Unfortunately there's a lot of truth in that statement, especially in the case of rare disease. It's really difficult to convince a company to spend billions to develop a treatment that will only cure 1 in 100,000 people without letting them charge an arm and a leg, and giving them a very long exclusivity deal so they can continue to charge high prices. So much of that cost to develop is due to the dozens of other failed drugs and formulations they tried on their way to success.
I don't have a solution for the problem, and I'm always a little suspicious of anyone who claims it's easy to solve. I think the UK has a decent idea, the NHS basically decides if the cost of a drug will be covered by insurance by comparing the expected benefit and the current cost. If the ratio is too skewed, they refuse to cover the medication. In theory, this should be an incentive for a company to charge less. In practice, it leads to some companies choosing not to market in the UK.
Here's a bit of hope for you, scientists have figured out how to trick the body into producing any protein or antibody they want, through technology like gene therapy and mRNA vaccines. We're about to cure a lot of diseases that used to be 100% fatal. Diseases that kill kids and adults alike.
Most things seem to be getting worse these days, but at least we're making progress in other areas.
Unironically, I had to delete this game from my phone because I wasn't getting work done. This game slaps.
Throwing in my $0.02, a correlation study is technically an option, where you look at differences as microplastics increase in concentration. But. my instinct is you would see some really unfortunate covariance - that is, another variable that increases (or decreases) at the same time as microplastics and is known to impact your variable of interest, e.g. socioeconomic status.
It's baffling to me LaRose got away with this. Luckily, every street corner has a pair of signs - either Trump/Vote no OR Harris/Vote yes. Makes it easy to remember.
Jfc just spent 15 minutes trying to cancel a newspaper subscription this morning. Shame I couldn't wait six months to do so.
For those interested in more, I found this People Make Games video to be super interesting. https://youtu.be/lYaDXZ2MI-k?si=pxrioKZq_S7ka9il
I got into an interesting discussion at work about an MRI sequence I've never used before. For context, I did a bunch of brain imaging in grad school, and now at work I'm encountering things that aren't the brain. Shocking.
The technique in question is trying to look at the amount of cartilage in a joint. I assumed the best way to identify potential problems with the MRI is to use a phantom like this one: https://www.truephantom.com/product/adult-knee/. We did this in grad school, but our phantom was basically an expensive jug of fancy water, which, apparently, looks enough like a brain to calibrate the machine.
It turns out the hospital just takes a random resident, puts them in the MRI, and takes MRIs of their joints. I'm assuming it's because the hospital doesn't want to pay $10k for a fancy fake knee.
So now I'm curious, if the radiologists and radiology-adjacent folks are out there, how many different phantoms do your teams own?
Answers to questions I didn't know I had, thank you! I have to read technical documents with these designations all the time, so this was helpful.
It also helps me understand why the lab techs are frustrated when they don't have certain vials on site, I assumed they were all basically the same and the colored tops just helped the team stay organized.
Ohioan here. You're not wrong. Sorry about JD Vance.
For me and mine, it's carrots. Do you know how difficult it is to find carrot-free items? Impossible.
Devastating loss for the science community. I used this database in my PhD, and didn't expect it to shut down ever.
Agreed, seems like a no-brainer. Typically this stuff is handled at an institutional level, with bad professors losing/ failing to achieve tenure. But some results have much bigger implications than just "Uh oh, I cited that paper and it was a bad one." Often, entire clinical pipelines are developed off of bad research, which wastes millions of dollars.
See also, the recent scandals in Alzheimer's research. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
Good riddance, Tom Bombadil. I don't care how merry a fellow he was, those were my least favorite chapters of Fellowship.
To be fair, my job involves very sensitive medical data. We've seen entire businesses shut down because of data breaches.
I'm 100% so far at my job, but we had one test that tricked somewhere around 30% of employees. They spoofed everyone's supervisor and made it look like an urgent Teams message was pending.
Usually, if you get phished you lose your bonus. They made an exception that one time.
In grad school I worked with MRI data (hence the username). I had to upload ~500GB to our supercomputing cluster. Somewhere around 100,000 MRI images, and wrote 20 or so different machine learning algorithms to process them. All said and done, I ended up with about 2.5TB on the supercomputer. About 500MB ended up being useful and made it into my thesis.
Don't stay in school, kids.
I've never seen anything like this - cryptic board games, akin to cryptic crosswords. Anyone else know of games in a similar vein or genre?
There are options to buy premium currency, but even after the massive update last week you can still play for free and have a blast.
Outer Wilds was the best game I played on PS4. I strongly recommend experiencing it for yourself.
I would say the space ship/0g flight is maybe 30% of the gameplay, and you don't need to be really excellent at it, thankfully.