There were some meetings between Trump officials and some Russians, but so far no more than you’d expect from a campaign that was publicly and proudly pro-Putin. And so far nothing we know of these meetings proves or even indicates collusion.

Is this guy actually retarded?

On the flip side, it's $600 for 30X WGS to find all those hundreds of off target mutations.

Joking aside, the weird part:

None of these DNA mutations were predicted by computer algorithms that are widely used by researchers to look for off-target effects.

An interesting, though definitely somewhat odd finding. If it's true, it'd undermine the current model of how CRISPR/Cas9 finds where and where not to cut in the genome. On the other, that goes against a lot of what's already been observed in cell lines taken out of the body. But maybe things really are really different in vivo.

In any case, CRISPR therapies are valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars each, so I have the feeling it won't be long until the answer to that is worked out. And even if the canonical Cas9 fails, there's also a dozen variants lined up with different mechanisms to reduce off target effects.

Quoting a friend here: The "S" in IoT stands for "Security"

TREMENDOUS.

But seriously, I'm curious, how many cells do you end up getting from each patient and what fraction of those actual survive the freeze / thaw procedure?

I honestly prefer this aspect, of a formal regulation agency approving tests that have decent support for them. You can already download your SNP data from 23andme and run it through the genetic gauntlet with other services, but this adds convenience and separates the well-supported from the less-well-supported associations out there.

FWIW, from 23andme's privacy statement

We will not sell, lease, or rent your individual-level information (i.e., information about a single individual's genotypes, diseases or other traits/characteristics) to any third-party or to a third-party for research purposes without your explicit consent.

Definitely something to keep an eye on in the future (though companies can already get your genetic info through the incentive of healthcare discounts iirc.

Past few months have been dealing a lot with chronic lower back pain, so here's something slightly different in the vein of productivity. For 2017 I bought a calendar that I can mark off my accomplishments for each day:

Each of those symbols corresponds to a different exercise for physical therapy, as well as rock rock-climbing and days of major lab work. I've found that seeing the calendar every morning helps prod me to do the maintenance that I'd otherwise skip. Because let's face it, PT is otherwise tedious and boring.

On the lists of politicians that you may surprisingly agree with: Bernie Sanders

Did you know that 2.5 millilon employees work in healthcare insurance and that a single payer option would probably reduce that in a huge way, creating a massive group of unemployed people? There are dozens of major insurance companies who, in the course of daily business operations, duplicate the work that is being done at competing companies. Obviously, Blue Cross' accounting department isn't going to do the accounting for Cigna, and so you get two accountants doind the same parallel work multiplied across all the companies. But if the US Gov't is going to do all the work in a single payer system, you'll have a massive cut in employment. No way around it. I don't think people realize that the sudden disappearance of probably 1.5 million jobs will be a reality in that case. Esepcially not Trump who has advocated for single payer and ran on a major employment focus.

FWIW, even countries with fully socialized medicine have their own private healthcare insurance industries (ex: UK). But even so, this strikes me as a backwards argument: health insurance is too expensive, so we should preserve the inefficiencies and bloat already present in the system.

So far, the clearest summary of the ACA's shortcomings has been that it addressed health insurance coverage without doing enough to address costs. So now you have fewer uninsured people waiting until the last minute to get treatment instead of preventative care, and fewer insured people being denied the coverage the payed for due to undisclosed domestic violence. But the drugs, the scans, and the doctor salaries are still roughly the same. And medicare still can't negotiate drug prices.

So the delta flow of money is still heavy in the direction of providers.

For me? Not to this date, no

Truth. And yet it's just one control and a few experiments short of being a landmark paper in the field of Alzheimer's imo.

Crazy research of the week:

In which researchers took skin cells from a fully grown human, converted them into stem cells, partially differentiated them into neurons, and put them into mouse brains to study the effect of the same environment on neurons from different species.

When I saw that paper, I had a woah moment. Holy shit are we living in the future.