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(1) Peer review is a lot more powerful when you can review the data itself, not just what the paper says about the data. In bioinformatics, we've known this for years, which is why you absolutely can't publish a paper concerning a microarray experiment without making the raw data available in GEO or a similar repository.

(1.5) Any high-throughput experiment generates enormous amounts of data (that's pretty much the definition of "high-throughput") and that data is very often useful for answering questions other than the specific one the experimenter was asking. Public availability of data has proven an enormous boon to basic biology, and an awful lot of people would like to see that carry over into medical research.

(2) Generally speaking, "medicine" refers to clinical practice, and "medical research" to research in that practice, while "biomedical research" refers to research in the biology underlying disease and the treatment of disease. "Biomedicine" is, more or less, best defined as "what biomedical researchers do." For example, if you have cancer, your oncologist may prescribe chemotherapy (medicine) but before that, a pharmacologist designed the drug you're now being administered (biomedicine) and a biostatistician analyzed the results of the clinical trials on the drug (medical research). Ideally, data sharing will help close the loop: more biostatisticians can analyze the results of your and other patients' treatments, and more pharmacologists can use the results of that analysis to design the next generation of treatments.

Thanks for the reply. Putting in VItamin D and CVID into Google gets me this as a top result:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18451650
"Patients with CVID may present asymptomatic vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D and VDRs play an important role in the innate immune system and modulate Toll-like receptor-related responses. Delay in diagnosis may predispose these patients not only to irreparable bone loss but also to infections, and autoimmune and malignant disorders, thus emphasizing the importance of prompt intervention."

As a start, be sure to get your Vitamin D level checked, and get the actual number, and compare it against these two suggestions (the 40-60 ng/mL range):
    http://www.grassrootshealth.net/
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
    http://www.heartscanblog.org/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

A slightly lower target:
    http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx

Basically, your immune system needs vitamin D to "trigger and arm" the immune system:
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7379094/Vitamin-D-triggers-and-arms-the-immune-system.html

But, it also needs vitamin D to shut down an excessive immune response too (thus it can be involved in both too little and too much immune response). More on that:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/h1n1-flu-and-vitamin-d.shtml

And of course you need the basic phytonutrients from plants (many as yet undiscovered) for your body to be at its best.

Anyway, your health may well involve other issues. Still, what people often call "genetic" is really an issue of how genes interact with an environment (including what we eat and how much sunlight we get) and if we can change the environment, sometimes we can keep our weak links from ever being exposed (Dr. Fuhrman says that in his book "Eat to Live").

If I said anything helpful to you, I'm glad, and you can pay me back by helping someone else with such information or something else someday. :-)

What I don't see enough discussion about is the bioaccumulative effect.

For catch-up: fat-soluble toxins can accumulate in the bodies of organisms such that at every step of the food chain, the concentration is multiplied. It's not just a single species accreting the toxin, but what happens when its predators are eating from this concentrated source. Any links up the food chain up to the apex predator are going to have a multiplied effect, which is why a seemingly insignificant amount of mercury pollution versus the ocean's volume has made tuna consumption a point of caution.

We are seeing radiation levels that could be a bit of a concern and the Fukushima situation is still not under control. And are some of the compounds it's emitting bioaccumulative? Yes, Cesium 137 for example, and that has a half-life of 30 years. And the first thing you should do is move your consumption as far down the food chain as possible. Even if you don't plan to go vegan, learn Indian cooking or a low-meat cuisine, because the less animal product you're consuming, the better.

Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11482657
http://www.marietta.edu/~biol/102/2bioma95.html
http://science.jrank.org/pages/854/Bioaccumulation.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-rainwater-radiation-181-times-above-us-drinking-water-standard-2011-4

Then why in the world don't medical doctors and biology majors receive a STRONG education in math and statistics?

So they can reinvent calculus: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8137688

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: In Tai's Model, the total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas. The total sum of these individual areas thus represents the total area under the curve. Validity of the model is established by comparing total areas obtained from this model to these same areas obtained from graphic method (less than +/- 0.4%). Other formulas widely applied by researchers under- or overestimated total area under a metabolic curve by a great margin.

RESULTS: Tai's model proves to be able to 1) determine total area under a curve with precision; 2) calculate area with varied shapes that may or may not intercept on one or both X/Y axes; 3) estimate total area under a curve plotted against varied time intervals (abscissas), whereas other formulas only allow the same time interval; and 4) compare total areas of metabolic curves produced by different studies.

Here's a fact: there were no reported cases of "restless leg syndrome" until after the commercials for it started airing

[citation needed]

Hey, I think reported cases went way up after the commercials came on too, but it does seem like a real affliction. Do you not believe the NIH?

http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/restless_legs/detail_restless_legs.htm

(There were some mentions on the wikipedia page from centuries ago, but some of the pages were no longer available, so I'm only mentioning it here -- if someone else can provide further citation for long ago mentions/descriptions of it, great.)

Alcohol was made illegal and what happened?

Alcohol consumption dropped to less than one gallon per person per year.

1906-1910 2.60 gal.
1916-1919 1.96 gal.
1934 0.97 gal.
1955 2.0 gal.
1973 2.62 gal.
1980 2.76 gal.
2007 2.31 gal.

Apparent per capita ethanol consumption for the United States, 1850-2007. (Gallons of ethanol, based on population age 15 and older prior to 1970 and on population age 14 and other thereafter).

Higher addiction rates, instead of lower ones like you might expect

If this were true, you should be seeing higher liver cirrhosis mortality rates.

In fact, the rates between 1920 and 1940 are about half those of 1910. Age-Adjusted Liver Cirrhosis Mortality U.S. 1910-1996 [chart]

Alcohol was made illegal and what happened?

Alcohol consumption dropped to less than one gallon per person per year.

1906-1910 2.60 gal.
1916-1919 1.96 gal.
1934 0.97 gal.
1955 2.0 gal.
1973 2.62 gal.
1980 2.76 gal.
2007 2.31 gal.

Apparent per capita ethanol consumption for the United States, 1850-2007. (Gallons of ethanol, based on population age 15 and older prior to 1970 and on population age 14 and other thereafter).

Higher addiction rates, instead of lower ones like you might expect

If this were true, you should be seeing higher liver cirrhosis mortality rates.

In fact, the rates between 1920 and 1940 are about half those of 1910. Age-Adjusted Liver Cirrhosis Mortality U.S. 1910-1996 [chart]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691850/?tool=pmcentrez (+ related articles)

(and its really trivial to stumble upon many sources via googling the keywords, you might try it sometimes)

Meta analysis was used for that study. That means that the data from a number of previous studies was combined to create a statistically significant sample of almost 7000. It is not credible that a study of over 2000 would reach the opposite conclusion (that male sexual orientation is related and female is not) if the correlation were strong and data collection was consistent. Another study calls into doubt whether data obtained directly should be combined with data obtained using photocopying, I am not sure that the data was obtained in a consistent manner across these studies. I think the jury is still out.

Meta analysis was used for that study. That means that the data from a number of previous studies was combined to create a statistically significant sample of almost 7000. It is not credible that a study of over 2000 would reach the opposite conclusion (that male sexual orientation is related and female is not) if the correlation were strong and data collection was consistent. Another study calls into doubt whether data obtained directly should be combined with data obtained using photocopying, I am not sure that the data was obtained in a consistent manner across these studies. I think the jury is still out.

The meta study that's the source behind your quote (abstract here) concludes that male sexual orientation and 2D:4D ratios are unrelated, but female sexual orientation and 2D:4D ratios are related. The GP's claims included both genders, so at least from the meta analysis some of them are plausible.

We report on a polymer-based anti-fog coating covalently grafted onto glass surfaces by means of a multistep process. Glass substrates were first activated by plasma functionalization

[From the abstract to this researcher's recent work on anti-fog coatings at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21381643%5D

So, you're going to drag this plasma functionalization equipment around with you to stop your glasses fogging up? Or maybe not ; you're just going to have to take your glasses to the optical lab to have this "permanent" coating applied. Which doesn't sound so bad. Yet.

The anti-fog coating was then created by the successive spin coating of (poly(ethylene-maleic anhydride) (PEMA) and poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) layers. PEMA acted as an interface by covalently reacting with both the glass surface amino functionalities and the PVA hydroxyl groups, while PVA added the necessary surface hydrophilicity to provide anti-fog properties.

Uh huh ... yes ... one plastic to bond to the glass and to the other plastic ; the other plastic to provide a hydrophilic surface. (yes children, hydrophilic not hydrophobic ; this evidently works by constraining the water to form a uniform coating on the surface instead of forming irregular droplets. As a spectacle wearer with a chemist parent, I worked out this aspect of stopping my glasses fogging up long before I left home for university. It is fairly unavoidable.) The hydrophilic surface holds the water to it's surface instead of forming droplets that disrupt the rays of light more than the uniform surface of the glass does.

Finally, following a 24 hour immersion in water, these PEMA/PVA coatings remained stable and preserved their anti-fog properties.

So, if you put your coated glasses into water, the coating doesn't fall off. Which is a good start. And if you have to wipe dust off your glasses on a dry day? This is a very restricted meaning of "permanent".

I do see that the researcher has an additional publication coming out imminently. bt that's what I can find at the moment. I'll carry on spitting on the lenses of my glasses and on my diving mask ; my microscope and camera optics will continue to get rinsed in alcohol, then have the grit and dust licked off them before another alcohol rinse (the tongue can detect grit far more easily than you can see. Seriously.) ; and I'll continue to breathe out of the side of my mouth while framing up a snowscape photograph, to avoid fogging the viewfinder lens.

My hopes got raised for a few moments there.

Between Chris Hansen, perverted justice and all the other law enforcement agencies out there, there are a lot of fake teenagers who will say yes to a meeting. How many real teens would agree to meet a 40 year old so fast?

I don't really see "fast" or "slow" as part of the equation, and even it it were I doubt we could get statistics on that. However the rest of the question is interesting, so I spend a few minutes on Google trying to find some real data on the subject. I couldn't find an exact match, but I did find a statistic that should get us into the ballpark of the true answer. Source: US National Institute of Health Age differences between sexual partners in the United States

I realize you're not American, but I didn't have much choice in the matter as that was the only reference I could find with approximately the right sort of statistic. The survey and percentage is based on the US, so I'll continue the calculation based on the US. The final result should not be wildly off for other industrialized countries if you scale for population size. From the reference source:

64% of sexually active women aged 15-17 had a partner within two years of their age, 29% a partner who was 3-5 years older, and 7% a partner who was six or more years older.

The population of the US is 311 million. Half are female, 155.5 Million. (Actually throwing out males is gender biased, but How many are 15-17? We could take 3 years divided by average lifespan, but the population percentages skew younger. 3/70 is more accurate, 6.66 million. If you check back in the threat I posted to someone else statistics demonstrating about 55% of the population lose their virginity by 17, so lets throw out the half who haven't had sex. 3.33 million. The statistic is for "sexually active", so lets be conservative and say only half of non-virgin teens are still sexually active. 1.67 million. 7% currently have a partner 6 or more years older. That gets us to about 117 thousand 15-17 year old girls at any given moment currently engaged in a sexual relationship with a partner 6 or more years older.

Note that what you asked for is how many would be willing to do so. And I do believe that would be the correct number we want. On top of the 117 thousand currently in such a relationship, there would be some additional who had a previous such relationship, there would a large number who tried and failed, and there would be an even larger number who would given favorable circumstances. I'd say that easily puts the answer at over a quarter million at any given time. And lets not forget we threw out males. There's probably a significantly lower number of males at that age engaged in a significantly older sexual relationship, but I'd also say that it's safe to assume an even larger percentage would be willing and eager to do so given favorable opportunity. Basically we're talking over a half million total, easy. That figure is wildly approximate and doesn't fit our definition perfectly, but I'd say it gives a decent feel for what's going on in general. And the number would be even bigger if we count teens who actively engage in explicit sexchat as an online game, deliberately stalling and declining any meetup.

Chris Hansen runs what, a few dozen stings per year? I'd be hard pressed to guess how many active undercover decoys there are dedicated to this, but I doubt there are very many. The number of decoys certainly pales in comparison to the number of actual teens curious to discover what's going on in taboo adult sex chat rooms.

-

Your right, the west should be quick to judge the foreign cultures we have little personal experience of and take the moral high ground; After all acts like the crippling economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the UN after bombing their country into the stone age only caused an estimated million civilian casualties of which an estimated 500,000+ were children.

But how can the Chinese live with themselves, not allowing children under the age of 18 to visit Internet cafe's? It is much more important we quietly sweep our acts of indirect genocide under the mat then and focus on the real moral issue here, these backward evil nations that resist us putting a Starbucks and MacDonald's on every street corner.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1719267/pdf/v088p00092b.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions#Effect_of_the_sanctions_on_the_Iraqi_people

http://www.suite101.com/content/children-as-casualties-of-war-a176530

I have done research and have been showing you the evidence to support my arguments. You however, have done nothing of that sort. You say the radiation readings from Japan are a "billion" times lower than ones from Chernobyl, yet to fail to provide any evidence or explanation as to how you came to that conclusion so quickly, full well knowing the situation cannot be assessed so quickly after the tragic accident.

Perhaps you'd like to tell us what exactly "below health concerns" is? Is it the same type of harmless radiation that the U.S. government said was present at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility? Because that "safe" radiation caused an increase in lung cancers all over the area in a span of SIX YEARS, and yet you come out nearly 2 weeks after a much bigger accident in Japan and declare everything is safe, but have zero proof.

That's fine, I can see you're not here to actually present any credible proof or a coherent argument, you're just here to act cool because it's trendy to laugh in the face of possible danger (we don't know just how dangerous or not this "plume" will be). So you sir, have yourself a good day, and I really wish you are right and all the best to yourself and your family - I hope the plume misses all of us, and has no effect on anyone.

http://ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1997/105-8/correspondence.html

CDs are more costly, and they won't last longer than say, flash memory, except for special circumstances. For example, some CDs will degrade in as little as 18 months in humid conditions, or there's a fungus that will colonize and eat your discs. Flash memory is practically unaffected by storage conditions, as long as you don't throw it into the oven and switch it on: it can take basically any value for humidity, even a straight-up dump into water, survive freezing and tropical heat, fungi, etc.

So really, instead of CDs, music publishers should just migrate to read-only memory chips for storing music: more can be shipped in a single shipment, cheaper, and more durable.

Engineering Corynebacterium glutamicum for isobutanol production

or pdf download:

doi:10.1007/s00253-010-2522-6

Yes, the incoming (and intermediate) data sets are huge. You don't just sequence each base once, but 30-50 times over on average (required to call variants accurately). And you don't want to throw this data away, since analysis algorithms are improving all the time. But it's true that the final 'diff' to the reference sequence is very small, and has been compressed to as little as 4Mb in one publication:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942

As far as I understand: that is how:

Under the scanning electron microscope structures were revealed that may be the remains—in the form of fossils—of bacteria-like lifeforms. The structures found on ALH 84001 are 20-100 nanometres in diameter, similar in size to the theoretical nanobacteria, but smaller than any known cellular life at the time of their discovery.

and

Dr. Hoover has concluded they are indigenous to these meteors and are similar to trichomic cyanobacteria and other trichomic prokaryotes such as filamentous sulfur bacteria.

Nanobacteria is very rare, cianobacteria is not so rare.

Suspiciously enough the reference to Search for past life on Mars: possible relic biogenic activity in martian meteorite ALH84001.McKay DS, Gibson EK Jr, Thomas-Keprta KL, Vali H, Romanek CS, Clemett SJ, Chillier XD, Maechling CR, Zare RN. is missing.

(and sorry, I have no source)

Here's an article that has links to several sources, albeit from the American perspective. I haven't checked all of the links, but at least a couple seem to work.

The Australian government likes to mess with the day light offset for sporting events and I think they gave everyone a whole 5 weeks advanced notice a few years back. You get to the point where you just tell computer clocks to keep a common offset and then go change it twice a year.

There are some master time zone files that can be found here:
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/
On Unix like system you can run a command like # zic australasia (or whatever zone is messed up.. or just run them all).

Then things should work.
Here is a script I wrote up to test this sort of nonsense about half a decade ago....
http://www.abnormal.com/~thogard/timezone.shtml

Different studies will yield slightly different stats. Here's one I found:

For all forms of abuse and neglect, the gender breakdown is about 48.2 percent make and 51.1 percent female, which is close enough to 50/50 to not nit-pick. See Child Maltreatment 2009, p. 22, "Child Victim Demographics", http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm09/cm09.pdf for that statistic.

The full article is behind a paywall, but the abstract for
"Characteristics of child sexual abuse victims according to perpetrator gender," http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7583755 , says "Both lone female and lone male perpetrators abused more girls (62%, 76%, respectively) than boys."

This study was published in August 1995. These numbers do not include victims who had multiple abusers working in concert. However, with the 3-to-1 preference for girls by lone male perpetrators, and that male perpetrators are generally thought to outnumber female perpetrators 3-5 to 1, I find it very hard to believe that female victims don't outnumber male victims by a noticeable margin even if other factors such as any differences in the number of victims per perpetrator based on the perpetrator's preferred victim gender are included. Sorry this isn't the rock-solid evidence you wanted but until something that contradicts it comes along, it should be enough to support the claim that female victims outnumber male victims.

So it does not cover the 99% of DNA that is the same between people

There's no need for it to cover that. The consensus DNA sequence (human genome reference sequence) is freely available from the NCBI website.

So it does not cover the 99% of DNA that is the same between people

There's no need for it to cover that. The consensus DNA sequence (human genome reference sequence) is freely available from the NCBI website.

This comes as a weird time for me, as I just a month ago got an autoimmune attack in my system. That is when your own system starts attacking itself thinking theres an enemy. It's usually unknown where or why it hits a person, but I probably got it from some food in south east asia. End result - now 1,5 months in hospital and unable to walk. Doctors aren't yet completely sure what it is, but they're thinking it's Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Human blood cells attacking itself is some nasty bug. At least my legs and hands still work little bit so I will be able to recover.

After you get your level checked, you'll have to then decide what level is a good thing.

Here are four different recommendations for optimal levels in increasing order

IOM:
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2010/Dietary-Reference-Intakes-for-Calcium-and-Vitamin-D/DRI-Values.aspx
>20 ng/mL (but their recommendations sort of imply not much more than that is important)

Dr. Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
35–55 ng/mL

Grassroots Health:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
40–60 ng/mL

Vitamin D Council:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
50–80 ng/mL (or higher for some specific conditions)

So, it's great to have a level. But even then there are disagreements about what is best.

Remember, parents have been warned heavily over the last decade or two to keep their kids out of the sun.

The vitamin D hpothesis easily explains stuff like the high rate (5X) of autism among Somali children or the high rate (9X) of schizophrenia among second generation Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/minneapolis-and-the-somal_b_143967.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2418996/
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/167/3/362

No doubt there are socieconomic issues at play in the disparity, but 5X and 9X?

Note that in the link you provide, the units were different (nmol/L which requires a higher level to be in the right range).

I'm still not following their logic to dismiss what they found: "Age-standardized means based on observed serum 25(OH)D concentrations were significantly (P http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/22/pregnant-women-advised-to-get-more-vitamin-d.aspx
"Please do not assume your levels are fine, as Drs. Hollis and Wagner found that over 87 percent of all newborns and over 67 percent of all mothers had vitamin D levels lower than 20 ng/ml, which is a severe deficiency state. As a result, the researchers recommended that all mothers optimize their vitamin D levels during pregnancy, especially in the winter months, to safeguard their babies' health. This finding could easily help to explain the disproportionately high numbers of poor outcomes among African American births, as deficiency is extremely common among people with darker skin colors."

However, another variable is how much vitamin D do people with different ethnicities or skin color need? So, even the general ranges above, are they appropriate for all ethnicities? Maybe people with darker skin have other adaptations to function well on less? So, there remains more to research about all this. But with that said, just look at how much sun people got 1000 years ago, and look at how much people get now, and considering how melanoma is one of the easiest to detect and treat cancers, how much sun or vitamin D supplements seems "conservative" considering the conditions human are adapted for? Pretty much no humans in the past spent all their lives in caves that I'm aware of (except maybe rich ones, but they probably got diseases of affluence like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on).

We got hit by this ourselves with health issues with our kid (as well as a C-section, which turns out to also be at increased risk with vitamin D deficiency). We just naively followed all the advice to stay out of the sun, etc.. I actually asked our pediatrician if we should be giving vitamin D sup

"In more recent news, the author of one of the big studies which suggested massive Vitamin D deficiencies recently said that he was wrong, and that there's no worldwide Vitamin D deficiency crisis."

Citation?

Toxins include heavy metals (including lead in paint and gasoline, and mercury from burning coal), synthetic pesticides, estrogen mimics, arsenic, food additives, dioxin and other pollutants, and more. Now, people have always been exposed to some toxins. What is different for humans in the last century is the amount of human-produced toxins we are not well adapted to deal with going up and the amount of vegetables, fruits, and vitamin D, and so on we need to deal with toxins going down in our diet and from less sun exposure.

I'll hope to see your handwaving citation :-) and raise you Harvard med school people (not that Harvard doesn't have problems) ; see also:
    "Environmental risk factors for autism: do they help cause de novo genetic mutations that contribute to the disorder?"
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19699591
And comments:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/new-harvard-paper-on-autism.shtml
"Last month, Dr. Dennis Kinney and four of his colleagues at Harvard University accepted the Vitamin D theory of autism and then expanded it by adding five usual suspects. While I was thrilled to see the Vitamin D theory accepted, appreciate them crediting the theory to me, and loved seeing their paper in the same journal that published the original theory, Medical Hypotheses, their five additions are all toxins, the usual suspects. The authors imply these toxins are delivered to our genome by air or water pollution, such as mercury-contaminated seafood, where these toxins selectively damage the genome of those silly enough to be Vitamin D deficient. My problem with the paper is the same problem I have with any of the air and water pollution autism theories, why now? Certainly, if a toxin was causing autism, evidence exists that exposure to that toxin has increased part and parcel with the epidemic of autism. ..."

It probably is a combination of both factors, IMHO. But, if I had to emphasize one, I think dietary changes to eat less vegetables and lack of vitamin D duet to fears about the sun might be more important.

"No, one or a few of Behe's claims may have been demolished, but I know many physicists, engineers and biologists that can not "demolish" the idea of IC, even in their own minds."

Irreducibly complex systems in biology were first predicted by H. J. Muller in 1918 to be a consequence of evolution. See talk.origins for a quick summary, or a review of Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" from 1997. There's a (lot of) reasons why Behe wasn't taken seriously back when "Darwin's Black Box" was published in 1996 and the criticism has only deepened since then. If you're interested in the evolution of the heart a quick search turns up many articles on pubmed, for instance I learned something new today: crocodilians have a four-chambered heart!

The brain is an inexplicable thing

Bullshit. The brain is a computer. Sure, it's a strange architecture: it's made of billions of impressively energy-efficient gates each operating at the order of tens of hertz. Fan-out is huge --- a gate on a microprocessor might be connected to 50 others, but a neuron can have tens of thousands of connections. A CPU has one fast, global clock, while the brain has overlapping and distributed clock signals for synchronizing neuron firing. The short term memory system uses the equivalent of old-fashioned delay lines, while long-term storage is implemented with redundant, distributed rewiring. It's content-addressable and has a storage capacity in the terabyte range, though it has really lousy indexing. Input and output are essentially memory-mapped, with lots of special purpose hardware acceleration.

There are a lot of similarities too: both our computers and our brains run software, with only a few basic features baked into the hardware. Both parse raw environmental input and parse it into abstractions that can be manipulated symbolically according to software-defined rules. Both can evaluate the lambda calculus and run a universal Turing machine. Neither can solve the halting problem in all cases. Both have large data stores. Both have networked inputs. Both crash. Both employ algorithms and data structures to process information. Both eventually fall apart.

Our brains are not magical devices somehow above scientific inquiry. They are ordinary, pedestrian objects in that obey the same laws of physics that govern baseballs and light switches. That we don't completely understand all the brain's mechanisms is no reason to believe it's qualitatively different from any other computer. Have you read every line of code in the web browser you're staring at?

There has been a lot of pathogen-specific research in the last decade, most of that data is public and is available in GenBank, which also happens to be where all the other genetic data resides. There's a European one and a Japanese one too, as well as various topic-specific and private ones, but the GenBank is the biggest. It's a whole lot to sift through, a previous employer has a great graphic for making sense of it all.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.

Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...

I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.

As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.

If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.

The life expectancy of someone with Marfan syndrome was 32 +/- 16 years in 1972, and is now 41 +/- 18 years (all you need to see from that link is the abstract). If I could guess that the increase has to do with improved treatment technology (rather than improved management strategies), then someone getting surgery for Marfan syndrome is probably in their 20s or 30s, because they're unlikely to live too much longer than their late 30's or early 40's without surgery.

Consider the following. Many persons with Asperger Syndrome who are charged with crimes are giving the judiciary fits because it threatens the concept of mens rea. It creates a hitherto unknown mental state that is neither culpable nor insane as understood in R. v. M'Naughten .

A quick search shows many articles on the subject. While I didn't read all of the, a quick look showed that many are observational, prompting the famous "causation != correlation" argument, but some are intervetional and show a causative link between video games and aggressive behavior.
On /. there have been a few articles on the subject, many showing positive correlation, but some didn't show a connection. As someone wrote before me, given so much evidence, can we still cry vehemently against the "weak science" regarding video games and violence? Aren't we better than other groups that do not let evidence stand in the way of a good argument?

Here is the reference for the 1 vs 2 sugar pills effect on ulcers study (it is actually 2 vs 4 pills). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2014313/

Could not find the vomiting study in the rotating drum but I believe the muscle relaxant study was of Carisoprodol and can be found at this PDF. The asthma placebo effect study appears to be this study on this new bronchodilator.

If you're saying "citation needed" to imply that the placebo effect is not real, then I ask you why so many reputable institutions almost require a placebo group? It's obviously so they are capable of renormalizing the results to account for the placebo effect and not wrongly attribute their drug to something the patients caused themselves to believe they felt or to actually feel.

I might take issue with his claim that the placebo effect 'caused the muscle relaxant molecules to be more effective in relaxing the muscles' (or however he rambled it) as I have always thought that the placebo effect operated on a psychosomatic or neurological level.

BTW, citation on the homeopathy thing:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1712197/

I don't believe you.

Ethanol
http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/index.cfm?objectid=E881DFFB-BDB5-82F8-F033AA77BFF80F0C

Isopropyl
http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/index.cfm?objectid=E882096F-BDB5-82F8-F67816F2A2D5C71B

I don't believe you.

Ethanol
http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/index.cfm?objectid=E881DFFB-BDB5-82F8-F033AA77BFF80F0C

Isopropyl
http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/index.cfm?objectid=E882096F-BDB5-82F8-F67816F2A2D5C71B