Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer... Ok I take that back. Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices that have clunky web interfaces.
You sound like a professional, so the pool of people you know is probably a bit skewed. I'm a biologist, literally no one I know is a creationist. Sadly they are many out there lurking in dark places, conspiring to ban evolution from the classroom and replace it with a bible.
For the record, this isn't exactly a "hearing aid in the mouth." The reciever seems to go on your ear, it just wirelessly transmits to an emitter on your teeth, presumably because putting a microphone in your mouth would pick up you talking and not much else, and keeping your mouth open anytime you wanted to hear something would get annoying.
I was hoping the same thing. Then I read TFA and no longer needed to hope:
There are other hearing aid devices that utilize bone conduction. Most, however, use a titanium pin drilled into the jaw bone (or skull) to transmit sound to the cochlea. SoundBite seems to be the first non-surgical, non-invasive, easily removable device.
Oh. We were trying to tell you that we fixed it so it's not apocalyptic anymore, but you didn't hear us. We assumed your hearing aid had run out of batteries. I guess it wasn't the batteries...
Yes, I realize that wasn't an endorsement of that mindset. I was assuming you weren't a "don't make waves" executive of a major electronics corporation. That wasn't meant to be a criticism of you.
There was a gaming phone a few years back. It flopped. No one revisited.
It's a good thing that not everyone has that mindset.
Wilbur Wright: "Wouldn't it be great to build a flying machine?" Orville Wright: "Did you hear about that guy Otto Lilenthal who tried to make one?" Wilbur: "No, what happened?" Orville: "He crashed and died." Wilbur: "Oh well, then that proves it can't be done ever." Orville: "Yup, lets get back to making this bicycle and never talk about flying ever again."
As an aside, this would make locating weapons extremely easy--all you have to do is walk around with an RF scanner, searching for watch and/or weapons signals.
It's early, maybe I'm just slow, but what would be the advantage of that for the person who would be doing the scanning?
I gotta enter the pin so that I can use my gun to defend myself.
Man, when -I'm- mugging people, I shit myself at the sight of a gun, and run away. I don't bother inspecting it closely. I'd also assume that if you didn't enter the pin on the watch before hand (and, uh, if you're carrying the gun and the watch, why would you not have already entered the pin?), there isn't a big sign that says "Harmless" on the gun.
You must have some very determined/observant muggers where you live.
Amazon dropping publishers is just an offense to me as their customer.
It also sounds like an insanely immature way of answering a question. The article wasn't too clear to someone like me who doesn't work in publishing, or maybe I'm just not awake yet, but it sounds like MacMillan just asked them to raise their prices, not "Macmillian said 'Raise the prices or don't sell our stuff'."
Here's an exchange which would have been much more professional and profitable for both parties, authors, and customers:
Macmillan"Hey we want to charge more for our books" Amazon: "GO DIE IN A HOLE FOR QUESTIONING OUR PRICING STRUCTURE, YOU ****ING ****HEAD!!! But we will continue selling your books at the price we decide."
So, there should be tests. Depending on your score, you get to have (or not have) certain things in your vehicle, like radios, heaters, people, pets, phones, etc.
Assuming those tests cost absolutely zero dollars to the state of California... well we still couldn't afford it.
Postulate: no greater crimes will be committed against humanity than when we discover the secrets to clinical immortality.
Okay, but it's going to be a while before that's anything other than academic, and it isn't sped up by the results here. The present study has preliminary results on signaling needed to make mouse blood stem cells divide more as they did when they were younger. One day we may be able to use this knowledge to improve immune function in seniors. Cell signaling tends to be very specific to the cell type, the context. We are most likely not going to find that these same signals make all other stem cells act new, like say the stem cells in your gut or the stem cells which would repair your heart.
This line of research is not going to make your body immortal, it's probably at best going to make you less susceptible to infection as a senior citizen. Which is good, it's just not the sci-fi you're thinking of.
Except acting young again, does mean they stem cells will have lost any genetic damage, that occurred though aging. Perphaps some day though medicine will be able to produce truely young stem cells, but that would require checking that the DNA hasn't mutated from the orignal young cell line
The current thinking in the field is that stem cells are generally more resistant to DNA damage than many other types of cells. A lot of damage comes from when the cell replicates it's DNA in preparation for division. The "textbook" stem cell don't seem to divide very often, instead they divide once to make transit amplifying cells, which divide like mad for a short period, making cells which will eventually mature and then not divide again. Why exactly older stem cells don't replentish the immune system, it sounds like that isn't known. They did say it had something to do with a growth factor, it sounds like it has little to do with DNA damage in the stem cells.
So my understanding of current stem cell theory is that stem cells won't have as much DNA damage as you would expect, and that shouldn't affect their behavior. I am not a stem cell biologist though, my understanding may be obsolete by now, and of course the "textbook" understanding of stem cells in general may or may not be true for any or all stem cell examples, such as the hematopoetic stem cells discussed here.
True, but off-topic. They're probably going to go ape-shit over someone wearing fake leather. I doubt they are going to be reading the methods sections of scientific papers, they'd probably get upset over the non-cruelty-free ink the paper was printed on first.
Buy a brick of velveeta cheese and a bottle of castor oil. Sprinkle some of the castor oil on the brick and feed it to the dog every time it gets out of the fence.
How appropriate, that sounds more like a Jack O'Neil solution than a MacGyver solution. MacGyver would have increased the voltage to the dog using a paper clip, a roll of newspaper, and two tube socks. A Samantha Carter solution of course would be to trap the dog and the neighbor in a black hole paralell universe using the power of science. A Daniel Jackson solution would be to interpret the ancient runes on the dog's collar, call the neighbor, and whine until the neighbor agreed to promise to not let the dog get over into the yard again. Teal'c would just stare the neighbor down, clenching and unclenching his jaw, until the neighbor shit his pants and moved away.
Do stupid laws and frivolous lawsuits make you too afraid to help someone in trouble?
I know it was a rhetorical question, but the answer is definitely no, I had never heard of that before (IANAL). Is it a widespread thing? I googled "sued for helping" and then "good samaritan sued" and got some malpractice pages and one case of a woman in LA being pulled from a car and getting paralyzed. Is that it, or are there a lot more cases? We don't seem to be experiencing a rash of thousands of people trying to get rich by suing people who come to their aid. If that really is the one case, I would argue that there's not exactly anything wrong here. One case doesn't mean there is a general big problem with lawsuits and helping people out. It's too bad for the friend, and while I don't agree with the plantiff, I'd imagine if you were suddenly a quadruplegic, with no source of income, facing huge medical bills etc, desperation could get the better of you, but that isn't a common case and reaction.
Anyway, if that's the rationale behind the law, I think the bigger issue is "Why are we passing laws based off one isolated case?" I've been sued for a freak skiing accident, yet it didn't even cross my mind to stop skiing to prevent that one case from ever happening again, yet california appears to be doing that on a huge scale.
Again, assuming there aren't a lot more cases that I'm just not finding in my exhaustive "first page of google hits" research...
That, and they still are good for research. If you want to study human cell biology, like how the embryo makes liver cells initially, this is an easier way.
I could be wrong, but I think I remember hearing that male pattern baldness wasn't caused by a loss of hair follicle stem cells, it was caused by a loss of signaling in the niche the hair cells reside in.
I guess it's possible that induced pluripotent stem cells could be used to make new scalp, including the niches, and then you could put that on, essentially resetting the clock so you'd have 20 or so more years of hair.
(Disclaimer, I heard a seminar on baldness and stem cells over a year ago, so that could be outdated in addition to partially forgotten. Don't clone yourself, scalp him, and then sue me because you went bald in under a year.)
If you never do research with fetal stem cells, you'll never know what they can do.
To add to that, you know what research started us down this whole avenue, right? There are quite a few genes in the genome, but they only looked at 19
Reasoning that multiple transcription factors would probably be required to reprogram fibroblasts to a neuronal fate, we cloned a total of 19 genes that are specifically expressed in neural tissues, have important roles in neural development, or have been implicated in epigenetic reprogramming
How did they come up with that magic 19 instead of like 100,000 in the mouse genome? Other studies that used fetal stem cells, or possibly IPsC cell studies, which themselves were discovered based on knowledge gleaned from studies in fetal stem cells.
If there had been no research on fetal stem cells we wouldn't have this, induced pluripotent stem cells, OR much knowledge about adult stem cells (which, not for nothing, haven't gotten us to the finish line yet, which is -why- research continues) and very little hope for anyone who has medical conditions like paralysis or parkinson's disease.
Instead we would have a little more incinerated biomedical waste from fertilization clinics.
For those of you trying to find the actual nature article, here. I know we hate paywalls, but it should really be required for submission to slashdot that a link to the real paper, not preview, be included.
I am not a stem cell biologist, nor am I a neurobiologist, and I will need to read the paper more carefully when I’m at home, but some of my thoughts: There do seem to be some hurdles to using this in humans, but many are trivial in comparison, and the reason the authors didn’t do them yet is because they wanted to get this out there before anyone else did. For one thing, they haven’t shown this in humans yet, but it should work in human cells that’s their stated next step. These cells were grown using dead mouse “feeder cells” which is common in cell culture, but complicates things for human therapy. You don’t want even dead mouse cells or other people’s dead cells in something that is going to go into your brain. People are working on culturing without feeder cells, I’m not sure where they are on that. The method of getting the 3 genes in is also an issue. These guys used lentiviral transfection, which is not something you want for human cells. Earlier work on IPSC got it done by incubating cells with transcription factor –protein- modified to penetrate cells. That might be a good next step here, though it would probably decrease the efficiency.
A bigger issue to me is what they are transfecting. They’re putting in three transcription factors, Ascl1, Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l. One of them, Ascl1, is found in many cancers (according to wiki anyway) and might be tumorgenic. Especially if they find they can’t get it to work without viral transfection, that could be a concern. The other two though aren’t tumorgenic apparently. Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l are both associated with neuron differentiation, which is interesting.
They did overcome a big hurdle: these are not pluripotent, which probably means there’s less chance of causing tumors, teratomas. With induced pluripotent cells, that is a concern. If you were to inject IpsC into your brain, you don’t know what you’re going to get. You could get bone cells growing in there, cells which aren’t supposed to be there that could potentially cause tumor formation. This doesn’t seem like that will be an issue here, they apparently get all neurons, neurons which appear not to continue dividing. I do find it a little hard to believe though that these only produce neurons and never glial cells, though I’ll need to reread it a few more times.
This is also a interesting paradigm shift for developmental biologists: apparently you don’t have to go back to square one to switch cell fates, it will take longer and be less efficient to do so. IpsC take about a month to become pluripotent and then be grown back into neurons, and only about 1% of the cells do that if I recall correctly. These take a week.
For much of the study, they seem to be using 5 different factors, not the 3 minimal ones. They state that Ascl1 alone was sufficient to make these cells start looking like neurons, but the other two were needed for them to look and behave like mature neurons. Most of the figures were working with a combination of 5 factors. With all 5, they showed a good mix of different types of neurons, but that had less efficient conversion than the minimal 3. I’m wondering if you’d actually be able to get all the different types of mature neurons with just the 3. I’d guess it’s not that they intentionally did it that way, but they wanted to hurry up and publish ASAP, so they skipped doing that characterization for now.
One problem facing all these therapies eventually, as I understand it, is that you want to get one specific type of neuron for therapy. I have no idea what strategies there are to direct differentiation into specific types of neurons, but this seems like it would be the bigger hurdle.
Slashdot Mirror
Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer... Ok I take that back. Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices that have clunky web interfaces.
You sound like a professional, so the pool of people you know is probably a bit skewed. I'm a biologist, literally no one I know is a creationist. Sadly they are many out there lurking in dark places, conspiring to ban evolution from the classroom and replace it with a bible.
Just as genetic diversity helps prevent epidemics from sweeping through and wiping out a species, browser diversity does the same thing.
The same thing being preventing extinction of species?
Whoa.
But it might really be useful for those people getting a little long in the tooth.
If it worked, yes, that would be coming soon.
For the record, this isn't exactly a "hearing aid in the mouth." The reciever seems to go on your ear, it just wirelessly transmits to an emitter on your teeth, presumably because putting a microphone in your mouth would pick up you talking and not much else, and keeping your mouth open anytime you wanted to hear something would get annoying.
They use these dental implants to send auditory signals to the populace while people are asleep.
If you're wondering, they charge up the batteries with the fluoride they put in the water.
I was hoping the same thing. Then I read TFA and no longer needed to hope:
There are other hearing aid devices that utilize bone conduction. Most, however, use a titanium pin drilled into the jaw bone (or skull) to transmit sound to the cochlea. SoundBite seems to be the first non-surgical, non-invasive, easily removable device.
Oh. We were trying to tell you that we fixed it so it's not apocalyptic anymore, but you didn't hear us. We assumed your hearing aid had run out of batteries. I guess it wasn't the batteries...
Yes, I realize that wasn't an endorsement of that mindset. I was assuming you weren't a "don't make waves" executive of a major electronics corporation. That wasn't meant to be a criticism of you.
There was a gaming phone a few years back. It flopped. No one revisited.
It's a good thing that not everyone has that mindset.
Wilbur Wright: "Wouldn't it be great to build a flying machine?"
Orville Wright: "Did you hear about that guy Otto Lilenthal who tried to make one?"
Wilbur: "No, what happened?"
Orville: "He crashed and died."
Wilbur: "Oh well, then that proves it can't be done ever."
Orville: "Yup, lets get back to making this bicycle and never talk about flying ever again."
Just like computers are for DOING MATH. :P
As an aside, this would make locating weapons extremely easy--all you have to do is walk around with an RF scanner, searching for watch and/or weapons signals.
It's early, maybe I'm just slow, but what would be the advantage of that for the person who would be doing the scanning?
I gotta enter the pin so that I can use my gun to defend myself.
Man, when -I'm- mugging people, I shit myself at the sight of a gun, and run away. I don't bother inspecting it closely. I'd also assume that if you didn't enter the pin on the watch before hand (and, uh, if you're carrying the gun and the watch, why would you not have already entered the pin?), there isn't a big sign that says "Harmless" on the gun.
You must have some very determined/observant muggers where you live.
Amazon dropping publishers is just an offense to me as their customer.
It also sounds like an insanely immature way of answering a question. The article wasn't too clear to someone like me who doesn't work in publishing, or maybe I'm just not awake yet, but it sounds like MacMillan just asked them to raise their prices, not "Macmillian said 'Raise the prices or don't sell our stuff'."
Here's an exchange which would have been much more professional and profitable for both parties, authors, and customers:
Macmillan"Hey we want to charge more for our books"
Amazon: "GO DIE IN A HOLE FOR QUESTIONING OUR PRICING STRUCTURE, YOU ****ING ****HEAD!!! But we will continue selling your books at the price we decide."
So, there should be tests. Depending on your score, you get to have (or not have) certain things in your vehicle,
like radios, heaters, people, pets, phones, etc.
Assuming those tests cost absolutely zero dollars to the state of California... well we still couldn't afford it.
Postulate: no greater crimes will be committed against humanity than when we discover the secrets to clinical immortality.
Okay, but it's going to be a while before that's anything other than academic, and it isn't sped up by the results here. The present study has preliminary results on signaling needed to make mouse blood stem cells divide more as they did when they were younger. One day we may be able to use this knowledge to improve immune function in seniors. Cell signaling tends to be very specific to the cell type, the context. We are most likely not going to find that these same signals make all other stem cells act new, like say the stem cells in your gut or the stem cells which would repair your heart.
This line of research is not going to make your body immortal, it's probably at best going to make you less susceptible to infection as a senior citizen. Which is good, it's just not the sci-fi you're thinking of.
Except acting young again, does mean they stem cells will have lost any genetic damage, that occurred though aging. Perphaps some day though medicine will be able to produce truely young stem cells, but that would require checking that the DNA hasn't mutated from the orignal young cell line
The current thinking in the field is that stem cells are generally more resistant to DNA damage than many other types of cells. A lot of damage comes from when the cell replicates it's DNA in preparation for division. The "textbook" stem cell don't seem to divide very often, instead they divide once to make transit amplifying cells, which divide like mad for a short period, making cells which will eventually mature and then not divide again. Why exactly older stem cells don't replentish the immune system, it sounds like that isn't known. They did say it had something to do with a growth factor, it sounds like it has little to do with DNA damage in the stem cells.
So my understanding of current stem cell theory is that stem cells won't have as much DNA damage as you would expect, and that shouldn't affect their behavior. I am not a stem cell biologist though, my understanding may be obsolete by now, and of course the "textbook" understanding of stem cells in general may or may not be true for any or all stem cell examples, such as the hematopoetic stem cells discussed here.
PETA is going to go ape-shit.
True, but off-topic. They're probably going to go ape-shit over someone wearing fake leather. I doubt they are going to be reading the methods sections of scientific papers, they'd probably get upset over the non-cruelty-free ink the paper was printed on first.
Buy a brick of velveeta cheese and a bottle of castor oil. Sprinkle some of the castor oil on the brick and feed it to the dog every time it gets out of the fence.
How appropriate, that sounds more like a Jack O'Neil solution than a MacGyver solution. MacGyver would have increased the voltage to the dog using a paper clip, a roll of newspaper, and two tube socks. A Samantha Carter solution of course would be to trap the dog and the neighbor in a black hole paralell universe using the power of science. A Daniel Jackson solution would be to interpret the ancient runes on the dog's collar, call the neighbor, and whine until the neighbor agreed to promise to not let the dog get over into the yard again. Teal'c would just stare the neighbor down, clenching and unclenching his jaw, until the neighbor shit his pants and moved away.
This is just an attempt by apple to make this appealing.
It's a genius strategy really. What do rich hipsters want more than anything? Answer: board games.
Do stupid laws and frivolous lawsuits make you too afraid to help someone in trouble?
I know it was a rhetorical question, but the answer is definitely no, I had never heard of that before (IANAL). Is it a widespread thing? I googled "sued for helping" and then "good samaritan sued" and got some malpractice pages and one case of a woman in LA being pulled from a car and getting paralyzed. Is that it, or are there a lot more cases? We don't seem to be experiencing a rash of thousands of people trying to get rich by suing people who come to their aid. If that really is the one case, I would argue that there's not exactly anything wrong here. One case doesn't mean there is a general big problem with lawsuits and helping people out. It's too bad for the friend, and while I don't agree with the plantiff, I'd imagine if you were suddenly a quadruplegic, with no source of income, facing huge medical bills etc, desperation could get the better of you, but that isn't a common case and reaction.
Anyway, if that's the rationale behind the law, I think the bigger issue is "Why are we passing laws based off one isolated case?" I've been sued for a freak skiing accident, yet it didn't even cross my mind to stop skiing to prevent that one case from ever happening again, yet california appears to be doing that on a huge scale.
Again, assuming there aren't a lot more cases that I'm just not finding in my exhaustive "first page of google hits" research...
What's the big benefit of harvesting embryo's?
A man's gotta have hobbies.
That, and they still are good for research. If you want to study human cell biology, like how the embryo makes liver cells initially, this is an easier way.
I could be wrong, but I think I remember hearing that male pattern baldness wasn't caused by a loss of hair follicle stem cells, it was caused by a loss of signaling in the niche the hair cells reside in.
I guess it's possible that induced pluripotent stem cells could be used to make new scalp, including the niches, and then you could put that on, essentially resetting the clock so you'd have 20 or so more years of hair.
(Disclaimer, I heard a seminar on baldness and stem cells over a year ago, so that could be outdated in addition to partially forgotten. Don't clone yourself, scalp him, and then sue me because you went bald in under a year.)
If you never do research with fetal stem cells, you'll never know what they can do.
To add to that, you know what research started us down this whole avenue, right? There are quite a few genes in the genome, but they only looked at 19
How did they come up with that magic 19 instead of like 100,000 in the mouse genome? Other studies that used fetal stem cells, or possibly IPsC cell studies, which themselves were discovered based on knowledge gleaned from studies in fetal stem cells.
If there had been no research on fetal stem cells we wouldn't have this, induced pluripotent stem cells, OR much knowledge about adult stem cells (which, not for nothing, haven't gotten us to the finish line yet, which is -why- research continues) and very little hope for anyone who has medical conditions like paralysis or parkinson's disease.
Instead we would have a little more incinerated biomedical waste from fertilization clinics.
Yeah, we really made the wrong decision there.
The foreskin contains about 90% of the nerve endings on the penis.
So I'd have more nerves to stimulate down there, and be even less than a one minute man if I hadn't been circumsized? Thanks Mom and Dad!
For those of you trying to find the actual nature article, here. I know we hate paywalls, but it should really be required for submission to slashdot that a link to the real paper, not preview, be included.
I am not a stem cell biologist, nor am I a neurobiologist, and I will need to read the paper more carefully when I’m at home, but some of my thoughts:
There do seem to be some hurdles to using this in humans, but many are trivial in comparison, and the reason the authors didn’t do them yet is because they wanted to get this out there before anyone else did. For one thing, they haven’t shown this in humans yet, but it should work in human cells that’s their stated next step. These cells were grown using dead mouse “feeder cells” which is common in cell culture, but complicates things for human therapy. You don’t want even dead mouse cells or other people’s dead cells in something that is going to go into your brain. People are working on culturing without feeder cells, I’m not sure where they are on that. The method of getting the 3 genes in is also an issue. These guys used lentiviral transfection, which is not something you want for human cells. Earlier work on IPSC got it done by incubating cells with transcription factor –protein- modified to penetrate cells. That might be a good next step here, though it would probably decrease the efficiency.
A bigger issue to me is what they are transfecting. They’re putting in three transcription factors, Ascl1, Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l. One of them, Ascl1, is found in many cancers (according to wiki anyway) and might be tumorgenic. Especially if they find they can’t get it to work without viral transfection, that could be a concern. The other two though aren’t tumorgenic apparently. Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l are both associated with neuron differentiation, which is interesting.
They did overcome a big hurdle: these are not pluripotent, which probably means there’s less chance of causing tumors, teratomas. With induced pluripotent cells, that is a concern. If you were to inject IpsC into your brain, you don’t know what you’re going to get. You could get bone cells growing in there, cells which aren’t supposed to be there that could potentially cause tumor formation. This doesn’t seem like that will be an issue here, they apparently get all neurons, neurons which appear not to continue dividing. I do find it a little hard to believe though that these only produce neurons and never glial cells, though I’ll need to reread it a few more times.
This is also a interesting paradigm shift for developmental biologists: apparently you don’t have to go back to square one to switch cell fates, it will take longer and be less efficient to do so. IpsC take about a month to become pluripotent and then be grown back into neurons, and only about 1% of the cells do that if I recall correctly. These take a week.
For much of the study, they seem to be using 5 different factors, not the 3 minimal ones. They state that Ascl1 alone was sufficient to make these cells start looking like neurons, but the other two were needed for them to look and behave like mature neurons. Most of the figures were working with a combination of 5 factors. With all 5, they showed a good mix of different types of neurons, but that had less efficient conversion than the minimal 3. I’m wondering if you’d actually be able to get all the different types of mature neurons with just the 3. I’d guess it’s not that they intentionally did it that way, but they wanted to hurry up and publish ASAP, so they skipped doing that characterization for now.
One problem facing all these therapies eventually, as I understand it, is that you want to get one specific type of neuron for therapy. I have no idea what strategies there are to direct differentiation into specific types of neurons, but this seems like it would be the bigger hurdle.