playing w/ ifconfig & route, setting up ethernet card by hand 15 hours ago
Comparison of protein changes throughout AD progression suggests: most pronounced changes occur in early AD mitochondria http://is.gd/4QYec16 hours ago
A good introduction in Nature on the risks and advantages of letting people know their genetic risk information via personal genetics services. I do hope that the test-takers will finally become the risk overtakers.
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is a rapidly growing market — the past year has seen the launch of companies, such as Navigenics and 23andMe in California and DeCODEme in Iceland, that offer DNA screening for a range of common genetic variants linked to disease. The testing outfits have created a buzz in the business and research communities as well as in the wider public: Google has invested in two of them and Navigenics briefly opened a store in New York’s hip SoHo district.
“It’s an intriguing idea that you can peel back your genome and reveal your future.”
The idea is that test-takers will be alerted to risks and so take preventive action where possible. But psychosocial scientists who study how people respond to risk information say there is scant evidence that people are affected deeply by genetic test results, or that such tests spur much change in behaviour.Read the rest of this entry »
Will it one day be possible to take a pill to stay young? How will an average life expectancy of beyond a hundred years affect society and the planet? Join leading longevity researchers Robert Butler, David Sinclair and Richard Weindruch to investigate the facts and implications surrounding scientific developments — emerging technologies, novel therapies, and innovative medical practices — that forecast a radical extension of a healthy human life. Featuring a special performance by acclaimed singer, Marilyn Maye.
Desktop background images are important parts of people’s everyday lives in terms of unintended staring time. Usually they are picked up for the eyes (sg spectacular & cool and/or sexy) and hearts (family members), but why not use them for information uptake and learning? So I’d like to ask: What’s your current science related desktop image, if there’s any and how can you utilize it? Here is my current desktop image with the source;
Bonnet et al.:
A Mitochondria-K+ Channel Axis Is Suppressed in Cancer and Its Normalization Promotes Apoptosis and Inhibits Cancer Growth Cancer Cell Volume 11, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 37-51
Figure 1. A Reversible Metabolic-Electrical Remodeling in Cancer Contributes to Resistance to Apoptosis and Reveals Several Potential Therapeutic Targets
A burning question for real: What is (or how to set up) the Google Health status/condition of deanimated, frozen people, like Dr. Steven P. Rievman:
Rievman, 64, who co-founded the Cryonics Society of South Florida in the 1960s, now resides in a deep-freeze capsule at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, awaiting the day when medical science can ”re-animate” him and cure his ills: lupus and Type I diabetes, which afflicted him starting at age 17. Read the rest of this entry »
In part 1 we had Skull from the game zone. Now comes the loser geek archetype George McFly - played by Crispin Glover – from Back to the Future or at least his laugh. The relation between Skull & George is more than obvious: chocolate milk. (Yes, it’s weekend.)
Homeless people without proper medical insurance are the insignificant others for the health care system.
Wikipedia says but maybe it is obvious enough for everybody:
“Health care for the homeless is a major public health challenge.
Homeless people are more likely to suffer injuries and medical problems from their lifestyle on the street, which includes poor nutrition, substance abuse, exposure to the severe elements of weather, and a higher exposure to violence (robberies, beatings, and so on). Yet at the same time, they have little access to public medical services or clinics, in many cases because they lack health insurance.”
In the meantime & on the other side of life Google Health launched this week as the online personal health/medical information management system for people……with a web access, stable income, medical records, medical insurance and home.
At first sight Google Health does not seem to offer any solution for storing the health information of homeless people and thereby helping them somehow. But here there is this option:
So the idea is that social workers/caretakers are uploading and managing the Google Health profile of the homeless people they’re familiar with.
I asked the following question on Twitter recently:
“A question for all of you Twitterers: Are you for, against, or just neutral on healthy life extension? How long would you like to live? Why?”
I have to tell you it’s hard to give good links to the whole chat without noise. Maybe on FriendFeed.
To my big surprise, many people were neutral about life extension using different arguments & beliefs and those are all smart, well informed geeky persons, many of them biologists.
On the other hand it’s hard to formulate an exact question in 140 characters and to give a good specification on exactly what type of healthy lifespan extension is addressed.
But nevertheless the conclusion for me is that life extensionists should pay a bigger attention to all the ‘neutral’ – ‘pseudo neutral’ arguments. A pseudo neutral argument could turned out to be a for- or anti- life extension argument after a thorough analysis.
When Google Trends went live one of my first search was for “life extension” and posted a little analysis about that. Here is a quick update with a serious question about the stagnating or declining popularity of ‘life extension’ searches. Explanations are needed. /I don’t know the exact search scale for the y axis/.
Science-Business eXchange aka SciBX is a new publication from the makers of Nature and BioCentury that aims to improve the translation of today’s science into tomorrow’s products for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease.Read the rest of this entry »
The O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp is a nice option for the emerging personalized genomics companies or any web-related biotech startups to communicate and cooperate with alpha geeks and early technology adopters.
The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year’s Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each topic rather than a lecture, in which participants will learn from each other as well as from entrepreneurs who’ve already been successful.Read the rest of this entry »
Roni F. Zeiger, MD (watch his presentation), Google Health product manager, whose PubMed profile (if he really is the very same person) gives us a very strong reason why he was hired by Google for this job (he joined Google in 2006).
The 38-year-old, who still sees patients some evenings and weekends at a nearby clinic, said: “At Google, I can use my expertise and knowledge to potentially help millions of people each day.”
Fortunately all of his 3 papers are freely accessible out of which 2 are particularly interesting and related to Google (Health). Here I just copy the abstracts and probably get back to the papers after I digested them.
We designed hedges for clinical queries sent to MEDLINE and Google in an attempt to explicitly model the relationship, such as treatment or diagnosis, between search terms. A pilot evaluation suggested that mean average precision (MAP) improved for a precomputed diagnostic query but not for a precomputed treatment query. An important limitation to this approach is that target resources do not explicitly model these relationships.
Here is a little timeline from a liveblogger for the Google Factory Tour of Search (05/19/08) including the official launch presentation of Google Health – time frame 83:35/1:23:35 – 90:45/1:30:45 -, by dr. Roni Zeiger, Google Health product manager who truly believes – & he is probably right – “that the most interesting, innovative services of Google Health are the ones that we haven’t seen or even thought of yet.”
So watch “the pivotal moment of the history of healthcare” using the words of Stephen Suffin, corporate chief medical officer from Quest Diagnostics.
People expect usually too much from Google even in the sectors, like biotechnology or medicine where Google is not native. For me the recent Google Health – which is basically an embryonic online medical health record system for users with a Gmail Account in the USA – seems to be rather about just catching up with the past than doing the future right now. That is not a criticism but rather a description. Storing/exchanging/updating individual medical records digitally is a “must-have-done-by-now” for the geeks, early technological adopters as the technology long exists, while it is still far-far away concerning current medical practices.
Google Health is really forward thinking in the way that it facilitates medical consumers/patients to upload their medical profile/conditions in the lack of institutional data thereby getting more familiar with everything health related. But Google Health is for the more or less healthy/mainstream and not for the seriously ill: in its recent form it cannot help to find a clinical trial for a rare disease, say.
For the moment, Google Health looks like a charity operation. The company won’t serve ads on the site (presumably to avoid the appearance of impropriety); nor does it plan on selling data, which would likely be extremely lucrative.
Instead, the company is focused on building out the service and growing market share. That’s a good thing, say industry watchers, because it could take years before the market matures and consumers are ready for the digital health revolution.
Yep, it is still too early and building a critical mass is a crucial thing. It is so early that most of the angles remain hidden in obligatory posts on Google Health. I suggest to read the detailed & insightful comments, for instance this one at TechCrunch by Fred Neil:Read the rest of this entry »
Nature Biotechnology is the (peer review) journal for me: it’s geeky, fresh and it takes into account more than just one point-of-view, that of the scientist-academist’s: technology & business are hand in hands also. (Recommending Nat Biotech makes a niche sense here while recommending Nature, which is actually the only science journal I’m reading issue by issue is hm… too obvious)
But Nature Biotech goes as far as citing even a non peer review journal – I am also prettyfamiliar with – called Wired. So my puzzle is /please use your contextual knowledge first & just then your typing skills while thinking of an answer/: which Wired article is cited in a March Nature Biotech News and Views article (very good, by the way) named Synthetic genomes brought closer to life by Robert A Holt amongst strict science articles. Don’t think too high, it’s rather a reflection.
David Secko writes: “Today, it is thought that one third of the proteins present in a typical mammalian cell are covalently bound to phosphate (i.e. they are phosphorylated at one time or another)”
Well I haven’t checked what kind of measurement the above 1/3 estimation is based on but if true it is no wonder that phosphorylation is the almost constant subject of biological research. But if it is not true, then what’s the reason of the stardom?
“That’s the problem these days,” 2K says. “Nobody wants to do work hard. Everybody wants easy. In my days, we knew what heavy lifting was. I had to carry rocks to my cave in the office. We carried rocks to write on. We wrote our code with a hammer and a chisel. That’s not software kid. That’s hardware.”Read the rest of this entry »
Along the lines of self-motivated employees, I asked a manager whether most of their new products came from the individual employees or from management. He expressed the conviction that most innovation in most companies comes from individual employees. Where management can help is in finding effective places to fit new features into the organization and product line.
Google found that releasing too many products prevented the public from learning about them and adopting them. Adding a feature to an existing product such as Gmail or Blogger could mean that millions of people adopt it, whereas releasing it as a stand-along product might limit adoption to a few thousand.
The question for me is always how these experiences can be compared and applied to the biotech industry, in this case I am curious how biotechnological innovation is going in the profit sector outside academia. So if you are working at a biotech startup or at a big pharma please share us your opinion (anonymously if you like) in the comments on the nature of innovation at your company!
Say Hello to my new 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.2 MacBook right from the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, New York City! We are back in New Orleans waiting for the swarm of the formosan termites.
Let me recall some Manhattan moments with the help of quick iPhone photos.
F. Murray Abraham is one of my favorite actors, the Coen Brothers are one of my favorite movie makers. So we enjoyed ‘Almost an evening‘ the first ever play of Ethan Coen (half of the Coens) featuring Abraham as god amongst others in Bleecker Street Theatre, Off-Broadway. (The play itself probably won’t be an evergreen.) /picture at the top right corner via Flickr
a very geek Warhammer game player at the end of Washington Square Park in the Village
Malcolm Gladwell has a nice, but a bit Microsoft heavy essay on scientific/technological multiples, ie. the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery in New Yorker: In the Air
Gladwell argues that it is always misleading to apply the paradigm of artistic invention to scientific/technological invention and he is probably right.
Two sections just for your appetite:
“This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.”
Anna and me are visiting New York City from 8th to 11th, Sunday this week. We are eager to meet geeky figures particularly as our current location, New Orleans is not really a heaven for tech-savvy people. If interested to meet with us, drop me a line: [attilacsordas][at][gmail.com]
