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Comment MD here... (Score 4, Informative) 135

These are for patients who have recurrent C. diff, who have already failed PO vancomycin or fidaxomycin (difficid). Those are the only two antibiotics we really have after you fail metronidazole therapy. It's not an issue of strongness; it's penetrating into encysted bacteria which vancomycin does fairly poorly, and fidaxomycin does only moderately better. At that point, options are fecal therapy, another round of vanc or difficid with increasingly diminishing returns, or in severe cases, colectomy.

Comment Upbeat about this trial (Score 4, Informative) 43

I own stock in the company conducting the trial (AMEX: CUR), and this phase I study is really more of a formality, as they have finished injections in the cervical and lumbar spine for a phase IIB study using the same stem cells in ALS patients; thus far the safety profile has been excellent (efficacy hasn't been rigorously looked at yet, but the initial results are promising). The results in rat models for spinal cord injury were very impressive, if this stuff translates it'll be a real game changer...I've read most of their published data so far and everything looks legit.

Comment Re:Ummm (Score 2) 347

The time period over which pair production-annhilation occurs might be a small part of the correction here, but from my quick reading of TFA, I think the key phrase is "This results in a small correction to the angular frequency of a photon and thus its velocity," where velocity is the key word. Velocity of course is a vector quantity, consisting of both a speed (c) and a direction. The key aspect here is the direction; when the pair recombines, the total energy of the system is slightly different as the positron-electron pair is affected by gravity and thus may pick up a small positive or negative acceleration from the gravitational potential they are traveling through. When they recombine this will be reflected in the new velocity (c d) of the resultant photon, which is not exactly the same as the photon prior to pair production. At least thats what I got, but I'm the wrong kind of doctor to be an expert in this. Any PhD's wanna weigh in and correct me, please do!

Comment I am a physician... (Score 4, Interesting) 200

in residency, and yes, from time to time I'll look up something on wikipedia on my phone for a quick overview if its a condition I'm not familiar with, or is outside my specialty, and I'm rounding or otherwise away from a computer. However, I don't use it for treatment or diagnostic purposes; there exist much better, peer reviewed sources for that, which I will happily access from a computer. That being said, I'd say a large amount of the wikipedia articles tend to be pretty decent, and at least sound as if they've been written by someone with some sort of formal medical treatment. They get the quick and dirty job done about 75% of the time for me.

Comment Re:Not a QC! (Score 4, Insightful) 96

I submitted the article. I called it a QC, because if you read TFS, there are a couple of papers linked indicating that there seems to be evidence that the machine is functioning as an adiabatic quantum computer. Of course, these results have been challenged. However, for the purposes of a summary, it seemed in my mind, ok to call it what the manufacturer does, which is an adiabatic quantum computer.

Comment Re:Unfunded mandate? (Score 4, Insightful) 285

Not only that, but the funding level for NASA is actually lowered by 5% to boot. I suppose no one should be surprised that the people who seem to have difficulty with science also have difficulties with math. Unless they think going to Mars is going to be a cheap proposition.

Submission + - A look at quantum computer manufacturer D-Wave and its founder (nature.com)

tpjunkie writes: Many slashdot readers will remember D-wave's announcement in 2007 of its quantum computer, an announcement met with skepticism and a good amount of scorn. However, today the company has sold quantum computers to such companies as Lockheed Martin and Google, and their computers have gone from a handful of qubits to 512 in their most recent offerings. Nature has a story including an interview with the company's founder Geordi Rose, and a look at where the company is headed and some of the difficulties it has overcome.

Comment Re:Be still, my heart! (Score 3, Insightful) 214

Assuming that you're targeting processed mRNA. I feel the same way as you however. I believe that producing cDNA of a naturally occurring protein (whether wild type or novel mutation) is not "creation" per se, so much as translation (well, reverse translation followed by reverse transcription if you want to be anal) of an existing, natural item. Are translations patentable? Perhaps copyright is more appropriate, although the existing copyright laws might actually be worse than patent law.

Comment As a former Bloomberg employee, and terminal user (Score 3, Informative) 55

This is not really news. The terminal has an instant messenger application built into it. If you have a buddy list with the users in question in it, you can see without doing ANYTHING whether or not that user is signed into their terminal. Furthermore, even if you are not using the instant messenger, you can always do the equivalent of a "whois" search for a user and it will tell you their status. As far as determining the functions a user is using, that is due to the analytics department whose function it is to assist users with obtaining information and helping them use various functions of the terminal. Not sure why the news division had access.

Submission + - Kepler finds 2 exoplanets in one star's habitable zone (universetoday.com)

tpjunkie writes: Nasa's Kepler mission announced the discovery of two rocky exoplanets in the same system both orbiting in the habitable zone of their star, Kepler-62, located 1200 light years away. Both planets are slightly larger than Earth, and estimates of their mass indicates they may be oceanic in nature.

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