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Hey, a link to the paper's abstract would have been nice, wouldn't it.

http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/applan/article/S0168-1591(13)00013-0/abstract

I love when the headline question is answered right there in the summary.

Actually there is a way to make a cow poop if you follow links to the actual abstract:

None of our tests reliably stimulated defecation, which seemed to occur most when cows were exposed to novelty.

Basically, cows poop when they see something new, Unfortunately, showing them something over and over becomes "old" pretty quickly. Fresh material stimulates the production of "fresh material" from cows.

Here's a study: http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0002-9343/PIIS0002934309004045.pdf ("Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study")

"92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance."

So while the medical debt is not necessarily sky-high, losing your job due to illness means that you are screwed on all your debts. Car, house, etc.

Also, further down: "Out-of-pocket medical costs averaged $17,943 for all medically bankrupt families" ... this means that these families successfully paid A LOT of money (~$13K) before declaring bankruptcy and ending up in an average of ~$5K of medical debt. These are not the people that ran up huge consumer debts and declared bankruptcy. These are the people that paid every bill until they just had no money left.

lol, wtf? defensive much?

"So what I'm asking is, do you think homosexuality was magically created by a process other than evolution?"

uh, no. duh.

"Look kin selection is a very common, very well understood, fundamental concept in genetics. It's as close to proven as you're ever going to get. Homosexuality has been well demonstrated in numerous studies to have a genetic component in numerous species"

Fine, great, so SHOW ME THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE supporting your IDEA that kin selection is the actual mechanism for the continuance of homosexuality in animals. Because until you collect the evidence and do the statistical analysis on the data for, eg., homosexuality in a particular species, your idea is just as good as any other. And just because YOU can't come up with an "other evolutionary mechanism we don't know about that is likely to have caused it" (and there ACTUALLY ARE SEVERAL other highly plausible theories for the evolution of homosexuality BTW), doesn't in any way mean that the theory you shat out over your lunch break must be the right one.

Oh, and you should probably start taking your own advice when you snidely chastise other people because you think THEY "haven't bothered to look at the hundreds of studies" on a particular scientific issue. Because it just so happens that Bobrow and Bailey DID look into the theory of whether kin selection explained homosexuality in humans in a paper from 2001 entitled "Is male homosexuality maintained via kin selection?", and guess what, they RULED IT OUT as the causative mechanism. you ass.

There is experimental research going on in reshaping cones via a laser.

We are a lot closer to replacing the eye then you think.

http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0002-9394/PIIS0002939401013010.pdf

Once stem cells become 'routine' changing the genetics involved would be the next logical(to me) research step.

Of course, that doesn't answer the question of what happens if we can expand the freq. the optics can interpret? Would it just not work? would the brain see a new color?

This isn't a meta-analysis or a meta-study, because he doesn't bother stating what his inclusion/exclusion criteria, what tests he performs, how he eliminates bias across all the studies, etc. Rather, this is a review of sorts. Critically, a review isn't as good as a meta-analysis in the hierarchy of evidence.

And the conclusion that the only greater danger is the effect of tobacco smoking on lung cancer? Not so, my friend. From a cursory glance at the references and a quick look in jahonline.org (it's not indexed through pubmed yet) and Google book search reveals the following.
http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/1054-139X/PIIS1054139X07003916.pdf
http://books.google.com/books?id=moifZwJHunsC&pg=PA237&dq=handbook+of+children+and+media+huesmann&sig=UBS6uSgbGWpMtJOkoXImuYXmr8w#PPA237,M1 (try to find page 235)

1. First of all, that is not the conclusion of the paper.

"In summary, exposure to electronic media violence increases the risk of both children and adults behaving aggressively in the short-run and of children behaving aggressively in the long-run. It increases the risk significantly, and it increases it as much as many other factors that are considered public health threats. As with many other public health threats, not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior, and many will acquire the affliction who are not exposed to the threat. However that does not diminish the need to address the threat."

2. This is not a quantitative analysis (which would be called a meta-analysis). So there is no way you can compare it using the results of this study.

3. The smoking/lung cancer correlation comparison is referred to from one of their earlier publications in "Handbook of children and the media" where they wrote an article "Effects of televised violence on aggression." (Forget the fact that this did not take into account the effects of internet-related violence, which they cite in this study.) In fact, in that article, they were also citing another paper (Bushman, Phillips and Anderson 2000) which was in turn using data on smoking from the 1950 article by Wynder and Graham into the effects of smoking and lung cancer. So in fact, the conclusion he came to in this present 2007 article is based on data from 1950. If you compare it to the classic Doll and Hill paper (BMJ 1950), Wynder and Graham had smaller samples. Why are they basing the evidence on 1 paper (in fact one of the first papers) from 57 years ago, when there are many others to take into account? Also, how can you extrapolate effects seen in adults to children?

Do journalism degrees not have courses in "Critically evaluating research articles"? Better yet, why not buy a book - Trisha Greenhalgh's How to read a paper. May there should one specifically marketed for them: Reading papers for dummies. Seriously, did Patricia Reaney even read the paper and follow it up? What editing did Belinda Goldsmith do? Cut and paste? Justified to the right? Run spell-checker?

http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/1054-139X/PIIS1054139X07003916.pdf

The research itself is excellent, and other posters have pointed out its merits. Whoever wrote the Reuters article should be fired for misrepresentative journalism:
- The first quote (Exposure to...) the Reuters author combined sentences from multiple areas of paper, taking each piece completely out of context.
- The second quote (Video games are...) is accurate and verbatim.
- The third quote (The research clearly ...) appears nowhere in the article.
- The article misplaces the notion of public health, stating it is a threat TO public health, rather than a public health threat. There is a difference.

Completely missing the point of research is OK. Misrepresenting the research and its conclusions is not OK.

If you read the abstract of the scientific paper TFA refers to, you'll see that the LIPUS (low-intesity pulsed ultrasound) device _significantly_ decreases resorption.

The article mentions a previous publication in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics which you can access for $30 as a pay-per-view sort of thing, but the abstract gives more than enough information if you want to know more about how it actually works. I copied the URL here, but bear with me, I don't do much slashdot posting of URL's. http://www2.us.elsevierhealth.com/inst/serve?actio n=searchDB&searchDBfor=art&artType=abs&id=as088954 0604002872&nav=abs&special=hilite&query=%5Bcontrib s%5D(el-bialy%2C)

You can download the original article from the european journal of cancer website http://www.intl.elsevierhealth.com/journals/ejca/ Volume 41, issue 18, pages 2904-2910. I agree with your point above. I'm just saying that spatial and temporal clustering is in and of itself far from sufficient to show causality. The link between infectious agents and ALL, or brain tumors, has been made previously in other studies. I'm not particularly familiar with those. This particular paper provides some further evidence supporting that hypothesis, but they do not analyze any infection data, only cancer history cases.

A little more poking around takes you to the abstract at Science Direct

Why shouldn't suicide count? I have a family that are close personal friends whose 16 year old son had a fight with his girlfriend, grabbed the family's .22, drove down the road and shot himself in the head.

According to this study you are 16 times more likely to have a suicide occur in your home when guns are accessible.

It is my opinion that my 16 year old friend would not have killed himself if he had to go in search of a means. With a gun readily available an impulse decision to kill himself was easily acted upon. Yes, there are other means. Yes, if he was determined, it would have happened anyway. But in this case and many others it is my opinion that gun availabiliyy was a factor. I am a lifelong hunter and gun owner, and no counter-argument will change that opinion.

There are plenty of sources for statistics. But statistics rarely change opinions, so it's a moot point.

2. Pets Boost Children's Health. BBC News. June 14, 2002. Available online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/health/2045704.stm.

I grew up on a farm, and besides slopping the hogs, cleaning out the chicken coop, and tending to the cows, horses, dogs, fish, ducks, rabbits, and even a Peacock, I used to turn over cow patties looking for bugs and later mushrooms. I'm pretty sure this made a difference when I went to places where a scratch made some of my teammates very sick.

I laugh whenever one of those advertisements come on Tv trying to sell 'air sanitizers' and people spraying Lysol on everything. "OMG, there are GERMS in the air?!?"

-cp-

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