Slashdot Mirror

Not to mention hepatitis-C, which is another blood-borne, debilitating (usually) or fatal (CDC says 1-5%) disease spread pretty much the same way as HIV... and which is 4x more prevalent than HIV in the U.S. population.

Koch's Postulates and other proof

Short version, HIV causes AIDS.

I'd also say it proves you're an idiot, but we'd have to culture you in isolation as part of the process, and I don't think we can get funding for that.

The Evidence That HIV Causes AIDS

HTH. IHBT. HAND.

I'm reminded of an old nursery rhyme

The old lady that swallowed a fly
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/oldlady.htm

The paper you link is a different one. This is the actual paper:

Alexander GM, Kurukulasuriya NC, Mu J, Godwin DW. Cortical feedback to the thalamus is selectively enhanced by nitric oxide. Neuroscience. 2006 Jul 28 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=168 76956&query_hl=12&itool=pubmed_docsum

Indeed the area they study is somewhat mysterious: The thalamus provides separate communication channels for essentially all sensory information from the sensory organs (e.g. eyes) to the cerebral cortex. However, unlike most brain areas it appears that there is no transformation going on in the thalamus. So if there is no computation, it must be a relay! As much as much most neuroscientist find the idea of pure "relay" unsatisfactory we simply have no evidence for anything beyond it. Hence all the speculation. Unfortunately, the present paper sheds no light onto the thalamus mystery. The authos cut a slice out of a brain and study in isolation. Clearly you won't get much functional information about what's actually going on in this way. Then the authors dump a drug onto the slice to show that it differentially turns up the gain of one input and turns down the gain of another one. Nice, but we don't know if this is actually going on in the brain or how this chemical would get there. If --as the journalists claim-- this finding were to transform our ideas about the thalamus then it probably wouldn't be published in a third tier journal like 'Neuroscience'.

So much for science journalisms.

-phystor-

many people believe that crack is a worse substance than cocaine...because nobody informed them that they are the same drug, taken in a different form (crack is smoked and therefore absorbed faster; but cocaine can be injected, and absorbed still faster)

But the speed of administration makes a huuuge difference.

--daksya

Tidbit: "Observational studies of subjects with marijuana exposure failed to demonstrate significant associations between marijuana smoking and lung cancer after adjusting for tobacco use."

To add to this: we use eye tracking systems in my brain lab (at a major research university). It is, in fact, highly unusual for subjects to only look at one thing, or even to look at whatever they want to do when they do it. There are many extra eye movements (saccades) to other areas of a scene for planning and multitasking, even before the person is conscious of their plans. Here are two papers relating to eye tracking and games in particular:

motion tracking and planning:
Ripoll H. Percept Mot Skills. 1989 Apr;68(2):507-12.

multitasking:
Cavanagh P, Alvarez GA. Trends Cogn Sci. 2005 Jul;9(7):349-54.

Needless to say, any successful attempt at eye-tracking control for something like video games would have a lot of sophisticated programming to do in order to figure out the user's intentions. From my own personal experience, especially in FPS games, I rarely look where I'm shooting. I would like to keep my sensors (eyeballs) and effectors (hands/feet/other body parts) separate, to allow me to take in more information and perform mor actions simultaneously. It would also prevent any weird interactions if the training provided by the games affects the way hardcore gamers attempt to interact with the real world (although those would be very interesting to study).

To add to this: we use eye tracking systems in my brain lab (at a major research university). It is, in fact, highly unusual for subjects to only look at one thing, or even to look at whatever they want to do when they do it. There are many extra eye movements (saccades) to other areas of a scene for planning and multitasking, even before the person is conscious of their plans. Here are two papers relating to eye tracking and games in particular:

motion tracking and planning:
Ripoll H. Percept Mot Skills. 1989 Apr;68(2):507-12.

multitasking:
Cavanagh P, Alvarez GA. Trends Cogn Sci. 2005 Jul;9(7):349-54.

Needless to say, any successful attempt at eye-tracking control for something like video games would have a lot of sophisticated programming to do in order to figure out the user's intentions. From my own personal experience, especially in FPS games, I rarely look where I'm shooting. I would like to keep my sensors (eyeballs) and effectors (hands/feet/other body parts) separate, to allow me to take in more information and perform mor actions simultaneously. It would also prevent any weird interactions if the training provided by the games affects the way hardcore gamers attempt to interact with the real world (although those would be very interesting to study).

I think you'll find the bioinformatics field to be broad enough to meet just about any interest that you may have - work ranges from programming pattern recognition/alignment software (for protein or DNA work) to mathematical modeling of protein networks. Don't worry if biology isn't your greatest strength as you'll be working as a programmer/mathematician solving a biological problem, not as a biologist working with computers (in fact, graduate level programs in bioinformatics tend to recruit computer science majors as the biology/biochem/etc majors don't have the required background).

Some links for further information:
International Society for Computational Biology
National Institute of Health
UCSD
Stanford
IBM

Anyway methane(CH4) is odourless. Almost all the livestock odours come from Hydrogen Sulfide H2S and Ammonia NH3. Infact natural gas is methane. It has no natural smell. They add a very highly stinking compound to the gas to make it detectable. Since methane/CH4/NG/CNG are gases they are always stored, sold and used from sealed containers and you get much less chance to smell them.

Getting fuel out of farm waste benefits all.

1. The farm waste is contained to capture methane, that also captures H2S and Ammonia thus reducing stink for the neighbourhood.

2. Captured methane originally came from the atmosphere, so it does not add any extra green house gases to the atmospher. When it is burnt the carbon in CH4 is released as CO2 from the tail pipes, which is 100 times better for the atmosphere than releasing all that unburnt methane into the atmosphere like we are doing now.

3. After extracting the combustible compounds from the farm waste, what is left behind is high quality organic fertilizer.

4. USA has 100 million cows and about 200 million pigs. The methane released from their excreta can cut our oil imports by 15 to 25%. Saudi Arabia will be begging us to buy their oil at 10$ a barrel if we alter the supply/demand equation by 25%.

The only downside is that we have to go through a phase where we have to endure sophomoric jokes about cow farts from every newscaster in this country.

No new tech breakthroughs are needed. The basic technology is more than 30 years old. What is needed is making it economically viable. As oil price goes up, they will become viable. It is just a matter of time.

What's the point of replacing gasoline with ethanol when you have to use almost the same amount of fossil fuel energy, in the form of natural gas and coal, to make the stuff? Producing ethanol from corn produces little net energy, and the whole process produces nearly the same amount of CO2 as just burning straight gasoline.

source

"stem cell research has been performed and funded directly by the federal government going back to 1963, possibly before. But the first published report in PubMed is in 1963."

The PubMed 1963 report was published and funded by CANADA. Why use the published report as evidence when it doesn't reference the US?
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=300599

While I am no doctor, this might shed some light on things.

For example, here's evidence that hypnotic suggestion can reduce the Stroop effect, an incredibly robust and well-established index of automatic cognitive processing. And a 1998 article from MIT Press's Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience finds that hypnosis is accompanied by "significant increases in both occipital regional cerebral blood flow and delta EEG activity."

To deny that hypnotic suggestion is real is nearly equivalent to denying that people can be persuaded to see things differently when they've been made very relaxed. That said, the study in question may be unscientific because of other methodological reasons, but the use of hypnosis does not immediately mean it's bad science.

For example, here's evidence that hypnotic suggestion can reduce the Stroop effect, an incredibly robust and well-established index of automatic cognitive processing. And a 1998 article from MIT Press's Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience finds that hypnosis is accompanied by "significant increases in both occipital regional cerebral blood flow and delta EEG activity."

To deny that hypnotic suggestion is real is nearly equivalent to denying that people can be persuaded to see things differently when they've been made very relaxed. That said, the study in question may be unscientific because of other methodological reasons, but the use of hypnosis does not immediately mean it's bad science.

Current hypotheses that use visually guided reaching and grasping to explain orbital convergence, visual specialization, and brain expansion in primates are open to question now that neurological evidence reveals no correlation between orbital convergence and the visual pathway in the brain that is associated with reaching and grasping. An alternative hypothesis proposed here posits that snakes were ultimately responsible for these defining primate characteristics. Snakes have a long, shared evolutionary existence with crown-group placental mammals and were likely to have been their first predators. Mammals are conservative in the structures of the brain that are involved in vigilance, fear, and learning and memory associated with fearful stimuli, e.g., predators. Some of these areas have expanded in primates and are more strongly connected to visual systems. However, primates vary in the extent of brain expansion. This variation is coincident with variation in evolutionary co-existence with the more recently evolved venomous snakes. Malagasy prosimians have never co-existed with venomous snakes, New World monkeys (platyrrhines) have had interrupted co-existence with venomous snakes, and Old World monkeys and apes (catarrhines) have had continuous co-existence with venomous snakes. The koniocellular visual pathway, arising from the retina and connecting to the lateral geniculate nucleus, the superior colliculus, and the pulvinar, has expanded along with the parvocellular pathway, a visual pathway that is involved with color and object recognition. I suggest that expansion of these pathways co-occurred, with the koniocellular pathway being crucially involved (among other tasks) in pre-attentional visual detection of fearful stimuli, including snakes, and the parvocellular pathway being involved (among other tasks) in protecting the brain from increasingly greater metabolic demands to evolve the neural capacity to detect such stimuli quickly. A diet that included fruits or nectar (though not to the exclusion of arthropods), which provided sugars as a neuroprotectant, may have been a required preadaptation for the expansion of such metabolically active brains. Taxonomic differences in evolutionary exposure to venomous snakes are associated with similar taxonomic differences in rates of evolution in cytochrome oxidase genes and in the metabolic activity of cytochrome oxidase proteins in at least some visual areas in the brains of primates. Raptors that specialize in eating snakes have larger eyes and greater binocularity than more generalized raptors, and provide non-mammalian models for snakes as a selective pressure on primate visual systems. These models, along with evidence from paleobiogeography, neuroscience, ecology, behavior, and immunology, suggest that the evolutionary arms race begun by constrictors early in mammalian evolution continued with venomous snakes. Whereas other mammals responded by evolving physiological resistance to snake venoms, anthropoids responded by enhancing their ability to detect snakes visually before the strike.

Oh, and bother actually reading my post. I already SAID that type 1 was not about sugar - but that Type II is.

We do have a cure fror diabetes. It's called a pancreas & kidney transplant.

We do have a cure fror diabetes. It's called a pancreas & kidney transplant.

depression is more likely for people who don't get out much:

and heart disease but other than that, no, you should be just fine without a real life, er, I mean without real life.

Easier copying enables people to spread existing materials more widely, so that more people can benefit from them at low cost. But there is a downside. It also drastically reduces the ability of anyone in the market to fund the development of these sorts of compilations. Why should I develop something that will take a huge investment if it will be copied?

Because you, or someone else willing to provide funding for you, need it? Really, this isn't rocket science. Think.

This is not an issue of petty rent-seeking.

To the contrary, that's exactly what it is. That's exactly what *all* "Intellectual Property" law is about.

Tell me where can I can download the human genome sequence?

Look here.

The Drosophila version of this protein has been shown to be absolutely required for creating leg joints. Without it, you get flies with short stubby legs that can't walk, and as a result die. See this paper for details.

The knockout mice mentioned above also have major problems, from a brief search of the literature. See this and this for example. This implies that the protein has critical functions that are so important that they are somewhat conserved all the way from flies to humans. So important, it seems, that the negative effects of having the protein don't outweigh the positive ones.

The Drosophila version of this protein has been shown to be absolutely required for creating leg joints. Without it, you get flies with short stubby legs that can't walk, and as a result die. See this paper for details.

The knockout mice mentioned above also have major problems, from a brief search of the literature. See this and this for example. This implies that the protein has critical functions that are so important that they are somewhat conserved all the way from flies to humans. So important, it seems, that the negative effects of having the protein don't outweigh the positive ones.

The Drosophila version of this protein has been shown to be absolutely required for creating leg joints. Without it, you get flies with short stubby legs that can't walk, and as a result die. See this paper for details.

The knockout mice mentioned above also have major problems, from a brief search of the literature. See this and this for example. This implies that the protein has critical functions that are so important that they are somewhat conserved all the way from flies to humans. So important, it seems, that the negative effects of having the protein don't outweigh the positive ones.

There's many more, perhaps 90% is over the top, but there is much to go on about a reduced risk of cancer. I was hoping you would look more toward the sources listed on the pages, not the pages themselves.

"A vegetarian lifestyle of long duration (> or = 20 y) was associated with decreased overall and cancer mortality. Other determinants of decreased cause- specific mortality were physical activity, body weight, and strictness of adherence to the life-style. The relationship between a vegetarian and fiber-rich diet and a decreased risk for colon cancer has been reported in many studies. In this study, the influence of other factors such as health-conscious behavior and a healthy lifestyle seem to indicate partly stronger effects than nutrition itself. This may explain the generally better health of moderate vegetarians. "
http://intl.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/5/114 3S

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=95190656&dopt=Citatio n
"This report is a review of results that suggest that the diphenolic isoflavonoids and lignans are natural cancer-protective compounds."

"Other analyses showed that non-meat-eaters had only half the risk of meat eaters of requiring an emergency appendectomy, and that vegans in Britain may be at risk for iodine deficiency. Thus, the health of vegetarians in this study is generally good and compares favorably with that of the nonvegetarian control subjects."
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/70/3/525S

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=6944545&dopt=Citation

"Frequent consumption (more than once a day) of soy milk was associated with 70 per cent reduction of the risk of prostate cancer (relative risk=0.3, 95 percent confidence interval 0.1-1.0, p-value for linear trend=0.03)."
http://www.springerlink.com/(unt1czj5hhaoh3i5sckbk 255)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&bac kto=issue,5,18;journal,75,126;linkingpublicationre sults,1:100150,1

"We conclude that a well planned lacto-vegetarian diet or a mixed diet with abundant amounts of vegetables and fruits is beneficial as regards the rate of cell proliferation, and most likely also reduces the risk of developing colorectal cancer."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7652722&dopt=Citation

And more:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=vegetarian+can cer&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&start=50&sa=N

No, not everything is "you-must-be-vegetarian" it's more, less red meat(don't have to eliminate) and give soy milk a try. I love to see how defensive people get when you (don't actually) challenge their diet. :)

There's many more, perhaps 90% is over the top, but there is much to go on about a reduced risk of cancer. I was hoping you would look more toward the sources listed on the pages, not the pages themselves.

"A vegetarian lifestyle of long duration (> or = 20 y) was associated with decreased overall and cancer mortality. Other determinants of decreased cause- specific mortality were physical activity, body weight, and strictness of adherence to the life-style. The relationship between a vegetarian and fiber-rich diet and a decreased risk for colon cancer has been reported in many studies. In this study, the influence of other factors such as health-conscious behavior and a healthy lifestyle seem to indicate partly stronger effects than nutrition itself. This may explain the generally better health of moderate vegetarians. "
http://intl.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/5/114 3S

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=95190656&dopt=Citatio n
"This report is a review of results that suggest that the diphenolic isoflavonoids and lignans are natural cancer-protective compounds."

"Other analyses showed that non-meat-eaters had only half the risk of meat eaters of requiring an emergency appendectomy, and that vegans in Britain may be at risk for iodine deficiency. Thus, the health of vegetarians in this study is generally good and compares favorably with that of the nonvegetarian control subjects."
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/70/3/525S

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=6944545&dopt=Citation

"Frequent consumption (more than once a day) of soy milk was associated with 70 per cent reduction of the risk of prostate cancer (relative risk=0.3, 95 percent confidence interval 0.1-1.0, p-value for linear trend=0.03)."
http://www.springerlink.com/(unt1czj5hhaoh3i5sckbk 255)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&bac kto=issue,5,18;journal,75,126;linkingpublicationre sults,1:100150,1

"We conclude that a well planned lacto-vegetarian diet or a mixed diet with abundant amounts of vegetables and fruits is beneficial as regards the rate of cell proliferation, and most likely also reduces the risk of developing colorectal cancer."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7652722&dopt=Citation

And more:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=vegetarian+can cer&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&start=50&sa=N

No, not everything is "you-must-be-vegetarian" it's more, less red meat(don't have to eliminate) and give soy milk a try. I love to see how defensive people get when you (don't actually) challenge their diet. :)

There's many more, perhaps 90% is over the top, but there is much to go on about a reduced risk of cancer. I was hoping you would look more toward the sources listed on the pages, not the pages themselves.

"A vegetarian lifestyle of long duration (> or = 20 y) was associated with decreased overall and cancer mortality. Other determinants of decreased cause- specific mortality were physical activity, body weight, and strictness of adherence to the life-style. The relationship between a vegetarian and fiber-rich diet and a decreased risk for colon cancer has been reported in many studies. In this study, the influence of other factors such as health-conscious behavior and a healthy lifestyle seem to indicate partly stronger effects than nutrition itself. This may explain the generally better health of moderate vegetarians. "
http://intl.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/5/114 3S

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=95190656&dopt=Citatio n
"This report is a review of results that suggest that the diphenolic isoflavonoids and lignans are natural cancer-protective compounds."

"Other analyses showed that non-meat-eaters had only half the risk of meat eaters of requiring an emergency appendectomy, and that vegans in Britain may be at risk for iodine deficiency. Thus, the health of vegetarians in this study is generally good and compares favorably with that of the nonvegetarian control subjects."
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/70/3/525S

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=6944545&dopt=Citation

"Frequent consumption (more than once a day) of soy milk was associated with 70 per cent reduction of the risk of prostate cancer (relative risk=0.3, 95 percent confidence interval 0.1-1.0, p-value for linear trend=0.03)."
http://www.springerlink.com/(unt1czj5hhaoh3i5sckbk 255)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&bac kto=issue,5,18;journal,75,126;linkingpublicationre sults,1:100150,1

"We conclude that a well planned lacto-vegetarian diet or a mixed diet with abundant amounts of vegetables and fruits is beneficial as regards the rate of cell proliferation, and most likely also reduces the risk of developing colorectal cancer."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7652722&dopt=Citation

And more:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=vegetarian+can cer&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&start=50&sa=N

No, not everything is "you-must-be-vegetarian" it's more, less red meat(don't have to eliminate) and give soy milk a try. I love to see how defensive people get when you (don't actually) challenge their diet. :)

Are you suggesting that people survive being buried under avalanches until literally frozen (i.e sub-zero body-temperature?)

Not me.... that particular and rather simplistic association is all yours :)

Are you saying that being an avalanche victim and frostbite are not commonly associated? Seems so, and there's the nonsense. [Medical aspects of avalanche accidents: hypothermia and frostbite]

Core temps...?

C'mon, please...a piece of meat, frozen solid...? Again, not something normally associated with frostbite. Freezer burn maybe :) How does that fit with anything I said? (rhetorical, so...)

Nice try and thanks for taking a run @ me - better luck next time.

MAO inhibitors http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/uspdi/ 202054.html?

For those who want to see the abstract for the original paper that this news article is written about, check out the following link. Of course, to actually see the paper, you need to sign up as a guest, and pay lots of money to the people who deal with Psychiatric Genetics.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=16538181

MAO inhibitors http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/uspdi/ 202054.html?

That's rotary motion, not rotating motion. And you're right only at the macro scale; many bacteria move by means of rotating flagella.

Source? According to http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/cold.htm "There is no evidence that you can get a cold from exposure to cold weather or from getting chilled or overheated.". Your immune system is also not as affected as you would think, perhaps after a brush with hypothermia, but not a 20 minute stint outside.

Female literacy is one of the key factors in determining birth rates.

Increased female literacy allows women greater access to information on birth control and also higher statuts in society leading to greater control over reproductive decisions. To reduce population growth teach girls to read. This is an abstract of a study discussing factors impacting birth rates such as female literacy. Here is a little bit more info.

I would bet that ImageJ would do the job for you.

It is multi-platform, fairly fast and has a number of plugins and macros. If you find a combination of operations that work well, you can save it as a macro that a kid could probably handle on their own.

It is available at http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/index.html.

The website is rudimentary, but the program itself is fun to mess with.

NIH Image has been superseded by ImageJ. And am I really the only one who knows the definitions of discreet and discrete?????

First, The Gimp makes something like this pretty easy. Open an image and go to 'Image -> Mode -> Indexed...', select the Generate Optimized Palette, and select the number of colors you want to use (10 might last your son 5 minutes, 200 might last him four years). Turn dithering off and hit OK. Next, go to 'Image -> Mode -> RGB' to switch it back to RGB color, then go to 'Filters -> Artistic -> Cartoon...', tweak the settings (Mask radius=10 and Percent black=1.0 seem to work), and hit OK. With these two, I was able to get a 'completed-looking' color-by-numbers image from a photo in about 10 seconds. The rest is up to you (I would start by selecting by color, getting the black outlines, and copying them into a new layer. Add in numbers and a legend, and you're good to go). If you want to get fancy, you could use some python-jitsu and whip up some script-fu to do it automagically.

Second, you can keep it hardcore and use a program like NIH Image (or its PC counterpart, ScionImage) and use a procedeure called thresholding to get different levels of black and white from an image. The program is scriptable, and if you google around enough (or poke through the sample scripts) you might be able to hack something together pretty easily. I've used this software to track points glued onto soft tissues (ligaments), and if I recall correctly, it was fairly easy to get it to do this sort of thing (i.e., Biomedical Engineering undergrads were able to get it to work). N.B. This is a serious research-level program, so it is not super user-friendly. I also doubt you'll find anything in the help forums if you search for color-by-number. Search instead for thresholding.

The first option is likely to be waaay easier than the second.

How about the fact that published papers have shown, since at least 1996, that ultrasound can accelerate bone growth.

If it can accelerate bone growth, it seems a logical enough step for someone to experiement with teeth, and given that it's been ten years since bone growth was seen, why is teeth/jaw regeneration so hard to believe?

Or is it just because you haven't heard of it, it can't be real?

Did you also know that light acts simultaneously as both a particle and a wave, depending on how you examine it?

These were probably rat stem cells, so who cares whether they were adult or embryonic?

Actually, these were human stem cells injected into rats. The particular cell line is derived from cells that were taken from aborted human fetuses in 1998.

These are classed as embryonic stem cells. If I'm not mistaken, a human fetus is actually an embryo, though it is a much later stage than the 'undifferentied ball of cells' that you hear about when politicians and scientists promote embryonic stem cell research.

[reference]

In my not so humble opinion, there are serious ethical questions with this kind of research which the nascent field of bioethics has spent the last decade dodging. Bioethics is basically a bad joke. Bioethicists are kept in-house by universities like Stanford and Duke, and spend their time justifying experiments done by these same institutes -- which is a rather serious conflict of interest right there. They never seem to seriously consider whether that a type of research is actually acceptable or not... instead their goal is to make arguments to convince other people that the research is a good thing.

PRK has been used for more than 14 years. Not a lifetime, but a fairly long period of time. During that time, those treated with PRK have typically seen their distance vision stay the same since treatment.

Here is an abstract of a 2-5 year follow up study on this stuff. It was published in 1998. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9640571&dopt=Abstract

(my first thought when reading this.)

"But Genentech does not want to license the drug for this use as it is. No sir, they will only sell a 'repackaged' version for 100X the original price. A real 'eye opener'."

Actually, that's not really it at all, but thanks for playing. Avastin has been used by retinal specialists to treat wet macular degeneration (and presumed ocular hisoplasmosis syndrome, but that affects far fewer people so there aren't any real studies done with it as yet.) When retinal specialists got the idea to use an angiogenesis inhibitor to treat MD, the real problem was the size of the Avastin molecule. They were concerned that it was too large to penetrate the retinal membrane and thus wouldn't be effective against MD. Genentech immediately went back to the drawing board and developed Lucentis which is a smaller molecule that can more easily penetrate the retinal membrane.

In the meantime, retinal specialists have been using Avastin with some success, but it's believed that Lucentis will be more successful because of the smaller molecule size. Genentech doesn't license the drug for a purpose, the FDA approves it for a purpose. The fact is that there have been no large scale trials with Avastin. The largest I know of is this one by Avery et.al. which had only 79 participants. But now that Lucentis is out, there are official trials being done with it and assuming it passes (which it appears all but certain that it will), it will probably be significantly better at treating MD than Avastin.

An interesting example is as follows:" A fluorescence-activated cell sorter. A cell passing through the laser beam is monitored for fluorescence. Droplets containing single cells are given a negative or positive charge, depending on whether the cell is fluorescent or not. The droplets are then deflected by an electric field into collection tubes according to their charge. Note that the cell concentration must be adjusted so that most droplets contain no cells and flow to a waste container together with any cell clumps."

The empirical scientists that correctly implement such challenging procedures are rarely mentioned.

An interesting example is as follows:" A fluorescence-activated cell sorter. A cell passing through the laser beam is monitored for fluorescence. Droplets containing single cells are given a negative or positive charge, depending on whether the cell is fluorescent or not. The droplets are then deflected by an electric field into collection tubes according to their charge. Note that the cell concentration must be adjusted so that most droplets contain no cells and flow to a waste container together with any cell clumps."

The empirical scientists that correctly implement such challenging procedures are rarely mentioned.

An interesting example is as follows:" A fluorescence-activated cell sorter. A cell passing through the laser beam is monitored for fluorescence. Droplets containing single cells are given a negative or positive charge, depending on whether the cell is fluorescent or not. The droplets are then deflected by an electric field into collection tubes according to their charge. Note that the cell concentration must be adjusted so that most droplets contain no cells and flow to a waste container together with any cell clumps."

The empirical scientists that correctly implement such challenging procedures are rarely mentioned.

Too bad they don't have a US Gov Image Google search as well, would have loved to see what "porn" would have returned. However a text search on "porn" returns almost only stuff about "child porn".

It also teaches you about interesting things, such as Dial-a-Porn, that porn will damage you and your whole family, that PORN can be a bad disease, that Porn can be a last name, or even that P2P actually means Porn-to-Porn (notice the name of the poster btw)

Google taught me new things again today!

Too bad they don't have a US Gov Image Google search as well, would have loved to see what "porn" would have returned. However a text search on "porn" returns almost only stuff about "child porn".

It also teaches you about interesting things, such as Dial-a-Porn, that porn will damage you and your whole family, that PORN can be a bad disease, that Porn can be a last name, or even that P2P actually means Porn-to-Porn (notice the name of the poster btw)

Google taught me new things again today!

I would also like to see you defend your comment about most of the space research budget has been diverted to militarizing space. That just sounds like a whole lot of bunk.

If you are concerned about space science budgets, then you should be rooting for the death of the moon-mars initiative and over-emphasis on manned space. That, the ISS, and the shuttle are pretty much killing space research. The ESA is fortunate to not have that millstone around their necks. Besides, in 2001 at least, the ESA space science budget was only about 12.5-percent of the science budget of NASA, so I'm not sure how you can defend your statement that the ESA is doing most of the space research.

from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: "This article reviews several recent military cases and three deaths that have occurred as a result of overhydration, with resultant hyponatremia and cerebral edema. All of these cases are associated with more than 5 L (usually 10-20 L) of water intake during a period of a few hours." Though unlikely to occur with a healthy person, death can be the result of overhydration in people with kidney and heart problems. Taking in overly large amounts of water in a short span of time can also kill a normally healthy person, but the cases of this are few and far between ( and are often related to the use of MDMA and the improper judgement of sufficent water to remain hydrated ).