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Yep, it's long been known that extremely high protein diets are bad for humans.

Hmmm....Have to disagree with you there, to some extent. Rabbit starvation is really about the lack of fat in the diet, not the amount of protein (wild rabbit being very lean meat).

Most people with good renal function (and without liver disease) will have a hard time doing a lot of harm. The funny thing is, and the reason there is some science behind Atkins, is that carbohydrates are the one food source you can omit the most. Protein and to some extent fat are very difficult to synthesize from carbohydrates. Most proteins are easily converted to glucose, lipids, or more specifically the glycerol backbone of trigylcerides can also be converted to glucose..

From the article:

“But it’s probably overly simplistic to say that everyone should go on a low-protein diet at this point.” Among the many caveats, for example, is that the mouse study used a single strain, though different strains can have different reactions to diets such as calorie restriction. Kaeberlein also thinks it’s unlikely that reduced protein alone explains the dramatic impact of calorie restriction on lifespan.

Mice strain can have a huge impact on the results.

http://jaxmice.jax.org/strain/... http://jaxmice.jax.org/strain/...

Yes. Seems there is a theory concerning the apoptosis of cells, in which antioxidants disrupt the normal pathways, keeping cells alive that are better off dead. This explains the fact that smokers who take beta carotine tend to die of lung cancer more often than those who do NOT take it, which was discovered in the late 90s, I believe*. The smoking probably generates cancer cells that may or may not die, but antioxidants keeps more of them alive long enough to get a foothold.

Throw away your vitamins. They are not helping you, probably do not contain what you think they do, and may actually be harming you. Throw them out now. Don't wait until you have finished the bottle. Food has all the vitamins you need (unless you are vegan, in which case you need to eat some eggs or drink some milk once in a while to get B12.)

* http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19876916

"The ones that every doctor will tell you about. The ones that this very story is about."
Only if you over eat.

"Highly doubtful.":
neither you should should be talking about your person health. It's not good data, and it's irrelevant and you don't know what each other health is like.

"It doesn't have to be, but often it is and it will never be as healthy as a vegetarian diet."
Vegetarian can becomes over weight, and they can have there own set of health problems.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

In short: A properly planned vegetarian is fine. But so is a properly balance omnivore diet.

"Despite what someone might have told you, not everyone finds animal flesh appealing."
fair enough, but we aren't discussing personal taste. And yes the person who posted that shouldn't have, it's a weak attempt at an ad hom. Pointless to the topic.

"Pretentious? When? Where?"
here:
"As a meat eater, you miss out on most veggie dishes because you aren't looking for them. "
You act like you know something you don't actually no anything about, that person person dietary habits.
Just so you know, I eat a lot of vegetarian dishes and meat dishes. You are trying to create some sort of false dichotomy between you and meat eaters, stop it. What he said is true: You have restricted yourself to a subset of choice; therefore less varied.

IN NO WAY should this betaken as my implying you shouldn't be vegetarian, or you are wrong for being one.

"You're the one posturing and resorting to ad hominem."
He isn't posturing. He is using ad hominem, and he is wrong for doing so, just like you. See you do have something in common.

Prohibition seems to work only in very limited contexts, like preventing individual citizens from buying material useful for making nuclear weapons. Drugs, porn, sex, alchohol, cigarettes etc, prohibition only seems to increase the value of the stuff that is sold.

Prohibition of alcohol in the US cut per capita consumption significantly. Even after prohibition ended consumption was much lower than it had been previously, and it took about 40 years to return to pre-prohibition levels.

Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation

Now that marijuana use is being legalized in various US states it appears that consumption is significantly rising.

Lastly, legalizing the sale or distribution of child porn which is already out there, while coming down extremely hard on the producers could in theory change the economics such that it's no longer profitable to make new child porn.

A lot of it is generated out of personal interest, so that isn't going to help. If anything it will likely make the problem worse.

This is likely to be a growing issue in the future. There are various cultures in the world that accept sex between adults and children, and there are elements in Western society chipping away at the taboo. Pedophilia seems to be nearing the state that homosexuality was in the US in the 1950s. Abuse taking place in schools is a much bigger problem than many people realize. Society is rapidly dispensing with ideas of traditional morality, and it is unlikely that what remains will be able to stem the tide.

No statistically significant increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes was seen among children of survivors.

By the way, a significant portion of fertilized eggs or embryos (up to half of them?) isn't viable because of genetic or developmental defects and they get spontaneously miscarried. This happens naturally, without any anthropogenic radiation or radioisotopes.

GE corn has lower levels of mycotoxins that are reasonably certain to cause cancer - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu.... A new variety (GE or not) might arise that is better in that regard (and other). Why shouldn't customers be able to know the exact variety they are buying? GE or not.

Excuse for being anal, but - an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot who thinks he knows everything about fossilised poop? Something's wrong here.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

Yes, but there's also a poorly understood bottleneck in the transmission of the mother's mitochondrial "chromosomes" to her children...

I'm not a expert on this by any means, but a simplistic answer is that it suggests that only a few of mitochondria out of the 1000's that are in the egg are the ones replicating (rather than all of them uniformly). Perhaps it is related to the inhibition process described in this analysis. As I recall, the eggs come as part of the later differentiation cycle in the inner cell mass and those are the only ones that get passed to children.

Of course that's just a guess. As I understand it, one question is if the "chromosomes" go through some sort of actual selection process before/during/after mtDNA replication prior to binary fission and what that mechanism might be, or if there is a selection process done after fission by some other unknown method.

"since probiotic yogurt does nothing, then you want have much of a case. IT's all dead before it gets to your intestine."

Are you lying or just ignorant? Check out the research on the effects of probiotic yogurt on IBD. Just because the culture may not survive to the intestines does not mean it "does nothing".

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

See? I can "stalk" you, too. The difference is that I done lie and spout off in ignorance.

Of course mitochondrial disease elimination isn't a binary thing because of heteroplasmy in mutations and inheritance.

Yes, but there's also a poorly understood bottleneck in the transmission of the mother's mitochondrial "chromosomes" to her children: even though a typical cell contains hundreds of copies of the mitochondrial DNA, effectively only a few of these copies are inherited by each child. For example, I was recently recently looking at some next-generation mitochondrial sequencing data (2000X coverage) from an extended family, where certain members are suspected to have a mitochondrial disorder, and there was only one position, out of the 16 thousand positions (nucleotides) along mitochondrial "chromosome", that was definitely heteroplasmic. The family had about 60 differences from the reconstructed mitochondrial reference sequence (the ancestral mitochondrial "eve" sequence) but, except for that one heteroplasmic position, the differences were all at 100% (fixed) - 100% within each individual and all individuals had exactly the same 60 differences from the reference.

This doesn't make any sense to me either. Current pills containing hydrocodone are a mixture with other drugs, mostly other drugs that have a higher toxicity, and part of the reason for that is to keep people from taking too many of them. If you OD on Vicodin, it's not the 5mg of hydrocodone that kills you, it's the 500mg of acetaminophen. For a 50kg person, you can get to a reasonably toxic quantity of acetaminophen (200 mg/kg) with 20 vicodin, which gives you a dose of 100mg of hydrocodone, or 2 mg/kg. Quick googling found this: http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-... that gives animal toxicity studies showing an LD50 for hydrocodone in the range of 86 mg/kg (mice) to 375 mg/kg (rats). Granted, you certainly don't want to take anything *near* to the LD50 of any drug, but the highest dosage for a Zohydro pill is 50 mg. For a 50kg person to get a dose of 1/4 the mouse LD50 would be over 20 pills. As noted, if those 20 pills were vicodin, then they would also be toxic, but only because of the acetaminophen. And really, if you're downing 20 of *any* prescription painkiller, you almost certainly have a different goal in mind than temporary pain relief. I just really don't see this as causing much harm, and potentially helping a fairly specific set of people who need it.

People who are intent on abusing pills can get around the acetaminophen simply by breaking the pills up, putting them in cold water, and running them through a coffee filter. This is known as cold water extraction.

Part of the reason for the acetaminophen in painkillers is because of a loophole in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act that classified pure Hydrocodone as a strictly controlled Schedule II drug (Which Zohydro will fall under). However, Hydrocodone combination products, such as Vicodin, which contains Hydrocodone and acetaminophen, into the less strict Schedule III classification. As a Schedule III drug, combination drugs such as Vicodin can be refilled as many as five times, while Schedule II drugs can be filled only once.

So why is there so much pushback against Zohydro, when it clearly fits a need and will be more difficult to obtain and abuse than Vicodin? I think it might have to do with the fact that it's put out by a tiny company (Zogenix) rather than one of the big players. Teva Pharmaceuticals who literally spent millions on lobbying last year has a competing product "TD Hydrocodone" which they're trying to get to market, but Zogenix beat them to it. If Zohydro were delayed for a little while, perhaps they could get to market with their competing drug and given their vastly larger resources they'd likely win market share. Another large company Purdue Pharma (the makers of OxyContin) also have something in the works

There could be significant issues with biomedical data, too. For example, the policy gives the example of 'next-generation sequence reads' (raw genomic sequence data), but it's hard to make this truly anonymous (as legally and ethically it may have to be). For example, some researchers have identified named individuals from public sequence data with associated metadata: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

That all may well have some truth. Also, many decades ago, social roles and courtship procedures were more clearly defined (as "manners", and also religious systems). So, it may have been easier back then for Aspies to marry at a younger age with less unstructured social situations to navigate?

Still, another factor could be that vitamin D deficiency may also cause autism, and I wonder if older parents may spend less time outdoors in the sun and so have their young child outdoors less? Older skin also has more trouble making vitamin D. And certainly many Aspies may have intense indoor hobbies and jobs.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.psychologytoday.com...

This recent study somewhat questions the link through for mothers and kids though (except they cite the population mean which itself seems to be low, which may confound the study IMHO):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Contrast with supplements needed to adjust for our indoor lifestyle:
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...

Maybe also of interest on the implications of living in a world with so many artificial toxins in the air and food (like lead and artificial colors) -- where a lack of things like vitamin D and iodine make it harder for kids to deal with the toxins:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Anyway, a complex topic, with pros and cons about everything relative to different situations.

I think there has generally been a reluctance in Western medicine up until fairly recently to make use of therapies of that sort, probably for a lot of reasons. Drugs and surgery tend to be well known treatments, and have the halo of modern science and a certain specificity to them. Using leaches*, maggots, and hookworms would seem medieval, and to be something of a Pandora's box, even if it works. Still, at least some treatments of that sort are making a comeback.

Medicinal Leeches: Nature’s Finest Surgical Tool From the Swamps

Although long dismissed as quackery, the medicinal leech has recently made a modern medical comeback and is now being used by doctors to treat everything from reattaching severed fingers and salvaging necrotic tissue to treating potentially fatal circulation disorders.

Maggot Therapy Takes Us Back to the Future of Wound Care: New and Improved Maggot Therapy for the 21st Century

I know that I'm missing the human-interest angle of the story here, but as someone who works at a company that has performed some large-scale DNA vaccine production research (Vandalia Research, but please don't google us because the website is an embarrassment), I'm a little disappointed that the article didn't try harder to explain the difference between these new vaccines and the old egg-grown ones. I think a little science education is a good thing to provide, to pull back the curtain on the good that genetic engineering can do. The first-pass explanation was "Flublok uses insect proteins instead of eggs. (The other is Flucelvax, which relies on animal proteins.)" which is rather poor since the proteins don't replace the eggs, the insect/animal culture cells those proteins are grown in do. I don't expect an in-depth discussion of promoters or vectors, but more about the recombinant engineering involved than "insect cells are used to cultivate hemagglutinin" would be nice. For anyone interested in a more academic explanation of Flublok's approach, along with several other possible vaccine design strategies that will hopefully be coming soon, a good page to read would be http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Molecular biologist is not a virologist or epidemiologist. Yes he invented PCR which by the way is not a test. It is a way of replicating DNA so that small quantities can be tested. It had nothing to do with disease transmission.

he is certainly qualified to comment on how the test he invented works

Here is the introduction from one of Duesberg's books. The only link to PCR is that he was doing work with PCR when he started asking questions. His issue is that he could not find someone who could point to a smoking gun at that time and became a Duesberg believer after one lecture. Take a look at this page and you see many smoking guns that show HIV needs to be present for AIDS yet neither Duesberg or Mullis have changed their views. In 1988 there may have been lack of proof but today there is plenty of proof.

Glancing through the article, there don't seem to be any new dangers to children. There seem to be more things that are _known_ to be dangerous, but these things obviously were dangerous even when we didn't know they were. So no need to panic.

"No need to panic" is one of the stupidest phrases in the English language.

Of course there's no need to panic. There's never a need to panic. The house is on fire? No need to panic. Your wife got shot in the head? No need to panic. The World Trade Center got hit by an airliner? No need to panic.

"Panic" is just a word to diminish a legitimate concern for a serious potential danger that is supported by scientific evidence that is about as solid as you usually get in real life.

Of course there are no new dangers to children. These are all old dangers, that are well-known to scientists, and have been denied by the industries that are selling these products. What's new here is that the evidence for these dangers is getting stronger and stronger, and the industry shills are looking more and more ridiculous when they try to argue that "the science is unproven" or "there's no need to panic."

For example, Herbert Needleman first published the dangers of lead toxicity in the 1970s. There was strong evidence that lead was causing damage to children's brains that you could measure in IQ tests and correlate with their blood lead levels. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

At the same time, the lead industry was selling tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive, which was the best way imaginable to distribute lead into the environment in a way that nobody could escape it. They were also selling lead paints, which were a good way to target lead to children, and to painters, and to the construction workers who finally demolished the houses at the end of their cycle.

The lead industry launched a well-funded campaign including lawsuits to discredit Needleman, which finally collapsed as the evidence for the dangers of lead grew and finally become overwhelming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now we have an article in one of the top 4 medical journals (which I read every week) in which the authors (endorsed by their peer-reviewers) say basically that we told you so, the evidence for the toxicity of these 11 industrial chemicals is even stronger now, and it's reasonable to conclude that these widespread industrial chemicals are causing measurable, significant neurological damage, especially in children, just like lead was doing, and we should do something about it now, rather than let industry lobbyists run the world and continue to harm people.

(And BTW they're talking about industrial chemicals, which are manufactured in quantities of hundreds of tons, and wind up being distributed widely in the environment, and have measurable and significant cognitive effects at parts per million. This isn't chemical phobia.)

To agree with your point to some extent, I think Elysium (the movie set partially in a space habitat) would have been a much better film if Jodi Foster as a villain had made the point that the solar system would be "full" in 1000 years of unchecked growth, and so as a matter of policy, the "unworthy" breeders on Earth had to be kept down and away from Elysium. I'm not saying I'd agree, but it would have provided a justification of her actions on a larger scale -- a justification very similar to that made by many wealthy people today or in years gone by.

"Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation"
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.u...

"Scientists have created the ultimate GM crop: contraceptive corn. ... The company, which says it will not grow the maize near other crops, says it plans to launch clinical trials of the corn in a few months."
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

Seven years later: "New Study Links Genetically Engineered Corn to Infertility"
http://www.organicconsumers.or...

Or maybe I've just watched too much "Star Gate: SG1"? :-)
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki...
"The Aschen's intentions were eventually uncovered when members of SG-1 unearthed the remains of what used to be a thriving urban civilization on the Volian world, learning that the Aschen's Anti-aging vaccine had the effect of sterilizing the entire population, after which they were wiped out."

Robots, Terrafoam, and contraceptives in the water is probably more reliable though, as Marshall Brain envisioned in "Manna":
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"I replied, "We could change it now. Robots are doing all the work. Human beings -- all human beings -- could now be on perpetual vacation. That's what bugs me. If society had been designed for it somehow, we could all be on vacation instead of on welfare. Everyone on the planet could be living in luxury. Instead, they are planning to kill us off. Did you hear that women were trying to drink the water out of the river? Some people think they're putting contraceptives in the water.""

That reflects and aspect of my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."

It may well be the case that there are always current limits. Perhaps everyone can't have their own private Caribbean island (yet, but maybe someday via SeaSteading or HoloDecks). There may always be some level of competition, including as young men and women struggle to show off for potential mates. But as a society we can shape how those competitive urges are directed to some extent, like James P. Hogan talked about in "Voyage from Yesteryear".

Still, there is a huge difference between people going hungry and being forced to take jobs they do not want versus people who can eat what they want and choose to spend their time how they want (subject to what other people are willing to do together with them). There may be many levels of abundance, but it seems that such a change in people being able to choose how to spend most of their waking hours without a direct need to earn money, such as via basic income, may be the biggest one.

And there may be dark sides to it too, like the potential for addiction, alienation, and isolation that can come with a wealth of material objects and personal space. Related items:
http://europepmc.org/articles/...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...

In fact not only are they unsourced, at least one (late onset adrenal hyperplasia) is flat out wrong. Its incidence rate is 1/15000, not 1/66-- see here
http://rarediseases.info.nih.g...
Under "basic information":
How common is 21-hydroxylase deficiency?
The classic forms of 21-hydroxylase deficiency occur in 1 in 15,000 newborns. The prevalence of the non-classic form of 21-hydroxylase deficiency is estimated to be 1 in 1,000 individuals.

This whole thread is filled with BS. The missing source for GP's stats aside, when I actually look into things the "differ from standard" is incredibly misleading.

For one, Klinefelter is apparently the most common one, listed at 1/1000 incidence-- except that "most" (64% according to wikipedia) have no noticeable traits indicating them as such, so that drops to 1/3000. 0.03% is a heck of a long way from the 1% number that everyone is throwing around.

For another, the "late onset adrenal hyperplasia" which GP lists as having a 1/66 incidence rate (unsourced), is listed by NIH's Office of Rare Disease Research as having an incidence rate of 1/15000. Not only that, but the listed symptoms arent that the gender is ambiguous, just that some commonly male attributes are exaggerated-- women may be taller, experience "male pattern baldness", and have irregular menstruation-- not that they arent clearly women.

Those are just the first two I looked into, who knows what other BS is being thrown around in this thread as fact. Heres a tip-- if its not coming from the NIH, an EDU, or a proper publication, disregard it as not reliable, especially if the publishing organization has an easily identified self interest (Ie, Intersex society of North America).

I read through about 75% of it. It is not a great read. It takes a lot of time to get to a little meat.

It relies on "social pressure" to stop conspicuous spending. Lets see that work for real in womens shoes and I might believe it possible. Otherwise there is a substantial bit of anthropology that the author is hand-waving his way past.

Reproductively speaking, the minimum cost of reproduction is much smaller for the male than the female. For the female the time-cost is 40 weeks, while for the male it can be around 4 minutes. That is a 100,000 to one ratio. Although females have oestrus cycle times that are 9x less frequent than optimal cycle-times for males, this does not establish a reproductive cost equality.

This high asymmetry in cost drives different general normative behaviors.Game theory says that when the costs are so asymmetric, and so much larger, then you will see radically different optimal strategies. For women they have a huge vested interest in maximizing the input the man gives - they are selective in partners, and selective in frequency. This also drives a strange phenomena of "Costly but worthless gifts facilitating courtship". (link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...)

The most archaic, currently used, globally useful, non-worthless gift that can be given is not gold, diamonds, cash, or camels - it is footwear. If any commodity is hard-wired into female brains through the selective processes of 10,000+ years of recorded history of civilization it is a candidate such as this.

If your "social pressure" to stop "conspicuous spending" can actually apply to womens footwear, then it has substance. Don't just stop sales, show that the desire has been resolved. It has not been resolved in Europe - this means that the fundamental forces are still extensively at work in that culture. It also means that the Star Trek economy, while worth considering, is still a work of fiction.

Best regards.

I'm pretty sure I don't want to know the answer to this, but what exactly is "ambiguous genitalia" and how many people actually have it?

It's called intersexed, and here is some stats and more information on it. For years, doctors would just say "well, we can't tell, so take your pick boy or girl, and then the kid grows up and says 'WTF?' " because it was an arbitrary choice.

For some people, gender identity is a little more complicated than "penis or no penis" -- I've known a couple of trans people over the years, and once had a co-worker who began the process after I'd known him as 'he' for several years.

Trust me, nobody would go through all of that stuff (the reaction of people, the hormones, the discrimination, the cost, the upheaval to your life, the surgeries, people telling you you're going through a phase) unless they were REALLY certain that was what they needed.

I won't claim to understand it fully, or even be able to explain it well. But I do know these are real things, and that the people going through them have to deal with a lot of stuff which I sure as hell wouldn't wish on anybody.

This was an interesting read on the subject published by a medical doctor who apparently had a good stat background. Dr. Ioannidis has kind of been on a crusade to look at design issues through meta analysis of old med studies that were suspect. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.... There has been some more recent work of his in the news as of late i believe. I love the 1001 varying non-mathematical definitions of p values in this thread it was cute.

TDCS is not a new subject, There's a whole subreddit dedicated to it, not to mention hundreds of studies using TDCS for everything from curing Tinnitus to increasing general memory and cognitive function.

The environment inside a cell is nothing like a lake or ocean that you can go merrily boating through. The cell is packed with molecules jostling each other around and it's random thermal motion that rules that world. Overcoming that with a motor and expecting to maneuver around to specific places just does not seem like it is going to be effective

It has been proposed that at least some motor proteins use that brownian motion as the way to move around in a cellular environment. Using a force already necessarily present to move stuff is more efficient than generating a magnetic field, that's likely the reason it's preferred to magnetic movement or electric.

Furthermore, I'd argue that the inside of a cell IS in an important way like a lake or ocean: at such small scales, momentum is negligible, same as it is in a cellular environment.

Part of the problem is that publicly-funded science hasn't necessarily been public-access anymore.

Publically funded research has never been public-access in the sense you mean. Journals have a strangle hold, and it is difficult to pry loose the death grip. JSTOR was -- in its day -- a revolutionary step towards better public access, but with the rise of the internet, it's obvious that this is not enough. There are strong moves towards open access journals in academia (seriously, academics have no love of the journals, which are leeches), but the incentive structures that advance academic careers are a big problem. A cultural change needs to occur in how academics are assessed by their university administration in order to break the stranglehold. Furthermore, funding agencies are using their clout to change the situation as well.

In short, the situation today is far freer than even the near past, and the trajectory is against pay-walls -- so the sentiment that things were good in the past and bad now completely and utterly back to front.

The USA has always had megacorps that were willing to attack scientists in order to keep on poisoning the people of the USA.

See, for example, how Kehoe, Kettering and Midgely (working for GM, DuPont and the Ethyl Corporation) attacked the reputations and careers of whistle-blowing scientists (like Patterson, Landrigan and Needleman) in order to hide the horrific effects of lead poisoning. The high toxicity of lead was known in the 19th century, and well quantified by the mid-1930s, but hidden from the US public until the 1970s by a concerted corporate disinformation campaign.

In just the last century, we increased our exposure to lead in the environment by 625 times and the effects are going to last for several more generations at least. This poisoning of generations of children, with literally many millions of victims, was done to maximize corporate profits for America's ruling class. And in today's political climate - with Reagan corporatist Obama actually considered to be left-wing or even socialist - you can expect this sort of behavior will continue.

The big problem is that some pharma manufacturers in India make crap.
They know they're making crap and they're proud of it.
Ripping people off is part of business culture everywhere, but they don't seem to make a distinction between cheating people out of their money and cheating them out of their lives.

The problem is that everyone knows they're making crap in India, but no one can come right out and say it because lawyers will be all over whoever says it. regardless of proven past practices.

Here's an example of what's being said and not being said.
Read this first, a government statement:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Then read this to see what really happened:
http://features.blogs.fortune.... (The HIV drug part of the story is about halfway down)

PS:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

ultra sound ablative surgery: ex. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... .

Essentially you zap with low power to see where you are aiming, then high power to vibrate/boil the tissue you wish to destroy. The beauty of it is compared to most radiotherapy (proton might be better but is relatively rare and expensive) the distribution of normal to target dose is much better.

That is funny, because it is already known to be a problem for reprocessed water.

Let's do the same for what we eat, and let's make the humanity sterile, those endocrine thingies only affect pussies.

Dude, go get another cup of coffee or something. The GP addressed all of your points.

That is funny, because it is already known to be a problem for reprocessed water.
Let's do the same for what we eat, and let's make the humanity sterile, those endocrine thingies only affect pussies.

"Glucosamine and chondroitin food supplements? Next to useless."

Gee. Just like in humans. Imagine that.

Damn, beat me to it. For people who are wondering about this (but my granny takes it and she says it helps), look at the results of the GAIT trial. It's indistinguishable from placebo for most people, except for a small subset that no-one can explain. This, and the placebo effect (but mostly placebo) is what accounts for the various "but it helped my dog/cat" posts on here.

Don't forget to buy your dog and cat food with lots of grains and carrots in it, for their health! [nods furiously with shit-eating grin].

And electrolytes. Don't forget the electrolytes. It's what cats crave.

Did you read the entire abstract? "This increased risk was not statistically significant in either case."

Oops... there goes the ball game. Sensationalist hype for insignificant findings. Cancelled the study because there was not positive effect and a very slight negative effect.

Actually, there doesn't go the ball game, but you're right in your interpretation of the link I provided. I should have linked to the paper which included the follow-up period (discussed here http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/new... and here http://www.nih.gov/researchmat...)

From the first link:

A paper published recently from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 306:1549-1556, 2011) concluded that "dietary supplementation with vitamin E significantly increased the risk of prostate cancer among healthy men."

Thanks for pointing all this out. Its true, 3D printing organs is a waste of time. You'd rather just grow them in vats, shcluff off the existing cells, and populate the organ with cells from the receiver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bo...

All mammals are, by definition, born with the ability to digest milk, therefore they have the genes to do that. It can happen that those genes are epi-genitically turned off in adults that are not exposed to milk. However, the genes would be still there.

The genes for digestion are still there, yes, but they shut off after childhood unless you have a specific genetic mutation that allows lifelong production of lactase. Source 1, source 2.

All mammals are, by definition, born with the ability to digest milk, therefore they have the genes to do that. It can happen that those genes are epi-genitically turned off in adults that are not exposed to milk. However, the genes would be still there.

The genes for digestion are still there, yes, but they shut off after childhood unless you have a specific genetic mutation that allows lifelong production of lactase. Source 1, source 2.

Yeah, this sounded like bunk to me to, but I found some real facts. The rings were made from gold beads which had been filled with radon and implanted in people. It's the radon decay products causing the radiation, not the gold. Here's a real journal article about this problem.

No. Children, at least, can tolerate fevers up to 108 without long-term effects.
NONSENSE!
108 Fahrenheit is close to certain death or brain damage:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What...

WikiAnswers, without a source, is not really a very reliable source of information. "Up to" 108 turns out to be up to 107.6 according to that source. Note that all of the lower temperatures say nothing of brain damage. So, according to your source, you can tolerate temperatures up to 107.6.

Let's try some other sources.

Johns Hopkins:
"Fevers with infections don't cause brain damage. Only body temperatures above 108 F (42 C) can cause brain damage."
"...fevers from infection usually don't go above 103 or 104 F. They rarely go to 105 or 106 F. While the latter are "high" fevers, they are harmless ones."

NIH:
"Brain damage from a fever generally will not occur unless the fever is over 107.6 F. Untreated fevers caused by infection will seldom go over 105 F unless the child is overdressed or trapped in a hot place."

WebMD:
"High fevers may make your child uncomfortable, but they rarely cause serious problems. There is no medical evidence that fevers from infection cause brain damage. The body limits a fever caused by infection from rising above 106 F."

Yes, I know everyone "learned" that fevers above 104 F are bad and should be mitigated. We also learned that different sections of the tongue are responsible for different tastes. Your school textbook probably had a picture of the Bohr model of an atom. It turns out that often the things we learn aren't true.

Well, if you're a child, you probably shouldn't take aspirin for a fever.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

When you're sick enough to (feel you) need medication, stay at home. Don't spread germs all over the workplace / auditorium / public mass transport.

Nice idea, but almost useless....

The typical incubation period for influenza is 1—4 days (average: 2 days). Adults shed influenza virus from the day before symptoms begin through 5—10 days after illness onset. However, the amount of virus shed, and presumably infectivity, decreases rapidly by 3—5 days after onset in an experimental human infection model. Young children also might shed virus several days before illness onset, and children can be infectious for 10 or more days after onset of symptoms.

What this basically means is that you are infectious the day before you show symptoms.....therefore you will not be able to ever stop the flu, at least not without a better vaccine (no, don't go pulling that Jenny McCarthy shit or I'll have to slap you); we can just mitigate some of the spread. It is incumbent upon the uninfected to keep from getting infected, as those who are will not know they are until its too late.

The science is that fever is an adaptive response to an infection. Yes, fever is what makes you feel like crap, but it changes the kinetics of viral (and bacterial replication). Ever notice that microbiological (especially bacterial) incubators are set to 37 deg C? That's the sweet spot for replication....change it and you put the invader at a disadvantage. Modern medicine unfortunately has taken on the dogma that: "If it ain't right, it needs to be fixed", a few (and growing) are starting to learn that not all that is wrong is bad....I continually rally against treating fevers less than 40 deg C (above that is concern for brain injury), but I have an uphill fight against an entrenched culture.

My personal strategy? I take the anti-pyretics so i can sleep or function, but reintroduce the elevated temperature by bundling up and keeping my core above 37 deg C. This is not scientific, just what works for me, YMMV and I won't be held responsible if you up and die from the flu as this is not my official advice.

Monkey see, monkey do. It's a type of intelligence, but there are others that are tested too, some more important - such as puzzles that have to be solved without being shown the correct solution. For example, squirrels working out how to overcome anti-squirrel bird feeders are showing more intelligence than the monkeys in the examples you mention.

Check also these links please, and tell us your opinion, if you wish. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Sure, but the same arguments can be made for people donating blood. You might want to check out what actually happens when you pay people for blood rather than leave it as a civic duty some people feel compelled to do.

For example, see this NIH study talking about the effects on blood donation. It includes the following quote "There is a serious concern over using incentives in blood donations even on a temporary basis. That concern is based on the findings that using incentives may attract at-risk donors, and worse undermine the motivation to donate blood." and also

Using incentives for blood donation may undermine the altruistic motivation to donate blood. This concern has always existed after Titmuss study in 1971. He believed that commercializing the altruistic setting in blood donation has crowding-out effect on the number of blood donors.[23] Since then, several economic and psychological studies have shown the same results and proved that incentives have negative effects on prosocial behaviors like blood donation.

Given that, it seems like it is reasonable to ask whether the assertion that it will increase supply is well founded.

When you google "peer review problems" the first hits are:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/
and this
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access
and this
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

So, should all the journals discussed there be closed down? Peer reviewing ending up favoring somebodies paper whom the anonymous reviewers happen to know or like, or whose conclusions they agree with is a well known problem. As is peer reviewers delaying papers that disagree with their own research, despite impeccable research.

The problem is not that the peer review process used here was acceptable and should in fact have continued. The problem is double standards.

Here's an article on the topic.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2276592/

I can't believe this load of biased garbage is voted insightful. Genital mutilation? It wasn't mutilation when I got circumcised. It was a standard medical procedure needed for medical reasons which has several hygiene benefits too. You claims on sensation? [Citation required].

As for the rest of you post there's no need for a citation there because it's a load of bull. Both the WHO and the CDC have conducted studies which show that the HIV transmission rates to men reduced if circumcised. The studies show it had no effect on transmission to women but guess what, it's kind of hard to pass on an infection you don't have so the women benefit long term too. Before you run out criticizing the gates foundation maybe you should start at the WHO who recommended in 2007 that the medical procedure be used in the prevention of AIDS.

Now excuse me while I go mutilate my finger nails because they are getting too long.

I don't know where you live, but circumcision has moved from being SOP to a cosmetic surgery over the past 30 years in most places. In case of severe infection, the surgery is sometimes performed, just like a tonsilectome. In both circumstances, we're talking about a flap of skin that isn't really required anymore, but still provides benefits if it stays where it is. At one point, tonsilectomes were SOP too -- but they aren't anymore, despite the health benefits of having one.

sensation link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23374102

Oh, and I'm fairly unbiased about the whole thing, as I see benefits to both sides and detriments to both. But it's best to be properly informed on BOTH sides of an argument before ranting.

back up to what the rest of the world considers "normal"

"Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world. In Western society, at least 80 per cent of the adult population consumes caffeine in amounts large enough to have an effect on the brain." -abstract Caffeine consumption is normal.

It will also be the backbone of their diet in the process. It won't just be empty calories but will be a good chunk of most of what they need to live on since we are mammals.

Lots of people cannot consume milk past infancy. Most of the population of the world actually. About 30-50 million people in the US are lactose intolerant including 75% of Native Americans and 90% of those of Asian descent. Worldwide about 65% of people have some form of lactose intolerance. The percentage of people in north america and europe that can consume milk products without ill effects is actually unusually high.

Also bear in mind that most milk is heavily subsidized in price. The real price of a gallon of milk is somewhere closer to $4-$8 per gallon. Even higher for organic stuff.

You also can't easily replace that calcium.

You do not need milk or milk products to get the needed amount of calcium. There are plenty of fortified foods with extra calcium. Dark leafy greens are an excellent source as are sardines, soybeans, tofu, oranges, sesame seeds, almonds, salmon, white beans, figs, broccoli, and quite a few other foods. The notion that you need milk to get adequate calcium is easily and demonstrably not true.

It was an unrelated qualitative study, designed to "We conducted a qualitative research to explore care and support for children with AFP after their diagnosis."

I'm aware of that. I wasn't claiming that was the focus of the paper. The point was that the paper provided information about the coincident testing for NPAFP and vaccination, and thus the fact that they would occur together is not evidence for NPAFP causing NPAFP. Which would be why that quoted part didn't include such a claim and was on another line.
Just for fun, though, we have non-polio enteroviruses detected in numerous stool samples of those experiencing AFP and such enteroviruses can be associated with NPAFP. Seems like an possible cause for some of those cases.
There is also this article in 'The Hindi':

The non-polio AFP rate was not correlated with the number of oral vaccine doses that were administered, countered the WHO Country Office in its response. The largest number of oral vaccine doses given in India was in 2004, which had the lowest non-polio AFP rate in the last eight years. Moreover, although the number of oral vaccine doses given in the country had shown a continuous decline since 2007, the non-polio AFP rate had increased during the same period. In Bihar and U.P. too, there were similar trends of reduced oral vaccine doses and rising AFP rates during 2007-2011.

Maybe I'm not making this clear about the paper you're citing. It is a paper that makes big claims and provides no evidence. It's opinion. It's opinion, and an opinion that I have not seen replicated anywhere else, and that I have never seen supported by any other paper, ever. The comment to The Hindi by the WHO country office is in direct contradiction to the claims made in that paper (and for good reason: they were rebutting the paper).

Another interesting quote from the same paper [1] p. 116:

We have seen how polio, that was not a priority for public health in India, was made the target for attempted eradication with a token donation of $ 0.02 billion. The Government of India nally had to fund this hugely expensive programme, which cost the country 100 times more than the value of the initial grant.

It could have cost 40 bazillion times the value of the original grant, and that wouldn't make one iota of difference to the relationship between the polio vaccine and NPAFP.

So, the way it works is that Gates buys pharma stocks, then bribes few officials in India for $0.02 billion to make their country spend 100 times more on the program. Of course, the pharma makes big bucks not only on the vaccines, but far more on life-long "management" of the diseases they caused, all the while Bill's pharma stocks go up. Having been scammed of intellectual property by Microsoft in mid-1990s, I can see that Bill Gates hasn't changed his "ethics" one bit after moving into the "charity" business. It's same old Bill Gates.

And thus, he caught the bus to crazy-town.

NPAFP is a genuine problem, but it is a genuine problem that would be better addressed by addressing NPAFP rather than hanging off the words of one paper by two doctors in one country-specific medical ethics journal with no supporting evidence.