AFotD reference == win

I am a pediatric blood & marrow transplant physician. I have read the article abstract, but I don't subscribe to Science Translational Medicine, so I won't be able to read the article until my hospital library orders & acquires the article. These comments are based only on the abstract.

The Slashdot summary is misleading about what is novel in research. Unrelated donor bone marrow transplants (or hematopoietic stem cell transplants (HSCT), which are a superset) have been done routinely since the 1990's.

Allogeneic (meaning the stem cell source is another person, rather than the patient himself/herself) HSCT patients take immunosupressive medications to try to prevent (or to treat) graft versus host disease (GVHD). If the patient does not develop GVHD, they are usually weaned off the immunosuppressive medications by 6 months after transplant. Patients who do develop GVHD can require years (sometimes 5-10 years) of immunosuppression. In contrast, patients who receive common solid organ transplants (heart, liver, kidney) are usually on immunosuppressive medications for life, although the immunosuppression is typically stronger for the first few months after transplant. The article reports on patients who received simultaneous kidney and HSC transplants from the same donor. Some of these patients could be weaned off of immunosuppression. Although this type of simultaneous transplant is not common, it has been reported before, as well as the finding that patients could come off immunosuppression.

What is novel is the ability to perform unrelated donor transplants using donors who were not good HLA matches (the matching system that is used for HSCT) and not have the recipients develop GVHD. This was accomplished by manipulating the stem cell product after it had been collected from the donor, but before it was infused into the recipient. The majority of HSCT done today are done with unmanipulated stem cell products (I'm not counting processing that often needs to be done when the donor and recipient don't have the same red cell type - which is controlled by a different genetic system than HLA). However, some forms of stem cell product manipulation (T-cell negative selection and CD34+ cell positive selection) have been around for a few decades. They can be successfully used to decrease the risk of GVHD, but at the price of increasing the risk of graft rejection, relapse (for leukemias) and infection. In the end, almost all studies of those methods show that the overall survival or disease-free survival is unchanged.

This article describes a more sophisticated form of stem cell manipulation, in which the graft is enriched in hematopoietic stem cells and tolerogenic graft facilitating cells. There have been past reports of other sophisticated stem cell manipulations giving good results in a study, but these techniques require elaborate facilities to perform, and often when they have been replicated by groups other than the original group, the patient outcomes have not been as good as those in the original report.

So my bottom line is that this result is exciting, but needs at minimum validation in a multicenter study before it starts to look like a game changer.

To address some of the other comments:

1) The concern about graft-versus-leukemia effects is a valid one and it will need to be studied. However, that is not an issue when doing a transplant for a non-malignant disease, so it would be a definite win for those patients. For leukemias, the GVL effect is strongest in CML, then AML, and weakest in ALL (kids don't get CLL, so I don't know much about that disease). Ultimately it would take clinical trials to determine if the benefit from less GVHD outweighs increased relapse risk (if any) from decreased GVL.

2) The article uses reduced-intensity radiation / chemotherapy, which isn't exactly a picnic, but it is less toxic than standard-dose (10-14 Gy) total body irradiation and 120 mg/kg cyclophosphamide (or 4 day busulfan and 120-200 mg/kg cyclophosphamide).

IANAL, but the short answer is basically judges can order whatever they want in theory, although in practice there are significant limitations (more on that below). Another big point to mention is that the United States uses a common law system, meaning that large parts of the law have never been defined by a statute (i.e. a law passed by a legislature). The major limitations:

1. The judicial selection process almost always picks people who are not going to go off the deep end and start issuing crazy orders, but generally stick close to what is authorized by statutory, regulatory, or case law.

2. Orders from lower courts can be appealed and overturned by appellate courts.

3. There are mechanisms in place to impeach judges.

Within the law, there are various factors that limit orders judge are supposed to issue, and I suspect a relevant one here is jurisdiction. Divorce is a matter for state courts, and if the divorce is occurring in a state where Facebook doesn't have enough of a presence to bring it under the judge's jurisdiction, ordering the parties to swap passwords may be a lot simpler (from a legal perspective) compared to whatever they would have to do to bring another action in Federal court or in a state court with jurisdiction over Facebook to compel Facebook to turn over the data. I'm not sure why the court didn't just ask Facebook to turn over the relevant data. Of course it's also possible they did and Facebook refused, or the court knows that Facebook has refused similar requests (as distinguished from orders) in the past.

This is a very good point. The Federal Reserve currently holds about $1.6 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities. So it would be possible to sell those securities (which pulls the money that others use to buy them out of the economy) so that the the coin hack had no net effect on the money supply until the Federal government spent more than $1.6 trillion.

I would argue that we need the additional fiscal stimulus given the weakness in the economy, and that stimulus would not be inflationary. For the people worried about inflation, though, having the Federal Reserve sell Treasury securities would delay any theoretically possible inflationary impact of the coin hack for about a year.

I am the OP. As several people have posted, this approach is exactly equivalent to printing money. The reason it needs to be platinum coins rather than paper bills is that there is a law that limits the total value of paper bills that can be printed, but there appears to be no limit on the value of platinum coins that can be minted.

Of course, if you were to print a large enough amount of money, it would lead to inflation (or asset price bubbles, which actually seem to occur first in the current economy). The mechanism by which excess money supply causes inflation is by increasing demand to the point where bottlenecks appear in the economy. For example, people want cars, have money to buy them, but there aren't enough factories right now to supply demand - so the price of the limited pool of available cars is bid up. If labor markets are tight, employers looking for people to work to fill the demand created by the extra money will need to bid up wages to attract workers.

The key point is that all those mechanisms only work if an economy, or significant parts of it, are operating near peak capacity. This is the complete opposite of the situation we are in right now. Industrial capacity utilization was at 76.7% in June, several percentage points below the 1972-2010 average (80.4%) an well below the 85.1% peak in the 1990's. Unemployment is also high compared to historical averages.

In the current environment, it is vastly more likely that increasing the money supply will improve economic conditions without triggering inflation. Even at its pre-financial crisis recent peak (when unemployment was much lower than it is now), annual inflation (CPI-U, Dec 2006 to Dec 2007) was only 4.1%. Also keep in mind that the entire amount created ($5 trillion in my example in the OP) will not hit the economy at once. Initially it will be in an account at the Federal Reserve, and only as the government spends the money would it reach the economy.

I am the OP. The reason this approach counts as an 'escape hatch' is that it appears that the executive branch already has the authority to carry it out (in 31 USC 5112(k) ). To stop it, Congress would need to pass a law. To do that in the face of a presidential veto would require 2/3 supermajorities in both the House and Senate. As long as Obama can get 34 of the 51 Democrats in the Senate (or 53 Democrats plus independents who caucus with the Democrats) to back this approach, there is nothing that the House can do to stop it.

Almost all of the US Treasury debt owned by China (and in general) is in the form of book-entry securities. This means there is no physical document for the treasury bill, note or bond. It exists as an entry in the database of a broker or the US Treasury. The court could simply order ownership of an appropriate value of those securities to be transferred from the Chinese government to the successful plaintiff.

Take 3: Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act

The posting system mangled the link. I'll try again: Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act is the US federal law that regulates suits in US courts (federal or state) against foreign governments. It lists exceptions to the general rule that foreign states are immune to suit because of sovereign immunity. The exception that this suit is probably based on is the one that says a foreign state can be sued when it is engaged in “commercial activity”.

Assuming the plaintiff wins the suit, damages would be collected by seizing assets of the foreign state under US jurisdiction. Since US Treasury bonds owned by China are essentially promises by the US Treasury to pay a certain amount of money when the bond comes due, transferring ownership of those bonds to the plaintiff would seem to be a way of collecting damages. Of course, that might have diplomatic consequences.

IANAL either.

Because gravity is different from all other forces, and in some sense, is not a force at all. Mass (or more precisely, all components of the stress-energy tensor) changes the geometry of space-time so that the distances between objects, free of any forces acting on them, are different than what they would be in a flat Minkowski space-time.

An analogy is the difference in behavior between objects moving along lines that are initially parallel on a flat 2D plane and the 2D surface of a 3D sphere. On a plane, the objects will never meet. On a sphere, objects that start on adjacent lines of longitude at the equator (assuming the sphere is marked with latitude and longitude lines like the Earth), and move (initially in parallel) North will eventually meet at the North Pole. There is no force that pushes the objects together: they move together because of the geometry of the surface that they travel in.

Actually, if you start a time machine from rest on the Earth's surface, you will most likely end up emerging inside the Earth, with likely fatal results. Given general relativity, time machines would most logically travel along geodesic paths, which are analogs in curved manifolds (in this case, the space-time manifold curved by earth's gravity) of straight lines in Euclidean spaces. A simple way to imaging this would be that the time machine would follow the same path as an object that started from its location and with its initial velocity, but was only influenced by gravity (and specifically was not influenced by the electromagnetic and Pauli-exclusion-principle-based normal force that supports you when you stand on something).

That path would look like a highly elliptical orbit that was mostly inside the Earth. Going backward in time would mean going along the geodesic in the opposite direction from the normal forward in time movement. Except for brief intervals where the ends of the orbit emerge from the ground, most of the path will be inside the Earth. I suspect that for trips of any length, there would be serious velocity matching issues on emergence even if you did time arrival to one of those intervals where the path was outside the Earth. The safe way to operate a time machine would be to make the temporal jump after you were in Earth orbit.

Actually, warfarin wouldn't work. Its mechanism of action is to block a step in the synthesis of some clotting factors. It doesn't do anything to clotting factors already present in blood, which is why it typically takes a few days to see anticoagulant effect when you give it to a patient.

Heparin would be a good choice. This drug greatly increases the activity of antithrombin, an enzyme in blood that deactivates several clotting factors, including thrombin.

What is especially strange about much of academic publishing not changing its traditional subscription model to account for the rise of Internet is that (unlike a lot of other content providers) there is a clear, economically viable alternative.

Instead of charging for subscriptions, journals should get revenue by charging authors to publish (sometimes called "page fees"). Some journals already have page fees that don't cover the cost of publication, in which case they would need to be increased.

Since in biomedical research, at least (which is the area I'm most familiar with and the majority of research published in the US), both the money that currently pays for subscriptions and the money that would pay the author fees come from grants, it should be a global wash in terms of sources and sinks of the money. Subscriptions are payed out of institutional budgets that have as part of their input "indirect costs" (a kind of overhead fee on grants) that are levied by institutions. For example, if a university's indirect cost rate is 40% and a researcher gets a $500,000 grant, $200,000 goes to the university, and the researcher only gets $300,000 to spend herself. With a change to a publication fee model, indirect costs would go down, freeing up money that the researcher could then use to pay the fees.

There would be some redistribution of costs among groups in an institution and between institutions, but in general costs would be shifted to groups that were most successful at publishing, and thus should be in the best position to bear those costs.

One of the biggest advantages of this scheme is that if articles were not behind paywalls, it would be much more feasible to develop automated tools to index, search and analyze them. This hopefully would improve the ability of researchers to keep up with the huge amount that is published even in specialty areas.