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Comment Anti-VEGF drugs (Score 1) 311

I'd vote for anti-VEGF (growth factor) drugs. They're used for macular degeneration and diabetes-related blindness, a number of cancers... and they're very expensive! A year's worth of monthly injections for macular degeneration (12 doses) was close to $30k a year five years ago; now it's down to a bit less than half of that price.

Comment Re:Color Blind (Score 2, Informative) 114

The red-green test (binocular balancing) does work on anomalous trichromats, i.e. most of the people who are colourblind or colour deficient. Just because you can't distinguish between red and green doesn't change the way the wavelengths focus. (We have to adjust our questions to refer to the right or left side, rather than the red or green, but that's about it.)
Very few people are missing a particular colour of cones; rather, the light-sensitive pigment is altered by genetics to be most sensitive to a different/"wrong" wavelength. So your red-green colour deficient people usually have their 'green' cones more sensitive to red instead of green (or vice versa). That doesn't mean that they don't see green, they're just less sensitive to it than they are to red; the photopigments are still activated by wavelengths other than the one they're most sensitive to.
For more info, look up the spectral sensitivity functions for the various photopigments; you can imagine how shifting the sensitivity of any of the curves will affect things, but it will in no way prevent normal colours from being visible.
(I'm an optometrist. And yes, it's spelled "colour" here.)

Comment That's an interesting way of doing it... (Score 1) 214

Doesn't this mean that anyone in China who speaks, say, English or Russian could get around the censorship just by searching Bing in their other language? And I suppose this also prevents Chinese people from using a proxy to search Bing, if anything in simplified Chinese is being censored regardless of IP location?
Image

The Smell of Space 70

According to NASA scientists, space smells a lot like my uncle's workshop. One can detect hints of fried steak, hot metal, and the welding of a motorbike. They have hired Steven Pearce, a chemist and managing director of fragrance manufacturing company Omega Ingredients, to recreate the smell in a laboratory. NASA will use his research to help train potential astronauts. Steven said, "I did some work for an art exhibition in July, which was based entirely on smell, and one of the things I created was the smell of the inside of the Mir space station. NASA heard about it and contacted me to see if I could help them recreate the smell of space to help their astronauts."

Comment The way I figure... (Score 1) 298

Wouldn't it be great to have a free wireless network available virtually nationwide, regardless of filtering, for the simple purpose of online connected devices? Alarm clocks that gather local news and weather, refrigerators that order milk for you when you run out, an oven that preheats when you signal it from your car on the way home... none of these tasks need tons of bandwidth, nor do they depend on having uncensored access. I think this free wireless might take these sorts of things from the realm of science fiction, or at least hardcore geeks, to the hands of the masses.
Education

Submission + - Kansas Adopts New Science Standards

porcupine8 writes: The Kansas State Board of Education has changed the state science standards once again, this time to take out language questioning evolution. This turnaround comes fast on the heels of the ouster given this past election to the ultra-conservative Board members who originally introduced the language. "Science" has also been re-redefined as "a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations" (the word "natural" had been previously stricken from the definition).

If you'd like to see the new standards, a version showing all additions and deletions is available from the KS DOE's website (PDF).
Censorship

Submission + - Ethics of proxy servers

Mav writes: "I was recently asked to host a website for free in return for a lot of advertising. After querying them about how they knew the site would produce traffic they stated the site was going to be running PHPProxy (an open source web proxy). The traffic was a result of him and his contacts (nearly one thousand of them) using the site to bypass his school's firewall in order to view their MySpace pages and get access to their MSN messengers. Given all the attention social networking sites have recently received and the various laws attempting to block or control access to them I feel guilty and unsure making this available. Are there legal implications that I need to worry about? Could I be held liable if one of the students got in trouble? Most importantly, what's the moral thing to do?"

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