It appears that D3 is used far more efficiently by the human body than D2. There may be some issues with D3 used by other, minor metabolic pathways that make D3 healthier. Note D3 is the form produced by the human body on exposure to UV light.
http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/ 89/11/5387
It appears D2 is about 1/3 the effective dose as the same quantity of D3.
Latitude and DIET are the important factors. Inuit are darker skinned than the light exposer theories predict, but the traditional diet was very high in vitamin D. Europe was very different.
I have trouble believing that humans were in Europe for too short a time for evolution to occur. There are a great number of genes that have been selected for by disease resistance. Epidemic disease has only existed as an evolutionary factor for less than 10 000 years. Also, these mutations are very simple, its very easy to break a pigment gene by random mutation (much easier than a different but still functional immune receptor for disease resistance.) In fact, as long as dark skin was no longer an advantage we would expect to see people gradually become paler. Just like pigmentation dropped out of many cave dwelling creatures.
How does getting funded by private donations instead of votes prevent corruption?
I never said it did, but since that particular method of public funding doesn't fix the problem, it's not a viable alternative.
Funding based on votes (what the voting public thinks is in their interest) rather than pure donation (what the richest people/corporation thinks is in their interest) seems to lead to less corruption. In general the public doesn't like corruption in the government, as the liberals found out in the last Canadian election.
DCA (dichloroacetic acid) has not completed testing as a cancer treatment. It was used previously for mitochondrial diseases. Now DCA has shown promise against cancer in the petri-dish but there are still animal and clinical trials to do to find dosages, etc. DCA hasn't been proven as a real treatment in humans but shows lots of promise that it might be. Big Pharma isn't blocking this or researching this either. They cannot make money off DCA or DCA research, so they don't care. The DCA mechanism of fighting cancer by turning on mitochondria respiration might be of interest to Big Pharma if they can come up with a different, patentable drug that does this.
The point about Taxol was a separate little side note. Unlike most drugs, Taxol is very expensive to make, which is why new methods of gathering the natural product mentioned in TFA are relevant. Since this drug is expensive to make, new production methods are valuable (and patentable) so Big Pharma researches it.
If this was supposed to be about Big Pharma being good or bad for drug development, sorry. Obviously Big pharma researches drugs that will make the company the most money and not research thing that will loose them money. Big Pharma invests billions into drug research that would not be there otherwise. Not all drugs that help people will be profitable (eg. DCA) so Big Pharma is not the only solution. Different methods for different products.
Yes! American behavior makes a lot more sense if you watch American news. It wasn't until Katrina that anyone in the US dared mention anything bad about the President.
A bunch of party funding now comes from the tax system (which I have no problem with) and is based on the number of votes received.
And you don't have a problem with perpetuating a corrupt political party? That system only works when the elected party is a good one and we all know that it takes good candidates to make good parties and truly good candidates are hard to come by.
How does getting funded by private donations instead of votes prevent corruption?
Cheap and simple to make the chemical and non-patentable. That doesn't mean testing is easy or cheap. Why would a company spend hundreds of millions of dollars running animal trials, human trials and the rest when their competitors can just bottle and sell it after at the same cost. Why would a company spend money developing a product that they cannot legally make money on? There are plenty of other products to develop. This product does benefit the public (and the reputation of the University researchers) so it makes sense for public money to develop the drug.
Most drugs are very cheap to make. They cost a lot because on average a drug company spent $800 million figuring out the treatment. This is before they made a single cent or even started mass producing the drug.
btw, this article is about a drug that is extremely expensive to make, because Taxol has to be made from laboriously harvested natural products.
If this actually is a cure, it will never see the light of day. A watered down "treatment" version will likely appear, though.
Why cure something when you can gouge someone for the rest of their life? Because your competitor just offered them a cure. Which does the consumer pick?
But if it's so cheap and simple, why aren't the uncapitalist socialist-medicine countries developing it?
They are! It was the University of Alberta. Now there is still much expensive testing and trials to do, and they will not be done by pharmaceutical companies because there is no money in it. Don't worry, anything that promising will be looked into. This is exactly what public funded research should do.
Why don't we do this with all drug research? Because on average it takes $800 000 000 of investment to develop a drug before any profit is made. No governments or non-profits have been willing pay up nearly the amount that private companies have. To make money off patents, they have to reveal how they did things. This lets places like Brazil decide that it's worth violating patents to create generic drugs to save their citizens. (And drug companies whine about the billions of dollars of lost sales. All the money people never had in the first place, otherwise their country wouldn't risk the repercussions of violating trade agreements.)
Drug companies will keep making things that pay money (of which there are many). Academic research will continue on anything it can get funding for. Different strategies work better or worse for different products with different markets. This seems to confuse people.
Could you not claim the time you spent writing a novel against income made by selling the novel? If you are making money off something, then it is a business. How could you write off your time? You don't have an hourly pay rate, you get paid per book sold. Now the word-processor, writing desk & chair, etc. might be write offs.
If income is taxable, then expenses are deductible, right? So the game purchase, monthly fees, internet connection (required for both the game and sales), etc. are deductible. How about the video card and ram upgrades? Can that be justified if they are needed (or 'recommended' quality) to play the game?
My 'Gold farming' business went poorly last year. I made $2 selling gold and lost $1000 on expenses. Maybe this year I'll be less distracted by quests;)
This leads to another question I've wondered. If gambling winnings are taxable, then gambling losses would have to be deductible, by definition. Is there something I'm missing here? (A minimum amount of gross profits maybe?)
Polymer solar cells have already been made, there are some efficiency issues but they are incredibly cheap. The problem with them is that they disintegrate very quickly. As far as I understood, this was the real problem with conducting polymers of all sorts (the thiophenes, etc.) as far as I know. Anyone know the current status of this?
Bacteria are actually more 'highly evolved' in a sense. Compared to bacteria, more complex organisms have simpler biochemistry because bacteria have had so many more generations. This is part of the reason most new drug searches focus on 'lower' organisms. In the sense of the article, more generations is better.
Believe it or not, we conservatives are not interested in invading your private space, go live your life and have fun -- but we DO care if you die in a terrorist bombing or if your kids get raped and photographed by some perv.
Believe me, I don't want to live in Nazi Germany, but I don't want to die in a subway bombing either. Let's stop the partisan stuff and find a balanced solution. I had no idea other parties wanted our kids to get raped and terrorists to attack us. I assume living under constant surveilence might reduce terrorism and crime. Except of course by the government, but it is immune to corruption and terrorist attacks happen every day.
I think might need some mind altering substances to comprehend to logic properly. I'd like to avoid the high brain damage level of alcohol, but I can only buy the safer substance from criminals. Oh well, they're smuggling much needed unregistered guns into the country too.
Seriously, the conservatives could have won if they hadn't gone down the social conservative path and scared the hell out of all their moderate voters.
Correlation does not imply causation.:P Correlation does not always imply causation. Causation will always show correlation, just not the other way around.
The interesting implication here is that the GM mice's brains apparently developed with the ability to process the new colours. It would be fair to assume that ordinary mice's brains did not even contain the "concept" or "perception" of red hardwired in, since what would the point be?
Thus, if the converse is true, and human brains develop the same way as mice's, it could be assumed that the brains of people with the *physical* inability to detect certain colours from birth would never develop the mental concept/sensation of those colours. (*) But then, now does this explain "Martian colours"? I don't know about these 'martian colours' but from what I understand of normal colour blind people, they really don't have a concept of the what the other colors are. Some colours that look different to us, look exactly the same to them. And from the article, some women have 4 types of cones and can see a greater range of colour than the rest of us in a very similar way.
It's not that surprising that mouse brains were this adaptive though because many reptiles and fish have 4 or 5 different cones. At some point our great ape ancestors had to do this too, to get out of the red-green colour-blind state of most mammals.
There might be important developmental periods though. Maybe an adult never would be able to make sense of the new colours. Experiments with cats found that the ability to percieve horizontal or vertical lines required exposure during early development. Cats raised in rooms without horizontal lines could not 'see' the edge of a table as adults.
It probably is possible. It might be easier to try to replace the gene for blue-light cones with cones from rats (another mammal). Rat cones for blue light are sensitive to a shorter wavelength than humans, so they can see some UV. A person with this would see a greater color range (which makes some plain looking flowers look very pretty. Bees also tend to see UV.)
Music downloads are at singles prices. Downloaded music is inferior quality, (compressed, no cover art, easily lost). The only music that makes sense to purchase at those prices are singles. If you want the whole album, buying a CD is better value.
If 17 times as many songs are pirated as sold, does that mean a ~6 cent 'value' of work to find pirated songs? (Using the $1.00 itunes\17) I thought there was some kind of micro-economic principle about this. Would that mean that a the limit of 6 cents for a dubious quality, ripping off the artist song, piracy would become too much work for the average person?
I think the idea of limited money has some truth to it. I have limited money (as a grad student I'm making about 2/3 of a full time minimum wage job). I could buy CDs for some of the bands I listen to, or just pirate and use the money to see the bands that actually come to town. Guess which I pick.
CDs are overpriced. I can copy them myself for less than a buck which is about 1/20th of what it cost me 10 years ago. Yeah, that's not exactly a fair comparison but the point is costs have been dropping. CDs cost less to produce than tapes, yet when CDs came out they were priced higher because only the wealthier people owed CD players when they first came out. That price never went down. Where did all this money go? At least the higher price was for better quality though.
Now mp3s cost a fraction of what CDs did to produce and distribute and yet the price is to remain the same. Where is all the money going? iTunes is way over priced. Why would I pay as much as I would for a physical CD for an inferior product? I get the CD which can be used anywhere and lent to friends. I can make mp3s from a CD. It isn't compressed, so there's no quality loss (not that it makes a difference with my hardware). You get cover art and liner notes, etc.
Of course there are other costs. Recording equipment costs money, but again that cost is dropping quickly. Getting word out about your band is difficult and important. Now how much harder was that before MySpace? I guess just before music sales started dropping all the creative people were making much more money. Or was that not were the savings went?
We've seen similar stupidity in other sectors of media distribution. Scientific publications tried to charge just as for back-issues distributed over the internet as they did when they had to make physical copies. If they had near the influence over the content producers that music labels do, that would definitely still be the case. Video cassettes were supposed to kill the movie business.
Just maybe we are seeing signs of badly run industry starting to falter. That is absolutely no concern. The only concern to political bodies is if the benefits of musical art to society are diminishing.
But malaria IS the worse mosquito born disease to the countries involved and the mosquitoes only do better because they don't get sick from malaria. This is interesting because malaria would be the selective force holding the gene in the environment. The real danger level is about that of naturally breeding malaria resistant mosquitoes and releasing them. Natural mutation could make a more dangerous/fitter mosquito too.
Putting up some relatively small potential dangers as a reason not to definitely save many lives seems kinda silly doesn't it?
Unfortunately, it has the words genetically modified in it, so it will be classified as bad like golden rice. Maybe it's just ignorance about the dangers. Natural farming involves selecting and breeding the naturally occurring mutants. This can be dangerous! New breeds of potatoes, tomatoes, etc. occasionally revert to older natural states and become filled with poisons (they are related to nightshade). An insect resistant celery developed by normal means had to be withdrawn because of very high levels of carcinogens (its referenced in The Skeptical Environmentalist).
It is not all automatically good or bad. Real problems are complicated and involve thought.
How much does a computer made with 100% US parts cost?
Well, at US Stuff Computers, looks like about twice what foreign made would be. But then again, if you're a PATRIOT instead of a TRAITOR, that's the price you pay to make sure your NEIGHBOR can survive. We'll go with that. Your buying power would be about half, which is a big drop in your standard of living. All you patriots can do that right now, but I think its misguided.
When you buy things made in Taiwan, you're buying with US dollars. US dollars are only worth anything to the Taiwanese if they can buy something from the US or trade them with someone else who does. If no one wants US goods/services the value of the US dollar drops. This makes foreign goods more expensive to US citizens and local goods cheaper. (Ignoring problems like child labor, etc. where the Government steps in and says you won't trade.)
The US dollar was high because it made the most goods/services because the best, brightest, most ambitious people immigrated to the US where the best jobs were.
Feel free not to believe me, as I am a foreigner, but the 'Brain drain' of our best and brightest going to the US used to be (maybe still is) considered a major drain on our economy.
They basically refuse to pay that price point because above a certain pay level it's simply more economical to offshore the job.
I can think of an easy answer for that one: Ban imports. Put the United States into isolationist mode. Label anybody who does business offshore for what they are: A traitor, worthy only of execution. That should stop that argument dead in it's tracks, pardon the pun. And wait until inflation brings the rest of the world up to our standard of living, or until we degrade down to theirs. Your standard of living would drop like a stone. Just throw out everything made in Taiwan and see what you have left. Of course the rest of the world would hurt too. Check out some basic economics. How much does a computer made with 100% US parts cost?
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It appears that D3 is used far more efficiently by the human body than D2. There may be some issues with D3 used by other, minor metabolic pathways that make D3 healthier. Note D3 is the form produced by the human body on exposure to UV light. http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/ 89/11/5387
It appears D2 is about 1/3 the effective dose as the same quantity of D3.
I have trouble believing that humans were in Europe for too short a time for evolution to occur. There are a great number of genes that have been selected for by disease resistance. Epidemic disease has only existed as an evolutionary factor for less than 10 000 years. Also, these mutations are very simple, its very easy to break a pigment gene by random mutation (much easier than a different but still functional immune receptor for disease resistance.) In fact, as long as dark skin was no longer an advantage we would expect to see people gradually become paler. Just like pigmentation dropped out of many cave dwelling creatures.
I never said it did, but since that particular method of public funding doesn't fix the problem, it's not a viable alternative.
Funding based on votes (what the voting public thinks is in their interest) rather than pure donation (what the richest people/corporation thinks is in their interest) seems to lead to less corruption. In general the public doesn't like corruption in the government, as the liberals found out in the last Canadian election.The point about Taxol was a separate little side note. Unlike most drugs, Taxol is very expensive to make, which is why new methods of gathering the natural product mentioned in TFA are relevant. Since this drug is expensive to make, new production methods are valuable (and patentable) so Big Pharma researches it.
If this was supposed to be about Big Pharma being good or bad for drug development, sorry. Obviously Big pharma researches drugs that will make the company the most money and not research thing that will loose them money. Big Pharma invests billions into drug research that would not be there otherwise. Not all drugs that help people will be profitable (eg. DCA) so Big Pharma is not the only solution. Different methods for different products.
Yes! American behavior makes a lot more sense if you watch American news. It wasn't until Katrina that anyone in the US dared mention anything bad about the President.
And you don't have a problem with perpetuating a corrupt political party? That system only works when the elected party is a good one and we all know that it takes good candidates to make good parties and truly good candidates are hard to come by.
How does getting funded by private donations instead of votes prevent corruption?Most drugs are very cheap to make. They cost a lot because on average a drug company spent $800 million figuring out the treatment. This is before they made a single cent or even started mass producing the drug.
btw, this article is about a drug that is extremely expensive to make, because Taxol has to be made from laboriously harvested natural products.
Why cure something when you can gouge someone for the rest of their life? Because your competitor just offered them a cure. Which does the consumer pick?
But if it's so cheap and simple, why aren't the uncapitalist socialist-medicine countries developing it?
They are! It was the University of Alberta. Now there is still much expensive testing and trials to do, and they will not be done by pharmaceutical companies because there is no money in it. Don't worry, anything that promising will be looked into. This is exactly what public funded research should do.Why don't we do this with all drug research? Because on average it takes $800 000 000 of investment to develop a drug before any profit is made. No governments or non-profits have been willing pay up nearly the amount that private companies have. To make money off patents, they have to reveal how they did things. This lets places like Brazil decide that it's worth violating patents to create generic drugs to save their citizens. (And drug companies whine about the billions of dollars of lost sales. All the money people never had in the first place, otherwise their country wouldn't risk the repercussions of violating trade agreements.)
Drug companies will keep making things that pay money (of which there are many). Academic research will continue on anything it can get funding for. Different strategies work better or worse for different products with different markets. This seems to confuse people.
If income is taxable, then expenses are deductible, right? So the game purchase, monthly fees, internet connection (required for both the game and sales), etc. are deductible. How about the video card and ram upgrades? Can that be justified if they are needed (or 'recommended' quality) to play the game? My 'Gold farming' business went poorly last year. I made $2 selling gold and lost $1000 on expenses. Maybe this year I'll be less distracted by quests ;)
This leads to another question I've wondered. If gambling winnings are taxable, then gambling losses would have to be deductible, by definition. Is there something I'm missing here? (A minimum amount of gross profits maybe?)
Countries that want to trade on the world market do. Or face trade sanctions, your call.
Polymer solar cells have already been made, there are some efficiency issues but they are incredibly cheap. The problem with them is that they disintegrate very quickly. As far as I understood, this was the real problem with conducting polymers of all sorts (the thiophenes, etc.) as far as I know. Anyone know the current status of this?
Bacteria are actually more 'highly evolved' in a sense. Compared to bacteria, more complex organisms have simpler biochemistry because bacteria have had so many more generations. This is part of the reason most new drug searches focus on 'lower' organisms. In the sense of the article, more generations is better.
Believe me, I don't want to live in Nazi Germany, but I don't want to die in a subway bombing either. Let's stop the partisan stuff and find a balanced solution. I had no idea other parties wanted our kids to get raped and terrorists to attack us. I assume living under constant surveilence might reduce terrorism and crime. Except of course by the government, but it is immune to corruption and terrorist attacks happen every day.
I think might need some mind altering substances to comprehend to logic properly. I'd like to avoid the high brain damage level of alcohol, but I can only buy the safer substance from criminals. Oh well, they're smuggling much needed unregistered guns into the country too.
Seriously, the conservatives could have won if they hadn't gone down the social conservative path and scared the hell out of all their moderate voters.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Thus, if the converse is true, and human brains develop the same way as mice's, it could be assumed that the brains of people with the *physical* inability to detect certain colours from birth would never develop the mental concept/sensation of those colours. (*) But then, now does this explain "Martian colours"?
I don't know about these 'martian colours' but from what I understand of normal colour blind people, they really don't have a concept of the what the other colors are. Some colours that look different to us, look exactly the same to them. And from the article, some women have 4 types of cones and can see a greater range of colour than the rest of us in a very similar way.
It's not that surprising that mouse brains were this adaptive though because many reptiles and fish have 4 or 5 different cones. At some point our great ape ancestors had to do this too, to get out of the red-green colour-blind state of most mammals.
There might be important developmental periods though. Maybe an adult never would be able to make sense of the new colours. Experiments with cats found that the ability to percieve horizontal or vertical lines required exposure during early development. Cats raised in rooms without horizontal lines could not 'see' the edge of a table as adults.
It probably is possible. It might be easier to try to replace the gene for blue-light cones with cones from rats (another mammal). Rat cones for blue light are sensitive to a shorter wavelength than humans, so they can see some UV. A person with this would see a greater color range (which makes some plain looking flowers look very pretty. Bees also tend to see UV.)
I'd like to patent the methods of capitalism and patents. Any financial backers?
Music downloads are at singles prices. Downloaded music is inferior quality, (compressed, no cover art, easily lost). The only music that makes sense to purchase at those prices are singles. If you want the whole album, buying a CD is better value.
If 17 times as many songs are pirated as sold, does that mean a ~6 cent 'value' of work to find pirated songs? (Using the $1.00 itunes\17) I thought there was some kind of micro-economic principle about this. Would that mean that a the limit of 6 cents for a dubious quality, ripping off the artist song, piracy would become too much work for the average person?
I think the idea of limited money has some truth to it. I have limited money (as a grad student I'm making about 2/3 of a full time minimum wage job). I could buy CDs for some of the bands I listen to, or just pirate and use the money to see the bands that actually come to town. Guess which I pick.
CDs are overpriced. I can copy them myself for less than a buck which is about 1/20th of what it cost me 10 years ago. Yeah, that's not exactly a fair comparison but the point is costs have been dropping. CDs cost less to produce than tapes, yet when CDs came out they were priced higher because only the wealthier people owed CD players when they first came out. That price never went down. Where did all this money go? At least the higher price was for better quality though.
Now mp3s cost a fraction of what CDs did to produce and distribute and yet the price is to remain the same. Where is all the money going? iTunes is way over priced. Why would I pay as much as I would for a physical CD for an inferior product? I get the CD which can be used anywhere and lent to friends. I can make mp3s from a CD. It isn't compressed, so there's no quality loss (not that it makes a difference with my hardware). You get cover art and liner notes, etc.
Of course there are other costs. Recording equipment costs money, but again that cost is dropping quickly. Getting word out about your band is difficult and important. Now how much harder was that before MySpace? I guess just before music sales started dropping all the creative people were making much more money. Or was that not were the savings went?
We've seen similar stupidity in other sectors of media distribution. Scientific publications tried to charge just as for back-issues distributed over the internet as they did when they had to make physical copies. If they had near the influence over the content producers that music labels do, that would definitely still be the case. Video cassettes were supposed to kill the movie business.
Just maybe we are seeing signs of badly run industry starting to falter. That is absolutely no concern. The only concern to political bodies is if the benefits of musical art to society are diminishing.
But malaria IS the worse mosquito born disease to the countries involved and the mosquitoes only do better because they don't get sick from malaria. This is interesting because malaria would be the selective force holding the gene in the environment. The real danger level is about that of naturally breeding malaria resistant mosquitoes and releasing them. Natural mutation could make a more dangerous/fitter mosquito too.
Putting up some relatively small potential dangers as a reason not to definitely save many lives seems kinda silly doesn't it?
Unfortunately, it has the words genetically modified in it, so it will be classified as bad like golden rice. Maybe it's just ignorance about the dangers. Natural farming involves selecting and breeding the naturally occurring mutants. This can be dangerous! New breeds of potatoes, tomatoes, etc. occasionally revert to older natural states and become filled with poisons (they are related to nightshade). An insect resistant celery developed by normal means had to be withdrawn because of very high levels of carcinogens (its referenced in The Skeptical Environmentalist).
It is not all automatically good or bad. Real problems are complicated and involve thought.
Well, at US Stuff Computers, looks like about twice what foreign made would be. But then again, if you're a PATRIOT instead of a TRAITOR, that's the price you pay to make sure your NEIGHBOR can survive. We'll go with that. Your buying power would be about half, which is a big drop in your standard of living. All you patriots can do that right now, but I think its misguided.
When you buy things made in Taiwan, you're buying with US dollars. US dollars are only worth anything to the Taiwanese if they can buy something from the US or trade them with someone else who does. If no one wants US goods/services the value of the US dollar drops. This makes foreign goods more expensive to US citizens and local goods cheaper. (Ignoring problems like child labor, etc. where the Government steps in and says you won't trade.)
The US dollar was high because it made the most goods/services because the best, brightest, most ambitious people immigrated to the US where the best jobs were.
Feel free not to believe me, as I am a foreigner, but the 'Brain drain' of our best and brightest going to the US used to be (maybe still is) considered a major drain on our economy.
I can think of an easy answer for that one: Ban imports. Put the United States into isolationist mode. Label anybody who does business offshore for what they are: A traitor, worthy only of execution. That should stop that argument dead in it's tracks, pardon the pun. And wait until inflation brings the rest of the world up to our standard of living, or until we degrade down to theirs. Your standard of living would drop like a stone. Just throw out everything made in Taiwan and see what you have left. Of course the rest of the world would hurt too. Check out some basic economics. How much does a computer made with 100% US parts cost?