“The notion that scientists will make a more valuable contribution to the economic and social wellbeing of the world if their research is closely directed by politicians is the most astonishing piece of nonsense I have had the misfortune to come across in a long time.” -Brian Cox, quoted in Times Online
I didn’t eat again on the way back from the Netherlands (-6hrs), arrived at 5PM and broke my fast at 7AM.
That day was rough but the following days were fine, I think it worked. I’ll be doing that on my next jetlag-risk trip, though I’ll try to schedule my arrivals for early morning from now on. Going the night without food didn’t make my sleep terribly comfortable, I’d prefer to get that over with on the plane.
About 10%, based on mouse Ensembl 48.
Someone was wondering about this in a meeting. The Ensembl perl API makes these types of questions very easy to answer.
A recent science paper showed that mice will match their circadian rhythms to food availability.
From the paper:
“Our data indicate that there is an inducible clock in the DMH that can override the SCN and drive circadian rhythms when the animal is faced with limited food availability. Thus, under restricted feeding conditions, the DMH clock can assume an executive role in the temporal regulation of behavioral state. For a small mammal, finding food on a daily basis is a critical mission. Even a few days of starvation, a common threat in natural environments, may result in death. Hence, it is adaptive for animals to have a secondary “master clock” that can allow the animal to switch its behavioral patterns rapidly after a period of starvation to maximize the opportunity of finding food sources at the same time on following days.”
The researchers speculate that this may work for humans as well and could be a cure for jetlag.
I’m in Rotterdam for a conference this week. Normally a trip to Europe leaves me rather badly jetlagged so I tried fasting for 16 hours before and during the flight, then eating breakfast at 7:30 AM on arrival in Heathrow.
To my surprise, it appears to have worked. I’m usually a zombie the first day after arrival, but I slept well, woke up at 6:30 AM local time without difficulty and feel quite normal. I’ll see how the next couple of days are but so far I’m impressed. It may be psychosomatic, but it works for me: I’m handling a +6 hour time shift without any problems.
I’m sure there will be proper controlled experiments to see if this works on humans. Even if it doesn’t (or doesn’t always work) it’s possible the mechanisms they’ve identified can be targeted by some sort of reset drug that you’d take when you want your circadian clock restarted. People would pay an awful lot for a pill that cures jetlag.
Your Results May Vary, but it’s worth a try if you can make it 16 hours without eating. I’m going to try it again on the way home to see if it works again for a time shift in the opposite direction.
23andMe has gotten quite a bit of press as “personalized medicine” has become a hot topic. The press coverage is surprisingly uninformative. Most coverage amounts to a rewording of the 23andMe press releases.
The recent New Scientist article “How the MySpace mindset can boost medical science” is a little bit more enlightening:
“In a pilot project, personal genomics firm 23andMe, based in Mountain View, California, is building a site for people with Parkinson’s disease. Using a grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) in New York, the company will scan the genomes of up to 150 people with Parkinson’s for genetic variants associated with susceptibility to the disease. The patients will also be asked about their symptoms, medication and factors such as exposure to pesticides and use of alcohol and tobacco via online questionnaires developed by the Parkinson’s Institute in Sunnyvale, California. These patients have previously been examined in person on behalf of the institute, so by comparing the two forms of assessment, the study hopes to discover whether clinical information gained from a web-based patient community can provide a reliable means of investigating the genetic and environmental factors that can trigger Parkinson’s“
This is much more interesting. It looks like they’re building a platform for genetic disease investigation handling patient, data, and sample management issue. That’s getting much closer to a viable business model and seems to be a useful service. I expect that the resultant data is property of 23andme, unfortunately.
Notably, this makes relatively large scale studies (or at least the data required for them) accessible at relatively low cost. I can imagine consortia of patients with a disease forming in order to aggregate enough data for a study to be done. Too bad the data won’t be freely available.
Via Amazon recommendations:
Bio-Inspired Credit Risk Analysis: Computational Intelligence with Support Vector Machines
“…this book tries to integrate recent emerging support vector machines and other computational intelligence techniques that replicate the principles of bio-inspired information processing to create some innovative methodologies for credit risk analysis and to provide decision support information for interested parties.”
Sounds like an interesting read: I’ll put it on my list. Maybe it’ll show up in the university library.
Some quick googling shows that they’ve all published in the field of economics, didn’t find any biology publications.
Via Bruce Sterling, a nice (and frightening) paper on building security vulnerabilities right into hardware:
http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/
Of course this is only really an issue if you’ve outsourced much of your military and most of your civilian supply chain to potentially hostile countries. Which you’d have to be pretty silly to do, no matter how much money it saves.
Oh, wait…
I’m getting quite a bit of spam lately (i.e. “Reliable tools for detecting histone acetylation and deacetylation” ) which appears to be based on various publications with my name on them. Only one of the publications has my email address in Medline. I’m guessing that they’re cross-referencing from that one to get my email address: or possibly searching online, I have a unique name as far as I know.
It’s focused spam but spam nonetheless. Only slightly less annoying than regular spam.
http://magic.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/wp-uploads/hamming.pdf
A distinguished scientist talks about a career in science with some useful advice. I particularly like the tone, he sounds like a combination of Vonnegut and Feynman.
There’s a great bit in the Q&A section at the end on the origins of Unix:
Hamming: First let me respond to Alan Chynoweth about computing. I had computing in research and for 10 years I kept telling my management, ‘‘Get that !&@#% machine out of research. We are being forced to run problems all the time. We can’t do research because were too busy operating and running the computing machines.’’ Finally the message got through. They were going to move computing out of research to someplace else. I was persona non grata to say the least and I was surprised that people didn’t kick my shins because everybody was having their toy taken away from them. I went in to Ed David’s office and said, ‘‘Look Ed, you’ve got to give your researchers a machine. If you give them a great big machine, we’ll be back in the same trouble we were before, so busy keeping it going we can’t think. Give them the smallest machine you can because they are very able people. They will learn how to do things on a small machine instead of mass computing.’’ As far as I’m concerned, that’s how UNIX arose. We gave them a moderately small machine and they decided to make it do great things. They had to come up with a system to do it on. It is called UNIX!
A. G. Chynoweth: I just have to pick up on that one. In our present environment, Dick, while we wrestle with some of the red tape attributed to, or required by, the regulators, there is one quote that one exasperated AVP came up with and I’ve used it over and over again. He growled that, ‘‘UNIX was never a deliverable!’’
I recently sat through a presentation by a company about some preliminary work that they’re doing on text mining. It was much more sales and corporate oriented, so much so that I had a few flashbacks to my prior life working for various corporations. I’d forgotten how company people tend to be ‘on‘ and always selling their product. Given the context was a room full of scientists (and support staff), the approach was embarrassingly inappropriate.
So in that spirit, here are some notes for corporate types when talking to scientists:
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