So long as you don't actually tell anyone outside of your research group about those experiments, and then lie to your insurance companies about what happened if there is an accident.

For most of the $, it's hard to separate the two. Yes the FDA requires successful phase III and sometimes phase IV trials, Aren't those research? The actual paperwork for the FDA submission costs millions to prepare, but that's chump change compared to the rest of the costs.

But if this was describing actual drug instead of a blogpost about a hobby, QC/QA protocols would be followed to ensure that only the intended active pharmaceutical ingredients and excipients are in the dose, and that the method of administration doesn't introduce any contaminants.

Anyway, if you want to hear something even scarier: you can treat Alzheimers in mice by repeatedly permeabilizing the blood brain barrier for a few hours. How's that for potential of letting nasty stuff into the wrong place?

http://www.sciguru.org/newsite...

OK, consider me cued up.

A few things to consider:

1. Over a third of new drug approvals are for rare and orphan diseases (37% in the US last year). It is definitely economically feasible to create treatments for rare diseases.

2. This paper doesn't describe anything that wasn't described in a patent from 2012. (Methods to enhance night vision and treatment of night blindness US 20120157377 A1)

3. They aren't doing research to advance a treatment for a medical condition

OK, they have to offer coverage. So when they present you with a $30k bill for installation ...

You have a really narrow view of STEM.

1. DNA sequencing is several orders of magnitude faster and cheaper, as are ways of making use of the data for diagnostics and theragnostics. Moore's law might be better applied to bioinformatics than to transistors these days.

2. Cancer therapeutics that use the immune system to selectively attack cancer cells instead of stuff that is just somewhat more toxic to cancer cells than the rest of your body.

3. Just announced this week: Some of the first promising candidate drugs for Alzheimers ... How much more fuckin awesome can innovation get?

4. Viable electric cars and self driving cars on their way.

5. I can use my cell phone to get a ride from a stranger in a hybrid car cheaper and faster than I can get a cab.

The war will be with Nevada and Arizona over splitting up the Colorado river. As the law stands right now, Las Vegas goes dry and Arizona loses half of its supply before SoCal would lose a drop. CA's senators are Democrats as are most of CA's congress critters, the rest of the basin is pretty much Republican, and the fight will happen when both the senate and the house are dominated by republicans. Should get painful pretty fast.

Right now the population consumes a relatively small proportion of the water that is being used. Of course, living in CA would get very interesting if we had to fallow the farms. Whole congressional districts with unemployment over 50% (before they depopulated), food prices skyrocketing as CA became a net importer of food and ag products ...

Or the sewage used to fertilize the crops. If it is applied too soon before harvest, sunlight doesn't have a chance to kill all the bacteria on the leaves, strawberries, etc.

1. The amount of greywater and wastewater is much smaller than the amount of water currently used by agriculture in CA. The farmers would keep drilling deeper wells.

2. So how much energy and infrastructure would it take to pump that water from coastal cities back up into the central valley or over mountains to where the farms are?

The aquifiers won't go dry, but it eventually becomes cost prohibitive to pump water from ever deeper wells (1000 ft or more) and then having to demineralize it. Meanwhile, the upper layers of the aquifer become permanently compacted (areas of the cental valley have subsided 25 ft or more due to ground water depletion) and never recover their ability to hold so much water.

I agree, repeatedly permeabilizing the BBB to the extent that cells larger than bacteria can get in sounds a wee bit risky. Also:

The abstract mentioning completely clearing amyloid plaques in 75% of the mice, which, while awesome, is not fully restoring memory.

It's not just lack of interest. It was a lot cheaper for young boomers and Xers to buy cars: they generally didn't have 2-3x their starting salary locked up in college loans. The boomers didn't even have to go to college.

My guess is that it will skip a generation. Sort of like vinyl records.

That's a bit of hyperbole. They will certainly have the option to buy self driving cars, but it's unlikely that everything else will be phased out and off the road within ~5 years of self driving cars being introduced.

The bipedal crocodile idea isn't new or just based on this one specimen. Here's a reference FTA:

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/...

The bipedal stem crocodilian Poposaurus gracilis: inferring function in fossils and innovation in archosaur locomotion. Bull. Peabody Mus. Nat. Hist. 52, 107–126 (2011).

I think movement by button while sitting at your desk won't be disorienting at all, but movement dependent on walking/jumping on a device that provides feedback entirely unlike the environment being simulated will definitely take a lot of getting used to for each implementation.