Actually, given that there's 100-400 billion stars in the galaxy, and 0.001^4 works out to one in a trillion, that gives you about a 10 to 40% chance of there being one intelligent species in the milky way. /semantic But I agree, in general. The odds of earth being the only planet with life at all in the whole galaxy...are pretty astronomical, in my opinion.

C. diff infections are NOT always caused by antibiotic "overdose," which isn't really a thing - there's dose related toxicity for some classes of antibiotics, but not overdose. In the healthcare setting, infections are usually caused by overgrowth in the setting of depleted colonic flora, but symptomatic infections can also happen with contact with a patient already experiencing a C. diff infection - two years ago, a resident at my hospital ended up with such a severe infection she picked up from a patient that she nearly ended up with a total colectomy. In the community setting, about 50% of cases occurred without any prior antibiotic exposure in the past 30-90 days, at least according to a recent meta-analysis [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25058469].

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.

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.

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!

oof. Clearly, I meant training...which totally didn't happen because of any sleep-deprivation, honestly...

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.

Chad Orzel was my college physics professor. Cool dude.

Excellent idea, from my understanding of the process demonstrated above, yes, this could work, as this would be above the neurological level of the lesion in most patients suffering from locked in syndrome. - I am a physician.

I wish. I'm a broke medical intern. But hey, whatever you want to tell yourself.

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.

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.

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.

we can expect it gets cancelled less than halfway through its run