Science, Technology & Health: October 2007 Archives
Clinical trials will begin soon to test the hypothesis that tiny vibrations can stimulate stronger bones and reduced fat.
Dr. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is reporting that in mice, a simple treatment that does not involve drugs appears to be directing cells to turn into bone instead of fat.All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone.
It can't be hard to build a vibrating platform and test this myself....
(HT: Nick.)
Via JV is a plan to cover Chernobyl in steel to provide long-term containment.
The authorities in Ukraine have approved a giant steel cover for the radioactive site of the world's worst nuclear disaster - Chernobyl.Ukraine has hired a French firm to build the structure to replace the crumbling concrete casing put over the reactor after the 1986 accident.
The casing project is expected to cost $1.4bn (£700m).
It will take five years to complete and the authorities say they will then be able to start dismantling the reactor.
Maybe dealing with Chernobyl will help exorcise the demons that have hindered nuclear power in the US for so long.
Here are some instructions, pictures, and videos of a nifty mineral oil-cooled computer in an aquarium. It would be a lot of fun to build such a thing, though it would be hard to transport.
The blur near the left side of the image is a stream of bubbles they used to help cool the mineral oil. And for decoration!
(HT: Jimmy.)
Have any of you had LASIK laser eye surgery? I haven't, and I doubt I ever will considering the risks of LASIK surgery. According to Wikipedia (for whatever it's worth) there's a 3% - 6% incidence of "unresolved complications" six months after surgery. That sounds too high of a risk to take with my eyes. Am I wrong?
Here's a really cool experiment that demonstrates how neuroticism can pay off.
They say the meek shall inherit the earth, but these experiments with emotional computer programs (pdf) suggest it may actually be the neurotic. And that they'll probably take it rapidly by military force.The Austrian researchers want games to be more engaging by having emotional, not just coolly calculating, computer players. Instead of just challenging your rational planning and decision skills, you'll have use your emotional intelligence too.
They created aggressive, defensive, normal and neurotic versions of the AI software in the war strategy game Age of Mythology, drawing on "the big five" emotional dimensions to personality recognised by psychologists.
The bots are able to switch between states of pleasure, pain, clarity, and confusion in response to events. The strength of particular emotional changes is related to the overall personality.
The neurotic bot was more likely than the others to distort hard facts about resources - like the amount of timber around - and flip between extremes of behaviour. And it was better than the rest.
I think it's more likely that unpredictable and varying strategies trump consistent strategies, rather than that neuroticism is inherently advantageous. Neurotic behavior can reduce the chance of getting caught on the losing end of a pattern, but it won't take advantage when the player has the upper hand.
As commenter Shannon Love writes:
I suspect the neurotic AI my prosper by virtue of its unpredictability.Other AI's make decision largely based on evidence which in turn means that another player can come to a similar conclusion based on the same conditions and predict what the AI will consider the optimum strategy.
The neurotic AI,however, attaches arbitrary fictional weights to various inputs making it difficult for others to predict it actions based on the same inputs.
You see the same thing in chess in which a novice player defeats more skilled one by virtue of making sub-optimal moves the skilled player does not even consider.
An expert chess player, however, will beat a novice every time. What this experiment really shows is that the non-neurotic AIs just aren't very good.
All sorts of cool graphics datasets from NASA's Earth Observatory. You can even build custom animations!
Update:
Different but also spacey images: pictures from moonwalks.
Peter W. Huber has written an insightful and compelling explanation of how science is killing socialized medicine, no matter what our politicians may be saying now.
But we’re now past the days when infectious diseases were the dominant killers, and heart attacks and lung cancer seemed to strike as randomly as germs. And insurance looks altogether different when your neighbor’s problem is a persistent failure to take care of himself. Many people willing to share the burden of bad luck eventually tire of sharing the cost of bad behavior.The new medicine certainly hasn’t banished luck completely—molecules don’t predict car accidents and can’t yet cure Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, or many rare cancers. A widely shared sense of common decency also impels protection of children and the elderly. In between, however, the unifying interest in health insurance is surely the sense that anyone can be struck out of the blue by a ruinously expensive health catastrophe. And step by relentless step, molecular medicine is taking luck out of the picture.
Now consider what that does to insurance economics. Most critics of the status quo focus on the more manageable of the two core problems that health insurers now face: runaway cost. But the real problem is that for many people, health care is getting cheaper. This is what makes actuaries wake up screaming in the night: disease is coming out of the closet, and the new medicine splits health-care economics in two. For the health conscious, skipping the Cherry Garcia may be difficult, but it’s cheap, and Lipitor at almost any price is much cheaper than a heart attack. The health careless skip only the pill, not the ice cream, and end up in desperate need of what helps the least and costs the most. Doctors, hospitals, and scalpels summoned late in the day cost far more, and accomplish far less, than chemistry tuned to the point where there’s never plaque to cut.
No one-size, one-price insurance scheme can keep people happy forever on both sides of this ever-widening divide. Aetna can’t offer uniform coverage to individuals who face radically different risks, and who know it, too. Governments can’t, either.
Medical advances have eliminated many of the health threats that all humanity had in common, and eventually the health-conscious will start refusing to be lumped in with the un-health-conscious and will refuse to continue sharing the financial burden for their last-minute health care.
Read to the end of the article for a good explanation of why government-regulated drug price ceilings stifle innovation and push health care costs up and quality down.
Yes, this is science I guess... though whatever researcher conceived this study should go down in history for his chutzpa. Strippers earn more tips when most fertile.
Researchers also found that women who take the birth control pill make less in tips overall than women who do not take the pill, $37 an hour versus $53 an hour, respectively.For their research, psychologist Geoffrey Miller and colleagues visited local gentlemen's clubs and counted tips made on lap dances.
Click here to read the Psychology Today study
Dancers made about $70 an hour during their peak period of fertility, versus about $35 while menstruating and $50 in between. Researchers attributed the fluctuation in tips to the changes in body odor, waist-to-hip ratio and facial features that occur throughout a woman's cycle.
Uh, comments?
If the MySky GPS Star Tracker works as advertised, I must get one... or even better, one of my friends must shell out the $400 and then let me borrow it. In a few years it will be affordable, and hopefully they'll add a Pokemon-like collect-em-all mode so you can keep track of the stars you've... tracked.
An interesting study whose results are presented as "men worry less than women" could easily be cast in the other direction.
A U.S. study found females more likely think negative events predict future events and this may explain why women perceive more risk and have more anxiety.The study, published in Child Development, found that children and adults believe negative past events forecast negative future events, however, young girls and women more likely to believe negative past events predict future harm, compared to males.
But sometimes negative events do lead to more negative events, and "worry" is well-deserved. I think the study results would be more accurately reported if a word other than "worry" (which carries a negative connotation for the "worrier") were used.
