At least, it's an interesting theory.

The gradual yellowing of the lens and the narrowing of the pupil that occur with age disturb the body’s circadian rhythm, contributing to a range of health problems, these studies suggest. As the eyes age, less and less sunlight gets through the lens to reach key cells in the retina that regulate the body’s circadian rhythm, its internal clock.

“We believe the effect is huge and that it’s just beginning to be recognized as a problem,” said Dr. Patricia Turner, an ophthalmologist in Leawood, Kan., who with her husband, Dr. Martin Mainster, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Kansas Medical School, has written extensively about the effects of the aging eye on health.

Circadian rhythms are the cyclical hormonal and physiological processes that rally the body in the morning to tackle the day’s demands and slow it down at night, allowing the body to rest and repair. This internal clock relies on light to function properly, and studies have found that people whose circadian rhythms are out of sync, like shift workers, are at greater risk for a number of ailments, including insomnia, heart disease and cancer.

“Evolution has built this beautiful timekeeping mechanism, but the clock is not absolutely perfect and needs to be nudged every day,” said Dr. David Berson, whose lab at Brown University studies how the eye communicates with the brain.

So-called photoreceptive cells in the retina absorb sunlight and transmit messages to a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (S.C.N.), which governs the internal clock. The S.C.N. adjusts the body to the environment by initiating the release of the hormone melatonin in the evening and cortisol in the morning.

Melatonin is thought to have many health-promoting functions, and studies have shown that people with low melatonin secretion, a marker for a dysfunctional S.C.N., have a higher incidence of many illnesses, including cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

It was not until 2002 that the eye’s role in synchronizing the circadian rhythm became clear. It was always believed that the well-known rods and cones, which provide conscious vision, were the eye’s only photoreceptors. But Dr. Berson’s team discovered that cells in the inner retina, called retinal ganglion cells, also had photoreceptors and that these cells communicated more directly with the brain.

These vital cells, it turns out, are especially responsive to the blue part of the light spectrum.

Starving yourself on alternate days can make you live longer, according to scientists.
–A group of Americans have said that fasting on and off can boost brain power and help to lose weight at the same time.
–The National Institutes for Aging said their research was based on giving animals the bare minimum of calories required to keep them alive and results showed they lived up to twice as long.
–The diet has since been tested on humans and appears to protect the heart, circulatory system and brain against age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.

‘Dietery energy restriction extends lifespan and protects the brain and cardiovascular system against age-related disease,’ said Mark Mattson, head of the laboratory of neurosciences at the NIA and professor of neuroscience at John Hopkins University in Baltimore.

‘We have found that dietary energy restriction, particularly when administered in intermittent bouts of major caloric restriction, such as alternative day fasting, activates cellular stress response pathways in neurones,’ he said to the Sunday Times.

In one set of experiments, a group of mice were only fed on alternate days while others were allowed to eat daily.

Both groups were given unlimited access to food on the days they were allowed to eat and eventually consumed the same amount of calories.

Professor Mattson said he found the mice fed on alternate days were more sensitive to insulin and needed to produce less of it.

High levels of the hormone, which is produced to control sugar levels after a meal or snack, are usually associated with lower brain power and are at a higher risk of diabetes.

Long term recall (of events, at least) works by destroying the original memory (according to what I read in Brain Rules). In the normal course of things, the memory is refreshed (stored again). Supposedly you can soon take a pill which blocks the saving of memories retrieved. Careful not to think of any fond memories until it wears off :)

Luke M. relates (see linked discussion):

Baboons... literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated, hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troupes on the Savannah (just like we humans used to, and thus we evolved similarly), they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives.

Scientists have never observed a baboon troupe that wasn't highly aggressive, and they have compelling reasons to think this is simply baboon nature, written into their genes. Inescapable.

Or at least, that was true until the 1980s, when Kenya experienced a tourism boom.

Sapolsky was a grad student, studying his first baboon troupe. A new tourist lodge was built at the edge of the forest where his baboons lived. The owners of the lodge dug a hole behind the lodge and dumped their trash there every morning, after which the males of several baboon troupes — including Sapolsky's — would fight over this pungent bounty.

Before too long, someone noticed the baboons didn't look too good. It turned out they had eaten some infected meat and developed tuberculosis, which kills baboons in weeks. Their hands rotted away, so they hobbled around on their elbows. Half the males in Sapolsky's troupe died.

This had a surprising effect. There was now almost no violence in the troupe. Males often reciprocated when females groomed them, and males even groomed other males. To a baboonologist, this was like watching Mike Tyson suddenly stop swinging in a heavyweight fight to start nuzzling Evander Holyfield. It never happened.

This was interesting, but Sapolsky moved to the other side of the park and began studying other baboons. His first troupe "scientifically ruined" by such a non-natural event. But really, he was just heartbroken. He never visited.

Six years later, Sapolsky wanted to show his girlfriend where he had studied his first troupe, and found that they were still there, and still surprisingly violence-free. This one troupe had apparently been so transformed by their unusual experience — and the continued availability of easy food — that they were now basically non-violent.

And then it hit him.

Only one of the males now in the troupe had been through the event. All the rest were new, and hadn't been raised in the tribe. The new males had come from the violent, dog-eat-dog world of normal baboon-land. But instead of coming into the new troupe and roughing everybody up as they always did, the new males had learned, "We don't do stuff like that here." They had unlearned their childhood culture and adapted to the new norms of the first baboon pacifists.

As it turned out, violence wasn't an unchanging part of baboon nature. In fact it changed rather quickly, when the right causal factor flipped, and — for this troupe and the new males coming in — it has stayed changed to this day.

Somehow, the violence had been largely circumstantial. It was just that the circumstances had always been the same.

Until they weren't.

Voyager - one of the first digital cameras. Pretty good range on its wireless network, too :)

The dot is our sun.

23andme and other personal genome services make predictions based on research identifying correlations between particular genes and disease or other traits. However, most published studies in the area can't (yet) be reproduced:

It asks (a) if initial findings have been repeatable and (b) how much we should trust the repetition attempts. To answer the first question, they found that only a third (10 of 37) of initial findings were repeated when tested a second time. If things were working well, all of the initial findings would have been repeatable. The low replication rate doesn’t mean that two-thirds of the initial findings were false. Perhaps the replication attempts were poorly done and allof the initial findings would have held up if they were better done (e.g., larger samples). Or perhaps the replication attempts were biased toward positive results and none of the initial findings would have held up if they were better done.

The review paper also found that positive replication attempts had much smaller samples (median sample size about 150) than negative replication attempts (median sample size about 380). This suggests that the negative replication attempts are more trustworthy than the positive ones. The true replication rate is probably lower than one-third.

via

23andme does a decent job of classifying the strength of evidence, but they probably don't account for the poor replication rate, which may be due to data-mining effects (not fixing hypotheses in advance, or doing proper multi-hypothesis significance testing). Failure to do this is little better than fraud, of course. If you lie about the story that lead to your having published a model fit to some data, then that's nearly as bad as completely inventing the data. see also

"We received input from 23 scientists (heads of laboratories) and collected data from 67 projects, most of them (47) from the field of oncology. This analysis revealed that only in ~20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings. In almost two-thirds of the projects, there were inconsistencies between published data and in-house data that either considerably prolonged the duration of the target validation process or, in most cases, resulted in termination of the projects. . ."

via.

Of course, just from occasional relative incompetence on the part of pharma lab scientists I'd expect only a ~70% reproduction rate. And given the rate of attempted vs. accepted publications, and the bias toward publishing positive results, reduce that by another 70% (and this can be eliminated by waiting for multiple confirming studies), and you have about a 50% expected reproduction rate. This leads me to believe that (very rough estimate) half of published medical research is fraudulent.

So, the U.S. government is probably funding faux "research", wasting perhaps 50%. But the overall good done may be worth it (since it's nearly impossible to identify the honest vs. oversold research CVs and proposals). Perhaps if failed reproductions were made public, there could be eventual repercussions - funders could use that track record to reward the researchers with the greatest amount of influential, validated output (as opposed to merely published).

Via.

Road wear is roughly proportional to the FOURTH power of weight per axle, e.g. 3x the weight -> 81x the wear. So perhaps trucking (and heavy commuter vehicles) are both relatively under-taxed. This is due to the increased flexing of the road, more than rubbing from tires.

Via.