Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment The big drop was the 1960s (Score 1) 176

The birth control pill was first approved in 1960 in the US and 1961 in Finland, at the beginning of a huge drop in fertility rates for both countries:

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/fertility-rate

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fin/finland/fertility-rate

That drop alone brought the US down to about the current total fertility rate: 1960 (3.65), 1973 (1.88), 2024 (1.79). The drop from 2007 (2.12) until now is pretty minor in comparison. I of course won't say that birth control is the only thing that changed in the '60s: a lot of other factors starting converging then as well.

Overall I think the biggest contributor to the drop has been in unintended pregnancies: rates dropped the furthest in teenagers up to age 24. Most people, rich or poor, when they have a real choice, choose to 1, wait to have kids, 2, have fewer of them.

Comment Re:Advertising drives up costs (Score 1) 64

Well, logically, every dollar they spend on advertising could be spent on research or simply not added to the price.

That assumes the amount of revenue generated by the product isn't affected by advertising, but in reality in the US (though the intersection of those two sets seems to keep shrinking every day) drug revenue is strongly tied to advertising. Ads get people to go to the doctor about a condition sooner rather than later, they also get people to refill prescriptions sooner rather than later. And those increases in revenue happen immediately. On the other hand money spent on early stage research today won't even begin to generate revenue during the current CEO's tenure, and so should be avoided if at all possible.

Comment Re:No distinction between neurotypical and neurodi (Score 3, Informative) 25

One of the purposes of using mouse models is to study a problem in the simplest and cheapest scenario. Once a proof of principle is established, it makes sense to explore the boundaries of how far that principle can be extended. At any rate, they ran the experiments in C57BL/6J, C57BL/6 and a B6;129 cross. Which mouse lines do you think they should try in the future? Should they run those experiments before they look at mouse models of Alzheimers, FTD, and Parkinsons?

Comment Re:Yeah, "exciting" (Score 4, Interesting) 25

This sort of stuff isn't in his crosshairs; it's also catnip for aging billionaires. The real risk will be pressure to approve drugs based on this research that have very little evidence of actually providing a real benefit but do have severe side effects, like the recent crop of Alzheimer's drugs (Aduhelm, leqembi, Kisunla)

Comment Re:To put this in perspective (Score 1) 108

Try to read the summary again... slowly and it helps to move your lips. The summary states 0.6 g/kg, not 1.6 g/kg Math is hard.

The post leads off with:

A review of published meta-analyses examining protein supplementation found no evidence supporting intake beyond 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily, according to an analysis by cardiologist Eric Topol.

This (and 2.2 g/kg) are the levels of consumption that people have been recommending which Topol is addressing in the article.

Dripdry's comment:

Thatâ(TM)s like eating 10 chicken breasts per day.

The post does also mention the recommendation of 0.8 g/kg/day from the National Academy of Medicine, but whatever lets try the math again with 0.6 g/kg:

For someone to be eating 560 grams of protein a day at a rate of 0.6 g/kg, they would have to weigh 933 kg.

Comment Re:Bizarre angle re EAT recommendations (Score 2) 108

TL;DR: There is limited evidence for eating up to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily for increasing muscle mass IF you are younger than middle age and doing a lot of resistance training, but the upper limit of usefulness might actually be lower than 1.6. There is also evidence that eating too much protein increases the risk of atherosclerosis. It's not clear where the threshold for increased risk is; it is probably between 1 and 1.6 g/kg. Meanwhile the protein influencer and supplement industry is pushing levels of 2.2 g/kg.

Comment Re:Question (Score 5, Interesting) 174

I would think a 400 year trip is way to long what happens 200 year later when the next bigger faster ship passes them on a 40 year trip.

What happens when the first generation of kids comes of age, notices they never gave consent to be confined to a ship for their entire lives, and decides to turn around? And about that 40 year trip. Bear in mind this math is for a 2000 kg ship, 1 billionth the size of the proposed one:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html

Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor — there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 1017 Joules, so we can call it 2 x 1018 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external — that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime. To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 174

The one way trip requires 4.5 million tons of He3 and Deuterium, they'd need to either bring more than double that or find it there, and also remanufacture most of the 2.4 billion ton ship to bring it back to spec for the trip back. Actually though, I'm surprised at how llitle fuel they need for the trip.

Comment Re: Oh well (Score 2) 104

One of the companies that makes the most by selling HIV treatments (Gilead) made their biggest profits and biggest stock market gains by curing Hepatitis C.

Big pharma companies would love to invent more cures: who wouldn't want to own the entire market for a disease instead of having to compete with other treatments? But cures are typically much more difficult to develop, and in many cases will have to be tailored to individual patients. We're really only beginning to have the level of sophistication necessary to do this.

Slashdot Top Deals

The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem. -- Peer

Working...