forgotpwagain

Most recent edition was published in 2012. It's extensively updated between editions, so very much worth reading if you are seriously interested in neuroscience.

You regenerate the water when H2 and O2 are recombined to produce electricity.

Dan Nocera ( http://nocera.harvard.edu ) is very prominent in the water splitting field and has done a calculation in which a volume of an olympic sized pool would need to be split every second to replace all power sources on earth ( https://poptech.org/blog/daniel_nocera_on_personalized_energ... ).

It seems like a lot, but it would presumably be decentralized across many many locations. Additionally, you don't need 24 * 60 * 60 * olympic pool volumes -- you can cycle the same amount of water into/out of a fuel cell in a closed system.

This is overly judgmental.

Accidental pregnancies happen (even with contraceptive use), and can often not be detected until several weeks have passed. Even if alcohol consumption is stopped immediately, fetal alcohol syndrome spectrum disorder can still occur in the child, since development during the early stages of pregnancy is particularly sensitive to alcohol.

It would be remiss to not mention the well-curated list by Gerard 't Hooft [1999 Nobel Laureate in Physics]. A lot of books on the list, but also a lot of links to freely available lecture notes or online books as well.

http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/ (sidebar for specific areas).

You might be interested in the normal physiology of cerebrospinal fluid [0] and the disease hydrocephalus [1] that occurs when there is a blockage in the normal flow path. As a treatment for hydrocephalus, bypass shunts (made of tubing) are installed inside the skull that create a relief path for the fluid to flow. Unfortunately, they often get clogged with cells due to various scar formation and immune reactions -- designing better shunts is an active area of biomaterials research, and it's quite possible that an external pump could be an upgrade (though we first have to show that it has benefit...).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus

Also similarly, there are the Skilcraft products (most famously pens) for the US government.

[0]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skilcraft

As I understand it (from friends in med school), the grades in the pre-clinical classes are important as they affect the Dean's letter, the primary letter of recommendation for residency applications.

However, the grades from the time they spend in the clinic are much more important than the pre-clinical coursework.

biopsies of the heart can be done, but only for compelling reasons. it carries non-trivial risk to the individual.

untilHellbanned described the better way -- ideally, there would be some sort of biomarker in the blood that serves as a proxy for the level in the heart. But how do you find it and validate it? It's challenging (at best...)

You should compare the actual university press release [0] to the article written by an external organization above.

[0] http://news.mit.edu/2017/3-d-graphene-strongest-lightest-mat...

An advantage of the silicon photonics (over other on-chip optical technologies) is that we can leverage a lot of the experience that we have with silicon to fabricate these devices. There are still large technological challenges, since we often need to introduce new types of materials, etc, but we're not _totally_ out of luck -- there's useful knowledge that can be carried over.

Seconding this recommendation -- this book was a really fun (and fast!) read and was really eye-opening about how real memory tricks work and started to get me thinking about the utility of having vast amounts of information memorized.

Aha -- explains the smoking in lab bit.

It has the potential to be inefficient if they choose the wrong group of scientific advisors. But, for most of these initiatives, they're very careful to choose smart people to actually lead the details of the project and figure out how to best distribute the money.

Sometimes, we're actually within striking zone of these targeted diseases and funding more translational research is good. Other times, we still don't understand the underlying diseases well enough, and so we still need to do an enormous amount of basic science before trying to cure these diseases in the clinic. A team of good scientific advisors who are at the cutting edge of their respective fields can provide the insight and decision-making that this needs, to extract the maximum value from the money provided.

This is actually a useful experimental technique in biology. This wikipedia page isn't the best written, but is a good summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabiosis#Parabiotic_experime...

> I also worked in the lab with a guy who worked with ether and smoked in the lab.

I'm super curious -- when were you a grad student?

I would expect so.

Alcohol can cause inflammation, triggering various parts of the immune system to kick in. This could result in the release of free radicals from these immune cells, which promotes DNA mutations.

The number of birds killed by turbines is extremely small (hundreds of thousands [0]) compared to the number of birds killed by cats (hundreds of millions to billions [1, 2]).

[0] http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-... [1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cats-kill-more-one-billi... [2] (slight counterpoint to 1) http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...

Oh no =(

Looks like they're still available as DVDs though, so at least it's not _gone_. Still sad though =(

I recommend Connections or The Day the Universe Changed (out of print, I think?), both by James Burke. These aren't comprehensive histories of science, but they show how science, technology, and society are intimately connected. They are incredibly well written with lots of carefully selected images. In addition, there accompanying videos were also made (with very high production value) which are also a great deal of fun to watch.

I agree! I wonder if there's a substantial overlap between the set of people who buy yogurt frequently and the set of people who are averse to ~artificial chemicals~ in their food (tildes denoting a bit of sarcasm at chemophobia).

To elaborate a little bit more: the first generation of LVADs were had large mechanical pumps and were huge -- they could only be implanted in people with a large chest cavity, excluding a large number of patients (especially women) from eligibility for their device.

Current popular models are continuous flow rotors that are much smaller (enabling their use in almost anyone) and are non-pulsatile.

However, there's been a big push to move towards pulsatile devices. This is mostly driven by mechanobiolgy studies that show that there is a difference in the cellular programs of cells that are exposed to a continuous shear force versus a pulsatile shear force. Accordingly, to more closely replicate the natural physiology of the heart, there has been a big push towards using pulsatile devices.

I'm actually really curious -- why would you want to get rid of the ECG as an EEG tech? Do the signals interfere? (I don't know too much about EEG -- happy to learn more!)

Presumably a single lead would still be able to detect certain arrhythmias? I.e. if there are no QRS complexes, then there may be something wrong with the person wearing the device. There are benign explanations for why the signal might be weak but also lethal causes like Vfib -- with a few additional, I don't think it's implausible for a device to be able to make the decision to ask the user "hey, are you okay?" and then potentially seek help if the user doesn't confirm that they are OK within some set period.

For the HN audience, Physical Biology of the Cell may also be another useful perspective/introduction.

http://www.amazon.com/Physical-Biology-Cell-Rob-Phillips/dp/...

Thank you for your post. The best talk on CRISPR that I ever heard was ~45 minutes about previous genome editing techniques -- TALENs, Zinc finger proteins, etc -- and ~15 minutes about how CRISPR simplifies the genome editing process. It very much paid tribute to past work while also showing the utility of recent developments (while also noting that CRISPR is useless without extensive knowledge from genomics).

Typically quoted values are (in the current market), approx. $2-3B per product brought to market.

Drug development is incredibly difficult -- for very good reasons. The FDA has to be risk-averse in order to protect the health of the public and to prevent harm to be done.

There's also experimentation to generate hypotheses. I.e., let's sequence the genomes of healthy people and the genomes of people with some disease and see if there is a difference.

It's possible to argue that the implicit hypothesis there is that there is some sort of difference, but that is a particularly weak hypothesis compared to the specificity of hypotheses that can be formed once we have this pile of data -- i.e maybe X, Y, Z differences are important in this disease.

I think one of the difficulties with diamond was that n-type doping was very difficult in the past. However, there have been a huge number of improvements in fabricating various diamond-based devices (driven primarily by the development of various color center in diamond for applications in quantum optics, quantum computing), so it's likely to become more plausible in the future.

I don't know much about the relative performance of diamond transistors versus silicon transistors, so I can't say anything concretely about that. I could maybe see some sort of diamond solution being used as an add-on to current silicon technologies whereby the diamond helps enhance heat transport/cooling of the silicon device.

Oops, missed this comment. If anyone is reading still reading this...

To be honest, I don't know. I think it is possible to get a lot of information out of a single drop of blood. But there are issues with sampling--blood from the capillaries in my finger is very different from blood coming back from my intestine.

Maybe more fundamentally: a lot of "interesting" things are specific proteins. These can be at extremely low concentration--on the order of nanomolar all the way down to femtomolar. It's very difficult to amplify such a signal -- DNA is easy to amplify but proteins are not. At such low levels, the wrong drop of blood may have a dramatically different meaning, due to stochastic effects.

Getting one's hands dirty at a technical level is incredibly difficult. Bill Gates's training and experience is in computer science and business; to develop the background needed to understand the details of treatment for Malaria, HIV/AIDS, etc would take many many years of intense, focused effort.

Someone like Bill Gates could hire someone with the technical expertise while spending his own time on more productive things that are likely to yield more good for the world--networking with other billionaires to convince them to donate money, working to manage the overall structure of the B&M Gates Foundation, etc.

Complex systems are complex. 200 years ago, the amount that we knew was significantly smaller; one could get to the edge of human knowledge with just a few years of intense work. In contrast, it takes significantly longer to get to a level of expertise at which one can productively contribute.