How Los Angeles Regulates Air Pollution
Los Angeles is not really a city of skyscrapers. All around those skyscrapers is a flat expanse of one- and two-story buildings. This low-density urban development means you have to drive to get around in LA. Los Angeles’ sprawl is considered a classic case of failed urban planning.Los Angeles’ sprawl is considered a classic case of failed urban planning. Its public transportation has not been developed or utilized to its fullest potential. This has caused an inevitable increase in car o...
notesDespite increased traffic.
Study of 100 Billion Livestock Animals Finds No Harm from...
Globally, food-producing animals consume 70 to 90% of genetically engineered (GE) crop biomass. This review briefly summarizes the scientific literature on performance and health of animals consuming feed containing GE ingredients and composition of products derived from them. It also discusses the field experience of feeding GE feed sources to commercial livestock populations and summarizes the suppliers of GE and non-GE animal feed in global trade. Numerous experimental studies have consist...
1 The Problem of Inferring Anything about the Star Trek Uni...
The second problem has more to do with using Starfleet as the lens through which we draw conclusions about Federation society. If I were to show some alien society a documentary about the United States, set primarily on a US aircraft carrier, with ~90% of the situations and characters taking place in a military context, my alien viewers would draw some very interesting inferences about the US (or, more broadly, all of human society). They'd think we were a rigidly hierarchical society. They'd... notes The Law of Large Numbers
The game is called who’s the best at flipping coins. It’s pretty simple. You flip a bunch of coins and whoever gets the most heads wins. To make this a little more interesting, though, not everybody has the same number of coins. Some people—Team Small—have only ten coins, while the members of Team Big have a hundred each.
If we score by absolute number of heads, one thing’s for almost sure—the winner of this game is going to come from Team Big. The typical Big player is going to ... notes The Pareto Distribution
The Pareto distribution shows up in a remarkably wide array of complex systems. Together, “the” and “of” account for 10 percent of all words used in English. The most volatile day in the history of a stock market will typically be twice as volatile as that of the second-most volatile and ten times the tenth-most. Tag frequency on Flickr photos obeys a Pareto distribution, as does the magnitude of earthquakes, the popularity of books, the size of asteroids, and the social connectedness...Clay Shirky on what is also known as the "long-tail effect" or "90% of everything is crap" effect.
The answer lies in the cancer
Most cancers are the result of "immortal" cells that have ways of evading this programmed destruction of telomere. Cancer cells use every trick in the book to gain immortality. One of their cleverer maneuvers is to keep the little caps, called telomeres, at the end of their chromosomes long. As a normal cell divides, its telomeres gradually erode, eventually becoming so short and dysfunctional that the cell is marked for death. As harsh as this may sound, it's exactly what should happen; elim...Man has always longed to live forever. He has continually pushed the frontiers of science in his attempt to reach this goal.Immortality is the ultimate quest for redemption in humanity. Its universal application transcends time, space, and culture appearing in stories from the Epic of Gilgamesh composed some 4000 plus years ago, to novels of the twenty first century
If you are in good health,you can live to 120 years but not much longer,because at age 120 you reach the hayflick limit -maximum times a cell can divide and make new cells.
Telomere, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration, is thought to be the "clock of aging" contained within the human body. Many scientists believe that the limit on lifespan and decline in health is imposed by the gradual shortening of our telomeres that occurs with every cell division. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that a human cell that does not undergo telomere shortening will divide indefinitely and is, by all available measurements, immortal.
Now researchers have discovered the first compound that activates telomerase – an enzyme that lengthens telomeres – in the human body, potentially opening the door to arresting or even reversing the aging process. Human cells can keep living and dividing indefinitely when telomerase is continually present; i.e. the cells become immortal
A natural product derived nutraceutical known as TA-65, was shown to lengthen the shortest telomeres in humans, potentially extending human lifespan and healthspan. Telomerase activation is thought to be a keystone of future regenerative medicine and a necessary condition for clinical immortality. Although TA-65 is probably too weak to completely arrest the aging process, it is the first telomerase activator recognized as safe for human use.
Sturgeon's Law
I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.[1] Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is... notes90% of everything is crap, be it film, literature, music, etc.
