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It's almost impossible to die of space radiation overdose. The galactic cosmic rays can't kill you via a radiation overdose, they're dose rate is much, MUCH too low.

The only thing with a high enough dose rate is solar particle event. And, in fact, there are very few that are strong enough to kill you (but note, there are winter or thunderstorms that can easily kill you if you're unprotected on Earth). One has occurred, however, in August of 1972, with a dose of about 1 Sievert, but it'd only be that high if your only shielding was a thin space suit ( here's a source for that). If you were inside a capsule or on the surface of Mars (shielded by the yes-still-significant Martian atmosphere), you'd be totally fine. Even 1 Sv not really enough to kill you. You need about 2 Sv to really be in danger of immediate radiation overdose and death. But you could vomit in your spacesuit and suffocate. However, these events are not instantaneous, you'd have a warning and the events occur over a period of an hour or several hours, so you have enough time to get inside or behind a rock or something.

No, it's nearly impossible to die from acute natural radiation overdose in space.

You'll survive the trip. The worry is about an increase in occurrence of cancer when you get back. However, in any case, the risk of cancer from living in space is less than being a smoker. Although, given the huge deal we make about the space radiation issue, you wouldn't know it. You'd think you'd die instantly or something, which just isn't true.

As far as how to deal with it, well Mars' surface has a much lower radiation dose from GCRs and especially solar flares. You're half shielded by the planet itself and secondarily by an average of around 40 grams per square centimeter of CO2 mass, maybe more at lower altitudes. Additionally, just massive amounts of rock or dirt work great. And water is more effective per unit mass.

On the way to Mars, your best bet is to shorten the trip to 90-100 days as Musk suggests, and perhaps use your supplies (water, food, maybe propellant) to shield you from solar particle events. That'd reduce your transit dose to a manageable amount. And you can also use drugs like Amifostine to avoid some of the radiation effects, especially the effects of acute radiation (we're unsure if Amifostine helps for chronic radiation). But once on the surface of Mars, it's possible to reduce the dosage to arbitrarily low levels.

But again, these are long-term health effects, perhaps like you'd see in any kind of hazardous environment. But you'll be able to perform the mission just fine.

Monsanto has apparently been forced to change their tune, but they have argued since day one that a crop not dieing when round-up is applied was proof positive that their patented gene had been pilfered.

There was no outcry before GMO because before that, patents for plants were very narrow and quite limited. It just happens that in conjunction with GM efforts, the same parties lobbied hard for broader patent rights.

As far as transfer of RoundUp resistance from Canola, the only evidence I have seen is transfer to other varieties of Canola. This doesn't rise to the standard of transfer to weeds. If you have references to scientific articles please let me know.

Here's one. Note, oilseed rape = Canola before marketing decided the name was unfortunate. Here's another.

I have nothing against nudism, but wearing clothes is something humans have done for a long time - for 70000 years according to this. So arguably wearing clothes is as natural for humans as using tools.

A strange thing happened, I removed the junk data ( sync preamble ) from my floppy disk encoding and it quit working. I agree that SINEs and LINEs are less of a factor than others but a system is responsive to all its parts and until somebody makes a human clone with all the short and long repeats removed I assume that it does something, even if it just makes a different sync preamble or a getter ( to use a radio tube analogy ) for other junk.

At an abstract philosophical level you have a point, but by the same token you wouldn't let a doctor remove a wart from your finger, because we can't be sure that the wart doesn't play some unknown role in maintaining health. Practically, quite a bit of evidence shows that warts play no significant role in maintaining health, and can be removed safely. There is a LOT of evidence that LINEs and SINEs are simply 'scars' left by a parasitic attack, much like a wart. Large segments of "junk" DNA have been removed from mice with no apparent ill effect to them or their progeny.

Novel but useless. The most important feature of DNA that makes it different from polyethylen is replication.

People can tweak DNA polymerase to work with non-standard bases. And that is more interesting.

That is why this is more interesting:

Enzymes stitch together non-natural DNA:

By systematically tinkering with the structure of DNA polymerase at one or two specific locations, researchers can make enzymes that work with artificial bases. But this technique, called 'rational design', is a tedious and unpredictable process.

etc.

The fallacy here is that the assumption that the government or science has any firm idea of how to force somebody else or even one's self to not be fat. There's just that fascist impulse to raise the hammer of punishment and expect the overweight to find a way.

Here's a set of links on various ties between obesity and infection, to get the pot boiling.

• TCS Daily - Eating Some Crow on Fat
• Discovery Channel :: News - Health :: Study: Gut Bacteria Determine Fat or Thin
• Lipid metabolic changes in experimentally induced ...[Indian J Exp Biol. 2001] - PubMed Result
• Obesity Virus?
• BBC NEWS | Health | Obesity 'may be linked to virus'
• Bacterial-Modulated Signaling Pathways in Gut Homeostasis -- Lee 1 (21): pe24 -- Science Signaling
• An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increase...[Nature. 2006] - PubMed Result
• Obesity alters gut microbial ecology. [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005] - PubMed Result
• Gut microbiota and its possible relationship with ...[Mayo Clin Proc. 2008] - PubMed Result
• Biology News: Fat people harbour 'fat' microbes
• Discovery Channel :: News - Health :: Study: Gut Bacteria Determine Fat or Thin
• Symposium: Emerging Role of Pathogens in Chronic Diseases ... Uses the term 'Infectobesity'.

An Ig Noble award was for Fish Flatulence as a means of communication.

So we just need to create a robotic Bender, that burps and has an exploding ass, to really understand nature.

> Clear now?

Yes. It's obvious.;-)

Seriously, almost nothing is obvious to all people. Even something as basic as counting is not obvious to everyone ( http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=1207 ). Even the old cliche "The only intuitive interface is the nipple" is false, since it ignores the fact that some new mothers have breast feeding problems.

On top of that, many of the "obvious" things we know are wrong in some situations. It's "obvious" that when you drop a ball, it falls down....except if you're in space or your ball is more buoyant than its environment or.....

So "obvious" only has a meaning when referring to an audience in a particular context. For anyone in the computer world, it's "obvious" that if something exists in the real world that it's also possible for the same thing to exist in the virtual world. In this case, the real world analogy of "pointing to an item and saying 'put it on my tab'" is exactly equivalent to the computer implementation of the 1-click patent. It's "obvious" even though the technology for implementation might not be for a person who's unfamiliar with Java-script, HTML, cookies, and sessions (which sound more like a cooking show than a patent application).

BTW, your quote shows precisely the problem of most patent application. They use complex wordings to describe simple concepts in order to make that patent sound like something that should be patented. As Orwell pointed out, that's intellectual dishonesty ( http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm ).

If I were in charge of the patent office (and if I believed patenting was justified, which I don't), I'd reject any patent application that couldn't be phrased in a way that could be understood by a 10 year old, yet get solicit a "cool, why didn't I think of that!" response from anyone that looked at it.

No, it's not so simple

"Fat people harbour 'fat' microbes" and "An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest" PMID: 17183312

A further discussion of obesity and auto-immune disease can be found here.

My personal experience is that as the sarcoid went away, so did the diabetes and extra weight, and the sugar cravings.

oh, and should have mentioned nature has likely built such mega-accelerators for us http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news-print.cfm?art =1509

We recently had a speaker here to introduced us to the new methods of DNA sequencing that are so brilliant you might think we stole the tech from aliens. If you're interested, check out the 454 Life Sciences Corporation or THIS ARTICLE for a scoop on one such new method that'll knock your socks off if you're an old-school biologist. Their process (click through and read the slides) is light-years beyond where we were only 5 years ago. The speaker we had reported that their lab was able to sequence massive pools of DNA from bacteria that lives in our intestines (well, monkey intestines, but close enough) and were able to determine that we have upwards of 1000 different species of bacteria living in us, mostly likely helping our system.

To summarize the sequencing method very briefly and un-technically (if you want the tech, read the site above): it manages to sequence thousands of little pieces of DNA at once... something we had to do one at a time or with the best machines, 96 at a time with a good bit of manual labor. Now we're talking thousands at once, on one machine, in one reaction, on one array. Holy smokes. A single lab worker could potentially sequence more in a day than 10 people working for a month.

With new technology such as this, the thought of sequencing a person's entire Genome in an hour is far closer than we could have ever dreamed. We're talking a couple years here. A decade ago that thought was unimaginable and downright crazy talk. And as the article said, it can also give us glimpses into genetic interactions between organisms in populations from a perspective we could never see before. See "Lateral DNA Transfer: Mechanisms and Consequences".

There was a case of a woman who lost the ability to have REM sleep for over a year. It was thought for years that a person needed to enter this period of sleep but it turns out you don't, because she didn't suffer any serious effects. I don't doubt that in 50 years we will have a complete understanding of the human brain and how it works. At that point we can manipulate our genetics through drugs or gene therapy to eliminate the need for sleep. I know personally that I hate sleeping and would gladly do away with it if I could. From the article. "The study also backs up reports of patients who lost both their dreams and their REM sleep for up to a year after taking certain antidepressant drugs. "These people don't go mad," says Horne. They are completely normal and have no memory problems."

Then my good man please explain to me why temps actually dropped during the CO2 explosion casued by our industrial revolution.

The computer models they use for these gloom and doom predictions are nothing we should be looking at for reliable info. They are built on flawed and incomplete data sets. Think about it. We can't even reliably predict the weather for a week yet we are supposed to beleive they can predict the weather decades or centuries into the future? Get real. Our climate systems are incredibly complex. We do not understand all the dynamics at work here.

The only thing I was able to find was this article http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=1207 which shows that the ability to count even in small quantities is not naturally inherent in humans. How much of our "basic" abilities are truly nature or nurture?

Maybe it's an accounting error.

Charles Cockell, of the British Antarctic Survey, works on microbes growing in the extreme polar conditions. If you have an access to Nature, check his latest paper treating of "Ecology: widespread colonization by polar hypoliths". There's a summary available from BioEd Online for those (prolly 99% of the crowd here) who can't access Nature.