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Presumably if you're mixing siblings you won't get stripes...

Sometimes you do

Was it this one?

Am I the only one who read the title and thought, "Finally! All this messing with genes has produced something useful, a fire-breathing Chimera with a lion's head and a goat's body"? On a more serious note, the nature article in a similiar vein is here.

The Y chromosome is pretty screwy in its own right.

Actually people should note that this was originally a research article publishing in the respected journal Nature. Just because the story was later taken up the Christian Science Monitor is no reason to diss it.

They move by using their mid leg pair as oars and the back pair as steering wheels. Previously, researchers thought they generated small waves, but baby water striders are too small to generate waves big enough to move on. The new research show that the waves are a biproduct of using the middle pair as oars, not the reason they move. Pictures here, same news in norwegian here.

Put down that newspaper and read some actual science.

a more informative write up can be found at nature (there's a link to the actual research at the bottom, for those whose institutions suscribe).

rather than infect the host with dead/weakened ebola, they took the ebola gene that is responsible for making the coat protein (the capsid which surrounds the nucleic material), and inserted that gene into the adenovirus genome. andenovirus infects cell. ebola gene is activated and starts making lots of ebola coat protein. host response kicks in and starts making antibodies for both adenovirus proteins as well as ebola proteins (apparently adenovirus triggers big host response, although adenovirus really isn't that dangerous). host now has a plethora of ebola antibodies.

this particular trick should be useful for almost any virus for which the coat protein genes are known.

I don't share the same completely dim view of Biotech as you - at least in the sense of the time scale involved. It does seem to take the occasional brave leap forward by a company to "embarrass" some others into making a leap, other times there just happens to be profit in finding something more effective, more 'humane', with less side effects.

A combination of such things helped us progress forward in antidepressants, from monoamine oxidase inhibitors through tricyclics to SSRIs that can be prescribed by almost any practitioner (the book "The Synaptic Self" by Joseph Ledoux has a pretty good history on the subject)

That said, there always seems to be a cycle of 15-20 years from seeing something in a research paper/science magazine to seeing them come to fruition for the sake of humans, some of which I'm sure is related to IP issues, which are tougher to fault in medicine; there's more expense involved, and no direct equivalent of an open source movement :)

New-grown organs will make their way out of the lab slowly, but surely. Techniques with simple tissues, like skin,are already available. More complex multi-tissued organs that have to approximate embryonic growth patterns, kidneys for example, have had some success in animals, including pigs, but the age of the cells used for growth are really important at the moment.

There are two endeavors that will really help out the cause: telomerase research, which is one of the means to 'immortalize' cells - just read of some interesting advances in New Scientist where they've managed to immortalize a human muscle cell line with a hijacked retrovirus. This isn't a good option for most tissues, because it can make benign tumor growths keep growing, so they're trying the same experiment with adenoviruses instead for a 'one shot' version of the same effect.

The other is the nascent science of unravelling histone tails and their meanings. Histones are the spools around which DNA is wrapped. The histone 'tails' appear to determine what parts of the DNA get read/ignored/transcribed at any one time, and is one means outside of the DNA to control protein synthesis. Cracking this code could help us understand what makes a stem cell a stem cell, and how histone tails might indicate whether a cell is a neuron, or a liver cell or what have you. It could also indicate why we've had some trouble with cloning (the DNA doesn't change, but the histone code does). Organ growing is akin to cloning on a limited basis, and often requires identical, less specialized or stem cell versions of the tissue you wish to generate.

One interesting fallout of organs grown this way - applied often enough until the technology gets cheap, and you have an interesting alternative to getting meat from animals.

That wouldn't be utopia, mind you. If there's a 'cheaper, more humane way' to get meat, we could lose some farm species. Not to mention that the 'vat meat' might be too uniform, get infected, and would constantly have to be screened for tumors :)

Something to think about :)

My apologies for so many subscription-required articles. Unfortunately, the biosciences are just like that. There have been some moves lately to make this less so, but large publishing companies like Elsevier and the Cell people and Science und Nature have been rather resistant. Hmmm, I wonder why.

Nature also wrote an article about the American Solar Challenge 2003. This summary of Nature's story contains photographs coming from the ASC Photo Library, but read Nature's article for more technical details.

Here the World Trade Organization (WTO) lent the biotech industry a shoulder to cry on by allowing the major players to formulate the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) which came into force in 1995. TRIPS aims to force all countries to take on board a menu of biotech patents and 'harmonize' their national patenting regimes accordingly - the aim is to make the world follow the US example.

See also why Biotech patents are patently absurd. As members of the WTO, and signatories to TRIPS, these countries really don't have a choice; they'd be in breach of the TRIPS treaty if they do not ratify these laws.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/030324/030324-7.html

also here:

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/media-info/20030 207/

It was discussed on /. too I believe.

The Ministry of Truth should also censor the Nature journal and the "Al" Caida web-site, as these are some of the sources Sean P. Gorman cites on some of his e-mails.. just query "sgorman1@gmu.edu" on Google...

Scienticians have done it again, providing us with a new adhesive material material that may one day rival duct tape's utility.

Apparently, a single glove covered in this stuff would suffice to suspend a person from the ceiling.

But you can at least have a look at the pictures, even without a site license... start here and use the arrows to navigate. And here is the figures from paper #2.

But you can at least have a look at the pictures, even without a site license... start here and use the arrows to navigate. And here is the figures from paper #2.

One, called blue jets, also streams upward but does not rise as high or spread over as wide an area as the giant jets in the new study.

Here is a link to the two articles in the most recent Nature, though w/out a site license or subscription all you can see is the first paragraph of the paper by Su et al.

One, called blue jets, also streams upward but does not rise as high or spread over as wide an area as the giant jets in the new study.

Here is a link to the two articles in the most recent Nature, though w/out a site license or subscription all you can see is the first paragraph of the paper by Su et al.

Here's a decent Nature article on QGP http://www.nature.com/nsu/000217/000217-5.html

Or perhaps DNA accumulated from other sources. Like endogenous retroviruses.

That is retrovirues that have transcribed their RNA into DNA and merged it with out genome. About 8% of the genomic DNA is from ERVs i.e. they exceed by far the number of protein-coding gene sequences.

So the question is what are they doing there?

Do they help mediating jumping genes?.

When did they arrive?

Are they involved in schizophrenia or any other diseases?

Find out more here or here.

Greg Bear has put this to good use in some of his recent books: "Darwin's Radio", "Vitals" and "Darwin's Children".

Interactions between cells and the extracellular matrix (ECM) have long been accepted to have pivotal roles in neural development and regeneration. Recent data also support the involvement of several ECM molecules in synaptic plasticity. Here, we review the present knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. These include interactions with cell surface receptors for ECM molecules coupled to the cytoskeleton and tyrosine kinase activities, and interactions with ion channels or neurotransmitter receptors. We hypothesize that ECM molecules derived from neurons and glia might also shape synaptic plasticity through regulation of organelle trafficking, and by imposing diffusion constraints for neurotransmitters and trophic factors.

It is assumed that thousands of years ago all people had hypolactasia in the same way as most mammals do today. At that time in cultures where milk consumption was started after childhood, lactase persistence had a selective advantage. Those people with lactase persistence were healthier and had more children than people with hypolactasia, and the frequency of the lactase persistence gene started to increase.

it seems most likely that the European and Arabia-Sahara centers of LAC*P prevalence, and the Uganda-Rwanda center (if it in fact exists), arose independently. Population movement and gene flow can be very extensive and, no doubt, have played a substantial role around the centers. Despite the efforts of some authors to find a common origin in the ancient Middle East, it is simpler to suggest independent origins than to postulate gene flow from the Middle East to Scandinavia and to the interior of East Africa. The problem might be resolved in the future if gene sequencing could show that the LAC*P alleles in Sweden and Saudi Arabia are, in fact, the same or are distinct forms of the gene with a similar function.

Finally, the LAC*P and LAC*R genes are interesting far beyond their biomedical significance. Along with linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology, further research on lactase genes and other genetic markers will provide clues to the prehistory of peoples, their migrations and interminglings, and the origins and development of major language families.

and here is a brief writeup from Nature.

In case you want to try to access the article:

Subscription may be required to read the full article

If you are accessing from within the domain of an educational institution, and your institution subscribes to Nature, you can access the article for free, just like if you went to the library.

brief article on Nature's site
At the bottom is an "article" link which takes you to the paper's abstract, and if you have access, you can view the full text via a "full text" link to the left of the abstract.

• http://www.nature.com/nsu/020826/020826-2.html
  
• http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20020826/geck o.html
  
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/18/03840/816
  

who in turn picked it up from Nature Materials, where the full article is soon to be published. The abstract is here (advance online publication) and if you've got a subscription to Nature Materials you can get the full article from there.

As another poster quoted, it's hard to do specific experiments when you don't know what to look for. So are we trying to find proof of life LIKE US, Intelligent life LIKE US or just beings on Mars?

The British-built 'Beagle 2' will be searching for specific organic properties as they are understood on Earth. Not for life, but for organic properties related to life on Earth.

The NASA-built probe is looking for water in various forms, because water is the basis for the posibility of life as we know it on Earth.

Dr. Levin is looking for other things (perhaps respiration and motion, I haven't looked to much into his work) representative of life that those probes don't look for, and that other people claim the earlier data have.

None of the tests are for intelligent beings, obviously.

It really depends on what you are looking for.

Science has got a fairly good, simple definition of 'life', but it certainly isn't what the probes are looking for. Even the two fundamental issues that we consider 'life' (1) Provisions for energy and nutrients, and (2) reproduction, may not hold. There is an interesting article in nature.com about that.

So what would be required? Motion? We have life that isn't particularly active. Water? There are animals like one on Animal Planet's "The Most Extreme" that was recently on (I forget the animal's name) that would actually lose all liquid water and be able to just be dormant for centuries, then re-hydrate when conditions improved. Certainly there is the posibility of a living thing that uses something else for circulation or motion. Respiration? Virii are technically clasified as a form of life, but they don't require breath. Reproduction is on the list of things needed for life, but that doesn't mean it will happen when the probe is there. Even if some unknown form of virus were present, it may just be missing the proper host to restore it to life.

I think that the scientists are right in dismissing the public assumption -- at least the perception that there is life on the planet Mars right now, that it intellegent, and that it is like us.

But then there are the idio^H^H^H^H^H people who believe that alien abductions happen every day, that alien UFO's are here but somehow they either avoid detection or are intentially kept quiet by air traffic controllers, the military, astronomers, private researchers, scholars, and armchair scientists, and that The Man has a Conspiricy to hide The Truth from The People. Or that We never made it to the Moon . Or whatever else the media or their religious dogma teaches them, regardless of the observed facts and probabilities.

I have more to say on a tangent to that, so I'll reply to myself. :)

frob

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?)

Due to the viral GNU GPL license everything you put on the scanner becomes open source if you use this program.
The main GNU leaders believe the intellectual property has no justification and must therefore turned into open source at any possibility.
Furthermore it's very likely that SCO will claim ownership of everything you scanned (this includes your wife and cat) due to the Unix IP violations in the Linux kernel.

While you can easily do this sort of research yourself with an obscure tool known as "Google", I'll help you.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/011004/011004-8.html
http://www.sciencenews.org/20020323/bob9.asp
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2001/split/558-2 .html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/blackhole-01b.html

These reputable enough? They're all on the first page of results when searching for "large hadron collider" "black hole".

You shouldn't judge a newspaper by its name; the Christian Science Monitor is actually one of the best English language papers there is, and in my experience, their science reporting is much better than average.

Diamond is one of the most remarkable materials known to exist.

Yes we all know it's the hardest material in existence. But it's also the stiffest, the least compressible and the best conductor of heat and sound, and one of the best electrical resistors. And it's not brittle either -- it has a tensile strength equivalent to steel.

In fact one of the potentially biggest uses of diamond coatings is nothing to do with its strength. The combination of electrical resistances and heat conductivity makes diamond coatings ideal for coating electronic components -- it means you can pack components closer together and still have them effectively cooled.

For more info on diamon, go here (free registration required).

yup, some groups are working on that

Had the atmosphere at the time been oxidizing (basically oxygen rich), these deposits could not have formed since iron would have combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to form rust basically (hematite, Fe2O3).

This has been addressed elsewhere in this /. story and /. already has sufficient dupes, so I won't address it again.

what hardcore rock solid evidence do YOU have that YOUR ideas are not just like every other fairy tale?

First, let's make sure that we're reading from the same page: you're asking me to compare my brand of Christianity with other religions, which you call "fairy tales". Since Materialism is as much a religious PoV as Buddhism or Jainism, not only is it a "fairy tale" but I'm also going to include that in the comparison. Also, nobody was there with a video camera, so all evidence is going to be more or less indirect. But more on that point later.

On the question of origins, there are four basic approaches (modulo some mind-bending fringe philosophies which make The Matrix look simple and tame):

1. No creation ("we have always been here"); herein perennialism (note: I don't know if there is any such word, nor do I care, it only needs to be obvious and unique within context);
2. Creation not addressed (e.g. Pantheon sprang one way or another from previously existing material/gods); herein indeterminatism;
3. Creation happened long ago ("once upon a time"); herein gradualism;
4. Creation happened recently; herein catastrophism.

While the steady-state and cyclic camps within Materialism do represent perennialism, I'm going to guess that you don't suport them, and not bother to address them (other than to say that there are many indicators which should be showing up if the universe truly were that old, and they aren't, and that some Materialist scientists are ruling out the cyclic theories).

Indeterminatism is by its nature not addressable. This simply leaves many religions out of the debate, which IMESHO is a valuable distinguishing point that disqualifies those religions due to lack of necessary authority. It should be noted that "I know we're here and I can't see any evidence of God but think evolution is a blind alley so I don't know how we got here but Creationism ain't it" perspective is a dilute form of indeterminatism. A stronger form of my invented term would be "cop out".

Gradualism is easy to speak against in many ways, but I'll keep it brief because this is not the interesting section.

One simple example: the continents. These would wear down absolutely flat within about 10 million years, leaving us a few kilometers underwater (see, the dolphins do win in the end!); if you propose to make up the difference with orogeny, first off there ain't nearly enough of it to make a difference, and second off you also need to explain why the contients, having been completely recycled at least 400 times since the formation of Earth, aren't almost entirely homogeneous instead of being, as they are, possessed of a significant amount of internal structure. AFAIK there is no suitable sorting mechanism or anything resembling a candidate. The homogeneity, by the way, is a de novo piece of reasoning; if it appears anywhere else it's a coincidence.

Another by-the-way, examples of large-scale rapid erosion like the Grand Canyon or Washington Badlands don't need to happen very often throughout history to provide a drastic shortening of that ten gigayears, and even given that timescale we should see evidence of a lot more of these features than we do, probably a handful for every hypothetical ice age.

Catastrophism splits into two camps, naturalistic (a la Velikovsky) and supernaturalisti

I was reading this article and, while interesting in one regard, is a bit scary in another. In a good way, it is a definite possibility as a cure to Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer's disease is an overabundance of a certain malformed protein in the hippocampus. Skirting around the ill-functioning hippocampus and replacing it with a microchip would be incredible as a cure (although, there are several other cures in the works out there, such as The Alzheimer's Vaccine). The scary part of this is the Total Recall-esque possibility of introducing new thoughts to the brain via the mock hippocampus. The hippocampus is the main circuit for new thoughts to be formed. I just think it's a bit of a scary prospect.

This article amazes me. These people literally assembled a lifeform (or does a virus not count??) from the raw materials.

The most intersting thing about these images now is the fact that they are not blurred:

This Nature article describes how....hmmm I had better quote:

"As a beam of starlight hops towards us through countless Planck times, its speed varies. This would smear the beam out so that different parts arrive at different times and distort our picture of where it came from. The longer the journey, the bigger the smear."

So that means that these deep Hubble photographs should all get more blurry the deeper you look and not razor sharp like we have come to love.

Its a fascinating problem!

Some scientists used a similar virus technique to insert a gene into mouse liver cells, convincing them to be pancreas cells and produce insulin, thereby curing their diabetes. Good stuff.

How does this automatically indicate unconscious racism? I'm sure there could be other possible reasons for the reaction. How about that trying to process and recognize faces of a different race is usually more difficult than faces of one's own race?

And people have known about them only for, oh, a few decades.

dna computing quantum computing

These guys are hilarious. My favorite thing is the "Embryonic cell fusion redefined: The new RMX2010". It doesn't do anything special, but costs nearly $10,000. My question is, though, if they don't have any employees, they certainly have been productive with this machine, the website, and press coverage, releases, etc.

Heh, heh...

-Sean

I just read the Nature Medicine article and the authors speculate that they were able to induce differentiation of hepatic stem cells or hepatocytes into islet-like cells, and it looks very convincing. A potential major shortcoming of this approach is not addressed, which is that in type I ("juvenile") diabetes, the islet cells are destroyed by an autoimmune response. Thus if you generate new self "pseudo islets", you may have present the very antigens that led to their destruction in the first place. The reason that is not a problem in this experiment is that the authors artificially destroy the islets with the toxin streptozotocin. The real test would be in an animal model that mimics type I diabetes, like the non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse. I hope and assume that is the next critical experiment.

From Nature about the sheep Dolly:

it emerged that caps at her chromosome ends called telomeres, which get shorter each time a cell divides, were 20% shorter than was normal for a sheep her age. This led to speculation that Dolly's biological age might equal that of her and her mother combined.

Dolly's breed, the Finn Dorset, can live to 11 or 12 years of age. Dolly's comparatively premature - if unnatural - death is typical of cloned animals. From conception onwards, clones suffer a higher mortality rate than non-clones. Studies in mice seem to show that this bad health persists throughout life.

We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London.

A similiar technique has been used by italian mathematicians to differentiate pages from various authors by using zip. A nature article can be found here. After a request from a dutch newspaper they were able to identify one author (Marek van der Jagt, which made his first debut) to be the same as an already well-known author (Arnon Grunberg).

Here's a link to Bond's paper in Nature.

So either you're on the paper or you're not, depending on who you are.

is here. It's not overly technical but quite detailed. And no, this stuff is not science fiction or metaphysics, it is quite real.