Right here
. Although I must beg to differ, with you - the mechanism wasn't obvious to anyone until this study. For what it's worth, it was in the "Letters" section of nature - it wasn't even a full article:
Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans
ANDREW FIRE, SIQUN XU, MARY K. MONTGOMERY, STEVEN A. KOSTAS, SAMUEL E. DRIVER & CRAIG C. MELLO
Experimental introduction of RNA into cells can be used in certain biological systems to interfere with the function of an endogenous gene,. Such effects have been proposed to result from a simple antisense mechanism that depends on hybridization between the injected RNA and endogenous messenger RNA transcripts. RNA interference has been used in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to manipulate gene expression,. Here we investigate the requirements for structure and delivery of the interfering RNA. To our surprise, we found that double-stranded RNA was substantially more effective at producing interference than was either strand individually. After injection into adult animals, purified single strands had at most a modest effect, whereas double-stranded mixtures caused potent and specific interference. The effects of this interference were evident in both the injected animals and their progeny. Only a few molecules of injected double-stranded RNA were required per affected cell, arguing against stochiometric interference with endogenous mRNA and suggesting that there could be a catalytic or amplification component in the interference process.
Seriously, I wish Lucas would understand that we would rather see completely new material from him than to see him repackage and alter what we have and do love from him.
George Lucas had a few good movies in him, but in reality he had one great thing and that was to revolutionize the use of special effects. He is more of a technical specialist rather than a story teller - why else would he continue to re-work the same material over and over again by enhancing the effects?
But to expect any great new material in the form of new stories and plots from him is unrealistic. I think that Star Wars volumes I-III proved that.
Re:Roland the Plogger posts a press release
on
Life Inside a Cell
·
· Score: 1
I assume (hope) that this was actually a trailer and there are more in depth animations either available or in the works.
Another gripe, they were inconsistent with how they altered the time scale. For instance, kinesin dragging around a vesicle was slowed down, while the cell migration through the blood vessels was speeded up.
Still, it's nice to see animations based on real molecular structures... finding a way to incorporate real principles of signal transduction and intermolecular interactions would make this a valuable research tool as well as an educational one.
In this article, it says that a research assistant, Walter DeNino, discovered that Poehlman was fabricating data. It sounds like Poehlman was pretty aggressive in trying to slander DeNino to save his own skin...
The Ioannidis article you cite has more to do with overinterpretation of statistical power in data analysis than outright falsification of data as in the Poehlman case. In particular, Ioannidis is actually critical of overinterpretation of results obtained from sample sizes that are too small or experimental designs that have too many degrees of freedom. In fact, the title of his study is an overinterpretation of the conclusions in the paper itself - which I'm sure he did on purpose to incite debate on the topic.
This is well summarized in this response to the article, which has the added bonus of quoting "Mudd's Women" to support the argument.
I spend a significant amount of time EVERY DAY to ferret out fake data. I have several automated processes that search for and remove any data that does not fit certain criteria.
So did the researchers who used your data set take this into account? For that matter, did you have a significant role in the study beyond providing the data set?
According to this site, the overhead for US-UNICEF is 16.3% . A little on the high side, but at least 83.7 % gets where it's supposed to and UNICEF is reliable.
Another one on the list is Americares which has a 1% overhead rate and seems to support clean water as well. Might be worth checking out.
UNICEF does a lot to promote child health and safe drinking water. I believe that they also use the "salt rehydration" method that the grandparent poster describes.
"The collaboration has gotten 'pure' researchers out of their ivory towers and truly engaged in working on human disease."
Making a knockout mouse may be a more physiological model but it's still a far cry from really working on human disease. It may be more sophisticated than cells in a dish but it's still basic research.
What does this author have against basic research anyways.. the tone of the article is really negative:
It has a pile of discoveries to show for it -- but no cure.
Discoveries, after all, are supposed to be good for something besides filling science journals.
No kidding! But how can anyone even begin to take a rational approach to medicine without basic research? There is a place for excellent basic research, just as there is a place for truly clinically oriented research.
First off, you have to be excited about the science. However, it's not just the science, in this day and age, you have to sell it as well.
An example:
The NIH pay line is currently at ~10% - this means that 90 % of grant applications fail to be funded. As anyone who has been a member of a study section can attest, this is not because of a lack of outstanding proposals - instead there is a limit to the level of funding available to support them. You really need a personal connection to crack the funding barrier.
Being able to associate a face to the name on the grant goes a long way to accomplish that. Being the person who gives lots of seminars and goes to meetings is part of the process. So does inviting influential scientists to give talks at your institution. Maybe a study section member reads Slashdot... can't hurt.
If you don't promote your own work, no one else will. Call it PR if you want, or networking, but without it you cannot succeed in the US as an independent scientist.
Somewhat off topic, but I thought that the interface for the IHT webpage was one of the best I'd ever seen - it really minimizes the amount of scrolling you have to do and it felt much easier to read. Why haven't more news sites used this?
Since PLoS is an open access journal, anyone can read the original article.
As the title of the article says, they show that isolated human neutrophils are capable of killing Anthrax. The mechanism is unusuual, the spores are first eaten by the neutrophils. Then the spores germinate inside the cells to a form of bacteria that are readily killed (vegitative) as opposed to the virulent, disease causing form which is formed in the outside environment.
However, they don't look directly at animal models - so the leap of faith is that the lung infection is bad when the spores do not elicit a neutrophil response. How the spores avoid eliciting a host response in lung is the bigger question, which is not addressed by the paper.
Baltimore and Thereza Imanishi-Kari were eventually exonerated, the whole issue was a combination of a Congressional witch hunt and sour grapes by the "whistle blower", Margot O'Toole. link
However, I wonder what it is in addition to the Nobel Prize about David Baltimore that attracts all this nonsense in the first place.
GoldenPalace.com is doing what any other company is doing, matching their advertising to their clientele... mainly folks who like goofy tech, web oriented stuff, quasi-religious objects and who are despirate to strike it rich.
Rather than worry about trying to detect stegnography, any image posting service could just arbitrarily set all of the least significant bits of jpgs to "1" as part of the image posting process. It might slightly degrade the image, but it would also erase any potential encoded messages.
Slashdot Mirror
At the bottom of the page:
"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it." -- Alex Schure
Current melt value and composition of US coins can be found here: http://www.coinflation.com/
If you look back at the older silver coins, you can see how the amount of silver used to be proportional to coin value.
If you really want to laugh, you should see how my NCAA Basketball brackets usually turn out ...
The real Revenge of the Nerds will be when Georgia Tech beats Georgia in football today ...
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
I think that the study itself really drives this point home. If you read the actual paper (PDF file) a major part of their case is:
1) When the weather is lousy, children watch more television
2) Places with a lot of rain and snow have more autistic children
I'd imagine that when the weather is bad, children also are more likely to use umbrellas. Therefore, by their logic, umbrellas cause autism.
Right here . Although I must beg to differ, with you - the mechanism wasn't obvious to anyone until this study. For what it's worth, it was in the "Letters" section of nature - it wasn't even a full article:
Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans
ANDREW FIRE, SIQUN XU, MARY K. MONTGOMERY, STEVEN A. KOSTAS, SAMUEL E. DRIVER & CRAIG C. MELLO
Experimental introduction of RNA into cells can be used in certain biological systems to interfere with the function of an endogenous gene,. Such effects have been proposed to result from a simple antisense mechanism that depends on hybridization between the injected RNA and endogenous messenger RNA transcripts. RNA interference has been used in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to manipulate gene expression,. Here we investigate the requirements for structure and delivery of the interfering RNA. To our surprise, we found that double-stranded RNA was substantially more effective at producing interference than was either strand individually. After injection into adult animals, purified single strands had at most a modest effect, whereas double-stranded mixtures caused potent and specific interference. The effects of this interference were evident in both the injected animals and their progeny. Only a few molecules of injected double-stranded RNA were required per affected cell, arguing against stochiometric interference with endogenous mRNA and suggesting that there could be a catalytic or amplification component in the interference process.
Seriously, I wish Lucas would understand that we would rather see completely new material from him than to see him repackage and alter what we have and do love from him.
George Lucas had a few good movies in him, but in reality he had one great thing and that was to revolutionize the use of special effects. He is more of a technical specialist rather than a story teller - why else would he continue to re-work the same material over and over again by enhancing the effects?
But to expect any great new material in the form of new stories and plots from him is unrealistic. I think that Star Wars volumes I-III proved that.
I assume (hope) that this was actually a trailer and there are more in depth animations either available or in the works.
... finding a way to incorporate real principles of signal transduction and intermolecular interactions would make this a valuable research tool as well as an educational one.
Another gripe, they were inconsistent with how they altered the time scale. For instance, kinesin dragging around a vesicle was slowed down, while the cell migration through the blood vessels was speeded up.
Still, it's nice to see animations based on real molecular structures
In this article, it says that a research assistant, Walter DeNino, discovered that Poehlman was fabricating data. It sounds like Poehlman was pretty aggressive in trying to slander DeNino to save his own skin ...
The Ioannidis article you cite has more to do with overinterpretation of statistical power in data analysis than outright falsification of data as in the Poehlman case. In particular, Ioannidis is actually critical of overinterpretation of results obtained from sample sizes that are too small or experimental designs that have too many degrees of freedom. In fact, the title of his study is an overinterpretation of the conclusions in the paper itself - which I'm sure he did on purpose to incite debate on the topic.
This is well summarized in this response to the article, which has the added bonus of quoting "Mudd's Women" to support the argument.
Although it is mainly protein oriented, there are several molecular tools available at ExPASy that I use a lot.
Also, VectorNTI is now free if you join their user group. It's a really powerful suite for plasmid design and molecular analysis.
So did the researchers who used your data set take this into account? For that matter, did you have a significant role in the study beyond providing the data set?
Another one on the list is Americares which has a 1% overhead rate and seems to support clean water as well. Might be worth checking out.
Thanks for the kick start ...
UNICEF does a lot to promote child health and safe drinking water. I believe that they also use the "salt rehydration" method that the grandparent poster describes.
Making a knockout mouse may be a more physiological model but it's still a far cry from really working on human disease. It may be more sophisticated than cells in a dish but it's still basic research.
What does this author have against basic research anyways .. the tone of the article is really negative:
It has a pile of discoveries to show for it -- but no cure.
Discoveries, after all, are supposed to be good for something besides filling science journals.
No kidding! But how can anyone even begin to take a rational approach to medicine without basic research? There is a place for excellent basic research, just as there is a place for truly clinically oriented research.
First off, you have to be excited about the science. However, it's not just the science, in this day and age, you have to sell it as well.
... can't hurt.
An example:
The NIH pay line is currently at ~10% - this means that 90 % of grant applications fail to be funded. As anyone who has been a member of a study section can attest, this is not because of a lack of outstanding proposals - instead there is a limit to the level of funding available to support them. You really need a personal connection to crack the funding barrier.
Being able to associate a face to the name on the grant goes a long way to accomplish that. Being the person who gives lots of seminars and goes to meetings is part of the process. So does inviting influential scientists to give talks at your institution. Maybe a study section member reads Slashdot
If you don't promote your own work, no one else will. Call it PR if you want, or networking, but without it you cannot succeed in the US as an independent scientist.
If the ads bug you so much, why don't you just read the articles using the "Printer Friendly" mode?
Somewhat off topic, but I thought that the interface for the IHT webpage was one of the best I'd ever seen - it really minimizes the amount of scrolling you have to do and it felt much easier to read. Why haven't more news sites used this?
As the title of the article says, they show that isolated human neutrophils are capable of killing Anthrax. The mechanism is unusuual, the spores are first eaten by the neutrophils. Then the spores germinate inside the cells to a form of bacteria that are readily killed (vegitative) as opposed to the virulent, disease causing form which is formed in the outside environment.
However, they don't look directly at animal models - so the leap of faith is that the lung infection is bad when the spores do not elicit a neutrophil response. How the spores avoid eliciting a host response in lung is the bigger question, which is not addressed by the paper.
Funny that you bring up Watson, since he does have some personality "issues" ...
However, I wonder what it is in addition to the Nobel Prize about David Baltimore that attracts all this nonsense in the first place.
GoldenPalace.com is doing what any other company is doing, matching their advertising to their clientele ... mainly folks who like goofy tech, web oriented stuff, quasi-religious objects and who are despirate to strike it rich.
which you can look up here
Bild and Sun
Rather than worry about trying to detect stegnography, any image posting service could just arbitrarily set all of the least significant bits of jpgs to "1" as part of the image posting process. It might slightly degrade the image, but it would also erase any potential encoded messages.