Friday, April 30, 2010

RNAi treats disease for first time!

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/gene-silencing-shows-first-success-preventing-human-disease
We will learn an enormous amount in the very short term, quite a bit in the medium term, and absolutely nothing in the long term.

Jeremy Grantham

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

You can fool some of the people all of the time... and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.

Monday, April 26, 2010

An iPod Touch is not just an iPod

I did not understand until I had had an iPod Touch for a while that it is not just an iPod. It is actually a completely independent computer.

The two major advantages for me:

It can play podcasts and audiobooks at double speed.

Apps!

I wish I had gotten one years ago. I had no idea it was like this... actually, maybe it should be called an iPadlet. That might better convey what it can do.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Comets can be even worse than volcanoes

http://www.physorg.com/news189351860.html

Maybe we can find extant lifeforms similar to the first life on Earth!

The world’s deepest drill is about to get taller—tall enough to dig into Earth's mantle. Already, the Chikyu research vessel is capable of fetching samples at depths of 23,000 feet below the seabed, two to four times that of any other drill. In 2007, off the coast of Japan, it became the first mission to study subduction zones, the area between tectonic plates that is the birthplace of many earthquakes. Over the next three years, scientists will tack on at least an extra mile of drill and attempt the most ambitious mission ever: piercing the Earth’s mantle. There, scientists expect to find the same conditions as those in the early Earth—and perhaps the same life-forms that thrived then.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/deepest-drill



The Swine Flu Really is worse

While seasonal flu deaths are in people aged 76 on average, the average age of people killed by swine flu was 37. So Simonsen also decided to calculate years of life lost to swine flu, a common measure for the impact of disease. She used the ages of people who died in 2009 and their life expectancy to calculate that the US lost nearly 2 million years of life to the pandemic - more than in the 1968 pandemic. By contrast, she calculates that 600,000 years of life are lost on average to seasonal flu.