Domain: nih.gov
Stories and comments across the archive that link to nih.gov.
Comments · 5,290
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Re:Incomplete Story
You might want to read up on this topic a bit. You obviously have a lot to learn. There are dozens of studies, just a sample of which are below, that indicate your goal of low serum levels of cholesterol will induce severe depression. One stupid study doesn't mean a thing. You have to ask yourself: For what does your body use cholesterol? Why is it called a lipoprotein? When you realize this, you'll understand why common ideas regarding cholesterol are flat wrong. Hint: There is a reason plants don't have cholesterol!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=16263178
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=100 71176&itool=pubmed_AbstractPlus
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=9018390
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=11954543
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=11099742
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=11022402 -
Re:Incomplete Story
You might want to read up on this topic a bit. You obviously have a lot to learn. There are dozens of studies, just a sample of which are below, that indicate your goal of low serum levels of cholesterol will induce severe depression. One stupid study doesn't mean a thing. You have to ask yourself: For what does your body use cholesterol? Why is it called a lipoprotein? When you realize this, you'll understand why common ideas regarding cholesterol are flat wrong. Hint: There is a reason plants don't have cholesterol!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=16263178
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=100 71176&itool=pubmed_AbstractPlus
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=9018390
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=11954543
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=11099742
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=11022402 -
Re:Incomplete Story
Intake cholesterol is indeed partly related to blood serum levels of cholesterol. I read an NIH study about cafestol in coffee that confirmed what is stated in the Wikipedia article on cafestol: "Studies have shown that regular consumption of boiled coffee increases serum cholesterol by 8% in men and 10% in women".
So, use filters or suffer the long term consequences. I drink a pot of decaf a day so for me this finding is significant. I've switched back to paper filters as a result. I plan on comparing my cholesterol levels since the change at my next well check.
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Re:Nobody RTFA!
And then there is surely a correlation between the BMI and the percentage of body fat one has. There are fully trained athlets whose musculature increases the BMI into obesity levels without being obese. But those are not normal people. Most people with a high BMI are really fat, and if you do a statistic you probably wont find a 1 as correlation factor, but something very high in the 0.9. Those few heavy lifters don't exonerage a whole fat population from being obese.
Do you have anything to back that up besides "surely's" and "probably's?" I only have my personal experience, but it is a data point. I am not a body builder. I am 6', 255 lbs. which gives me a BMI of 34.6. This indicates obesity. I can run a 5K, I play soccer and football and go to the gym 3-5 times per week. I wear and XL shirt and wear 40/32 pants. You would never call me obese (a bit overweight, maybe) and you would never guess I weigh 255lbs. If you look at the limitations of the BMI, note It may overestimate body fat in athletes and others who have a muscular build. I am not an athlete, I am a software engineer. Chalk it up to northern European barabarian genetics. I just have a "muscular build," I wore "husky" jeans as a kid and you may have referred to me as "chunky." But I am by no stretch of the imagination a "heavy lifter." -
Re:I'm skeptical...
You can look bigger, but the poster was claiming actual weight gain of 35 pounds, not apparent weight gain.
Symptoms:
Symptoms vary, but most people have upper body obesity, rounded face, increased fat around the neck, and thinning arms and legs. Children tend to be obese with slowed growth rates.
Other symptoms appear in the skin, which becomes fragile and thin. It bruises easily and heals poorly. Purplish pink stretch marks may appear on the abdomen, thighs, buttocks, arms and breasts. The bones are weakened, and routine activities such as bending, lifting or rising from a chair may lead to backaches, rib and spinal column fractures.
Most people have severe fatigue, weak muscles, high blood pressure and high blood sugar. Irritability, anxiety and depression are common.
Women usually have excess hair growth on their faces, necks, chests, abdomens, and thighs. Their menstrual periods may become irregular or stop. Men have decreased fertility with diminished or absent desire for sex.
Source: http://endocrine.niddk.nih.gov/pubs/cushings/cushi ngs.htm -
How many of those are climatologists?
I'm not being sanctimonious, but I'm not going to waste my time watching some infomercial. Have you watched "An Inconvenient Truth" yet or are you too sanctimonious?
I already know that Steve McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick are not climatologists. Are any of them?
Prof. Tim Patterson: Geologist
Prof. Edward J Wegman: Statistician
Prof. Bob Carter: Marine Geophysicist
Dr. Willie Soon: Astrophysicist
Dr. Madhya Khandekar: ???
Prof. Wibjorn Karlen: Paleoclimatologist
Dr. Henrik Svensmark: Physicist
Dr. Dick Morgan: Law Professor?
Dr. Fred Goldberg: Physicist
Hans H.J. Labohm: Economist
Steve McIntyre: Mineralogist
Dr. Ross McKitrick: Economist
Dr. Chris Landsea: Meteorologist
OK. So I've had to do a lot of work to get one name. Prof. Karlen is a climatologist. So, what was his contribution? If I do a Scirus search, I don't find much, but perhaps I'm not searching on the right terms. He wrote a paper in 1973 on Holocene climatic variations and another in 2000 on high-altitude fresh waters.
Ahah. I did another Scirus search and found this article. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be anything there. I really wish I knew what he had written as every other article I can find only deals with the holocene. Although the title is suggestive, it wouldn't be the first time that what one would infer from a title did not agree with the conclusions.
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Lindzen
Read the entire article and not just the abstract which he admits "is tantalizing for its ambiguity."
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Re:TFA is completely innacurate
IAAA (I am an anesthesiologist) and these guys are resurrecting aspects of a theory from over 100 years ago (Overton's study was published in 1901 and Meyer's in 1899) which fits very neatly with some data for volatile anesthetic agents and which is completely inconsistent with other observed data: The lipid partition coefficients of many anesthetic agents do appear to be closely related to their potency independent of structure (as the paper says), but there are other agents which are similar to volatile anesthetics in lipid partition coefficient and structure and which have no anesthetic activity (such as 1,2-dichlorohexafluorobutane) The reversibility of anesthetic action by pressure which they mention is indeed observed, but the effect of temperature on lipid fluidity which they also mention is completely different from the observed change in anesthetic requirement with change in temperature in mammals. For a much better description of the state of understanding of the action of anesthetic agents, I suggest this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=
p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=12933393 -
Re:TFA is completely innacurateJust to add to this, for people who are confused:
(1) Hodgkin and Huxley (1952) postulated the existence of transmembrane proteins that allowed conductance of ions in and out of the cell. They showed, using a giant squid axon, that action potentials are composed of a sodium current and a potassium current. While they had no way to directly observe the channels that allowed these currents to flow, using curve fitting, they worked out the general dynamics of these channels.
(2) Sakmann and Neher (1976) showed the existence of these channels by developing the whole-cell patch clamp technique. Single channels have been observed and characterized using this method (and employed by many labs).
(3) The term 'tranmission' is sometimes used in a confusing manner in neuroscience. In this case, as pointed out by the parent, transmission is down the axon of a single cell. Mylen sheaths can form around the axons of cells in order to speed up transmission. This can also occur by making the axon diameter wider. One interesting difference between vertebrates and invertebrates is that appearance of the mylen sheath with the advent of the backbone. This allows for cells to take up less space (so more can be packed into a given volume).
Another form of transmission of signal is between cells. This is usually done by chemical synapses. Chemical synapses work by the presynaptic cell releasing chemical into the synapse, the chemical ligand binding to receptors on the postsynaptic cell, and causing either an ionic flux (ionotopic channels) or a chemical cascade (metatrobic channels).
Somewhat recently there has also been discovered electrical synapses in the mammalian brain. These seem to be between inhibitory cells of the same type.
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Re:they got it backwards
"Few people need to do 3D queries right now"
It's very important for pharamceutical companies.
"and there is little data to do them on"
There are many databases of 3D representations of molecules.
Here's a little one to play around with (180MB uncompressed)
ftp://helix.nih.gov/ncidata/3D/nciopen3d.mol.Z
I am sure there are many more. -
Re:Dating the first clothingThe clothing dating you are referring to was actually also featured on Slashdot under the Best
/. Headline Ever: Pants Were Optional, 100,000 Years Ago.That paper, with its abstract available from PubMed, was from Mark Stoneking's group and I believe they said in interviews that they intended to pursue studying the difference between head lice and pubic lice to figure out when we lost our fur. So maybe this result tells us why there was no follow-up paper: The data could not be used to address that issue.
Well, maybe I should the paper. After I am done posting at
/. of course! -
Re:"Industrial"
It's NOT chemically identical to sucrose.
Fructose != Sucrose, they're chemically different with different absorbtion pathways in your body.
Fructose is only processed directly by your liver. Sucrose is processed in the gut.
Fructose causes massive insulin spikes and crashes, worse than sucrose does (which is one part fructose
and one part glucose- HFCS is pretty much nothing but Fructose...)
I suggest doing a little reading up on your organic chemistry and biochemistry before making bold
comments like your own. I know I have done my research- and it's not been the organic or health
food industry for this one (The Aspartame one started there, but went to more "reputable" sources...).
And you've not been doing your reading...
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/ 25/1/202
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A294 34-2004Aug24.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10520226&dopt=Abstrac t
http://www.centre4activeliving.ca/publications/res earch_update/2004/June.htm
Fructose makes you fat. Fructose makes you have vicious insulin spikes because your body
doesn't distinguish glucose from fructose- and you end up with fructose in your blood stream
until the liver can process it. Your liver can run off of either sugar- but it stores only
one day's worth of energy reserve in glucogen inside it's structures and then starts converting
the rest of the fructose and other sugars into FAT.
Combine the two and you end up with Type II Diabetes, heart disease, and so forth.
You see, Two years ago this week, I discovered by accident I was a Type II Diabetic, checking
into the Emergency room with a blood sugar of 607. At that point, I started digging into causes
with my doctor and other people.
Fructose was a major contributing factor. In and of itself, it's natural and you're supposed
to be taking it in. But refined like it is in HFCS, it's more of a poison than Sucrose is.
This is because while Fructose is bound up in the disaccaride Sucrose, it's got to be broken
apart, and there's as little as a third as much fructose, all things being considered, if you
stick with just Sucrose where it really IS a good thing in the mix.
Also worth noting is that there's very little need to be placing sugar of any kind in about 2/3
of the food we eat. The food industry currently does this to increase sales because it "tastes
better" and they know you're inclined to be addicted to the sweet taste.
But hey, keep drinking that damn soda with corn syrup in it. Me, I'm trying to find answers that
don't involve even Splenda if I can help it at all. -
Re:Pet Gun Peeve
The referenced url is on my Korean War website. Virtually none of us who fought in the Korean War used hearing protection in combat, apart from those in mortar or artillery positions. Many of us, in the comfort of our homes, wish we had. If back in the turmoil of combat, well, we might still prefer to take our chances.
The problem is that the effects of noise vary among individuals, as does our self-healing and permanancy of damage from the 140 db or so rifle blast. Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) We learn this on the firing line in boot camp, or elsewhere. Also, the true effect of combat sounds on hearing is in a, possibly improbable, distant future. The risk of being killed by missing some audible clue before the firing begins is immediate, and the damage definitely permanent.
This was true of all infantry I knew of, not just Americans. My Aussie Digger pals, for instance, never used hearing protection except in mortar positions. Myself, I still hear fairly well, but always use protection on the firing range (still a member of NRA.) -
The short answer...
Skipping all the crap and presuming you have an older distro that doesn't to automatic updates, I'll summarize the steps needed (Do this at your own risk, but it should work on any even remotely standard distro, even very old ones):
cd /tmp
wget --passive-ftp ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz
tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz
zic northamerica
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime
If you live outside the civilized world, insert the appropriate time zone in place of EST5EDT. ;-)
And finally, verify it with:
zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
Which should say "Mar 11" and "Nov 4" -
Re:Analogy
MacLeod likens this process to stretching a person's skin until it ruptures, exposing the flesh underneath.
That's the most horrifying scientific analogy I've ever heard.
Not to mention the stunning implications - that the Earth is suffering from pemphigus! -
Re:Inflatable
The human body isn't designed for a rotating frame of reference and it's quite easy to get nausea by moving around (rotating frames of reference throw off the body's sense of balance). Most designs I see plan around 1 revolution per minute (RPM). Common wisdom is that you can get to around 2 or 3 RPM and still have people grow acustomed to it. At 1 RPM, you'd need around 400-500 meters turning radius to generate a half gee. At 3 RPM, this would improve to around 40-50 meters. If this study is correct, then you can get up to 7-10 RPM through gradual acceleration and adaptable. I haven't read the study so I don't know how long it would take. What's particularly relevant is that the study claims people can leave and reenter the environment to some extent. This means a lunar high gee environment might be feasible for a starting colony. Assuming of course, that lunar gravity is a problem.
So I guess it's not as bad as I first thought. -
Re:CO2 least of my worries
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Re:Go Linux!
> Is there actually a patch from Redhat/Suse/etc for systems that are as old as
> Win2k available?
You don't need a "patch". All you need is a zoneinfo file. The format is the same for all Linux distributions as well as Cygwin, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64, UnixWare. and OpenVMS. The files are available at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ as well as many other places. -
90,000 articles on "evolution" in the last 10 year
PubMed has 90,000 articles which mention the keyword "evolution" in the last 10 years. Search http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD
= search&DB=pubmed for "evolution" with limits of 10 years. There are ~150,000 articles, all told indexed. And PubMed doesn't cover all biological journals.
All I'm saying is `You're nothing but a pack of cards!'. http://www.sabian.org/alicech12.htm -
Re:I'm doomed.
Actually, no. I've published extensively on HIV/SIV evolution. I have never had an editor censor or otherwise limit use of the terms 'evolution' or 'evolve'. As others have pointed out, the priimary issue with using 'evolution' with a virus like HIV is that it implies, to most people, benefit. While viral variants are clearly selected for by outside pressure, the resulting viruses generally replicate less well than the parental viruses in the *absence* of the selector -- as evidenced by sequence reversion that often happens upon transmission of a drug-resistant/immune selected/cxcr4-tropic virus into a new host. So with HIV at least, 'evolutionary benefit' is in the eye of the beholder, or more accurately, in the context of its replication.
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Re:research money getting wasted
Though I'm not sure if it works well, check US Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects. There is an enormous amount of pressure on government funded research programs to generate scientific advances, despite what many of the comments in this thread imply. Most NIH institutes currently fund less than 20% of all proposals (citation here); unproductive scientists will find it almost impossible to secure funding at these levels.
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Re:research money getting wasted
Though I'm not sure if it works well, check US Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects. There is an enormous amount of pressure on government funded research programs to generate scientific advances, despite what many of the comments in this thread imply. Most NIH institutes currently fund less than 20% of all proposals (citation here); unproductive scientists will find it almost impossible to secure funding at these levels.
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Parallels in the US Situation
Funding for the physical sciences (among others) in the United States has been facing a lot of difficulties lately as well. Failure of the congress to pass the new budget has caused a crisis in science funding from agencies such as the NSF and NIH that supply much of the money for taxpayer funded research in the states. This threatens to close major facilities*, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work.
Concerned citizens are encouraged to write to their congressmen to not forget the cause of advancement in the US. Instead of bemoaning the loss of the US edge in the sciences , speak up!
It seems hardly a coincidence that the US and UK are allies in the misguided Iraqi Invasion, as well as the fight against adequate science and research funding. With all the money diverted into these misguided efforts, no wonder science funding is suffering all over (There's only so much of it to go around!)
* Example from the nytimes.com article:
"Among the projects at risk is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, on Long Island. The $600 million machine -- 2.4 miles in circumference -- slams together subatomic particles to recreate conditions at the beginning of time, some 14 billion years ago, so scientists can study the Big Bang theory. It was already operating partly on charitable contributions, officials say, and now could shut down entirely, throwing its 1,069 specialists into limbo." -
also prevents 90% of genital warts casesI haven't seen it mentioned yet in this thread, but I think it's important to note that in addition to giving near 100% protection against 2 strains of HPV responsible for ~75% of all cervical cancers, this vaccine also gives near 100% protection for 2 additional strains of HPV responsible for approximately 90% of all cases of genital warts. So there's a reason for guys to get vaccinated too, although if you're a guy in the US, good luck finding someplace willing to vaccinate you.
A few more interesting tidbits:
-- At least 80% of women will have been infected by at least one strain of genital HPV by the time they reach 50 years of age.
-- Condoms are only about 70% effective at preventing HPV transmission
-- In 2007, approximately 11,150 cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States, and about 3,670 women will die from the disease. For comparison, seatbelts saved 13,274 lives in 2001 in the US.
-- Somewhere near 10% of people have had visible genital warts. These people may still be able to transmit the virus after the warts are gone.
-- HPV can be transmitted from a mother to her baby during birth, so it is even possible to get HPV from a virgin.
-- The HPV vaccine does not contain thimerosal/mercury.
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also prevents 90% of genital warts casesI haven't seen it mentioned yet in this thread, but I think it's important to note that in addition to giving near 100% protection against 2 strains of HPV responsible for ~75% of all cervical cancers, this vaccine also gives near 100% protection for 2 additional strains of HPV responsible for approximately 90% of all cases of genital warts. So there's a reason for guys to get vaccinated too, although if you're a guy in the US, good luck finding someplace willing to vaccinate you.
A few more interesting tidbits:
-- At least 80% of women will have been infected by at least one strain of genital HPV by the time they reach 50 years of age.
-- Condoms are only about 70% effective at preventing HPV transmission
-- In 2007, approximately 11,150 cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States, and about 3,670 women will die from the disease. For comparison, seatbelts saved 13,274 lives in 2001 in the US.
-- Somewhere near 10% of people have had visible genital warts. These people may still be able to transmit the virus after the warts are gone.
-- HPV can be transmitted from a mother to baby during birth, so it is even possible to get HPV from a virgin.
-- The HPV vaccine does not contain thimerosal/mercury.
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Re:Causes, not symptoms
First of all: Terrorists are a quite minor thread to your life
If you look at my previous post in the thread I stated that.
Second of all: If we would wage war on every potential killer of yours, we would have to concentrate the forces first on you, then on your mother, then on your stepfather (if you have one), then your biological father. Those four persons are the most probable to take your life. They are responsible for about 50% of all homicides.
Actually, homicide (by whoever) isn't even in the top 10 threats to my life. That's why we are waging a war on heart disease and a war on cancer. But as I previously stated, we should not stop there. We should extend our war effort to viruses!
Third: There is no direct relation between cause and effect in terrorist attacks. The most recent attempt to a terrorist attack in Germany I know of was a man who planned to carbomb a bank. Not for political reasons, but because of bad service. What's next? Battle against the Customer?
I think that's being done by outsourcing customer service :)
Seriously, if you had read my first reply in the thread, I was pointing out that "just keeping your nose out of people's business" does not insulate you from the threat of terrorism.
How we respond to the threat is a different deal; in that regard I agree with you, the US is overreacting with panic. -
Re:I will only take this seriously
Hey, that's not cool. Lead poisoning is a very serious. It's not the kid's fault they are exposed to it, but they get to deal with the damage for the rest of their life.
Some links for your educational pleasure:
http://www.todaysparent.com/healthsafety/allages/a rticle.jsp?content=20040206_103527_3540&page=4
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/1998/198_lead.htm l
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/factsheets/lyh/govtdo. htm
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HEC/CSEM/lead/biologic_fa te.html
http://oldweb.uwp.edu/academic/geology/lead/
http://www.cfc-efc.ca/docs/ldac/00000367.htm
http://www.nsc.org/library/facts/lead.htm
feel free to mod this up, mods, lead poisoning is underrecognised. -
Many Thanks to the Doctor
The kind doctor says, "We will begin with the obvious problem that they are treating autism as a single disorder."
There's a good discussion at National Institutes of Mental Health that provides something of an overview about the wide variety of behaviors you'll see.
My own son has been classified as "high-functioning autistic" by some physicians and medical practitioners, but not others. We've gone through the usual battery of testing, including MRIs, physical and behavioral exams, and enough blood tests that would bring a vampire to orgasm.
The truth is that, at least for the medium term (the next 20 years), we'll need to consider how to bring non-magic bullet therapies to these children, and then -- holy shit! -- continue to offer these people support well into their adulthood. My own son is very young, but I'm hearing horror stories of autistic children turning 18 or 21, and they and their families being left in a wilderness to fend for themselves, unable to cope with everyday living without support that's too expensive to provide because the person with the disorder no longer meets eligibility criteria.
I still hope Timothy Mrs. Frisby are happy in their new home, though. -
Re:Autism rates
I just heard a lecture on this subject today, so I can assure you that there has *NEVER* been any reputable study that showed a link between autism and childhood vaccinations. The entire argument is based on a post-hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: children get their vaccinations while around 1 years old, and the first signs of autism are noticeable about 6 months later, therefore the vaccinations cause autism.
What have the studies shown?
1) There is no difference in the rates of autism between vaccinated and un-vaccinated children.
2) Rates of autism have increased even though thimerosal was removed from the vaccines.
3) The increased rate of autism diagnosis is due to better identification and broader criteria, not due to a new cause.
Regardless, this has generated so much controversy that thimerosal has been removed from nearly all vaccines.
Don't get me wrong: vaccines do have a risk associated with them. But as far as the best science shows, autism is not one of them. -
Re:Some concerns
what effect does it have on your heart or your tongue?
It's my understanding that myostatin is only expressed in skeletal muscle, so cardiac muscle would be unaffected by a myostatin inhibitor.
I'm not an expert on it, but my lab has done a lot of research on myostatin and has identified some of the mutations in humans (including some cool papers looking at mutation prevalence in world class body builders).
This might be informative reading for you: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/dispomim.cgi?id =601788 -
Re:AIDS was discovered in 1981... err 1983/84
Regarding your 2nd point, and your "err, 1983/84", please allow me to disambiguate.
The Wikipedia article refers to the discovery of AIDS, which is the modern label applied to the clusters of disease cases with similar histories and symptoms which first identified (apparently) in 1981, although it seems some doctors and researchers were aware of unusual disease clusters for a few years leading up to that point. Recognition of AIDS as a disease led to researchers looking for a cause, which led to the subsequent discovery of the HIV virus. In any case, all of this activity took place in the 1980s within a few years, not "sometime in the 1970's".
This page includes some audio clips from interviews with some of the researchers: NIH researchers discuss the history of AIDS. -
Re:Not DNA, RNAWell the integrated copy of the genome is indeed DNA.
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Fact check?
The HIV virus [...] was discovered sometime in the 1970's
The first case of AIDS was reported in 1981; the HIV virus was discovered in 1983 (reference) One day you kids will learn all those super-secret ways of finding stuff on teh intraweb... -
Re:Solaris will be a problem?From http://www.reganfamily.ca/dst/
:
How to build the Unix Zoneinfo Time Zone Files ManuallyBuild binary zone files:
1: download the latest copy of ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata*.tar.gz. This will include the details of the DST change. You could also update the source files by hand i.e.:
/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/src in solaris2: view file to ensure necessary changes have been made.
3: compile the binary zone file per the instructions of the time zone compiler 'zic' which comes with the system.
4: install the new binary zone file over the current zone file, making sure all symbolic links, etc, are updated as needed.
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A round of applause for the tz guys
The tz database http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm underlies time zone handling for the GNU C Library, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris and many more, and is kept current by a dedicated team of (mostly?) volunteers. For time nerds, the historical comments in the plain text files of the tz ftp distribution (ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007b.tar.gz) are required reading.
If you're a Firefox person, FoxClocks (see my URL above) puts nice little world clocks on your statusbar. And yes, it uses tz too. Thanks guys. Andy -
PPAR-Gamma is a cellular receptor, not a compound
It might be wise for whomever posted this to read the article more completely before publishing. PPAR-gamma is a receptor found within/on cells, NOT a separate "magic compound." This is old news, anyway - PPAR-gamma's effects with respect to cancer have been well understood for months now.
Source:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=g ene&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=Graphics&list_uids=5468
Notice how it says "implicated in cancer"? That information has been there for quite some time. Time for people to stop posting this antiquated junk as "new news." -
Re:"fact of nature"
And they need to act fast. As the maintainer of a local copy of GenBank it saddens me that the patent section of GenBank has been growing far faster lately than say, the plant section or even the primate section. What does that say about us scientists? Blech!
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Re:Quality is Not the Same
And if you think that was too old, here are some recent problems:
Oct, 2004: (problems when customers switched to generics because of quality control)
http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/archives/editorial/ genric_drug_problem_raises_questions_on_quality.as p
Jan, 2000 (generic company lost license because of quality problems, it served 10% of market in GB)
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=1128727
Dec, 1997 (generic company hit with record fine for among other things falsifying records to cover up deviations from approved manufacturing processes)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1370/is_n7_ v31/ai_20097793 -
Biology was already open source
The study of biology was already open source. There is a wealth of data at the NCBI and other sources. We are seeing a renaissance in molecular biology right now and I, for one, attribute it to the hard work of thousands of researchers freely sharing their work. It's not just the data either, it's journals and software, too. We have more information than we know how to handle, and it's being created much faster than it will ever be understood. It's gotten to a point where new fields of study are being created just to interpret the collected data and try to make some sense of it. Bioinformatics and computational biology are truly amazing fields, the only trouble is attempting to explain just what it is you do to friends and relatives. Trust me, it's not always easy.
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Biology was already open source
The study of biology was already open source. There is a wealth of data at the NCBI and other sources. We are seeing a renaissance in molecular biology right now and I, for one, attribute it to the hard work of thousands of researchers freely sharing their work. It's not just the data either, it's journals and software, too. We have more information than we know how to handle, and it's being created much faster than it will ever be understood. It's gotten to a point where new fields of study are being created just to interpret the collected data and try to make some sense of it. Bioinformatics and computational biology are truly amazing fields, the only trouble is attempting to explain just what it is you do to friends and relatives. Trust me, it's not always easy.
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Re:An example of what should be done!
There is actually a lot of data associated with human disease that has been made available to the public. There are three main DNA databases throughout the world: NCBI from the US, EMBL from Europe, and DDBJ from Japan. These public sequence databases have a plethora of links associated with them that you can explore and find out more about the biology of human disease from sequences to academic papers. An example of is the The Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man. The down side, of course, is that many of the newer papers require a subscription to read in their entirety.
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Is tooFor further evidence of mercury toxicity in Autism, see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD= search&DB=pubmedhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez /query.fcgi?CMD= search&DB=pubmed>That's just the web site of PubMed, which is the index to the entire peer-reviewed medical literature.
That's like saying, "If you go to the library, you'll find lots of books that prove my point." Without mentioning which books they are.
(If you do want to look something up on Pubmed, Lancet, the journal that started the whole thing, now says that mercury-containing vaccines are harmless and save lots of lives.)
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Re:The likely future for this
... will be denouncing the technology because they believe almost all humans have varied degrees of these illnesses already.
A fact sheet describing the prevalence of mental disorders in America. (Quote: "Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.").
Come to your own conclusions.
CC. -
Mercury in Autism is not Bullshit
Its not bullshit, there are many kids who didn't have any autistic symptoms and subsequently developed them immediately after their shots. A subset of these kids then got much improved upon doing chelation therapy for mercury poisoning. If Autism was just genetic, its rates wouldn't be increasing as more people aren't just magically getting the gene and passing it on to their kids. Its is far more likely that the majority of the kids considered Autistic in the past 10 years have a greater genetic susceptibility to damage by heavy metals, and getting 20 shots that contain mercury before their first birthday put them over the edge. Because what has been increasing sine the late 80s/early 90s is the number of mercury containing vaccines required for babies.
The idea that there is mercury in vaccines and dental fillings in this country still is just fscking nuts anyhow. Its not necessary in either case and should be banned as it has been in many European countries. For christ sake, we freak out about eating a can of tuna once a week, but we shoot Hg into our babies and put it in our mouth. What a modern society have we..
For further evidence of mercury toxicity in Autism, see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD= search&DB=pubmed -
Real Data
Or, you know, you could look at a depiction of the Human Genome that contains real, usable data. Heaven forbid. This is like the folks who make "music" by assigning 4 notes to the 4 different DNA bases and playing them in one long string.
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Re:Patentless?
I've seen doctors who I thought made bad decisions, but they weren't intentionally cheating anyone. How could they do that without other doctors noticing, when everything's recorded in the chart? Is it all a big conspiracy?
Have you heard of Dr. Moon? I saw this story on 60 Minutes or something years ago. Pretty scary shit. One of the guys was getting ready to be operated on when one of the nurses told him to leave. Lucky for him he did and avoided unnecessary heart surgery.
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Re:Consider ImageJ software
There is open source software that does this. ImageJ is a free open source java software that does just this. It is well known among scientists and was developed by the NIH. Best of all, you get to choose your own calibration device. I've used it to measure biological specimens of sizes 1-3mm in size from a high resolution photograph taken with a Nikon D100 together with a 1/2 inch calibration block. I've been happy with the results. Besides measurements, it does a whole bunch of functions like counting particles and image processing
Since it is java based, there are versions of Windows, OSX and Linux. Of course it does not address perspective problems, but that is not an issue for me as I can keep my calibration device in the same plane as the item I am measuring. -
free pixel counter from NIH
The NIH has a free pixel counter you might try before shelling out $99 bucks. You'd just have to use a known size object, use the app to measure that object in pixels, then enter in the pixels/unit value. It's meant for biologists, but it has some nice features, like the ability to recognize objects ("particles") and 3d representation of pixel intensities. http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/menus/analyze.htm
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Brand power
The only reason to keep Netscape alive is brand recognition. Look at how many websites are still "best viewed"/"tested" or have bookmark or printing directions for only Netscape and IE, or just haven't been updated to say anything different: NOAA, part of NASA, NIH sites, govts of Utah and Minnesota, the IOC, a Consumer Reports site and college after college after college. If people keep seeing these notices, especially on government sites, there's no way they'll switch to some "other" browser, and keeping Netscape as a brand will be worthwhile. I mean, do I really have to mention AOL?
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Brand power
The only reason to keep Netscape alive is brand recognition. Look at how many websites are still "best viewed"/"tested" or have bookmark or printing directions for only Netscape and IE, or just haven't been updated to say anything different: NOAA, part of NASA, NIH sites, govts of Utah and Minnesota, the IOC, a Consumer Reports site and college after college after college. If people keep seeing these notices, especially on government sites, there's no way they'll switch to some "other" browser, and keeping Netscape as a brand will be worthwhile. I mean, do I really have to mention AOL?