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Here's a paper talking about proton beam -> neutron beam conversion. The input proton beams are lower than 2.5 MeV! I wonder what the proton-to-neutron conversion rate is. If it's greater than %50, we have a winner.

Yeah, the #1 cause of death is birth...

I've watched "the experts" stand around and scratch various body parts while they tried to explain the mercury concentration in the Florida Everglades, explanations like "naturally occuring" and "gee, we just don't know" were floated for about 10 years after the top predators started dying of mercury poisioning. After enough of that nonsense, somebody finally got the "clean" waste incinerators in the neighboring counties to just shut down, and miracle of miracles, mercury levels dropped and the alligators stopped dying with toxic loads of it in their brains.

High enough levels of non-ionizing radiation are definitely deadly, marginally lower levels cannot really be called "safe" in long-term exposure, and the "science" involved in declaring certain levels safe isn't really all that scientific. I still use cell-phones, live in a city, etc. and I don't think that it's going to kill me, but some common sense precaution is also called for.

How old is the tower? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site has power numbers ranging from 3000W for old towers to under 100W for newer ones.

Lots of stories about high-power ground-based aircraft and weather radar cooking geese and homeless people who nestled up to them for warmth. But that's about it for adverse effects.

Once you know the power level, you can pretty much gauge the impact in terms of energy emissions... comparing it to, say, a 100W light bulb. But for the most part I'd expect you would get higher doses of gigahertz radiation from your microwave or holding your own cell phone by your head.

You may or may not want to worry about terahertz radiation: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/30/1216230/How-Terahertz-Waves-Tear-Apart-DNA http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19154093 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19051324 . But you wouldn't be getting those from the cell tower. Supposedly terahertz radiation can have some effect on metabolism, maybe, which might be why they put different types of rocks in saunas and ascribe some kind of wanky "healing powers" to them.

So there you have it.

How old is the tower? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site has power numbers ranging from 3000W for old towers to under 100W for newer ones.

Lots of stories about high-power ground-based aircraft and weather radar cooking geese and homeless people who nestled up to them for warmth. But that's about it for adverse effects.

Once you know the power level, you can pretty much gauge the impact in terms of energy emissions... comparing it to, say, a 100W light bulb. But for the most part I'd expect you would get higher doses of gigahertz radiation from your microwave or holding your own cell phone by your head.

You may or may not want to worry about terahertz radiation: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/30/1216230/How-Terahertz-Waves-Tear-Apart-DNA http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19154093 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19051324 . But you wouldn't be getting those from the cell tower. Supposedly terahertz radiation can have some effect on metabolism, maybe, which might be why they put different types of rocks in saunas and ascribe some kind of wanky "healing powers" to them.

So there you have it.

O really? That's not entirely correct. Anti-biotics are largely on the way out for most use. In the future we'll see bacteriophages used for the vast majority of infections that previously we had used anti-biotics. Bacteriophage Therapy

Actually that was the theory until the 1990 when stem cells in the brain were discovered: see http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics4.asp

In the 1960s, scientists who were studying rats discovered two regions of the brain that contained dividing cells that ultimately become nerve cells. Despite these reports, most scientists believed that the adult brain could not generate new nerve cells. It was not until the 1990s that scientists agreed that the adult brain does contain stem cells that are able to generate the brain's three major cell types—astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, which are non-neuronal cells, and neurons, or nerve cells.

Sounds wrong to me. I recall that the researcher took the bacteria to prove he could recover using a course of anti-biotics and proton pump inhibitors (stomach acid blockers).

So I found this:

http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/hpylori/

Two-week triple therapy reduces ulcer symptoms, kills the bacteria, and prevents ulcer recurrence in more than 90 percent of patients.

Did they just get lucky ? or maybe their science is worth their Nobel Prize.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to continue within this thread since we are already several levels deep and at this point, it's probably just us reading it anyway. I'd like to continue offline, but not sure how without posting my email address to the world here. That being said, I'll respond to a few of your items.

I agree that we're probably the only ones reading at this point, but I'd be happy to continue this conversation privately. You can reach me at my username at gmail.

Sorry for the slow reply, I was waiting to see what the Republicans would propose at the summit. Unfortunately that was a pointless delay since they didn't offer anything substantive.

My apologies for the 95% remark. I dont' know that stats and was only trying to convey a clear majority. Yes, the average person is moderately healthy, but no, the distribution of medical expenses is not even remotely normal. That's precisely why medical insurance is so ridiculously complicated and expensive. Even if you exclude the uncontrollable factors, the costs are greatly varied.

Unfortunately getting all the proper stats for this debate will take far more time than either of us likely have, so I'll also have to overgeneralize and pull numbers out of my ass when discussing this issue. Feel free to call me out if I don't give the proper disclaimers or citations and I'll do the same when I see unfounded assertions. Apology more than accepted, I'm sure I'm guilty of the same in this thread.

That said, the strongest predictor of health care expenditures is age. Although individual expenditures definitely vary, I'd argue there's a pretty large average, moderately healthy population. Barring serious disabilities or diseases, most people should pretty closely follow the curve. To quote The Lifetime Distribution of Health Care Costs:

After the first year of life, health care costs are lowest for children, rise slowly throughout adult life, and increase exponentially after age 50 Bradford and Max (1996) determined that annual costs for the elderly are approximately four to five times those of people in their early teens. Personal health expenditure also rises sharply with age within the Medicare population. The oldest group (85+) consumes three times as much health care per person as those 65–74, and twice as much as those 75–84 (Fuchs 1998). Nursing home and short-stay hospital use also increases with age, especially for older adults (Liang et al. 1996).

Admittedly no individual perfectly fits the model, but when you have a large pool (say 100,000 or more people) it actually works quite well. There are, of course, outliers. Most of the outliers on the expensive side of the house are probably due to defect, disease, or injury. Insurance is, by its very nature, supposed to be the fortunate subsidizing the treatment of the unfortunate when it comes to disease and injury. As we've already discussed, pre-existing conditions are a bunch of BS and babies born with defects shouldn't be guaranteed uninsurable. Health care isn't a one-time use kind of thing, so rates shouldn't become financially impossible just because you had your first major expense before you hit 65.

Exclusive monopoly contracts are no different than government programs. Unless there is competition, there is no incentive to do a better job. My point was, it's not economical to have 5 fire service companies competing against each other. If your doctor sucks, you can get another doctor. If your fire department sucks, your house burns to the ground. You could make the same argument for Emergency Rooms, but I don't hear anyone saying that government should own the hospitals or emergency rooms.

Exclusive monopoly contracts with private enterprises mean that the private company has a fiduciary responsibility to yield the largest return for its investors as it ca

'Is that pure conjecture, or do you have a cite? Neither of the links you provided mention anything like what you suggest, nor have I discovered any such claims in my readings on the subject.'

Read more carefully! 33mM zinc gluconate (see second link) is certainly a 'significant concentration' by any reasonable standard. Zinc salt concentrations in the tens of millimolar range have easily measurable biological effects (e.g., activation of metallothionein synthesis in cells exposed to such levels). Since some reports do suggest an association between anosmia and intranasal zinc application:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=intranasal+zinc+anosmia

'potentially harmful' is perfectly justified. The first link lists the full range of dilutions commonly used in homeopathy, which go all the way from crazy numbers with lots of zeroes to 1 in 10. Many substances (if they have any activity to begin with) retain activity over a tenfold (and greater) dilution range. In the case of Zicam, the dilution was 100-fold from the stock solution (still qualifying as 'homeopathic'), reportedly giving a final (and certainly bioactive) concentration fo 33mM. This concerns me more than, say, the common 30C dilutions of various 'remedies' (which cannot contain any remaining active ingredients, unless you count the diluent or sugar pill etc.). In the latter case, the only worries are financial (paying for overpriced placebos) and moral (misleading the patient about a discredited system of medicine).

'While Zicam contains some homeopathic ingredients, they themselves have never been associated with anosmia.'

The zinc gluconate is itself a 'homeopathic' ingredient in this case, and intranasal use of zinc salts has indeed been associated with anosmia in some studies (see link above).

As I point out in other replies, if you look at how hunter/gatherers lived, you will see that people can function quite well among relative affluence.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

It's true that material affluence by itself can produce problems, as this study shows the general poor mental health of many wealthy families in the USA:
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/

But, I think that leaves out that our society in the USA has gone too far towards an extreme, and that trend has been amplified by competitive compulsory schooling:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""

And that is reflected in the dominant mythology of the USA:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47

And US foreign policy around the world has actively tried to destroy anything that might have emerged as a possible alternative good example. For example, the first September 11, in 1973, in Chile:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-December/006458.html

So, people can live well together in abundance, and we have historical proof of that. Some people, one might even call this mental illness, can not. How to deal with that is an interesting question, but maybe, as a start, we should make sure the lunatics are not running the asylum? :-( And all it takes, in a democratic society, to do that, is to have good candidates and to vote for them, as well as to build positive alternative non-governmental organizations and better businesses.

So, respectfully, if you keep looking for better answers, you may sometimes find them.

As for robots, they

Where I am, $100 at a bar is about 15-20 mixed drinks, IF you don't tip the bartender.

That's a dangerous thing to do.

Not tip the bartender, that is.
You could end up with a case of tetrahydrozoline poisoning if the barkeep is the spiteful kind.

Note how "environmentalists" is in quotes because anyone rational who claims to care about air pollution, global warming, deforestation, etc. etc. should love the idea of new, very safe nuclear power plants.

I'm a fan of nuclear power and I think it is one of the least objectionable and most practical options we have for making a real difference. That said, nuclear waste is a significant concern depending upon what rules are in place for generation, reprocessing, and disposal when these plants go online. Also, the potential link with childhood leukemia is a very real concern for environmentalists as well. The best data we have to date (http://ehsehplp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info:doi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.117-a437) seems to indicate there is likely a real link between rates of childhood leukemia and proximity to nuclear plants. Revamping our laws to reduce waste is important, but likewise is further research into this topic with strict and accurate methodology; and making sure these plants are located in relatively remote areas away from zoned residential areas.

Even your post speaks of "fault" in relation to obesity. You speak of choice about changing their weight. What I'm asking you to re-think is not that there's no choice for fat people about their weight, rather, to re-think your underlying assumption that there's only one choice that should be made: to lose weight. That that's the right choice. The moral choice. That people who remain fat are morally wrong; are lazy; have no self-control; over-eat.

That's not what I meant, or what I believe... I don't see how my post could be interpreted thus. It was a response to the first paragraph of your post, where you said that "lose the weight" is a pseudo-argument and you make crazy assumptions about the PP (black? gay? Ehh, what?!). That, in turn, was a response to your PP saying what to do "If you would prefer not to have those limitations". I disagreed with your statement and tried to explain why. I don't think I put down all overweight people as... anything, really, or demanded that all "horisontally challenged people" lose weight.

A friend jokes all the time about himself being fat (he is somewhat overweight), but he's perfectly happy and don't see the need to lose weight. That's very good. If a girl is very overweight I probably won't find her physically attractive, but then again I'm not partial to very thin girls either. I certainly don't find it "immoral" or "wrong" in any way. If a person is comfortable with his or her body, all is good.

I'm talking about those who complains that they want to lose weight but "can't". From my anecdotal experience it IS possible by taking measures in your everyday life, even if it can be very hard. It irks me when people claim that they want to lose weight, but give up without really trying "the obvious", and/or blame all kinds of circumstances they can't control. I believe that in the vast majority of cases they're factually wrong, and I try to say so in a gentle and constructive manner (I tried to be quite civil in my previous post).

..BMI...

BMI is certainly bullshit in many cases, that's why I never mention it. I, as well, was an accomplished athlete (cross-country skiing and soccer) with a BMI of 19, which is clinically underweight. I could bench 1.5 times my own body weight and I ran marathons, so I was not particularly worried :)

At least quote the actual study from whence the quote came. Let us judge that study on its scientific merits.

Thanks for introducing me to "whence", neat word! On topic: If Wikipedia is wrong, correct it. I'm in no way qualified to argue on scientific terms, neither do I find it particularly interesting or relevant to what you or I were saying. I didn't even read the whole article in the last case. Still, in my view as a layperson it's difficult to assume that correlation is not at least partially causation in these cases.

The source of my quote is here. The first hit on google for "obesity and caloric intake paper" yields this in the abstract: "The results show that obese or overweight individuals do absorb more calories at all ages but with differences that vary across gender and ages and across food nutrients such as carbohydrates, lipids or proteins."

For example, from your quote alone: "excessive" caloric intake? What is that? What's excessive, anything over 2,000 calories?

I have no idea, I never counted calories nor did I write the article, I guess it varies. When I was a cross-country skier practicing endurance and strenght six times a week I consumed enormous amounts of food while gaining only the muscle tissue I needed. What I take it to mean is "more than your body needs in order to function". If your body absorbs more energy than it needs it'll probably tend to store the excess as f

For example, from your quote alone: "excessive" caloric intake? What is that? What's excessive, anything over 2,000 calories? What about athletes? What about persons with a higher than average metabolism?

2000 calories is a rough guideline that we all know must be adjusted for your specific situation. A simple Google search turns up several calorie intake calculators that produce a better estimate, but even those aren't completely accurate.

There is no precise number of calories that everyone must take in, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as excessive calorie intake. "Excessive" simply means more calories than you need to maintain your current weight, and you can determine what's excessive for you (given your current size and activity level) by keeping track of what you eat and charting your weight: if you're eating too much, your weight will trend upward.

Fat is assumed to be bad and wrong because it is allegedly unhealthy. And yet, do we really know if it - being fat - is unhealthy? No, we don't. We know that many fat people tend to have heart problems, or diabetes. But are those conditions related to their weight, or are they related to the underlying behaviours or traits which caused their larger-than-average weight? No, we don't.

Actually, we have a pretty good idea. Here's one study which found independent associations between obesity and diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol: independent as in it's predicted by obesity itself, not by the other factors that predict obesity (age, economic status, etc.).

These issues began to occur to me when I was 17 years old and playing at a World Cup athletic event. I was 5'8", fit as a horse, with a six pack, and about 180 pounds. I had my BMI done and, if I recall correctly, I was rated "scientifically" as morbidly obese. What a joke. It reminded me that the BMI, the 2,000 calorie diet and all the assumptions these things and their kin are based on are all bunk. They are tautological in the sense that they can only be used on the very populations for which they were defined to be used: "normal" people. And when you think about it, what use at all is that?

Yes, BMI is well-known to be inaccurate for bodybuilders and athletes, because muscle is denser than fat, and if whoever tested your BMI didn't tell you that, they weren't doing their job.

But BMI is still quite useful, because most people aren't bodybuilders or athletes. Most people whose BMI is rated as "overweight" really are overweight.

1. Raise giant squid
2. ???
3. Profit!

I think #2 could easily be "open chain of squid restaurants" or "conquer the world"

You could also sell them as exotic pets to rich, stupid people.

A more legitimate use would be to prevent them from going extinct. They don't seem to be classified as endangered, but I'd guess that might have more to do with our ability to observe and count them than their actual likelyhood of going extinct.

What came to my mind first though was that giant squids might then be useful as model organisms for various studies. The giant axons of squids (regular sized squids, giant axons) were useful for first identifying the motor protein kinesin, and I've heard were also useful for early studies on neurons. Different animals may be particularly useful for doing research on, but if you can't keep them in a lab setting or catch many fresh, that really prevents that. Maybe the giant squid has some really interesting cellular process, we could study it, and learn something that will eventually cure cancer. Maybe not.

See original article here (from '88) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3191066?dopt=Abstract

I do not want to join a fight about all this.

Then maybe you shouldn't have posted.

I am convinced, that the drug industry is doing a lot of evil things, and that most bodies like the FDA are actually ment to protect the interest of drug companies (e.g. drugs with same ingredients cannot be sold if they are from India, Canada, etc..) and not the end users'.

So you're a conspiracy theorist. Do you also believe that the government is covering up the evidence for alien abductions and the the UN is secretly plotting to take over the US? What about water fluoridation, is that a secret plot by the communists to implement mind control or steal our "precious bodily fluids?" All of those conspiracy theorist beliefs are equally absurd.

So I recommend making a search on your favourite torrent site or even youtube for "Are Vaccines safe"

Right, because when I want accurate and timely medical information the first thing that comes to my mind is "Hey, I'll see what a bunch of random non-experts on Youtube have to say." If you want to actually learn something useful, try searching on pubmed. You can also read the Cochrane Reviews on the subject if you want the predigested non-definitive summary (being a scientist and not a clinician, I prefer the original literature to the reviews, but of course I'm not busy seeing patients).

By the way they want to make H1N1 shots obligatory in Costa Rica - where I live - and there will be a huge resistance to it as everyone is scared of the shots' side effects, and the fact that it had very little - if any - testing.

Sheesh, the H1N1 vaccine is no different from every seasonal flu vaccine ever made, with the exception of this one likely being more accurately targeted (and thus having higher efficacy). We've been using these things for decades, and you can search pubmed to see studies looking at their safety and efficacy.

You can also make a search for flu shots and alcheimers, shots and tumors and find a scary amount of hype and facts....

You can also search for timecube to learn the true theory of everything. Try searching the actual literature and see what science finds. You do remember science right? Its the thing that gave us the internet, drastically increased our lifespans and largely eradicated previous scourges like polio and measles. Funny how useful that science thing has turned out to be...

Sorry, I mixed up the links... the second one should point to this page.

CJ

Notice when there are outbreaks of measles, etc. they never tell you what percentage of those infected were 'vaccinated', do they... I wonder why...

Rubbish.

They most certainly do. Around a third of children infected with measles will have been vaccinated but they have milder infections and are far less likely to die of them. Take a look at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14506371, http://www.jstor.org/pss/30106702, and http://www.springerlink.com/content/wv6714265t3l8150/ for some examples.

Your statement is even more absurd when you consider the research that must be done to determine the probability of successful vaccination. In the case of the MMR vaccine it's only around 80%, IIRC. Luckily most children are surrounded by vaccinated people who wont spread it to them.

I don't know if you're trolling or honestly believe a big medical conspiracy is out to kill you but either way, you're wrong.

You are completely, 100 percent full of shit:

NIH budget in 2002: $19,319,125,000
NIH budget in 2008: $23,841,208,000

% increase: 23.4%

source: http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/appropriations/index.htm

Not exactly double, eh?

*****************

Do you also remember how Bush was going to double NSF's budget? We all know how THAT went:

News about bill from 2002: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200210/senate.cfm

According to the bill, NSF's budget was supposed to be $9.8B by 2007.

Actual 2007 budget: $6.43B.
Actual 2009 budget (even later): $6.85B.

So yeah, don't trust Bush or anyone who supports him. Nuff said.

Don't get carried away and be all rash now.

Some drugs actually promote neurogenesis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253627/

You wouldn't want to get stoned all the time and then have this new cell therapy and end up with too many neurons.

In fact, depending on how you define "curiosity", then there are already many examples of programs that are curious.

This is certainly true. reinforcement learning algorithms trade off between exploitation, choosing actions based on the assumption of a static environment, and exploration, testing alternatives, in case the environment has changed. This could be considered a kind of curiosity. What is more interesting to me, as a neuroscientist, is the human ability detect interesting sights or sounds and focus on them. It's like we have a fast but rough novelty detector that can guide our attention towards some event. There is evidence that the amygdala is key element in the neural circuit that detects interesting events, although the mechanism of detection isn't fully understood.

A robot is only as smart as its smartest programmer.

This, under normal defintions of smart, is clearly false. One example: I can program an AI search algorithm to play chess that will make far smarter choices than i would ever be able to (i'm not that good at chess). Some might argue that a search algorithm isn't smart, it's just fast. But to an external observer interacting with the agent, the AI seems much smarter than me, the programmer.

Prions can confer evolutionary advantages through protein-based inheritance. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11260797

and are themselves subject to mutation and natural selection. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20044542

...and parasites. Plant parasitism is a medium for horizontal gene transfer between different species Genes can be transmitted in both directions in this case. http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/1716.html

Prions can confer evolutionary advantages through protein-based inheritance. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11260797

and are themselves subject to mutation and natural selection. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20044542

...and parasites. Plant parasitism is a medium for horizontal gene transfer between different species Genes can be transmitted in both directions in this case. http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/1716.html

Has the entire Space Station Biological Research Program gone down the drain? Their planned experiments seemed the most important science that could be done on the ISS, but I believe that they depended on the rack space, glove boxes, and centrifuges of the CAM.

This simply a lie, as is the claim that 64 combinations producing 20 codons is "redundancy". The reason there are only 20 is well-known to anyone with the least little bit of familiarity with the subject: it is the maximum number of unambiguous combinations, so that if you get six bases in a row there is exactly one way to read them, because no two codons together can result in a third codon being read between them.

Except that isn't true. Every one of the 64 possible 3 base sequences is a valid code for either an amino acid or a stop codon. Some viruses take advantage of this by overlapping protein coding regions, with different proteins being coded by reading in different frames. In eukaryotes, there are some genes that can code for proteins with very different sequence regions because an exon skipping splice variant results in a frame shift that codes for a completely different sequence.

A more significant complaint about the "This code is universal, shared by all organisms" quote is that it isn't universal. There are small differences in the genetic code between genomes. NCBI lists no fewer than 23 different versions, but given that a tiny fraction of all species have been studied there are undoubtedly many more minor variants. An especially interesting case- and the place that difference in genetic codes were first discovered- is that human nuclear and mitochondrial sequences use slightly different genetic codes. The mitochondria even have their own distinct ribosomes.

more data warehouses: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

more data warehouses: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

And there's no scientific evidence that there's anything wrong with corn syrup.

Yeah! That's right!


Except for, you know, all the scientific evidence

This link has a brief explanation of how much Vit D supplementation vs. sun exposure you need.

Too bad the people who wrote this study did not look at the vitamin D connection:
"Schizophrenia in black Caribbeans living in the UK: an exploration of underlying causes of the high incidence rate"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2418996/
"The incidence of schizophrenia in black Caribbeans living in the UK is substantially higher than in the white British population. When first reported, these findings were assumed to be a first-generation migrant effect or merely the result of methodological artefacts associated with inconsistencies in the diagnosis of schizophrenia in black Caribbeans and doubts about population denominators. More recently, it has become clear that the incidence of schizophrenia, based on standardised diagnosis and sophisticated census methods, is higher still in second-generation black Caribbeans. The largest study to date has demonstrated a ninefold higher risk of schizophrenia in UK-resident black Caribbeans: findings that are of concern to black Caribbean communities, to their GPs, and to health service managers responsible for resource allocation."

Contrast with:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/the-black-community.shtml
"""
Vitamin D deficiency discriminates based on race, or more precisely, the amount of melanin (pigment) in the skin, which is an effective and ever-present sunscreen. The vitamin D theory of autism predicts that autism is more common in children born to darker-skinned mothers. Such studies are difficult as they raise sensitive social issues, although 3 of 4 recent U.S. studies found a higher incidence of autism in black children—sometimes appreciably higher. [Bhasin TK, Schendel D. Sociodemographic Risk Factors for Autism in a US Metropolitan Area. J Autism Dev Disord. 2007 Apr;37(4):667–77. Croen LA, et al. The changing prevalence of autism in California. J Autism Dev Disord. 2002 Jun;32(3):207–15. Hillman RE, et al. Prevalence of autism in Missouri: changing trends and the effect of a comprehensive state autism project. Mo Med. 2000 May;97(5):159–63.]
"""

Or:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/vitamin-d-and-schizophrenia.shtml
"""
Before I describe the remarkable paper from Harvard, I want to compliment researchers at the Saint Barthomew's Hospital in England for almost saying what most psychiatrists already know; the incidence of schizophrenia is much higher in people with dark skin. In the 1970s and 80s, that was an accepted fact, until charges of racism were leveled against the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The spineless APA promptly did retrospective chart analyses and announced the incidence of schizophrenia is exactly — precisely — the same for Blacks as it is for Whites. The ethnicity question is important as the Vitamin D theory is not tenable unless darker skin means a higher incidence. [Coid JW, Kirkbride JB, Barker D, Cowden F, Stamps R, Yang M, Jones PB. Raised incidence rates of all psychoses among migrant groups: findings from the East London first episode psychosis study. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008 Nov;65(11):1250–8.]
Actually, in 2007, a group at Columbia University appears to be the first to break with the APA's political correctness. Dr. Michaeline Bresnahan and her colleagues followed 12,000 children for up to 28 years after birth. African Americans were 3 (three) times more likely to develop schizophrenia than whites and socioeconomic factors could not explain away their findings. [Bresnahan M, Begg MD, Brown A, Schaefer C, Sohler N, Insel B, Vella L, Susser E. Race and risk of schizophrenia in a US birth cohort: another example of health disparity? Int J Epidemiol. 2007 Aug;36(4):751–8.]
"""

I wrote to the author of the first linked study on this (but no resp

It is possible that some of this vitamin D deficiency disaster could have been prevented with more information sharing. As I wrote here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005081.html
"""
Ryan pointed out to me the University of Wisconsin has patents related to Vitamin D. So, were people perhaps denied Vitamin D as an example of a public institution being funded by public dollars privatizing research results? Same as I can't easily see that study above on the web. ...
I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect most of this research is funded at least in part by public dollars.
I'm assuming, because the University of Wisconsin says they make a lot of money still from Vitamin D, that lawsuits might start flying if someone else starts using Vitamin D therapies without a license for various illnesses?
Is it possible this is a case of the patent system linked to profit-oriented non-profits damaging the health of billions of people globally? Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
If the global health care costs of treating all the diseases that have been suggested related to Vitamin D deficiency each year in whole or in part were totaled up, from flu through cancer to schizophrenia, it might total in the trillions of dollars per year in costs.
If people were somehow getting less Vitamin D because of the societal consequences of patents (including competitivenesses among researchers, but also making techniques to costly to use or delaying their widespread adoption), it is possible the the consequences of proprietary knowledge from just this one issue might have cost our global society many trillions of dollars and untold personal suffering. Enough money to fund endless researchers making more free knowledge. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin got a little bit bigger.
Obviously, I'm all for the Vitamin D researchers at the University Wisconsin as well as other universities getting all the resources they need to do good work. But, there may be a huge problem here with public funding strategies for research. The proprietary approach to research knowledge may literally have been costing trillions of dollars a year (in current dollars) for decades taken across the globe. For the past fifty years, at two trillion a year in excess medical costs, this might add up to US$100 trillion in excess medical costs due to such medical knowledge being proprietary and researchers not cooperating more.
Of course, then the huge public health bills are used to justify *increasing* the proprietary aspects of medical knowledge to create more artificial scarcity -- which is a tremendous and sad irony.
"""

Here is one study of the cost to Western Europe of vitamin D deficiency, and it does not even included costs for excess mental illness:
"Estimated benefit of increased vitamin D status in reducing the economic burden of disease in western Europe."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19268496
"""
Vitamin D has important benefits in reducing the risk of many conditions and diseases. Those diseases for which the benefits are well supported and that have large economic effects include many types of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, several bacterial and viral infections, and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Europeans generally have low serum 25-hydroxyvit

    But in some cases, the drugs only exist because of the condition, which was caused by modern lifestyles.

    I found this study which shows a marked increase in mortality due to diabetes between 1840 to 1970. Most of the increases happened between 1880 to 1911, when refined sugars and fatty foods were introduced. I've seen other studies that reflect this also.

    The cure could become virtually unnecessary if the cause was removed, rather than profiting from the treatment.

Links that are not reputable or factual but seem to support my case... (but I'm not a doctor so I can't tell)

http://archinte.highwire.org/cgi/content/summary/90/4/513
http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0442e/a0442e0m.htm
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/28630.php
http://www.alternet.org/story/274/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/280264/obese_britons_also_at_risk_for_malnutrition.html?cat=51
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r718533228ph9g55/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8581766
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S155072890800600X ...but in all truth I am not nearly as qualified as you are to talk about these things. I'm parroting things I've seen in biased documentaries. I bow before your might.

What makes me very dubious about these claims is that the structures are so small that they'd have to be nanobacteria, and yet the so-called "nanobacteria" on Earth turn out to be non-living.

B) The scientific word "prove" is more about the lack of any valid competing hypotheses. If you can't come up with a reasonable alternative explanation for the data, you have to accept the presented explanation.

No. One does not have to accept an extraordinary scientific claim just because one does not yet have another explanation. There is lots of data on UFOs. For some of this data, there is no reasonable alternative explanation. That doesn't mean that I have to start believing in UFOs. It just means that UFOlogy is a field where the data are all a big pile of doggy doo. Science has many subfields in which the state of the art is so terrible that reputable people don't want to get involved, and no progress is being made. Two good examples that spring to mind are nanobacteria and IQ testing.

I am very skeptical about extraordinary scientific claims coming from NASA. NASA has not succeeded in instituting a culture of proper scientific peer review. For instance, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project does crank stuff, and has ties to characters like Harold Puthoff, who specializes in things like telepathic visits to Jupiter. In a way it's not surprising that NASA has problems with proper peer review. They're the handmaiden of Congress. Congress wants the crewed space program to be run as a national prestige project, but they also want to be able to give justifications for the crewed space program that don't sound like pure nationalism. Therefore they coax NASA into coming up with bogus scientific justifications for programs like the shuttle and the ISS. In a culture that's all based on puffing up bad or nonexistent scientific achievements, it's not surprising that they're susceptible to kookiness.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is not sufficient to say that there is no alternative explanation for these structures in the meteorites, and therefore they must have arisen from living organisms. No geologist has ever been to Mars. We know far less about Mars's geological history than we do about the earth's. It's not at all surprising that we find geological samples where we can't explain how they were formed. That doesn't mean that we immediately have to leap to the conclusion that they were made by nanobacteria.

"i'm saying wouldn't it be better to have your testicles inside your body and evolve sperm that develop at a higher temperature? its pretty ridiculous to have such an important organ dangling outside unprotected. i never understood why"

You know why they're dangling out there (and you're right about your implication it is a *twisted* design to accomplish that), but you don't know why sperm need reduced temperature. I went looking for info. All I found was that spermatogenesis is more efficient at slightly lower temperature (2 deg C lower for humans), and that the effect is widespread in mammals (e.g., mice apparently are optimal at 8 deg C below their regular body temperature). From the papers I found, I get the sense that while the effect on spermatogenesis is well-studied, the exact cellular reasons for it are not well understood.

Well, according to this, they do seem to correlate with adult smoking:

http://medjournalwatch.blogspot.com/2007/05/candy-cigarettes-make-young-smokers.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17532370?dopt=Abstract

History of childhood candy cigarette use is associated with tobacco smoking by adults.

Klein JD, Thomas RK, Sutter EJ.

University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Department of Pediatrics and Community, Rochester, NY 14642, USA. jonathan_klein@urmc.rochester.edu

OBJECTIVE: We examined whether childhood candy cigarette use was associated with adult tobacco smoking. METHODS: 25,887 U.S. adults from the Harris Poll Online (HPOL) were surveyed about current smoking status from November 2005 to May 2006. Respondents were randomly assigned to a yes/no item or a dose-response scale to assess candy cigarette use. Data were weighted to reflect the U.S. adult population. RESULTS: 26.4% of respondents reported current smoking and 29.4% reported former smoking. Candy cigarette use was reported by 88% of both current and former smokers and 78% of never smokers (por=0.001). Logistic regression showed that the odds of smoking for those who used candy cigarettes was 1.98 (95% CI: 1.77, 2.21) for ever (current plus former) smokers and 1.83 (1.59, 2.10) for current smokers, compared to those who had not used candy cigarettes. Odds for current and ever smoking increased with increasing candy cigarette use. CONCLUSION: History of candy cigarette use was associated with increased risk of ever and current smoking among this nationally representative online sample of adults. Odds of smoking increased as candy cigarette use increased; these relationships persisted when controlled for sociodemographics. Elimination of candy cigarettes may protect children from products that promote the social acceptability of smoking.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001467.htm?

Sun allergy: Xeroderma pigmentosa. Not his symptoms, but this is what most people I know mean when they are talking about severe sunlight allergy.

I've seen claims that mothers who have a Caesarean section give birth to kids who don' have the ability to handle stress. The theory goes something like: the final pains labor trigger the a release of hormones into the fetus that then give the child the ability to deal with stress.

I am extremely skeptical of these claims. The idea that there are particular hormones that are released during such a short time period with such life-long effects seems a bit of a stretch to me. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it does seem like a bit of deus ex machina to imply that there is some omnipotent hormone behind it all.

I find it much more likely that a combination of factors, particularly cultural and social, offers a better explanation. See here and here for a couple of articles examining the link between Cesareans and psychosocial effects. Cesareans often result in a certain amount of psychological trauma for the mother that often impairs the mother's ability to bond with her child immediately. To complicate matters, for multiple reasons, delivery rooms often take the child for a number of examinations immediately after the birth. As a result, some mothers do not get to see their child's face until almost an hour after they are born. In my opinion, it would be better to let the mother see the child right away, even if only for a few seconds, before whisking them away. Additionally, better post-partum psychological support would be greatly beneficial toward reducing the effect of this trauma.

Another factor to consider is what became the dominant US culture for child-rearing in the 20th century. Breastfeeding declined immensely (though it's been making a comeback recently). There is also a cultural bias toward early detachment (such as letting babies "cry it out") that is unique in the history of the world. Co-sleeping is another common element in other cultures that is frowned upon in the US. (And if you are concerned about the risks, there are plenty of products that place a barrier around the baby that makes it nearly impossible to roll onto them. There are also bed-side cribs that offer nearly the same benefits of co-sleeping without the risk of roll overs.) As an alternative, my wife and I adopted the attachment parenting philosophy. The basic idea behind AP is that developing a strong bond with your infant and toddler helps to create a much better foundation for life-long emotional and psychological stability. That is, babies first need to feel secure and loved before they can begin to mature into independent children. You may disagree, but we've been happy with the results.

I would also assume that a woman too afraid to go natural might also have a genetic predisposition of an inability to handle stress, but that is my own conjecture.

Wow. That is one hell of an audacious statement. I have yet to find a woman who is "too afraid to go natural" and would prefer to have a Cesarean. My wife and I spent months going through Bradley method classes (i.e., no medication at all), and still ended up with a Cesarean. The reality is that the vast majority of women do not want to have a Cesarean. But the current state of the American health care system has lead to a dramatic rise in their occurrence. Two major factors are the lack of adequate childbirth preparation and the scarcity of doulas to advocate for the mothers. The decision to have a Cesarean is often

The food that most kids eat often contains flavor enhancers such as aspartame, sucralose, splenda, and MSG (aka 'autolyzed plant protein,' 'hydrolyzed plant protein') that have powerful neurological effects (that's why they are effective in stimulating the tongue nerve cells). Unfortunately, though, many of these substances also have toxic effects on nerve cells due to overstimulation or other means. Other neurotoxins in widespread use (compared with 1938) include solvents, lead, cell phone radiation, mercury, drugs, and high blood sugar (diabetes and pre-diabetes are much more widespread due in part to increased sugar consumption). It's likely that the increased environmental exposure of children to neurotoxins since 1938 has caused much of the increase in mental illness.

Mod parent down for grossly exaggerating. Cases of over diagnosis/treatment are rare in the real world. Any doctor worth a damn will only medicate kids with a real problem. i think you're reacting to something that isn't as real as you think it is. We have a tendency to hear/think about negative things far more than positive. You won't hear about the 10 kids whose lives radically improved after being treated, only about the 1 kid that was misdiagnosed. If that rare misdiagnosis twists your panties you're going to think about it every time the matter appears (and ignore pounds of case files about proper treatment).

Some kids DO have these conditions. Some kids will cope, others will spend their lives struggling. Our prisons are packed with people who have these conditions and weren't diagnosed or treated. My own life could have been radically different if i had been diagnosed. i went to school under people who "think" like you do. So i was "undisciplined and lazy". With treatment i could have earned the grades to go to college with scholarships instead of doing four years in the USAF followed by borrowing $30K.

Much of this cavalier attitude you're showing comes from ignorance backed by a religious belief that humans are meat occupied by spirits. That all we do is a matter of choice and will. When the reality is that we're only meat. With the addition or removal of this or that chemical we can make a person more or less violent, attentive, horny or whatever. We can herd the cats in people heads to help them deal with a world that doesn't care if someone keeps changing the channel in their head. Consciousness can only do so much.

i'd love to be as disciplined and awesome as you are, but my brain works like a radio in scan mode. Ever few seconds the channel changes without any input from me. Without medication sleep i get about 4 hours of sleep per day because the noise will not stop. But the rest of the world is like you, they don't get it, and they don't give a shit. They don't care that i'm reliving conversations from 15 years ago while they are talking to me. All they care about is that i forgot what they said. If only i could be as attentive and perfect as you!

As for helmets... brain injuries are often permanent and life altering. It is a risk that just isn't worth taking. A helmet is tiny thing to require. Do you wear your seatbelt or are you so tough that you could just walk it off after slamming your head into a windshield at 50 MPH? Wow, you are so cool.

i will agree with you that some parents are over protective and paranoid with regards to kidnapping and molesters and the like. i was allowed to range far and wide as a kid. i didn't have to go far to encounter a molester, he was right next door which is more typical than the "guy in the van". Kids should be allowed a long enough leash to learn how to handle themselves.

On the matter of cocooning and protecting them from challenge, i agree. Giving kids challenges and allowing them to make decisions is usually great for their development. As long as some responsible adult is there to make sure it's not TOO stupid.

The third sentence from the end highlights your ignorance with a search light and flashing neon arrows. You say that they shouldn't be taking medication for anything less than a physical problem. ADD, ADHD, Aspergers and the like ARE PHYSICAL PROBLEMS. Your brain is part of your body. Those conditions are as physical as diabetes.

The last sentence makes me wonder if you're trolling. It's so unhinged that it seems like satire or concern trolling.

Become less ignorant:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9679423
http://www.crimetimes.org/02b/w02bp1.htm
http://www.bhsi.org/stats.htm
http://enhs.umn.edu/current/6120/bicycle/index.html

Amusingly, cats may be responsible for increased culture-wide neuroticism in humans. I don't think it's been linked to autism though. :-)

While everything you say makes sense, it answers the wrong question.

Certainly universities want the very best students available in their graduate programs (except for students with a very rich or politically well connected daddy, but those don't count). What we don't know is how much better the foreign students are than the American students who didn't get in. Is an apparently better foreign student who might return home a better investment than the US student? Obviously you want the superstars going to the top universities no matter what, but below the elite level it's not so clear that there aren't enough qualified US citizens to go around. In light of the billions of dollars the current administration is allocating to affirmative action programs, the emphasis seems to be less on qualifications and more on politics anyway.

.

While everything you say makes sense, it answers the wrong question.

Certainly universities want the very best students available in their graduate programs (except for students with a very rich or politically well connected daddy, but those don't count). What we don't know is how much better the foreign students are than the American students who didn't get in. Is an apparently better foreign student who might return home a better investment than the US student? Obviously you want the superstars going to the top universities no matter what, but below the elite level it's not so clear that there aren't enough qualified US citizens to go around. In light of the billions of dollars the current administration is allocating to affirmative action programs, the emphasis seems to be less on qualifications and more on politics anyway.

.

Hint: Slashdot does not handle non-US characters very well, especially the mu character. A direct cut and paste of a scientific abstract will rarely render as intended. Here's a link to the abstract
And here's the salient bit, corrected for typos.

Conclusion: Even in a group of well-characterized, highly sensitive subjects with peanut allergy, the threshold dose of peanut protein varies. As little as 100 micrograms of peanut protein provokes symptoms in some subjects with peanut allergy. (J Allergy Clin Immunol 1997;100:596-600.)

Here's a link to Lovejoy et al., Ancient Trans-Atlantic Flight Explains Locust Biogeography.

The newest relevant scientific review article seems to be "Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review", J. Philippe Rushton and C. Davison Ankney, International Journal of Neuroscience vol 119 issue 5 pages 692-732 (2009), available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668913/

Thanks for the link. My statement that there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence is clearly wrong.

On the other hand:

1. Correlation doesn't imply causation. For example, it's possible that high socioeconomic status causes both a more intellectually enriching environment and better nutrition, leading to bigger brains.
2. If you talk to anyone who's a professional in the field of educational measurement, they'll tell you that so-called "IQ tests" are extremely poorly constructed and poorly normed compared to the modern level of quality expected in standardized tests.
3. I thought it was interesting that the correlation vanished for certain types of mental ability. Traditionally, the ability to visualize rotations in three dimensions has been considered an important proxy for measuring mathematical and abstract reasoning. However, this kind of spatial ability is uncorrelated with brain size. This is an example of the fact that "IQ tests" lump together a lot of different things that may not really be related. Nobody can really say what scores on these tests mean. All they can say is that they're correlated with some other things, like professional success. They're strongly affected by things like training kids receive in school on how to take tests.
4. In the context of the fossil skulls we're talking about here, what's being measured in head size rather than brain size. According to the paper, the correlation between head size and IQ is only .2, which means that head size only accounts for 4% of the variance in IQ scores. (The correlation between brain size and IQ is higher, about .4, but even that only accounts for 16% of IQ variance.) 4% of variance doesn't seem like much to go on, especially if you're trying to interpret fossils of extinct people who can't be given IQ tests to find out if the correlation holds for them. Of the other 96% of the variance, presumably quite a bit is explained by environment, and quite a bit by genetic differences that don't fossilize.

Most implant approaches use electrodes shoved in from the outside intending them to work immediately. That invasive technique leaves the person open to infection

Here's how to solve that problem. I haven't figured out the other part though :)

If you compare humans, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence.

That's a common myth. A quick Google for "Human brain size vs intelligence" gives the following two results as number 3 and 4 (and the first two that seem relevant):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#Brain_size
http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/sci_update.php?DocID=166

Both indicate a correlation.

Quoting from Wikipedia (which is least definite):

Within human population, studies have been conducted to determine whether there is a relationship between brain size and a number of cognitive measures. Studies have reported correlations that range from 0 to 0.6.[2] ...

[2] http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/129/2/386

The newest relevant scientific review article seems to be "Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review",
J. Philippe Rushton and C. Davison Ankney, International Journal of Neuroscience vol 119 issue 5 pages 692-732 (2009), available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668913/

Abstract:

We review the literature on the relation between whole brain size and general mental ability (GMA) both within and between species. Among humans, in 28 samples using brain imaging techniques, the mean brain size/GMA correlation is 0.40 (N = 1,389; p < 1010); in 59 samples using external head size measures it is 0.20 (N = 63,405; p < 1010). In 6 samples using the method of correlated vectors to distill g, the general factor of mental ability, the mean r is 0.63. We also describe the brain size/GMA correlations with age, socioeconomic position, sex, and ancestral population groups, which also provide information about brain–behavior relationships. Finally, we examine brain size and mental ability from an evolutionary and behavior genetic perspective.

Eivind.