Slashdot Mirror

I assume you are referring to the studies that show anti-depressants are no better than placebo. This was discussed here some time back:

http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/02/26/107234/Antidepressants-Work-No-Better-Than-a-Placebo links to http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045

hth, HAND.

It's a tiny subset that still insists that evolution "denies God," that the universe was literally created in six days, that species were set and defined at the moment of creation, etc. In other words, a minority of a minority of a minority, if you will.

Please have some integrity and stop downplaying the severity of the less favorable aspects of your fellow adherents.
In this national survey, 48% marked that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". That's also true of 16% of high school biology teachers.

Sure, they're extremist nuts, but they're not some piddling minority. The evangelicals get full credit, here.

... if we go from rna to dna and then xnv (I made it up) how can xnv eat rna? proteins, carbs and fats? If you want a sustainable circle of life, make it out of the same stuff.

That's not the way the circle of life works. Proteins, carbs and fats aren't directly linked to DNA/RNA. The closest connection between proteins and genetic code is in ribosomes. A different set of DNA bases would require a radically different ribosome, or a completely different method of transcription (the latter possibility would keep RNA the same but allow for totally different DNA.) Animals don't need to eat DNA, they synthesize it from simpler molecules. All life would have to share some amino acids, because humans can only synthesize 12 of the 20 common amino acids, but there's no reason all life would need to have DNA with the same structure. (Unless, of course, all life is related...)

In fact, researchers are working on creating new synthetic life forms that have 12 DNA bases instead of the standard 4.

Drugs cost a ton to do R&D on

And they cost even a shitload more to advertise.

Color me heartless and cruel, but I'm not shedding any tears over the plight of big Pharma. For all of you who don't want to RTFA, I will quote the very last paragraph:

From this new estimate, it appears that pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on promotion as they do on R&D. These numbers clearly show how promotion predominates over R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, contrary to the industry's claim. While the amount spent on promotion is not in itself a confirmation of Kefauver's depiction of the pharmaceutical industry, it confirms the public image of a marketing-driven industry and provides an important argument to petition in favor of transforming the workings of the industry in the direction of more research and less promotion.

Actually we can do this already but it's not really made it out of the lab and into the clinic yet.

That's because you aren't creating true "Stem cells" that can differenatiate into any tissue. You are creating 'pluropotent cells' but not anywhere near as pluropotent as a normal stem cell. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, no iPS cell has ever been reverted completely enough to differentiate into something useful; ie we can't figure out how to revert alpha islet cells back far enough to differentiate them into beta-cells, and given the amount of focus on trying to do this, it's doubtful that we ever will be able to. So, no, we can't "already do this already".

We have very few clinical uses for stem cells at the moment, but it seems a fairly safe bet that in the timeframe it takes to develop these clinical applications we will also develop a reliable system for generating stem cells from our own somatic cells. I certainly wouldn't (and didn't) spend the money to store umbilical blood cells from my kids.

I'd definitely wager against you; unless of course Bush's policy hindering the use of real stem cells was some how re-implemented. There a multitude of projects just waiting for funding to go into clinical trials. If the results are as promising as they are in rats, we could see approval in just a few years. While iPS are haven't shown promise in curing ANYTHING as they are still completely useless because they are not as pluropotent as a real stem cell.

In ten years, this thing will be useless, because we will be able to reprogram somatic cells to do all the work.

Actually we can do this already but it's not really made it out of the lab and into the clinic yet.

We have very few clinical uses for stem cells at the moment, but it seems a fairly safe bet that in the timeframe it takes to develop these clinical applications we will also develop a reliable system for generating stem cells from our own somatic cells. I certainly wouldn't (and didn't) spend the money to store umbilical blood cells from my kids.

I heartily disapprove of this "play nice" rhetoric.

A few points:
1) Apologists like you prefer to think that the literalists are a small minority. A third of the people I know are young earth creationists, and I live in Massachusetts. 48% of the US public are young earth creationists. 16% of high school BIOLOGY teachers are young earth creationists. If you only get one thing out of this, let it be this: have some fucking intellectual integrity and stop understating the issue. Please.

2) You're right to suggest that an argument can't be productive if there's no common ground from which to argue. It is, however, insulting to assume that there is no such common ground. To suggest that the concepts of Bayesian inference, justifiability, history and psychology are not inaccessible to a deeply religious person is condescending to the extreme -- certainly far more condescending than the comments of the GP.

3) Your comment implies that there is no merit to demonstrating intolerance to bad ideas. That's a very popular conception, and I think that, as a liberal policy, it's been utterly disastrous. Now, clearly, it can be effective in a discussion or argument to assume that the other person is capable of meaningfully participating in that discussion or argument, but that's not the same as tolerating bad ideas. Cultural pressure is one of the great factors in meme progression and suppression, and it needs to be used.

When you don't believe in apodictic truth, it's easy to have reservations about sharing your ideas, because they aren't so much correct as "merely" good. Secularists need to sack up and realize that good is good enough to be loud. Timidity is not a good policy.

There's no such thing as a 'proven alternative treatment'. Once it's proven to work it's not alternative medicine any more, it's just medicine.

If proof == "medicine" and no proof == "alternative treatment", then why is massage or acupressure or dietary changes considered alternative treatment?

I do shiatsu acupressure, and I can cite studies on its effectiveness.

And why is surgery considered "medicine"? Every placebo controlled study of a surgical technique has found it no better than a placebo operation.

Why is giving SSRIs out like candy considered "medicine", when they work no better than a placebo for most categories of patients?

Medicine is an art wherein clinicians apply their skills to relieve the suffering and promote the well-being of each individual patient. Of course a good clinician will consider all available evidence to figure out what's likely to work best, but the goal is not to do what's most effective who most people, but for this single patient. You only get evidence of that via treatment.

I know that some of what I - or any clinician, from bodyworkers to brain surgeons - do is the placebo effect. So what?

Uh. Alcohol will prevent you from functioning in society. Getting a job, getting along with peers, etc.

Really? My, my. Guess that's why everyone I saw drinking at holiday parties over the weekend was dysfunctional, unemployed, and hostile. Oh, wait...that wasn't the case.

SSRI's will enable to you continue functioning in reality and society.

SSRI's are little better than placebos for treating depression, and have been linked to increased risk of violence or suicide.

They're widely prescribed because they're far more profitable than psychotherapeutic approaches, and because they fit in with the modern mythology of neurochemical reductionism, not because they work well.

If they work for you, great. Bur be aware that there are other treatments that would probably work even better.

Uh. Alcohol will prevent you from functioning in society. Getting a job, getting along with peers, etc.

Really? My, my. Guess that's why everyone I saw drinking at holiday parties over the weekend was dysfunctional, unemployed, and hostile. Oh, wait...that wasn't the case.

SSRI's will enable to you continue functioning in reality and society.

SSRI's are little better than placebos for treating depression, and have been linked to increased risk of violence or suicide.

They're widely prescribed because they're far more profitable than psychotherapeutic approaches, and because they fit in with the modern mythology of neurochemical reductionism, not because they work well.

If they work for you, great. Bur be aware that there are other treatments that would probably work even better.

Perhaps you mean this

This "meta-study" suggests that most studies are more than 50% likely to be wrong: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124&ct=1

It's an interesting analysis, involving the sample size of a study as a predictor of its correctness, and the fact that most studies have a small sample size.

Assuming that his study itself is, in fact, true, should I still approach a paper with initial credibility? The right thing to do is I suppose, look at the sample size and if it is below the median cut-off, suppose it's false; otherwise, suppose it's true.

Did you look at the originating article Here? Looks like they are backing up what they are saying. I'm not to fond or familiar with an 'open-access article' as I think it could lead to distorting the facts, but I'll be open minded, for now.

For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").

They only cited two studies in calculating their number. And they did cherry pick their numbers. They clearly picked all their numbers except one from the CAM study. The one number they picked from the IMS study was only picked because it was higher.

Anyway, I did pick a number for the value of the drug samples as promotion. My number was 0. I said that I didn't think of samples as a promotion cost. I said that if someone disagreed (since that is in fact an arguable proposition), they could use the costing number rather than the retail number. It's true that I didn't give the costing number, although if you really wanted it, it was available in the study (it was the CAM number that they did not use, $6.3 billion).

I'm not complaining about the data in the study. The data is fine (one of the sources that they used was the pharmaceutical industry; in fact, the number that I don't like came from the pharmaceutical industry). I'm complaining that the methodology they used to interpret the data was horrible. They took two studies that gave promotion numbers of $27.5 billion (the pharmaceutical industry number) and $33.5 billion and somehow arrived at a number of $57.5 billion.

I apologize that I didn't copy and paste those numbers from the report previously, but I don't really care what the number is. I simply found their method of calculating it to be ridiculous. In particular, it should be obvious why CAM was using the wholesale cost rather than the retail cost. Pharmaceutical companies do not buy free samples from themselves at retail cost. Even the wholesale cost isn't really what's wanted here -- it should be the manufacture cost.

The argument regarding counting free samples as a production cost rather than a promotion cost is that these drugs would have to get manufactured anyway. Having the free sample simply saves having to prescribe them. Unless you are claiming that someone who would not have bought the drug is using the free sample?

There are any number of things that have a promotion benefit but no related promotion cost. For example, if your neighbor uses a drug and then you ask your doctor to prescribe it to you, the company benefited from that. However, would you really claim that such a referral cost the company in any way?

Free samples make sense as a promotion cost in industries where one might take something for free that one wouldn't otherwise try, e.g. shampoo or gum. It doesn't make as much sense with prescribed drugs. It's also worth noting that there is a big difference with pharmaceutical samples, since they are given to the doctor who doesn't normally pay for them rather than to someone who does (e.g. the patient, the insurance, or the government).

Where's the other 62% go? Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.

Link to actual study: The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States

I am not sure that free samples should be counted as a marketing cost. If they are counted, then they should be counted based on the cost to the company, not the retail cost (what the company would get if it had sold the sample). Use of such RIAA like tactics makes me very suspicious of the study. Such an obvious flaw strongly suggests that they picked the data to fit their theory rather than picking a theory to fit the data.

They also increased their estimate by 30% for "unmonitored" expenses. I.e. they assume that there is uncollected data. They then claim that this still under reports expenses by alleging that there are other expense categories that are not included. They have no references for the 30% number; no evidence that 30% is the right number; no evidence that the other expense categories are not already included in the 30%.

The best that could be said for this report is that it may be just as accurate as the reports from the pharmaceutical companies it decries.

Science is so awesome, in the most original sense of the word. It inspires awe.
Look at what these people are doing. They have odd bits of animals that died uncountable millions of years ago (except they figured out ways of counting them) and put the bits back together. And now they think they can figure out what colour they were? That is fantastic!

True. This reminds me of the proven fact that dinosaur soft tissues still survive.

In unrelated news, what you see is not always what you get.

That said, considering the latter link, the possibility that both linked articles are false is not to disregard. ;)

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0010056&ct=1

Original PLOS article.

Sicence Daily article that doesn't totally suck.

The REAL article describes the hub so much better than the blog entry.

You're exactly right. In fact if anything, science has started moving *away* from the kind of purely computational and statistical correlations that you get through data mining. Granted they are extremely important for generating hypotheses, but journals are much less likely to accept a paper without some kind of experimental validation.

The large scale genetic association studies are a great example. There was a day that you could publish a paper solely describing a correlation between a variant in gene X and its association with disease Y. However, because of the way we do statistics in science, sooner or later you'll find a statistically significant correlation simply due to chance alone. In fact the epidemiologist John ioannidis wrote an article about this (that I believe appeared on Slashdot as well). Now you're often required to show some kind of experimental validation that there is a biological basis that verifies the statistical correlation. The scientific method is not going away anytime soon.

Please provide a source for your assertion. You won't, but I had to ask so we could see you were fabricating your assertion from thin air.

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029&ct=1

There, now don't you feel stupid?

Nonsense. They may die sooner, but it takes a long, long time to do so. Especially when we're talking about being overweight. Also, in the mean time, those same fat people are using health care much more often than people of normal weight, because they have much more health problems related to being fat.

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029&ct=1

http://www.diet-blog.com/archives/2008/02/07/obese_people_have_lower_health_costs.php

http://ethxblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/help-your-country-smoke-drink-and-die.html

http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200701220003


The facts do not support your statement. The fact is, obese people who smoke cost society less.

Apparently it is living longer that costs more to society. Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure

The obese only consume more until they are in their mid 50's. After their deaths the thin and healthy live longer lives but and consume more than fat people over their lifespan.

I used to condemn fat people for their over use of pretty much everything. Now I relish crowds of fat people, especially people my age, as I know their early deaths will result in fewer people fighting for scarce resources in the future!

Eat up!

(Ok, I know it may be possible that what we are really talking about here is utilization rates of resources, and not total usage per person, but this is just a Slashdot post, give me a break!)

I'm not going to say that Internets will replace academic publishing houses, but they are in somewhat of a precarious position. I imagine they are facing pressure to be open more than would publishers in other fields, since openness can rightly be claimed as essential to the scientific process. And the Internets were at least partially created to publish scientific research in a useful and organized way, and people seem to be using it for that (albeit by posting pdfs rather than writing articles in HTML). So it's not clear to me what these publishing houses do (other of course than conferring prestige on authors) that is essential to the scientific process these days.

I imagine the publishing houses make a lot of their money from licensing access to their online databases of articles, which tend to have terrible user interfaces and be disconnected from each other (e.g. each database has a fixed number of journals that it serves). But Google scholar is much more pleasant to use than these databases so many scholars may not even be aware of which database Google draws the articles from. If enough people routinely post PDFs of their articles online, Google may preferentially link to these (since you don't have to have a subscription to read those versions) which might further dig into profits for the publishers.

Also free pre-print servers like arxiv.org seem to doing just fine in terms of fueling scientific progress. In some cases, posting to arxiv.org is done instead of publishing in a paper journal. There are even some questions about how important peer-review as practiced by journals really is. E.g.: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040058&ct=1

Although experts may disagree, and there is the occasional fraud or corperate shill in the science community, at least they are more likely to use the scientific method and choose facts over opinions.

Use of the scientific method sometimes leads to surprising results. ;)

Isn't it sad when people think of piracy in terms of music, when the REAL piracy problems (counterfeiting) are those which involve fake electrical/safety/baby equipment (or food)?

Or medicine.

PLoS Pathogens currently has an ISI Impact Factor of 6.1.
This is not comparable to to Nature, Science or PLoS Biology but for a specialized journal it's quite high.

The good thing about the PLoS Journals is that they rank quite high _and_ the articles are open accessible by day one. This means that an ordinary slashdot user (not sitting in a rich lab or library that has spent truckloads of money to access the most important journals in its field) has the chance to _read_ the f#@*ing primary resarch article.

As said, the paper is here although the site is down for maintenance at the moment ;).

I think (true) depression would qualify, being a chemical imbalance.

While the "depression is a chemical imbalance" line is heavily pushed by the companies that make SSRIs, it's not well supported.

If someone does have a demonstrated neurochemical imbalance, it might be appropriate to call that a disease. (Some caveats would still apply, such as "how do you determine what range is normal"?) But "clinical depression" is not diagnosed by chemical analysis, but by judgments of behaviors exhibited and ideas vocalized.

Dude, just tell me that someone who is clinically depressed or with some other severe mental disorder doesn't have a disease to my face, ok? ;)

Well, if it makes you happy, I'll tell you to your face that they may not have a disease, depending on how we define it. I'll tell you that clinical depression is a very different sort of entity than physical ailments, since it is diagnosed based on judgments of behavior rather than physical evaluation.

Depression (the disease under discussion) can be very real.

I thought we'd broadened the topic to general "mental illness" by now. And if you don't think anger and depression are linked, ask around. But look, the reality of depression is not in dispute here; what is being questioned is its categorization.

A broken leg is a real problem but is not a disease. (Indeed, I think that the concept of "mental injury" might serve as decent analogy in many cases, such as PTSD.) Various sorts of ignorance are real problems, can even be fatal (e.g., "only gays and drug users get AIDS, so I'm safe!"), but ignorance is not a disease. Depression is a real problem; many people think that categorizing it as a disease is inaccurate and/or not helpful.

One big reason is the sort of interventions it suggests. Diseases don't get better when you learn new skills; but cognitive-behavioral therapies are quite effective at helping people with depression. Labeling depression a disease automatically puts the emphasis on drug therapies (and, gods forbid, on psychosurgery or shock treatment).

Ever seen a person who used to function fine slowly (chemically) imbalance to where they can't get out of bed?

The "chemical imbalance" hypothesis is one of the big questions here. It's pushed by drug companies that make SSRIs, but there's a lack of evidence for it. (Which is not to say that mental activity doesn't have neurochemical correlates, just that they're not as simple as "low serotonin == depression".)

But yes, I've seen people - friends, family members, a housemate of mind - go into serious states of depression where they became unable to function. I fail to see how calling them "sick" would have helped.

Ever felt it yourself?

Self-diagnosis is a minefield. But I will say that years ago, my doctor dropped several gentle hints that I should consider SSRIs. I'm glad I didn't; instead I've made positive changes in my life, and I'm feeling much better now. Probably the most important involved becoming more aware of my body, learning to break the feedback loops of muscular tension. (Which is not to say that some drugs don't help some people.)

(oh, and you can see brain chemistry changes in autopsies http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/science/body/depression.html, just like hardening arteries, so, yeah, it's a physical disease)

Autopsies of people who committed violent suicide, which should hardly be taken as representative; and your linked article notes that "post mortem analyses are complicated by factors other than depression that may change brain chemistry. The mode of death, previous drug history, current therapy, and time between death and autopsy can all affect the results."

It may well be the case that some people who are diagnosed with "clinical depression" have a neurological disorder. But what is being diagnosed by the term "clinical depression" is not that neurological disorder, but a behavioral pattern.

What it seems to have found is that there is an indication that antidepressants do work for people who do have a serious depression

Actually, what they found is more that placebos don't work as well in people with a serious depression: sayeth TFA, "The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication."

There is a Dutch Study which points out that healthy people cost more than smokers or obese people, over a lifetime. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029

One thing is to make a person who decides to smoke pay more, as it is a conscious decision of that person, and that person could give up smoking to avoid higher fees

A study in Holland disagrees about the savings from obesity reduction:

Conclusions

Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.

Fat people cost everyone else greatly increased health costs

Since being fat is a personal choice

(losing weight is easy: stop eating so much!)

Fat people cost everyone else greatly increased health costs

Since being fat is a personal choice

(losing weight is easy: stop eating so much!)

Surely you're not suggesting that funding can change the results of studies?!?

A lot more people have type I diabetes, it was discovered hundreds of years ago, and we still don't know what causes the immune system to attack the pancreas. Autoimmune diseases (heck, most things involving living organisms) are a lot more complicated than your PC.

Of course, we have how many different drugs to help old men get it up?

...which was developed in an attempt to treat angina.

Select a random group of ignorant African men, circumcise some of them. Give them vague advice on safe sex, then tell them to go out and have sex. See how many of them come back with HIV.

From exactly where do you attain the information that the counseling on safe sex practices involved telling individuals to have sex or was less complete than the counseling available in Europe or the US?

The counselling session (15-20 min) was delivered by a certified counsellor and focused on information about STIs in general and HIV in particular and on how to prevent the risk of infection. During this session, participants were encouraged to attend voluntary counselling and testing in a public clinic located 200 m away from the investigation centre or in a voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) centre funded by the project and located in the same building as the investigation centre. Condoms were provided in the waiting room of the investigation centre and were also provided by the counsellor. Participants who had symptoms of STIs, as assessed by the nurse during the genital examination, or who tested positive for syphilis were treated at the local clinic or by doctors working for the project. A specific programme for prevention of opportunistic infections and delivery of antiretroviral treatment, if required, was put in place at the VCT centre to assist participants who attended VCT and who tested positive for HIV. The arrangement will remain in place until the public sector programme becomes operational in the area.B Auvert et al. Randomized, controlled intervention trial of male circumcision for reduction of HIV infection risk: The ANRS 1265 trial. PLoS Medicine. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020298 (2005).

As you can clearly see, the counseling, testing, and even treatment available to the study members was superior to the generally available treatment at the time.

Please do everyone a favor and save such clearly incitatory comments for the experimentations on subjects which are actually conducted in an unethical fashion, instead of merely those whose study population fits in with your preconceived notions of racism.

From the quick read of the news article, I'm not sure there is anything in this system that would prevent plants with the extra artificial chromosome from being fertile with plants without the art. chromosome. You can find the paper here:

http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0030179

A quick skim of the abstract indicates that the chromosome can, in fact, be transmitted to wild-type plants (in other words, "normal" corn plants). It would be surprising if this wasn't the case. Otherwise, you would need to introduce two artificial chromosomes in the initial transformation event to generate fertile offspring. Reading further in the paper indicates that at least some of the initial transformation events were monosomic for the art. chromosome.

If you are seriously interested in this topic, I recommend reading the comments (for and against,... and at least one response from the author) found at

        http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?SESSID=ffa6bd3b3cff3235d54a3cbcc6f295a1&request=read-response&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124#r1812

-=-=-
The obvious sometimes takes a while,... and, then, it too disappears.
-=-=-
The truth is what remains after all the lies are removed,... even then, it is overwhelming.
-=-=-

EAoBA [even afraid of being anonymous]

Some Epidemiological Claims of Sex Differences for Genetic Effects Not Replicated.

This is a *very* small number of claims from a subsection of a single field of one small bit of science. Tarring all of science based on some potentially dubious epidemiology is badly out of line. It would be like claiming that since some spinach has made people sick, all food is unsafe to eat. Absurd.

Epidemiology itself has a bit of a reputation of having a hard time finding really solid effects, partly because the effects that are measured are frequently multi-variate with lots on confounding effects, partly because you need huge numbers to have very much analysis power, partly because such studies are generally more observational then experimental. This guy has published a bunch of papers in the past arguing (and presenting models for) exactly this kind of problem. He comes up with the logical (if rather obvious) suggestions that amongst others: 1. Smaller studies are less likely to be true. 2. Smaller observed effects are less likely to be true. 3. The greater the financial interests there are in the study, the less likely it is to be true. 4. The "hotter" a topic is, the less likely a study is to be true. Largely these are no shit, sherlock kinds of things.

So, to sum up, there are lots of epidemiological claims in published articles out there that might not be right. This represents neither a new idea, nor a meaningful comment on anything but epidemiology.

-Ted

Hmmm... what fraction of news published and edited in reputable journals contains factual errors? That would be another interesting story.

But come on... 90% of everything is crap. This is no more or less true in medical research, which is a fraction of the $50 billion total spent on research. OMG that's like "One MILLLLIIION DOLLLLARS". That's like 0.5% of GDP so don't be surpised when it's bunk, it's drop in the bucket compared to development costs. If you haven't figure this out you're still a little naive.

So what do real scientists and engineers (that includes doctors) do? They build something that works, and it's a long hard slog, and most of the problems you encounter aren't the cool sexy ones you thought they would be at the start. They don't make big headlines, and they've mostly been discovered (and solved) by a zillion people before you. The key is solving a problem so well that nobody has to solve it ever again! Then the other bad solutions slowly go away, and people can work on other problems (yes QWERTY is good enough).

Now with medicine, things were made a bit better because of the FDA and the clinical trials model, before the more significant political interference of the last decade. Unfortunately, there's the issue that people really want to believe in magical cures that will save uncle Milt, or their cat so they'll pressure doctors and believe con-men for the rest of time. This is fed by the journalistic-industrial lie complex.

Sure scientists are wrong all the time, or certainly less accurate than they could be, but not usually about big things. More often than not they miss the real interesting results making things come out the way they think they should. It takes someone who really believes in their ability to do something right to discover something really new... and if it's truely astounding they better be prepared to spend the next decade proving it and developing some cool new tools with it. If those things work as they predicted and not the guys before... then hey they must be on to something!

The problem is that there are all sorts of quick-fix "cranberries cure cancer" quacks out there. They're in sales where it doesn't matter if it works. That's why your computer doesn't run any faster with the new whizzy RAM than the old stuff, but it doesn't mean Moore's Law doesn't progress. The key is the guys doing the development and implementing the new ideas, and proving they work. They keep making better faster cooler stuff !THAT WORKS!

The BS you read in most hype journals (EETimes are you listening?) is mostly unproven tripe. It occasionally has a grain of truth, along with a lot of interpretation bias, and if you bothered to read the original article (did you?) and some of their other articles (hah that's harder) you can often tell what the nuance is, how careful the methods were, and whether it's worth trying to replicate yourself. Guess what if you're not in the field that paper really wasn't meant for you (it was meant for the tenure comittee or the guys who gave you a grant etc). The stock market guys may go crazy, but that's because they don't give a damn about science or the truth. Same thing with most journalists these days, frankly. They care about money, and figure their reputation won't be much worse than anyone elses.

Go read the actual article:
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124&ct=1

It's not nearly as interesting as reading a sensationalistic WJ article, but I give them props for linking to it.

You hear about people surviving the wild for days or weeks with little or no food and water, and these people are hiking or walking, and in very hot or cold climates. So how is that only after 3 days someone who is just sitting there using almost no muscles can die in such a short time? Are they so malnurished that any day without food and water is death? Is their brain using so much energy gaming it starves their body?

First off, here's the actual article, which was published in PLoS Medicine (meaning free access for everyone, yay).

Whether this accomplishment (and it is a pretty cool accomplishment) will be meaningful for people is very uncertain. First of all, Alzheimer's is not a positive diagnosis, that is you diagnose it by the absence of other explanations for observed behavior. So you don't actually have a way of confirming that the mental defects of a patient are *really* due to a-beta deposits. Unlike many diseases, we can't (yet) test blood or tissue or do imaging studies to confirm a-beta deposits (though there is tons of effort being spent on developing such tests). So you'd have to decide to do a pretty serious procedure on (generally) elderly people in less than ideal health on the basis of a flimsy diagnosis. It might well be worth it, but it is a big question.

Moreover, though, we don't really know what causes the neurodegeneration associated with amyloid diseases. We know that deposits or a-beta or tau tangles (or light-chain or huntingtin, or SOD or transthyretin (which was the topic of my thesis work) or whatever amyloidogenic protein you like) correlate well with neurodegeneration. But whether those are the cause or not is still a very open question. In fact there is plenty of research around that suggests that amyloid deposits themselves are not damaging, but the precursors in the aggregation pathway are the real culprits. Some have even suggested that amyloid is a more or less inert structure that can be used to segregate potentially dangerously unstable proteins away from the rest of the cell.

So, supposing this treatment does everything perfectly, chops up a-beta and disintegrates plaques, *and* we can deliver it to correctly diagnosed patients, we still might not even be hitting the right target.

Not to be too down on this topic, but we are still quite a long way from a treatment, much less a cure.

-Ted

"... a mutation could mean that the triclosan can no longer get to the target site to kill the bacteria because the bacteria and the pathway have changed form."
I know that it's kinda a bad word now in the US and no-one wants to upset Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly (why anyone would care is beyond me though), but I think the word you're looking for there is "evolved"
Don't thank me, just doing my job...

I have some friends with PhD's in nuclear science who claim that radiation is beneficial. They go further: life started when there was a lot more radiation, so most of our genetic machinery is designed to work with far higher radiation than what we're seeing, which is to say we can stand a lot more radiation with little harm. They go further and claim that because there's less radiation now, we have more problems -- higher background radiation might act to suppress immune system malfunctions (sitting in radioactive hot springs does seem to reduce the symptoms of arthritis.) Life survival vs. number of cells should be inversely proportional as radiation level rises: if a bacterium has its DNA badly injured by a radiative event, it's less likely to survive than an animal with a million cells. (I've read in other places that every strand of DNA in every cell experiences tens of damage events requiring repair every day.) My friends the PhD's go so far as to claim that the reason that the seven counties in the US with the longest average lifespan are all on the Continental Divide in Colorado where the radiation levels are highest because of the elevation.
(Sorry I can't find a better link for the Eight Americas dataset: you have to download an Excel spreadsheet to get the raw data.)

Also, here's the cited paper.

This isn't that novel. It's very much like Randall Beer's insect work from a decade ago. It's hierarchical control using controllers built from control blocks the authors call "neurons". It's a pure reflex system, with no explicit prediction.

Also notice that it's a planar biped, constrained so that it can't fall sideways.

There's better locomotion and balance work going on in Japanese hobbyist robotics.

It's good that people are working on this stuff again. There was some impressive work in the 1980s and early 1990s, then a big lull.

PloS Biology just published a bunch of papers using metagenomics to study the ocean genome. They sailed a yacht from Nova Scotia to the South Pacific, stopping now and then to scoop up a bucket of sea water, filter out the microbes, extract DNA on mass and shotgun sequence them. They discovered enough new proteins to *double* the size of the GenBank database (molecular biology geeks will be impressed by this). Read all about it here. Or just read about it on our blog.