I don't know if carbonic anhydrase speeds up the reverse proton reaction.
Yes it does. From wiki:
"The reverse reaction is also relatively slow (kinetics in the 15-second range), which is why a carbonated drink does not instantly degas when opening the container, but will rapidly degas in one's mouth when carbonic anhydrase is added with saliva.
HCO_3^- + H^+ H_2CO_3 -> CO_2 + H_2O (in lungs and nephrons of the kidney - low CO2 concentration, in plant cells) "
But I actually learned about it in med school. There are two places in the body with lots of carbonic anhydrase - the kidney, where the bicarbonate ion is "saved" for use as the body's buffer, and excess protons are excreted (which is why urine usually has an acidic pH), and the lung, where excess bicarbonate ion is converted to CO2 in solution - the increased pCO2 in the lung facilitates its diffusion out of the blood and into the alveolus (And eventually out of the body).
The whole acid/base balance of the body is maintained by these two organs - with the lung able to provide quick adjustments in pCO2 (and thus indirectly, HCO3-) by changing the ventilation rate/volume, and over the long term (days) the kidney, by "saving" more (or less) HCO3-...
I generally don't pull anything out of my ass, much less numbers. Not my fault if all you do is listen to mainstream media coverage (coverup?) of the worst financial disaster ever.
This means that we will eventually turn the oceans into Coca Cola. Not too good for the flora and fauna, I can imagine. There's a practical limit to the CO2 that the oceans can absorb.
Of course if we could create some sort of genetically engineered algae that happened to produce carbonic anhydrase, you'd be able to degas huge amounts of ocean water just by pouring it into your algae tank...
For the life of me I can't see how this will be cost effective or environmentally friendly.
Oh it's carbon neutral, didn't you read? I mean, forget about all the CO2 produced when vast amounts of energy are expended to obtain, store, ship, and heat all that non-naturally occurring hydrogen - you don't need to know about THAT CO2 (kinda like the extra $14 trillion dollars the US government is currently printing/spending - what you thought the "bailouts" totaled 2 trillion?). But the carbon monoxide goes in, and comes out, in a 1:1 environmentally friendly ratio.
This is after all a US government program. You can TRUST the US government!
The World Trade Organization has found in favor of Antigua, and states that the US is in violation of the law by making online gambling illegal just because it wants to protect its brick and mortar casinos...
However the US threatens others with the UN, WTO, sanctions, military force when it wants to, and ignores those organizations when they become "inconvenient". And then Americans wonder why they are hated everywhere. That's ok, keep printing those dollars (the Federal Reserve is now the biggest purchaser of US treasuries - imagine that), propping up that bubble and lying to the public with imaginary "inflation" and "employment" figures, America. The whole house of cards will come down soon enough.
drugs ending in "dipine" are usually calcium channel blockers - amlodipine, nifedipine, etc. drugs ending in tidine are usually antihistamines - cimetidine, famotidine, ranitidine, etc. drugs ending in sone are usually steroids - prednisone, prednisolone, betamethasone, etc drugs ending in "pril" are usually ACE inhibitors - enalapril, captopril, etc drugs ending in "sartan" are usually AT1 blockers - valsartan, ibersartan, etc
and finally drugs ending in olol are usually beta blockers, there's like 30 of them or more (who cares).
What, did you think we actually MEMORIZED every single name of every single drug? Learn the rules, then learn the exceptions. Of course drug companies STILL love to screw us over with proprietary brand names that have NOTHING to do with the actual drug involved:)
I used to play a game called "Island of Kesmai", an ASCII pseudo-graphic multi-player RPG. My guild (the KILL guild) would specialize in these silly antics, such as attacking the dragon with a broken glass bottle, rocks, coins, and other fairly harmless items. I can't believe we paid $6+/hour for such silly stuff, but well, we had fun. Oh and yes we killed it - eventually...
From TFA: We would ask patients to go without cigarettes for 12 hours.
IDIOTS. Anyone who has ever quit smoking will tell you the HELL they go through in the first few days. So they take smokers, ask them to stop smoking, MARVEL at the fact that the patient who is struggling to maintain a grasp on reality anyway - loses it, and then claim that nicotine improves brain function?
How about a different conclusion: NICOTINE WITHDRAWAL IMPAIRS BRAIN FUNCTION IN SCHIZOPHRENICS. What a shocker. Well I dunno about "Cosmos Online" being a peer reviewed journal (as if even THAT matters nowadays), but this is a classic example of bad science, or incredibly bad reporting.
A good study would be to get non smoking schizophrenics to start smoking, and see if they improve, but the ethics committee would never approve it...
I don't prescribe it. But it's the official "government" beta blocker here. That or you could dream about your patient taking propanolol qid... yeah like that's going to happen.
The others - metoprolol, carvedilol (Coreg down here, which is what I mainly prescribe), etc, are all available on the private market - for a price. $50 a month or so. However this is a country where the average income is less than $1000 a month. No one can afford it except the upper middle class and higher.
Quite frankly, all the countries with "socialized medicine" are not paying their fair share for medical research.
Then please explain to me why the piece of plastic that goes on an otoscope, so that I can look in your ear and is disposable, cost ME $0.75? It's a fricken piece of plastic for god's sake. There's no reason it shouldn't cost a penny, or two. But NOOOOO, because it's MEDICAL EQUIPMENT, it's VERY expensive. Must be that special martian plastic.
Same with all other medical equipment. Earlier I heard someone complaining about $200 medical visitis. If you think a doctor is putting $200 in his pocket per patient, think again. You have no idea what it costs to set up and run a medical practice. Then let's talk liability insurance.
Me, I used to make around $15 per patient PROFIT. An hour that works out to around $45 in my pocket. Not bad for 9 years of school, huh? Why do you think I quit. I make more on the stock market per DAY as a day trader than I did in a week as a physician. Plus no stock has ever called me at 3am with a case of the sniffles.
I don't practice in the USA so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to make a detailed post about that. However I know a lot of professionals who have quit for just that reason - they don't enjoy being told how to practice medicine by an accountant.
From my perspective, working in a country that has both a mandatory (ie, it gets docked from your paycheck every month) health care system BUT ALSO offers private medicine for those rich enough to afford to skip the waiting lists, working for the government can't be much different than an HMO. Which is why I no longer work for the government.
All the drugs are generics - which isn't too bad except that every year or so they have new biddings to fill their purchasing contracts for the following year, and usually switch labs. Now a pharmacologist will talk a lot of BS about the area under the curve and "bioequivalence", but the truth is that even the same drug in the same dose from a different lab will have different rates of absorption, etc. So every year or so all the chronic patients become uncompensated, but all "administration" sees is that they saved $50k or so on their purchase of Atenolol... job well done. Who cares if all the medical beds are full of hypertensives who were taking their medication as usual and suddenly started having hypertensive crises.
The problem is that medicine is no longer practiced by doctors. We just follow the guidelines established by HMO's or pen pushers (give that patient a CT scan and we'll make next week hell for you if you can't think of a cheaper exam that would have been just as good), try to avoid the shark infested pools of lawyers swimming on the other side of the ledge just waiting for a chance to SETTLE (read: free money), and just do what everyone else does.
And yet in most countries it is a CRIME to practice medicine without a license. How did we let this happen? It's a WORLDWIDE phenomenon.
And I can tell you frankly that the medical profession is split in two. There are people who are in it for the human aspect - usually the doctors. Then there's the people who are in it for the money: The pharmaceutical companies.
This is not surprising, coming off another recent study done by (and now we learn that it was paid for) and published in a magazine owned by a subsidiary of Merck.
Just the fact that these companies are allowed to advertise on TV directly to patients is disgusting. But ask your doctor if XYZ is right for you, because you don't need it at all, or there's probably some cheaper similar drug whose patent has expired and costs 1/4 the price, but if you waste your doctor's time enough he'll write the prescription just to get you out of his office with a smile on your face. After all if he says "NO", you might not come back.
Just the fact that an HIV patient will literally die bankrupt, at $1000+ per month for the meds. Unless you're very rich, you won't be able to keep THAT up for very long, and when you run out of money - so sorry, we can recommend a hospice for you.
Pharmaceutical companies scream about billions of dollars in research, yet they can afford all that printed material for doctors, 5 star hotels for doctors for "seminars", pens, calculators, TV air time, etc. Yet some companies still make money with Aspirin - yes the name belongs to Bayer, but anyone can make and sell acetyl-salicylic acid - the patent expired years ago.
No, big pharma loves the protections patent law gives them, and if they can completely distort the market and throw actual science out of the window WHO CARES so long as it increases sales.
That's why we have Cochrane studies, where we DOCTORS look back at what we're doing and seeing if it REALLY IS effective. A new study from my country published by a close friend of mine suggests that having your blood pressure at 140/90mmHg gives NO INCREASED RISK of heart disease or stroke. But studies paid for by big pharma INSIST (and they've convinced the American Heart Association) that your blood pressure has to be UNDER 120/80. In fact, they want TEENAGERS to start taking blood pressure medication. Hey, at $100-200 per patient per month, SO WOULD I. But we know full well where the unethical branch of the medical sciences is...
The above comment is my opinion as a 3rd world physician, since I have to watch people die because they can't afford the few medications that DO work as advertised (and are thus even MORE expensive).
But the actual brain can change the synapses over time, making new ones and obsoleting old ones. I'd like to see some silicon do THAT. I wouldn't worry, we'll still be boss for a while.
Because if Microsoft reads it, expect a call from their lawyers for libel very very soon.
I dislike Microsoft and don't use most of their products, and have often been modded troll/flamebait for anti-Microsoft comments: HOWEVER: ONE example does not mean it's biased. I tried with several others and like many slashdotters I can't seem to find a bias. Now if the whole point of this article was to get more hits on bing - how desperate can you get?
A barcode or magnetic strip is safe in your wallet in your back pocket, RFID is not.
Safe? You've never heard of the "millionaire's march" down here in Central America. You are kidnapped at gunpoint, and forced to several ATMs where you insert your card and your PIN (or get your head blown off, choose). You keep hitting different ATMs until your account is empty or your maximum limit is reached (this usually happens late at night, so they can get two day's limits out of you). Then the criminals either kill you or dump you somewhere.
No, magnetic strips are not "safe" either. But they're a lot "safer" than RFID.
There's nothing particularly special on the RFID chip. A parking facility card and a passport generate the same amount of interesting information. A unique ID. Whew!
The problem is when you have another government computer that is counting on the Unique ID to be a UNIQUE ID, and using ONLY THAT parameter (plus other info also on the card) to identify someone - congratulations, you have just stolen someone else's identity.
Let's try to keep our government/authority-hate at least sort of grounded in reality.
Yes, we should all just roll over and pretend to be happy when criminal charges are brought against breaches of civil law. It's the new game in the US, has been for the past decade or so. I'm happy that the rate of violent crime in the US is so low that law enforcement has time to tase 70 year olds because their sons were speeding, tase and pepper spray epileptics having seizures, and arrest people for "stealing" a domain name.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if carbonic anhydrase speeds up the reverse proton reaction.
Yes it does. From wiki:
"The reverse reaction is also relatively slow (kinetics in the 15-second range), which is why a carbonated drink does not instantly degas when opening the container, but will rapidly degas in one's mouth when carbonic anhydrase is added with saliva.
HCO_3^- + H^+ H_2CO_3 -> CO_2 + H_2O (in lungs and nephrons of the kidney - low CO2 concentration, in plant cells) "
But I actually learned about it in med school. There are two places in the body with lots of carbonic anhydrase - the kidney, where the bicarbonate ion is "saved" for use as the body's buffer, and excess protons are excreted (which is why urine usually has an acidic pH), and the lung, where excess bicarbonate ion is converted to CO2 in solution - the increased pCO2 in the lung facilitates its diffusion out of the blood and into the alveolus (And eventually out of the body).
The whole acid/base balance of the body is maintained by these two organs - with the lung able to provide quick adjustments in pCO2 (and thus indirectly, HCO3-) by changing the ventilation rate/volume, and over the long term (days) the kidney, by "saving" more (or less) HCO3-...
Physiology is fun.
Sorry I rounded up, it's 13.5 trillion.
I generally don't pull anything out of my ass, much less numbers. Not my fault if all you do is listen to mainstream media coverage (coverup?) of the worst financial disaster ever.
oceans absorb CO2
CO2 + H20 H2CO3
H2CO3 ==> HC03- + H+ with a pKa of 3.6
This means that we will eventually turn the oceans into Coca Cola. Not too good for the flora and fauna, I can imagine. There's a practical limit to the CO2 that the oceans can absorb.
Of course if we could create some sort of genetically engineered algae that happened to produce carbonic anhydrase, you'd be able to degas huge amounts of ocean water just by pouring it into your algae tank...
For the life of me I can't see how this will be cost effective or environmentally friendly.
Oh it's carbon neutral, didn't you read? I mean, forget about all the CO2 produced when vast amounts of energy are expended to obtain, store, ship, and heat all that non-naturally occurring hydrogen - you don't need to know about THAT CO2 (kinda like the extra $14 trillion dollars the US government is currently printing/spending - what you thought the "bailouts" totaled 2 trillion?). But the carbon monoxide goes in, and comes out, in a 1:1 environmentally friendly ratio.
This is after all a US government program. You can TRUST the US government!
The World Trade Organization has found in favor of Antigua, and states that the US is in violation of the law by making online gambling illegal just because it wants to protect its brick and mortar casinos...
However the US threatens others with the UN, WTO, sanctions, military force when it wants to, and ignores those organizations when they become "inconvenient". And then Americans wonder why they are hated everywhere. That's ok, keep printing those dollars (the Federal Reserve is now the biggest purchaser of US treasuries - imagine that), propping up that bubble and lying to the public with imaginary "inflation" and "employment" figures, America. The whole house of cards will come down soon enough.
Standard SOP for solid waste burning is SERGEANT MAJOR IS A COCK SUCKER!
[citation needed]
And you come to slashdot to ask that question?
Start by hiring someone with real business talent to run it for you because you sound like your own worst enemy.
IF YOU CAN'T TRUST THE PEOPLE YOU HIRED THEN WHY DID YOU HIRE THEM?
that's pretty standard in the drug world.
drugs ending in "dipine" are usually calcium channel blockers - amlodipine, nifedipine, etc.
drugs ending in tidine are usually antihistamines - cimetidine, famotidine, ranitidine, etc.
drugs ending in sone are usually steroids - prednisone, prednisolone, betamethasone, etc
drugs ending in "pril" are usually ACE inhibitors - enalapril, captopril, etc
drugs ending in "sartan" are usually AT1 blockers - valsartan, ibersartan, etc
and finally drugs ending in olol are usually beta blockers, there's like 30 of them or more (who cares).
What, did you think we actually MEMORIZED every single name of every single drug? Learn the rules, then learn the exceptions. Of course drug companies STILL love to screw us over with proprietary brand names that have NOTHING to do with the actual drug involved :)
I used to play a game called "Island of Kesmai", an ASCII pseudo-graphic multi-player RPG. My guild (the KILL guild) would specialize in these silly antics, such as attacking the dragon with a broken glass bottle, rocks, coins, and other fairly harmless items. I can't believe we paid $6+/hour for such silly stuff, but well, we had fun. Oh and yes we killed it - eventually...
Was this study paid for by the tobacco industry?
From TFA: We would ask patients to go without cigarettes for 12 hours.
IDIOTS. Anyone who has ever quit smoking will tell you the HELL they go through in the first few days. So they take smokers, ask them to stop smoking, MARVEL at the fact that the patient who is struggling to maintain a grasp on reality anyway - loses it, and then claim that nicotine improves brain function?
How about a different conclusion: NICOTINE WITHDRAWAL IMPAIRS BRAIN FUNCTION IN SCHIZOPHRENICS. What a shocker. Well I dunno about "Cosmos Online" being a peer reviewed journal (as if even THAT matters nowadays), but this is a classic example of bad science, or incredibly bad reporting.
A good study would be to get non smoking schizophrenics to start smoking, and see if they improve, but the ethics committee would never approve it...
From one doc to another, stop using atenolol.
I don't prescribe it. But it's the official "government" beta blocker here. That or you could dream about your patient taking propanolol qid... yeah like that's going to happen.
The others - metoprolol, carvedilol (Coreg down here, which is what I mainly prescribe), etc, are all available on the private market - for a price. $50 a month or so. However this is a country where the average income is less than $1000 a month. No one can afford it except the upper middle class and higher.
Quite frankly, all the countries with "socialized medicine" are not paying their fair share for medical research.
Then please explain to me why the piece of plastic that goes on an otoscope, so that I can look in your ear and is disposable, cost ME $0.75? It's a fricken piece of plastic for god's sake. There's no reason it shouldn't cost a penny, or two. But NOOOOO, because it's MEDICAL EQUIPMENT, it's VERY expensive. Must be that special martian plastic.
Same with all other medical equipment. Earlier I heard someone complaining about $200 medical visitis. If you think a doctor is putting $200 in his pocket per patient, think again. You have no idea what it costs to set up and run a medical practice. Then let's talk liability insurance.
Me, I used to make around $15 per patient PROFIT. An hour that works out to around $45 in my pocket. Not bad for 9 years of school, huh? Why do you think I quit. I make more on the stock market per DAY as a day trader than I did in a week as a physician. Plus no stock has ever called me at 3am with a case of the sniffles.
Where does that leave the HMOs from the USA?
I don't practice in the USA so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to make a detailed post about that. However I know a lot of professionals who have quit for just that reason - they don't enjoy being told how to practice medicine by an accountant.
From my perspective, working in a country that has both a mandatory (ie, it gets docked from your paycheck every month) health care system BUT ALSO offers private medicine for those rich enough to afford to skip the waiting lists, working for the government can't be much different than an HMO. Which is why I no longer work for the government.
All the drugs are generics - which isn't too bad except that every year or so they have new biddings to fill their purchasing contracts for the following year, and usually switch labs. Now a pharmacologist will talk a lot of BS about the area under the curve and "bioequivalence", but the truth is that even the same drug in the same dose from a different lab will have different rates of absorption, etc. So every year or so all the chronic patients become uncompensated, but all "administration" sees is that they saved $50k or so on their purchase of Atenolol... job well done. Who cares if all the medical beds are full of hypertensives who were taking their medication as usual and suddenly started having hypertensive crises.
The problem is that medicine is no longer practiced by doctors. We just follow the guidelines established by HMO's or pen pushers (give that patient a CT scan and we'll make next week hell for you if you can't think of a cheaper exam that would have been just as good), try to avoid the shark infested pools of lawyers swimming on the other side of the ledge just waiting for a chance to SETTLE (read: free money), and just do what everyone else does.
And yet in most countries it is a CRIME to practice medicine without a license. How did we let this happen? It's a WORLDWIDE phenomenon.
People aren't as evil as you think (most of the time).
No, but boards of directors are.
And I can tell you frankly that the medical profession is split in two. There are people who are in it for the human aspect - usually the doctors. Then there's the people who are in it for the money: The pharmaceutical companies.
This is not surprising, coming off another recent study done by (and now we learn that it was paid for) and published in a magazine owned by a subsidiary of Merck.
Just the fact that these companies are allowed to advertise on TV directly to patients is disgusting. But ask your doctor if XYZ is right for you, because you don't need it at all, or there's probably some cheaper similar drug whose patent has expired and costs 1/4 the price, but if you waste your doctor's time enough he'll write the prescription just to get you out of his office with a smile on your face. After all if he says "NO", you might not come back.
Just the fact that an HIV patient will literally die bankrupt, at $1000+ per month for the meds. Unless you're very rich, you won't be able to keep THAT up for very long, and when you run out of money - so sorry, we can recommend a hospice for you.
Pharmaceutical companies scream about billions of dollars in research, yet they can afford all that printed material for doctors, 5 star hotels for doctors for "seminars", pens, calculators, TV air time, etc. Yet some companies still make money with Aspirin - yes the name belongs to Bayer, but anyone can make and sell acetyl-salicylic acid - the patent expired years ago.
No, big pharma loves the protections patent law gives them, and if they can completely distort the market and throw actual science out of the window WHO CARES so long as it increases sales.
That's why we have Cochrane studies, where we DOCTORS look back at what we're doing and seeing if it REALLY IS effective. A new study from my country published by a close friend of mine suggests that having your blood pressure at 140/90mmHg gives NO INCREASED RISK of heart disease or stroke. But studies paid for by big pharma INSIST (and they've convinced the American Heart Association) that your blood pressure has to be UNDER 120/80. In fact, they want TEENAGERS to start taking blood pressure medication. Hey, at $100-200 per patient per month, SO WOULD I. But we know full well where the unethical branch of the medical sciences is...
The above comment is my opinion as a 3rd world physician, since I have to watch people die because they can't afford the few medications that DO work as advertised (and are thus even MORE expensive).
But the actual brain can change the synapses over time, making new ones and obsoleting old ones. I'd like to see some silicon do THAT. I wouldn't worry, we'll still be boss for a while.
Because if Microsoft reads it, expect a call from their lawyers for libel very very soon.
I dislike Microsoft and don't use most of their products, and have often been modded troll/flamebait for anti-Microsoft comments: HOWEVER: ONE example does not mean it's biased. I tried with several others and like many slashdotters I can't seem to find a bias. Now if the whole point of this article was to get more hits on bing - how desperate can you get?
A barcode or magnetic strip is safe in your wallet in your back pocket, RFID is not.
Safe? You've never heard of the "millionaire's march" down here in Central America. You are kidnapped at gunpoint, and forced to several ATMs where you insert your card and your PIN (or get your head blown off, choose). You keep hitting different ATMs until your account is empty or your maximum limit is reached (this usually happens late at night, so they can get two day's limits out of you). Then the criminals either kill you or dump you somewhere.
No, magnetic strips are not "safe" either. But they're a lot "safer" than RFID.
There's nothing particularly special on the RFID chip. A parking facility card and a passport generate the same amount of interesting information. A unique ID. Whew!
The problem is when you have another government computer that is counting on the Unique ID to be a UNIQUE ID, and using ONLY THAT parameter (plus other info also on the card) to identify someone - congratulations, you have just stolen someone else's identity.
High school physics students will tell you that physics experiments are doomed from the start.
If it smells, it's Chemistry.
If it squirms, it's Biology.
If it doesn't work, it's Physics.
Just how they managed to suck billions of dollars from governments is beyond me, unless political "science" isn't really a science at all!
PS: for the humor impaired: This is a joke.
Let's try to keep our government/authority-hate at least sort of grounded in reality.
Yes, we should all just roll over and pretend to be happy when criminal charges are brought against breaches of civil law. It's the new game in the US, has been for the past decade or so. I'm happy that the rate of violent crime in the US is so low that law enforcement has time to tase 70 year olds because their sons were speeding, tase and pepper spray epileptics having seizures, and arrest people for "stealing" a domain name.
I've always thought Apple was just as greedy and immoral as Microsoft.
SOMEBODY has to pay for Steve Jobs' liver...
Like Benjamin Franklin said: "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for lunch"
Wow. That was totally unnecessary. Do you feel Internet Cool because you made a lame, overhashed bailout joke?
Your anonymous comment adds nothing to the discussion - not even humor. How does that make you feel?
I am not "Internet Cool". I am who I am, I say what I say, and if you don't like it - I DON'T CARE. Enjoy your day.
It IS filtered. And monitored. It's THEIR VPN, so they pretty much can do whatever they want with it.