Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.
The human heart really is badly designed. More specifically, the routing and number of our coronary arteries -- any interruption in flow that lasts for more than maybe 20 minutes or so can debilitate or kill a human.
In the development of animal models for human diseases, models of "heart attacks" created by deliberate blockage of cardiac blood vessels showed that many species did not suffer the immense amount of damage seen in humans. Guinea Pigs, in particular, were especially resistant; even with massive blockages, their excellent collateral circulation provided near immunity to myocardial infarction.
I don't recall anyone sitting down with me and explaining taxes, the penal code, family law (with regard to chihldren out of wedlock), and how to manage my checkbook. Other than only cursory explanations from my parents and some half-assed sex ed in school I had to figure out on my own what the implecations are of handling any of that stuff incorrectly.
One of the reasons I remember the teachers and administrators at my public elementary school fondly. Our school had a special program that met once a week, outside of normal school hours; during these classes we would learn about things that didn't fit neatly into the required curricula. Balancing your checkbook was one of those topics. Along with writing checks, we had a basic primer on the fractional reserve lending system, and the power of compounded interest (and which side of the compounding you wanted to be on).
The basics of investing were also covered, with an eye on practical application that went further than what might be covered in the regular economics class. For instance, while the economics class might tell you the basics of how stocks function as part of a capitalist economic system, but our special classes would explain things like broker commissions (and how they might give rise to conflict of interest), all the while running a fantasy investment simulation that provided some hard lessons to the students who chased after penny stocks and day-trading quick bucks.
What the article fails to mention, is that the mitochondrial genome contributed by the "3rd parent" is about 16,600 bp in size, or less than 0.00052% of the total human genome.
I am also a Sprint customer with Google Voice integration. For the most part things work smoothly, but I have some complaints.
One major problem is that there are no options for altering the behavior of a permanent secondary line. I cannot delete or suspend it, and cannot change the number (it is possible to change the number for a single primary, but this option is unavailable for a permanent secondary). If there is a way to selectively forward all calls from the secondary number to voicemail, I can't find it.
It's a bit of annoyance, because it turns out my permanent secondary number turned out to be very similar to the main number of a large company. I get up to a couple of wrong number calls a month, and it is starting to get annoying. At this point, I am considering de-integration from Sprint, so I can delete or change the number. However, there are a large number of people on the Google Voice forums that ran into glitches when de-integrating and re-integrating; not sure if the problems were ever fixed, and whether I should take the risk that something will break.
The immune system, innate and acquired, is sort of your own personal military-industrial complex, and has a nasty tendency to sometimes go off the rails and start killing civilians in an increasingly paranoid response to minimal or nonexistent security threats, giving us autoimmune disorders.
Consider the evolutionary theory of pathogen Molecular Mimicry -- infectious agents that adopt motifs that resemble normal host antigens should have a selective advantage. In an absolute form, the theory is not completely accepted -- immunological cross-reactivity between host and pathogen could be due to evolution, or it could be due to chance -- and examples exist that support either case. But I think it is likely that the mechanism operates at least some situations.
The consequence is that a somewhat over-active immune system may actually be the optimum state, with the particular degree of paranoia being the amount that best balances the trade-off between autoimmune disease risk against infection outcomes.
How much is this costing Ecuador? In terms of physically hosting him, probably not much. In terms of political cost, possibly quite a bit.
What's more, the US doesn't dispense foreign aid so we can all hold hands and sing kumbaya together. We spend money on foreign aid as a method of influencing the governments other other countries; it gives us a carrot we can dangle in front of other countries. And for those that have become dependent on it, something we can take away when we're displeased with their behavior.
TNX-901 was developed by Houston-based Tanox, started by two biomedical scientists, Nancy T. Chang and Tse Wen Chang, in 1986. There was a legal dispute whether Tanox had the right to independently develop TNX-901 under the tripartite partnership formed by Tanox, Novartis, and Genentech in 1996. Trials of TNX-901 for treating extreme peanut sensitivity, which affect children especially, were unfortunately mired in legal battles.
Although I've linked to the Wikipedia article on this subject, I don't consider the currently posted version of the article to be a good source of information on the subject; several sections of the article are written in a style unsuitable for an encyclopedia. For instance, use of rhetorical questions in the body of an article smacks of non-neutrality and non-factual writing, as in the example below:
The development history of Tanox and the story of TNX-901 are excellent subject matters for discussion in business school classrooms. Was there another way for Tanox to survive and grow? For a medical field as large as allergy and a potential drug market as large as for anti-IgE antibodies, isn't the development of a back-up drug for omalizumab a sensible strategy?
World of Warcraft: The Movie 3D IMAX Experience (suggested title) begins shooting in early 2014.
No matter how bad the movie turns out, if they do a co-promotion that rewards players with a highly desirably in-game item, millions will go see it. I suggest that the item take the form of a ticket item that allows you to fight a special "Shark" mob, with a hidden weakness triggered by jumping.
Every species exhibits conflict and turmoil among its own members, whereas violence between species is almost solely one of predator/prey relationship. If you don't eat them, and they don't eat you, there is almost never interspecies conflict. The greater the physical differences, the less likely any conflict.
Actually, this is not true. Two relatively well-matched species of predators may ignore each other, as there is substantial risk of injury to both parties. Two grossly mis-matched species may also ignore each other, if there is little overlap in ecological niche.
However, there is an intermediate zone of size difference in which one species of predator is clearly stronger, yet there is still some overlap in prey consumed by both species. In such cases, the stronger predator will often harass and kill the weaker species. What distinguishes this type of predator-predator interference competition from predator-prey relationship, is that the stronger predator will kill the weaker one even when not hungry, or without feeding on the carcass afterwards.
It's unreasonable to claim that Moore's law applies at all, because it is not a law, was never a law, and never will be a law. Not in the legal sense, and not in the physical makeup of the universe sense*. Moore's Law is a statistical anomaly.
In other words, it would more correctly be described as "Moore's Observation"?
And give the scholarship a grand-sounding name, so the kid can get some extra mileage in buffing his resume; such documents are often read by non-technical personnel who might misunderstand "Earned $**** reward for finding security vulnerability" (OMG HAX!), but would love to see something like "Recipient of the Paypal Merit Scholarship for Computing Security Excellence in Youth".
"Until age 56 annual health expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position."
As mentioned by the authors, there are studies that have reached opposite conclusions, as there are assumptions which can dramatically change the conclusions. In the comments section of the paper, there are reader comments which point out some very important problems with this particular paper (most of which seem to revolve around Ecological Fallacy-type assumptions):
Thomas Mittendorf: "It seems that the study has a major flaw in the inclusion of cost. The authors incorporated average health care costs in the model. These costs of course are higher the older the individual gets. But, as they are taking a prospective incidence orientated approach analyzing what happens to 20 year olds in the rest of their individual life it is not correct to use average costs. The average cost figures have to be differentiated between those costs that are incurred by persons that die and those who survive in the respective year. This has to be done for all cohorts. If the healthy people get older healthy and die five years later than the rest, dying gets cheaper. On the other hand dying is more expensive in younger cohorts."
David Strip: "Much in line with the response by Mittendorf, the validity of the results lies very strongly on key assumptions that are not demonstrated. The analysis assumes that the cost of an incidence of the 22 key diseases is independent of the risk factors being tested. Likewise, remaining health care costs, which account for 85% of health-care spending in the Netherlands , are assumed to be uncorrelated to risk factors. Given that this latter class of spending dwarfs the former, the importance of demonstrating the lack of correlation is particularly important. The incidence of numerous co-morbidities with obesity argues, in fact, that one might reasonably expect to find that the annual health costs are higher in the obese and that the cost of treatment in the last months preceding death may be quite different from the non-obese."
I'm not a doctor or pharmacist, so I don't have any opinion on proper methods manufacture, store, or otherwise handle various classes of prescription drugs. I have no idea what regulations make sense. It would be STUPID of me to comment on how a pharmacy must be run since I don't know anything about the subject.
Speaking of medicine, I'd like to bring up some of the metrics that are used to evaluate the cost/benefit of a drug. Think of an ID lock as being equivalent to the drug benefit; the number of deaths or injuries avoided with this technology (for guns, we would probably consider it more like a vaccine than a drug, since "deaths avoided" benefit includes both the owner and surrounding people). Likewise, side effects would be the number of deaths or injuries that would not occur in absense of this technology (because it failed to fire when needed, or malfunctioned in a lethal way).
Of course there are details that are must be thought through; for instance, if you consider reduction in suicides (suicide by a non-owner who obtains the weapon), do you credit the full "value" of a suicide avoided, or only the proportional reduction in suicide completion vs non-firearm attempts? Or, how do we evaluate the death of an intended target in terms of deaths caused/avoided; the situation can be rather complex when we consider the details of domestic violence murders.
The we ask, what is the Relative Risk of this technology? Is the number greater or less than 1? Then, some additional parameters we should need to consider include Number to Treat, from which we can start to consider the Pharmacoeconomics of the technology.
OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior
On the plus side for her, even if she contracts the virus the most likely outcome is that she will eventually clear it, as most infected individuals do. The risk for cervical cancer arises from the collision of a rather rare outcome with a extremely common exposure; nearly all sexually active adults will unknowingly carry HPV at some time in their lives. Unfortunately, the combination results in some 12,000 cases of cervical cancer per year, in the US.
The original research that identified the HPV-Cancer link actually had to study Nuns to find a sufficiently isolated population; the virus is actually rather common even in monogamous women. Men are not routinely screened for HPV status, and contrary to common belief infections does not necessarily result in genital warts -- for instance, high-risk strain HPV 16 is exceptionally good at producing invisible infections (which may be why it ranks among the more common of HPV strains, actually). These infections may persist undetected for anywhere from months to years, and while your daughter may remain virgin until her wedding night, the same might not be true for her husband (and oral sex counts as far as the virus is concerned, being related to risk of head-and-neck cancers).
An interesting bit of trivia: genetic material from high-risk strains of HPV can be found in some 15-25% of lung cancers tissue samples. We don't have sufficient evidence to make a claim for a causal relationship at this time, but it's a very interesting coincidence. Also interesting is that high-risk strains of HPV have also been found in the CNS of infants with certain forms of intractable epilepsy (Focal Cortical Dysplasia Type II-B). The more we look, the more places we are finding this virus.
I used to work in a company that grows animal tissue cultures. You certainly CAN grow lots of tissue types without horse serum or any animal-related products. In fact, lots of lab protocols require that.
Cyberax is correct, and the main driving force behind the shift has been the FDA; they've been pushing hard for chemically-defined culture media, with elimination of serum-type materials whenever possible. Although bio-pharm materials are closely examined for both known and unknown pathogens, their concern is that animal derived substances may yet harbor pathogens too novel to be detected by conventional methods. We're used to defined media for microbes being simple and cheap, but the ones used for mammalian cells are more complex and frequently must be tailored to each particular cell lineage, with comparatively exorbitant costs.
In any case, if you've got the capability to do large-scale mammalian cell culture, you'd be a fool to use it for a product that sells for dollars-per-pound, when that capacity could be put to work performing contract manufacturing of bio-pharmaceuticals that sell for for thousands-of-dollars-per-gram.
When it comes to mental "illness", often the only (or at least the best) treatments are behavioral therapy, in which the "illness" is trained away.
For mild forms of mental illness (bearing in mind that what we call "mild" mental illness can be crippling and painful from the perspective of the individual), perhaps. I'm not sure I agree with the way you phrase your position, but it is at least a valid position.
But behavioral therapy supposes that patient has enough function to engage with the therapist; even in the days before neuroleptics, it was recognized that some forms of mental illness did not respond well to talk therapy. A severely disorganized schizophrenic will turn even the simplest statements into jumbled hash; a catatonic depressive might not have sufficient volition to even reply.
Therapy is pretty advanced when dealing with patients who can't function enough to take care of their basic survival needs -- I'm not talking about acceptance of particular choices or values (by society or by self), or even whether they fit in well enough to hold a job. Rather, individuals rendered unable to attend to basic functions like "avoid freezing to death in winter" or "obtain and prepare sufficient food to maintain life, without endangering others". In such cases it is often a useful adjunct, but supposes that the patient can improve enough to be establish some level of meaningful communication.
Yes I read the book, I thought it was garbage pulp fantasy for those of limited breadth and imagination.
At the time I read Ender's Game as an adolescent, I thought it was awesome. Years later I picked it up again, and came to the same conclusion you did.
On the other hand, I didn't take much note of "Speaker for the Dead" as a young reader; it seemed a rather ho-hum sequel. I've since since changed my mind -- as a work of Science Fiction literature, it is the superior work. OTOH, Children of the Mind is still crap, Full Stop.
Same goes for the Slashdot story posting. The Slashdot summary and only linked article is useless to anyone who actually works with genetics and sequencing. As for the linked article, the more you know about the words being smashed together, the less sense it makes (the very definition of technobabble). It's a content-free wad of marketing promises.
There were some 80+ replies to this story by last night, and NOT ONE of them discussed anything specific to the actual device or technology featured in the story (so of course, that's why I had to do it:).
Samzenpus might as well have posted some bullshit that said something like "Genetic synergy innovates best-of-breed paradigm shift in DNA extraction for a win-win GATTACA future.. Discuss!". And, we would have probably gotten comments of approximately equal value in response, compared to what we're seeing here.
Why group them into a network? Doesn't that increase the risk of an embolism?
From the supplementary materials PDF, it looks like these particles are about 300nm in diameter. That's a fraction of the diameter of a single red blood cell, individual particles wouldn't be big enough to block even our smallest capillaries. However, 300nm is about the size of a large virus; I don't know how immunogenic these things are, but even if moderately inert they'd likely be targeted by our normal debris-removal functions, as the immune system really does not like virus-sized foreign particles.
Slashdot Mirror
Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.
The human heart really is badly designed. More specifically, the routing and number of our coronary arteries -- any interruption in flow that lasts for more than maybe 20 minutes or so can debilitate or kill a human.
In the development of animal models for human diseases, models of "heart attacks" created by deliberate blockage of cardiac blood vessels showed that many species did not suffer the immense amount of damage seen in humans. Guinea Pigs, in particular, were especially resistant; even with massive blockages, their excellent collateral circulation provided near immunity to myocardial infarction.
This is slashdot, we use base 2, not base 10.
What is this mysterious "2" you speak of? ;)
I don't recall anyone sitting down with me and explaining taxes, the penal code, family law (with regard to chihldren out of wedlock), and how to manage my checkbook. Other than only cursory explanations from my parents and some half-assed sex ed in school I had to figure out on my own what the implecations are of handling any of that stuff incorrectly.
One of the reasons I remember the teachers and administrators at my public elementary school fondly. Our school had a special program that met once a week, outside of normal school hours; during these classes we would learn about things that didn't fit neatly into the required curricula. Balancing your checkbook was one of those topics. Along with writing checks, we had a basic primer on the fractional reserve lending system, and the power of compounded interest (and which side of the compounding you wanted to be on).
The basics of investing were also covered, with an eye on practical application that went further than what might be covered in the regular economics class. For instance, while the economics class might tell you the basics of how stocks function as part of a capitalist economic system, but our special classes would explain things like broker commissions (and how they might give rise to conflict of interest), all the while running a fantasy investment simulation that provided some hard lessons to the students who chased after penny stocks and day-trading quick bucks.
How many chromosones to bake up a new baby?
What the article fails to mention, is that the mitochondrial genome contributed by the "3rd parent" is about 16,600 bp in size, or less than 0.00052% of the total human genome.
I am also a Sprint customer with Google Voice integration. For the most part things work smoothly, but I have some complaints.
One major problem is that there are no options for altering the behavior of a permanent secondary line. I cannot delete or suspend it, and cannot change the number (it is possible to change the number for a single primary, but this option is unavailable for a permanent secondary). If there is a way to selectively forward all calls from the secondary number to voicemail, I can't find it.
It's a bit of annoyance, because it turns out my permanent secondary number turned out to be very similar to the main number of a large company. I get up to a couple of wrong number calls a month, and it is starting to get annoying. At this point, I am considering de-integration from Sprint, so I can delete or change the number. However, there are a large number of people on the Google Voice forums that ran into glitches when de-integrating and re-integrating; not sure if the problems were ever fixed, and whether I should take the risk that something will break.
The immune system, innate and acquired, is sort of your own personal military-industrial complex, and has a nasty tendency to sometimes go off the rails and start killing civilians in an increasingly paranoid response to minimal or nonexistent security threats, giving us autoimmune disorders.
Consider the evolutionary theory of pathogen Molecular Mimicry -- infectious agents that adopt motifs that resemble normal host antigens should have a selective advantage. In an absolute form, the theory is not completely accepted -- immunological cross-reactivity between host and pathogen could be due to evolution, or it could be due to chance -- and examples exist that support either case. But I think it is likely that the mechanism operates at least some situations.
The consequence is that a somewhat over-active immune system may actually be the optimum state, with the particular degree of paranoia being the amount that best balances the trade-off between autoimmune disease risk against infection outcomes.
How much is this costing Ecuador
Annoying America - Priceless!
How much is this costing Ecuador? In terms of physically hosting him, probably not much. In terms of political cost, possibly quite a bit.
What's more, the US doesn't dispense foreign aid so we can all hold hands and sing kumbaya together. We spend money on foreign aid as a method of influencing the governments other other countries; it gives us a carrot we can dangle in front of other countries. And for those that have become dependent on it, something we can take away when we're displeased with their behavior.
If you're wondering about AMD, they also had a project doing graphics for ARM CPUs, but it was outright sold-off to Qualcomm.
Qualcomm's "Adreno" GPU? The name is an anagram of Radeon.
Urban legend or true story - I don't know. The inability to know stuff like this is a problem in itself.
Actual drug (anti-IgE Monoclonal antibody), WHARGARBL explanation. You're thinking of the Talizumab (TNX-901) and Omalizumab (Xolair) dispute:
TNX-901 was developed by Houston-based Tanox, started by two biomedical scientists, Nancy T. Chang and Tse Wen Chang, in 1986. There was a legal dispute whether Tanox had the right to independently develop TNX-901 under the tripartite partnership formed by Tanox, Novartis, and Genentech in 1996. Trials of TNX-901 for treating extreme peanut sensitivity, which affect children especially, were unfortunately mired in legal battles.
Although I've linked to the Wikipedia article on this subject, I don't consider the currently posted version of the article to be a good source of information on the subject; several sections of the article are written in a style unsuitable for an encyclopedia. For instance, use of rhetorical questions in the body of an article smacks of non-neutrality and non-factual writing, as in the example below:
The development history of Tanox and the story of TNX-901 are excellent subject matters for discussion in business school classrooms. Was there another way for Tanox to survive and grow? For a medical field as large as allergy and a potential drug market as large as for anti-IgE antibodies, isn't the development of a back-up drug for omalizumab a sensible strategy?
World of Warcraft: The Movie 3D IMAX Experience (suggested title) begins shooting in early 2014.
No matter how bad the movie turns out, if they do a co-promotion that rewards players with a highly desirably in-game item, millions will go see it. I suggest that the item take the form of a ticket item that allows you to fight a special "Shark" mob, with a hidden weakness triggered by jumping.
Ironically, that's less upsetting -- getting your nation's ass whooped -- than getting your Fearless Leader killed.
The rules being those proposed and ratified by members/servants of the Fearless Leader caste?
Every species exhibits conflict and turmoil among its own members, whereas violence between species is almost solely one of predator/prey relationship. If you don't eat them, and they don't eat you, there is almost never interspecies conflict. The greater the physical differences, the less likely any conflict.
Actually, this is not true. Two relatively well-matched species of predators may ignore each other, as there is substantial risk of injury to both parties. Two grossly mis-matched species may also ignore each other, if there is little overlap in ecological niche.
However, there is an intermediate zone of size difference in which one species of predator is clearly stronger, yet there is still some overlap in prey consumed by both species. In such cases, the stronger predator will often harass and kill the weaker species. What distinguishes this type of predator-predator interference competition from predator-prey relationship, is that the stronger predator will kill the weaker one even when not hungry, or without feeding on the carcass afterwards.
It's unreasonable to claim that Moore's law applies at all, because it is not a law, was never a law, and never will be a law. Not in the legal sense, and not in the physical makeup of the universe sense*. Moore's Law is a statistical anomaly.
In other words, it would more correctly be described as "Moore's Observation"?
And give the scholarship a grand-sounding name, so the kid can get some extra mileage in buffing his resume; such documents are often read by non-technical personnel who might misunderstand "Earned $**** reward for finding security vulnerability" (OMG HAX!), but would love to see something like "Recipient of the Paypal Merit Scholarship for Computing Security Excellence in Youth".
No action by the scientists led to the observed regeneration. In fact, they were shocked to discover it.
They shouldn't have been so surprised; this regeneration is a well-known ability possessed by Time Fronds of Gallifrey.
The designs are in English.
Even worse -- the designs are in American!
"Until age 56 annual health expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position."
As mentioned by the authors, there are studies that have reached opposite conclusions, as there are assumptions which can dramatically change the conclusions. In the comments section of the paper, there are reader comments which point out some very important problems with this particular paper (most of which seem to revolve around Ecological Fallacy-type assumptions):
Thomas Mittendorf: "It seems that the study has a major flaw in the inclusion of cost. The authors incorporated average health care costs in the model. These costs of course are higher the older the individual gets. But, as they are taking a prospective incidence orientated approach analyzing what happens to 20 year olds in the rest of their individual life it is not correct to use average costs. The average cost figures have to be differentiated between those costs that are incurred by persons that die and those who survive in the respective year. This has to be done for all cohorts. If the healthy people get older healthy and die five years later than the rest, dying gets cheaper. On the other hand dying is more expensive in younger cohorts."
David Strip: "Much in line with the response by Mittendorf, the validity of the results lies very strongly on key assumptions that are not demonstrated. The analysis assumes that the cost of an incidence of the 22 key diseases is independent of the risk factors being tested. Likewise, remaining health care costs, which account for 85% of health-care spending in the Netherlands , are assumed to be uncorrelated to risk factors. Given that this latter class of spending dwarfs the former, the importance of demonstrating the lack of correlation is particularly important. The incidence of numerous co-morbidities with obesity argues, in fact, that one might reasonably expect to find that the annual health costs are higher in the obese and that the cost of treatment in the last months preceding death may be quite different from the non-obese."
I'm not a doctor or pharmacist, so I don't have any opinion on proper methods manufacture, store, or otherwise handle various classes of prescription drugs.
I have no idea what regulations make sense. It would be STUPID of me to comment on how a pharmacy must be run since I don't know anything about the subject.
Speaking of medicine, I'd like to bring up some of the metrics that are used to evaluate the cost/benefit of a drug. Think of an ID lock as being equivalent to the drug benefit; the number of deaths or injuries avoided with this technology (for guns, we would probably consider it more like a vaccine than a drug, since "deaths avoided" benefit includes both the owner and surrounding people). Likewise, side effects would be the number of deaths or injuries that would not occur in absense of this technology (because it failed to fire when needed, or malfunctioned in a lethal way).
Of course there are details that are must be thought through; for instance, if you consider reduction in suicides (suicide by a non-owner who obtains the weapon), do you credit the full "value" of a suicide avoided, or only the proportional reduction in suicide completion vs non-firearm attempts? Or, how do we evaluate the death of an intended target in terms of deaths caused/avoided; the situation can be rather complex when we consider the details of domestic violence murders.
The we ask, what is the Relative Risk of this technology? Is the number greater or less than 1? Then, some additional parameters we should need to consider include Number to Treat, from which we can start to consider the Pharmacoeconomics of the technology.
OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior
On the plus side for her, even if she contracts the virus the most likely outcome is that she will eventually clear it, as most infected individuals do. The risk for cervical cancer arises from the collision of a rather rare outcome with a extremely common exposure; nearly all sexually active adults will unknowingly carry HPV at some time in their lives. Unfortunately, the combination results in some 12,000 cases of cervical cancer per year, in the US.
The original research that identified the HPV-Cancer link actually had to study Nuns to find a sufficiently isolated population; the virus is actually rather common even in monogamous women. Men are not routinely screened for HPV status, and contrary to common belief infections does not necessarily result in genital warts -- for instance, high-risk strain HPV 16 is exceptionally good at producing invisible infections (which may be why it ranks among the more common of HPV strains, actually). These infections may persist undetected for anywhere from months to years, and while your daughter may remain virgin until her wedding night, the same might not be true for her husband (and oral sex counts as far as the virus is concerned, being related to risk of head-and-neck cancers).
An interesting bit of trivia: genetic material from high-risk strains of HPV can be found in some 15-25% of lung cancers tissue samples. We don't have sufficient evidence to make a claim for a causal relationship at this time, but it's a very interesting coincidence. Also interesting is that high-risk strains of HPV have also been found in the CNS of infants with certain forms of intractable epilepsy (Focal Cortical Dysplasia Type II-B). The more we look, the more places we are finding this virus.
If I wanted to watch attractive, young people doing exciting things, I'd watch sports.
Or Porn!
I used to work in a company that grows animal tissue cultures. You certainly CAN grow lots of tissue types without horse serum or any animal-related products. In fact, lots of lab protocols require that.
Cyberax is correct, and the main driving force behind the shift has been the FDA; they've been pushing hard for chemically-defined culture media, with elimination of serum-type materials whenever possible. Although bio-pharm materials are closely examined for both known and unknown pathogens, their concern is that animal derived substances may yet harbor pathogens too novel to be detected by conventional methods. We're used to defined media for microbes being simple and cheap, but the ones used for mammalian cells are more complex and frequently must be tailored to each particular cell lineage, with comparatively exorbitant costs.
In any case, if you've got the capability to do large-scale mammalian cell culture, you'd be a fool to use it for a product that sells for dollars-per-pound, when that capacity could be put to work performing contract manufacturing of bio-pharmaceuticals that sell for for thousands-of-dollars-per-gram.
When it comes to mental "illness", often the only (or at least the best) treatments are behavioral therapy, in which the "illness" is trained away.
For mild forms of mental illness (bearing in mind that what we call "mild" mental illness can be crippling and painful from the perspective of the individual), perhaps. I'm not sure I agree with the way you phrase your position, but it is at least a valid position.
But behavioral therapy supposes that patient has enough function to engage with the therapist; even in the days before neuroleptics, it was recognized that some forms of mental illness did not respond well to talk therapy. A severely disorganized schizophrenic will turn even the simplest statements into jumbled hash; a catatonic depressive might not have sufficient volition to even reply.
Therapy is pretty advanced when dealing with patients who can't function enough to take care of their basic survival needs -- I'm not talking about acceptance of particular choices or values (by society or by self), or even whether they fit in well enough to hold a job. Rather, individuals rendered unable to attend to basic functions like "avoid freezing to death in winter" or "obtain and prepare sufficient food to maintain life, without endangering others". In such cases it is often a useful adjunct, but supposes that the patient can improve enough to be establish some level of meaningful communication.
Yes I read the book, I thought it was garbage pulp fantasy for those of limited breadth and imagination.
At the time I read Ender's Game as an adolescent, I thought it was awesome. Years later I picked it up again, and came to the same conclusion you did.
On the other hand, I didn't take much note of "Speaker for the Dead" as a young reader; it seemed a rather ho-hum sequel. I've since since changed my mind -- as a work of Science Fiction literature, it is the superior work. OTOH, Children of the Mind is still crap, Full Stop.
it's even less generally useful than I'd thought.
Same goes for the Slashdot story posting. The Slashdot summary and only linked article is useless to anyone who actually works with genetics and sequencing. As for the linked article, the more you know about the words being smashed together, the less sense it makes (the very definition of technobabble). It's a content-free wad of marketing promises.
There were some 80+ replies to this story by last night, and NOT ONE of them discussed anything specific to the actual device or technology featured in the story (so of course, that's why I had to do it :).
Samzenpus might as well have posted some bullshit that said something like "Genetic synergy innovates best-of-breed paradigm shift in DNA extraction for a win-win GATTACA future.. Discuss!". And, we would have probably gotten comments of approximately equal value in response, compared to what we're seeing here.
Why group them into a network? Doesn't that increase the risk of an embolism?
From the supplementary materials PDF, it looks like these particles are about 300nm in diameter. That's a fraction of the diameter of a single red blood cell, individual particles wouldn't be big enough to block even our smallest capillaries. However, 300nm is about the size of a large virus; I don't know how immunogenic these things are, but even if moderately inert they'd likely be targeted by our normal debris-removal functions, as the immune system really does not like virus-sized foreign particles.