The one weird trick: don't eat anything.

RDA for a semi-active 30 year old 6' tall/200 lb male is ~ 2500 kcal.

2500 kcal * 14 days / ~3500 kcal/lb = 10 lbs.

It's on the internet AND it's true!

What I took away from this is that people who use Bing get cancer.

I'm imagining people with massive student loan debts throwing themselves in front of cars now...

During my Ph.D. program we had a series of guest lecturers on special topics rotate through, and this venerable senior M.D. came in to lecture about relationships between obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

I felt compelled to ask: "Surely, out of the thousands+ of patients you've seen with type 2 diabetes, haven't some of them decided to become more athletic? The benefits on insulin sensitivity and blood sugar balance are well-established [as he had talked about during the lecture]."

The Dr. looked at me like I just asked him if he had ever treated a unicorn. "It's hard," he said, as if it were an impossibility.

Overall, I think the lardasses are that way not because of imprecision with the calorie, but a lack of willpower, or some other deeply-ingrained psychological problem.

Dear Genius,

You might want to not do your math again and see if you come up with a different answer.

Sincerely,

They

Kinases do much more than just spur protein synthesis. They are among the primary signaling enzymes in the body, involved in turning on and off a multitude of cellular processes by attaching phosphate groups to various targets. Some enzymes simply don't function without being triggered by a kinase. The summary just irks me when it's misleading or wrong

Not sure why this was voted down as this was exactly what I was thinking.

A 20 or 30 year old represents a large investment of resources in society. Also, a young adult is far more productive than a child. If children as a group or adults as a group magically vanished from society, society would be come to a halt if you lost the adults, whereas losing children would be a much smaller waste of time and money.

With the equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity

It might blow your mind to learn that my idea of riding my bike is attaching it to a car, driving it to a bike trail, biking, and then driving it back. The roads here aren't safe for cyclists unfortunately, unless you participate in one of those huge, thousand+ cyclist events which effectively shuts down traffic (usually on rural streets).

Wanted to toss in my anecdotal experience here.

I work as a biochemist in a research-intensive hospital. Practically speaking, what this means is that I do science in buildings that are adjacent to patient care buildings. Depending on the day, I may wander through the actual hospital, but ~98% of the time I am in a research-only building and avoid patients altogether.

The university, medical school, and hospital are all affiliated, and their policy on flu vaccination had been that it was required for anyone who had direct patient contact. A couple of years ago, this policy was revised to make the flu policy mandatory for anyone who worked in a patient care building (regardless of direct contact). This past year (2014) everyone here received a flurry of rather harshly worded emails saying that flu vaccination would soon become mandatory for all employees, students, and faculty regardless of where they worked or what their position was, so long as they were affiliated with the hospital.

These emails were threatening enough that my boss (a principal investigator scientist) got the vaccine for the first time in his life. Coincidentally, like my boss, I have never received a flu vaccine because I am skeptical about how much it would benefit me or "the herd", and I intentionally avoided receiving the vaccine. For the record, I am pro-vaccine when it comes to things like MMR, polio, and HPV.

Did I lose my job? Funnily enough, the end of 2014 had a major flu outbreak in the hospital. Dozens if not hundreds of people contracted the flu, the majority of whom were vaccinated against it. Oddly have not received any more emails about their new vaccination policy...

Say what you want about how flu vaccines still help by knocking down the common strains or sometimes reducing the severity of an outbreak. I liken flu vaccination (or vaccination against any genetically labile virus) to the same situation we have with antibiotic resistance: the more you select against the common strains, which is clearly an imperfect process, the higher the likelihood that some nastier and resistant form of it will appear.

The point I'm trying to make is that it's not just uneducated dimwits who are skeptical about vaccination, and that each vaccine needs to be evaluated independently based on its merits. As a scientist myself, I trust my judgment over the government's as to what I put into my or my kids' bodies, but at the same time I appreciate the argument for protecting others through vaccination.

Lest we forget what this country was founded upon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

"Water, fire, air and dirt
****ing magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all mother****ers lying, and getting me pissed"

I'd be willing to bet money on it. I'm all for high school science fairs, but the way the media (and, in turn, Slashdot) sensationalize results like this is incredibly depressing. Real science is real hard.

I agree that the title is misleading. The reason that this paper is in one of the highest-impact scientific journals is not because it suddenly dawned on scientists that cancer is pervasive and just a fact of how cells work, but because they found tumors in early (in evolutionary terms) species that had never been discovered before.

Scientists have known since the dawn of knowing what cancer was that this was an intrinsic property of life. When the error-checking machinery is error-prone, things can get out of control.