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Regarding the side effects, I can speak for Prialt. My wife tried it in her infusion pump, and she had terrible problems. Massive headaches (like a spinal fluid leak), burning skin, etc. We forced our way into the Doctor's office and insisted they flush her pump out with saline. As we were leaving, we met another woman also there to cut off her Prialt because of side effects.

I'll stick to searching 'pubmed.org' for "milk, osteoporosis" and seeing the randomized control trials, thank you.

Culling out publications from obviously biases sources such as the "Journal of Dairy Science", can you find a randomized controled trial showing that unfortified dairy products have a protective impact on osteoporosis?

Such a result would be surprising given the findings of a study published in the American Journal of Public Health which followed 77,761 women and found no protective impact of dairy products on fractures.

A PubMed search will find this meta-analyis from Pediatrics on osteoporosis, or this article on the increased risk for prostate cancer from dairy consumption from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This study from the same journal notes "Over the years, doubts have arisen concerning the use of milk as a calcium source in the prevention of osteoporosis, particularly because of potential offsetting effects of protein and phosphorus." This letter in that same journal points out that living in countries with a high dairy consumption is a risk factor for osteoporosis.

This page from PCRM give citations to several studies on the health impact of dairy consumption.

See also this analysis in Public Health Nutrition which states, "Regarding associations relating the consumption of dairy products with chronic diseases, in Western societies consumption of dairy products has traditionally been linked to cardiovascular diseases (arteriosclerosis) and osteoporosis owing to their saturated fatty acids and calcium content, respectively. While the association between saturated fat intake and risk of arteriosclerosis is well established, the association between calcium from dairy products, together with vitamin D, and osteoporosis is less clear."

I'll stick to searching 'pubmed.org' for "milk, osteoporosis" and seeing the randomized control trials, thank you.

Culling out publications from obviously biases sources such as the "Journal of Dairy Science", can you find a randomized controled trial showing that unfortified dairy products have a protective impact on osteoporosis?

Such a result would be surprising given the findings of a study published in the American Journal of Public Health which followed 77,761 women and found no protective impact of dairy products on fractures.

A PubMed search will find this meta-analyis from Pediatrics on osteoporosis, or this article on the increased risk for prostate cancer from dairy consumption from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This study from the same journal notes "Over the years, doubts have arisen concerning the use of milk as a calcium source in the prevention of osteoporosis, particularly because of potential offsetting effects of protein and phosphorus." This letter in that same journal points out that living in countries with a high dairy consumption is a risk factor for osteoporosis.

This page from PCRM give citations to several studies on the health impact of dairy consumption.

See also this analysis in Public Health Nutrition which states, "Regarding associations relating the consumption of dairy products with chronic diseases, in Western societies consumption of dairy products has traditionally been linked to cardiovascular diseases (arteriosclerosis) and osteoporosis owing to their saturated fatty acids and calcium content, respectively. While the association between saturated fat intake and risk of arteriosclerosis is well established, the association between calcium from dairy products, together with vitamin D, and osteoporosis is less clear."

I'll stick to searching 'pubmed.org' for "milk, osteoporosis" and seeing the randomized control trials, thank you.

Culling out publications from obviously biases sources such as the "Journal of Dairy Science", can you find a randomized controled trial showing that unfortified dairy products have a protective impact on osteoporosis?

Such a result would be surprising given the findings of a study published in the American Journal of Public Health which followed 77,761 women and found no protective impact of dairy products on fractures.

A PubMed search will find this meta-analyis from Pediatrics on osteoporosis, or this article on the increased risk for prostate cancer from dairy consumption from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This study from the same journal notes "Over the years, doubts have arisen concerning the use of milk as a calcium source in the prevention of osteoporosis, particularly because of potential offsetting effects of protein and phosphorus." This letter in that same journal points out that living in countries with a high dairy consumption is a risk factor for osteoporosis.

This page from PCRM give citations to several studies on the health impact of dairy consumption.

See also this analysis in Public Health Nutrition which states, "Regarding associations relating the consumption of dairy products with chronic diseases, in Western societies consumption of dairy products has traditionally been linked to cardiovascular diseases (arteriosclerosis) and osteoporosis owing to their saturated fatty acids and calcium content, respectively. While the association between saturated fat intake and risk of arteriosclerosis is well established, the association between calcium from dairy products, together with vitamin D, and osteoporosis is less clear."

We really didn't want 17 sets of electric wires on the pole out back, did we? Nope.

Want it or not, we had it for a while. Example pic; I've seen a lot others from the era (three of the profs I do IT support for are historians focused on that era of technology), but this is the only one that turned up on the Web in a fast search. Alas, this one shows a relatively low level of wire clutter; most of those I've seen were worse.

DO NOT DO THIS. This is horrible advice. Windshield washer fluid contains methanol, which is extremely poisonous.

Deja vu also in patients suffering from schizophrenia: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=169 05402&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_DocSum. Thats when it gets really weird... did I have this delusion before...

You are right, the thyroid was shown to be vulnerable to particle emission but not much focus was put on the effects of electro magnetic radiation on that particular glad. That is not to say that you won't find several papers documenting averse effect of electro magnetic radiation. Radiation kills, what we don't know is if cell phones operate at a safe power for the part of the spectrum they use. For IR, our skin is pretty good at sensing when we are about to cook, for other part of the spectum we need careful studies to set the safe level of exposure. Just take UV as an example. We don't sense when what are being cooked by UV. We can stand a good deal of daily exposure but as little as 30 mins beyond your safe limit under the summer sun and you can expect your skin to peel of in the following days. Just because you can safely absorb some amount of radiation in a given part of the spectrum don't make it automatically safe for 5 times that amount. Hence, a study on exposure to cell phones 1/5 the power of current devices don't mean that we are currently safe.

Putting a device that emits radiation next to your head is harmful.

And you could give me what evidence for that statement? What study are you quoting? Or did you just make it up on the spot? I'm guessing the latter.

Putting a device that emits radiation next to your head is harmful.

And you could give me what evidence for that statement? What study are you quoting? Or did you just make it up on the spot? I'm guessing the latter.

Seriously though this is the sort of thing that you don't want to sneeze at, it can sound both inane and brilliant. Anderson is not such a crackpot, I found a presentation of his on optical computing and an introduction to its underlying theory called perspex algebra ( "Representing geometrical knowledge."). He seems to be a geometer stating his perspective in the first line of that presentation: "Aims: To unify projective geometry and the Turing machine".

He's a geek hero! Who knows if his nullity will end up just NaN with a British twang or the next best thing to sliced bread and i?

I was unable to hear the realaudio casts but from Book of Paragon, The Perspex Machine (Anderson mentions transreal arithmetic) and Exact Numerical Computation of the Rational General Linear Transformations (a mathematical treatise with applications to computer vision and robotics) just glancing I'd have to say the guy seems to be a real mathematician, geek and philosopher-king. I don't know if he's up there with Newton but he at least deserves an honorable mention for his wonderfully witty (and to me as yet inscrutable) naming of the Walnut Cake Theorem (see page 10 of Perspex.pdf). It seems that he was motivated to create nullity in order to make reliable advanced computers that would not barf when asked questions about the universe, and to him "Not-a-Number" is vomit. I'd say read some of his stuff before assigning him to the 9th Hell. Would like to hear what any mathematicians or other people with brain cells over the age of 12 have to think about it. It's okay if he reinvented something but it appears he is trying to make a machine that can handle infinities and other tough numerical concepts with ease, and that's worth something. Oh, that and his quantum computer looks neat.

Sure. If time is as simple as, say, a Moebius loop, then there you are ! :)
    As for the chemistry...
          a
          b
          c
          d

    Flat Earth, Flat Time, Flatheads. Yawn !

    1D. 2D. 3D. nD. nnD. n'D. n'nD... iR-D. Oh, and why not ? Dee-Dee ! (DxD).
    Or, Georg Cantor.

    Go figure.

Aneuploidy (wrong chromosome copy number) is triggered during cell division and has something to do with damage to the kinetochore, a protein structure that sits on a centromere at the junction of the chromosome arms. This is the thing that attaches to a mitotic spindle and drags the chromosome along the spindle into its daughter cell. That mechanism can malfunction by either not transporting the chromosome, or by pulling it the wrong way, or gluing it to another chromosome, or falling apart, etc. Aneuploidy could result from any of these things. But exactly what happens when kinetochores break is not well understood yet.

But it's not a product announcement, it's a piece of research science. From the abstract, the model does make useful and testable predictions, providing an unexpected mechanism by which tumor invasiveness (the most important clinical aspect of a tumor) can emerge. It doesn't bother me that people sit around and snipe at serious scientists making useful contributions to the world, but it does bother me that other people mod them up.

First, do you hold any fraction of a belief that there is a god, or gods? In other words, do you believe there is a deity or deities, anywhere, of any type, regardless of how closely they might or might not cleave to the various religious ideas prevalent today or in the past?

No I do not believe there is any supreme diety. Nor do I believe one does not exist. I have no belief one way or the other, though I would like to know.

Second, as (presently, it appears to me) you seek to hold onto the central position between there might be a god or gods, and there might not be a god or gods, can you tell me why you find the odds for the two cases to be relatively balanced?

I don't seek to maintain this central position you describe, as I've stated before I want to know if a supreme diety exists or do not exist. Nor do I find the odds of one existing or not to be balanced. Actually if I had to choice either way with the I have I'd have to say one does not exist as I sense no evidence one does exist. I won't even use Pascal's Wager to say a supreme diety exists. What was left out is what version of one or more exists. There's a multitude of different gods each with different characteristics so how can a person decide which one to believe in? And remember some of them are jealous and don't want any other diety worshipped. So you're up shit creek if you pick the wrong one. Actually as far as I'm concerned any "God" or gods that requires faith to be "saved" isn't worth being worshipped much less respected.

can give me the reason(s) that you think it is essentially, equally likely that there is, or is not, a god or gods, that in turn showing how the comparison to the invisible pink unicorn presumably fails.

Can you show me where I make this comparison?

I've really not encountered very many agnostics who are open to discussion; that does tend to get them thrown into my prefab "agnostics are copouts" box, but in those cases, I don't feel very apologetic about it... they just feel like people who have taken politically correct behavior to an intellectually dishonest extreme to me.

Maybe it will be easier to understand my position by knowing where I come from. Though my mom was and is Roman Catholic and we went to church at least some when I was little, I don't recall how much though, I considered myself myself as having converted to Buddhism before entering my teen years. I continued studying not just Buddhism but most other major religions including comparitive religous classes in college, even though my major was Computer Engineering. Eventually I came up with my own beliefs made up of Buddhism, Christianity, and Wicca along with other Pagan beliefs. However a little over ten years ago I had a serious accident in which I wasn't expected to live but ended up surviving a Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI. Afterwards, though I still recall what they were I no longer believe in the beliefs I had prior to the accident. And because spirituality was important to me I've been seeking to learn if there is anything there, metaphysically. I even kept up going to a spiritual groups I was a member of before the accident which was located at a small metaphysical bookstore. And I was most comfortable or at ease there than in many other places, the only place I was as comfortable if not more was where I was getting therapy in a neuropsycologist's office.

Immunosuppressants are scary shit, and usually considered an absolute last-resort treatment when the other choice is death. Admittedly, it sounds like this MIGHT be a rather targeted immunosuppressant with fewer side effects than most, but still, it's an immunosuppressant.

Yet, the government gives an implicit "okay" to prostitution. About 33% of Chinese men returning from the mainland to Hong Kong have purchased the services of a prostitute.

Why is pornography worse than prostitution? Pornography is about fantasy. Prostitution is about reality, and in China, prostitutes are sometimes children.

If slashdot was a technical crowd that likes highly detailed information, I would recommend that whenever a post is related to a publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal, there should be a link to it and the title should be stated. In this case, the Queen of Lyase recently published a paper called Sphingosine-1-phosphate lyase potentiates apoptosis via p53- and p38-dependent pathways and is down-regulated in colon cancer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, or PNAS for short. It deals with cancer epigenetics, which will be one of the most important emerging areas of oncological research. Scientists once thought that cancer was caused by a critical mass of mutations, but now many of them realize that errant epigentic marks such as histone acetylation and cytosine methylation can be equal contributors to cancer. Epigentic marks do this by turning off tumor suppressor genes or activating oncogenes. Several histone deacetylase inhibitors are currently in human clinical trials. Having some nice primary source material is great for us technical folks.

"weed" can be consumed in numerous ways which are not cancer-causing.

However, burning a joint (or otherwise burning the plant with an open flame) will generate carcinogens, which cause cancer.

See http://www.drugtext.org/sub/marmyt1.html (item #5)
Or, which contends even more carcinogens: http://www.nida.nih.gov/Infofacts/marijuana.html (section Effects on the Lungs, paragraph #3)

You can cook with it, or you can vaporize it.

Promote cannabis, not cancer!

I suggest you look up "knowitallatosis" while you're at it

      Here, some links from reputable sources for the terminally lazy. I don't know it all, but I know a lot more than you about this particular subject, at any rate. Sure, you can believe that doctors are "making this stuff up". Or you can believe the snake oil salesman when he promises to cure everything with silver. Eventually you'll come to us anyway. I have a special rate for people like you.

http://www.emedicine.com/derm/topic595.htm

http://dermatology.cdlib.org/111/case_reports/argy ria/wadhera.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=11107524&dopt=abstrac t

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Search&db=pubmed&term=argyria&tool=QuerySuggestion

I suggest you look up "knowitallatosis" while you're at it

      Here, some links from reputable sources for the terminally lazy. I don't know it all, but I know a lot more than you about this particular subject, at any rate. Sure, you can believe that doctors are "making this stuff up". Or you can believe the snake oil salesman when he promises to cure everything with silver. Eventually you'll come to us anyway. I have a special rate for people like you.

http://www.emedicine.com/derm/topic595.htm

http://dermatology.cdlib.org/111/case_reports/argy ria/wadhera.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=11107524&dopt=abstrac t

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Search&db=pubmed&term=argyria&tool=QuerySuggestion

Well, there are also better treatmens nowadays, the laser-based treatments for example. So there is a lot of progress! But the value of these new methods can be really appreciated only when tested in realistic settings, in animals or humans (sometimes even that last step can be decisive, see for example the recent tragic human trial of antibodies. Therefore I propose to market new methods as new methods, and new breakthroughs for those cases that really have proven to be a breakthrough.

The sex ratio of radiation workers' offsprings is often altered, in favour of girls.

You can read this for example. Other studies show similar effects on (nuclear) submariners, etc.

Indeed, it seems like a small minority are first world (USA as the most obvious example)

It would seem that the last thing poor people in the US need is another reason to be sedentary ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15177197&dopt=Citatio n ). What would be more helpful is a $100 exercise bike or something.

Ummm ... I don't know if you're really unaware of the counter-argument here, but this has nothing to do with heating or not. The plain and simple fact is that DNA does not interact with light at microwave/radiowave frequencies. Therefore DNA can't get damaged by cell phone radiation.

It's definitely true that DNA cannot be directly damaged by microwave radiation, but can microwaves catalyze a reaction that can lead to increased rates of DNA damage through other mechanisms that normally exist in the cell?

For example, I'm aware of at least one study that shows how alternating magnetic fields can damage DNA. You may tell yourself -- quite reasonably -- that magnetism has no effect on DNA since DNA is non-magnetic and be right, but it does have an effect on iron ions in the cell, which can catalyze the creation of peroxide in the cell which can damage DNA. So, even though magnetism cannot directly damage DNA and cause cancer, it can affect other systems that can. Read more here.

Now the big question, which we haven't found and answer to, is whether or not low levels of microwave radiation can similarly affect a process that can damage DNA. Research into the safety of cell phones produces contradictory results, and no one has found a mechanism, like Dr. Lai's above, to explain the increase in DNA strand breakage found in some research results. Barring a mechanism, it's mostly a battle between independent and industry-funded researchers over whether actual DNA damage occurs or not and whether it's more than the body can naturally handle or not.

Ever wonder why canabalism is considered so bad, why Jewish rules forbid pork, and why the saturated fats from pork products are so bad for humans? I've wondered that if human meat tastes like pork, and since humans and pigs are anatomically/physiologically close to each other one of the reasons canabalism is so horrible is that the ingestion of human meat is at least as bad or worse than pork.

Disgusting Food for Thought.

Disclaimer:) I do like bacon, prosciutto and chinese pork/chicken sausages. After thinking about the above though, I do try to limit the amount of pork that my family eats.

Actually, there is already quite a bit of public money invested in biomedical research. The NIH budget is about 28 billion dollars (one of the major reasons why the U.S. is a world research leader, by the way).

Currently, universities are encouraged to patent innovations created with federal funding and make money off those patents, thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act. This statement calls on universities to open up their patents when doing so could help the developing world. It does not appear to call for any changes in how public money is spent -- only in what is done with the products of that public investment.

3 grams of morphine is about 100 times the maximum daily dose for a 70kg adult. The article even mentions that it was per kilo of body weight. Now that would be a huge dose. But nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if this actually makes it into anything useful for human use.

That said, the dosages do sound quite high. I might have to check out the PNAS article when I get back to work to find out what the researchers really did. I noted in another comment that the LD50 for mice is only 600 mg/kg, meaning 3 g/kg is about 5X the lethal dose.

Heroin has fewer side-effects and better potency than morphine, and in a sane culture, it would be medically used, like in the UK.

I realised i went too far back when I noticed this in my bedroom...
http://www.ncrr.nih.gov/newspub/apr01rpt/Apr01gif/ ANDi-monkey.gif

I would imagine in much the same way that leaches out of your dinner crystal and into
your wee doch-an-dorrach. Or is that fictitious too? And of course, if your local MSW
is incinerated all bets are off.

For a more direct answer (a study specifically about CRT leeching) see this study.

See also http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/riafile.nsf/vwAN/S9 9-23.pdf/%24File/S99-23.pdf (It's probably not a bad idea to recover the Yttrium either.)

P.S. Intellectual laziness is pathetic.

Considering that the majority, if not all of Osteopathy is a pseudoscience and treatments like Bowen technique are unproven it's no surprise your doctor wouldn't recommend it. I'd question any doctor who would.

Intelligent and skilled clinical physicans will use all information, including anecdotal evidence, to find a conservative and effective treatment. They will recommend conservative and safe CAM treatments for which research evidence (may I suggest Asian Bodywork Therapy?) or anecdotal evidence exists before radical and risky treatments like major surgery or toxic drugs.

I'm not familiar with the Bowen technique; from the descriptions I found with Google, it sounds a little bit like some of the gentle release techniques used in tui na (Chinese "medical massage"). It is massage, not osteopathy, as it works with soft tissue. A quick PubMed search turns up some case and pilot studies - that's enough that a physican interested in finding relief for their patient (rather than acting as an enforcer for current medical orthodoxy) should say, "Other people have said this helped them. It's not proven, but you might consider trying it out before we move to the next conventional treament, which is to cut you open, move your parts around, and sew you back up like a ripped overcoat."

It's interesting that many people who demand scientific proof of the effectiveness of CAM treatments, will unquestioningly accept conventional medical treatments which are unproven (and often will simply refuse to accept studies that do show CAM treaments to be effective). The same guy who demands to see double-blind controlled studies of acupuncture, for example, will gladly submit himself to surgical techniques for which no double-blind controlled studies exist. (And yes, while it's very tricky to design, there are a few double-blind controlled studies of acupuncture, which show positive results; meanwhile, the only placebo-controlled trials of surgical techniques I'm aware of have found the technique under investigation no better than placebo.)

What does bigger brain really mean anyway?

As was recently suggested in the context of dolphins, increased brain size might simply be a result of the pressure on the organism's metabolism caused by cooler climate conditions (abstract on PubMed; summary on random blog). So European brains might be bigger, just because they have to keep thinking in the frosty winters. And as with dolphins, there's no reason to link brain size to intelligence unless you're not terribly bright yourself. Of course, none of this rational debate will happen in the mainstream press.

... Wait a minute. Slashdot covered the dolphin story, for heaven's sake: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/2 1/0358215. Never mind all this talk of sea-bound mammals: the /. community has the combined memory of goldfish!

Yes, a 6-week old baby is a viable life. That's why it's called a baby, not an embryo. I never said anything about killing life or 6-week old babies. You and your ilk love to pull out the over-wrought emotional comparisons when you have no valid reasons to oppose the science.

Read and understand before speaking on subjects for which you have only been told what to think rather than thinking for yourself. From this reference:

The embryonic stem cell is defined by its origin--that is from one of the earliest stages of the development of the embryo, called the blastocyst. Specifically, embryonic stem cells are derived from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst at a stage before it would implant in the uterine wall. The embryonic stem cell can self-replicate and is pluripotent--it can give rise to cells derived from all three germ layers.

Is this the one? Computer analysis of the binding reactions leading to a transmembrane receptor-linked multiprotein complex involved in bacterial chemotaxis. D Bray and R B Bourret Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=301293&tools=bot

Pseudoscience kills. Do not spread it.

Facts: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/Factsheets/evidhiv.htm

"Our son prefers to sleep on his stomach or side; I know that some research indicates a slight correlation of SIDS with sleeping on the stomach, but there is no evidence of causation. It's the only way he would sleep; what's a parent to do?"

Well, from one parent to another, let me say this... it's not a "SLIGHT CORRELATION", it's a statistical fact that the rate of SIDS has dropped by 50% since the inception of the Back To Sleep campaign.

You can spin it however you want, but an awful lot of babies were smothering themselves on the bedding by sleeping on their stomachs that didn't have to be. The rate among African-American babies remains the highest in the US with SIDS, which coincides with the fact that sleeping on the stomach remains the highest for African-American babies. An interesting coincidence?

There are many reasons why my kids would not go to sleep. Gas in the gastrointestinal tract (simethicone drops), too hot (take the onesie off), too cold (put a warm sleeper on), feeling vulnerable (swaddle him to constrict him), etc. There are always more tricks to try before letting them sleep on their stomach.

POSIX systems shoud use the source ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2006n.tar.gz Zoneinfo files are your friend.

Maybe it's time to scale back or end the Back to Sleep campaign before we have even more babies with flat heads.

My 13-month-old son would have never gotten a moment's sleep if we had tried to force him to sleep on his back for the first year of his life -- he hates sleeping on his back, and always has. The same medical industry drones who wanted us to do prenatal testing for Down's Syndrome (what difference would knowing this beforehand make, other than a stressed-out pregnant woman? We'd love our son just as much.) also harped on the "Back to Sleep" campaign. When we balanced almost assured skull deformity against the low risk of SIDS, there wasn't any choice at all.

I'm all for making sure my son is safe, but keeping a death watch isn't my idea of parenting.

We sue for-profit companies who produce products which are known to be harmful to us, even after being told for three decades that what they produce is harmful, yet still continued to buy and use the product, and win.

And for how many of those decades were we told that nicotine is as physically addictive as heroin?

Tobacco companies have known since the fifties of this addictive nature, but I don't recall seeing it mentioned on the packaging of any tobacco product, ever.

Even when told how dangerous it is, virtually no smoker has the ability to quit once they've started, regardless of their desire to do so. Of all the smokers you've known, how many would have started if they'd known it was that addictive? A lot of people willingly submit to brief danger (like unintentionally inhaling gasoline fumes) but would think differently if they knew one moment of contact would force them into a lifelong spiral of increasing exposure to the same danger.

The article can be found at: doi:10.1210/jc.2006-1375.

It can be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=17062768&dopt=Abstrac t

For what it's worth, this study only includes men from Boston. From their abstract:

Results: We observe a substantial age-independent decline in T that does not appear to be attributable to observed changes in explanatory factors, including health and lifestyle characteristics such as smoking and obesity. The estimated population-level declines are greater in magnitude than the cross-sectional declines in T typically associated with age.

Conclusions: These results indicate that recent years have seen a substantial, and as yet unrecognized, age-independent population-level decrease in T in American men, potentially due to birth cohort differences or to health or environmental effects not captured in observed data.

Believe it or not: the urine of women who use hormonal birth control. I read about an environmental study in the Pacific Northwest somewhere, where it was shown that sewage, dumped into a river, had estrogenic effects on male fish. The culprit? Synthetic estrogens, which are excreted in the urine of women who take hormonal birth control. Wastewater eventually makes its way into rivers and streams, which feed back into the reservoirs from which we get our drinking water. Not that this is conclusive in any way, but it's definitely something that's being looked at.

There's a very large and extensive amount of work that has been done on precisely those kinds of questions. In fact, billions of dollars are poured yearly into them.

One place to start (probably a bit advanced) is NCBI - which houses GenBank, the biggest DNA database on Earth -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ they have a ton of great resources and even whole textbooks which can be freely read on the subject.

There a massive amount that is still unknown, but also a suprisingly large amount which is quite well known, about how genes work.

So when they sequence the human genome, how do they handle the variations?

This doesn't change the fact that medical research does show it has harmful effects.

... and has also shown its beneficial effects.

Not only did a study in Madrid in 2000 show anti-carcinogenic properties of cannabis, but a similar project in Virginia which showed similar reults was squelched by the DEA under Reagan .

from this condition has happened before. One case was a woman also with Parkinsons. She suffered a period of amnesia and her voice came back for no apparent reason.

I got to see all kinds of similar improbabilities when I worked an NIDCD http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/

One of my favorites was bilingual people who'd had a stroke and lost one language but not the other. Completely mystifying.

Fellow Dilbertites,

It seems the great overloard Adams was in fact inflicted by the great malady. Rejoice at his miraculous recovery!

PS - I was quite confused at first as to the authenticity of this until I got goog-learned. It seems it really does exist, he very well may have had it, and if he recovered was indeed a miracle. However, it could also be an elaborate ruse, as I would expect from a satirist of his pedigree. :)

First, the Labeled Release (LR) experiment could only run the test on two relevant categories of known soils, terran and lunar. That still is true. I consider that only a couple of data points. You shouldn't claim that you've discovered life based on that kind of evidence.

Maybe he stated that because it's true.

If you can produce a reputable, peer-reviewed study to the contrary, please share. Articles by Dailey and Cameron do not qualify.

I was an Eagle Scout, Senior Patrol Leader, Junior Assistant Scountmaster, and finally, an Assistant Scoutmaster. I was involved with the scouting movement from the time I was seven years old until I was out of college. I would not ever want my child involved with the parsimonious, right wing ideologs that make up scoutings core today This is for several reasons. Units I have seen recently have become increasingly intolerant of difference rather than celebrating it, they have become cheerleaders for the far-right and ultra-nationalism, and they have become decreasingly involved in the outdoors. Much of the adult leadership I have seen is anti-gay, ant-flag burning, pro-marriage amendment, pro-bible-banging, out-of-shape and generally-not-the-sorts-of-people-I-want-my-son-to -learn-from. This anti-piracy merit badge is just in line with the thinking I've seen from Scout leaders.

Finally, with the increase in liability over the years, there are more and more limits to the activities troops get involved with. Fewer troops seem willing to take part in 50 mile afoot/afloat activities or go to places like Philmont Scout Ranch.

As a personal parting shot, I find the BSA's exclusion of martial arts as an acceptable activity to be ridiculous. When I was in scouts, my peers could get the athletics merit badge by: "Tak(ing) part for one full season as a member of an organized team in ONE of the following sports: baseball, basketball, bowling, cross-country, diving, fencing, field hockey, football, golf, gymnastics, ice hockey, lacrosse, rugby, skating (ice or roller), soccer, softball, swimming, team handball, tennis, track and field, volleyball, water polo, or wrestling (or any other recognized team sport approved in advance by your counselor, except boxing and karate)." The BSA cites safety reasons, however for karate and Chinese martial arts, the medical literature indicates that they are safer in incidence and severity of injuries than the majority of activities listed. See Birrer's article on the results of an 18 year survey. We can get into a detailed discussion of medical injuries in the martial arts later, but I find it ironic that scouting bans martial activities even though it is descended from using children as messengers on the battlefield in the 2nd Boer War.