What types of radiation damage DNA and how exactly do they accomplish this?
Ionizing radiation (ultraviolet light and above) is known to damage DNA. It does so because individual photons carry enough energy to disrupt chemical bonds. Microwave photons are too low energy to do this, so if they damage DNA, they must do so by another, novel mechanism.
Are tumors, cancers and other symptoms of damaged DNA normal?
In a sense, yes. First, we are all exposed to some ionizing radiation from cosmic rays and from decay of natural radioactive minerals. DNA can also be damaged by chemical reactions with reactive chemicals. Cellular metabolism actually "leaks" reactive free radicals. There are mechanisms to clean them this cellular pollution, but much as in the external world, there is a cost to this, and beyond a certain point, cleaning them up just isn't "cost-effective," evolutionarily speaking, so a certain amount of cancer risk is accepted.
You don't need to explain why a phenomena occurs to tell if it occurs.
Not necessarily. But when the evidence for whether a phenomenon occurs is ambiguous, as is the case here, one tries to address the question theoretically--is there any any plausible known mechanism by which it could occur?
Also, of course, having an idea of the mechanism makes it easier to design good experiments to test whether the phenomenon actually occurs in practice.
Indeed, microwave radiation could simply heat up the surroundings of DNA and that would break the DNA. How does this work?
Microwave radiation couples to the dipole moment of water molecules, which makes them vibrate harder, causing a local rise in temperature, much like in a microwave oven. See this wikipedia article
Yes, at high enough intensity, microwave radiation could damage DNA by cooking the cell. But thermal effects of microwave radiation are well understood, and safety limits are well known. Cell phones don't even come close to being able to put out enough energy to cause thermal damage.
It is a humanitarian responsibility to prove beyond reasonable scientific doubt that a product is completely safe before everyone starts using/consuming/walking around with that product. You wouldn't eat some new food just because about half the studies assert that it probably isn't a deadly poison right?
I almost feel guilty disturbing your fool's paradise.
But the hard reality is that nobody ever proves "beyond reasonable scientific doubt" that a product is completely safe--not drugs, not foods, not automobiles. In fact, I take it as a given that no product is completely safe. Indeed, if that were the standard, we would have no new products, because the cost would be immense. Think about it--let's say you test a product on 10,000 people (probably considerably more than almost any company could afford). Let's suppose that the product kills one person in 20,000. Then there's a 50% chance that you wouldn't even see it in your study (and even if you did, it almost certainly wouldn't be statistically significant). Now let's suppose 10 million people use your product. Bang! 500 people dead.
So really, about the most you can hope for is that a product isn't horribly, obviously hazardous. Cell phones certainly meet this standard. Epidemiological studies of illness associated with cell phone use pretty consistently show no hazard or only a small hazard. They are probably at least as safe as most drugs, and lots safer than automobiles. Are they perfectly safe? Almost certainly not, although I can predict with pretty good confidence that the number of people harmed because of somebody being distracted by a cell phone greatly exceeds the number of people harmed by the biological side effects of microwave radiation.
And don't you find it a bit worrysome that the companies are putting extensive restrictions on research grants, and the the US is no longer putting untethered money into the hat?
Research grants on topics like this are reviewed in competition with grants on other topics. So if they aren't getting funded, it is because the researchers involved have not managed to convince study sections that they are likely to make significant progress--which at this point in the game would probably mean showing that they have some sort of real handle on the mechanism of the putative effect. So the money ends up going to projects that look like they have a greater chance of succeeding.
I see respected scientists in their fields saying 'we need more research'. So I say 'Ah... I'll go with More Research for 1000, Alex'.
Actually, pretty much everybody will tell you that there is a need for more research (and especially, more grant funding) in their own field, whatever that may be.
Given the POTENTIAL here (guess: pretty much everyone on the planet that HAS a phone will be using a cell phone in 30 years), I think its worth a good 50 million for a first round of studies.
The epidemiological evidence is pretty marginal, with many studies failing to find any effect at all or only small effects. That means that the risk, if any, is almost certainly not large. So the primary grounds for interest are not public health, but the possibility of discovering novel biological phenomena.
Some very well established institutions actually have conducted extensive research, and have concluded that cell-phone radiation does have negative effects.
The quality of research cannot generally be judged by how "well established" the institution is, but rather by where the results are published. For a high-profile topic like this, the place to look for significant papers is in major journals like Science or Nature. Also, academic research institutes do not draw conclusions--conclusions are drawn by individual investigators, and are not endorsed by their home institutions.
And, once again, I'll refer you to the article, "When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one--three out of every four papers shows an effect"
Scientists tend to draw conclusions based on the quality and nature of the data, not a census of the number of publications on each side.
Again, please actually read the article. One lobbying effort is stated in the first three paragraphs. Also read the last page: "As a result, many U.S. scientists have moved on, either focusing on other areas or leaving the research arena altogether, relying on the rest of the world to pick up the slack."
While the article mentioned some industry objections to specific research, it is notable that they were ineffective. Indeed, the substance of the article is that the real obstacle to continued research is researchers in the area have been unable to convince other scientists that the evidence for a phenomenon is strong enough to merit additional public grant funding. This is basically what happens in a field like this--if you fail to make significant progress, it gets hard to renew your grant.
Proteins and enzymes, and probably even DNA (IANABC) rely heavily on steric (shape) effects to do their work. Why cannot microwaves cause a molecule to flip and turn into a stereoisomer of itself ?
It's an energy issue, again. Biological molecules have to be stable while being constantly bombarded by 37 degree C water molecules and charged ions. The energy of a single microwave photon is much, much less than the energy of the chemical interactions that proteins are constantly being subjected to. If the energy barrier between one conformation and the other is so low that a microwave photon is going to flip it over, then things would be flipping over all of the time, just from occasional random energetic collisions. If the alternate "bad" conformation was more stable (lower energy), then pretty soon most of the molecules would occupy that conformation. If it wasn't more stable, then it would flip right back to the "good" one.
There are numerous international studies which have seen various effects. This is unlike cold fusion, where the results couldn't be reproduced.
On the contrary, it is very similar. Some people claimed to reproduce the results, others could not. It is more accurate to say that they could not be reliably reproduced. Here is a recent DOE review
Note also that it is a lot easier to get positive results published than negative. So when I hear, "half the studies support it, and half don't," that tells me that it is very hard indeed to reproduce.
Furthermore, if you had read the article, you'll see that researchers are explicitly facing harassment by the industry. Many are being driven out because of this harassment.
By and large, industry has little power to drive anybody out of research. But to get continued grant funding for something as improbable as this, a researcher would have to show clear progress in elucidating the mechanism.
As for industry, I am sure that they are concerned about possible public relations or liability fallout from such research. But they probably also sincerely believe that is nonsense--because in terms of known mechanisms, it makes little sense.
This is a Nobel Prize-category topic. Our existing understanding of physics and biochemistry is simply insufficient to account for any interaction between microwave radiation and DNA.
I agree. Its current status is about the same as cold fusion. Right now we have a bunch of scattered hard-to-explain and hard-to-reproduce results in the literature, mostly in minor journals, and it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere. It could easily all be artifact. What is needed to give this field some credibility is some real progress on the question of mechanism.
The energy per photon is just too low to break covalent bonds, so there is no way microwave energy could break DNA directly, unless you pump in enough energy to cook it.
So you really have to resort to some fancy hypotheses to rationalize this. Well maybe, just maybe, there is some kind of a resonance of the current through an ion channel (although I'm not entirely sure that this is even plausible), which somehow alters its coupling to some intracellular kinase or other second messenger system, which activates an enzyme that happens to produce free radicals, and those break DNA. But I'd have to see some definitive evidence before I take that kind of hypothesis seriously.
The point is that "microwaves damage DNA" is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. "Some studies support it and some do not" simply doesn't qualify.
I'm skeptical of "DNA break" assays, anyway. There is a long history of people finding DNA damage by this and that, and others failing to reproduce the result. It's easy to break DNA--you can even break it by rough handling.
One would think that if evolution is true, and species evolved from one specie to another, it's only logical we would find a lot of fossil evidence of these hybrid species, not to mention hybrid species living today.
Not really. The implicit assumption you are making is that these hybrid species were equally abundant and survived as long as the better-known species. But evolutionary theory leads us to expect that evolutionary change often occurs in small populations that are not widely distributed. So unless you happen to look in exactly the right place, you'll miss them. Even then, you'd have to be extraordinarily lucky.
A new study was released yesterday by Tulane Medical which tracked video game users over a 8 year period testing how much the video games they play affect their tendency toward violence. The study found that among those who played games 8% went on to have some form of violence conviction while only 6% of the non-gamers did.
The remarkable thing is that the effect is only two percent. Note that in epidemiological studies, effects less that 100% generally are unreliable. Since this is an uncontrolled study, at least some, and quite possibly all, of that 2% probably reflects the fact that violently inclined people tend to enjoy violent entertainments.
I've read a number of these studies, and they are pretty much worthless. Either they fail to control for overall arousal with an equally exciting control stimulus, confirmed by heart rate measurements, or they call things like "hitting and kicking" violence.
When kids hit and kick, it is aggression, but it is not serious violence. Kids know that they aren't strong enough to cause serious harm to one another by hitting or kicking, so they have few inhibitions about fighting than adults. That doesn't mean that they aren't capable of serious violence, though, especially if they use a weapon like a knife or a rock. I'd like to see one of these studies that excluded all of the rough play nonsense, and only counted incidents serious enough to require admission of the victim to a hospital.
The bottom line is that as games have gotten increasingly popular, and more realistic and violent, the incidence of youth violence has decreased not increased. So either these studies are wrong (which seems likely, considering the incompetent methodology and the obvious bias of many of the researchers), or the effect is so small that it is insignificant next to other cultural and social influences.
In every generation, we have some idiots running around trying to blame some aspect of youth culture for the fact that teenaged boys are, on average, more violent than grownups.
The fact that violent crimes, and even violent crimes by young people have steadily declined as games have become both more violent and more realistic proves that any possible pro-violence effect of games is statistically negligible relative to other social and cultural factors.
The possibility that violent videogames actually decrease real world violence cannot be excluded, and is consistent with the data (although one can think of many other explanations--perhaps the decrease in violence is due to violent movies, rather than violent games, or to easier availability of pornography, or liberalized abortion laws).
Experimental studies that attempt to correlate "violent behavior" with gameplaying (or violent TV, for that matter) are pretty much crap. I've read a number of these studies, and they either confuse aggression with serious violence (a boy pushing or hitting another kid is not the same as a serious attempt to kill or maim) or fail to properly control for overall excitement (there would have to be a control stimulus that is equally exciting, confirmed by heart rate measurements--a sports match, perhaps).
Studies that track kids and try to relate their violent behavior with their taste in media are also pretty worthless, because they are not randomized (that is, they don't pick a bunch of kids at random and force them to play games several hours a day whether they want to or not). As a result, you can't distinguish between the hypothesis that kids with a propensity for violence like violent entertainment and the hypothesis that violent entertainment causes real violence.
It would not require purchase of hardware that costs twice as much as its PC twin with the same performance.
What always amazes me when working with Windows is how much slower a "comparable" Windows system seems to be. I think that individual operations are as fast or faster, but more things seem to monopolize the computer so that I can't do other things, which makes the whole system just feel pokey to me. I'm particularly annoyed that it doesn't seem possible to switch over and work in another application while installing an application or system update.
I find a common, fixed position, always there menubar is a great feature.
I agree. As far as I'm concerned, the menubar belongs to me, not to the application. I don't want applications to mess with it--they can add their own menus (as long as they leave the standard ones up), but that's it. I'll make an exception for PowerPoint, since when I'm running PP in fullscreen I'm really using my computer as a slide projector rather than a computer.
I'm just curious if there is some "anti-communism" law forbidding the state/fed gov. from making this kind of investment, or if it's just too risky for them, or if they aren't allowed to profit from the investment, or...?
So far as I know, there are no actual laws against it, but the feds are generally reluctant to go into competition with private industry. Politically, it would be hard for the federal government to profit off of a life saving drug that was developed with public money, so using the proceeds from one drug to finance the development of future drugs, as the pharmaceutical industry does, probably isn't viable.
However, drug development is an extremely risky and expensive endeavor. Much like the movie industry, it is "hit driven." Rare extremely-profitable drugs have to finance the research on the one that flop or are not big commercial successes. So like the film industry, Pharm companies often play it safe by trying to produce "sequels" to successful drugs rather than venturing out into the unknown.
Also, some important classes of drugs are not strong targets for development due to their limited profit potential. For example, there is little money to be made by developing treatments of parasitic diseases in the 3rd world, even though this is probably the area where the greatest potential advances in relieving human misery could be made. Some pharmaceutical firms are doing some work in the area, essentially pro bono (Merck, in particular, is doing this), but they can't afford to make it a big emphasis.
Antibiotic research is another area that could stand more attention. Again, nobody is going to profit much from an expensive new antibiotic. First, they are actual cures, so people only take them for a limited time. And existing antibiotics are cheap, so there's not a market for a new, pricey drug unless a resistant strain of something nasty emerges--by which time it is too late to start the research. And finally, it just looks bad even for a private firm to charge too much for a life-saving drug.
The NIH is establishing a separate academic enterprise for developing "open source" chemical libraries and screening them, but the emphasis, at least as stated, is on developing new research tools rather than new drugs. Still, I hope that this will encourage more academic research into important pharmaceutical areas with limited profit potential.
However, with the perpetual war against terror, we seem to be entering an era of tight budgets when it comes to federally funded nonmilitary biomedical research. So money for such an expensive research initiative would have to come from other important research areas.
Currently on iTunes a whole album costs $9.99, now I can walk into a music store and get the actual CD for $14.99.
Personally, if its only five bucks, I'd much rather have the CD. You get a pernament backup, the song lyrics and all of the other extras.
Cheaper, if you buy it used. CDs with decent care last pretty much indefinitely. In my opinion, the price is already too high for songs that come without liner notes or a hard backup, and that are dependent upon the consent of the manufacturer to play. If they want me to order music online, the price needs to be closer to 25 cents per song. Otherwise, I'll stick with buying used CDs and ripping them myself.
We're talking about patents: The university discovers and develops the drug (does the testing trials, the biological research), and then licenses the patent to a pharma company.
Who does the expensive research. As an academic pharmacologist, I can tell you that it is nearly impossible to obtain federal or noncommercial grant funding sufficient to do the medicinal chemical research and testing necessary to bring a drug to market.
Bzzzzzt! wrong answer. "First amendment" cannot be deemed a defense for prior restraint of COMMERCIAL SPEECH, as the various statutes against false advertising attest. As well as the prohibition of tobacco advertising.
Wrong. Tobacco ads are not prohibited. Indeed, in 2001 the US Supreme Court overturned a Massachusetts law prohibiting tobacco ads next to schools. You are probably thinking of TV ads. However, TV is a special case as the airwaves are regarded as a public resource, and restrictions on tobacco ads have been justified on grounds of protecting children, for whom tobacco use is illegal. There is no such rationalization available for pharmaceutical ads. Pharm ads could probably be (and probably should be) regulated more tightly by the FDA, but the FDA does not have authority to ban them altogether.
Is is only "effective" because all companies do it so everyone is compelled to do it.
The reason they are "compelled" to do it is that it works to increase market share.
What is insane is marketing to the public, which is the reason why advertising expenses skyrocketed to leave R&D expenses in the dust. And, in any case, pharma companies have no reason to market to the public as only doctors are the ones who can prescribe given drugs.
Prohibiting advertising to the public is the key here to lower drug prices.
This might well be the case. Indeed, I've heard a similar view expressed by a drug company executive. But there are 1st amendment issues involved in trying to prohibit pharmaceutical companies from advertising. As for the notion that "there is no reason to market to the public," pharm companies wouldn't do it if it wasn't effective. Doctors may be the only ones who can prescribe, but the doctor is ultimately working for the patient, and if a patient wants a particular drug, the doctor is likely to go along with the patient's request if it is not clearly medically inappropriate.
Drug companies don't invest much in research anyways, as research money comes from governments and is also subject to tax credits; most of their money goes to marketing.
Duh. Companies don't have less money by virtue of engaging in advertising. They advertise to increase sales, thereby making money. So advertising is what brings in the dollars that are subsequently used for research.
And no, the money for drug company research does not come from governments--the most expensive studies are funded by income from the company's existing drugs.
Incentive to do drug research commercially yes. But there are still many drug researchers who are intrinsically motivated and will continue to research at universities or part of non profit orginizations.
Actually, a lot of the guys at the drug companies are "intrinsically motivated," too. But this isn't mathematics, where all you need to make a discovery is a blackboard. Doing this kind of research costs money--developing a new drug is so hugely expensive and risky these days that only the biggest pharmaceutical companies can afford to do it. The universities just can't afford it.
Most all research is actually done in universities, and "finished" in corporations.
So no loss to the end customer.
The universities do the cheap basic research--discovering potential targets and mechanisms. But they can't get the money to do the expensive research--developing huge compound libraries (although there is a new NIH initiative to get universities into this business), optimizing lead compounds, doing preclincical testing on animals, and doing the human safety and efficacy trials that the FDA requires to approve a drug.
The expense of these latter studies is so enormous that it simply doesn't make economic sense for a company to do them unless they have some kind of exclusive rights. Indeed, in the old days, the drug companies often simply ignored promising academic research that could potentially lead to important drugs. It was only when policies for licensing compounds to industry were liberalized that discoveries in the universities began to be exploited to develop therapeutically useful drugs.
Note also that that industry money flowing back to universities through licensing deals helps to support research that would otherwise have to be paid for by federal grants.
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What types of radiation damage DNA and how exactly do they accomplish this?
Ionizing radiation (ultraviolet light and above) is known to damage DNA. It does so because individual photons carry enough energy to disrupt chemical bonds. Microwave photons are too low energy to do this, so if they damage DNA, they must do so by another, novel mechanism.
Are tumors, cancers and other symptoms of damaged DNA normal?
In a sense, yes. First, we are all exposed to some ionizing radiation from cosmic rays and from decay of natural radioactive minerals. DNA can also be damaged by chemical reactions with reactive chemicals. Cellular metabolism actually "leaks" reactive free radicals. There are mechanisms to clean them this cellular pollution, but much as in the external world, there is a cost to this, and beyond a certain point, cleaning them up just isn't "cost-effective," evolutionarily speaking, so a certain amount of cancer risk is accepted.
You don't need to explain why a phenomena occurs to tell if it occurs.
Not necessarily. But when the evidence for whether a phenomenon occurs is ambiguous, as is the case here, one tries to address the question theoretically--is there any any plausible known mechanism by which it could occur?
Also, of course, having an idea of the mechanism makes it easier to design good experiments to test whether the phenomenon actually occurs in practice.
Indeed, microwave radiation could simply heat up the surroundings of DNA and that would break the DNA. How does this work?
Microwave radiation couples to the dipole moment of water molecules, which makes them vibrate harder, causing a local rise in temperature, much like in a microwave oven. See this wikipedia article
Yes, at high enough intensity, microwave radiation could damage DNA by cooking the cell. But thermal effects of microwave radiation are well understood, and safety limits are well known. Cell phones don't even come close to being able to put out enough energy to cause thermal damage.
It is a humanitarian responsibility to prove beyond reasonable scientific doubt that a product is completely safe before everyone starts using/consuming/walking around with that product. You wouldn't eat some new food just because about half the studies assert that it probably isn't a deadly poison right?
I almost feel guilty disturbing your fool's paradise.
But the hard reality is that nobody ever proves "beyond reasonable scientific doubt" that a product is completely safe--not drugs, not foods, not automobiles. In fact, I take it as a given that no product is completely safe. Indeed, if that were the standard, we would have no new products, because the cost would be immense. Think about it--let's say you test a product on 10,000 people (probably considerably more than almost any company could afford). Let's suppose that the product kills one person in 20,000. Then there's a 50% chance that you wouldn't even see it in your study (and even if you did, it almost certainly wouldn't be statistically significant). Now let's suppose 10 million people use your product. Bang! 500 people dead.
So really, about the most you can hope for is that a product isn't horribly, obviously hazardous. Cell phones certainly meet this standard. Epidemiological studies of illness associated with cell phone use pretty consistently show no hazard or only a small hazard. They are probably at least as safe as most drugs, and lots safer than automobiles. Are they perfectly safe? Almost certainly not, although I can predict with pretty good confidence that the number of people harmed because of somebody being distracted by a cell phone greatly exceeds the number of people harmed by the biological side effects of microwave radiation.
And don't you find it a bit worrysome that the companies are putting extensive restrictions on research grants, and the the US is no longer putting untethered money into the hat?
Research grants on topics like this are reviewed in competition with grants on other topics. So if they aren't getting funded, it is because the researchers involved have not managed to convince study sections that they are likely to make significant progress--which at this point in the game would probably mean showing that they have some sort of real handle on the mechanism of the putative effect. So the money ends up going to projects that look like they have a greater chance of succeeding.
I see respected scientists in their fields saying 'we need more research'. So I say 'Ah... I'll go with More Research for 1000, Alex'.
Actually, pretty much everybody will tell you that there is a need for more research (and especially, more grant funding) in their own field, whatever that may be.
Given the POTENTIAL here (guess: pretty much everyone on the planet that HAS a phone will be using a cell phone in 30 years), I think its worth a good 50 million for a first round of studies.
The epidemiological evidence is pretty marginal, with many studies failing to find any effect at all or only small effects. That means that the risk, if any, is almost certainly not large. So the primary grounds for interest are not public health, but the possibility of discovering novel biological phenomena.
Some very well established institutions actually have conducted extensive research, and have concluded that cell-phone radiation does have negative effects.
The quality of research cannot generally be judged by how "well established" the institution is, but rather by where the results are published. For a high-profile topic like this, the place to look for significant papers is in major journals like Science or Nature. Also, academic research institutes do not draw conclusions--conclusions are drawn by individual investigators, and are not endorsed by their home institutions.
And, once again, I'll refer you to the article, "When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one--three out of every four papers shows an effect"
Scientists tend to draw conclusions based on the quality and nature of the data, not a census of the number of publications on each side.
Again, please actually read the article. One lobbying effort is stated in the first three paragraphs. Also read the last page: "As a result, many U.S. scientists have moved on, either focusing on other areas or leaving the research arena altogether, relying on the rest of the world to pick up the slack."
While the article mentioned some industry objections to specific research, it is notable that they were ineffective. Indeed, the substance of the article is that the real obstacle to continued research is researchers in the area have been unable to convince other scientists that the evidence for a phenomenon is strong enough to merit additional public grant funding. This is basically what happens in a field like this--if you fail to make significant progress, it gets hard to renew your grant.
Proteins and enzymes, and probably even DNA (IANABC) rely heavily on steric (shape) effects to do their work. Why cannot microwaves cause a molecule to flip and turn into a stereoisomer of itself ?
It's an energy issue, again. Biological molecules have to be stable while being constantly bombarded by 37 degree C water molecules and charged ions. The energy of a single microwave photon is much, much less than the energy of the chemical interactions that proteins are constantly being subjected to. If the energy barrier between one conformation and the other is so low that a microwave photon is going to flip it over, then things would be flipping over all of the time, just from occasional random energetic collisions. If the alternate "bad" conformation was more stable (lower energy), then pretty soon most of the molecules would occupy that conformation. If it wasn't more stable, then it would flip right back to the "good" one.
There are numerous international studies which have seen various effects. This is unlike cold fusion, where the results couldn't be reproduced.
On the contrary, it is very similar. Some people claimed to reproduce the results, others could not. It is more accurate to say that they could not be reliably reproduced. Here is a recent DOE review
Note also that it is a lot easier to get positive results published than negative. So when I hear, "half the studies support it, and half don't," that tells me that it is very hard indeed to reproduce.
Furthermore, if you had read the article, you'll see that researchers are explicitly facing harassment by the industry. Many are being driven out because of this harassment.
By and large, industry has little power to drive anybody out of research. But to get continued grant funding for something as improbable as this, a researcher would have to show clear progress in elucidating the mechanism.
As for industry, I am sure that they are concerned about possible public relations or liability fallout from such research. But they probably also sincerely believe that is nonsense--because in terms of known mechanisms, it makes little sense.
This is a Nobel Prize-category topic. Our existing understanding of physics and biochemistry is simply insufficient to account for any interaction between microwave radiation and DNA.
I agree. Its current status is about the same as cold fusion. Right now we have a bunch of scattered hard-to-explain and hard-to-reproduce results in the literature, mostly in minor journals, and it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere. It could easily all be artifact. What is needed to give this field some credibility is some real progress on the question of mechanism.
The energy per photon is just too low to break covalent bonds, so there is no way microwave energy could break DNA directly, unless you pump in enough energy to cook it.
So you really have to resort to some fancy hypotheses to rationalize this. Well maybe, just maybe, there is some kind of a resonance of the current through an ion channel (although I'm not entirely sure that this is even plausible), which somehow alters its coupling to some intracellular kinase or other second messenger system, which activates an enzyme that happens to produce free radicals, and those break DNA. But I'd have to see some definitive evidence before I take that kind of hypothesis seriously.
The point is that "microwaves damage DNA" is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. "Some studies support it and some do not" simply doesn't qualify.
I'm skeptical of "DNA break" assays, anyway. There is a long history of people finding DNA damage by this and that, and others failing to reproduce the result. It's easy to break DNA--you can even break it by rough handling.
it makes you look like unscientific amateurs.
Yes, scientists are far too serious to give something such a frivolous name.
One would think that if evolution is true, and species evolved from one specie to another, it's only logical we would find a lot of fossil evidence of these hybrid species, not to mention hybrid species living today.
Not really. The implicit assumption you are making is that these hybrid species were equally abundant and survived as long as the better-known species. But evolutionary theory leads us to expect that evolutionary change often occurs in small populations that are not widely distributed. So unless you happen to look in exactly the right place, you'll miss them. Even then, you'd have to be extraordinarily lucky.
A new study was released yesterday by Tulane Medical which tracked video game users over a 8 year period testing how much the video games they play affect their tendency toward violence. The study found that among those who played games 8% went on to have some form of violence conviction while only 6% of the non-gamers did.
The remarkable thing is that the effect is only two percent. Note that in epidemiological studies, effects less that 100% generally are unreliable. Since this is an uncontrolled study, at least some, and quite possibly all, of that 2% probably reflects the fact that violently inclined people tend to enjoy violent entertainments.
I've read a number of these studies, and they are pretty much worthless. Either they fail to control for overall arousal with an equally exciting control stimulus, confirmed by heart rate measurements, or they call things like "hitting and kicking" violence.
When kids hit and kick, it is aggression, but it is not serious violence. Kids know that they aren't strong enough to cause serious harm to one another by hitting or kicking, so they have few inhibitions about fighting than adults. That doesn't mean that they aren't capable of serious violence, though, especially if they use a weapon like a knife or a rock. I'd like to see one of these studies that excluded all of the rough play nonsense, and only counted incidents serious enough to require admission of the victim to a hospital.
The bottom line is that as games have gotten increasingly popular, and more realistic and violent, the incidence of youth violence has decreased not increased. So either these studies are wrong (which seems likely, considering the incompetent methodology and the obvious bias of many of the researchers), or the effect is so small that it is insignificant next to other cultural and social influences.
In every generation, we have some idiots running around trying to blame some aspect of youth culture for the fact that teenaged boys are, on average, more violent than grownups.
The fact that violent crimes, and even violent crimes by young people have steadily declined as games have become both more violent and more realistic proves that any possible pro-violence effect of games is statistically negligible relative to other social and cultural factors.
The possibility that violent videogames actually decrease real world violence cannot be excluded, and is consistent with the data (although one can think of many other explanations--perhaps the decrease in violence is due to violent movies, rather than violent games, or to easier availability of pornography, or liberalized abortion laws).
Experimental studies that attempt to correlate "violent behavior" with gameplaying (or violent TV, for that matter) are pretty much crap. I've read a number of these studies, and they either confuse aggression with serious violence (a boy pushing or hitting another kid is not the same as a serious attempt to kill or maim) or fail to properly control for overall excitement (there would have to be a control stimulus that is equally exciting, confirmed by heart rate measurements--a sports match, perhaps).
Studies that track kids and try to relate their violent behavior with their taste in media are also pretty worthless, because they are not randomized (that is, they don't pick a bunch of kids at random and force them to play games several hours a day whether they want to or not). As a result, you can't distinguish between the hypothesis that kids with a propensity for violence like violent entertainment and the hypothesis that violent entertainment causes real violence.
It would not require purchase of hardware that costs twice as much as its PC twin with the same performance.
What always amazes me when working with Windows is how much slower a "comparable" Windows system seems to be. I think that individual operations are as fast or faster, but more things seem to monopolize the computer so that I can't do other things, which makes the whole system just feel pokey to me. I'm particularly annoyed that it doesn't seem possible to switch over and work in another application while installing an application or system update.
I find a common, fixed position, always there menubar is a great feature.
I agree. As far as I'm concerned, the menubar belongs to me, not to the application. I don't want applications to mess with it--they can add their own menus (as long as they leave the standard ones up), but that's it. I'll make an exception for PowerPoint, since when I'm running PP in fullscreen I'm really using my computer as a slide projector rather than a computer.
I'm just curious if there is some "anti-communism" law forbidding the state/fed gov. from making this kind of investment, or if it's just too risky for them, or if they aren't allowed to profit from the investment, or...?
So far as I know, there are no actual laws against it, but the feds are generally reluctant to go into competition with private industry. Politically, it would be hard for the federal government to profit off of a life saving drug that was developed with public money, so using the proceeds from one drug to finance the development of future drugs, as the pharmaceutical industry does, probably isn't viable.
However, drug development is an extremely risky and expensive endeavor. Much like the movie industry, it is "hit driven." Rare extremely-profitable drugs have to finance the research on the one that flop or are not big commercial successes. So like the film industry, Pharm companies often play it safe by trying to produce "sequels" to successful drugs rather than venturing out into the unknown.
Also, some important classes of drugs are not strong targets for development due to their limited profit potential. For example, there is little money to be made by developing treatments of parasitic diseases in the 3rd world, even though this is probably the area where the greatest potential advances in relieving human misery could be made. Some pharmaceutical firms are doing some work in the area, essentially pro bono (Merck, in particular, is doing this), but they can't afford to make it a big emphasis.
Antibiotic research is another area that could stand more attention. Again, nobody is going to profit much from an expensive new antibiotic. First, they are actual cures, so people only take them for a limited time. And existing antibiotics are cheap, so there's not a market for a new, pricey drug unless a resistant strain of something nasty emerges--by which time it is too late to start the research. And finally, it just looks bad even for a private firm to charge too much for a life-saving drug.
The NIH is establishing a separate academic enterprise for developing "open source" chemical libraries and screening them, but the emphasis, at least as stated, is on developing new research tools rather than new drugs. Still, I hope that this will encourage more academic research into important pharmaceutical areas with limited profit potential.
However, with the perpetual war against terror, we seem to be entering an era of tight budgets when it comes to federally funded nonmilitary biomedical research. So money for such an expensive research initiative would have to come from other important research areas.
Currently on iTunes a whole album costs $9.99, now I can walk into a music store and get the actual CD for $14.99.
Personally, if its only five bucks, I'd much rather have the CD. You get a pernament backup, the song lyrics and all of the other extras.
Cheaper, if you buy it used. CDs with decent care last pretty much indefinitely. In my opinion, the price is already too high for songs that come without liner notes or a hard backup, and that are dependent upon the consent of the manufacturer to play. If they want me to order music online, the price needs to be closer to 25 cents per song. Otherwise, I'll stick with buying used CDs and ripping them myself.
We're talking about patents: The university discovers and develops the drug (does the testing trials, the biological research), and then licenses the patent to a pharma company.
Who does the expensive research. As an academic pharmacologist, I can tell you that it is nearly impossible to obtain federal or noncommercial grant funding sufficient to do the medicinal chemical research and testing necessary to bring a drug to market.
Bzzzzzt! wrong answer. "First amendment" cannot be deemed a defense for prior restraint of COMMERCIAL SPEECH, as the various statutes against false advertising attest.
As well as the prohibition of tobacco advertising.
Wrong. Tobacco ads are not prohibited. Indeed, in 2001 the US Supreme Court overturned a Massachusetts law prohibiting tobacco ads next to schools. You are probably thinking of TV ads. However, TV is a special case as the airwaves are regarded as a public resource, and restrictions on tobacco ads have been justified on grounds of protecting children, for whom tobacco use is illegal. There is no such rationalization available for pharmaceutical ads. Pharm ads could probably be (and probably should be) regulated more tightly by the FDA, but the FDA does not have authority to ban them altogether.
Is is only "effective" because all companies do it so everyone is compelled to do it.
The reason they are "compelled" to do it is that it works to increase market share.
What is insane is marketing to the public, which is the reason why advertising expenses skyrocketed to leave R&D expenses in the dust. And, in any case, pharma companies have no reason to market to the public as only doctors are the ones who can prescribe given drugs.
Prohibiting advertising to the public is the key here to lower drug prices.
This might well be the case. Indeed, I've heard a similar view expressed by a drug company executive. But there are 1st amendment issues involved in trying to prohibit pharmaceutical companies from advertising. As for the notion that "there is no reason to market to the public," pharm companies wouldn't do it if it wasn't effective. Doctors may be the only ones who can prescribe, but the doctor is ultimately working for the patient, and if a patient wants a particular drug, the doctor is likely to go along with the patient's request if it is not clearly medically inappropriate.
Drug companies don't invest much in research anyways, as research money comes from governments and is also subject to tax credits; most of their money goes to marketing.
Duh. Companies don't have less money by virtue of engaging in advertising. They advertise to increase sales, thereby making money. So advertising is what brings in the dollars that are subsequently used for research.
And no, the money for drug company research does not come from governments--the most expensive studies are funded by income from the company's existing drugs.
Incentive to do drug research commercially yes. But there are still many drug researchers who are intrinsically motivated and will continue to research at universities or part of non profit orginizations.
Actually, a lot of the guys at the drug companies are "intrinsically motivated," too. But this isn't mathematics, where all you need to make a discovery is a blackboard. Doing this kind of research costs money--developing a new drug is so hugely expensive and risky these days that only the biggest pharmaceutical companies can afford to do it. The universities just can't afford it.
Most all research is actually done in universities, and "finished" in corporations.
So no loss to the end customer.
The universities do the cheap basic research--discovering potential targets and mechanisms. But they can't get the money to do the expensive research--developing huge compound libraries (although there is a new NIH initiative to get universities into this business), optimizing lead compounds, doing preclincical testing on animals, and doing the human safety and efficacy trials that the FDA requires to approve a drug.
The expense of these latter studies is so enormous that it simply doesn't make economic sense for a company to do them unless they have some kind of exclusive rights. Indeed, in the old days, the drug companies often simply ignored promising academic research that could potentially lead to important drugs. It was only when policies for licensing compounds to industry were liberalized that discoveries in the universities began to be exploited to develop therapeutically useful drugs.
Note also that that industry money flowing back to universities through licensing deals helps to support research that would otherwise have to be paid for by federal grants.