Slashdot Mirror

Any enzymes that do exist in "raw milk" would not survive the process of digestion.

I suggest you read about digestion before you post such an uninformed borderline retarded statement as this. Enzymes ARE digestion. http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/yrdd /

"The article I read.." gets modded informative? Vitamin D supplements are pretty inexpensive, and easily supplied in "ridiculous quantities." http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind.asp Why is anyone assuming there's an epidemic of people avoiding sunlight anyways? Plenty of sunlight comes in here in through the basement window of my Mom's house!

Are you wilfully keeping yourself from understanding? Let me repeat - certain points in microwaved food may reach temperatures never reached outside (i.e. hotspots) - you have no simple way of telling. Contrast this to conventional cooking, where there is a straightfoward upper bound on temperature that _no_ part of the food will ever cross.

> The temperature of your flame is much, much higher than you will ever attain in a microwave.

No, wrong

Take a look here: a domestic microwave oven can be used to melt metal at 1000 degrees Celsius.

Take look at the other interesting reply to you by an AC that I echoed - he claims a plain grape generates a plasma.

Take a look at this paper: it describes a witches brew of "oil fractions produced by microwave-assisted pyrolysis of different sewage sludges". Interestingly, it describes different products formed when heating the sewage conventionally, v/s heating in a microwave. Why? A webpage on their research also states "800-1000C to be attained with microwave power of 1 kW and frequency of 2450 MHz." - the same power level available in many home microwaves.

My mentioning microwaved cheese tasting funny IS pertinent to this discussion. The funny taste may indicate high temperature products formed during microwaving, but not formed when cooking pizza in a normal oven (Consider: by definition, cheese in a normal over goes through the entire range of temperature - from room temperature, to oven temperature - yet microwaved cheeese tastes different - why?)

And you would argue out of ignorance. All of those theories are based on observation and founded in mathematics. The concept of 'chi' has no such foundation, and has not stood up to observation.

Chinese Medicine is no less strigent of a science and based on thousands of years of observation, and trial and error, with a quarter of the world's population! It's creation was dependent on careful observation.

But to refute your position that it has "not stood up to observation", I'll point you to 127 scientific medical publications on the topic, most of which would seem to support these theories:

I'm amused that you think a foundation of mathematics is a magic bullet; that somehow math magically makes hypotheses true. String theory is indeed based heavily on math, but it is far from achieving a conscensus in the scientific community on its "truth". In fact, there's plenty of debate on whether or not it even qualifies as science!

There is a [0]more detailed report on this from 2003. So, what is new?

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi ?c md=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12771628&dopt=Abst ract

Could not read the linked article but here is the abstract. Can not be complete bullshit.

This is definitely a sensationalized story, but I also found this link buried on the US national institute of health website that contains an abstract of (at least a very similar) experiment.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12771628&dopt=Abstrac t

Anyone claiming they need medical marijuana can get it in prescription tablet form.

The ones claiming they need it want to smoke it to get intoxicated in the short term and get lung cancer in the long term.

The debate over medical marijuana was over a long long time ago since you can already get an equivalent prescription in non-smokable tablet form.

I want to know how and what lengths the manufacturer of medical marijuana will need to go to get it approved as a prescription medicine considering the difficulty in convincing the FDA that the lung cancer causing aspects of smoking it outweigh the short term effects.

From the National Institute of Health, a US federal government agency:

Dronabinol: A prescription preparation of the major physiologically active isomer of THC in soft gelatin capsules that is used to control nausea caused by chemotherapy and to stimulate appetite in cases of AIDS-induced anorexia -- see MARINOL

Marinol: trademark -- used for a preparation of dronabinol

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/mplusdictionary .html

30% did sound high, but the way I feel lately...

Did look at the National institutes of Mental Health.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/suicideprevention/suifact. cfm

8th leading cause of death by males is suicide.

Crazy...

I'm not sure how well tolerated SWNTs will be in the body, since some studies have shown toxicity (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Search&db=PubMed&term=toxicity+nanotube+carbon&too l=QuerySuggestion). Also, while it's probably possible to derivatize the ends of nanotubes without greatly affecting their properties, derivatizing the sides (is this what you mean by "surface"?) would likely degrade their conductivity, as it would disrupt the flow of the pi electrons.

http://www.unc.edu/~cory/autism-info/orgautsa.html

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/ awh330v1

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1593599 3

The nice thing about the Microsoft "crap" about Avalanche is that it ensures press about BitTorrent. Certainly, it's inaccurate to a fault, but it will make people look it up on the web.

Obviously sharing "other-people's data" is a common use for BitTorrent, but a growning number of companies distribute their wares via BitTorrent, and I'd like to see more of that.

Specifically, I would like to see purveyors of large databases (particularly public ones like those at the NCBI) start to embrace P2P as a distribution strategy. In the case of NCBI, every biotech and pharma on the planet is grabbing copies of those huge databases on a regular basis (they change frequently). This incurs huge bandwidth on their part, and promises slow delivery for those downloading. BitTorrent could drop their bandwidth usage 10,000-fold and fantastically speed up transfer rates to the downloaders. Everybody wins!

This smells fishy. Especially considering most of the authors of the original 1998 study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism have apologised and had their paper retracted by the Lancet due to a conflict of interest. Furthermore, a recent study of Danish children has shown rates of autism continued to increase even after the removal of thimersol from vaccines (via a MetaFilter discussion of this topic).

Now, don't get me wrong; it may still be the case that thimersol or some other vaccine ingredient contributes to autism. However, the balance of evidence from qualified medical researchers is against this viewpoint at the moment, and it's unethical of Mr Kennedy to start spreading what is essentially FUD unless he has the epidemiological data to back it up.

This smells fishy. Especially considering most of the authors of the original 1998 study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism have apologised and had their paper retracted by the Lancet due to a conflict of interest. Furthermore, a recent study of Danish children has shown rates of autism continued to increase even after the removal of thimersol from vaccines (via a MetaFilter discussion of this topic).

Now, don't get me wrong; it may still be the case that thimersol or some other vaccine ingredient contributes to autism. However, the balance of evidence from qualified medical researchers is against this viewpoint at the moment, and it's unethical of Mr Kennedy to start spreading what is essentially FUD unless he has the epidemiological data to back it up.

I think he needed more random links.

While I think that from a financial standpoint, libraries would save money publishing articles themselves, they don't have the editorial ability of a major publishing house. It's the kind of thing that doesn't de-centralize well, either, because you need a limited amount of "restriction points" to effectively filter out the crap from the submission stream. That then enables people who produce material that makes it past the editorial and peer-review filter to claim that as an accomplishment when applying for grant and tenure.

Here's the analogy for the slashdot crowd: it's like article submissions are electrons. You want to get a certain current by using editors as resistors(and believe me, they do resist). Now what happens to current as you add more resistors in parallel?

The solution to all of this would be for libraries to require all submissions in some kind of markup like LaTeX(to enable Semantic Web goodness- in the biological and medical fields, submission as MS Word files is not uncommon), not produce a printed version at all, and publish the citations with abstracts in a central index, similar to Pubmed. Now, instead of an article in Science or Nature having more weight than an article in the eskimo journal of snow science, an article would be ranked by the number of views, and by the number of non-self citations it receives from subsequent articles.

However, there are two problems with this. One is that it would take a longer time for an article's worth to be evaluated that way than with a dedicated staff of editors working on it, where the value accrues immediately upon publication(though this is all debatable). The other, more serious, problem is how to find important, relevant work with no one filtering out the crap for you. Imagine slashdot with all submissions accepted, and no moderation or comment threading, just one long stream of post after post after frist psot! So maybe moderated comments would be enabled on the citation indices, and you'd have something like the grand thing we have here, with a mix of people acting selfishly and altruistically. That's not that different from the system we have today, I don't guess. Who's going to decide which articles make the front page? A small pool of people who are expert in their field? Editors?

I subscribe to some RSS feeds of pubmed search queries for keywords important to me, and each query is updated with several articles each day. This is for articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals(again, many of which editorially triage articles before selecting ones to send out for review).

Keeping up with the reading of this pre-selected set is a big task already. It would be more than a full-time job to read an unfiltered set, then moderate or comment upon each. I know some fields are even busier than mine.

So, I would love to see the current system change as much as anyone else, but I don't have the time or funding to put my efforts where my mouth is, nor does anyone else who wants to actually do research instead of just read about it. The editors are doing a hard job, and much as I hate them sometimes, I respect what they're doing.

Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:

• Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
  
• Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
  
• Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
  
• DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
  
• Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
  
• Contributes to soil erosion.
  
• Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
  
• Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
  
• Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
  
• Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
  
• Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere.
  
• Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
  

Have you heard of Connotea? You can grab bibliographical info from Pubmed, HubMed, and many other indices directly into your Connotea list, and output in .RIS, so you can import into RefMan or whatever. The eventual goal is to move totally away from Thompson ISI and their crufty old products, but until someone comes out with a Journal Style formatting package, we're stuck with RefMan's heinous old interface, at least for now.

So if you click through any search result, you can grab the citation info, and then pass that on to EndNote or whatever, but hopefully we'll soon not even need to do that. Give Connotea a try, you may find it more useful for at least making the list.

What I'd like to see is better cooperation with dx.doi.org and more OpenURL support, but I guess that is mostly up to the libraries. I'm going to try to talk my school into registering their resolver with Google, so it knows which library I get my access from, and hopefully Open Access continues to spread.

Since it's really all about the interface, now we need good forward and backward citation navigation. Tree based approaches, like the one they use at Hubmed, is nice, but the implementation is still a little rough. I would think Google, with their AJAX skillz, could do something much nicer, ala Google Maps.

... it shows me what a void there is still to fill!

ISI has had a fantastic run providing bibliometric research tools for nearly 30 years, but only to deep-pocket libraries. WebOfScience finally brought the ISI analysis of academic pubs into 21st century, and so it is no surprise that they quickly bumped into Google, who brought fundamentally the same insight (citation impact/in-degree is a great clue) to the Web. If GoogleScholar has simply nudged Thomson (who bought ISI in 1992) to broaden the market for this tool, that's already progress in my book.

For now, the interesting part to me is a compare/contrast of just what each brings to the party. While this review by Péter Jacsó' (his earlier review is also helpful) is part of Thomson/Gale's site, I think it's unfair to see it simply as a vendor whitepaper; he identifies serious flaws in GoogleScholar. But even with the price differential aside, it must be clear to all that WoS has some serious issues, too! (Some of you might be interested in an author-focused comparison I did recently between GS and WoS: Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data , arXiv.org preprint arXiv:cs.IR/0504046, 11 Apr 05). Do they really want to hold up the interface to WoS as a virtue?! Checkout the touchgraph browser for CiteSeer as an example of what we can hope for. And while there isn't yet an API to GoogleScholar, screen-scraping at least lets us do some experiments over this corpus; WoS does not seem willing to provide similar access (I've tried:).

These aren't the only two vendors, of course: GoogleScholar was certainly inspired by the CiteSeer (originally at NEC, now at UPenn) project; it continues to be an innovative force. Our local, generally well-stocked library doesn't carry Scopus (too expensive?), but I hear good things about it. Entrez/PubMed has been mentioned and (while it is great in many other dimensions!) I don't see it is as especially relevant until the citation linkages it is beginning to build via PubMedCentral come online. And when the NIH's "Open Access" policy (cf. [Science 11 February 2005; 307: 825 DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5711.825], but not without a subscription:) starts to kick in, and as changing standards regarding exchange of ``open citation'' information (e.g, CrossRef) propagate, the pace of change is bound to accelerate.

Looking a bit farther afield for suggestions of what might be coming, some of you lawyer-types may appreciate what Shepards does for case law searching. They orignally started doing simply the manual "inversion" of citation links that ISI does, but grew into an entirely new source of independent analysis of the arguments connecting the two documents. Imagine how helpful it could be if scientific and web citations carried as much third-party (ie, from neither the cited or citing authors) metadata!

... it shows me what a void there is still to fill!

ISI has had a fantastic run providing bibliometric research tools for nearly 30 years, but only to deep-pocket libraries. WebOfScience finally brought the ISI analysis of academic pubs into 21st century, and so it is no surprise that they quickly bumped into Google, who brought fundamentally the same insight (citation impact/in-degree is a great clue) to the Web. If GoogleScholar has simply nudged Thomson (who bought ISI in 1992) to broaden the market for this tool, that's already progress in my book.

For now, the interesting part to me is a compare/contrast of just what each brings to the party. While this review by Péter Jacsó' (his earlier review is also helpful) is part of Thomson/Gale's site, I think it's unfair to see it simply as a vendor whitepaper; he identifies serious flaws in GoogleScholar. But even with the price differential aside, it must be clear to all that WoS has some serious issues, too! (Some of you might be interested in an author-focused comparison I did recently between GS and WoS: Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data , arXiv.org preprint arXiv:cs.IR/0504046, 11 Apr 05). Do they really want to hold up the interface to WoS as a virtue?! Checkout the touchgraph browser for CiteSeer as an example of what we can hope for. And while there isn't yet an API to GoogleScholar, screen-scraping at least lets us do some experiments over this corpus; WoS does not seem willing to provide similar access (I've tried:).

These aren't the only two vendors, of course: GoogleScholar was certainly inspired by the CiteSeer (originally at NEC, now at UPenn) project; it continues to be an innovative force. Our local, generally well-stocked library doesn't carry Scopus (too expensive?), but I hear good things about it. Entrez/PubMed has been mentioned and (while it is great in many other dimensions!) I don't see it is as especially relevant until the citation linkages it is beginning to build via PubMedCentral come online. And when the NIH's "Open Access" policy (cf. [Science 11 February 2005; 307: 825 DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5711.825], but not without a subscription:) starts to kick in, and as changing standards regarding exchange of ``open citation'' information (e.g, CrossRef) propagate, the pace of change is bound to accelerate.

Looking a bit farther afield for suggestions of what might be coming, some of you lawyer-types may appreciate what Shepards does for case law searching. They orignally started doing simply the manual "inversion" of citation links that ISI does, but grew into an entirely new source of independent analysis of the arguments connecting the two documents. Imagine how helpful it could be if scientific and web citations carried as much third-party (ie, from neither the cited or citing authors) metadata!

Shut the fuck up.

He didn't say anything offensive about people with Tourette's Syndrome, he only stated that shouting out vulgar words can be a symptom of it, and guess what? It can be! (http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/tourette/detai l_tourette.htm#32063231; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourettes)

If you're such an over-sensitive fuckhead that someone stating a fact about your disorder offends you, please kill yourself or at the very least get off of the internet.

Thanks for the info!

Ha. Score! Stewing, boiling, or poaching are done at or below 100C (212F); cooking at this low temperature creates negligible amounts of the chemicals. Me and my trusty bottle of Steel Reserve/can of peach nectar/apple juice are good to go!

--grendel drago

It is important to honesty state the risks of new technology.

True, having an honest assessment may delay rollout of new technologies and may cause others to be abandoned because the vendors think the payoff won't be as great if they expect to have only 10 million customers instead of 20 million in the time before the tech is obsoleted, but in the long run this is better than the technological equivalent thalidomide.

The bottom line:
If risks are properly understood, those who can afford to take the risks will use the technology, those who can't won't. If there is not enough of a market, the vendors may spend their money on other, more profitable ventures.

If risks are not properly understood, then people will, in ignorance, take risks they would never knowingly take.

Being a carrier for cystic fibrosis is probably a defense against diarrhea, which makes it a defense against cholera and typhoid fever, as well as other diseases. Carriers of cystic fibrosis may have some disadvantages in life when it comes to sports, on the other hand, if cholera wipes out a medieval village, the few survivors may all be carriers, and perpetuate the gene into future generations, where the carriers may be at a disadvantage in daily life ... until the next epidemic http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rjh9u/cysfib.html http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/may98/niaid-06.htm

My understanding is that the genes in question would be those responsible for causing Tay-Sachs disease.

The problem here of course is that Tay-Sachs is also known to be a disease of Amish people too.

More information

I don't recall there being a lot of Amish chess champs.

one that I use, in the lab, is called ImageJ. It is released by the NIH, and can be found at:

http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/

despite it's being java based, it runs fairly quickly (once the VJM has loaded, &c.), is decent, as packaged, and is easy to extend via user written plugins and macros.

the price beats the heck out of most of the commercial solutions, out there, and it seems to have fewer bugs (it's been a couple of years since i bothered with the $10k+ commercial software, though, so they might have improved their quality...)

btw: i like the bot-blocking verification, but this one is hard on my eyes...

I have to admit, I mischaracterized what happened. The patients he gave transfusions to were already infected with Ebola. He gave them the blood of convalescant Ebola patients, and 87.5 of them survived. See this. Plans are being made to study the phenomenon on a much larger scale with the next big Ebola outbreak.

Consensus Statement: Atlantic Coast Contaminants Workshop 2000

It's relatively well known some chemicals mimic hormones or otherwise disrupt sexual functions in a number of animals.

This is a study on rats

This is a big problem with medical research today, many drugs are tested on rats, guinea pigs, and other animals, which doesn't really show what effects those drugs will have on humans. One candidate may not be effective as a drug on the species being used to test with whereas it may very well be effective for humans, and visa versa.

What about all the breakthroughs we've gained through animal research? The historical value of animal research with regard to human health remains in question.

Researchers from Harvard and Boston Universities concluded that medical measures (drugs and vaccines) accounted for between 1 and 3.5% of the total decline in mortality rates since 1900. Scores of animals were killed in the quest to find cures for tuberculosis, scarlet fever, smallpox and diphtheria, among others, but was their unwilling contribution important to the decline of these diseases? Dr. Edward Kass of Harvard Medical School, asserts that the "primary credit for the virtual eradication of these diseases must go to improvements in public health, sanitation and the general improvement in the standard of living." These benefits have nothing to do with animal studies.

Animal research appropriates money, time, personnel, facilities and other resources that would save more lives if those same resources were placed into, let's say, education or prevention. In the end, it becomes a question of priorities - do we want to focus on supporting what we know works or do we place our faith in serendipity? Over 44 million Americans have either no or inadequate health care coverage, if we really want to "improve human health" we need to provide adequate access to care, not fund more animals experiments, which offer no promise of success (in fact their track record is abysmal) and divert funds, support and attention from more productive areas.

Being a survivor of a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, I hope they can help increase the knowledge about brains as well as neurogenesis.

The thing is, anything that helps us fight infectious disease in general may also help with "combating bioterrorism." And a good simulation of the response of bacterial populations, which often show emergent behavior, respond to biochemical stimuli may very well be helpful in coming up with new methods of diagnosis and treatment. (For an understanding of why this is so, check out work on swarming behavior, and the research interests page of Leah Edelstein-Keshet, one of the leading researchers in the field.) I'm not any happier than you are about how the bioterrorism card is played in every grant application, but it really is one of many valid applications here.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1281715 2&query_hl=8

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1521973 6&query_hl=8

Mu-ming Poo's lab has some evidence for STDP in vivo although the studies have their problems. I hope the links work.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1281715 2&query_hl=8

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1521973 6&query_hl=8

Mu-ming Poo's lab has some evidence for STDP in vivo although the studies have their problems. I hope the links work.

The Inuits are suffering from more than just Global Warming, they also suffer from PCB and other toxins:

Consensus Statement: Atlantic Coast Contaminants Workshop 2000

...

Participants reported on potential endocrine-related effects and impacts in wildlife and humans resulting from contaminant- and noncontaminant-related factors. Natural ecologic influences such as marine mammal strandings were discussed. Methods and biomarkers of endocrine-related impacts were presented including those based on inducible genes; clinical parameters and population monitoring of bottlenose dolphins; probable risk assessment of reproductive effects; comparative biochemistry of species-dependent, Ah receptor-based assays; and contaminant interaction and mechanisms of thyroid hormone-dependent processes. Possible contaminant-mediated impacts on alterations in population health, reproduction, steroid hormone homeostasis and/or immunologic alterations were outlined for cetaceans from the Atlantic Ocean; native Inuit peoples from northern Quebec, Canada; bald eagles from the northeastern United States; St. Lawrence beluga whales; polar bears from Svalbard, Norway; scaup ducks from Alaska or Canada wintering in the northeastern United States; and a variety of birds, fish, and aquatic mammals from Arctic, Atlantic, and other marine ecosystems. The utility of humans and aquatic wildlife as sentinels and surrogates of endocrine-related effects resulting from contaminant exposure was also discussed.

First off, if you're looking for quality research literature on the automated analysis of 2D protein gels, you're reading the wrong journal (Journal of Orthopaedic Science).

Rather than posting your question to slashdot, head over to PubMed (still better than google scholar for this type of thing), and search for, say "image analysis algorithm protein gel" and poof! You'll have 38 links, about a quarter of which are seem to be on precisely this topic.

Second, the whole premise of your question is underinformed. Any scientist involved in proteomics who wants her funding renewed knows enough not to rely on a single computational approach to pick spots from 2D protein gels. Or, if they do, they're usually doing some high-throughput method that feeds into tandem mass-spec, or some other validating experimental approach.

In short, why are you asking slashdot about this? Go to the library!

This NIH support page shows they're definately using Outlook on Win2k. Perhaps they're going to opt going to Suse/OpenExchange/NLD instead of the XP/2k3 upgrade?

I'd be interested to see which departments/agencies under NIH opt to go with SuSe/OpenExchange first and why, besides the obvious licensing savings.

Well, what happens is the sysadmins bury the purchase of a recent Red Hat distro in the paperwork and we all just load it up on our Linux boxes.

No problem.

Dick Cheney has not threatened me.

Yet.

If you don't beleive HHS runs Linux, check this out Biowulf .

http://bt.naccho.org/E-newsletter-archive/NYC-Blac kout-Article.htm/

Excerpting one section that makes my point:
"Despite having emergency generators, four of 76 hospitals in the city were temporarily without electricity during the blackout. The longest interruption was two hours and 45 minutes. "

If you read more you'll see there was concern about vaccine spoilage, their were many desktop computers that had been deemed non-critical yet turned out to be critical during the blackout.

I just dont think people realize how critical power is and when it is gone lives are at stake. I would hazard to say the impact on non metropolitan areas and rural areas would be much worse than in NYC.

The conclusion from the following NIH report http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15640685&dopt=Abstrac t/ states "The blackout dramatically increased EMS and hospital activity, with unexpected increases resulting from respiratory device failures in community-based patients. Our findings suggest that current capacity to respond to public health emergencies could be easily overwhelmed by widespread/prolonged power failure(s)."

Currently, it's easy to 1) amplify large chunks of DNA verbatim and 2) change individual nucleotides. What is difficult is making large blocks of novel or heavily modified sequence, as it's expensive or impossible to synthesize them from nucleotides. Codon Devices seems to have a way to generate large chunks of customized sequence.

This is certainly on its way, whether from Codon Devices or elsewhere. See e.g. this paper by George Church et al on using microfluidics for DNA synthesis.

BTW, it's not currently impossible to synthesize DNA, just obscenely expensive at $1.45 per nucleotide.

Oops...some other really tough problems they'll also have to solve along the way:

1 - Synthesising DNA chains more than 1,000bp long in one go...not easy. http:///http://www.dna.biosource.com/> Even long-established companies can't put together more than a few dozen basepairs in a custom chain.

2 - Eukaryotic proteins require chaperonins to assist folding. Which chaperonin goes where and when to help which part of folding? Noone really knows. Good luck solving that one. http://www.chaperone.sote.hu/Examples.html

3 - Glycosylation and post-translational modification. That's right, you've now got to solve the species specific addition of sugars and other bits and pieces to your newly synthesised protein. We can almost do it in hamsters...nice try in humans. I'll give you 10 years solid research at the least. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8063726&dopt=Abstract - just one of many original research papers on this huge topic.

So this ain't gonna happen any time soon. Photoshop for proteins? Sure, just like etch-a-sketch for car manufacturing.

-Nano.

There is a follow-up article criticizing the original article: abstract) used implanted tumours. It is already known that tumours have the capacity to evade immune response, and we should not be surprised that implanting a foreign tumour mass into a host and stimulating the immune system will provoke a favourable response. The situation is more complicated when trying to raise the immune system to attack a tumour comprised of one's own cells. It seems to me that, at this point, they are trying to prove their particular growth model, not developing a de facto cure.

That their devised strategy worked on a single human subject is cause for optimism, and nothing more. That work has not been published (that I could find), so there is no way to properly assess the result. At this point, they are more than likely drumming up press to ensure continued funding for their research... not that there's anything wrong with that ;).

There is a follow-up article criticizing the original article: abstract

And a response by the original authors: abstract

In any event, it's a little premature to celebrate. Their follow-up work in mice (abstract) used implanted tumours. It is already known that tumours have the capacity to evade immune response, and we should not be surprised that implanting a foreign tumour mass into a host and stimulating the immune system will provoke a favourable response. The situation is more complicated when trying to raise the immune system to attack a tumour comprised of one's own cells. It seems to me that, at this point, they are trying to prove their particular growth model, not developing a de facto cure.

That their devised strategy worked on a single human subject is cause for optimism, and nothing more. That work has not been published (that I could find), so there is no way to properly assess the result. At this point, they are more than likely drumming up press to ensure continued funding for their research... not that there's anything wrong with that ;).

There is a follow-up article criticizing the original article: abstract

And a response by the original authors: abstract

In any event, it's a little premature to celebrate. Their follow-up work in mice (abstract) used implanted tumours. It is already known that tumours have the capacity to evade immune response, and we should not be surprised that implanting a foreign tumour mass into a host and stimulating the immune system will provoke a favourable response. The situation is more complicated when trying to raise the immune system to attack a tumour comprised of one's own cells. It seems to me that, at this point, they are trying to prove their particular growth model, not developing a de facto cure.

That their devised strategy worked on a single human subject is cause for optimism, and nothing more. That work has not been published (that I could find), so there is no way to properly assess the result. At this point, they are more than likely drumming up press to ensure continued funding for their research... not that there's anything wrong with that ;).

There is a follow-up article criticizing the original article: abstract

And a response by the original authors: abstract

In any event, it's a little premature to celebrate. Their follow-up work in mice (abstract) used implanted tumours. It is already known that tumours have the capacity to evade immune response, and we should not be surprised that implanting a foreign tumour mass into a host and stimulating the immune system will provoke a favourable response. The situation is more complicated when trying to raise the immune system to attack a tumour comprised of one's own cells. It seems to me that, at this point, they are trying to prove their particular growth model, not developing a de facto cure.

That their devised strategy worked on a single human subject is cause for optimism, and nothing more. That work has not been published (that I could find), so there is no way to properly assess the result. At this point, they are more than likely drumming up press to ensure continued funding for their research... not that there's anything wrong with that ;).

* 52% of identical (monozygotic) twins of homosexual men are likewise homosexual
* 22% of fraternal (dizygotic) twins are likewise homosexual
* 11% of adoptive brothers of homosexual men are likewise homosexual

Homosexuality is also not confined to humans - 10% of sheep are exclusively homosexual, to pick a random example. Perhaps they chose it too?
To anyone who's looked at the research, a biological basis is not really in doubt. I am always puzzled by people who come out with statements like "I don't think that's something you're born with." on the basis of exactly zero evidence. I would be interested to know if you still believe that.

Well, having just experienced my very first colonoscopy I must say this development leaves me with mixed feelings.

One one hand this "bug" is way smaller than what explored my nether regions.

On the other hand the drugs that they gave me at the clinic while doing the procedure were very good!

What I know about plants is that the best overall efficiency is about 10%. Algea, I'm not sure about. I suspect, however, that the 50% estimate is too generous. The best I could find doing a google search was about 15%. The acutally photosynthetic process as I understand it is approximately 90% efficient. The problem as you already noted is all the house cleaning stuff these organisms must carry out.

I've read this sentence three times and I don't know what it means yet.

Are you sitting down? When residents (i.e., at a hospital) work 65 hours a week instead of 80, they get more sleep, and make fewer mistakes. Surprise!
But wait, there's more! When interns work shifts of 24 hours or more, they get into lots more auto accidents. Who'd a thunk it?

Are you sitting down? When residents (i.e., at a hospital) work 65 hours a week instead of 80, they get more sleep, and make fewer mistakes. Surprise!
But wait, there's more! When interns work shifts of 24 hours or more, they get into lots more auto accidents. Who'd a thunk it?

We should have a species gene database. We should catalog every species http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mapview/ Of course, it will be quite a long time before we will be able to reconstruct an complex organism from sequence information alone.