daughart

This water would probably pull relatively concentrated salts below their physiologically safe level (e.g. sodium, potassium, calcium), making it not useful for leeching out toxic stuff which is usually at a very low concentration. In other words, it would be very non-specific.

Ozarka's own documents detail the mineral contents of their water. Ultra pure water by definition has no mineral content. You cannot buy ultra pure water in a grocery store. It's (relatively) expensive to produce water this pure. You have never consumed ultra pure water, I can guarantee it. I work in a specialized lab and our water is only down to 4 ppb, basically murky compared to this stuff.

I think emerging research in genome engineering and sculpting evolutionary fitness using genome engineering tools will probably solve these disorders. However, these technologies have--in my opinion--lower hanging and more profitable fruit in other biomedical interventions, such as cancer therapy. They will probably cure mitochondrial disorders as a side-effect, though, and possibly by small start-ups (since there's such little money in these rare, one-shot-cure diseases).

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in systems biology.

Mitochondrial diseases don't seem like an easy target because they are really metabolic and homeostatic disorders, which are very complex. If the main failure of mitochondrial disorders were a lack of energy production, how could cancer cells grow faster than regular cells, yet turn off mitochondrial energy production in favor of anaerobic glycolysis and lactic acid fermentation (which is much less efficient)? Mitochondria have an under appreciated role in ion homeostasis, intermediary metabolism, and biosynthesis that seems to be the cause of many mitochondrial diseases. The mitochondrial genome only codes for a few proteins, but relies heavily on the nuclear genome for proteins. In other words, the mitochondria isn't just an isolated power plant; it's an integrated system that provides power in addition to logic, material processing, signaling, etc. Sorry to hear about your disorder, fortunately there are people researching these diseases.

Go Quakers!

I haven't used it myself but I've heard great things and it closely matches your request: "Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection" by Dr. John E. Sarno (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0446557684)

"Why hasn’t China “nuked” us? If Beijing sold Treasury securities in massive quantities, it would cause a panic, but the world’s deep markets would quickly adjust. The Chinese, we should remember, would get back dollars. Because they are doing this to undermine America, they would have to either buy hard assets or convert the proceeds into other currencies. As a practical matter, China’s deficit-plagued central government needs the income so most of the funds would go into interest-bearing instruments denominated in euros, pounds, francs, and yen.

The euro, pound, franc, and yen would obviously soar in value, so Brussels, London, Bern, and Tokyo would have to go out into the markets to rebalance their currencies. The only practical way to rebalance would be to buy . . . dollars.

So why don’t the Chinese go nuclear? They know that in a short period calm would return to the markets, America’s debt would end up held by its friends, and they would be stuck with a wide variety of assets their managers had shunned in the first place."

G.G. Chang, Forbes OP/ED 10/06/2013

You don't want your G+ friends automatically notified when you burn dinner? Or will it be targeted ads for delivery pizza?

As I said 2 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6684466) with respect to adding AppleScript support back into iWork:

"Apple increasingly proves that intransigence in response to customer feedback is not a defining feature of Apple's aesthetic. Another example is the reduced motion setting in iOS7. There's no need to piss people off just for the sake of purity; Steve gave that to Apple, but it is fundamentally distinct from Steve's primary gift - his vision of consumer products. Steve would have berated you for using Applescript, until Apple released the update a year later that supported Applescript."

More importantly, why do their ATM machines hold on to your card until after they give you money, practically begging you to leave your card behind if you're even mildly distracted or intoxicated?

While not an attack on free speech as a constitutional provision, it is a direct attack on the ability of academics to speak freely. If academics cannot communicate their work without fear of personal or political retribution, then the research itself is fundamentally tainted.

Let's say that you pulled this off for four years (as the actual student). What is stopping you from telling Harvard that you actually did the work and hoping they recognize your effort by giving you a diploma instead of the guy who was hiring you? I assume only contractual terms about non-disclosure. Since the contract itself is probably in violation of the law in some way -- I'd guess that you've committed fraud -- is the NDA agreement enforceable? What happens to the $170k you've been paid? Do you have to return this? Would you both face criminal punishment?

Thank you for pointing this out.

That was my first submission to HN and I was really surprised to see my submission title changed, and you're correct that the title change directed the conversation away from what I intended. I'm probably not going to start a blog so that I can control the titles of my posts to HN, so I will probably be dissuaded from submitting content in the future.

It's unfortunate that I seem to remember this fact every time I watch porn on said network. :-s

Was this a genuinely dumb oversight on the student's part? Harvard WiFi requires students to log in with unique IDs to gain access (http://www.fas-it.fas.harvard.edu/node/189), so Harvard can monitor and log all of your traffic.

Does this mean Harvard could in theory have this transmission recorded as it goes in to the TOR network? Would something as simple as going across the street to Panera Bread have thwarted this kind of investigation?

I'm really curious if the flaw in this kid's plan was that obvious.

I got a C and two B- in college. Currently in grad school at Harvard. One or two bad grades shouldn't hold you back. Given the recent grade inflation scandal (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/3/grade-inflation-...), it seems like even very poor work at Harvard is graded at C or better (this was certainly the case for my C; I probably deserved to fail).

The Harvard (non-guest) network is secure - you must connect to it using your Harvard web ID login information. Harvard can then uniquely identify all of your traffic. (http://www.fas-it.fas.harvard.edu/node/189)

I guess I should have written a paragraph's worth of inane blog spam to get my submission title used? I was trying to make this exact point in my original title. The title my submission was assigned is not the real title of the PDF either... seems very arbitrary.

Would private research have ever discovered the structure of DNA? And why? How do you defend this R&D project to your board of directors in the early 1950's? What does the ROI calculation look like?

Companies are good at research when there is a payoff in sight. What about the fields with no quick return? Or the fields that don't yet exist?

Technology doesn't inherently reduce the number of quality jobs, but in very recent history it appears to have had this effect. From the MIT Technology Review:

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/426436/tectonic-shift...

Why the app store hate? My work computer needed an OS re-install recently (learned to be careful with sudo) and then they bought me a new computer shortly after. The app store made it easy to re-install a bunch of my apps like Evernote, Aperture, iWork, etc., and the app store keeps these constantly upgraded. Then I had to go through and download a bunch of other non-app-store apps (MS Office, ImageJ, Matlab, Adobe suite, Canopy, etc.), and these apps are always popping up with their own custom update software to remind me to update them when I open them.

I think it would be great if I could just use the app store to keep track of all my software, easily install and uninstall it on different machines, and keep it updated in the background.

The Lewis lab's main contribution here is the scale and precision of 3D printing. These batteries are not immediately useful (although there are sensors and other electronics that are an order of magnitude smaller than the batteries that power them, and in the future micro-scale batteries could overall reduce the size of these electronics). They are not powerful or robust, but they are precisely assembled. This type of 3D printing will enable future miniaturization of electronics and be especially useful at the interface of electronics and biology. For instance, current 3D printers have resolution several orders of magnitude above the scale of features in tissues. Increasing the resolution of 3D printing enables tissue engineering at a scale similar to actual biological features. Batteries are just a flashy and potentially useful application of this fundamental printing technology.

In what way?

You say it as a joke but I've been interviewing web and software developers for the past couple days to develop new tools to interact with data generated by a method our group has developed that combines next generation RNA sequencing with fluorescent in situ hybridization. Cancer biology is an obvious application. So yes, developers can help cure cancer. They don't understand the biology - that's my job. But I, and many other scientists, don't understand software/web development, so we rely on others to create the tools that enable our work. Not only are these efforts resistant to others coming in and stealing the idea, they can enrich the developers (financially), and they enrich society.

Sorry for being so nasty above, but there's a lot of wasted talent in silicon valley developing technology that allows teenagers to post dick pics while still spouting pious claims of social benefit. The arguments resemble the business plans... we do good like we make money, because people use us, right?

I have to log in to get an example? No thanks.

Go create something that enriches society, rather then whining when someone steals your obvious app that exploits humanity's most despicable traits.

It's poetic justice that one of our most vile, vapid celebrities has stolen your vile, vapid idea.

The NIH should require statistics training in the same way the require ethics training for all life sciences graduate students.

Misleading title linked to crap pseudoscience article.

"World renowned heart surgeon" - Hasn't had a medical license since 2008, and had 5 regulatory actions taken against him between 2000 and 2008 while working in Arizona (nowhere to be seen on the U.S. news ranking of top hospitals for heart surgery). Regulatory actions reflect poor practice of medicine.

"what really causes heart disease" - In his opinion. Some, but not all, of which has any relation to published scientific findings.

In addition, it looks like he has had financial and legal troubles and primarily hypes his views to sell products (books, supplements), like any huckster. You can tell when a scientist or doctor holds serious, well-founded views because s/he usually doesn't try to make a buck selling trinkets and scams. Source: http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/lundell.html

Fantastic article - worth the read. This is why I am astonished about the talk of Microsoft selling Xbox. Live is clearly a distinguishing feature and I look forward to seeing what is more important to sales - the Xbox Live ecosystem or the PS4 graphics quality. Since I am considering buying an Xbox just for the cable box replacement features, I suspect Live will win out.

Venter deserves credit, but for what?

- Shotgun sequencing was invented by Sanger, not Venter.

- Venter used capillary sequencing, like the Human Genome Project (HGP), which is a dead-end technology surpassed by next-generation sequencing and someday single-molecule sequencing. Venter has nothing to do with these technologies.

- Venter's draft genome relied heavily on publicly available data that was generated by the HGP. It's clear (to me) that his draft was probably unpublishable without this additional data.

So really, I think Venter gets a lot of credit he probably doesn't deserve. He really deserves credit for disrupting the HGP. George Church long advocated for technology development rather than the laborious method HGP chose to pursue (http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/HGP.html), but Venter's independent project helped ensure that the HGP would be the first and last human genome sequenced as a grand initiative. Venter's public threat forced the HGP to wrap up and abandon capillary & tiling approaches. Within the decade, we had three "next-generation" sequencing technologies available that could give us genomes in a few weeks at a fraction of the price. Of course, by that time Venter was already engaged in his next project.

They can still buy private ammunition. I think you're correct that a personal military ammunition stock is no longer mandated by the state.