In future job interviews, you will be surreptitiously sniffed by electronic devices that estimate whether you might be a liability to the health insurance group plan or a frequent absentee who uses up all the paid sick days.
Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#52First epilepsy (dogs), now Parkinson's. Leads me (retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist) to wonder if ALL pathology has an olfactory component that, with sufficient sensitivity of instrumentation, can be detected. Perhaps we won't require a "Star Trek"-type imaging device: just stand still and let the mass spectrometer do its thing.
Wow so 2 whole things are able to be identified by volatile chemicals and this leads to all?! And I wonder how people like Holmes are able to survive for >10 years. We can deliver nicotine via patch, so obviously all drugs should be delivered that way. We can measure glucose from a drop of blood so obviously it follows that all blood tests run that way. Where is the evidence that even a small fraction of the most com…
Curiosity is the entire point of this site. Cross-examining someone on fraud charges is way over the top! Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN? These include:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#53EDITED: She can also smell Alzheimer's, even before a person is about to develop it. https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1107030/dementia...
But her sensitivity to smell means she is unable to enter the cleaning products aisle in supermarkets. To most people, the plastic packaging has no odour; to Joy, it is so intense she starts to retch. Is that even remotely true that people can't smell that aisle? I don't think I have an extraordinary sense of smell and I think of the smell of that aisle as "rank" or something like that.
Yeah, I can't really smell it. I have to get very close to the products. But, I have a bad sense of smell.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I can smell that aisle, but it's from the detergent, not the plastic.
I think that distinction in the text was not the intended point. With 'the plastic' they mean the products, not the plastic packaging. Because of it was the packaging, made of common materials, entire supermarkets would be off limits. And no, I don't think most people feel no smell in the cleaning aisle.
I guess they mean that most people can smell freshly sprayed cleaning products but think the products don't smell of much when still in the bottles.
The aisle has a faintly bleachy/detergenty smell to me, but not usually oppressive, more just pleasantly clean, I suppose.
But I have noticed my hands/sweat smell different when I have a cold, and sometimes a day or two before I feel ill. I usually only get close enough to notice it on my own body, but I have a couple of times entered someone else's room/office and smelt the same smell before hearing confirmation from their croaky voice, snuffling, or them just telling me they have a cold.
(And no, it's not the smell of cough sweets or lemon/honey-based cold remedies, but it might be partly the smell of damp tissues and stale phlegm and other such nice things. Subtle but sickly sweet.)
Obviously this is neither particularly useful nor a superpower, but I'm glad research is going on into more useful applications of similar phenomena.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#55First epilepsy (dogs), now Parkinson's. Leads me (retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist) to wonder if ALL pathology has an olfactory component that, with sufficient sensitivity of instrumentation, can be detected. Perhaps we won't require a "Star Trek"-type imaging device: just stand still and let the mass spectrometer do its thing.
Many early medical texts routinely used smell in diagnosis.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a riff on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — a bug that changes behaviour when you try to observe it, typically the sort of bug that you can’t reproduce under debug conditions. Often they’re race conditions or other timing-sensitive bugs, and the debugger changes timings enough that the bug doesn’t trigger.
I fondly remember a bug that only appeared when print statements were removed. The i/o of the system out was just long enough for some buffer to clear, making the app work. That was very annoying.
earlier today I had a problem with Xcode always opening the wrong file, a README
Turns out I am not the only one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53132398/xcode-10-1-open...
half a year old at least, as long as the first file is a readme it will open that one instead of the actually clicked file in a new window no matter what. Only fix is to remove the file
but if Xcode is instead set to open as new tab instead of new window, instead everything works just fine.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#57November 15, 2018 publication: Discovery of volatile biomarkers of Parkinsons disease from sebum https://doi.org/10.1101/469726 (free full-text PDF link on site) From the abstract: We have serendipitously identified a hyperosmic individual, a Super Smeller that can detect Parkinson's Disease(PD) by odor alone, and our early pilot studies have indicated that the odor was present in the sebum from the skin of PD subjec…
Thanks for the actual paper. No authentic standards were used to validate the assignments. These are being identified by low-resolution single-quad mass alone. The chances that these compounds, if they exist, are correctly identified is very small. For point of comparison, they also found artemisinic acid, an antimalarial drug precursor that is not typically administered in the UK -- and not as the precursor.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#58It calls for some company to create an efficient electronic nose. Build a database of disease markers, save lives, and say farewell to the health condition privacy.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#59This is exciting for two reasons. First, we could develop a measurable diagnosis based on this. Second, we can now search for the source of these chemicals and use them to better understand this illness, and that might lead to a cure. I love when people use these small time superpowers for tho good of everyone.
Does anyone know how close are we at the moment from being able to say "we're getting X smell, so here are the genes producing X producers"? I know we can (most of the time) say, here are the sites producing a specific protein. But are we able to find sites for second and higher order results yet?
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Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#60This is exciting for two reasons. First, we could develop a measurable diagnosis based on this. Second, we can now search for the source of these chemicals and use them to better understand this illness, and that might lead to a cure. I love when people use these small time superpowers for tho good of everyone.
Does anyone know how close are we at the moment from being able to say "we're getting X smell, so here are the genes producing X producers"? I know we can (most of the time) say, here are the sites producing a specific protein. But are we able to find sites for second and higher order results yet?
It's luck of the draw. We understand perhaps 15-20% of the genes/proteins in the human genome fairly well. We have fairly general notions of what the rest are but lack specific understanding. We also discover novel functions for genes/proteins we thought we knew well.
One way to discover function is to what's called a "genetic screen": Assuming one develops a robust way of measuring those chemicals; we fix that as the "phenotype" we're looking for. We can then disable each gene (with CRISPR, or RNAi, or chemical mutagenesis..) and see if the chemicals get produced (or stop getting produced); and then sift through those. This strategy is far from being exhausted; and people keep coming up with cool phenotypes to measure.
One idea I've been excited for some time is using ML to robustly annotate behaviors from mice by using wide-range microphones and 24/7 video as the phenotype; and use a combinatorial genetic screen to rigorously discover genetic contributors to behavior (aggression, mobility, curiosity, socializing behavior etc.) The ML algorithm can be initially trained by hand-annotated behaviors (annotated by post-docs etc.)