find something that targets and destroys these mutant cells, boom, cure for cancer...
find something that cuts off the blood supply to said mutant cells, boom! cure for cancer...
Unfortunately, a cure that non-specific also targets normal stem cells, and the treatment actually curing cancer vs. killing the patient becomes a dice game that works on small cancers.
Isn't that EXACTLY what NK cells do naturally, though? They target abnormal cells that do not self-identify as belonging to the body (notable, cancerous cells) without targeting normal cells (stem cells included).
It's amplifying the body's own cure for cancer so that it works better, quicker, and more often. Sounds like a (potential) cure to me.
Pluto is a planet in the same way that Europe is a continent. I see no reason why we can't have a definition that say "these nine things are planets".
Maybe because it's not scientific? Ceres was downgraded from planet to asteroid in the early 1800s for the same reason (it was only one of many objects in the region). Pluto really should have been downgraded a while back when it was found to be only one of many Kuiper Belt Objects, but it was so much larger they let it slide. Suddenly you get Eris, which is bigger than Pluto. It would be hard to classify Eris as a planet, since we know it's just a big trans-Neptunian object. However, that would mean that we were inconsistent in our naming of planets.
Really, planets used to be defined pseudo-randomly. It was somewhat historical, the first 9 objects orbiting the sun, although with the good sense to exclude Ceres quickly when the asteroid belt was discovered. To create a definition based on physical properties, we either needed to cut Pluto loose, or add Eris at a minimum, and possibly the other 3 dwarf planets as well!
There's no reason not to have a special place in our hearts for Pluto. There is a reason not to call it a planet, and it's scientific. It's the failure to downgrade it earlier that was the political/emotional reasoning.
Ah, but these cells are the ones that normally prevent cellular mutations from becoming tumors. It's the body's own defense mechanism, and it works the vast majority of the time. If you can increase the number of NK cells, you increase the body's defenses against all forms of cancer, including relapses. In fact, this treatment would be especially good at relapses, since part of their purpose is to destroy individual cancerous cells before they can grow into tumors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_killer_cell
While there are obviously some hurdles, mobilizing the body's anti-cancer response enough to overpower tumors sounds like a cure to me.
I agree absolutely, I am simply disagreeing with the author's methods. As you say, people need to be taught better so they get excited about science, rather than trying to fit the science into what is currently popular (celebrity watches and reality TV).
About Pluto specifically, I think there was room to better educate the public about why the decision was made. However, there's no way to make that 'sexy' as Americans think of it currently. For it to be something that Americans would be actively engaged and interested in (beyond simply being angry), you hit the nail on the head that we must have better education.
My thought was simply not to put the cart before the horse. The education needs to be done before we can engage the public on questions such as 'is this ball of ice a planet?' Once we have done that we might get a useful response from the public based both on reason and nostalgia, rather than the two populations being at odds with each other.
From quotes on websites to a joke by Stephen Colbert, they offer anecdotes about how the public was against the IAUâ(TM)s (International Astronomical Union) decision to remove Pluto from the list of planets, leading the authors to call the situation a âoeplanetary crack-upâ and then ask, âoeDidnâ(TM)t the scientists involved foresee such a public outcry?â Well, if the scientists did foresee an outcry, then what? Should they conduct a public vote next time?
Mooney and Kirshenbaum barely mention any of the scientific bases for the IAUâ(TM)s decision. Instead, they present the case as if the astronomers chose to reclassify Pluto on an inexplicable whim, and it makes one question whether or not the authors looked into any of the actual science for themselves.
I think it's pretty well established that the goal should not be to fit science into pop-culture, at least not if we want it to remain correct and relevent. Your average citizen doesn't care that pluto is only the first discovered Kuiper Belt object, they care that they learned it was a planet when they were a kid. That isn't thinking scientifically. There is no way to make the decision popular without compromising on proper science.
It's not an easy problem to fix. It seems to me like it requires you to teach people to care about science, rather than making science into something people care about. It wasn't that long ago when Bill Nye was getting kids interested in more pure science. Now about the best we have is Mythbusters, which certainly piques curiosity, although it has to resort to explosions and skipping most of the steps in the scientific method to make it palatable. They even have a "warning" for science content, which is a bad sign (tongue-in-cheek or not). Maybe we could get back to that, but it seems the prevailing momentum is toward smaller tidbits and shallower topics.
Makes sense to me, advertise your game heavily influenced by the 7 deadly sins by using marketing tied to the 7 deadly sins.
Their execution was a little... off on a couple of the stunts (lust). This latest greed ploy, though, is quite good. Guaranteed to get press, generates lots of debate (and therefor attention), and doesn't hurt anybody. Well, I suppose if a reviewer gets caught cashing the check they could lose credibility, but it's better than asking a convention full of geeks to commit "acts of lust" with booth babes.
Hmm, If I remember correctly from my physics class, any time electrons move through a magnetic field, don't they produce electric forces in a direction perpedicular to the motion through the magnetic field?
An electrical current generates a magnetic field surrounding it. In the presence of another magnetic field, the two push against each other (as magnets do) and produce a physical force on the condustor.
And as TFA mentions, rats suffered no ill effects from long-term exposure to strong (probably several Tesla) magnetic fields. It is possible that intensely strong (hundreds or thousands of Tesla) could cause issues, though, but that's what research and experiments are meant to determine.
Wait, if you move a wire through an unchanging field (perpendicularly), you'll induce a current, right? You'll also induce one if you hold a wire still in a field whose strength is changing.
A voltage is induced only when the magnetic flux (aka, the strength of the magnetic field) in the wire changes. If the wire is moving perpendicular to the field in such a way that the wire 'sees' a constant magnetic field strength (in theory), there will be no voltage. In practice this is very difficult to do (the wire will move at least a little bit). Per the definition you are correct that a time-varying magnetic field will also induce a voltage (this is how the secondary on a transformer works). However, the field in the article is stationary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction
On a related note, axons are in many ways like long wires. Move around in a high magnetic field, and you'll notice odd effects. It's more of a problem for people than for mice -- our axons run longer, and so inductive effects are stronger.
As my sibling post mentions, axons do not act like wires in terms of electromagnetism. It is possible that the mechanism could be affected by very strong magnetic fields, but they shouldn't induce a current in neurons.
Have they been overused? Yes, but so have clubs and fists. Bad or scared cops will will abuse whatever weapons you put into their hands.
Given the state of public opinion, it would be more likely that a cop would be disciplined for beating you unnecessarily than for tasing you unnecessarily. Tasers have become so blase that they are rarely considered unnecessary force (by the system, at least).
My thought is that in the instance where mild force is justified, make that mild physical force. When severe force is needed, use a stun gun. And when it's unnecessary force that you're trying to fight in court, you're more likely to convince a judge/jury that you shouldn't have been bludgened than you shouldn't have been tasered.
The field in this experiment isn't EM radiation at all. It's just a (really big) magnet. There is no time varying component (it has no frequency) so it does not have an electric component (look up Maxwell's equations). This has as much to do with EM radiation as a cup of water on your desk has to do with the waves on the ocean.
That said, if you move a wire through it, you'll generate one hell of an electic field, but only while the strength of the magnetic field through the wire is changing.
It took 16 Tesla to float a frog, so it would take about 150kT to levitate a human. The strongest field created by man was 2.8kT, but was a single pulse and created with explosives. The strongest continuous field was 45T so good luck waiting for the scale-up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(magnetic_field)
That said, I'd wait to see the long term physiological effects on the mice. It's possible that any cellular damage would scale up as well...
Right, but that should be reserved for times when otherwise an officer would use a firearm to subdue the perp. Tasers have expanded their role to include instances where the officer would have just hit the perp and been rough with them.
There are some times when a taser can fit between these two places (some massive dude high on PCP is threatening to pummel a cop with his fists, I'm not going to require the cop to subdue him physically if he has access to a stun gun), but in general, I think that most of your taser stories ('don't tase me bro' guy or the naked wizard) would be better handled by just cuffing them roughly. Of course, when you have a dude covered in kerosene charging you with a lighter, a taser seems like a better alternative than an officer dying or needing to shoot the guy in the kneecaps.
Just like a club is less lethal than a sword... but it still does 1d6.
Personally, most taser incidents where the perp is not threatening the officer's safety should be replaced with a rap on the calf or elsewhere with a smaller billy-club. Still hurts, without resorting to electric shocks. Less likely to die from 'mysterious circumstances' from a sharp rap on a muscle than from electrical pulses (and less of an uproar, probably, when they do).
Or in brief, the main problem is almost non-existent immunity for this strain in the population. So probably YOU will get it once the flu season starts.
Which, more importantly, means that those who are at risk for flu complications are more likely to catch the flu this year. The mortality rate of sick people isn't any higher, but if more people get sick then the mortality rate overall will be higher.
Of course this is in addition to all the people who get the seasonal strain as well (some people will get swine but not seasonal, some will get the opposite, and some will even get both). But either way, if more people are sick at the same mortality rate, the total dead will also increase. The short way to say it: worry less about mortality rate, worry more about transmission rate.
The big worry isn't all the athletic, healthy, strapping young gamers at PAX. It's their high-risk friends, family members, co-workers, etc who can easily contract the virus from them. Worry less about the cosplayers, worry more about the cosplayer's teacher's ailing mother who ends up severely ill or dead.
My assumption is they came to 18W by measuring the power output of this much hair, guessing how much more he could add in parallel, and scaling it to 18W. Normal photovoltaics increase current by wiring the cells in parallel, so I'm guessing that's the scale-up plan (assuming it works).
The article claims the panel is 18W, not the individual cells making up the panel. Assuming the panel is about a square meter, bright sunlight of 1000W/m/m, and 2% efficient, that works out to 20W for the panel. If the panel were made of 64 cells (8x8) then each cell would be 0.3W.
Still not sure this is possible with hair, but the numbers are reasonable for photovoltaics.
Even being conservative with power, an LCD still draws power on static images, while e-ink does not. This means that while an OLPC (with a 2W power goal) might last 12 hours on a 24Wh battery, a Kindle will last 12 days worth of reading at a standard pace with the same size battery. I've heard Kindle users getting 40 hours or reading time (no wi-fi) on a tiny battery (Agai, for the application (lots of static images, several seconds apart) e-ink will almost always be better.
To which, I feel, a full-book keyword search could perform better in many circumstances.
An e-book reader doesn't have to be better in every quality, just enough to justify its cost to each person. Depending on the type of reading you do, your habits, how many books you read, etc an e-book reader could be well suited for you, or it might be significantly more/less than you need/want. That just means there's still a market for both books and e-books.
Unless your name is Johnny 5, you aren't reading each page. A Kindle could flip from the first to the last page in the same amount of time as any other page flip, assuming you don't care about reading what's in between (which seems to be the case in your analogy).
They still draw power constantly to display an image. This means they've only solved half of the problem (outdoor readability), and it's the half that's less important for e-books. E-ink is used because it draws no power while displaying a static image, which is >90% of the time while reading a book.
The Pixel Qi display is better for netbooks, where video is actually needed and removing the backlight is a sufficient power reduction.
I can't wait to pay 50% more for a second screen to my ebook reader so that I can look at both pages surrounding every other page break at the same time.
I can't wait for the reduced battery life that comes from having an additional screen, LCD screens, a touchpad, and other things that don't help me read books or PDFs more easily!
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Unfortunately, a cure that non-specific also targets normal stem cells, and the treatment actually curing cancer vs. killing the patient becomes a dice game that works on small cancers.
Isn't that EXACTLY what NK cells do naturally, though? They target abnormal cells that do not self-identify as belonging to the body (notable, cancerous cells) without targeting normal cells (stem cells included).
It's amplifying the body's own cure for cancer so that it works better, quicker, and more often. Sounds like a (potential) cure to me.
Pluto is a planet in the same way that Europe is a continent. I see no reason why we can't have a definition that say "these nine things are planets".
Maybe because it's not scientific? Ceres was downgraded from planet to asteroid in the early 1800s for the same reason (it was only one of many objects in the region). Pluto really should have been downgraded a while back when it was found to be only one of many Kuiper Belt Objects, but it was so much larger they let it slide. Suddenly you get Eris, which is bigger than Pluto. It would be hard to classify Eris as a planet, since we know it's just a big trans-Neptunian object. However, that would mean that we were inconsistent in our naming of planets.
Really, planets used to be defined pseudo-randomly. It was somewhat historical, the first 9 objects orbiting the sun, although with the good sense to exclude Ceres quickly when the asteroid belt was discovered. To create a definition based on physical properties, we either needed to cut Pluto loose, or add Eris at a minimum, and possibly the other 3 dwarf planets as well!
There's no reason not to have a special place in our hearts for Pluto. There is a reason not to call it a planet, and it's scientific. It's the failure to downgrade it earlier that was the political/emotional reasoning.
Ah, but these cells are the ones that normally prevent cellular mutations from becoming tumors. It's the body's own defense mechanism, and it works the vast majority of the time. If you can increase the number of NK cells, you increase the body's defenses against all forms of cancer, including relapses. In fact, this treatment would be especially good at relapses, since part of their purpose is to destroy individual cancerous cells before they can grow into tumors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_killer_cell
While there are obviously some hurdles, mobilizing the body's anti-cancer response enough to overpower tumors sounds like a cure to me.
I agree absolutely, I am simply disagreeing with the author's methods. As you say, people need to be taught better so they get excited about science, rather than trying to fit the science into what is currently popular (celebrity watches and reality TV).
About Pluto specifically, I think there was room to better educate the public about why the decision was made. However, there's no way to make that 'sexy' as Americans think of it currently. For it to be something that Americans would be actively engaged and interested in (beyond simply being angry), you hit the nail on the head that we must have better education.
My thought was simply not to put the cart before the horse. The education needs to be done before we can engage the public on questions such as 'is this ball of ice a planet?' Once we have done that we might get a useful response from the public based both on reason and nostalgia, rather than the two populations being at odds with each other.
From TFA:
From quotes on websites to a joke by Stephen Colbert, they offer anecdotes about how the public was against the IAUâ(TM)s (International Astronomical Union) decision to remove Pluto from the list of planets, leading the authors to call the situation a âoeplanetary crack-upâ and then ask, âoeDidnâ(TM)t the scientists involved foresee such a public outcry?â Well, if the scientists did foresee an outcry, then what? Should they conduct a public vote next time?
Mooney and Kirshenbaum barely mention any of the scientific bases for the IAUâ(TM)s decision. Instead, they present the case as if the astronomers chose to reclassify Pluto on an inexplicable whim, and it makes one question whether or not the authors looked into any of the actual science for themselves.
I think it's pretty well established that the goal should not be to fit science into pop-culture, at least not if we want it to remain correct and relevent. Your average citizen doesn't care that pluto is only the first discovered Kuiper Belt object, they care that they learned it was a planet when they were a kid. That isn't thinking scientifically. There is no way to make the decision popular without compromising on proper science.
It's not an easy problem to fix. It seems to me like it requires you to teach people to care about science, rather than making science into something people care about. It wasn't that long ago when Bill Nye was getting kids interested in more pure science. Now about the best we have is Mythbusters, which certainly piques curiosity, although it has to resort to explosions and skipping most of the steps in the scientific method to make it palatable. They even have a "warning" for science content, which is a bad sign (tongue-in-cheek or not). Maybe we could get back to that, but it seems the prevailing momentum is toward smaller tidbits and shallower topics.
Good call, I wasn't particularly putting much thought in. I'm too far into applications (Electrical Engineering), I've kinda forgotten my basics.
Makes sense to me, advertise your game heavily influenced by the 7 deadly sins by using marketing tied to the 7 deadly sins.
Their execution was a little... off on a couple of the stunts (lust). This latest greed ploy, though, is quite good. Guaranteed to get press, generates lots of debate (and therefor attention), and doesn't hurt anybody. Well, I suppose if a reviewer gets caught cashing the check they could lose credibility, but it's better than asking a convention full of geeks to commit "acts of lust" with booth babes.
Hmm, If I remember correctly from my physics class, any time electrons move through a magnetic field, don't they produce electric forces in a direction perpedicular to the motion through the magnetic field?
An electrical current generates a magnetic field surrounding it. In the presence of another magnetic field, the two push against each other (as magnets do) and produce a physical force on the condustor.
And as TFA mentions, rats suffered no ill effects from long-term exposure to strong (probably several Tesla) magnetic fields. It is possible that intensely strong (hundreds or thousands of Tesla) could cause issues, though, but that's what research and experiments are meant to determine.
Wait, if you move a wire through an unchanging field (perpendicularly), you'll induce a current, right? You'll also induce one if you hold a wire still in a field whose strength is changing.
A voltage is induced only when the magnetic flux (aka, the strength of the magnetic field) in the wire changes. If the wire is moving perpendicular to the field in such a way that the wire 'sees' a constant magnetic field strength (in theory), there will be no voltage. In practice this is very difficult to do (the wire will move at least a little bit).
Per the definition you are correct that a time-varying magnetic field will also induce a voltage (this is how the secondary on a transformer works). However, the field in the article is stationary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction
On a related note, axons are in many ways like long wires. Move around in a high magnetic field, and you'll notice odd effects. It's more of a problem for people than for mice -- our axons run longer, and so inductive effects are stronger.
As my sibling post mentions, axons do not act like wires in terms of electromagnetism. It is possible that the mechanism could be affected by very strong magnetic fields, but they shouldn't induce a current in neurons.
Have they been overused? Yes, but so have clubs and fists. Bad or scared cops will will abuse whatever weapons you put into their hands.
Given the state of public opinion, it would be more likely that a cop would be disciplined for beating you unnecessarily than for tasing you unnecessarily. Tasers have become so blase that they are rarely considered unnecessary force (by the system, at least).
My thought is that in the instance where mild force is justified, make that mild physical force. When severe force is needed, use a stun gun. And when it's unnecessary force that you're trying to fight in court, you're more likely to convince a judge/jury that you shouldn't have been bludgened than you shouldn't have been tasered.
The field in this experiment isn't EM radiation at all. It's just a (really big) magnet. There is no time varying component (it has no frequency) so it does not have an electric component (look up Maxwell's equations). This has as much to do with EM radiation as a cup of water on your desk has to do with the waves on the ocean.
That said, if you move a wire through it, you'll generate one hell of an electic field, but only while the strength of the magnetic field through the wire is changing.
It took 16 Tesla to float a frog, so it would take about 150kT to levitate a human. The strongest field created by man was 2.8kT, but was a single pulse and created with explosives. The strongest continuous field was 45T so good luck waiting for the scale-up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(magnetic_field)
That said, I'd wait to see the long term physiological effects on the mice. It's possible that any cellular damage would scale up as well...
Right, but that should be reserved for times when otherwise an officer would use a firearm to subdue the perp. Tasers have expanded their role to include instances where the officer would have just hit the perp and been rough with them.
There are some times when a taser can fit between these two places (some massive dude high on PCP is threatening to pummel a cop with his fists, I'm not going to require the cop to subdue him physically if he has access to a stun gun), but in general, I think that most of your taser stories ('don't tase me bro' guy or the naked wizard) would be better handled by just cuffing them roughly. Of course, when you have a dude covered in kerosene charging you with a lighter, a taser seems like a better alternative than an officer dying or needing to shoot the guy in the kneecaps.
Just like a club is less lethal than a sword... but it still does 1d6.
Personally, most taser incidents where the perp is not threatening the officer's safety should be replaced with a rap on the calf or elsewhere with a smaller billy-club. Still hurts, without resorting to electric shocks. Less likely to die from 'mysterious circumstances' from a sharp rap on a muscle than from electrical pulses (and less of an uproar, probably, when they do).
Thank you, SilverEyes, that was the joke...
Or in brief, the main problem is almost non-existent immunity for this strain in the population. So probably YOU will get it once the flu season starts.
Which, more importantly, means that those who are at risk for flu complications are more likely to catch the flu this year. The mortality rate of sick people isn't any higher, but if more people get sick then the mortality rate overall will be higher.
Of course this is in addition to all the people who get the seasonal strain as well (some people will get swine but not seasonal, some will get the opposite, and some will even get both). But either way, if more people are sick at the same mortality rate, the total dead will also increase. The short way to say it: worry less about mortality rate, worry more about transmission rate.
The big worry isn't all the athletic, healthy, strapping young gamers at PAX. It's their high-risk friends, family members, co-workers, etc who can easily contract the virus from them. Worry less about the cosplayers, worry more about the cosplayer's teacher's ailing mother who ends up severely ill or dead.
My assumption is they came to 18W by measuring the power output of this much hair, guessing how much more he could add in parallel, and scaling it to 18W. Normal photovoltaics increase current by wiring the cells in parallel, so I'm guessing that's the scale-up plan (assuming it works).
The article claims the panel is 18W, not the individual cells making up the panel. Assuming the panel is about a square meter, bright sunlight of 1000W/m/m, and 2% efficient, that works out to 20W for the panel. If the panel were made of 64 cells (8x8) then each cell would be 0.3W.
Still not sure this is possible with hair, but the numbers are reasonable for photovoltaics.
Even being conservative with power, an LCD still draws power on static images, while e-ink does not. This means that while an OLPC (with a 2W power goal) might last 12 hours on a 24Wh battery, a Kindle will last 12 days worth of reading at a standard pace with the same size battery. I've heard Kindle users getting 40 hours or reading time (no wi-fi) on a tiny battery (Agai, for the application (lots of static images, several seconds apart) e-ink will almost always be better.
To which, I feel, a full-book keyword search could perform better in many circumstances.
An e-book reader doesn't have to be better in every quality, just enough to justify its cost to each person. Depending on the type of reading you do, your habits, how many books you read, etc an e-book reader could be well suited for you, or it might be significantly more/less than you need/want. That just means there's still a market for both books and e-books.
So, an equivalent average total speed would only require the e-ink to refresh twice as fast as your average page turn. Seems reasonable to me.
Unless your name is Johnny 5, you aren't reading each page. A Kindle could flip from the first to the last page in the same amount of time as any other page flip, assuming you don't care about reading what's in between (which seems to be the case in your analogy).
They still draw power constantly to display an image. This means they've only solved half of the problem (outdoor readability), and it's the half that's less important for e-books. E-ink is used because it draws no power while displaying a static image, which is >90% of the time while reading a book.
The Pixel Qi display is better for netbooks, where video is actually needed and removing the backlight is a sufficient power reduction.
I can't wait to pay 50% more for a second screen to my ebook reader so that I can look at both pages surrounding every other page break at the same time.
I can't wait for the reduced battery life that comes from having an additional screen, LCD screens, a touchpad, and other things that don't help me read books or PDFs more easily!