If the macrophages do this with tattoo ink, they no doubt do it with other things, as well.

I wonder if using this cream to remove ALL the dead-macrophages-loaded-with-junk from the skin will result in effectively "younger" skin?

So instead of having the tattoo ink spread out in a relatively benign part of my dermis, instead I'll concentrate it in my lymph nodes.

I was under the impression that the macrophages would then be broken down and their contents recycled or disposed of - that this migration was just one step in the process. Is this not true?

There are a lot of macrophages migrating to the lymph nodes over a lifetime. If they just went there, died, and left their contents the nodes would swell with age and never shrink - yet this doesn't seem to happen.

An enzyme takes the hydrogen back to protons and electrons...
Isn't that nuclear fission?

No, it's chemistry. Specificially, ionization.

Monatomic hydrogen has a single proton (and very occasionally one or two neutrons) for its nucleus, "orbited" by a single electron. Molecular hydrogen has two atoms of hydrogen - two protons bound together into a molecule by sharing their associated electrons in a chemical bond.

Separating the individual nuclei from their chemical bonds (typically dragging along all but one or all but a few of their electrons) is a chemical process, producing a dissolved positive ion. Because hydrogen has a single proton and electon per atom, a positive ion of (non-heavy) hydrogen, missing one electron, is a bare proton.

Now if you wanted to change the number of protons and/or neutrons in the nucleus, change a proton to a neutron or vice-versa, or rearrange a multi-nucleon atom into or out of an excited state (say by adding or releasing a gamma ray), you WOULD be talking nuclear processes. If it cosisted of separating the nucleons of a single nucleus into two groups it would be nuclear fission. But separating the nuclei of different atoms from a molecular bond and/or removing electrons from them, is just chemistry. Energies per operation are measured in single-digit electron volts, rather than kilovolts or higher.

Geo-engineering

Back in the '60s and '70s a friend and I would occasionally take a back road from Ann Arbor to the "Dexter-Chelsea Industrial Complex" (a Vietnam War in-joke). We'd pass a small commercial site (always deserted on weekends) labeled "Industrial Tectonics".

She made up a nice rant about how they're been hired by the "Committee to Reunite Gonwanaland" to adjust continental drift to re-merge the continents into a single supercontinent.

(Later I found that "industrial tectonics" was about making fancy ball-shaped things of metal, ceramic, etc. for things like bearings, valves, and shot-peening (surface treating metals to create desired effects by tumbling them in an industrial-scale "cement mixer" with a bunch of ball bearings or other small, hard, objects.) Spheres, yes. Continental drift engineering, no. B-( Though I suppose you COULD speed up continental drift by injecting enough fancy ball bearings into faults, ala fracking.)

I searched your italicized quote there. First result.

Thank you.

It looks like he's talking about Reye's Syndrome, a pathology that can cause substantial brain damage (and/or other things: Liver damage, death, ...) in children - adults generally recover fully after a couple weeks. (I wanted to be sure he hadn't signed on to the immunization/autism claims, which have been thoroughly discredited.)

Reye/Reye's is a reasonably rare side effect of several viral illnesses, including immunizations for them. Risk of it seems to be multiplied by a factor of something like five if aspirin is taken, but aspirin (or other salicylates) is not necessary for its occurrence. It seems also to be associated with pre-existing metabolic disorders, so some families might be at very high risk while others effectively immune.

It's clear from even the soundbite posted: Rand's claim is that the decision to risk a child's health is properly the parents', and the government should not be able to force the child's exposure to a series of these risks over the parents' objections - informed or otherwise.

Immunizations are partly about population immunity - reducing the density of people susceptible to a disease to the point that it peters out in a declining exponential rather than blowing up in an expanding exponential, thus also protecting those not (yet) immunized, for whom the immunization was ineffective, or who were at risk despite the availability of immunization (e.g. AIDS sufferers). So risk/benefit calculations are for populations as well. Accepting the risk of the immunization helps others as well as the immunized person, so being immunized is partly an altruistic act.

Rand's point is that he believes the government shouldn't have the power to FORCE people to risk their lives for the benefit of others, that these life-critical decisions are personal and should be left up to the people in question (or their guardians if they're too young to make the choice themselves).

Rand Paul says vaccines cause mental illnesses!

Citation needed.

Yet the Colts didn't deserve to be in it. The balls they played with on offense weren't altered or deflated and the still only scored 7 points to the eventual 45 that the patriots scored. The Colts offense was shut down by the Pats defence and that's that

No, the Colts (or whomever the rules say) DO deserve to be in it, if that's what the rules say.

The Patriots cheated and were caught cheating. Unless the rules explicitly prescribe some other punishment for that offence, this should be treated as a game forfeit. They LOSE. If that means a far weaker team that almost certainly would have been clobbered if they'd played by the rules gets a superbowl slot - that's just fine. Maybe next year the teams will be more careful to keep their people under control.

If the rules are just advisory, who cares about the game? (They'll still get SOME fans. Like Pro Wrestling, for example, where the fans see it as a morality play entertainment, not a contest of strength and skill.) But $6,000 scalped seats won't be in their future.)

Meanwhile, the Colts got all the way to that last playoff game, so they're not TOTAL klutzes. If they deserve the slot cause they got their by playing fairly (or at least MORE fairly) and the Patriots don't, it would still be a fine contest.

As yourself this: Is Football about playing the game by the rules? Or is it about seeing how crooked you can be and get away with it?

People die of cancer. stroke, heart attack, emphysema. and countless other disease, but aging isn't one of them.

With AIDS the HIV virus gradually destroys the immune system. Then some infection isn't successfully fought off. The immediate "cause of death" is the infection. But the underlying cause of death is the destruction of the immune system by HIV.

Similarly, with aging, a host of systems gradually fail, through a number of mechanisms, of which telomere-shortening is the underlying cause of most. Eventually one of these systems failures results a disease process (or failure to reverse a disease process), and that disease process causes death. The recorded "cause of death" is the particular disease process. But the underlying cause is the system failure from aging.

Take cancer: Accumulated errors in DNA replication, perhaps combined with a couple pre-errored codes inherited from the parents, result in a clone of cells that don't stop replicating when they should, and are able to evade the self-destruct mechanisms (including the hayflic. The accumulation of errors is one aspect of aging. The failure of the immune system to recognize, destroy, and clean out the clone of misprogrammed cells, more common in older people, is another.

All the 'Libre' crowd rants about the source code of the software, but somehow gives a pass about the hardware not being open ...

You haven't been watching very closely.

*I* have been ranting on slashdot about AMT for years. Look it up.

Next you know the young whipper-snappers will take "variables" and call them "dynamic constants"

In Bluetooth (especially Bluetoothe Low Energy (BLE)) they already reanamed them. They call one a "characteristic" (when you include the metadata describing it) or a "characteristic value" (when you mean just the the current value of the variable itself).

I thought the point of the charge was to make the "wooly" side-fibers of the strands wrap around the prey's limbs and/or the microscopic irregularities in the exoskeleton, tangling to it. "Tying" the fibers to the prey would have a similar binding effect to gluing them to it, without the need for glue, and lots of little fibers could make a very strong attachment.

(Stretching fibers made of long chains makes them stronger by aligning the chains along the direction of the stretch.)

Youtube just switched to HTML5 video by default, so perhaps we can uninstall Flash for good now!

But can it play "Badger Badger Badger"?

Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol? Is the performance so critical that it's worth all the troubles?

Also, because there's a lot of C code that has been in heavy use, and tested for correctness, for decades, suitable for reuse with substantial confidence that it's correct (though you check it anyhow...).

Let's see you find code like THAT for a language that hasn't been AROUND for decades. B-)

Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol?

For starters, because it's transparent. The "K&R compliant assembly laguage", as one of my former colleagues once characterized it, translates to object in a clearly understandable way (especially if you turn optimization down or off). Though it gives you more opportunities to create bugs, it makes it hard for the bugs to hide from inspection.

The "higher-level" the language, the more it takes over and inserts its own stuff between you and the metal, and the more opportunity for that to inject an invisible vulnerability - which you might have trouble removing even if you DO discover it.

Meanwhile, many of the things "higher-level" languages protect you from can also be detected and flagged by both modern C compilers and code examination tools - starting with the venerable "lint".

I can guarantee you that if the Govt. left it up to drivers to get the proper training and instruction on how to operate vehicles safely, people wouldn't do it.

Interesting claim - since it doen't work that way for guns.

Where the government requires training, most gun purchasers take the minimum required, then stop. Where it doesn't, most people start with the course recommended by the gun stores (which is far more comprehensive - and more focussed, with less time spent on political indoctrination B-) ) and also do substantially more range time, until they feel adequately competent. (Then there are those that get interested in shooting as a hobby...)

A similar effect is the reason police normally don't shoot at private ranges simultaneously with civilians. Most police are embarrassingly HORRIBLE shots and pistol-handlers - because they do only the minimum training and practice required by the department (which has lots of other stuff for them to do while they're being paid for their time), and almost never have to actually fire their gun during their work.