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Dear Alumni,
I am delighted to announce the release of the first-ever Harvard University Department of Physics newsletter.
Whether you are near or far, we hope that this publication virtually brings you back to campus….
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https://www.physics.harvard.edu/uploads/files/Newsletter_Fall_2014.pdf
Sliding #Oil & Gas Prices
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/business/economy/lower-oil-prices-give-a-lift-to-the-american-economy.html US spends $1B/day on gas, 1.4K gal/yr/person; $3.23/gal 11/13 price, falling to $2.89 now
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With Americans spending roughly $1 billion a day on gasoline, Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, estimates that consumers will save roughly $8.4 billion in November and December, compared with the last two months of 2013, based on an average price for regular gasoline of about $2.89 a gallon as opposed to $3.23 last November and $3.26 last December.
The typical American household buys 1,200 gallons annually, so if prices fall to the level Mr. Kloza predicts and stay there, that adds up to a yearly savings per household of at least $400. A 15 percent drop in the cost of home heating oil since last winter should also be helpful, especially as cold weather arrives in the Northeast.
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Why So Few Blockbuster #Drugs Invented Today? (Eroom’s law) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/why-are-there-so-few-new-drugs-invented-today.html Short answer: use of genomics v traditional pharmacology
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“If you read them now, the claims made for genomics in the 1990s sound
a bit like predictions made in the 1950s for flying cars and
anti-gravity devices,” Jack Scannell, an industry analyst, told me.
But rather than speeding drug development, genomics may have slowed it
down. So far it has produced fewer returns on greater investments.
Scannell and Brian Warrington, who worked for 40 years inventing drugs
for pharmaceutical companies, published a grim paper in 2012 that
showed the plummeting efficiency of the pharmaceutical industry. They
found that for every billion dollars spent on research and development
since 1950, the number of new drugs approved has fallen by half
roughly every nine years, meaning a total decline by a factor of 80.
They called this Eroom’s Law, because it resembled an inversion of
Moore’s Law (the observation, first made by the Intel co-founder
Gorden E. Moore in 1965, that the number of transistors in an
integrated circuit doubles approximately about every two years).
That’s not to say that target-based drug discovery, informed by
genomics, hasn’t had its share of spectacular successes. Gleevec, used
since 2001 to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (C.M.L.) and a
variety of other cancers, is often pointed to as one of the great
gene-to-medicine success stories. Its design followed logically from
the identification of an abnormal protein caused by a genetic glitch
found in almost every cancer cell of patients with C.M.L.
Many of the drugs developed through target-based discovery, however,
work for only single-mutation diseases affecting a tiny number of
people. Seventy percent of new drugs approved by the F.D.A. last year
were so-called specialty drugs used by no more than 1 percent of the
population. The drug Kalydeco, for instance, was approved in 2012 for
people with a particular genetic mutation that causes cystic fibrosis.
But only about 1,200 people in the United States have the mutation it
corrects.
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http://appadvice.com/appguides/show/space-war
the spirit of Bushnell
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If you want to play the original, look no further than the Atari Classic app. The graphics, sound, and retro experience are all here. Currently the control mechanism is not the most intuitive thing, but if you can get good at the controls this is a fantastic notable option. The app is free to download and included one game, Mission Control. You’ll need to purchase each of the other titles after that. The other games, such as Space War, will be $.99 apiece; though of course there are package deals you can purchase if you’re a die-hard retro Atari fan.
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What the shape of our cities says about the way we live
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/what_the_shape_of_our_cities_says_about_the_way_that_we_live Longer commutes from more distended layout (via night lights)
Nighttime light shows more distended layout gives longer commutes & a lower standard of living… but this only applies to walking-only cities
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What she found is that “compactness” — in her paper, the nearer, basically, that a city’s shape is to a circle — is a kind of urban amenity, like a subway line or a movie theater, that people will pay for. All else being equal, India’s compact cities have lower wages, higher rents and shorter commutes. “One standard deviation
deterioration in city shape, corresponding to a 720 meter increase in the average within-city round-trip,” Harari writes, “entails a welfare loss equivalent to a 5 percent decrease in income.”
An instructive comparison is between Kolkota (Calcutta) and Bengaluru (Bangalore). Among the country’s largest cities, these are on opposite ends of Harari’s measurement system: giraffe-like Kolkota has the “worst” geometry, squat Bengaluru the “best.” According to Harari, “if Kolkota had the same compact shape that Bengaluru has, the average trip to the center would be shorter by 4.5 kilometers and the average trip within the city would be shorter by 6.2 km.”
Just a couple of miles difference, right? But the average commute speed in India is 12 km per hour, and is forecast to fall to 9 km per hour within the decade. For the average person, on an average potential trip, compactness could save an hour a day.
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Do Data From #Wearables Belong In The Medical Record? by @dshaywitz
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidshaywitz/2014/09/07/do-data-from-wearables-belong-in-the-medical-record/ The dichotomy: High-quality morsels v messy gobs
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I suspect that the routine use of wearable data by the medical establishment will closely parallel that of genomic data: everyone will agree that it’s interesting, and represents an area that should be followed closely, but relatively few pioneers will actually jump in, and really start collecting data and figuring out how all this works; the return on investment will be hard to define, the
uncertainty viewed as too high.
It wouldn’t surprise me if many of the same innovators that are early adopters of genomics (e.g. pursue whole genome sequencing on an ambitious scale) will be also be the earliest adopters of data from wearables, with the idea that the combination of rich genotype plus rich phenotype is likely to be an important source of insight (again, keep in mind that I work at a genomic data company). Within pharma, I’d suspect many of the largest companies (playing not to lose) will pursue lightly-resourced exploratory projects in this area, while companies I’ve called mid-size disruptors are more likely to take a real run at this, as part of a more confident and aggressive strategy of playing to win.
I’m obviously a passionate and long-time believer in the value of collecting and colliding large volumes of data, but I also recognize that this remains largely an unproven proposition, and I can understand why anxious administrators, prudent physicians, cautious corporations, and sensible investigators might prefer to place their bets elsewhere at the moment, deciding it’s still too early to jump in.
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Babbage … gave the name to the [Cambridge] Analytical Society, which he stated was formed to advocate ‘the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university.’
— W.W.R. Ball
History of Mathematics (3rd Ed., 1901), 451.
Create qt on calculus notations
http://todayinsci.com/B/Babbage_Charles/BabbageCharles-Quotations.htm
Sequenced genomes reveal mutations that disable single genes and can point to new drugs.
Ewen Callaway
28 October 2014 Corrected:
29 October 2014
http://www.nature.com/news/geneticists-tap-human-knockouts-1.16239
You should also read the Corrections to this article
http://www.nature.com/news/geneticists-tap-human-knockouts-1.16239#/correction1
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The poster child for human-knockout efforts is a new class of drugs that block a gene known as PCSK9 (see Nature 496, 152–155; 2013). The gene was discovered in French families with extremely high cholesterol levels in the early 2000s. But researchers soon found that people with rare mutations that inactivate one copy ofPCSK9 have low cholesterol and rarely develop heart disease. The first PCSK9-blocking drugs should hit pharmacies next year, with manufacturers jostling for a share of a market that could reach US$25 billion in five years.
“I think there are hundreds more stories like PCSK9 out there, maybe even thousands,” in which a drug can mimic an advantageous
loss-of-function mutation, says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California. Mark Gerstein, a bioinformatician at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, predicts that human knockouts will be especially useful for identifying drugs that treat diseases of ageing. “You could imagine there’s a gene that is beneficial to you as a 25-year-old, but the thing is not doing a good job for you when you’re 75.”
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The genomic landscape of #Neanderthal ancestry in…humans
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7492/full/nature12961.html Regions enriched & depleted in ancient alleles, from 1000G
1004 indiv. => 1000G phase 1
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Here, we have systematically inferred Neandertal haplotypes in the genomes of 1,004 present-day humans. Regions that harbor a high frequency of Neandertal alleles in modern humans are enriched for genes affecting keratin filaments suggesting that Neandertal alleles may have helped modern humans adapt to non-African environments. Neandertal alleles also continue to shape human biology, as we identify multiple Neandertal-derived alleles that confer risk for disease. We also identify regions of millions of base pairs that are nearly devoid of Neandertal ancestry and enriched in genes, implying selection to remove genetic material derived from Neandertals. “}}