Posts by A

Boffins finger reason for non-aligned cows

PNAS

I'm shocked that you missed the fact that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is abbreviated to PNAS. It's caused more than one female scientist to turn red after realizing what they've just said.

Fiorina threatens to get in McCain's antique cabinet

Spelling Mistake

"Carly Fiorina would now like to lend her insight gained about running large organizations and alienating as many people as possible to the White House."

Should read:

"Carly Fiorina would now like to lend her insight gained about ruining large organizations and alienating as many people as possible to the White House."

Stem cell researchers claim victory in battle with Church

@Dan and Dominic Kua and AC

Dan - BSE has nothing to do with organophosphates, they can cause brain damage and have in some humans, usually due to their use in sheep dip, but this is not transmitted and certainly not by eating

Dominic - he's refering to the use of growth hormone from infected animals, though there is little/no evidence suggesting that this led to the emergence of vCJD. However the use of human growth human taken from cadavers that had CJD has been shown to have caused CJD in people who used it. This happened at very low levels however and you were more likely to get HIV that CJD from human growth hormone.

AC who Dominic responded to - human growth hormone has been presented as a "wonder drug" though this was largely due to misinterpretation of one paper, as I've said the deaths its use cause were in no way cross-species and as there have only been 26 reported I'm not sure that qualifies as many. The deaths had nothing to do with the growth hormone itself just with not purifying it well enough. Would you stop the use of any drug that's ever killed anyone regardless of how many lives it might save? If so I can't imagine there's anything in your medicine cabinet.

3rd Space FPS gaming vest

PC only

Being PC only isn't going to reduce the possible buyers by much. The only people who would have bought it anyway are rich idiots and gaming fanatics. I think you'll find that even those among those groups who have a mac also have a pc; or at the very least dual boot, the state of mac gaming being what it is.

Leaked email reveals civil service laptop rules

From an Anon-y-mouse MRC employee

The guidelines apply to all removable media.

This being the MRC (Medical Research Council) this is about personal info collected about people in the course of research so what must be encrypted is the database that connects details of which sample (blood, tissue etc.) belongs to which patient and any details we hold about that patient.

This kind of information is never on file without the people concerned knowing because we only got it by asking them.

You can take your laptop from the office if either it has none of this type of information on it or this information is encrypted. Similarly for mobiles.

I work at an MRC unit but don't have any of this type of information anyway so this doesn't even affect me. Most people at most MRC units will probably be mostly unaffected. We don't keep large databases of peoples information. We keep small ones for specific research projects.