Almost 50% of the children previously diagnosed with autism are found to be suffering from some degree of brain seizure activity that is undetectable to the eye...In the cases where these seizures are the cause of the symptoms, once the seizures have been detected and treated, the level and speed of recovery in the children has been remarkable.-Please Help Avoid Misdiagnosing Development Disorders
I am undergoing radiation and drug treatment for cancer.
The drug is Erbitux, which at least is something I had heard about. (You may recall that was the drug involved in the Martha Stewart lying-to-the-S.E.C. case.) It has made my face look worse than anyone’s face ever looked when I was in high school.
I know that it is not news that radiation treatment can be miserable. I did not do all the homework I could have done, so perhaps I should have been better prepared.
But the pain involved is more than I have ever experienced. It is virtually impossible for me to eat. I am losing weight at an impressive rate, to the dismay of the radiation doctor. I have little energy, which is probably both because of the radiation directly and because of the lack of nutrition...
It is not fun, but it has been inspiring. In a way, I am happier about my life than at any time I can remember. Clint Eastwood once asked, “Do you feel lucky?” My answer is a shouted yes...
I am 62, and have had the honor of being a financial columnist here for more than 20 years. I have been happily married for 26 years, and last Friday saw our son graduate from high school. He will be attending an excellent college in the fall.
I hope to have a lot more years. But I’ve had a lot already, and they have been better than a lot of people have any reason to hope for. I am grateful.
This is trite but also so, so true: A brush with mortality turns out to be the best way to appreciate how blue the sky is, how sensuous grass feels underfoot, how melodious kids’ voices are. Even teenagers’ voices. A friend and colleague, David E. Sanger, who conquered cancer a decade ago, says, “No matter how bad a day you’re having, you say to yourself: ‘I’ve had worse.’ ”
“Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair.
There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.
“The big toe is lined up with the rest, not divergent, the way you see with apes and our closest nonrunning relatives,” Dr. Bramble said. “It’s the main push-off in running: the last thing to leave the ground is that big toe.”
Springlike ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don’t have them.) A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. And most humans can store about 20 miles’ worth of glycogen in their muscles.
And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said. “There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running.”
A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large 2007 study showed an increase of nearly 60 percent in the risk for obesity among people whose friends gained weight. And last year, Harvard researchers reported that strong social ties could promote brain health as we age.
History of medicine, anti-academic, anti-knowledge. Medicine: whenever we use knowledge as a driver instead of tinkering, we get in trouble. Examples: Our understanding of biological processes led to a decrease in cures. When just tinkering we did better than with directed research. Directed research gives us a strong bias and blinds us to things we don't know are there. In medicine, most medicines are used to cure something completely different from what the intention was. Side-effects dominate. Try to collect positive black swans. Hubris problem, overestimating our knowledge. Difficult to think rationally about uncertainty and risk. Trust the science part, ask the doctor, but the doctor has no idea about the probabilities. Each person, disease is different. Minimize the harm coming from theories. Empirical doctors were successful until eliminated after the rise of Arabic medicine. Western medicine was rationalistic after the Arabic tradition. Improvements after that came from the barbers, not from the doctors. Thinking has not helped us a lot. Evidence in option trading. People think that quants make option formulas, therefore the market uses them. Bogus. Supply and demand. Did a lot better before the Black and Scholes formula...
Religion and probability. Most people think that religion is about belief, but it is about practice. Greek Orthodox but Arabic-speaking. The way Arabs say is not "I don't know" is "God knows." Allows you to say you don't know, transfers from yourself to another entity. Allows you to be humble. History of medicine: accounts of giving a fortune to the Temple of Apollo: You saved me when my doctors failed me. Doctors gave negative contributions, particularly by bleeding; or more recently, delivered a baby after going to the morgue. Brought in religion. Error we have in believing religion is about belief, but it's about commitment, the system, living with something. We're not yet good with ideas. Can see from this crisis. Great Moderation turned out to be not so great. What does probability have to do with religion? Idea of true/false; degree of belief. May do something against the odds because the consequences or large or even without analyzing it. Probability is not opaque; and even if it were, we wouldn't use it because of the consequences. Pascal's wager: Since God might exist, I might as well be a religious person. Payoffs from being religious are much higher than negative payoffs if God doesn't exist. Had to also assume that God doesn't exist and also not know about gaming the system. Maybe actions are more important than beliefs--in some religious systems the actions count. Greek Orthodox, Easter; Judaism, Maimonides, not every Jewish sage lists belief in God as one of the commandments because there is a debate about whether you can mandate belief. In Arabic, the name for religion, din, is the same as the word for law in Hebrew. To be a law-abiding citizen, keep the rules. Hard to keep the rules if you do not keep the faith. Motivating people without faith. Losing patience about people who are skeptics about religion, and at the same time are not skeptical about economics or VAR. Solving our own problems. Hayek, lot of instinct, contributions part of philosophical thinking.
THE controversial legislation which allows reimbursement of living kidney donors was passed in Parliament yesterday after a heated debate.
Even after Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan assured the House that the new law did not seek to legalise organ trading, not all were convinced.
When the final vote on the amendments to the Human Organ Transplant Act (Hota) was taken, four MPs abstained and one said 'no'.
The four were Madam Halimah Yacob (Jurong GRC), Ms Denise Phua (Jalan Besar GRC), opposition Hougang MP Low Thia Khiang and Non-Constituency MP Sylvia Lim.
The dissenter was Mr Christopher de Souza (Holland-Bukit Timah GRC), who objected on the grounds that the Bill lacked details to ensure donations would be 'not-for-profit, transparent and devoid of abuse'.
'While I agree with the principle of reimbursement...the framework in the Bill could be the subject of abuse,' he said.
All in, a dozen MPs spoke passionately on the Bill over the past two days.
They were all for three of the four changes - lifting the age limit on cadaveric donors, allowing recipients to swop donors for a better match, and increasing penalties for organ trading. But most were uncomfortable about allowing reimbursement of living kidney donors. Their main fear was that people would exploit it to induce donors to sell their kidneys, opening the back door to organ trading.
They were also worried about an uneven playing field, with the rich finding it easier than the poor to obtain kidneys.
Questions they posed: Should there be caps on payments? Should foreign donors be excluded from receiving reimbursements? What role does the Government play to safeguard against abuses?
New figures from Deloitte LLP, an international consulting firm, show how popular the practice has become with an estimated 750,000 Americans seeking medical care abroad in 2007.
Projections indicate this number could be as high as six million by 2010.
the emergence of a new field of scientific research on the specialized ends of chromosomes and the telomerase enzyme that extends them.
Big is often regarded as beautiful in Mauritania, but the controversial act of force-feeding is still practiced in some parts of the country.
We, meaning doctors and scientists, used to think that gender was culturally created for humans but not for animals. When I was in medical school in the 1970s and '80s, it had already been discovered that male and female animal brains started developing differently in utero, suggesting that impulses such as mating and bearing and rearing young are hardwired into the animal brain. But we were taught that for humans sex differences mostly came from how one's parents raised one as a boy or a girl. Now we know that's not completely true, and if we go back to where it all started, the picture becomes abundantly clear.
Imagine for a moment that you are in a microcapsule speeding up the vaginal canal, hitting warp drive through the cervix ahead of the tsunami of sperm. Once inside the uterus, you'll see a giant, undulating egg waiting for that lucky tadpole with enough moxie to penetrate the surface. Let's say the sperm that led the charge carries an X and not a Y chromosome. Voilà, the fertilized egg is a girl.
In the span of just thirty-eight weeks, we would see this girl grow from a group of cells that could fit on the head of a pin to an infant who weighs an average of seven and a half pounds and possesses the machinery she needs to live outside her mother's body. But the majority of the brain development that determines her sex-specific circuits happens during the first eighteen weeks of pregnancy.
Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female - female is nature's default gender setting. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl's brain cells sprout more connections in the communication centers and areas that process emotion. How does this fetal fork in the road affect us? For one thing, because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother. Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand. For another, it defines our innate biological destiny, coloring the lens through which each of us views and engages the world.
Scientists have known for a long time that females react to infections differently than males, especially mood-wise. Researchers have been trying to figure out why. Now a new study shows that female mammals - rodents that is - react to the effects of an infection by producing more of a substance, called cytokines, in the brain yielding a “bad mood”–or a depressive-like behavior in a rat. The males did not suffer this effect.
These services add up to what he calls a “boutique cosmetic gynaecological laser surgery programme”, because customers will often have several at once. He does hymen repair, but doesn’t talk about it since receiving death threats from religious groups.
His latest product is the G-Shot. This is when a quantity of collagen — the same stuff that goes into lips — is injected into the rough area inside the vagina that is supposed to constitute the G-spot. It costs £955 (£1,290 for a double hit), and lasts four months before being reabsorbed. Matlock also ships G-Shot kits to doctors all over the world.
WSJ: If you can pick an index-outperforming stock 51% of the time, how many picks do you need to make to have better than a 99% chance of outperforming the index? (We’ll assume your picks are uncorrelated and that the magnitude of any outperformance or underperformance is the same.)
Mr. Mlodinow: Consider a stock analyst versus an index fund in a kind of stock-picking World Series. The law of large numbers says if you play a best-of-X series you can be confident that the best team will win — if X is large enough. But for small X, say, a best-of-seven series, there is a surprisingly large chance that the lesser team will win. So in sports just because one team is superior doesn’t mean it will win the series.
The same uncertainty applies to the market. For example, suppose the stock picker has a 51/49 edge over the index fund, meaning he or she will outperform it, in the long run, in 51% of the years in which they compete. How long is the long run in this case? The mathematics shows that in order to justify 99% confidence that the stock picker will outperform the index fund more often than it underperforms it, the contest would have to go on for about 13,700 years...
WSJ: After a particular drug is on the market, it will cause a particularly serious adverse effect to happen to one of every 3,000 patients in an epidemiological, i. e., post-hoc analysis. In retrospect, how many patients must be tested in the randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, clinical trial to achieve 95% confidence that the side effect will show up?
Mr. Mlodinow: You need roughly 14,000 patients. Here is how you get that: The process is governed by the binomial distribution, which can be approximated by the normal distribution. The chance of an adverse reaction in any one patient is one in 3,000. Since you want a 95% confidence interval for one (or more) reactions, you want enough patients so that 1.00 is 1.64 standard deviations (or more) below the mean. With 14,000 patients the mean number of adverse reactions will be about 4.6 and the standard deviation is about 2.2, which gives you what you require. (I have rounded my answer to the nearest 1,000).
Correction: To achieve 95% confidence that the side effect will show up, you need 8,985 patients receiving the drug. This blog post misstated the number as 14,000. See the comments of this post for more details.
WSJ: Might we need to proceed irrationally in our lives to succeed? In other words, if we really believed that so much of success was the result of luck, wouldn’t a lot of us just give up trying?
Mr. Mlodinow: Some theorize that this is the evolutionary reason that we like to assume we are in control, even when we clearly aren’t. That may be so, but I don’t mourn the role of luck, I celebrate it. All else equal, it is a lot more fun not knowing how your book will do, or how your life will turn out, than it would be if everything could be determined by a logical calculation. Moreover, the fact that luck matters means you can help yourself by being persistent. A failure doesn’t mean you are unworthy, nor does it preclude success on the next try. As Thomas J. Watson, the highly successful IBM pioneer, said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”
Adrian Sudbury has been a reporter for both the Huddersfield Express and Chronicle Series and the Huddersfield Examiner. In November 2006 the 25-year-old was promoted to digital journalist, effectively editing the new-look Examiner website. Just two days into his new role he became seriously ill and called in sick. A week later he drove himself to A&E and was eventually diagnosed with leukaemia. It was then identified that he actually has two distinct types of the disease running at the same time. According to the medical literature he is the only person in the world to have this condition. As such, it has not been possible to offer Adrian a prognosis. Here he shares his experiences of the disease and his treatment.
A colony of genetically identical E. coli is, in fact, a mob of individuals. Under identical conditions, they will behave in different ways. They have fingerprints of their own.
If two genetically identical E. coli are swimming side by side, for example, one may give up while the other keeps spinning its corkscrew-shaped tails. To gauge E. coli’s stamina, the late biologist Daniel Koshland once glued genetically identical bacteria to a glass cover slip. They floated in water, tethered by their tails. Dr. Koshland offered the bacteria a taste of aspartate, an amino acid that attracts them and motivates them to swim. Stuck to the slide, the bacteria could only pirouette. Dr. Koshland found that some E. coli clones twirled for twice as long as others.
E. coli expresses its individuality in many other ways, as well. Under identical conditions, some clones cover themselves in sticky hairs that let them stick to host cells, while others remain bald. Feed a colony of E. coli lactose (the sugar in milk), and some will respond by slurping it up through special channels and digesting it with special enzymes. Others will turn up their microbial noses.
These quirks of E. coli’s personality can mean the difference between life and death for the bacteria. In times of stress, some members of a colony respond by building thousands of toxin molecules and then burst open, killing off the unrelated E. coli around them. Their fellow clones survive, though, and thrive without the competition.
Certain viruses slip into E. coli through one of the many kinds of channels in its membrane. In a colony of genetically identical bacteria, some may be covered with these channels like pincushions. Others have none at all. The viruses will kill the vulnerable clones, while the other clones live on.
E. coli’s quirks can be a matter of life and death for us, as well. Some strains cause infections in the gut, the bladder, the blood and even the brain. In many cases, doctors try to kill the bacteria with antibiotics, which jam up the normal workings of their genes and proteins. In a susceptible colony of E. coli, a strong antibiotic will kill most of the bacteria, but not all of them. Some will survive.
The survivors escape death because they are trapped in a strange twilight existence called persistence. They make hardly any new proteins and grow barely, if at all. Antibiotics can’t kill persisters because there’s nothing in them to attack. The difference between normal cells and persisters cannot be found in their DNA. After persister cells survive an attack of antibiotics, some of their offspring switch back to normal growth and rebuild the colony. Most of their descendants will be normal E. coli. But some will be persisters. The colony remains the same motley crew of clones.
The key to understanding E. coli’s fingerprints is to recognize that the bacteria are not simple machines. Unlike wires and transistors, E. coli’s molecules are floppy, twitchy and unpredictable. In an electronic device, like a computer or a radio, electrons stream in a steady flow through the machine’s circuits, but the molecules in E. coli jostle and wander. When E. coli begins using a gene to make a protein, it does not produce a smoothly increasing supply. It spurts out the proteins in fits and starts. One clone may produce half a dozen copies of a protein in an hour, while a clone right next to it produces none.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is excellent. If, like me, you find it hard to believe that the average quadriplegic is fairly happy, this movie will convince you. In fact, it does more: By putting you in the shoes of a man able only to move one eyelid, you'll realize that you too could be ecstatic simply to regain your abilities to speak and eat- Bryan Caplan
