Income Inequality in America Explained

Income inequality explained in such a way you'll never accuse America of becoming a socialist state again. http://mashable.com/2013/03/02/wealth-inequality

Zero

0 is the integer immediately preceding 1. Zero is an even number,[26] because it is divisible by 2. 0 is neither positive nor negative. By most definitions[27] 0 is a natural number, and then the only natural number not to be positive. Zero is a number which quantifies a count or an amount of null size. In most cultures, 0 was identified before the idea of negative things (quantities) that go lower than zero was accepted. The value, or number, zero is not the same as the digit zero, used in numeral systems using positional notation. Successive positions of digits have higher weights, so inside a numeral the digit zero is used to skip a position and give appropriate weights to the preceding and following digits. A zero digit is not always necessary in a positional number system, for example, in the number 02. In some instances, a leading zero may be used to distinguish a number.

Chasing the Higgs Boson NYT 3/5/13

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-the-higgs-boson-how-2-teams-of-rivals-at-CERN-searched-for-physics-most-elusive-particle.html?view=introduction At the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two armies of scientists struggled to close in on physics' most elusive particle

How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?

According to the Publication Research Bureau (http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth?aspx )107 billion people haved on Earth since 50,000 BC and just over 7 billion, 7% currently roam the planet. Of all who have lived, about 60% have been Asian.

What's the Difference Between Celiac Disease and Gluten Sensitivity

Celiac Disease and Gluten Sensitivity: An Interview With Medical Experts Posted: 09/13/2012 8:11 am http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sz-berg/celiac-disease_b_1770781.html In honor of National Celiac Disease Awareness Day and to kick off my William Edwards book series, a new series of novels for kids ages 8-12 years in which the main character, William Edwards, has celiac and a food allergy, I'm writing a series of posts about celiac, gluten sensitivity and food allergies, including interviews with actress Jennifer Esposito (Crash) , musician Allie Moss (Corner), and Disney's Kenton Duty. What follows are email interviews with both Alessio Fasano, M.D., medical director of the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research, and Daniel Leffler, M.D., director of clinical research, The Celiac Center at BIDMC. Both are NFCA scientific/medical advisory board members. S.Z. Berg: What is the difference between gluten sensitivity and celiac disease? Is it a spectrum? Can you have gluten sensitivity and not have the gene for celiac? Dr. Alessio Fasano: Think of gluten ingestion on a spectrum. At one end, you have people with celiac disease. This autoimmune disorder triggered by gluten causes intestinal damage leading to malabsorption of nutrients, which results in a wide variety of symptoms and potential complications. It can affect the gastrointestinal system, the central nervous system, and other areas of the body. It can affect anyone at any age and is treatable through the implementation of a strict gluten-free diet for life. People with celiac disease can't tolerate one "crumb" of gluten in their diet. At the other end are the lucky folks who can consume all the pasta, bread and beer they want with no ill effects whatsoever. In the middle, we have this murky area of gluten reactions, including gluten sensitivity. This is where we are looking for answers about how to best diagnose and treat this recently-identified group of gluten-sensitive individuals. Although symptoms of gluten sensitivity (particularly gastrointestinal) are often similar to those of celiac disease, the overall clinical picture is less severe. Recent research at the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research shows that gluten sensitivity is a different clinical entity. It doesn't seem to result in the intestinal inflammation that leads to a flattening of the villi of the small intestine that characterizes celiac disease. The development of tissue transglutaminase (tTG) autoantibodies, used to diagnose celiac disease, is not present in gluten sensitivity. A different immune mechanism, the innate immune response, comes into play in reactions of gluten sensitivity, as opposed to the long-term adaptive immune response that arises in celiac disease. We use the term gluten sensitivity when celiac disease, wheat allergy, and other clinically-overlapping diseases (Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases and Helicobacter pylori infection) have been ruled out. Symptoms in gluten sensitivity are triggered by gluten exposure and alleviated by gluten withdrawal. In gluten sensitivity, there is often a prevalence of extraintestinal instead of gastrointestinal symptoms, including behavioral changes, skin rash, bone or joint pain, muscle cramps, leg numbness, weight loss, "foggy mind," and fatigue. Typical gastrointestinal symptoms include abdominal bloating and gas. Typically, the diagnosis is made by exclusion, and an elimination diet and "open challenge" -- we carefully reintroduce foods with gluten -- are most often used to evaluate whether the patient's health improves with the elimination or reduction of gluten from the diet. Through clinical data from the Center for Celiac Research, we estimate that approximately six percent of the U.S. population, or 18 million people, suffers from gluten sensitivity. This group reacts with some of the same symptoms as people with celiac disease, but gluten-sensitive individuals typically test negative for celiac disease in diagnostic blood tests and show no signs of the damage to the small intestine that defines celiac disease. Contrary to celiac patients who almost invariably (the percentage is close to 100 percent) express the HLA DQ2 and/or DQ8 genes, only 50 percent of subjects with gluten sensitivity are positive for these genes (compared to approximately 35-40 percent of the general population). Dr. Daniel Leffler: Celiac disease is an immune-mediated disease triggered by gluten, which results in significant inflammation and damage to the small intestine as well as formation of antibodies, which can attack tissues in your body. Gluten sensitivity is a disorder where people have symptoms related to gluten exposure that may be indistinguishable from celiac disease but does not damage the intestine or result in abnormal antibody production. Whether gluten sensitivity is more related to celiac disease or irritable bowel syndrome is unclear, though most investigators currently favor the latter. One reason for this is that it is clear that you can have gluten sensitivity without the gene for celiac disease, while it is very rare for people with celiac disease not to carry these genes.

Same Genetic Basis Found in 5 Types of Mental Disorders

By GINA KOLATA Published: February 28, 2013 The psychiatric illnesses seem very different — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet they share several genetic glitches that can nudge the brain along a path to mental illness, researchers report. Which disease, if any, develops is thought to depend on other genetic or environmental factors. Enlarge This Image Mark Ostow for The New York Times Steven McCarroll, of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., noted the significance of the study. Health Guides: Autism | Bipolar Disorder | Schizophrenia | ADHD Their study, published online Wednesday in the Lancet, was based on an examination of genetic data from more than 60,000 people worldwide. Its authors say it is the largest genetic study yet of psychiatric disorders. The findings strengthen an emerging view of mental illness that aims to make diagnoses based on the genetic aberrations underlying diseases instead of on the disease symptoms. Two of the aberrations discovered in the new study were in genes used in a major signaling system in the brain, giving clues to processes that might go awry and suggestions of how to treat the diseases. “What we identified here is probably just the tip of an iceberg,” said Dr. Jordan Smoller, lead author of the paper and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “As these studies grow we expect to find additional genes that might overlap.” The new study does not mean that the genetics of psychiatric disorders are simple. Researchers say there seem to be hundreds of genes involved and the gene variations discovered in the new study confer only a small risk of psychiatric disease. Steven McCarroll, director of genetics for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., said it was significant that the researchers had found common genetic factors that pointed to a specific signaling system. “It is very important that these were not just random hits on the dartboard of the genome,” said Dr. McCarroll, who was not involved in the new study. The work began in 2007 when a large group of researchers began investigating genetic data generated by studies in 19 countries and including 33,332 people with psychiatric illnesses and 27,888 people free of the illnesses for comparison. The researchers studied scans of people’s DNA, looking for variations in any of several million places along the long stretch of genetic material containing three billion DNA letters. The question: Did people with psychiatric illnesses tend to have a distinctive DNA pattern in any of those locations? Researchers had already seen some clues of overlapping genetic effects in identical twins. One twin might have schizophrenia while the other had bipolar disorder. About six years ago, around the time the new study began, researchers had examined the genes of a few rare families in which psychiatric disorders seemed especially prevalent. They found a few unusual disruptions of chromosomes that were linked to psychiatric illnesses. But what surprised them was that while one person with the aberration might get one disorder, a relative with the same mutation got a different one. Jonathan Sebat, chief of the Beyster Center for Molecular Genomics of Neuropsychiatric Diseases at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the discoverers of this effect, said that work on these rare genetic aberrations had opened his eyes. “Two different diagnoses can have the same genetic risk factor,” he said. In fact, the new paper reports, distinguishing psychiatric diseases by their symptoms has long been difficult. Autism, for example, was once called childhood schizophrenia. It was not until the 1970s that autism was distinguished as a separate disorder. But Dr. Sebat, who did not work on the new study, said that until now it was not clear whether the rare families he and others had studied were an exception or whether they were pointing to a rule about multiple disorders arising from a single genetic glitch. “No one had systematically looked at the common variations,” in DNA, he said. “We didn’t know if this was particularly true for rare mutations or if it would be true for all genetic risk.” The new study, he said, “shows all genetic risk is of this nature.” The new study found four DNA regions that conferred a small risk of psychiatric disorders. For two of them, it is not clear what genes are involved or what they do, Dr. Smoller said. The other two, though, involve genes that are part of calcium channels, which are used when neurons send signals in the brain. “The calcium channel findings suggest that perhaps — and this is a big if — treatments to affect calcium channel functioning might have effects across a range of disorders,” Dr. Smoller said. There are drugs on the market that block calcium channels — they are used to treat high blood pressure — and researchers had already postulated that they might be useful for bipolar disorder even before the current findings. One investigator, Dr. Roy Perlis of Massachusetts General Hospital, just completed a small study of a calcium channel blocker in 10 people with bipolar disorder and is about to expand it to a large randomized clinical trial. He also wants to study the drug in people with schizophrenia, in light of the new findings. He cautions, though, that people should not rush out to take a calcium channel blocker on their own. “We need to be sure it is safe and we need to be sure it works,” Dr. Perlis said.