One of the all-cause mortality reductions of vitamin D may stem from the fact that it is synthesized from a cholesterol precursor, thus removing it from the bloodstream. Supplementing would not have this benefit.
This hypothesis is testable by following a group of sunlight-synthesized vitamin D patients and comparing them against a group which receives less sunlight exposure and supplements the difference.
There are two types of traits which people refer to as “intelligence”, and two regions of the brain with their storage infrastructure: there’s the ability to draw new insights from disparate data, mediated by inductive long-term retrieval (hippocampus) and there’s the ability to draw formal and rapid mathematical/logical conclusions from existing theorems, mediated by working memory (anterior cingulate cortex).
One treatment which would probably be fairly effective to counteract an infection with an antibiotic-resistant bacterium which causes symptoms by secreting a toxin (such as pathogenic E. Coli which releases a Shiga toxin) is to induce an immune response (via immunoglobulin) against the toxin rather than the bacterium for the duration of the traditional symptomatic period. This should alleviate the symptoms as long as treatment is followed, and when the treatment ends the underlying infection will have been fought off by the immune system. Thus patients would be technically infected (and infectious) but would not exhibit symptoms caused by the toxin.
Here’s a study which demonstrates that it is possible to induce an immune response against the Shiga toxin in mice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC321607/
I’ve been thinking of ways to produce long-term localized immunosuppression recently in order to help people with autoimmune diseases. What I’ve dreamed up this time is a device similar to a radioactive “seed” used for prostate cancer, but delivering an inhibitor of cellular signaling (take your pick of interleukins) in direct response to a high concentration of inflammatory cytokines. By carefully controlling the dose in response to environmental conditions, it should be possible to produce a strong localized immunosuppressive response without too much of the drug entering systemic circulation.
Corticosteroids aren’t an option – one challenge is to find something that can be used long-term with few side effects.
The traditionally held restrictions of malloc()-allocated objects are “no constructor calls” and “no destructor calls”. However, there is an additional restriction: no virtual functions or polymorphism. If you wish to implement polymorphism on the Arduino and plan to use dynamic memory, you must declare operators new and delete (in terms of malloc() and free()) before you can use polymorphism. Once declared, these operators acquire the “magic” they are known for.
Attempting to call a virtual function on a malloc()-allocated object on the Arduino will not crash in an obvious way. It will merely return a bogus result which appears to come from some random spot in memory (maybe where the function points).
Of course, if you’re developing for a normal platform and not a microcontroller, just use the native new and delete and be done with it.
Images have texture. Sentences have texture too. Use the keyblock approach to dynamically build n-grams. ‘Nuff said.
It is possible to define a mapping between the bits in a digital key and the shape of a physical key. Further, it is possible to physically etch a digital key onto a physical one below the resolution at which said data could be easily copied. Consequently, it is possible to design an intelligent lock which possesses a public key and which generates a cryptographic challenge, which is then decrypted using the private (physical) key. A key which could physically open the lock but which does not possess the appropriate private key could trigger an alarm.
Certainly digital keys exist, but this key would require no power source. The lock, on the other hand, would require both power and enough logic to implement the PKI approach of choice. Nevertheless, this strikes me as a practical approach for car or office locks.
Videos and music become popular because people like to minimize their risk of wasting time listening to or watching something unenjoyable. Actually, I suspect something similar lies at the heart of popularity in any context.
Here’s my hypothesis: Similar to illness behavior, it prevents you from hunting when conditions are unfavorable to you. Dreams allow simulations of threatening events instead. Fasting long enough overrides the clock (it does; you can change your circadian rhythm by hours at a time by selectively fasting); eventually the need for energy outweighs the risk of hunting at night.
This could potentially be very sensitive in measuring humidity between a remote source and the current location… depending on the frequency, anyway.