I knew a girl in high school who wanted to work as a hot zone researcher; last I heard, she was applying to law schools. I'm not sure which profession involves more noxious material.
Depression (at least in mild cases) is one of the few diseases where people taking placebo do get better, actually. And while the use of 'active comparators' in drug trials is becoming more common (mainly because it allows you to demonstrate better results, and thus demand better reimbursement from Medicare and HMOs, e.g.) using placebo is still very common. As long as the patient knows when they sign up that they might not be getting the study drug, it's perfectly ethical.
The exception would be in cases where effective treatment exists, and withholding it would be a death sentence. For example, you probably won't see many placebo-controlled trials of new HIV drugs. In these cases active comparator trials are the only way to fly.
I'm glad somebody said that. I know us 'soft scientists' are typically not held in high regard by engineers, but believe it or not, most biology is a tiny bit complicated. Not to say an engineer couldn't learn it, of course, but it's not the sort of thing you can really instinctively know.
Quantum malware will be a huge threat...as soon as we have the widespread adoption of quantum computers performing sensitive tasks. And people who understand how to program viruses for them. And quantum computers for the virus programmers.
Is this really even a story? We may as well be worrying about where to buy reliable crossbows once the atomic wars destroy civilization.
Yeah, I sort of thought the whole idea behind 'wisdom of crowds' is the fact that you aggregate enough data to cancel out the individual biases and result in a relatively accurate conclusion. If you pull out all the "experts" who make the correct call in one trial, don't you lose the correcting power of the group? How big and intellectually diverse does a 'crowd' have to be?
"Safe and efficacious" as an FDA standard applies to drugs--you can't sell sugar pills to people and call them medicine because although they're safe, they don't produce real clinical benefit.
On the other hand, things like dietary supplements and beverages don't need to be submitted to the FDA for approval; the manufacturer just assumes responsibility for the product being safe, with the FDA stepping in only if there are ill effects.
So for something like this, I doubt you have to provide any effectiveness data. I suppose you could argue that it's false advertising, but if they have studies (however ill-designed) showing that it does, in fact, burn calories, then they'd probably be covered.
Take a look at Lazar's 2006 letter to Nature Medicine. It's been shown that excess adipose tissue can lead to hypersecretion of factors such as TNF-alpha and interleukin-6, which act indirectly to cause insulin insensitivity and in turn, elevated blood glucose. It's now considered to be an alternative theory of diabetogenesis. Of course, there are genetic factors involved that may increase susceptibility or even cause the condition in people who are not obese.
However, I will admit, like those insulin receptors, I have been insensitive, and I do apologize to anyone offended by my joke. Fair enough?
Should I point out the widespread prevalence of obesity in America? Or should I point out how you only have to turn on a TV, go to the movies, or open a magazine to see the importance society (American and otherwise) puts on thinness? Should I challenge your assumptions that I'm 1) thin 2) young, or 3) conceited?
Nah. I'll just suggest that you go have a few cheeseburgers to cheer yourself up. It's always worked in the past, right?
Maybe, maybe not. I think it's pretty obvious from my tone that I was joking. Obesity (and attendant high blood glucose) is pretty well accepted as a major risk factor in the development of diabetes. Just like smoking is a major risk factor for lung cancer. Which doesn't make it any less tragic or horrible when it happens. It's true that metabolic syndrome and how insulin resistance and obesity affect each other aren't totally clear, but I've never seen a published paper that claimed obesity couldn't be a risk factor.
So calm down. I know it's fun to build up a big load of righteous indignation, but there's just no call for it.
Another downside of obese life eliminated...now if they could just make a pill that would make fat people look attractive at the beach, there'd be no limits to the future of American corpulence!
You can't remove undesirable genes from a population by culling the afflicted, unless you have a disease which is caused by having bad copy of the gene. Take sickle cell anemia: if you magically killed everyone who has it this second, there would still be millions of carriers with a single bad copy of the gene who don't develop the disease. And if two carriers have children, 1/4 will likely be sickle cell.
Besides which, new mutations arise constantly, so even if you could wipe out all known genetic illness, something new would just show up to replace it.
I think the point the GP was making was that there was nothing between them in the movie, and it's true. The movie didn't do much with Jane, or Wash (to say nothing of Book and Inara who barely had any presence). It's probably unavoidable, though--there just wasn't enough screen time to do everything we would have wanted to see from the characters.
This is the only reference to it I could find in a quick Google search that didn't refer to government mind control chips or biblibcal prophecies about the mark of the beast. If you're interested, you could probably pull a list of the investigator's publications and see what he's done since then: http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/011097/tech_r oboroach.html
This sort of research really lays low the idea often trumpeted in the popular media that totally decoding the genome will immediately open the door to genetic therapies and cures for hereditary diseases. Between epigenetic modification of DNA and the existence of micro-RNA based expression control, we're finding that there's a lot more subtlety and intricacy in how genes work than we would have guessed 10-15 years ago.
The central dogma doesn't refer to quantities ('more DNA = more protein')--it's about the flow of information from the relatively stable medium of DNA, through the transient messenger RNA, into the proteins that do the bulk of the work in the cell. The reason Fire and Mello's work flew in the face of the central dogma is because they showed that some small, non-protein producing RNAs could feed back and downregulate the production of protein from the mRNAs. And what's more, work that's going on right now in micro-RNA (miRNA) shows that most multicellular organisms are already using some of the mechanisms involved in RNAi to regulate. It makes the regulation of gene expression infinitely more subtle and adaptable.
Plutonium isn't really that toxic. Carcinogenic, sure, but in the traditional sense of 'toxicity, plutonium isn't much worse than lead. I forget his name, but one of the chemist in the Manhattan project got sprayed in the mouth with plutonium oxide and swallowed some. A little mouth-rinsing and stomach pumping later and he was fine--he lived long enough to give an interview on the project in 1998. He said that for the next several years periodic checks of his urine were still finding trace amounts of plutonium.
The wannabe flying kid was so terribly annoying that I was really hoping he'd jump off of the building and face plant. So imagine my excitement when he seemed to be doing just that--only to have my hopes dashed when his brother flew up and caught him. Definitely dampened my enthusiasm for the show.
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I knew a girl in high school who wanted to work as a hot zone researcher; last I heard, she was applying to law schools. I'm not sure which profession involves more noxious material.
Depression (at least in mild cases) is one of the few diseases where people taking placebo do get better, actually. And while the use of 'active comparators' in drug trials is becoming more common (mainly because it allows you to demonstrate better results, and thus demand better reimbursement from Medicare and HMOs, e.g.) using placebo is still very common. As long as the patient knows when they sign up that they might not be getting the study drug, it's perfectly ethical.
The exception would be in cases where effective treatment exists, and withholding it would be a death sentence. For example, you probably won't see many placebo-controlled trials of new HIV drugs. In these cases active comparator trials are the only way to fly.
"who would mistake Barbara Streisand for Shrek, or Lance Bass of N'Sync for a Teletubby?"
I think it's more a question of 'how many beers' than of 'who.'
I'm glad somebody said that. I know us 'soft scientists' are typically not held in high regard by engineers, but believe it or not, most biology is a tiny bit complicated. Not to say an engineer couldn't learn it, of course, but it's not the sort of thing you can really instinctively know.
Quantum malware will be a huge threat...as soon as we have the widespread adoption of quantum computers performing sensitive tasks. And people who understand how to program viruses for them. And quantum computers for the virus programmers.
Is this really even a story? We may as well be worrying about where to buy reliable crossbows once the atomic wars destroy civilization.
Yeah, I sort of thought the whole idea behind 'wisdom of crowds' is the fact that you aggregate enough data to cancel out the individual biases and result in a relatively accurate conclusion. If you pull out all the "experts" who make the correct call in one trial, don't you lose the correcting power of the group? How big and intellectually diverse does a 'crowd' have to be?
If only /. was constructed with paradox-absorbing crumple zones!
"Safe and efficacious" as an FDA standard applies to drugs--you can't sell sugar pills to people and call them medicine because although they're safe, they don't produce real clinical benefit.
On the other hand, things like dietary supplements and beverages don't need to be submitted to the FDA for approval; the manufacturer just assumes responsibility for the product being safe, with the FDA stepping in only if there are ill effects.
So for something like this, I doubt you have to provide any effectiveness data. I suppose you could argue that it's false advertising, but if they have studies (however ill-designed) showing that it does, in fact, burn calories, then they'd probably be covered.
Take a look at Lazar's 2006 letter to Nature Medicine. It's been shown that excess adipose tissue can lead to hypersecretion of factors such as TNF-alpha and interleukin-6, which act indirectly to cause insulin insensitivity and in turn, elevated blood glucose. It's now considered to be an alternative theory of diabetogenesis. Of course, there are genetic factors involved that may increase susceptibility or even cause the condition in people who are not obese.
However, I will admit, like those insulin receptors, I have been insensitive, and I do apologize to anyone offended by my joke. Fair enough?
Should I point out the widespread prevalence of obesity in America? Or should I point out how you only have to turn on a TV, go to the movies, or open a magazine to see the importance society (American and otherwise) puts on thinness? Should I challenge your assumptions that I'm 1) thin 2) young, or 3) conceited?
Nah. I'll just suggest that you go have a few cheeseburgers to cheer yourself up. It's always worked in the past, right?
Maybe, maybe not. I think it's pretty obvious from my tone that I was joking. Obesity (and attendant high blood glucose) is pretty well accepted as a major risk factor in the development of diabetes. Just like smoking is a major risk factor for lung cancer. Which doesn't make it any less tragic or horrible when it happens. It's true that metabolic syndrome and how insulin resistance and obesity affect each other aren't totally clear, but I've never seen a published paper that claimed obesity couldn't be a risk factor.
So calm down. I know it's fun to build up a big load of righteous indignation, but there's just no call for it.
Another downside of obese life eliminated...now if they could just make a pill that would make fat people look attractive at the beach, there'd be no limits to the future of American corpulence!
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/10/13/nkorea .test.sample/index.html
You can't remove undesirable genes from a population by culling the afflicted, unless you have a disease which is caused by having bad copy of the gene. Take sickle cell anemia: if you magically killed everyone who has it this second, there would still be millions of carriers with a single bad copy of the gene who don't develop the disease. And if two carriers have children, 1/4 will likely be sickle cell.
Besides which, new mutations arise constantly, so even if you could wipe out all known genetic illness, something new would just show up to replace it.
I'm not sure you can really call deep fat frying a natural food process, to be honest.
I think the point the GP was making was that there was nothing between them in the movie, and it's true. The movie didn't do much with Jane, or Wash (to say nothing of Book and Inara who barely had any presence). It's probably unavoidable, though--there just wasn't enough screen time to do everything we would have wanted to see from the characters.
1. Space debris
2. Gatling guns
3. ???
4. Profit!
This is the only reference to it I could find in a quick Google search that didn't refer to government mind control chips or biblibcal prophecies about the mark of the beast. If you're interested, you could probably pull a list of the investigator's publications and see what he's done since then: http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/011097/tech_r oboroach.html
This sort of research really lays low the idea often trumpeted in the popular media that totally decoding the genome will immediately open the door to genetic therapies and cures for hereditary diseases. Between epigenetic modification of DNA and the existence of micro-RNA based expression control, we're finding that there's a lot more subtlety and intricacy in how genes work than we would have guessed 10-15 years ago.
The central dogma doesn't refer to quantities ('more DNA = more protein')--it's about the flow of information from the relatively stable medium of DNA, through the transient messenger RNA, into the proteins that do the bulk of the work in the cell. The reason Fire and Mello's work flew in the face of the central dogma is because they showed that some small, non-protein producing RNAs could feed back and downregulate the production of protein from the mRNAs. And what's more, work that's going on right now in micro-RNA (miRNA) shows that most multicellular organisms are already using some of the mechanisms involved in RNAi to regulate. It makes the regulation of gene expression infinitely more subtle and adaptable.
If it's not testable (and thus, falsifiable) then it's not a theory. The same way intelligent design isn't a theory. ::ducks::
Plutonium isn't really that toxic. Carcinogenic, sure, but in the traditional sense of 'toxicity, plutonium isn't much worse than lead. I forget his name, but one of the chemist in the Manhattan project got sprayed in the mouth with plutonium oxide and swallowed some. A little mouth-rinsing and stomach pumping later and he was fine--he lived long enough to give an interview on the project in 1998. He said that for the next several years periodic checks of his urine were still finding trace amounts of plutonium.
In American nursing home, power suit lifts YOU!
The wannabe flying kid was so terribly annoying that I was really hoping he'd jump off of the building and face plant. So imagine my excitement when he seemed to be doing just that--only to have my hopes dashed when his brother flew up and caught him. Definitely dampened my enthusiasm for the show.
...about 80% of the people who play CS and WoW, but that's a conservative estimate.