Slashdot Mirror

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15477546?ordinalpos=13&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

Short version: Pot didn't help keep the patients on the most effective meds. (which is an issue for Parkinson's... you can't just take the meds forever. They stop working)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15111259?ordinalpos=18&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

Short version: pot might help people with Parkinson's, and here's how. Need to test that out.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15372606?ordinalpos=15&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

Short version: if you ask patients, 25% of them admit to using pot, and about half of those people said it helps.

I couldn't find any trials on cannabis alone as a treatment or how it compares to Levadopa in my cursory 2 minutes search.

Well in this study, they mention that they see significant improvements in depression symptoms and dopamine levels, which you don't see with normal exercise, and the researchers hypothesize that something about the video game component is causing this. There are actually quite a few studies finding that using the Wii is an incredibly effective form of rehab. One case report: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18689607?ordinalpos=13&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

And all of the studies refer to it as a "low-cost gaming console". In comparison to traditional rehab, which cost just as much in equipment then add in the billing rate of a physical or occupational therapist, the Wii is dirt cheap.

Yes, absolutely sure. Try a search at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ for "Influenza A", and you'll see papers this term going back to the 1940s. H1N1 designates a subset of Influenza A viruses that include (e.g.) the 1918 'Spanish Flu' and the current pandemic 'swine flu' strain. The H5N1 'bird flu' is also Influenza A. For a good overview, see:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/swineflu/biofacts/swinefluoverview.html

At a quick glance, this wikipedia page looks OK:

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

The government does fund research, but not always for direct projects. NIH Grants http://grants.nih.gov/grants/oer.htm provide funding for lots of research related things, such as laboratory improvements, new equipment, etc. One of the stimulus packages included added more funding for NIH Grants. You can see all the active ones at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/search_results.htm?year=active&scope=pa

The government does fund research, but not always for direct projects. NIH Grants http://grants.nih.gov/grants/oer.htm provide funding for lots of research related things, such as laboratory improvements, new equipment, etc. One of the stimulus packages included added more funding for NIH Grants. You can see all the active ones at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/search_results.htm?year=active&scope=pa

This is quite correct; after doing a tiny bit of research, I found this and this (also plenty more if you're interested).

While it's nothing conclusive, it would appear that EMR can indeed mess with neurons.

This is quite correct; after doing a tiny bit of research, I found this and this (also plenty more if you're interested).

While it's nothing conclusive, it would appear that EMR can indeed mess with neurons.

Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized.

Fortunately the NIH public access policy is doing a lot to reverse this trend, but unsuprisingly, it's meeting with a lot of resistance. Mostly from the publishers, not the drug companies, but that's a matter of whose ox is being gored. If the FDA ever gets serious about its threats to open up clinical trial data, you'll see a real brawl.

The National Institutes of Health annual budget: $29 billion. That money funds most of the university biomedical research in the US http://www.nih.gov/about/budget.htm Current NIH funded projects include among other things the human genome, the human microbiome, almost all cancer research in the US, obesity, diabetes, communicable diseases.. The National Science Foundation has an extramural grant budget of $6 billion. The Department of Energy has an extramural research grant budget of $24 billion Among other things they fund alternative energy research, genomic research, You might say the US federal government should be funding more, but you cannot say it is not funding anything at all. The space race and the Manhattan project were both driven by wars: WWII and the Cold War. Maybe that is what it takes for a government to fund major research: fear of losing power and primacy to an opponent.

http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/txtsrch.htm

http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/lawdb.htm

http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/discover.htm

They were imaging and indexing up to several million documents. During a civil suit, in discovery, companies on each side of the lawsuit have to disclose every relevant document to each other.

Lawyers probably use the most flexible and all-encompassing systems, since they have to deal with every industry, every profession, everything. They also spend more money on their systems than most people can afford. They told me it costs them about $1 a page to thoroughly index big databases.

Information scientists told me the best model of a document database was PubMed, which indexes virtually every significant published medical article. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed

The big limitation of Google is that you can't search too well by date. Another limitation of text searches is that you can't search for concepts -- just words. Sometimes words (particularly names) match concepts very well, but if they don't, you've got a problem.

Yeah, it would have been nice if you had set up coding and naming conventions at the beginning, so the original authors could have sorted them as you went along. It may be difficult or impossible to go back and re-code them after the fact. It could wind up costing $1 a document. OTOH, you could be lucky -- some industries have been using standardized filing schemes and standardized jargon since the days of slide rules and T-squares.

There should be standard filing schemes and procedures throughout your industry, so your solutions may be industry-specific. There should be consultants that deal with your industry who would be happy to talk to you (for the prospect of maybe getting your business). There should be trade magazines in your industry that have covered the same issue for companies of your size. (Hell, if the price is right I'll write a roundup for them.) Or you might have a trade or professional association with some friendly people who have done it before. Trade and professional associations usually have a computer or information technology section, and if you're a member of the association, you can call up the members of the section.

Or maybe it isn't stupid. Genetics play a strong role in who gets addicted, and a huge role in the carcinogenic effects of smoking as well. I know there is a certain public-health mentality that abhors these studies fearing they might give some people license for risky behavior, but if you ask me that's just ignoring the facts to fit the risk model as it was previously understood. The fact is, people do have different risk/reward ratios depending on individual differences. My fair skin means I have to mess with sunscreen more than black people. But I don't have to regulate my intake of sugar like my diabetic friend does.

Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world.

Maybe. Although nobody has come up with any convincing evidence yet; most studies find no effect. And some psychologists have suggested the effect could be the opposite (i.e., not being able to see the acts they already fantasize about may push them to do them themselves, rather than watching somebody else do them), although I have yet to see a study examining this hypothesis explicitly.

I.e., we don't know whether the effect of limiting access to such material is to reduce or increase the number of offences that are committed. Therefore, IMO, it is hideously irresponsible to act based on hunches and guesses of what might be the case.

In Michigan mother's milk was considered unfit for human consumption for quite a while, see Polychlorinated biphenyl contamination of nursing mothers' milk in Michigan.; so yes the EPA might be involved in spilled blood!

Speaking of ignoring things, here's something from that site you linked me...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19268036?ordinalpos=13&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

The cause of autism remains largely unknown because it is likely multifactorial, arising from the interaction of biologic, genetic, and environmental factors.

Which is basically what I said several pages ago.

Addendum:

Here's a link to an exhaustive (n=>100'000) study that shows no link between vaccines and autism.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14519711
Association between thimerosal-containing vaccine and autism.
JAMA. 2003 Oct 1;290(13):1763-6.

I am sorry you feel the way you do... really... because you're being destructive towards yourself, your child, and our very society. Please seek professional treatment for your anxiety.

Damn you Slashdot. Igbr, your question made me curious, so I had a look. Here's an abstract you might be interested in: http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/sscc/staff/rwcox/ISMRM_2006/ISMRM%202006%20-%203340/files/03263.pdf

Coincidentally, it's written by people I know. They tried to measure the minimum detectable change for repeated fMRI experiments. Unfortunately, they're looking at minimum detectable change in serial scans of one subject, whereas we'd really like to know the MDC across subjects. However, since the across subject metric will include additional sources of variation, we can at least use the intra-subject value as a lower bound.

They looked at two tasks, a finger flexion one and a more cognitive test, the 2-back. In a 2-back test they show a series of digits on a screen and you have to press a button whenever the digit being shown is the same as the next-to-last one. 2-back isn't too hard. 4-back makes your head hurt.

Both finger flexion and N-back tasks are used a lot because they give fairly robust responses. Testing something as nebulous as "spatial abilities" is probably going to be less reliable than either, but of the two, the N-back test is the more relevant.

For the N-back they got MDC in the number of pixels activated between about 38% and 23%, depending on how many averages they did.

Their focus is stroke recovery so they're primarily interested in laterality index. Unfortunately, they only reported the MDC in pixel count as a fraction. MDC will vary not only with how robust a response you get for your particular task, but also by how large the responding region is. As an extreme example, if you measure a response in two pixels, even without noise your MDC cannot be less than one pixel, or 50%.

So even ignoring all the caveats, you cannot expect to see any changes within a subject of less than about 25%, best case. It's not perfect data, but it probably gives us a ballpark figure. If you actually wanted to do the study you'd first have to scan a few volunteers of both sexes to establish what the inter-subject variability is. You'd then decide how sensitive you wanted your analysis to be, depending on how big you thought the difference between sexes was. Then you'd run the numbers through the formulas to determine how many subjects you need to get the required statistical power. Then you'd go to your supervisor / granting agency and give them the pitch. Even given the best case estimate that's probably going to translate into quite a few scans, at something north of $600 each.

Certainly nobody should regard "an fMRI scan" as any sort of evidence.

I'm sorrowful. Sorrowful because of earlier comments. Is it really big achievement to read short paper and then write review of "Brief Report"? Nevertheless slashPOTTERS! The idea is quite old. Thomson et.al. described this idea in this paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5858/1917 . There are earlier, but this one is good one and representative too.

I suppose that questions about possible mechanism come from ignorance and laziness. Partially answer can be found here :http://images.cell.com/images/Edimages/Cell/IEPs/3661.pdf

Besides, I think that questions about capabilities of lay out the mixture of proteins can be answer in following way. If we try to analyze how DNA vectors work into cells, we can conclude, that they impact on some part of biochemical pathways. They of course don't impact directly but through interactions with some others molecules e.g: proteins. Because this relation is injection (in mathematical sense ) so we can conclude, that deep analysis of DNA role in generating iPSCs can deliver us hints which proteins should we use. The best mixture we get (if our criterion is simplicity of mixture), when we find proteins in bijection relation with DNA vectors. Of course it is not simple task, but without analysis of genetic process in generating iPSCs we will able only to shoot wild.

If someone is interested about this subject I recommend this papers:
+ http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/retrieve/pii/S1934590908005250
+ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17554338

secondly, the mouse's immune system's gonna just reject and kill the cells as soon as they are put into the mouse,

They'd be using SCID mice. These mice are often used for xenografts, sometimes with human tissue. For example, here's an abstract describing a study in which researchers implanted human ovarian tissue into SCID mice, and the tissue actually developed into something resembling a functional human ovary. I think I saw the lead researcher give a talk, she thought these tissues would be functional with hormone stimulation.

Even a small accident can kill thousands of people and make a place unliveable for millions of years.

Chernobyl, by no means a small nuclear accident, has killed 56 people so far... 47 workers directly involved in the immediate cleanup from radiation poisoning and 9 children in the surrounding area from thyroid cancer due to increased iodine-131 exposure, mostly through local milk. There have indeed been many cases of thyroid cancer which have been linked to Chernobyl, but it is actually a highly treatable cancer with a very good prognosis with early detection. The rise in the most malignant cancers such as leukemia should have been seen within ten years, but there has been no statistical increase found yet. Of the pregnant women who evacuated the area around Chernobyl who elected to carry full term, there was no significant increase in birth defects or mortality found in their children.

As for making the place unlivable for millions of years? Study after study shows that after the initial death toll the wildlife took, populations have not been significantly impacted. Specimens have been taken from the area which are so radioactive that they have to be handled specially... however studies on even these animals show little to no statistical increase in DNA damage over control specimens. Often times, samples taken from areas of lower radiation exposure surprisingly showed LOWER rates of DNA damage and associated cancers than control specimens not affected by the accident... the current best supported theory of radiation hormesis is that low levels of radiation exposure trigger DNA repair mechanisms which account for this anomaly, and studies have found that proteins responsible for DNA repair are indeed transcribed at a much higher rate in mildly irradiated organisms. Basically, it has been shown that the linear non-threshold model used to predict casualties due to radiation has been shown to be invalid at exposures lower than about 100 milliSeverts.

This video from the BBC has a pretty good summary. Am I going to attempt to get irradiated? No. But the current widely held fear of low dose radiation simply is not supported by evidence, but a mathematical model which is proving to be faulty the more we look at it.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12914564/ re Iceland gene pool less heterogenous than other European populations.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/9/14/ re status of Ashkenazi Jews as genetic isolates.

First, you have to consider the source. Of course Nalgene would say that. What else would you expect them to say?

But, since you brought it up, here are a few papers that contradict what you say.

Endocrine disruptors and reproductive health: the case of bisphenol-A.

Bisphenol A (BPA) has been linked to damage in developing brain tissue.

Scientists issue group warning on plastic chemical's hazards.

The Real Story Behind Bisphenol A

That last one is perhaps the most telling: "... consider this: Of the more than 100 independently funded experiments on BPA, about 90% have found evidence of adverse health effects at levels similar to human exposure. On the other hand, every single industry-funded study ever conducted -- 14 in all -- has found no such effects."

Sometimes it pays to spend just a few minutes on Google, rather than just arguing from ignorance.

Haven't people realized by now that the fact that some people are misdiagnosed with ADHD doesn't mean that the condition isn't real?

The problem is that there is a gap between the fairly extensive diagnostic procedures that should be used and what sometimes happens in practice (5-minute office visit where general practitioner hands out prescriptions on the school's or parent's sayso). I don't blame people for being skeptical, but that doesn't mean there aren't real kids (or adults) with a real disorder.

The second Fumento article attacks numerous straw men, as did his first one. The most irrelevant point is that these various doctors do not give their personal support for the Atkins Diet. One of them even trots out that sad old "only under the influence of a physician" bullshit, which any physician would say about any diet for the twin reasons of liability and job security.

The article is also attacked for not including interviews with those he spoke with who don't support his position. This is a laughable assertion at best; not because it isn't true, but because if you're trying to prove a point you don't go around including a bunch of testimony that claims to contradict it, especially if you don't think it's relevant. Taubes' assertion is that most doctors and dietitians have bought the party line they were taught in school, and have a vested interest in parroting it, which gives them the tendency to simply speak and not actually think.

Here's a specific example of Fumento attacking a straw man: there is no empirical support for Taubes's assertion that high-fat intake can suppress hunger and he cited no such support. That's because he never claimed that a high fat intake can suppress hunger. In Big Fat Lie he instead specifically claims that consuming "high-glycemic-index carbohydrates" frequently can alter your response, leading to a downward spiral of ever-increasing fatness. He then quotes Michael Schwartz: "Although the concept that insulin triggers weight gain has little scientific merit, it remains a key selling point for advocates of diets that are low in carbohydrate and high in protein and fat" But Insulin's job is to regulate glycogen storage in cells, and insulin resistance is a real and well-known phenomenon.

Anyway, I could go on, but clearly you are in the same category as Fumento. I will address your final link though: Someone should tell your pet dietitian Rosenbloom that the rate of lean muscle loss is slowed during ketosis. During the normal process of your body you lose one part of muscle for every three parts of fat you lose; you actually lose half that or less in ketosis. Ignorance is a bitch, isn't it?

You'll be drinking a lot of BPA until the bottle runs out of it, and it's not clear that the bottle will be usable as such by the time BPA release drops to a reasonable level. See this paper for the effects of repeated cleanings in a dishwasher: the bottles released an average of 31 times the amount of BPA released by a new, unwashed bottle during the first 169 washes--and that's when the scientists stopped measuring, so there's no reason to believe that concentrations would plummet after any known, higher number of washes.

Also, a new bottle only has a fixed amount of BPA to leech.

True, but...

After several uses (especially after being washed in a hot dishwasher several times) the amount of BPA present should be negligible.

that depends on your definition of "several". This study showed that bottles exposed to a normal dishwasher process leaked an average of 36 times the amount of BPA released by new bottles during the first 51 washes, which went down slightly to an average of 29 times the baseline for the subsequent 118 wash cycles.

Those don't seem acceptable levels of leakage to me.

I've yet to find an authoritative source, but it's my understanding that Iceland is the least diverse country in the world, genetically speaking. this ref just says that they're probably the least diverse in Europe. I'll keep looking.

Soda bottles are made fomr PET.

Oh, Good.

... Movie Makers Not Impressed.

An entertainment industry magazine interviewed several movie producers to find out what they thought were the implications of the research that identified in mice two key proteins necessary for ovulation to take place http://www.nih.gov/news/health/may2009/nichd-14.htm . Responses ranged from "Mouse ovulation? What?" to "Are you high?".

It is FICTION, people. It requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

This link will help: http://cit.nih.gov/Support/FAQ/FDCC/

FDCC is what the USAF and all other Armed Services are currently moving toward. It's Vista Enterprise with a bunch of tweaks.

It's not exactly safe either.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2523949

I found the easiest diet is simple: Eat slow, put more effort into meals, and skip meals. This gem really caught my attention: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16529878 [nih.gov] "The effect on health of alternate day calorie restriction: eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life.""

While I have heard things good about the benefits of extreme caloric restriction, I"ve also read about and experienced the benefits of eating reasonable calories (coming from the right kind of foods), and spreading those meals out to 5-6 smaller meals a day rather than 2-3 big ones.

I find by doing this, I really avoid any times of real hunger (the type where I lose it and gorge myself on something). I read that by eating a little all day long, you help to raise your basal metabolism since you have having to basically process food all day.

And along with any diet modification, you gotta have exercise.

Who says we should eat 3 meals a day every day? How about: put more effort into selecting and preparing our meals, eat fewer meals! I find I'm way less hungry if I go longer without eating - as I'm not constantly 3 or 4 hours after the last big meal. The hunger sensation goes away if you get past it (a good analogy is the vibrations of breaking the "sound barrier" in a jet airplane, you throttle past it). In the USA, family and friends are so programmed to do the "3 meals a day" thing that practically nobody questions it.

Discovery of this study changed my life. Now, some days I just eat one big meal, I focus more on enjoying that meal. If you have only one meal in a day: 2 hours to enjoy the meal, read while I'm eating or socialize with friends. I focus more on the quality of food, not quantity. Eating less frequently is a lifestyle change, not a diet!

From: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16529878

=======================

"The effect on health of alternate day calorie restriction: eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life."

Restricting caloric intake to 60-70% of normal adult weight maintenance requirement prolongs lifespan 30-50% and confers near perfect health across a broad range of species. Every other day feeding produces similar effects in rodents, and profound beneficial physiologic changes have been demonstrated in the absence of weight loss in ob/ob mice. Since May 2003 we have experimented with alternate day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20-50% of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as two weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette's, Meniere's) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes. We hypothesize that other many conditions would be delayed, prevented or improved, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, brain injury due to thrombotic stroke atherosclerosis, NIDDM, congestive heart failure. Our hypothesis is supported by an article from 1957 in the Spanish medical literature which due to a translation error has been construed by several authors to be the only existing example of calorie restriction with good nutrition. We contend for reasons cited that there was no reduction in calories overall, but that the subjects were eating, on alternate days, either 900 calories or 2300 calories, averaging 1600, and that body weight was maintained. Thus they consumed either 56% or 144% of daily caloric requirement. The subjects were in a residence for old people, and all were in perfect health and over 65. Over three years, there were 6 deaths among 60 study subjects and 13 deaths among 60 ad lib-fed controls, non-significant difference. Study subjects were in hospital 123 days, controls 219, highly significant difference. We believe widespread use of this pattern of eating could impact influenza epidemics and other communicable diseases by improving resistance to infection. In addition to the health effects, this pattern of eating has proven to be a good method of weight control, and we are continuing to study the process in conjunction with the NIH.

Especially in the USA, we eat too damn much (calories). We market these calorie laden meals to ourselves, we eat way too fast (scarf scarf).

I started to question the whole "3 meals a day" that is brainwashed by well meaning friends and family - to discover that it's probably made up social convention that is totally inappropriate for modern lifestyle [especially the typical slashdot geek ;)].

I found the easiest diet is simple: Eat slow, put more effort into meals, and skip meals. This gem really caught my attention: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16529878 "The effect on health of alternate day calorie restriction: eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life."

So now I eat 3 or 4 meals total every 2 days - and put a lot more effort and time into those meals. I'm less hungry, more satisfied.

Higher speed limits on the interstate can decrease accidents, but only if traffic already moves faster than the speed limits. It's not high speeds that are necessarily the problem, but rather variation in speeds. That should be the argument against these things, not that higher speeds save lives. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2621023 http://www.science.org.au/nova/058/058print.htm http://www.consumersunion.org/other/speedlimits/speed031500a2.htm http://www.roadsafety.org.uk/information/publish/article_127.shtml http://sense.bc.ca/disc/disc-09.htm http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/

how does converting apr03 to April-03-2007 cause any data loss?

The comment right above mine had already posted a link to a study explaining it in detail.

(I've posted this before, but still)

Yes, it is a pain.

Your link is a failure and I hope you rot in hell.

I spent many years in medical school doing research work on viruses, including work with SIV. This article is very optimistic in some of its summaries. HIV and SIV are qualitatively different in the extent of "hypervariability" in their surface proteins. It is generally accepted to be "easier" to create antibodies to SIV, which has been done for many years.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7865316?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=1&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed

The technique described is very interesting, don't get me wrong, and I hope it works. However, there are *already* many techniques that appear to immunize against this HIV analog, which do not work for human HIV. The two are significantly different.

(I've posted this before, but still)

Yes, it is a pain.

Although Diesel gives off about 12% more CO2 emissions the energy per volume burned is even better.
According to this study Diesel engined vehicles presently have a 24-33% advantage.

> My wife tells me I'm going deaf, but I reckon i'm picking up more noise than normal.

You may a mild auditory processing disorder, if it's always been that way.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/auditory.asp

Another possibility, especially if this is increasing over time, is some kind of auditory neuropathy.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/neuropathy.asp

Or your wife could be right, and it's just a case of age-related hearing loss, also known as "presbycusis".
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/presbycusis.asp

If it bothers you, by all means go get your hearing checked. Health insurance in the US usually will cover this. Nearby universities with speech pathology and audiology departments can often offer audiometric exams done by students for free or a small fee.

Whether treatment is necessary or not, it's always nice to have a baseline for later comparison as you age.

> My wife tells me I'm going deaf, but I reckon i'm picking up more noise than normal.

You may a mild auditory processing disorder, if it's always been that way.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/auditory.asp

Another possibility, especially if this is increasing over time, is some kind of auditory neuropathy.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/neuropathy.asp

Or your wife could be right, and it's just a case of age-related hearing loss, also known as "presbycusis".
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/presbycusis.asp

If it bothers you, by all means go get your hearing checked. Health insurance in the US usually will cover this. Nearby universities with speech pathology and audiology departments can often offer audiometric exams done by students for free or a small fee.

Whether treatment is necessary or not, it's always nice to have a baseline for later comparison as you age.

> My wife tells me I'm going deaf, but I reckon i'm picking up more noise than normal.

You may a mild auditory processing disorder, if it's always been that way.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/auditory.asp

Another possibility, especially if this is increasing over time, is some kind of auditory neuropathy.
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/neuropathy.asp

Or your wife could be right, and it's just a case of age-related hearing loss, also known as "presbycusis".
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/presbycusis.asp

If it bothers you, by all means go get your hearing checked. Health insurance in the US usually will cover this. Nearby universities with speech pathology and audiology departments can often offer audiometric exams done by students for free or a small fee.

Whether treatment is necessary or not, it's always nice to have a baseline for later comparison as you age.

When you adjust for inflation, during Bush's second term the NIH budget shrank. It actually got smaller. You can find the change rates as published in the New England Journal of Medicine http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/16/1665/F1 [nejm.org]

The same chart shows that Bush raised the NIH budget by almost 15% for each of his first four years. This is after adjusting for inflation. In fact, we can find some more direct evidence:

The ASM has endorsed a $2.7 billion increase for the NIH in FY 2001, a 15 percent increase in funding which would bring the NIH budget to a level of $20.6 billion.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/291/5509/1677b?ck=nck

"President George W. Bush said last week that he will request a record $2.8 billion increase for the National Institutes of Health in his 2002 budget proposal. But some biomedical science groups say that the figure--a 13.8% boost, to $23.1 billion--is only a starting point for their campaign to win a $3.4 billion boost."

And, finally:

http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/ui/2008/Summary%20of%20FY%202009%20Budget-Press%20Release.pdf

"The FY 2009 Discretionary Budget Authority request for the NIH is $29,230 million"

So, over the course of his entire term, Bush boosted funding for NIH from 20 billion to 30 billion. The bulk of the increases came during his first term. Note that despite having spent 200 billion dollars over the last 8 years, there have no cures for cancer, the flu, or the cold. So, not only did this olive branch of increased federal spending completely fail the Republicans politically, if we go by the left's yardstick of missile defense, the scientists doing all this research actually accomplished nothing.

We don't know with any confidence that we are poisoning the earth. We know that we are having effects on it but we simply don't know if any or all of those effects are poisonous.

Really? When the recommended allowance of some fish is ZERO servings, i think it is pretty clear that we have poisoned the waters. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694

Beluga whales are toxic waste

As for giving out children asthma, I have never seen a causation study blaming pollution for the cause of asthma.

It is probably because you haven't looked.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10674285
From the abstract: "...In asthmatics, epidemiological studies generally show a positive correlation between the particulate fraction of air pollution and increased morbidity, although roles for other co-pollutants (for example, ozone) are implicated as well. Direct experimentation using air pollutants, especially particles, to investigate their effects on humans or on animal models of asthma provides corroboration of the epidemiology and has begun to identify the pathophysiological mechanisms involved...."

Am I a "religious" environmentalist? Maybe. I don't really know what that means. And when i mentioned destruction/mutation of species, I should have been clear, that i also don't really care about the species pre se ... during the Cretaceousâ"Tertiary extinction event about 3/4 of species were extinguished. I just mentioned it as evidence of the poisoning of the earth.

I am not worried about the earth. The earth will be fine. Long after humans are gone, the Earth will still be around. I am only an environmentalist because I want to preserve the current beauty of the planet for future generations of humans.

Unfortunately, the issue is that most Americans don't differentiate between the two main types of stem cell research - adult and embryonic. Even the title of this post doesn't! There are major differences, and if you don't already know them, see this (same site that is hosting the article): http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/health.asp There have already been cures developed from adult stem cells, and pluripotent stem cells have been developed from adult stem cells (all according to the same nih.gov site). So why do we continue to pour public time, money, and effort down the embryonic stem cell avenue when the issue is so divisive to our country? That's what private research grants are for.

Amen! And don't even get me started on the guys who did this study. Sheesh!

More was done to secure the US govt by OMB fiats, than any other recent actions.

Why? Because someone at OMB said:
Harden every desktop installation of Windows XP & Vista. One leader at the NSA, for the entire federal government, could greatly assist in doing the same for every piece of IT we operate. This is a start on the massive IT security problem the federal govt has. After that, a govt wide approach for software security would be nice.

it's just that without Myriad, *no one* would know that having the BRCA1 gene was a precursor to breast cancer.

Are you ^!&%! kidding? Are people so bamboozled by the FUD of pharmaceutical companies that anyone who doesn't know the truth assumes that the big, nice company must have sunk a ton of time and money into finding this gene from scratch, and without them the gene would never have been found? The truth is very, very different, and this is why Myriad is so hated in the scientific community.

BRCA1 was discovered by Mary-Claire King, now a geneticist at the University of Washington, following over a decade of government-funded basic science work that started when she was a graduate student and then junior faculty at UC Berkeley. Back then genetics was hard work - not hard like today, *really* hard. When she started no one really believed that one could even find a gene for a trait that wasn't expressed 100%, it just seemed too complicated to pick one mutation out of a huge haystack when you had to allow for some people having the bad mutation yet having a normal phenotype. Remember this is before the human genome project, before automated sequencing; she even started before PCR. Just pinning the candidate gene down to one small region of one chromosome took over a decade of work by dozens of people.

As the process came towards fruition, they first narrowed the field to a small part of chromosome 17 (paper), then made a laborious map of the region of interest (paper), and then together with a group at the NIH, they identified the actual single gene we now know as BRCA1, sequenced it, and spelled out the mutations in it that caused breast cancer in the affected families (paper1, paper2). Notice that all of this was done completely in the public eye, with all of her lab's results published immediately so as to help other researchers advance the field with her. It was good science.

But wait, where's Myriad genetics so far? What's left to do? Didn't we already "discover" BRCA1? How could anyone patent it now? All good questions. The next thing to do was to make a copy of this gene, by itself, in a test tube. This would be preliminary work for all sorts of biochemical analysis. The act of copying a gene off of a chromosome onto a separate loop of DNA in a test tube is called "cloning". Cloning is still pretty hard even today, especially for long genes like BRCA1. It can take months, especially since you usually need to copy it in bits and then glue those bits together.

What Myriad understood, and perhaps Dr. King did not, is that a cloned gene (that loop in a test tube) is patentable because it's considered "artificial", even if it's a perfect copy of a natural sequence of DNA. Myriad jumped in at this point, threw their whole company into cloning the gene and then patenting it, and did it before Dr. King or anyone else realized they were in a race. Ironically, Dr. King's lab had probably already cloned it in pieces (usually a prerequisite to sequencing) but hadn't made a complete intact copy yet, and certainly hadn't filed any patents. Myriad did none of the prior work on BRCA1. They did not come up with the idea of hereditary breast cancer. They did not do the laborious work of mapping where BRCA1 might be. They did not pinpoint the gene that was BRCA1. They did not sequence

it's just that without Myriad, *no one* would know that having the BRCA1 gene was a precursor to breast cancer.

Are you ^!&%! kidding? Are people so bamboozled by the FUD of pharmaceutical companies that anyone who doesn't know the truth assumes that the big, nice company must have sunk a ton of time and money into finding this gene from scratch, and without them the gene would never have been found? The truth is very, very different, and this is why Myriad is so hated in the scientific community.

BRCA1 was discovered by Mary-Claire King, now a geneticist at the University of Washington, following over a decade of government-funded basic science work that started when she was a graduate student and then junior faculty at UC Berkeley. Back then genetics was hard work - not hard like today, *really* hard. When she started no one really believed that one could even find a gene for a trait that wasn't expressed 100%, it just seemed too complicated to pick one mutation out of a huge haystack when you had to allow for some people having the bad mutation yet having a normal phenotype. Remember this is before the human genome project, before automated sequencing; she even started before PCR. Just pinning the candidate gene down to one small region of one chromosome took over a decade of work by dozens of people.

As the process came towards fruition, they first narrowed the field to a small part of chromosome 17 (paper), then made a laborious map of the region of interest (paper), and then together with a group at the NIH, they identified the actual single gene we now know as BRCA1, sequenced it, and spelled out the mutations in it that caused breast cancer in the affected families (paper1, paper2). Notice that all of this was done completely in the public eye, with all of her lab's results published immediately so as to help other researchers advance the field with her. It was good science.

But wait, where's Myriad genetics so far? What's left to do? Didn't we already "discover" BRCA1? How could anyone patent it now? All good questions. The next thing to do was to make a copy of this gene, by itself, in a test tube. This would be preliminary work for all sorts of biochemical analysis. The act of copying a gene off of a chromosome onto a separate loop of DNA in a test tube is called "cloning". Cloning is still pretty hard even today, especially for long genes like BRCA1. It can take months, especially since you usually need to copy it in bits and then glue those bits together.

What Myriad understood, and perhaps Dr. King did not, is that a cloned gene (that loop in a test tube) is patentable because it's considered "artificial", even if it's a perfect copy of a natural sequence of DNA. Myriad jumped in at this point, threw their whole company into cloning the gene and then patenting it, and did it before Dr. King or anyone else realized they were in a race. Ironically, Dr. King's lab had probably already cloned it in pieces (usually a prerequisite to sequencing) but hadn't made a complete intact copy yet, and certainly hadn't filed any patents. Myriad did none of the prior work on BRCA1. They did not come up with the idea of hereditary breast cancer. They did not do the laborious work of mapping where BRCA1 might be. They did not pinpoint the gene that was BRCA1. They did not sequence

it's just that without Myriad, *no one* would know that having the BRCA1 gene was a precursor to breast cancer.

Are you ^!&%! kidding? Are people so bamboozled by the FUD of pharmaceutical companies that anyone who doesn't know the truth assumes that the big, nice company must have sunk a ton of time and money into finding this gene from scratch, and without them the gene would never have been found? The truth is very, very different, and this is why Myriad is so hated in the scientific community.

BRCA1 was discovered by Mary-Claire King, now a geneticist at the University of Washington, following over a decade of government-funded basic science work that started when she was a graduate student and then junior faculty at UC Berkeley. Back then genetics was hard work - not hard like today, *really* hard. When she started no one really believed that one could even find a gene for a trait that wasn't expressed 100%, it just seemed too complicated to pick one mutation out of a huge haystack when you had to allow for some people having the bad mutation yet having a normal phenotype. Remember this is before the human genome project, before automated sequencing; she even started before PCR. Just pinning the candidate gene down to one small region of one chromosome took over a decade of work by dozens of people.

As the process came towards fruition, they first narrowed the field to a small part of chromosome 17 (paper), then made a laborious map of the region of interest (paper), and then together with a group at the NIH, they identified the actual single gene we now know as BRCA1, sequenced it, and spelled out the mutations in it that caused breast cancer in the affected families (paper1, paper2). Notice that all of this was done completely in the public eye, with all of her lab's results published immediately so as to help other researchers advance the field with her. It was good science.

But wait, where's Myriad genetics so far? What's left to do? Didn't we already "discover" BRCA1? How could anyone patent it now? All good questions. The next thing to do was to make a copy of this gene, by itself, in a test tube. This would be preliminary work for all sorts of biochemical analysis. The act of copying a gene off of a chromosome onto a separate loop of DNA in a test tube is called "cloning". Cloning is still pretty hard even today, especially for long genes like BRCA1. It can take months, especially since you usually need to copy it in bits and then glue those bits together.

What Myriad understood, and perhaps Dr. King did not, is that a cloned gene (that loop in a test tube) is patentable because it's considered "artificial", even if it's a perfect copy of a natural sequence of DNA. Myriad jumped in at this point, threw their whole company into cloning the gene and then patenting it, and did it before Dr. King or anyone else realized they were in a race. Ironically, Dr. King's lab had probably already cloned it in pieces (usually a prerequisite to sequencing) but hadn't made a complete intact copy yet, and certainly hadn't filed any patents. Myriad did none of the prior work on BRCA1. They did not come up with the idea of hereditary breast cancer. They did not do the laborious work of mapping where BRCA1 might be. They did not pinpoint the gene that was BRCA1. They did not sequence