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Here is the abstract. The actual paper is behind a paywall.

"ROC analysis of [the test statistic], for cancers plus precancerous/suspect conditions vs. controls, cancer vs. precancerous/suspect conditions plus controls, and cancer vs. controls, gave areas under the curve of 0.87, 0.89, and 0.93, respectively (P<0.001). Optimization allowed test sensitivity or specificity to approach 100% with acceptable complementary measures."

The ROC curve has area under it of 1 for a perfect classifier and 0.5 for wild guessing. This is a more useful measurement than the p-value. (E.g. if I look at height vs sex for humans, it won't take too big a sample to get a great p-value for there being a difference, yet classifying people as male/female depending on whether they exceed some height threshold is a very poor diagnostic system.) I don't have much of a feel for how good ROC area of about 0.9 is for a medical test. I'd guess it is good enough to be useful, but you'd not want to rely on that test alone.

We found that rats ran 35% less far on a treadmill and showed cognitive impairment in a maze test with 9 d of high-fat feeding

The actual paper is here. Only the abstract is publicly available, however, and I can't read the full paper, so there's a chance that you're not completely wrong.

Lesson: always go to the source when the topic is something of public interest, like diet. To be fair, this NYT columnist seems to have gotten it mostly right, but this is the exception when it comes to health reporting. Or anything that might bring in a few more readers if blown out of proportion.

Found it. Substance in question is theobromine. Study was at Imperial College London

Study in question (PDF warning)

As it happens, I am trying to find information on the effects of vibration from high-frequency machinery on bones, muscles and other structural members of the human body. A friend and I served aboard a Navy ship, in a space that housed our ship's steam-powered electric generators. These 400 kW generators each had a steam turbine that spun around 8k rpm. Some doctors suggest this high frequency vibration might damage bones through conduction.

Here is an article that discusses vibrations up to 100 Hz:

FASB Journal: Bone cell responses to high-frequency vibration stress: does the nucleus oscillate within the cytoplasm?

Seems to be more complicated when it comes to gravisensing.

CC.

This story might seem insignificant but what you don't realize is that Alzheimer's is a growing problem. Like many things, as the baby boomers begin to retire it will increase. People are living longer and, as a result, the genes responsible for Alzheimer's are being exposed. When evolution shaped us, there was no way to naturally select genes that didn't have Alzheimer's traits as our species was most likely dead by the time we hit that age.

As I understand it, Alzheimer's is caused by a twisted or malformed protein (beta amyloid) that starts to cause synapses of the brain to clump too close or cause their dendrites not to touch other synapses. Resulting in huge cognitive problems. There has also been research linking it to lipids and cholesterol intake.

What makes this research interesting is that I believe the idea in the field was that the gene mutation could be virus induced or suspected to not begin until one cell grew with the characteristics and successfully multiplied (often later in life). I'm not a medical researcher so don't quote me on any of this.

Unfortunately, since many of these baby boomers are fairly wealthy, more research will be going into Alzheimer's disease than AIDS as it will most likely be easier to market in developed nations. You can call me a conspiracy theorist but that's my honest opinion. Michael Chrichton pointed it out in Jarrasic Park when the park was built instead of something more useful like a cure for AIDS. You can charge people whatever you want to see dinosaurs but you can't charge them whatever you want to save their lives, it just looks immoral to do so.

Gene research is often the most politically frowned upon form of medical research but necessity breeds innovation ... er ... understanding. It will be interesting to see how far stem cell research and the like are allowed to proceed given a vast aging population in the United States. Currently, I've seen Alzheimer's research being done in the form of mammalian brain tissue introduced to a herpes virus that has previously infected cells which had the Alzheimer's gene. They then infect the new brain tissue but do not kill it (as herpes is not normally lethal to cells).

Perhaps you should do some research before spouting off caustic remarks like that. There are quite a few studies that show THC and other marijuana components could have anti-cancer & tumor properties. I've linked a few, you can do the rest of the legwork.

http://jpet.aspetjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract /jpet.103.061002v1
http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/111/1/43
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/17/3/529
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/20 05/08/29/newscolumn6.html