Science, Technology & Health: March 2012 Archives
How long until we have bionic limbs that are better than what we're born with? I say five years.
(HT: Better All The Time.)
StemCells Inc. is harvesting brains from aborted babies and injecting the cells into adults in an attempt to cure macular degeneration. It's important to note that these aren't embryonic stem cells, because embryos don't have brains to harvest -- these cells are taken from a functioning human brain from a person with a face, arms, legs, fingers, toes, and a beating heart. It's hard to think of anything more repugnant and inhumane.
I pity the adults who suffer from diseases like macular degeneration, but it is disgusting to attempt to treat them by murdering innocent children.
A new study claims that red meat causes 1 in 10 early deaths. First off, an "early death" is defined as dying before age 75, so that's not exactly young. Rob Lyons analyzes the study and decides that not only is red meat pretty safe, but also that other major lifestyle decisions seem to have little impact on longevity.
The authors claim that 9.3 per cent of deaths in men and 7.6 per cent of deaths in women could be avoided by eating little or no red meat. To put that into some back-of-an-envelope statistical perspective: multiplying that 9.3 per cent by the 20 per cent who actually died shows that about 1.8 per cent of red-meat eaters would die by the time they were 75 because of their meat-eating habit. Even if that claim were absolutely accurate (and even the authors call it an estimate), would you really give up your favourite foods for decades on the slim possibility of an extra year or two of old age?A serious problem with the present study is that while the researchers excluded anyone who had a heart problem or cancer at the time the study started, there were some pretty important differences between the groups examined. In both the male and female groups, at the start of the study the people who ate the most red meat were also about twice as likely to be diabetic and took much less exercise. The men in the high red-meat group were also three times as likely to be smokers and drank much more, too. (Women who like their red meat also liked booze and fags more than their burger-dodging sisters did, but the differences weren't as large.)
There was also a clear trend in total calories consumed per day for both men and women. The low red-meat group consumed far fewer calories each day (1,659 for men and 1,202 for women) then the highest red-meat group (2,396 for men and 2,030 for women). These are enormous differences.
It's pretty amazing that someone who eats so badly and exercises so little only has a 1.8 percentage point increase in his chance of dying before age 75. Does that make diet and exercise pretty much a waste of time?
Final thought: what's the most dangerous risk factor?
The thing most likely to determine whether you live or die - apart from old age, of course - is whether you are male or female. One way to illustrate this is to add up the total number of years that people in each group lived and divide it by the number of people who died. The group of women who ate the most processed meat suffered one death for every 124 person-years lived. The group of men who ate the least processed meat suffered one death for every 89 person-years lived. Being a man is much more dangerous than eating bacon, it would seem.
Darn.
I recently created a free OnLive account for the sole purpose of playing a demo of FTL (a fun-looking game that you can support through Kickstarter if you're interested). Anyway, OnLive didn't blow me away, but this recent article about quantum computing makes me think that services like OnLive are going to dominate the future of computing.
Given the rapid progress that IBM has made, scalable quantum computing is starting to look like a real possibility. As error-correction protocols improve and coherence times lengthen, accurate quantum computing becomes a real possibility. But don't expect to have a quantum smartphone anytime soon using this technique. In order to get the results the IBM team has seen in either the 2-D or 3-D configuration, the qubits have to be cooled down to less than a degree above absolute zero."There's a growing sense that a quantum computer can't be a laptop or desktop," said Steffen. "Quantum computers may well just being housed in a large building somewhere. It's not going to be something that's very portable. In terms of application, I don't think that's a huge detriment because they'll be able to solve problems so much faster than traditional computers."
Emphasis mine. We may have quantum computing at warmer temperatures eventually, but the first few generations of quantum computers will be in giant warehouses, and we'll connect to them over high-speed networks. A quantum computer you access via a service like OnLive will be orders of magnitude more powerful than anything you could fit in your house, and so desktops and laptops will die off and be replaced with thin clients that have just enough computing power to display streaming video from a quantum computer.
