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That's called innate immunity, and it has little to do with the immune system. Actually this is a form of evolution, which means that the necessary mutation must occur and be selected for before it has any chance of stifling the spread of the disease. And that process can take decades to hundreds of years.

In fact that innate immunity against HIV is already present in the form of ccr5delta32 individuals, mainly in caucasians and possibly as a result of the Black Death. There are other genotypes where ccr5 has been lost as well, present in other populations. The resistance to infection with a ccr5 knockout is strong but not perfect, and has a lot to do with the fact that HIV usually infects people via macrophages with their ccr5 coreceptors. You can also be infected via your T-cells expressing the cxcr4 coreceptor, although since that may require blood-to-blood transmission it is a far less efficient pathway. It would be wrong to assume that the ccr5delta32 mutation makes us stronger though - it just protects us from this one disease. One could argue that the force of evolution is usually applied not developing novel attributes but simply tweaking the ones we already have to maintain the status quo - the Red Queen Hypothesis. ccr5 is involved in cell signalling, and although it appears we can survive without it, there may be underappreciated side effects, like the possiblity it plays a role in multiple sclerosis, as I said before.

There's been plenty going on in the field of fusion. The first experiments which investigated sonoluminescence were thought to include fusion. These were disproven. Since then, however, sonic experiments have been conducted with heavy acetone and evidence of fusion has been certain.

And yes... people are always trying to disprove it.

Worldwide study that indicts Australia more by saying that climate was a factor elsewhere. Even so, 121 genera of megafauna extict out of 150 is a pretty sizable chunk. (That's 80% of the megafauna alone. Smaller species also went extinct.)

Science Daily has a report from a while back that goes into depth in the specific case of Australia.

Australian Museum factsheet on this subject.

Hope this helps

Well, if adult stem cells can cure blindness and retard Parkinson's Disease, why don't we give them a couple more years first before rushing to promote the trade in baby flesh?

This is exactly what will happen when people in poorer countries realise that they can sell a newborn or unborn baby (whom they don't or hardly know, or in some cases don't care about anyway) for more than several year's wages.

And the answer to "why don't we push funds towards adult stem cells which are known to be productive?" is very simple: because some people don't want to. They want a reason, a justification, to excuse the murder of any of those little inconveniences which from time to time pop up.

And really, what's the difference between you and a baby? How about ten minutes before the baby's born? Ten days? Ten weeks? A local hospital is able to save and raise babies more than 20 weeks premature who grow up to be normal adults. The answer is clearly "there is no practical difference". Yet some people are hell-bent on creating one.

It is the only news I watch on TV. Hell, it is the only thing I usually watch on TV. I do however read online blogs from RSS feeds I filter, subscribe to the New York Observer and am generaly reading stories from Slashdot/SciScoop/EurekaAlert.

Not sarcastic at all - The Gates Foundation is one of the major forces fighting TB today.

This Eurekalert article discusses a new technique using chemical messengers to lead nerve growth toward a specific site. While originally intended for spinal regrowth after severe trauma, it (and the many other research projects online the same line) would appear relevant to this artificial vision project. They're trying to save the optical nerve so they can stimulate from the eye to the brain. If they could regrow nerve tissue care in surgical placement of the implant during eye surgery might be of less concern.

Also, PBS has a series Innovation - Life, inspired where one of the episodes discusses another artificial vision procedure consisting of a direct ocular brain implant currently in human trials. The program follows a patient who has the surgical procedure done and then her recuperation and initial testing of the implant. Most interesting. They also show another group who is trying a different kind of brain implant, but who haven't yet made it to human trials.

Between nerve / brain cell regrowth and implant research ongoing we will likely see amazing cures for formerly untreatable injuries and illnesses within our lifetimes. It's pretty amazing to see the beginnings of Bionic Man type stuff actually happen in my lifetime. --M

A study was done at Texas A&M University regarding male and female monkeys playing with toys. It seems the monkeys preferred toys according to their sex, and right in line with sexual stereotypes.

Boy monkeys played with toy trucks and girl monkeys played with dolls.

IT seems easier to emulate A.I. in a radiation hardened computer controlled probe,
than to modify humans for long term space flight.

Though if they combine the new hibernation drugs / gene boosters with the IGF-1 Boosted muscular genes it might work.
( European Molecular Biology Laboratory )

The extra copy of an IGF-1 gene in mice makes them little body builder mice. The enhanced mice don't grow any weaker as they grow older.

So, indeed, future space explorers will be genetically engineered superhumans! KAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!

Stem cells.

Now, the hypothosis of global warming has not been irrefutably proven and certain discrepencies have not been accounted for.

For instance, A volcanic erruption can cause so much more so called "greenhouse" gasses to be released into the atmosphere than all the polutants man has expelled since the first machine of industry.

Since there is no explanation for the past trend nor the fact that looking even further back the entire planet had a higher median temperature. as is evident by the many hypothosis that the thunder lizards may have died due to an ice age... I don't really have to point out there weren't humans then to contribute to that natural disaster that caused a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.

...that the scientists in JPL are already in an unhealthy state due to the difference between Earth's and Mars' day (as mentioned here).

This particular disequilibrium of sleep will accentuate the reactions to the loss.

Isn't it similar with ./ers?

Now, the hypothosis of global warming has not been irrefutably proven and certain discrepencies have not been accounted for.

For instance, A volcanic erruption can cause so much more so called "greenhouse" gasses to be released into the atmosphere than all the polutants man has expelled since the first machine of industry.

Secondly, there are periodic climate changes throughout earth's history that have still yet to be explained. Also, the depletion of the green house gasses has not been proven to be solely the cause of the BAD human made CO/CO2 and not the GOOD naturally occuring CO2 (See eruptions)

Since there is no explanation for the past trend nor the fact that looking even further back the entire planet had a higher median temperature. as is evident by the many hypothosis that the thunder lizards may have died due to an ice age... I don't really have to point out there weren't humans then to contribute to that natural disaster that caused a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.

We need to continue to regulate our usage of all natural resources, since not doing so would be insane, but saying that greenhouses gasses are the sole influence that causes this affect. Believing so would discount all other evidence available. That humans contribute, is surely true. But how much, and is it even measurable compared to a massive volcanic eruption?

According to this daring young thinker, our whole silly idea of time being a continuum from past thru present onto the future may be bunk. With the abolition of the time interval and precise measurements of place at a certain time, it solves some of the great mathematical paradoxes. You can read a better layman's summary and explanation here.

The concept of time is so passe...

• Dukes also calculated that the amount of fossil fuel burned in a single year - 1997 was used in the study - totals 97 million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent to more than 400 times "all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year," including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.
  
  
• "Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," he adds.
  
  
• In another calculation, Dukes determined that "the amount of plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial Revolution began [in 1751] is equal to all the plants grown on Earth over 13,300 years."
  

For more references about this United Nations University study, here is one useful and informative links: UN study shows environmental consequences from ongoing boom in personal computer sales. You can look at the flyer of the study (PDF format, 2 pages, 181 KB). Finally, you can visit this page to discover the contents of the book, "Computers and the Environment: Understanding and Managing their impacts." You can even order it for $35 or 32. On a similar subject, you also can read Why Do We Need 'Greener' Computers which tals about all the waste of electricity caused by the inefficiencies of our computers after they're built. And on yet another similar subject, you can read 4 Tons of Plants per Mile to Ride your Car.

I only took a year's worth of physics (with one semester on electromagnetism), but this sounded very interesting so I went looking for more information. I stumbled upon a couple other articles that give a lot more information about the split ring structure, manufacturing technique, and scientific significance.

"In normal materials the constituent atoms and molecules determine electrical and magnetic properties; they are much smaller than the wavelength of light so only the average response of the atoms matters. In the new materials an intermediate or meta-structure is engineered on a scale somewhere between atomic dimensions and the wavelength of radiation. The properties of metamaterials are not limited by the periodic table and scientists can now engineer a huge range of electromagnetic responses that can be tailored to anything allowed by the laws of electromagnetism..."

The first design for a magnetic metamaterial was the 'Split Ring' structure. "A simple, plain ring of metal gives a magnetic response, but in the wrong direction....By cutting the ring the flow of current is interrupted by capacitance across the gap which, together with the inductance of the ring, makes a tuned circuit whose resonant frequency is determined by the inductance and capacitance. It is well known that a resonant structure responds with opposite signs on either side of the resonant frequency. Hence by tuning through the resonance the desired negative magnetic response is obtained: positive or negative."

The split ring structure "looks like a small letter 'C' inside a larger letter 'C', with the smaller C turned to face the opposite direction...many Split Rings brought together in organized 2D or 3D grids form a magnetic metamaterial." The material can be tuned for specific frequencies by changing the size and layout of the split rings. Here are metamaterials tuned to microwave frequencies, and the Terahertz materials used "a special 'photo-proliferated process' that deposited the 3 micrometer-wide (0.003 mm) copper rings on a quartz base."

Pretty cool stuff..."So far we have only seen negative refraction at microwave or GHz frequencies but some of the most exciting applications in sensing, communication, and data storage would be at higher frequencies... But the really valuable applications have yet to be dreamt of. Think back to when the first lasers were made, the reaction was that they were just incredible, but what the hell would we do with them?"

No - it's not a scam nor perpetual motion machine. A company has already built submarines on this principle that are being used as autonomous research drones. Here's announcment about the Slocum Glider. Here's a couple of action shots of it being deployed. My advice would be to talk a couple of college physics courses to undertand how BUOYANCY works.
Granted it's more complicated in air (larger because air is so dilute when compared with water) however with advances in composite materials, it is certainly doable.

This is just one example of the increased power of automated pattern recognition. Once computers reach a level of vision close to humans, we will se an explosion in automated tasks. Other examples include Sony Aibos vision, lip-reading software that helps in speech recognition, 'robot scientists' and the next generation of speech recognition with the potential to revolutionize human computer interaction. HAL, is that you?

Science article, full article available to those with access to Science
More at EurekAlert

Ethanol causes Pollution too
Ethanol wrong for CA

I've seen other materials cited saying that ethanol is not harmful. Regardless, I'm sure that the pollution that is generated by your corn-fed in-house ethanol-hydrogen fuel cell will be contained by the time this thing gets to market.

EE unemployment is 6.7% which the IEEE considers pretty high.

I'd go for synthetic biology. That will be the next technological wave.

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center weighs in at 500TB. They run Objectivity.

Internet Archive weighs in at 300-400TB and runs Linux.

Google is probably somewhere in that range, but they don't tell. A rough guess would be 3307998701 pages * 100KB/page / 1024KB/MB / 1024MB/GB / 1024GB/TB = 308TB. They run pigeons

The standard model is pretty well fucked anyway. It's not a revolution, it's a kick in the ass that's going to force us to re-examine a large amount of our basic assumptions/research done in the Standard Model.

Already outstanding issues include pentaquarks (5-quark exotic baryons), the inability to find the Higgs boson (not so much finding it, but having the found mass be correct), muon g-factor anomalies, and kaon decay, to name but a few.

I guess what I'm saying is: it's going to be a long time. Don't hold your breath.

firstly, bipolar disorder isn't genetic as far as we can tell.

• 2003-08-11 NSA's Statement on Cybersecurity (articles,security) (rejected)
• 2003-08-19 DNA based game playing computer (science,science) (rejected)
• 2003-09-06 Brown Dwarfs fingerprinted (radio,science) (rejected)
• 2003-09-06 Study Indicates Possible Surface Water on Mars (science,science) (rejected)
• 2003-09-07 GSM cellular phone encryption cracked (articles,security) (rejected)

It has been 14 years since two little-known electrochemists announced what sounded like the biggest physics breakthrough since Enrico Fermi produced a nuclear chain reaction on a squash court in Chicago. Using a tabletop setup, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, of the University of Utah, said they had induced deuterium nuclei to fuse inside metal electrodes, producing measurable quantities of heat. That was the opening bell for one of the craziest periods in science. Cold fusion, if real, promised to solve the world's energy problems forever. Scientists around the world dropped what they were doing to try to replicate the astounding claim. Full story

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solar system's creation. The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania at a meeting of NASA's Division of Planetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif. Full article

And you clueless. There are some technologies that can dump the hd storage devices (no pun intended) and unify the whole memory speed hierarchy. If that happens, say goodbye to rdbms's and swallow something like object prevalence.

Actually, there is little evidence to support the notion that "mental condition" plays a major role in fighting diseases like cancer. Probably just wishful thinking.

• Estes Social Progress Report
  
• Health Care Indexes
  
• UN Human Development Index
  
• HHS Global Health Report
  
• Amnesty International Report on US
  

So no version of pong yet?

Human factors experts at Sandia take new approach
to studying human failure in engineered systems"

Little chunks of gamma emitters with a 31 year half life lying all over the place means whoever is left around has to deal with the consequences of a fight they may have had no part in, or may not even remember what the conflict was all about to begin with.

Keep in mind that you could go around an decontaminate the area by irradiating it with X-rays, the same way that you got the hafnium to decay originally.

However, after searching around I found that the experiment could not be repeated by others. So I guess this idea needs to go back to the drawing board. Bummer.

Using the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, which has more than 100,000 times higher X-ray intensity than the dental X-ray machine used in the original experiment, and a sample of isomeric Hf-178 fabricated at Los Alamos, the team of physicists expected to see an enormous signal indicating a controlled release of energy stored in the long lived nuclear excited state. However, the scientists observed no such signal and established an upper limit consistent with nuclear science and orders of magnitude below previous reports.

The team set out to verify previous findings that stated a nuclear isomer, (hafnium) Hf-178, which has a half life of 31 years, is able to release a controlled amount of energy (decay quicker) when tickled with dental machine X-rays. However, when the team turned the APS X-ray beam onto the sample of 31-yr. Hf-178, no detectable increase of the isomer decay occurred. In other words, the X-ray irradiation did not decrease the time it takes for hafnium to decay; a result that Becker and the team claim is consistent with nuclear physics.

The first red flag went up when you have this guy saying that inside of a century you'll have people able to live 5,000 years. This article already has the faint odor of that cult that supposedly cloned a human.

A lot can happen in 50 years.. microwaves ovens, computers, space travel, eradication of world wide diseases like polio and small pox, solar power and let's not forget.. communication with the internet. I would say that given the increasing rate of discovery we are seeing it is rather short sighted to say something "won't" happen. It is more reasonable to discuss the possibilties with facts and it doesnt' take much looking around.. try..

Eurekalert.Org

for an excellent overview on discoveries in nanotech, biotech and pretty much all the sciences. Amazing stuff really...

Second red flag: Assuming that if you can extend the life of roundworms by six times you can do the same for humans. Bzzzzt

My background is in biochemistry and I have recently been studying the metabolism of C. elegans roundworms. It is a fact that the mechanisms which generate energy in ALL multi-cellular organisms use glucose as a fuel. The machinery that directs energy production in all studied organisms from yeast to WORMS to apes have VERY CLOSE parallels with humans. The parallels with mouse machinery is even closer. Perhaps drugs that interact with the energy producing proteins or these organisms may not work with humans... but do you really think it would be that long before they found one that did if they could use their discoveries with these organisms to work from. I guarantee that as soon a people are given a whiff of a healthy option to death, there won't be much that will prevent things moving forward in human applications.

Third red flag: Sure, our organs may give out. But scientists are now breeding special kinds of pigs that may be able to grow replacement hearts and lungs What, are we cars now? When an organ starts acting flaky we go down to the corner store, buy a new one, open the hood and drop it in?

Do I assume by the above comment that you disagree with heart, kidney, bone marrow and other transplants? Or is it just the idea that an animal that most people eat for breakfast that makes you squeamish? If people can eat them for food, why do they have a problem in using their 'parts' for survival. Be that as it may, current research in adult stem cells is showing that all of our body tissues likely are able to regenerate and that tweaking the appropriate swtiches will allow the repair of aging tissues.

A good recent example of this ability to use your own cells to repair the heart is:

Stem Cells and Heart Repair

In regards to your last comment... to paraphrase something I read a while ago:

"Man didn't stay within the limits of the cave...
He didn't stay within the limits on the ground..
He didn't stay within the limits of his planet...
And I doubt very much whether he will stay within the limits of his biology"

We ARE designed to evolve... we are fulfilling our 'natural' purpose in the pursuit of self-evolution as we have done since we gained the capacity of abstract thought and choice of direction. Qualities that make us uniquely 'human'. To deny the path we are on is to negate everything that we have accomplished to get us thus far.

caerus

Found a list of sites/reports about this guy, Peter Lynds. To prevent a slashdotting, I will just print them here. It was found at http://www.phy.cuhk.edu.hk/course/phy2002/forum/me ssages/299.html (remember to remove the space in the link if you MUST go /. them) but you should use the links here to prevent swamping them.

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id= 827792003

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20 030801.utime0801/BNStory/International/

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/icc -gwi072703.php

http://www.dagbladet.no/kunnskap/2003/07/31/374849 .html

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/latestnewsstory.cfm?stor yID=3515588&thesection=news&thesubsection=gene ral

http://iblnews.com/noticias/08/83260.html

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2003/08/01/ciencia/1 059697327.html

http://www.rsnz.govt.nz/

http://www.elcorreogallego.es/periodico/20030801/u ltimahora/N205769.asp

http://actualidad.eresmas.com/articulos/704306.htm l

http://brightsurf.com/news/july_03/ICC_news_073103 .php

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/ 6440571.htm

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/newswire.cgi /news/pa/2003/08/02/technology/amateurclaimssoluti ontotimepuzzle.html

http://www.diariodigital.pt/news.asp?section_id=60 &id_news=64588

Im posting at +2 to make sure they get seen, so modding them up isn't necessary (dont need the karma). There are some serious questions about the guy, both ways, according the googling _I_ did. Don't have an opinion yet...

Not only bacteria, but Mutant plants, Mutant mice and strange behaving worms.

if your urine is clear, you're set.

Yeah, if you have opaque urine, I'd definitely worry.

After the War, the housing industry was booming and someone discovered that the tape was great for joining the heating and air conditioning duct work.

Well, actually, it isn't. Studies show that duck tape actually is lousy at sealing heating ducts.

Anyone want to go a few rounds with Bender?

It's pretty easy to come up with an arbitrary list of cool science websites, considering there are in excess of 3,083,324,652 pages on the web nowadays.
But in my opinion, cutting science news sites have to have the edge, and there are times when science on slashdot is not as fast as the news on eureka alert or for that matter, the science and tech areas of the bbc news site. Of course, Nature has had a leading role for scientists in the news area for years.
But I guess that there are as many favourite groups of science sites as there are readers of science sites! (Can such a conjecture be proved, though?)

"Los Alamos restores U.S. ability to make nuclear weapons" (April 23, 2003)

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-04/dan l-lar042303.php

Aha! Thanks to this study, I know now why I am surrounded by guys with an abbreviated cluestick. But, thanks to This Study, I know why I haven't seen them pushing around baby strollers... yet.
-os

Thogard seems to be looking for a radiation-delivery system that doesn't harm the tissue between the source and the tumor. The moving-beam solution that everyone else mentions seems great, but sounds like it still causes some damage to the intervening tissue.

What Thogard asks for sounds like a Two Photon Microscopy technique currently in use. From what I can gather from the web, this technique is also in use for cancer treatment. (Unfortunately, that info comes from more --sigh-- science reporting.)

Normally, microscopy (often) causes damage to the sample (or the fluorescent dye) because all of the molecules soak up the energy and break. By the time you're done looking at the close stuff in the sample, the far stuff has soaked up so much light it's already damaged (and isn't fluorescing).

Two Photon Microscopy means focusing two lasers on a single point. Each laser uses a wavelength that does not cause damage to the sample. At the focal point, the fluorescent dye soaks up energy from both lasers and fluoresces and ultimately breaks. Thus you can focus the lasers on a plane within the sample and only damage that plane. Damn cool!

Please see: http://www.cbit.uchc.edu/microscopy_nv/two_photon. html:
"Two-photon excitation of fluorescence is based on the principle that two photons of longer wavelength light are simultaneously absorbed by a fluorochrome which would normally be excited by a single photon, with a shorter wavelength. The nonlinear optical absorption property, of two-photon excitation, limits the fluorochrome excitation to the point of focus."

This appears to be in use (or development) for cancer treatment:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1996-12/ORN L-OMMT-031296.php:
"The beam of light, two photons at a time, is absorbed by the targeted tumor tissue, activating an ingested pharmaceutical agent that is taken up by rapidly proliferating cells like those found in tumors. The activated agent disables the DNA of the cancer cells, halting their reproduction. Activation of the pharmaceutical agent is limited to the focus of the beam as a result of the unique physics of the photoactivation process called simultaneous two-photon excitation."

Since they're activating a pharm agent, I dunno if this actually counts as radiation treatment. However, none of this counts as "on topic" for backwards-propagating materials, anyway! :-)

hth

In fact, the article from the New Scientist needs to be completed by reading this press release from the American Chemical Society. You also can read this article from Boston.com to get more information.

Interestingly enough, after the second last ESA launch "problem", the artemis satellite which was on board was brought from low ellipitical orbit to geo-stationary orbit using the only system available, its ion thrusters. Pretty impressive achievement, especially when 20% of the satellites command and control software had to be rewritten to allow the fine control of the engines required.

This is valuable experience for the ESA. They also did some other pretty nifty stuff, like image transfer using an optical link

Story here

I go to a number of sites for "news" news; I find that the "same" news is very different coming from different countries:
BBC News, which everyone's familiar with;
CNN, the epitome of US government-sanctioned news;
The Economist, of course;
The Times of London,
Japan Today,
Pravda,
The Beijing Review,
Le Monde, and
The Tehran Times

...and a couple of sites for tech and science news:
EurekAlert, a great site for science and medicine press releases,
the former, but still running, Hacker News Network,
BottomQuark,
the phenomenal journal Nature,
Science magazine,
and, of course, The Source.

Some good comics, most of which you will all know, but which I love; here are a couple you might not know:
Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet, a comic that actually features a female sysadmin/techgoddess, and
Bateman Political cartoons, a fun political comic updated regularly.

And, of course, take a look at my sig... Click every day.

Well, it looks like it has in corals . Apparently the different species of corals can change in response to changes in sea currents. So a species seems to have time and location components to its definition, as well as genetic. Pretty cool; since my lab works on fluorescent proteins isolated from coral and jellyfish I'll look forward to reading the paper. This (and the homology among the fluorescent proteins we've been studying in a round about way) links into the fact that the more we learn about biology, the more evolution becomes an inescapable conclusion.

I had some trouble pulling up the article, but I found another article using google. Isn't google amazing!?!

See The Five Ages of the Universe (review), by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin.

Opps, messed up the link.