Top Ten Advances in 2004

An anonymous reader writes "Technology Research News has released it's top ten picks for advances of 2004. Something for everyone here including notable advances in biotechnology, communications, computing, engineering, energy, security, nanotechnology, applied physics and the Internet."

Comments

Re:Nothing about space here?

[bc90021]

None of that is NEW, just better (or differently funded) implentations of stuff that's been around for forty years.

This list is made up of NEW things.

Re:sigh....

[rainman_bc]

Let's hope we have enough oil to last 50 to 100 years... If things are the same we'll see economic chaos before then.

Read up on Hubert's peak... Scary shit.... Don't mean to act like Chicken Little and claim the scy is falling, but still...

Re:Really?

[crmartin]

It does look a good bit like an ME-163, although the 163 was ground launched.

With Isp in the neighborhood of 200, though (see the "hot engine"), an air launched 163 would have been quite similar to SS1.

Re:Missing Category: Ethics

[reverseengineer]

Generally when new drugs meant to treat life-threatening are tested in clinical trials, the procedure is to test against the accepted treatment if one exists rather than against a true placebo. For example, a new cancer drug would be matched against a more traditional course of therapy. This has the advantage not only of ensuring that both the experimental and control groups get treated, but also provides a head-to-head test of the new drug and the old drug. No one is doing a Tuskegee Experiment-type trial now where mortally sick people are left untreated in the interests of science. Primum no nocere is supposed to be the guiding principle, after all. What good would having a sugar pill control do in a trial for an AIDS or cancer drug anyway? Of course a new antiretroviral is going to outperform dextrose in prolonging life and health in an AIDS patient. No useful science is produced in finding out the placebo group has a 100% mortality rate. What matters is whether the new drug has demonstrable advantages over the old drugs, be it as more efficacy, fewer side effects, fewer doses, etc.

Now, in the case of less serious conditions, yes, sometimes sugar pills are handed out to study volunteers. But what alternative is there in many cases? The placebo (and for that matter, the nocebo) effect is quite real, and should be accounted for. Those crazy side effects you hear about in prescription medication commercials? While of course some of those are from the medication itself, there are always people who report effects like headache, fatigue, dry mouth, and nausea- in both the experimental and placebo groups. It's worthwhile knowing whether it's the medication which causes these symptoms, or rather just the anxiety that comes naturally from taking a strange new pill.

By the same token, drugs shouldn't be on the market if they can't beat Placebex (R) in efficacy- and that can be surprisingly difficult to establish. From personal experience, I've noticed minor aches and pains tend to clear up when I take an OTC pain reliever- but I often start to feel better before the drug has had time to take effect. It's as though the action itself of doing something about that nagging headache induces my body to help out in doing something about that nagging headache. That sort of thing needs to be sorted out in order to know what a drug really does and how well it does it, and double blind studies with placebo are the only certain way to do that.