I think this report has major problems. It seemed to me that they did a lot controlling for various factors. Normally, this is a good thing in a study but if you start controlling for too many things you erase the factors you want to compare. I'm not entirely sure because I don't remember, but I think they took into account things like student:teacher ratios, class sizes, and some other things. THAT'S WHY YOU SEND YOUR KIDS TO PRIVATE SCHOOLS! The end of the article you quoted was interesting too:
"NCES commissioner Mark Schneider said the new study, and the earlier NCES study that shed a negative light on private schools as compared to public schools, are inappropriate for his agency. He said the analysis relied too heavily on subjective judgments. The department has no plans to replicate the analysis with the 2005 or 2007 NAEP results, he said. "
I thought it was interesting how the lymphocytes stuck around for about a year. I thought they would have either died or kicked the gene out by then...
Hmmm, I don't know about that... It seems like this pay-per-view model of internet browsing could destroy the "free-ness" or open-nature of the internet. I guess there are already plenty of sites where you have to pay to see certain content, but this seems different somehow and not in a good way. Then again, I was never accused of being an optimist.
"Of course the reason would be because i would be 75% less likely to use a car that really cant go anywhere."
Only 75%? Personally, I would be 100% less likely to use a car that really can't go anywhere. Unless I were homeless or looking for a nice seedy place in which to Fornicate Under Carnal Knowledge...
The article says that attitude is the major barrier, but I still think it's cost right now. This page is obviously out of date (although the girl is still cute!), but I think it still makes the point that gasoline is still a pretty cheap liquid by comparison. Oil is around $1.20 per gallon right now. I'd be lucky if I could find a cup of coffee for that price! Ethanol is still expensive and will be until the demand is high enough to start using it. Sure, mass-production plants have yet to be built... but those things aren't cheap, either. I feel like (no basis in fact!) the price of oil/gasoline is going to have to increase much, much further for ethanol to be a realistic alternative. Just my 2 cents.
That's all fine and well, but the degree of asininery that goes on with peer-reviewed publications can be just unbelieveable sometimes. I submitted a paper that was rejected from 4 different journals because I drew conclusions that was directly opposed to the current thinking (some really obscure molecular cell biology; nothing earth-shattering). Nevermind that the previous data was putting chicken peptides into frog cells, whereas I put human peptides into human cells. Apparently, my conclusions were wrong and my data just didn't jive too well. I guess using a homologous, species-relevant model is just plain stupid...
I don't advocate data manipulation, but I don't think "raw data" exists anymore either. There's ALWAYS some kind of manipulation you can do pre- or post- image capture. You can't show everything in a paper, often due to space requirements. Digital image capture of microscopic images are all pseudo-colored anyway. As long as you're not obscuring contradictory data, it's probably OK.
I still keep original images just in case I'm ever audited. You know, the images that are as raw as raw data can be, in this day and age.
...because cardiac tissue usually doesn't regenerate. Your heart is significantly weakened after a heart attack, so "whatever doesn't kill you make you stonger" doesn't apply.
As others pointed out, planting "healthy" tissue that outgrows cancer is just giving someone a worse cancer.
I would think that the transporter answering the question of "Do we have souls" could be pretty dangerous. One of the contributors to The Edge touched on the soul thing (and another actually wrote The Physics of Star Trek!). If you could completely dematerialize someone and shoot them across space, would the soul go with him/her? If so, then that means we're nothing more than biology. If we actually do have souls, what would happen if it wasn't transported with us? Does no soul = no religion? What would a world without religion be like? Sure, the fundies might go away, but what about the rest of us that do good based on religious beliefs?
Anyone remember those little toy cars called MicroMachines? They had commercials with the guy who could talk really fast. Maybe these NanoMachines(TM) [Mine, mine!, all mine!], will have an even faster talking guy.
PS It doesn't look like the second site will weather a slashdotting. Just lettin ya know!
Sorry, I don't know why I said mosquitos are monogamous. I don't think they are.
The theory is that you flood the area with sterile males (hooray! more itchiness!) so that when the females go to reproduce, the probability they'll mate with a fertile male is low. Eventually, the female will live her entire life w/o producing offspring and die. Sure, it's based on probability, but it should decrease the population of disease-carrying mosquitos (ie females). The caveat is that sterlizing the males may make them less "attractive" for whatever reason and this whole thing may not be as effective as you want.
Prob1: To sterilize them all, you'd have to catch them all. If you did that, why not just kill them? This is a way to kill malaria carrying mosquitos.
Prob2: Once the females mate, they die soon after. So in a way, yes they are monogamous.
Yes, only the females suck blood. As far as sterilization goes, that's not something that's standard on a large scale, AFAIK. As part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenge these guys apparently are going to develop a more appropriate way.
You'd hope the screeners would wonder why they suddenly started getting a 100% hit rate and figure it out. I guess you'd hope more that you're not the first one to get, umm... searched, before they figure it out.;)
Besides, for precisely those reasons you'd swab the inside of bags as well as the outside.
It doesn't appear as if this machine would be useful in preventing Bali-type bombings. It sounds a little Draconian to check every piece luggage before entering a hotel or club, doesn't it? It would be much harder to examine every bag since they don't need to be tagged in anyway, like on an airplane. There, they weigh every back one by one, tag them, and then scan them (in some form or other) already. This obviously doesn't happen in hotels.
You're right about not abandoning other methods of screening though. To do so would be just plain silly.
As I said in an earlier post, this is a portable (relatively) mass spectrometer. It gives you very very accurate results and it will know the difference between your hotdog, gundpowder, and high explosives. I don't know enough about firecrackers and capguns to know if they'll be interpreted as explosives, though. Is gunpowder a common enough compound to be ignored? Down here in the south, people go hunting all the time and thus gun shot residue is all over them. Hopefully, the TSA won't enter gunpowder and GSR results into the database as "suspicious." Otherwise a whole lotta rednecks are gonna squeal like pigs when they do the cavity search on them!
This is basically a portable mass spectrometer which is very very very accurate as well as sensitive. It's so accurate, it can give the identities of proteins as well its sequence. Now, this "portable" (I use quotes, because its as portable as mass spec machines can be) model probably won't be THAT accuarate, but probably more so than any other machine. It would be hard to get false positives out of this thing because of its accuracy.
As for chaffing. I don't think this machine was meant to analyze the atmosphere of the entire airport. You just swab the bag and run it through the machine. There are ways to make the readings meaningless, but this would indicate some fishy behavior and cause for "other" means of investigation (ie "Bend over, son.").
This would be a real boon for forensic science in general, if they've managed to make one for a relatively cheap price in addition to its size. Now you don't have to wait for the lab, you can bring it with you.
This is really cool technology, and if you read the actual Nat Biotech article, they've improved the sensitivity by a couple orders of magnitude using some kind of lableing process (ie gold)...
However, using this as a method of detecting cancer might not be so useful. The presence of various markers in the blood is probably normal. What you want to know, is whether or not these markers are present on cells when they should be absent. They claim to be able to detect PICOgrams/mL of a specific protein in the blood. Unfortunately, all males have PSA in their blood and it's the amount that's important, not its presence. That's just for prostate cancer. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that we don't know enough about most cancers for us to know what to detect to be useful.
I can definitely see this as a useful tool for detecting hazardous chemicals and biologicals agents and scientists are always looking for more sensitive instruments. I think that's why the article appeared in Nature Biotechnology and not Nature. Still way impressive, though.
k98sven is spot on. However, something else to add is that bacteria are not humans and can't synthesize some human proteins. Especially complex ones that have disulfide bonds, complex quaternary structure (ie, multiple subunits), inorganic subunits, modifications such as phosphorylation, glycosylation, etc etc etc. Bacteria have limitations and are not the end-all, be-all solution to our biomedical/pharmaceutical problems.
Sorry to be geeky, but this is the science section, isn't it?
Most proteins eventually degrade, if they are not immediately destroyed by the immune system (ie, antigenic). Furthermore, for proteins that don't degrade quickly, how would you detect these proteins? Other than putting radioactive isotopes (try getting on an airplane with that in today's environment!), I don't see how you would detect them other than strapping someone down and getting some blood. I suppose you could always try a gene therapy technique to continually express protein, but gene therapy is still highly experimental and presents its own problems. This sounds way more complicated than just implanting inorganic RFID chips/beacons/whatevers under the skin or in a (cough!) body cavity.
There were registries like you described, but patients called foul and they were immediately taken down. No, I'm not a physician. If you still think they exist, then I've got a nice tin-foil hat in my closet somewhere.
If a particular professional (e.g. doctor) has had lots of good things said about them though in a public forum, and only one bad thing, the bad thing is likely to stand out as being obviously incorrect.
Wow, I wish I had your optimism! People are, on the whole, stupid.
I kind of agree with you. While glamorizing science won't make kids smarter, it may encourage kids to become scientists/engineers who would otherwise go into banking, consulting, or law (gasp!). The example I would have used is how CSI is causing a huge increase in people interested in forensics. A lot of med students are going into pathology with the intention of being medical examiners. When ER was really popular a lot of med students went into emergency medicine. The glamorization may not increase overall talent, but it could shift talent from other fields to science.
Slashdot Mirror
"NCES commissioner Mark Schneider said the new study, and the earlier NCES study that shed a negative light on private schools as compared to public schools, are inappropriate for his agency. He said the analysis relied too heavily on subjective judgments. The department has no plans to replicate the analysis with the 2005 or 2007 NAEP results, he said. "
This is the interesting part, I thought: "The researchers also have isolated TCRs that recognize common cancers other than melanoma."
Here's the absctract for the original article. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to see the whole thing.
2 9003v1
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/11
I thought it was interesting how the lymphocytes stuck around for about a year. I thought they would have either died or kicked the gene out by then...
Hmmm, I don't know about that... It seems like this pay-per-view model of internet browsing could destroy the "free-ness" or open-nature of the internet. I guess there are already plenty of sites where you have to pay to see certain content, but this seems different somehow and not in a good way. Then again, I was never accused of being an optimist.
Only 75%? Personally, I would be 100% less likely to use a car that really can't go anywhere. Unless I were homeless or looking for a nice seedy place in which to Fornicate Under Carnal Knowledge...
The article says that attitude is the major barrier, but I still think it's cost right now. This page is obviously out of date (although the girl is still cute!), but I think it still makes the point that gasoline is still a pretty cheap liquid by comparison. Oil is around $1.20 per gallon right now. I'd be lucky if I could find a cup of coffee for that price! Ethanol is still expensive and will be until the demand is high enough to start using it. Sure, mass-production plants have yet to be built... but those things aren't cheap, either. I feel like (no basis in fact!) the price of oil/gasoline is going to have to increase much, much further for ethanol to be a realistic alternative. Just my 2 cents.
I don't advocate data manipulation, but I don't think "raw data" exists anymore either. There's ALWAYS some kind of manipulation you can do pre- or post- image capture. You can't show everything in a paper, often due to space requirements. Digital image capture of microscopic images are all pseudo-colored anyway. As long as you're not obscuring contradictory data, it's probably OK.
I still keep original images just in case I'm ever audited. You know, the images that are as raw as raw data can be, in this day and age.
As others pointed out, planting "healthy" tissue that outgrows cancer is just giving someone a worse cancer.
I would think that the transporter answering the question of "Do we have souls" could be pretty dangerous. One of the contributors to The Edge touched on the soul thing (and another actually wrote The Physics of Star Trek!). If you could completely dematerialize someone and shoot them across space, would the soul go with him/her? If so, then that means we're nothing more than biology. If we actually do have souls, what would happen if it wasn't transported with us? Does no soul = no religion? What would a world without religion be like? Sure, the fundies might go away, but what about the rest of us that do good based on religious beliefs?
Of course, what I didn't realize was that the original story wasn't actually a blog. Shame on me!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9645594/
Yes, I do realize the source is from M$NBC...
PS It doesn't look like the second site will weather a slashdotting. Just lettin ya know!
The theory is that you flood the area with sterile males (hooray! more itchiness!) so that when the females go to reproduce, the probability they'll mate with a fertile male is low. Eventually, the female will live her entire life w/o producing offspring and die. Sure, it's based on probability, but it should decrease the population of disease-carrying mosquitos (ie females). The caveat is that sterlizing the males may make them less "attractive" for whatever reason and this whole thing may not be as effective as you want.
Prob2: Once the females mate, they die soon after. So in a way, yes they are monogamous.
Yes, only the females suck blood. As far as sterilization goes, that's not something that's standard on a large scale, AFAIK. As part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenge these guys apparently are going to develop a more appropriate way.
Ask any scientician!
Besides, for precisely those reasons you'd swab the inside of bags as well as the outside.
You're right about not abandoning other methods of screening though. To do so would be just plain silly.
As I said in an earlier post, this is a portable (relatively) mass spectrometer. It gives you very very accurate results and it will know the difference between your hotdog, gundpowder, and high explosives. I don't know enough about firecrackers and capguns to know if they'll be interpreted as explosives, though. Is gunpowder a common enough compound to be ignored? Down here in the south, people go hunting all the time and thus gun shot residue is all over them. Hopefully, the TSA won't enter gunpowder and GSR results into the database as "suspicious." Otherwise a whole lotta rednecks are gonna squeal like pigs when they do the cavity search on them!
As for chaffing. I don't think this machine was meant to analyze the atmosphere of the entire airport. You just swab the bag and run it through the machine. There are ways to make the readings meaningless, but this would indicate some fishy behavior and cause for "other" means of investigation (ie "Bend over, son.").
This would be a real boon for forensic science in general, if they've managed to make one for a relatively cheap price in addition to its size. Now you don't have to wait for the lab, you can bring it with you.
However, using this as a method of detecting cancer might not be so useful. The presence of various markers in the blood is probably normal. What you want to know, is whether or not these markers are present on cells when they should be absent. They claim to be able to detect PICOgrams/mL of a specific protein in the blood. Unfortunately, all males have PSA in their blood and it's the amount that's important, not its presence. That's just for prostate cancer. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that we don't know enough about most cancers for us to know what to detect to be useful.
I can definitely see this as a useful tool for detecting hazardous chemicals and biologicals agents and scientists are always looking for more sensitive instruments. I think that's why the article appeared in Nature Biotechnology and not Nature. Still way impressive, though.
Sorry to be geeky, but this is the science section, isn't it?
Most proteins eventually degrade, if they are not immediately destroyed by the immune system (ie, antigenic). Furthermore, for proteins that don't degrade quickly, how would you detect these proteins? Other than putting radioactive isotopes (try getting on an airplane with that in today's environment!), I don't see how you would detect them other than strapping someone down and getting some blood. I suppose you could always try a gene therapy technique to continually express protein, but gene therapy is still highly experimental and presents its own problems. This sounds way more complicated than just implanting inorganic RFID chips/beacons/whatevers under the skin or in a (cough!) body cavity.
There were registries like you described, but patients called foul and they were immediately taken down. No, I'm not a physician. If you still think they exist, then I've got a nice tin-foil hat in my closet somewhere.
If a particular professional (e.g. doctor) has had lots of good things said about them though in a public forum, and only one bad thing, the bad thing is likely to stand out as being obviously incorrect.
Wow, I wish I had your optimism! People are, on the whole, stupid.
I kind of agree with you. While glamorizing science won't make kids smarter, it may encourage kids to become scientists/engineers who would otherwise go into banking, consulting, or law (gasp!). The example I would have used is how CSI is causing a huge increase in people interested in forensics. A lot of med students are going into pathology with the intention of being medical examiners. When ER was really popular a lot of med students went into emergency medicine. The glamorization may not increase overall talent, but it could shift talent from other fields to science.