oyvindeh

Human feces hasn't been an area with much prestige (and money to be made), so few used to care about it. But, if I remember correctly, the growing interest has partly been caused by geneticists who were initially studying the genome of e.g. humans, but who switched target as the original work was done much quicker than anybody though was possible.

From what I know about the research so far, it seems like our bacterial flora, especially in the gut, is tightly connected to quite a few diseases. However, for many of them, it is still unclear what is cause and effect: Does the altered flora cause the disease, or does the disease cause the altered flora? External factors like stress is known to alter gut flora. On the other hand, bacteria in your gut may affect your mood and personality. Figuring out what is what is tricky, and I suppose there can be feedback loops here as well.

There is much more research to be done. You should be careful with experimenting, as there is risk involved: You may get bacteria that you don't want, and you don't know what the changed flora will do to you. An acquaintance of mine is a researcher in this field, and he does not recommend taking probiotics for e.g. IBS, as he think we still know too little about what types of bacteria to take, dosage, and potential negative long term effects. "Good" strains can do bad things in some contexts, and interaction/symbiosis between different strains (and us) may complicate things. That being said, afaik, probiotics is generally thought to be safe (although I am not sure all manufacturers are trustworthy).

Personally, I think this field has the potential to really change the way we think about health, disease, and medicine. Another field, which I think is related, is diet and fasting: food, and lack of food, alters our gut flora too.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029470.700-fresh-air...

Saving money on office space is money saved. People being distracted and doing poor work is money lost. I wonder how it sums up.

However, I am curious about the research showing that users will leave a website after 3 seconds. Where was this measured? On desktop, or on a low-end/low-bandwidth device? With low-end devices and/or low bandwidth, most websites will load slowly, and my guess is that performance expectations will be different than on desktop.

(That being said, I wonder if the extreme types of workout many people promote is actually good, or if it does more damage than good in the long run. I guess some people believe that one extreme can out-weight another extreme.)

Also: Getting out the door is good: Five minutes of "green exercise" turns out to be good for your mental health[2].

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/16/news/ecanomy/annie/fortune_a...

[2] http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/201...

The solution is to get up and move around often, i.e. every ~20 minutes or so.

Exercise is still good even if you stand/move around often. And standing all day also has its problems, like others have mentioned.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829233.200-dont-take...

(edit: wording)

By the way: Gut flora may play a role in anxiety[2], at least for some. It seems to play a role in many different mental, as well as physical, illnesses.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/d...

[2] http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx

I think this is bad. Not because the technology isn't good, but because small companies (or idealistic organizations, or others with a small budget) will have to implement useful apps for several platforms. Perhaps they cannot afford it (or think it's too much hassle, or don't care).

E.g., say that there is a product made to make life easier for people with a certain disease. Perhaps some users will have to switch device in order to use it. And maybe there are other apps they need which are available only for their old device. (And don't forget that are other platforms than iOS and Android as well, including desktop.)

Web apps (either run on the web, or natively) solves this problem, even though I agree that JavaScript, with it's myriad of ways to shoot yourself in the foot, is not ideal.

Like another commenter pointed out, there are options for compiling to multiple platforms. But it often doesn't seem to happen that way, and perhaps it's not always possible or feasible.