The NIH has written an excellent review of stem cell therapy for myocardial infarction for those interested. It hasn't been updated in several years, but it should provide a lot of the biological context and rationale for these types of experiments.
The hierarchy of blood is a bit complicated. Everything starts with hematopoietic ("blood making") stem cells. Stem cells can divide to make more stem cells, or they can mature and become blood progenitors. Blood progenitors can't go backwards and form stem cells. However, progenitors can divide to form multiple blood lineages such as platelets and white blood cells depending on the biological signals they receive.
Most articles talk about hematopoietic progenitors rather than stem cells to be technically precise. Stem cells are incredibly elusive; as far as I know, it is currently technically impossible get a completely pure population of them. You can, however, purify populations of bone marrow that contains nearly all the stem cells but also have a bunch of progenitors as well. These populations, confusingly, are often called progenitors themselves, even though they actually contain stem cells.
The Pentagon really needs to think outside the box here. Airplanes and boats are pretty small and can't really do that much damage. Imagine how much damage someone could inflict by hijacking a 1,000 foot 15,000 ton train.
The actual abstract and article can be found on Nature's website and is entitled Hax1-mediated processing of HtrA2 by Parl allows survival of lymphocytes and neurons.
Essentially what the researchers showed was that the gene Hax1 keeps cells alive when they aren't being stimulated with survival signals. This is interesting, for example, because cancer metastasis cells must survive in very foreign environments where they probably aren't receiving these factors. On the flip side, deficiencies in Hax1 results in blood cells dying early, causing a disease called severe congenital neutropenia.
That's pretty cool if you live in a climate when your main problem is dirt / rain. But what about ice/sleet/freezing rain, which is the bane of my existence now that I'm living in the Midwest.
Support groups for families and children with rare diseases have been around for decades. Whether someone in your family has Rett sydnrome, Glanzmann's thrombasthenia, or Schwachman Diamond Syndrome, you can find other people who are in a similar situation. There interesting thing here is that doctors are identifying new chromosomal abnormalities and sub-classifying people whose diseases were previously under an umbrella of ambiguous terms such as "autism." This is a good thing, because these diseases are most certainly heterogeneous at the molecular level and probably manifest themselves in subtlety different ways that aren't obvious when there are only four or five cases ever described. Unfortunately, the treatments for them rarely takes into account the underlying genetic cause, and advocacy and support groups such as these can better inform doctors and researchers about these rare diseases.
Fortunately, there's still this lawsuit, where the government accidentally sent the defendant a transcript of his own phone records obtained without a warrant.
Statistics these days are becoming increasingly worthless, often just used to justify a political agenda on both sides. It's like the old adage says: statistics are like a bikini: what they reveal is interesting, but what they hide is crucial.
Orwell was right. The English language is dying. From IBM's e-mail:
We said when we released 1Q results we would be putting in place a series of actions to address cost issues in our U.S. strategic outsourcing business. We have undertaken efforts toward that, and recently implemented a focused resource reduction in the U.S. While any such reduction is difficult for those employees affected, these actions are well within the scope of our ongoing workforce rebalancing efforts.
It's pretty sad that, like most American holidays, Mother's Day has been corrupted into a holiday that celebrates consumption and hollow platitudes rather than anything meaningful. One of the original premises of Mother's Day was a call to women worldwide to stand up against violence and war that had taken the lives of so many of their sons. It wasn't a tribute to mothers, but a rallying cry for mothers of the US to band together in a political cause to improve the world. The "mother" of Mother's Day became so disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday that she actively campaigned against it.
I was a being a little over simplistic. You're right in that they can't take your home if you declare bankruptcy (they can and do if you do not). However, it is my understanding that under both chapter 7 and 13, once you declare bankruptcy, you still have to make your payments on your home. When people are torn between paying their medical bills, paying the house payment, and paying the electric bill etc, they often lose the house.
My friend and I just had a conversation about this last night. The fundamental problem is that your health is my responsibility, no matter what.
Let's say we went to a world where only private doctors existed and no one accepted insurance. The rich will be able to afford most care (although they're pretty much dead if they need something big like an organ transplant). With insurance so expensive these days, this isn't too far off from reality today.
Now, pretend that you're poor, and you come down with melanoma, despite your best attempt to avoid the sun. You can't afford care, so you wait until the last minute to get care at the ER. By then, your disease is probably advanced and much more expensive to treat, and the ER can't turn your away legally.
The ER charges you some really high price that you can't pay. They repossesses your car and foreclose on your home so you can pay for it. Maybe you can find a lawyer to declare bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the ER is still waiting for their payment, and the doctors have to be paid to pay off their student loans. So what do they do? They charge the rich people more to offset the cost.
Now you're now homeless, without a car to get to work, unemployed, and you're still in debt. Where do you go? Perhaps you turn to a life of crime and end up in prison. You definitely end up on welfare and Medicaid, probably living in a homeless shelter that is likely funded by tax-payer money.
This isn't some theoretical story. It happens to people all the time.
So, all of you who are terrified of having your tax dollars pay for "socialized health care," you're really missing the point. You're paying for it already. You're paying it in your hospital bills as cost shifting. You're paying for it via Medicare and Medicaid. You're paying for it in the prison system (which is the new mental health system). You're paying for it in terms of treating STDs by county clinics and through federally-qualified health centers.
Socialized health care is inevitable because it's already here, albeit in a horribly disorganized and inefficient state. If we kept everyone healthy, the cost of health care would drop for everyone. The question is, how can we do that while balancing quality care?
I once lived with a roommate who got home early one day:
Me: You're home early; not enough work to do? Roommate: No, the server burned out Me: Oh, that's no big deal; you just wait for them to get replacement parts and then you get back to it Roommate: No, seriously, it's burned out. The air conditioning unit failed, the entire server room heated up to the point of spontaneous combustion and the entire server room caught fire
Lesson learned, keep your backups somewhere far, far away from the servers.
A vaccine is any substance that stimulates your immune system to attack a pathogen specifically. It stimulates what is known as the adaptive immune system, which is the part of the immune system that recognizes a specific infection. For example, you may be infected with Hepatitis A, and that generates a nonspecific inflammatory response. Later on, your T and B cells "learn" to specifically begin attacking the Hepatitis A virus. If you get infected with Hepatitis B, you still have the nonspecific inflammatory response, but your learned response against Hepatitis A doesn't help here; it's very specific for Hepatitis A.
In contrast, most drugs don't prime your immune system against specific proteins on the pathogen. Chemotherapy drugs tend to just kill rapidly dividing cells non-specifically; you get nausea because the normal cells in your gut are also killed. There are some drugs such as monoclonal antibodies that can specifically attack and kill the pathogenic cells, but they don't work by priming your immune cells.
It's a misconception that all vaccines prevent you from getting the disease. The BCG vaccine for TB doesn't really prevent you from getting infected with TB chronically; it prevents you from getting a really severe kind of acute TB. In fact, some vaccines are actually administered after you've already been infected. For example, the rabies vaccine causes a brisk immune response against rabies. You usually receive it *after* you've been bitten by a rabid animal, so there is already rabies virus replicating within your cells. It helps you clear the virus that is already there.
Hmm...very little about this on wikipedia. You seem knowledgeable - how is the lean body mass defined, and why is basal metabolic
rate proportional to it?
Lean body mass is a theoretical number that pretty much asks how much you would weigh if you had no fat (ie the weight of your bones, muscles, organs). The true value is obviously is difficult to actually get it, but decent estimates can be made using calipers and some more technical measurements. There are some equations for calculating it from height and weight, but they are suspect like BMI.
Basal metabolic rate is proportional to lean body mass because muscles, bones, and organs have positive energy requirements. Fat, on the other hand, is a store of energy. So the energy you use tends to get eaten up by the components of lean body mass and stored in fat. This is a somewhat oversimplification because fat also needs energy, but for the most part, it's far less energy.
Where do the mass and energy go?
Most of your energy goes to simple things like maintaining your temperature at 98.6, keeping your liver working, producing digestive enzymes, replacing old proteins, maintaining the the ion gradients in your cells, etc. Unfortunately, you have little control over how much energy is used here because it's pretty intrinsic to your genetics and your hormonal state. There are some nutritional supplements that claim to alter this (and some work), but most them mess around with your hormones in dangerous and unpredictable ways.
I'm a solid believer in conversation laws, and I don't really know what it means for someone to have a higher metabolism than someone else. There are only so many ways for mass and energy to leave the body. These are the major ones I can think of:
* mass and energy - excretion - even ignoring what you call the TEF, I'm sure different amounts of energy can be absorbed from the food depending on how your digestive system's doing. If you have diarrhea, you're probably getting much less of the energy printed on the label than you would otherwise.
* energy - heat
* mass - perspiration
* energy - mechanical work
It seems like what you describe as "BMR" (60-70%) must be heat and excretion, "PA" (20%) must be heat and mechanical work, and "TEE" (10%) pure heat.
That's somewhat correct. BMR is pretty much heat and general housekeeping (replacing old proteins, powering your brain). Excretion doesn't usually come into play because most people who don't have malabsorption syndromes (dysentery, celiac sprue) absorb nearly all their food. TEF isn't pure heat. It's also involved in producing digestive enzymes, muscle contractions that move your food along the digestive tract, etc. It's really not important for all intents and purposes; I just included it for completion.
How does heat vary from person to person? Is there some reason that with similar amounts of exercise (i.e., ignoring your 20% PE) and similar surrounding temperatures, two people's heat output would be significantly different?
Yes! Basal metabolic rate is to a large extent determined by age. The younger you are, the more you burn. Also, hormone status. For example, people with too little thyroid hormone tend to have cold bodies and get chubby because their metabolic rate is slow. There also seem to be intrinsic differences in people's metabolism that just happen (I'm sure you know people that can eat whatever they want and never gain weight). Finally, exercise and weight training can not only add more muscle (which needs more energy to support in your rest) and make that muscle more efficient, so you can burn more energy when you do it.
We all maintain roughly the same core temperature, right? I suppose our surface areas and the clothes we wear would affect the efficiency of maintaining that temperature. Are some people inherently more insulated than others? (I suppose fat is more insulating than muscle?)
Anyone who has studied basic human metabolism should be able to figure this out. Exercise alone simply is a bad way to lose weight.
The total energy expenditure (TEE) of the human body is determined by the following equation:
TEE = BMR + PA + TEF
BMR = Basal metabolic rate
This is proportional to the lean body mass, not the BMI (which is a really bad measure of obesity).
This is typically 60 - 70% of your TEE
PA = Energy expended during physical activity
This consists of around 20% of your energy expenditure
TEF = Thermic effect of food
This is the energy expended to digest food, typically 10% of kcal's consumed. This really doesn't really come into play in weight gain since eating more food still gives you excess calories (albeit at 90%) and eating less is still fewer calories.
In other words, the majority of your energy expenditure is determined by your basal metabolic rate by a ratio of around 3.5 to 1. This is especially true in children whose BMR's are naturally higher than most adults'. This is not to say that exercise isn't useful. BMR is determined by lean body mass, which is determined by your muscle mass, which is determined by genetics and exercise. Exercise does help you lose weight, but it takes a lot longer than diet. Exercise also has independent benefits on cardiovascular health and a host of other health measures.
So all those people who tell you that losing weight is 80% diet and 20% exercise aren't lying. That's simply the science.
That's a common myth. Mussolini did not get the trains to run on time; he just took credit for other's work. Just because a government is totalitarian doesn't make it competent at serving its people, but the beauty of such a government is that you can take credit for whatever you want and then kill off the people who disagree with you.
I remember a game called Psychic Detective. The premise is that you were investigating a crime, but could jump into other people's minds and watch things unfold from their point of view. As you played through the game, you would only see a certain part of plot unfold the entire way, because the game progressed linearly and following one storyline prevented you from following another that happened concurrently. Moreover, the choices you made would influence the ending. If you replayed the game, you could view the game from other people's point of view and other aspects of the plot would unfold.
I always found this concept to be pretty brilliant, but I can't think of any other game that utilizes it. It showed that you can have a linear plot but allow the player to make choices that influence the ending. Why have other games like this not been developed?
Don't say I didn't warn you guys about this "don't be evil thing." First they start swapping TB for "academic" purposes, then maybe some avian influenza in some apartments around Mountain View, and next thing you know, they'll be a smallpox outbreak and we will coincidentally receive advertisements on gmail that we can buy the cure for a few thousand dollars from one of their Adsense "partners."
Each bill should be introduced, debated on, and amended. When no more amendments or riders are added, the bill should be placed off the table for one week. During this week, the final text of the bill should be published online, giving the public time to review it and question it. After a week, the bill should be re-debated and voted on. This would have an added benefit of making Congress debate a lot more and pass fewer and better laws.
Sometimes the solution is just one more level of indirection.
Call me a cynic, but I suspect that politicians draft overly broad laws on purpose, in an effort to criminalize as much as possible. They can create so many complicated laws that it is impossible for most citizens to even be aware of what is and what is not legal. This later allows them to selectively apply the law for political ends.
As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Slashdot Mirror
The NIH has written an excellent review of stem cell therapy for myocardial infarction for those interested. It hasn't been updated in several years, but it should provide a lot of the biological context and rationale for these types of experiments.
The hierarchy of blood is a bit complicated. Everything starts with hematopoietic ("blood making") stem cells. Stem cells can divide to make more stem cells, or they can mature and become blood progenitors. Blood progenitors can't go backwards and form stem cells. However, progenitors can divide to form multiple blood lineages such as platelets and white blood cells depending on the biological signals they receive. Most articles talk about hematopoietic progenitors rather than stem cells to be technically precise. Stem cells are incredibly elusive; as far as I know, it is currently technically impossible get a completely pure population of them. You can, however, purify populations of bone marrow that contains nearly all the stem cells but also have a bunch of progenitors as well. These populations, confusingly, are often called progenitors themselves, even though they actually contain stem cells.
The Pentagon really needs to think outside the box here. Airplanes and boats are pretty small and can't really do that much damage. Imagine how much damage someone could inflict by hijacking a 1,000 foot 15,000 ton train.
The actual abstract and article can be found on Nature's website and is entitled Hax1-mediated processing of HtrA2 by Parl allows survival of lymphocytes and neurons. Essentially what the researchers showed was that the gene Hax1 keeps cells alive when they aren't being stimulated with survival signals. This is interesting, for example, because cancer metastasis cells must survive in very foreign environments where they probably aren't receiving these factors. On the flip side, deficiencies in Hax1 results in blood cells dying early, causing a disease called severe congenital neutropenia.
That's pretty cool if you live in a climate when your main problem is dirt / rain. But what about ice/sleet/freezing rain, which is the bane of my existence now that I'm living in the Midwest.
Actually, HIPAA does not cover third party databases.
Support groups for families and children with rare diseases have been around for decades. Whether someone in your family has Rett sydnrome, Glanzmann's thrombasthenia, or Schwachman Diamond Syndrome, you can find other people who are in a similar situation. There interesting thing here is that doctors are identifying new chromosomal abnormalities and sub-classifying people whose diseases were previously under an umbrella of ambiguous terms such as "autism." This is a good thing, because these diseases are most certainly heterogeneous at the molecular level and probably manifest themselves in subtlety different ways that aren't obvious when there are only four or five cases ever described. Unfortunately, the treatments for them rarely takes into account the underlying genetic cause, and advocacy and support groups such as these can better inform doctors and researchers about these rare diseases.
Fortunately, there's still this lawsuit, where the government accidentally sent the defendant a transcript of his own phone records obtained without a warrant.
They'll be fine with the fjords as long as they can get some reticulating splines.
Statistics these days are becoming increasingly worthless, often just used to justify a political agenda on both sides. It's like the old adage says: statistics are like a bikini: what they reveal is interesting, but what they hide is crucial.
Studies have also shown that women with longer ring fingers tend to be lesbians.
It's pretty sad that, like most American holidays, Mother's Day has been corrupted into a holiday that celebrates consumption and hollow platitudes rather than anything meaningful. One of the original premises of Mother's Day was a call to women worldwide to stand up against violence and war that had taken the lives of so many of their sons. It wasn't a tribute to mothers, but a rallying cry for mothers of the US to band together in a political cause to improve the world. The "mother" of Mother's Day became so disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday that she actively campaigned against it.
I was a being a little over simplistic. You're right in that they can't take your home if you declare bankruptcy (they can and do if you do not). However, it is my understanding that under both chapter 7 and 13, once you declare bankruptcy, you still have to make your payments on your home. When people are torn between paying their medical bills, paying the house payment, and paying the electric bill etc, they often lose the house.
My friend and I just had a conversation about this last night. The fundamental problem is that your health is my responsibility, no matter what.
Let's say we went to a world where only private doctors existed and no one accepted insurance. The rich will be able to afford most care (although they're pretty much dead if they need something big like an organ transplant). With insurance so expensive these days, this isn't too far off from reality today.
Now, pretend that you're poor, and you come down with melanoma, despite your best attempt to avoid the sun. You can't afford care, so you wait until the last minute to get care at the ER. By then, your disease is probably advanced and much more expensive to treat, and the ER can't turn your away legally.
The ER charges you some really high price that you can't pay. They repossesses your car and foreclose on your home so you can pay for it. Maybe you can find a lawyer to declare bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the ER is still waiting for their payment, and the doctors have to be paid to pay off their student loans. So what do they do? They charge the rich people more to offset the cost.
Now you're now homeless, without a car to get to work, unemployed, and you're still in debt. Where do you go? Perhaps you turn to a life of crime and end up in prison. You definitely end up on welfare and Medicaid, probably living in a homeless shelter that is likely funded by tax-payer money.
This isn't some theoretical story. It happens to people all the time.
So, all of you who are terrified of having your tax dollars pay for "socialized health care," you're really missing the point. You're paying for it already. You're paying it in your hospital bills as cost shifting. You're paying for it via Medicare and Medicaid. You're paying for it in the prison system (which is the new mental health system). You're paying for it in terms of treating STDs by county clinics and through federally-qualified health centers.
Socialized health care is inevitable because it's already here, albeit in a horribly disorganized and inefficient state. If we kept everyone healthy, the cost of health care would drop for everyone. The question is, how can we do that while balancing quality care?
I once lived with a roommate who got home early one day:
Me: You're home early; not enough work to do?
Roommate: No, the server burned out
Me: Oh, that's no big deal; you just wait for them to get replacement parts and then you get back to it
Roommate: No, seriously, it's burned out. The air conditioning unit failed, the entire server room heated up to the point of spontaneous combustion and the entire server room caught fire
Lesson learned, keep your backups somewhere far, far away from the servers.
A vaccine is any substance that stimulates your immune system to attack a pathogen specifically. It stimulates what is known as the adaptive immune system, which is the part of the immune system that recognizes a specific infection. For example, you may be infected with Hepatitis A, and that generates a nonspecific inflammatory response. Later on, your T and B cells "learn" to specifically begin attacking the Hepatitis A virus. If you get infected with Hepatitis B, you still have the nonspecific inflammatory response, but your learned response against Hepatitis A doesn't help here; it's very specific for Hepatitis A.
In contrast, most drugs don't prime your immune system against specific proteins on the pathogen. Chemotherapy drugs tend to just kill rapidly dividing cells non-specifically; you get nausea because the normal cells in your gut are also killed. There are some drugs such as monoclonal antibodies that can specifically attack and kill the pathogenic cells, but they don't work by priming your immune cells.
It's a misconception that all vaccines prevent you from getting the disease. The BCG vaccine for TB doesn't really prevent you from getting infected with TB chronically; it prevents you from getting a really severe kind of acute TB. In fact, some vaccines are actually administered after you've already been infected. For example, the rabies vaccine causes a brisk immune response against rabies. You usually receive it *after* you've been bitten by a rabid animal, so there is already rabies virus replicating within your cells. It helps you clear the virus that is already there.
I hope this helps.
Lean body mass is a theoretical number that pretty much asks how much you would weigh if you had no fat (ie the weight of your bones, muscles, organs). The true value is obviously is difficult to actually get it, but decent estimates can be made using calipers and some more technical measurements. There are some equations for calculating it from height and weight, but they are suspect like BMI. Basal metabolic rate is proportional to lean body mass because muscles, bones, and organs have positive energy requirements. Fat, on the other hand, is a store of energy. So the energy you use tends to get eaten up by the components of lean body mass and stored in fat. This is a somewhat oversimplification because fat also needs energy, but for the most part, it's far less energy.
Most of your energy goes to simple things like maintaining your temperature at 98.6, keeping your liver working, producing digestive enzymes, replacing old proteins, maintaining the the ion gradients in your cells, etc. Unfortunately, you have little control over how much energy is used here because it's pretty intrinsic to your genetics and your hormonal state. There are some nutritional supplements that claim to alter this (and some work), but most them mess around with your hormones in dangerous and unpredictable ways.
That's somewhat correct. BMR is pretty much heat and general housekeeping (replacing old proteins, powering your brain). Excretion doesn't usually come into play because most people who don't have malabsorption syndromes (dysentery, celiac sprue) absorb nearly all their food. TEF isn't pure heat. It's also involved in producing digestive enzymes, muscle contractions that move your food along the digestive tract, etc. It's really not important for all intents and purposes; I just included it for completion.
Yes! Basal metabolic rate is to a large extent determined by age. The younger you are, the more you burn. Also, hormone status. For example, people with too little thyroid hormone tend to have cold bodies and get chubby because their metabolic rate is slow. There also seem to be intrinsic differences in people's metabolism that just happen (I'm sure you know people that can eat whatever they want and never gain weight). Finally, exercise and weight training can not only add more muscle (which needs more energy to support in your rest) and make that muscle more efficient, so you can burn more energy when you do it.
The total energy expenditure (TEE) of the human body is determined by the following equation:
TEE = BMR + PA + TEF
BMR = Basal metabolic rate
This is proportional to the lean body mass, not the BMI (which is a really bad measure of obesity). This is typically 60 - 70% of your TEE
PA = Energy expended during physical activity
This consists of around 20% of your energy expenditure
TEF = Thermic effect of food
This is the energy expended to digest food, typically 10% of kcal's consumed. This really doesn't really come into play in weight gain since eating more food still gives you excess calories (albeit at 90%) and eating less is still fewer calories.
In other words, the majority of your energy expenditure is determined by your basal metabolic rate by a ratio of around 3.5 to 1. This is especially true in children whose BMR's are naturally higher than most adults'. This is not to say that exercise isn't useful. BMR is determined by lean body mass, which is determined by your muscle mass, which is determined by genetics and exercise. Exercise does help you lose weight, but it takes a lot longer than diet. Exercise also has independent benefits on cardiovascular health and a host of other health measures.
So all those people who tell you that losing weight is 80% diet and 20% exercise aren't lying. That's simply the science.
That's a common myth. Mussolini did not get the trains to run on time; he just took credit for other's work. Just because a government is totalitarian doesn't make it competent at serving its people, but the beauty of such a government is that you can take credit for whatever you want and then kill off the people who disagree with you.
I remember a game called Psychic Detective. The premise is that you were investigating a crime, but could jump into other people's minds and watch things unfold from their point of view. As you played through the game, you would only see a certain part of plot unfold the entire way, because the game progressed linearly and following one storyline prevented you from following another that happened concurrently. Moreover, the choices you made would influence the ending. If you replayed the game, you could view the game from other people's point of view and other aspects of the plot would unfold.
I always found this concept to be pretty brilliant, but I can't think of any other game that utilizes it. It showed that you can have a linear plot but allow the player to make choices that influence the ending. Why have other games like this not been developed?
Don't say I didn't warn you guys about this "don't be evil thing." First they start swapping TB for "academic" purposes, then maybe some avian influenza in some apartments around Mountain View, and next thing you know, they'll be a smallpox outbreak and we will coincidentally receive advertisements on gmail that we can buy the cure for a few thousand dollars from one of their Adsense "partners."
Each bill should be introduced, debated on, and amended. When no more amendments or riders are added, the bill should be placed off the table for one week. During this week, the final text of the bill should be published online, giving the public time to review it and question it. After a week, the bill should be re-debated and voted on. This would have an added benefit of making Congress debate a lot more and pass fewer and better laws. Sometimes the solution is just one more level of indirection.
Call me a cynic, but I suspect that politicians draft overly broad laws on purpose, in an effort to criminalize as much as possible. They can create so many complicated laws that it is impossible for most citizens to even be aware of what is and what is not legal. This later allows them to selectively apply the law for political ends. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
That's a great essay, but you should attribute it to the man who wrote it, Hugh Gallagher.