Too much sugar, chronically, over time, yes bad.

No one has or will die from just the sugar content in cans of tomato puree, nor will they get diabetes so long as they maintain their calorie intake within reasonable ranges. Your position is pedantic.
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It's true, and it's basic and I too tire of it being toddled out as thoughtless refutation of any observational study. However, it's not so basic that even a small child knows, and reporters get it wrong all the time.

One of the early lessons I learned as an undergraduate taking microbial physiology is that there are all sorts of microorganisms out there that will consume just about any energy containing substrate you can think of, to include plastics, styrofoam, petrochemicals, you name it. You just have to provide sufficient substrate, temperature and in some cases the proper atmosphere.

(Aside, this was one of my favorite classes. We were each tasked with isolating and characterizing the microbe of our choice, based on substrates we could easily obtained and were interested in. I got a few buckets of muck from an oil spill and worked on isolating bacteria that break down crude oil. Someone else used foam cushions from cars, another worked with plastics. Anyway, it felt like we were all back in elementary school all over again, what with working on soil samples and little dirt projects.) There are all sorts of tricks to getting this to work, but mainly bacteria are finicky eaters so getting them to do this stuff in specialized environments is nowhere near as hard as getting them to do it out in the open with sun, variable humidity, temp, o2 levels, etc.

But back to the point: If you are worried about what bacteria can eat, you probably don't want to know what is in the soil, air, and even on your skin right now.

Honest question here:

I'm curious, how does one pay back something like $20 million? I assume most thieves only retain a fraction of value of the original stolen goods/funds. In this case, it sounds like he has roughly $5 million to forfeit so presumably that brings the total down, but even if he could scrape up $10 million, what's left is a number I have a hard time wrapping my mind around.

And I assume it will be very hard for most thieves to find lucrative legal employment after felony conviction/prison.

So, after someone in this position is squeezed dry and they serve their time, what next? Is there incentive for them to seek employment, and can they gain it? Or ... is this pretty much a one way financial trip to nothing?

This is a complicated topic and I'm not going to be able to respond both concisely and with nuance. So, first, three concessions: Yes, people do or try to do illegal things. Yes, currently there are also legal provisions for accessing your health data in certain forms (e.g., de-identified, or grossly aggregated) and for certain purposes. And yes, I would concede that as health data pools grow the risks of misuse that exist will get higher and new ones will arise.

However, when it comes to human data there are also a variety of legal controls, including but not limited to HIPAA, and the assertion that "they" will find some "pseudo-legal" way is, in my experience, often false.

I say this because I've worked in this space for years. Someone will want to analyze data that they have access to. Or someone will want to sell data they have access to. In every instance I've been involved in, someone else with authority has spiked those inclinations hard. I've seen this at multiple companies, large and small.

But yes, please fight for your data rights. We aren’t as well protected as I would like, and I believe it’s only going to get uglier. But we are also better protected than you state.

No you don't. (Also, it's "HIPAA" not "HIPPA")

You regret that suppressing perceived microaggressions is impractical but otherwise are sympathetic? Positions like this make me realize how old and rigid I've grown. I've been trying to understand microaggressions and safe spaces for a few years now (part of my kids' culture) and I just can't cross the logical bridge to support what is increasingly the mainstream position.

Does suppressing offensive behaviors of some individuals actually make the environment safer for others? If so, then maybe ... there's justification. But the way I figure it, the people who aggress, micro or otherwise, are still physically there either way, and their attitudes are unlikely to be changed in a positive way by the suppression of what are, arguably, their legal rights (at least in the US). So, what is the point? Is it that we make people actually safer, or just feel safer? And if so, do we believe that making people feel safer is a sufficient justification? And is that even healthier for them? I find myself skeptical.

I grant you, I will never understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of some of the types of bigotry we're talking about, so maybe I'm wrong and just don't get it. (Wouldn't be the first time.)

"Maybe you wouldn't be converted, It obviously worked on a few million people."

I haven't read all of Mein Kampf but I'll own up to having read sections out of curiosity. It didn't strike me as particularly anything other than bland and disgusting. I imagined that that those were inflamed by it already fit a mindset. Perhaps one that grew out of a particular time or location or set of circumstances.

At the risk of getting flamed to hell and back, I think the closest parallel in modern times to the Nazi movement would be, well, Donald Trump's movement. Regardless of your view on his ideology, or how his support group grew, and what reasonable things people might have thought in backing him initially, the way it ended ... the way he took what was nominally a conservative block and turned the lot into, if not outright raving fascists then at least complicit in the closest thing to a coup I hope to see in my lifetime, just stunned me. I'd like to think that once enough time has passed everyone we will view his brief tenure on the American stage in much the same light as we would Mein Kampf. Hopefully, to be remembered but not to be lauded.

"Believing what has been demonstrated by history makes one a Nazi? Do you even know what a Nazi is? Maybe you should read the book."

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I misunderstand. But this sounds like you support Nazis, which is disturbing. You may wish to clarify if otherwise.

"There are lots of cases where you could show a drugs effect on some cells cultured in a dish. You can show what a Protein will do with a computer simulation."

I haven't worked directly in pharma R&D in years so what I'm saying below is no doubt out of date. With that caveat, traditionally, the cell line work is exactly what you would do before you would move into animal models. It was not uncommon for you to observe very different results in animals than you observed in cell lines. It was and is still not uncommon for animal models to fail to capture all of the nuance of what a drug compound will do, or fail to do, in humans. This holds even when the drug you were testing were not first in class.

I don't know how much can be done with computer modeling nowadays, but when I was involved in this the hype vastly overshadowed the delivery. (There was this common hype that shallow but broad and heterogeneous data could somehow be aggregated into what would prove to be reliably predictive models.) I've no doubt the models are much better than they were a decade ago. I'd be surprised though if I live to see them yet live up to their promise. The article also mentioned organ chips. I've read a bit about them but don't know enough to comment. But I'll allow that new technologies come along and, at some point, may obsolete all sorts of ways we did things in the past.

Anyway, my own take is that FDA isn't stupid. If they are going to consider cases it is likely because they can envision scenarios where animal model testing of drugs is unnecessary, and my guess here is the impetus is less about rodent/dog/chimp lives saved and more about paving the way for potentially more rapid development of something perceived as low risk but life saving. Pharmas, to the extent that they think they can plausibly go this route, will be pleased at the possibility of lower costs/timelines. But I expect less sanguine researchers are going to see this as mostly a false trail, where counting on this options leads to dead ends with subsequent timeline delays, and I expect there will be a lot of internal bickering over cost/benefit. Drug R&D is hard, and FDA isn't going to just open the floodgates to this sort of thing.

To this point, the article notes that currently something like 90% of drugs fail in clinical development due to safety or efficacy (there's no other way to fail). While this might bolster the claim that the animal models aren't providing much value, it should also give some pause for us to consider just how hard it is to predict what will happen in humans even with cell lines, computer simulations, *and* animals. And these failure rates have been around a long time. What would be more compelling in my mind is to see evidence that, after introducing one or more of these new methods, the failure rates in human clinical trials were to decrease. Then maybe you could argue some of the historical steps have been adequately supplanted and could be phased out.

I don't LIKE paying 30% more, but honestly for most of what I buy via the app store ( $5) I wouldn't notice. I'm not saying Durov is wrong -- I haven't really thought about it. But 30% on a few bucks is probably rounding error for most people walking around with Apple phones.

I prefer people in STEM programs to learn theory adequate to use their tools correctly for their intended purpose. If you are leveling your washing machine, no you don't need calculus or linear algebra, etc.. If you are helping design a study for medical device efficacy, I want you to know more than how to mash buttons.

I'm mostly in agreement. There are lots of areas of science where calculus is not a pre-req, and no sense making it harder than it need be.

However, there are also a lot of areas, especially biological disciplines, that rely heavily on statistics to do anything rigorous, which in turn relies heavily on calculus (and on linear algebra) for any real understanding of what you are doing.

Yes, you can push numbers around in any number of powerful software applications without really understanding stats (i.e. with just your one required "stats for non-majors" class under your belt), but the number of completely screwed up papers published every year by biologists who do not know what they are doing mathematically (and presumably vetted by reviewers who similarly did not have a clue) is just ... well, a shame. Sometimes I think science would be better off with half the people in it, not twice as many. At least if you could eliminate more of the crap.

Right. Or more.

Even PCR, which technically is exquisitely sensitive (single copy nucleic acid detection) still relies on larger copies for reliable detection and even more for quantitation. You may not have those copies in as little as a single ml, for certain types of analytes, whether we talking about infections agents, or shedded byproducts of human cells.

Theranos had a lot of people on the outside scratching their heads ("they claim they can do WHAT"). Of coursee, initial skepticism doesn't always mean something is impossible ... but after a while it became clear Theranos had nothing to offer. Beyond the smoke and mirrors.

I'm trying to decide if you are being facetious or serious. If I misread you, my apologies.

Like probably many on Slashdot, most of my travel is for my company. I'm often booking and rebooking last minute and these seats you speak of are regularly not available at any price. Even when available, the upgrades below business class, are usually like choosing between ... say, a rotten piece of fruit, and a rotten piece of fruit that has most of the blemishes carved out.

I suppose it's too much to ask that we at least acknowledge that airlines operate on economics, they sell much of their seating to business, and the businesses don't much care about your physical pain. This leads to crappier conditions for everyone.

I don't see any way to fix this, but I'm pretty sure that so long as passengers keep pointing their fingers at each other and not the airlines, there's no incentive to change anything.

I mostly agree. However, adverse events (AEs) outside of clinical trial settings presents a challenge. Unless an AE is severe and observed by a medical professional the reporting is, by nature, anecdotal. Additionally, if you as a consumer experience an AE and report it to your PCP, it may still not be reported to the required regulatory agencies and it may therefore not be included in the various databases used to track such. This leads to a downwards bias in incidence estimates for AEs that are not clinically urgent (e.g., headaches, muscle aches, and fatigue).

For my own part, I care about this with COVID because I think the argument against the occurrence of AEs for COVID is a distraction. Even if we allow that the majority of subtle self-reported AEs for COVID vaccinations are real, the downsides of vaccination simply don't outweigh the benefits.