing.
• Having more nurses doesn't inherently result in more nursing jobs.

If you look at retention rates and graduation rates as a percentage of incoming freshmen, three times as many CS majors drop out or change majors within the first year, and only about half as many CS majors actually graduate with a CS degree. This is not because CS is hard. After all, nursing is hard and requires intellect. CS requires... something entirely different and much more rare.

Programmers have to be highly creative, but also highly logical. Lots of people are highly creative, but have a hard time wrapping their heads around the logical aspects of programming. Those folks might be decent managers or product designers, but will probably never be good software engineers. Others are highly logical, but are not very creative. That second group might pass as "code monkeys", but also will never be good software engineers.

And programmers also have to simultaneously be able to think abstractly and concretely. They have to be able to see something abstract and turn it into a concrete representation. And to make the big bucks, they also have to be able to go the other way—to see what the final concrete representation is supposed to look like and work their way back to an abstract underlying architecture that can support it, and then turn that into concrete representations for each part.

Programmers also need a larger than average working set memory, a stronger language center, and stronger ability to pay attention—often to the point of hyperfocus (getting "in the zone"). Although to some degree those skills can be improved with practice, they all have a genetic component as well.

Another area with essentially the same properties is music. (This may be why musicians are so over-represented in tech.) Unsurprisingly, in a 2008 study, researchers concluded that musical ability is about 50% genetic. Some people really are naturally predisposed to being good at it, and that predisposition results in getting good at it much more quickly and ending up being better at it than people without that predisposition, regardless of how much effort the latter group puts in.

Any CS teacher will tell you that the same is true for computer programming. There is a sizable subset of people who, no matter how much they might want to learn how to program, will try and try and will never wrap their heads around it, or at best, will do so at a pace that makes it a very poor career choice for them.

It would be great if we exposed more people to computer programming at a young age so that a greater percentage of the people who are innately predisposed to being good programmers will choose careers in that field. I'm not convinced that this will drive the cost of labor down, though. After all, a glut of good programmers will also result in a glut of new ideas that turn into new companies that hire more programmers.

The same thing happened in music beginning in the 14th century. We called it the Renaissance. There wasn't a cheapening of creativity; if anything, the reverse was true. Creativity bred demand for creativity. Similarly, that's what will likely happen if we convince people that there is a shortage of computer programmers. In fact, that's what has been happening for the last couple of decades, just in case folks didn't notice.

And Donald is wearing a natural covering of feathers that adequately cover his inside-out pOnOs.

Yeah, I read the linked paper and a lot of the breathless press about it, too. Thanks for asking. The press really got it wrong, and maybe that's what twisted me up. These guys got it right: http://blogs.discovermagazine.... -- very few of the others did.

The reason that there is so much guaiacol in whisky from Scotland has a whole lot to do with the way that they smoke the barley. Especially the Islay whiskys. They smoke the malted barley, then ferment it, then distill it, and even after being distilled twice, the whisky still smells smoky to the nose, and more so with a splash of water.

Makers Mark is made from corn, and the only thing smoked is the inside of the barrel, which is charred. The article authors are not talking about high-proof bourbon. IMHO, you are just diluting that, which may not be a bad thing.

[Citation Needed]

It falls on you to back up your claim, first.

Uh, that post is almost certainly trolling, in the original internet sense of the word: somebody who is posting for no other reason than to get a reaction. Responding to him in any way does nothing other than feed the troll; the correct reaction was to ignore him and wait for him to be moderated "troll".

It's too late for that now, though. To deal with facts: the actual response is that autism rates are not declining: http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Here's a good correlation graph, if you're looking for correlation: https://www.sciencebasedmedici...

Here is the deal for my jurisdiction -- Québec Canada
No vaccination, homeschooling. No vaccination--no public schooling access. No college or university access (which all are greatly funded by the government) and its likely your child won't have a playmate, unless the other is also home schooled.

[Citation Needed]

It falls on you to back up your claim, first.

Uh, that post is almost certainly trolling, in the original internet sense of the word: somebody who is posting for no other reason than to get a reaction. Responding to him in any way does nothing other than feed the troll; the correct reaction was to ignore him and wait for him to be moderated "troll".

It's too late for that now, though. To deal with facts: the actual response is that autism rates are not declining: http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Here's a good correlation graph, if you're looking for correlation: https://www.sciencebasedmedici...

But what was the *dead salmon* thinking, Mary Lou?

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

The hype over T.gondii has been largely driven by popular opinion pieces such as “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy” instead of high quality research.

In-fact in what they call, "to our knowledge, the most comprehensive assessment of the possible link between T. gondii infection and a variety of impairments in a single cohort," Duke University researchers Karen Sugden suggests that there may be nothing to worry about after all. They report that toxoplasmosis is associated with essentially no behavioural abnormalities in humans. http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Apparently iodine is the reason people today are marginally more intelligent than the were before.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

That doesn't mean that genetics doesn't make a difference.

I've read about this role for the appendix for at least 5 years? At LEAST.

Here's an early article I found on the subject https://blogs.scientificameric... - and if SciAm had it in 2012, it had to be relatively established information, they're not anywhere near cutting-edge reportage.

And here's a Discover magazine thing saying the same thing in 2008: http://discovermagazine.com/20...

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Sorry, but that's just not the case. The problem in that statistical analysis is that the "pause" only exists if you pick exactly the right data subsetset. Pick the wrong start year, and it vanishes. But when you have to select a specific data subset to show an effect, and the only reason to pick that data subset is that this is the one that shows the effect-- that's not signal; that's statistical noise. The noise in the measurement is about 0.2C; the run of 18 years (or whatever run you pick) is simply mathematically not long enough to derive a local slope with high enough precision to reject a 0.015/year rise..

The fact that the deniers don't have a well-defined null hypothesis is a significant part of the reason that scientists don't consider their work science. Here is a good null hypothesis: "greenhouse gasses added by humans to the atmosphere do not cause an increase in the average temperature". This null hypothesis thus states that the rise in temperature from 1960 to present is statistical fluctuation (or, due to natural random factors not known, which is equivalent.) But, random noise will go down as much as it goes up. But the upward trend is significant. The graph trends up, but never down.

So, the null hypothesis is statistically rejected.

Now, rejecting the null hypothesis does not necessarily mean that the rise is due to human effects: it means that the rise is real, but does not say what causes it. So, the "human produced gasses do not cause warming" argument needs a different explanation of the rise.

So far, that different explanation simply has not been found, although there have been many many people looking for it.

The current trend is no statisically significant warming for about 18 years,

No, it's not. You're quoting denier talking points from several years ago. The purported "pause"-- which never reached the level of statistical significance-- went back to a rising trend years ago. http://blogs.discovermagazine.... Get some up-to-date talking points, why not?

and considering how few sunspots there have been lately, it's likely to cool down a bit as well.

Considering that meteorologists and climate scientists have been looking for a link between sunspots and temperature for over a hundred years now, and have still failed to find any link, this is a speculation that doesn't seem to have any evidence. The latest solar cycle (24) was lower than the previous one... but the temperature rise during this cycle was more than during the previous one. So, if anything, the most recent solar cycles show the opposite from what you suggest.

Overview: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/n...

The conclusion - men are pigs. From the article, the first and foremost reason : Overt sexism, unwanted attention and sexual harassment create hostile working conditions.

The biggest problem in our workplace between men and women was the men were concerned that by saying the wrong thing, they were going to be fired. So communications with women were very guarded. That certainly isn't a friendly situation, but completely understandable. If you don't have a reason to talk to someone who can have you fired, you probably won't.

A lack of role models for women in technical fields is discouraging. "When faculty members are looking for the next person to win a Turing Award, which is computer science's Nobel Prize, they tend to look for people like the last ones who won such awards. This usually involves looking in the mirror,” Roberts said.

Seriously? a lack of women in technical role models? Here's 90 of them http://womenshistory.about.com... Here's 90 of them http://discovermagazine.com/20...

http://www.mnn.com/leaderboard... Some random ted talks, all by female scientists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And if you want yound ladies to have especially physically attractive role models there's always : https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/p... a physicist/Astronomer who manages to not look like the stereotype egghead.

So all I have to say, if Herr Professor hasn't found female role models to present to his students, well - that is his fault not menarepigs

His study is the typical "women are weak" model, where any negativity causes tehm to seek other careers, which presumably have no sexism and all men are perfect gentlemen. He can rail on about his women's school model for a million years, but it won't cure the problem.

Study on one aspect: https://depts.washington.edu/s...

So the problem appears that if a female encounters any stereotype that she disagrees with, it completely destroys her interest.

Movie: http://www.bigdreammovement.co...

I should come up with a list of links to copy/paste, that lot was just a quick Google search.

So - does this mean that there was something wrong with any woman who did not allow herself to be intimidated out of a science career that she was passionate about, but the passion was killed by anyone that didn't give her positivity?

I don't know specifically

The idea that there's more money to be made shilling against burning petroleum than there is shilling for it is simply farfetched.

Oh, really?

Suppose a climate researcher, let's say Dr. Smith-Jones, is a professor at a university, and he likes his job and he likes his university. Suppose he wants grant money to cover his studies. Do you really think that he will get more money for a study based on the idea that catastrophic climate change isn't real, or more money for a study that will bolster the climate change idea? Keep in mind it is the Obama administration right now.

Now maybe, just maybe, he could make more money by jumping ship and shilling for Evil Big Petroleum company. (a) He doesn't want to; his friends would cut him off cold, he doesn't want to move, etc. (b) He likely doesn't have any idea how to do that. How do you reach out to Evil Big Petroleum company and say "I am willing to shill for you, give me money"?

Any scientist who can conclusively disprove AGW would be able to dine out on that for the rest of his life.

Maybe. Yet here's the thing. I don't understand why we are even talking about this. We believe that human-caused climate change is going to be catastrophic because of some computer models from two decades ago. Those models are outside their 95% confidence interval now. The temperature is nearly flat since two decades yet Carbon Dioxide levels have gone up significantly. We have no reason to think that warming will be catastrophic aside from these models, and these models have been shown to be completely inaccurate at predicting the future.

Yet the climate change believers are not phased in the slightest. I have seen a prediction that 50 millions people would be displaced by 2010 due to climate change. It didn't happen, now the prediction is 200 millions people displaced by 2050.

One might think that the person who proved that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria would "dine out for life" on that. First he had to convince a sceptical world by giving himself ulcers. This radical step proved his thesis but how can one do the same for climate change? When the dogma is so entrenched how can one fight it?

That's got nothing to do with "African American", you can have the same effect in Europe, with the implication that white trash parents and especially teen moms choosing the name of their heartthrob film star as the name for their child. That phenomenon got the name "Kevinism" in Germany (and neighboring countries "suffering" from the same phenomenon), i.e., as the article linked says, the implication is "Your name's Kevin? You're probably white trash".

The female version being "Chantallism", by the way.

Names do affect your children's ability to get ahead later in life. Take a moment to find a name that isn't going to hurt their chances.

This development reminds me of the things predicted this article from 2001. The article itself was written about Napster, but it's written in the vein of all the bad things that could happen *in the future* after Napster is gotten rid of, and the banning of analog inputs/outputs was a large part of it.

Now, his timeline was obviously way too fast, but moving analog headphone jacks would fit into his vision -- he does talk about the "hoarding of analog speakers", after all. (Which is kind of ridiculous, as ultimately, even a set of speakers with a digital interface ultimately has an analog speaker making the actual sound, but whatever.) If analog sound outputs do go the way of the dodo (Apple's move certainly doesn't take us there, but it could be the first step in a several decade process that does) ... then a complete DRM path like we're seeing with a lot of HD video now might actually happen.

In a similar vein, RMS The Right to Read dystopian short story (written about software and reading freedom rather than sound countent, but still similar) may actually be coming closer to reality, though he set his time frame further ahead -- 2096, 100 years in the future -- so we can't really say he predicted it or not yet.

So a pedestrian in dark clothes, at night, not hearing an electric car, and jaywalking by stepping out from between vehicles means the driver drives like "a moronic asshat."

you do know that electric cars are almost silent, especially at low speeds, right?

Yeah, and they are also invisible, at least at low speeds.Holy fuck, don't they teach looking both ways before crossing the streets where you live? Hint: that's not just for kids.

Even apes do it . http://blogs.discovermagazine....

if we want to start making that ridiculous distinction, we need to start talking about "dog intelligence" and "cockroach intelligence" too.

Sure, why not?

Haven't been to Germany lately, I take it?

http://discovermagazine.com/~/...

Hey, it beats looking at a brown coal strip mining site.

Well they're not entirely wrong to think that, given that miRNA from rice has been shown to alter gene expression.

Strawman ?

Would you care to talk about the current levels of fraudulent research funded by the government ?
Perhaps, irreproducible sociology research funded by the government ?

BTW seeing as your a self proclaimed conservative you'll be happy to know the government funded a study proving you're an idiot

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Also, deflategate, he got the ideal gas law all wrong, and made an ass out of himself claiming that the ball couldn't have lost pressure.

http://physicsbuzz.physicscent... http://www.digitaltrends.com/h...

Yeah, so?
Hawking has made mistakes http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-admits-the-biggest-blunder-of-his-scientific-career-early-belief-that-everything-8568418.html,
Einstein has too http://discovermagazine.com/2008/sep/01-einsteins-23-biggest-mistakes,
and so has Newton.

Most famous scientists have till their death defended a claim that was shown wrong long before.

Also describing it as a "global cooling scare" is far overstating the case.

It wasn't just that NOAA paper fuelling the cooling scare. You might recall that Dr. Stephen Schneider was one of the many scientists calling out the imminent ice age in the 1960's and early 1970's. Since then he declared that he was wrong, jumped on the global warming band wagon, and testified before congress for that team. Of course the revisionists live on his Wikipedia page and remove any mention of such things, but Discover magazine still has a (very brief) article up from 2006 where he discusses his change in point of view. http://discovermagazine.com/20...

Bad Astronomy talks about the odds of getting killed by one as 1:700,000. But this includes extinction events, etc. You are more likely to die by meteorite than terrorist apparently.

I couldn't find any odds of getting hit by one, never mind two falling in the same area within the space of a couple of weeks, but I think it would be much lower than getting hit by lightning (1:960,000). About 500 meteorites hit the earth each year. There are 138 million lightning strikes per year. So, not accounting for population density, I would estimate that your odds of getting hit by a meteorite is 1:265,000,000,000 (1 in 265 billion).

Roughly.

That is assuming none of the recent breakthroughs in technology actually work. EM Drive, for instance. There are also flaws in the article. Conventional fission is 1% fuel efficient, but a breeder reactor with reprocessing is 99.5% fuel efficient. A fusion reactor like the one the Skunkworks is working on is also a possibility (because it would be small enough for a spaceship). There are already fusion and fission fast mars concepts as well that should work fine for interstellar travel.

That doesn't even touch on theoretical stuff like the Alcubierre drive, and wiki doesn't even have some of the workarounds to certain problems such as using metamaterials to divert Hawking radiation. There still are some other serious problems that need to be addressed with that one.

But... but.. but... NASA already gets like 25% of the Federal budget. And now Congress wants to give them Billions more while there are starving brown transgender children that need to be bombed? GET YOUR PRIORITIES STRAIGHT, AMERICA!

For those unwilling to read the link (from 2007) provided by Thud457, I offer these excerpts:

the average American thinks that NASA gets 1/4 of the U.S. total budget

(the NASA allocation in 2007 was approximately 0.58% of the budget.)

But... but.. but... NASA already gets like 25% of the Federal budget.
And now Congress wants to give them Billions more while there are starving brown transgender children that need to be bombed?
GET YOUR PRIORITIES STRAIGHT, AMERICA!

What unmitigated bullshit!

Here...written in terms so simple even you should be able to grasp. Read and learn:

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Below is but a few of the many recent noteworthy contributions from the so-called religion of peace to the field of Scientific Advancement

Polio is making a come back in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan, thanks to Islam, many health workers were killed because they were accused of trying to make the little children infertile with the polio vaccine

Islamic clerics from Saudi Arabia claim that female who drive are prone to damage their ovaries

And if you really want to know how moslem feel about science, I encourage you to read an article from the Discover Magazine to find out

http://discovermagazine.com/20...

... and yes, to most moslems, science has to follow the quran or it'll be deemed to be haram

i actually disagree with that, a more aggressive name makes sense, but lying about one's age is... basically too much thought. If i'm lying about my age, i'm generally swapping the date around and bumping by a year or two in either direction, that's generally because i'm hesitant to enter any identifying information about myself. It's in the ballpark though. I would say that, yes the verification of age is troubling, but it's also not fatal. we know that lying takes more energy than telling the truth. http://discovermagazine.com/20... . It's just a pain in the ass to lie about one's age too egregiously if there's no age limit.

even if it were a fatal weakness to the paper, just because the assumptions of the population are incorrect doesn't mean the analysis of it are as well. It just means that you're not describing the group of people that you thought you were. It might be that you are describing the trend of behavior as people age as well as how people think they should act at those ages.

still not valueless.

Also, it's surprising to me, to a certain extent. I thought people were dicks at all ages, but what? people become less of a bag of dicks as they get older?

maybe if you grow your own or buy in a place that is legal. but illegal marijuana is cut with all sorts of crap that makes it far far worse than the crap tobacco companies put in cigarettes. dealers will cut marijuana with all sorts of shit. and i mean that literally:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.... (tldr: the cdc saw a salmonella outbreak, and traced it to distributors cutting weed with feces)

illegal drugs are horrible to consume as you have zero accountability or responsibility for who put what in it. if something you buy at a store poisons you, you can go after the seller and/ or manufacturer. like this:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/21/... (tldr: company executive faked peanut tests, people died of salmonella poisoning, executive goes to jail for a long time)

in many ways, it's an argument for legalization/ decriminalization/ some sort of safe harbor provision so people aren't being killed by who knows what poison some asshole puts in their drugs. but until such time, you need to either grow your own, move to a place your drug of choice is legal, or find some sort of chain of distribution that you implicitly trust. but taking some pill some low life asshole you don't know says is {XYZ} is a way to get parkinson's disease, cancer, or violently ill

what kind of blows my mind is morons like yourself who rail against evil corporations and modern food growth and distribution, and then will eat/ smoke/ shoot some poison form some random douchebag who is a genuinely amoral asshole

really?

corporations do plenty of evil in the world, but drug dealer's are yet many many levels lower on that measure of integrity or sense of morals. why is that corporations get so much distrust form you, but some shitbag slinging drugs is someone you trust with chemicals you put in your body?

Here's a Discovery article that proposes Venus as a better option:
http://blogs.discovermagazine....

When looking at this without ideology, one quickly learns that nuclear is simply too expensive.

Yes, using 1950-1970s technology it is. Of course morons like you are blocking research into actually fielding thorium systems.

As such, it is not a solution to any problem - investing in nuclear makes the situation worse by wasting resources.

Talk about 'ideology'.. wasting what resources, the ones that are going to wind and solar et al. which don't have the energy density and baseline power to keep civilization going? Fuck you.

Ethanol is one of the smallest organic molecules, most drugs are huge in comparison. It might help to think of it as a solvent, not unlike water.

I hear ya. Small molecules are why DMSO nicotine patches may exist but not generally, prescription drug patches (never mind the dosing nightmare). Just like the Java Sandbox concept or Microsoft Wallet, many biological barriers/frontiers that were once considered difficult or impossible to breach have been crossed.

The skin: while small-molecule poisons and toxins, even simple hydrocarbons were long known to pass through the skin, it was only ~1963 when it was realized that DMSO can help carry larger molecules into the bloodstream.

The Blood brain barrier has been known to be weakened by inflammation but has been breached outright by gas microbubbles and localized ultrasound (too damned creepy!).

And the Placental blood barrier opens in late pregnancy, presumably to give the developed fetus a survival-edge of antibodies from the mother, but long before that there are specialized mechanisms to transport only fats or glucose or eliminate waste. What if some miracle drug has the unintended effect of compromising the mechanism that decides when and how it is opened? In the case of (S)Thalidomide it was not the drug itself, but compound CPS49 produced from it by the liver (the mother's I think) that crosses the barrier.

So nature's greatest defenses have become small hurdles...

not your grandfather's mandelbrot

I like. This one actually resembles my grandfather.

Chirality of Enantiomers is usually not, but may be important in the consideration of new drugs. And if chirality is an issue, then a benign molecule may be broken apart by the liver and (possibly) recombined back into the same substance, but in a wrong, harmful way. We now "know" this. We did not know this then.

TA portrays Thalidomide as a simple case of 'superior' FDA gate-keeping in the United States that prevented a harmful drug from reaching the market, a drug company dismissing (with hubris implied) what turned out to be serious danger. And this is true --- Dr. Kelsey was basing her judgement on a just a few reports of adverse effects, a numbing condition in arms and legs which indicated nerve damage. And Kelsey's projection that what ever caused this symptom might also impair development of the fetus was prescient and brilliant. It's a win.

As to why the medical community maintained the myth that drugs would not pass through the placental barrier when alcohol clearly did, that's a clearly a what-the-fuck.

To be fair however, there was an aspect to Thalidomide that confounded everyone at the time, and may even have confounded Dr. Kelsey herself had she been a chemist at the pharmaceutical company she fought. Trials on humans had indicated Thalidomide to be effective and safe, and the manufactured batches distributed in Europe were chemically indistinguishable from those that had yielded early successful trials.

To dispense with the jargon of chemistry in favor of the delightful aphorism of Richard Feynman, "Nature is screwy," so-called organic molecules can have left and right handed "threads". He introduces handed-ness or chirality, in his his lecture on symmetry in physical laws as he describes a simple experiment where sugar is dissolved in water... (astoundingly, almost precisely!) only abut half of it is taken in by bacteria. And yet, though the bacteria cannot digest the remaining "wrong-handed sugar", chemical tests of composition would reveal that it is the same. And the half that remains is clearly different somehow, and that difference can be seen when light is passed through it with a polarizing filter. This optical property of chemistry was observed by Louis Pasteur in 1812, but not until the tragedy of Thalidomide did we realize that chirality matters.

As described in this nice succinct PDF, (+)(R)-thalidomide was safe by itself, the enantiomer responsible for the beneficial sedative effect, but (-)(S)-thalidomide inhibits new blood vessel growth. Perhaps early batches used for testing had disproportionate amounts of (R) --- or something else happened. Perhaps I'll be down-modded if I suggest any reason that does not distill down to greed and malfeasance. But what is certain is that the tragedy brought chirality out of the realm of scientific curiosity to become a crucial part of drug development.

For a time it was thought that a more refined manufacturing process which created (R) to the exclusion of (S) may have rendered Thalidomide "safe". And it would have, except that normal liver function involves breakdown and recombination of such molecules in equal amounts. Just like that dissolved left-handed and right-handed sugar.

Today the chirality of new drugs is carefully considered and (R) and (S) enantiomers are tested separately. While Dr. Kelsey made a good judgement call, at the time she could not know precisely why it was a good call.

The actual mechanism by which (-)(S)-thalidomide impairs the fetus has only recently been discovered.

It is still plenty bright enough to not need long exposure times.

Bad astronomy to the rescue again. Complete with a great illustration of what the sun would look like from the surface of Pluto. Short version: the Sun on Pluto is 250 times brighter than a full moon is on Earth.

The NAACP is going to be all over you in a hot minute.

"the sun is just a star in the sky that's a bit brighter than the others"
A bit very much brighter star than the others, actually:

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

It is far more bright than the full moon.

Bert

In the U.S. the anti-vaxxers are largely those who go around calling people Deniers because they don't drive a Prius.

GIven that much edepends on the framing ot the questions, it appears that between liberals, moderates, and conservatives, it's all about the same.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

As in so many aspects of life, it depends on your own political views. If you are conservative - the liberals are the bogeyman. If you are liberal, it's conservative bugaboos.

People like myself, in the middle, recognize that one's politics, left or right, does not prevent them from being a flaming asshole, which any anti-vaxxer most certainly is.