I agree that it's hard to get truly unbiased science working for a government agency that has certain vested interests and is governed by political appointees. The idea of manuscripts having to pass a "poltical correctness" litmus test is a huge red flag for transparency.

But the flip side is that many of these agencies are in charge of scientific evaluations which require extensive in-house expertise that would be difficult to outsource without creating larger conflicts of interest. Most academics rely on said government agencies directly or indirectly for research funding, which would presents a problem when it comes to objectively evaluating that agency's mistakes. Often the specific science required by a government agency is decidedly unsexy stuff (example, the transects detailed in the manuscript) that an independent academic would simply not be able to sustain an academic career with in the absence of a long-term contract from the government agency specifically for that purpose. Contract research (i.e. where an outside expert is hired) is great for short term studies with a highly specific goals, but for long term stuff where you are not exactly sure what to look for up front, you must have your own in-house expertise. Even if you contract out all the gruntwork (i.e. seasonal, short-term staff), you need long-term staff trained to analyze the results and evaluate how it impacts the mission of the agency , not to mention to design these studies in the first place.

Hear hear! I always maintain that if we really wanted an objective take on AGW, the best thing to do would be to identify the best and brightest climatologists, seclude them in a secret bunker somewhere, tell them they can't be fired but please keep us updated on a regular basis on Exactly How Bad it really is. Instead, we turn every single utterance that anyone remotely related to climate research into A Big Deal in the mass media, we have politicians threatening to cut all their funding on a regular basis, we've created a climate where only the agenda-aggrandizing, media-attention-craving big ego set can survive. And that's not really what we wanted regardless of your political stance.

Heh, that's how wildlife biology is done, experienced eyes and good notetaking are usually superior to technological overkill in most circumstances. I'm sure if you want to foot the tax bill for continuous video monitoring that can detect a seal on the ice in any direction from 1,300 feet from a moving helicopter, said biologists wouldn't be against having one. Heck, I was impressed they have a data recorder and an actual database set up for this and not just scribbles in lab notebook.

Coming from the bio-molecular simulation world, you'll find that the GPU performance is not only vendor specific (as has been mentioned) but even among essentially equivalent simulation software will be implementation specific (i.e. package X was written for CUDA and needs double precision so you have to buy the expensive Tesla stuff vs package Y in single-precision will work with a consumer NVIDIA card vs something else that works in an AMD card) and even problem-specific (i.e. there's a speedup if you simulate this many atoms but not if you simulate more than that many atoms arranged in such and such a way.). It may work in a GPU but not even provide any speedup.

In such a scenario there's no substitute for in-house benchmarking on evaluation hardware with real-world test cases before you plunk down for a large GPU order. The majority stakeholders may already be aware of strict hardware requirements for any existing GPU code, so start there. If noone has used GPU's in their applications before now and this is an attempt to "future-proof" the cluster, don't do it! Delay the purchase until you can establish that the user group will actually see a benefit from GPUs before you buy, otherwise it will easily become a white elephant. .

Yeah, I used to wonder that too. Then my wife got a job in state government. And the answer became painfully obvious judging by the maximum pace at which stuff gets done even when you have people willing to work hard and important problems sitting right in front of you. If you allowed unspent money to roll over indefinitely, that would create an irresistible incentive to do the cheapest job that won't get you in trouble and then hoard, hoard that money. Heck, you could stretch that 3-year project into a 5-year one by doing it very slowly. You could build up a war chest and use it on pet projects that noone approved. Or you could wait till no-one even remembers the project existed anymore and then embezzle it.

So as inefficient as it is, the blanket rule that all money must be spent the year in which it is allocated is a simple way to increase transparency and accountability across the board. It may even be one of the driving forces anything gets done remotely on schedule in an environment where purchasing a USB cable requires 2 requisition forms, 3 vendor quotes, the signature of your boss (who is in an all-day meeting), your boss's boss (who is talking with legislators today and can't be disturbed), and pre-approval from someone in accounting (who just went on vacation yesterday).

Of course, it would be great if getting the job done on time and under-cost were somehow rewarded. But that's incentivizing success, that's the profit maximizing, the corporate bottom line, whereas the the Gub'ment bottom line is minimizing "embarrassment" (be it from the media, the voting public, and especially legislators on the appropriations committee). You use a Gub'ment bureaucracy for things you can't trust the for-profit world to do on their own, so the service provided has to be somewhat divorced from the revenue stream if you want to ensure more reliable results than just contracting out to a private company. (I'm sure Ron Paul would beg to differ, but then again he also probably enjoys being able drink water out of the tap without getting sick). You wouldn't pay a health inspector, for example, just based on the number of sites inspected per day because that encourages as cursory a job as possible on as many sites as possible. Instead, you set a minimum quota they have to fulfill, and then make it known you'll have their head on a platter if a restaurant shows up in the news for salmonella poisoning the week after you've signed off on it. That's the Gub'ment way. .. .

As much as I want the JWST to succeed, I'm sure this precise concern will cause many sleepless nights for the space scientists and engineers involved. It's an excellent argument against mortgaging the future of an entire field on one, single, monolithic project.

Fortunately, the JWST is going on an Arianne 5 provided by ESA, which has a 95% success rate (2 failures in 36 launches). As a bonus, if it blows up we can point fingers at the Europeans, always a popular pastime on this side of the pond.

I agree - this is the most unsatisfying aspect of this study, in that most cases end with settlement and a non-disclosure agreement, meaning there is absolutely no data on how meritorious the claim was and how exploitative the settlement was. It seems quite obvious to me, (IANAL) that only relatively strong patent claims would actually result in litigation, and that most "troll-like" behavior would be in cases that are simultaneously weak but expensive enough to contest that a settlement is cheaper. Arguably, the prevalence of this behavior, which cannot be addressed in any way by this study, is at the heart of the patent troll debate.

from page 26 of TFA: "One important caveat is that most cases settle. Indeed, most of the cases studied here settled or were otherwise disposed of without a merits ruling. This can affect the findings in a couple of ways. First, it reduces the sample size. Second, it is unclear why cases settle. It may be that only the weakest patents are litigated because defendants refuse to pay. However, it could also be that the strongest patents are litigated because plaintiffs refuse to settle for a nuisance payment. Third, many cases are litigated to judgment because NPEs are asserting infringement where there is none."

Given that senators get older every year, you can rest assured they have never significantly cut funding for aging related research unless it was stem-cell related. For grins, you can do a full-text search for "telomerase" and "aging" in the NIH funded grant database and see how many hits you get. . .

http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cf

you'll see lots of ideas along the lines you've proposed (not exactly but close). I'm not in the aging field, but I can attest that to the fact that pretty much everyone who took cell biology with me walked out of the aging lecture thinking "why can't we fix this already", so I'm pretty sure others are trying as we speak. The devil is always in the details, of course, and from what little I do know I'm not holding my breath until we get a working gene therapy vector that doesn't give you leukemia as a side effect. . .

http://2008.igem.org/Team:Davidson-Missouri_Western/DNA_Encoded_XOR_Gates

Looks like these undergrads still have some bugs to work out, but in principle such a thing should be eminently possible given that most genes already have tons of positive and negative regulators that can be easily co-opted and transplanted. The trick is making a robust system with enough dynamic range that you can easily read the output, but with enough finesse that it can dampen the noise as well as mother nature does it.

It's been noted by other posters, but this treatment is just amping up what the cell would normally do if it detected a viral infection, that is, kill itself to save the host. It turns out most successful viruses have evolved a way to shut off this response, and this treatment is like adding a redundant way to activate it. That's not to say it couldn't backfire, most of these self-destruct pathways need to be activated by multiple inputs to avoid accidental triggering (just like needing two special keys to be pressed at once to launch a nuke), and now it's replaced by one giant shiny red button.

As for weakening our immune system, I should add It's a common misconception that the adaptive immune system provides the bulk of our body's defense from invasions (i.e. the one that can "learn" from vaccinations and infections). In fact the first line of defense is the innate immune system which is what is protecting us 99% of the time, and the naturally occurring suicide pathways alluded to before (apoptosis) are a last-line of defense - neither of these are systems with any capability to "learn" from an infection and therefore they won't get weaker just because we use them less should such treatments prove effective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system

Back when I was doing biomolecular NMR research, I would regularly have to crawl under a 16.4 T magnet to calibrate the pulse sequences. All the fillings in my mouth would ache like I was getting my first set of braces in middle-school again. Freaky.

Back to TFA - only an abstract is posted, so I can't read about the proposed mechanism, but as all the people who work with MRI's have pointed out this amount of effect on blood viscosity at such a "low" field strength is hard to imagine unless there is something unusual about the shape or duration of the pulse that makes it substantially different from the static field in an MRI. Previous work with static fields has shown maybe a 1% change at 1T field strengths, with the more significant, 15-20% changes not evident until 5T or so (which is much higher than a typical clinical-use MRI, although some research MRIs certainly are in this range)

see fig 5 of this article if you have institutional access for the work cited above http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030488530001249X

similarly, the WHO summary of health effects of exposure to magnetic fields only cautions against cardiovascular effects for fields > 8T http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs299/en/index.html

The filers of the patent are all employees of microsoft's blue-sky R&D labs (research.microsoft.com) in their "health and well being" section. They are not associated at all with microsoft product development, or with the Gates foundation, this is microsoft's attempt to replicate what Bell Labs or Xerox parc used to be like, and you can only hire that caliber of talent out of academia by letting them do whatever they want. Good gig if you can get it.
And they are, in fact, people who primarily do work in bioinformatics and human-computer interfaces and such, this patent very much reads like something written by electric engineers as it spends 75% of the time talking about the monitoring apparatus and otherwise just rehashes textbook-level information on the actual pathology and biology of parasites. So for all of those who are somehow worried that this is a part of an evil conspiracy on microsoft's part, don't worry, these people don't actually have a wet lab with germs and bugs in it, nor would they know what to do with them if they had it.