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Myth #2: Asthma is caused by your surroundings. Fact: Asthma may be TRIGGERED by your surroundings only if you have a predisposition to it based on genetic factors.

Myth #3 Inserting Mitrochondria into an egg is Genetic modification. FACT: BS (barbra streisand). It is no more genetic modification that transplanting a kidney. Understand this: Mitochrondria ARE NOT CODED FOR IN OUR GENOME! They are passed on FROM THE MOTHER AND NOT FROM THE FATHER AT ALL!!!!!

Myth # 4 Sperm Mitochondria are passed on. FACT: the Egg executes any Mitochondria found in the sperm. Mom's Sperm Executes Dad's MITOCHONDRIA!

The first link is slide from a Brookhaven talk. Not much useful info here, and the picture doesn't match what the other links describe. The entire slide show is fairly interesting, though.

The second link is PDF whitepaper discussing the commercial production of such cable. A great read, if you have the time to wade through it.

The third link is an article from the Nov. 18, 2000, issue of "Science News" on the same subject as the Knight-Ridder article. Much more technical details.

A conflicting article on CFC damage to the ozone layer was published Dec. 1999 in Science News.

Volcanos do dump tons of nasty stuff into the air, having adverse consequences on the environtment worldwide. And on that note don't forget that we have ticking timebombs of our own, even in my own backyard, Mt. Rainier.

According to an article in Science News (sorry, the article itself isn't online, but here's the references for the article), about 70% of the genes that code for chemoreceptors in our olfactory bulbs are faulty (in the average person. For some people it's worse). For dogs, the number of genes is roughly the same as humans, but all of theirs work.

The question is, what would happen if you modified a human embryo to correct this? ( patch -d1 <good_genes.diff) Would you get a human with a dog's level of scent-awareness? Would some other sense suffer (less visual acutity/worse hearing/???) Remember that even in humans, the olfactory bulb is wired in pretty fundamentally (down in the reptile part of our brain.) Consider how smells can trigger memories. What then?

Also, most folks here have been talking about having infrared. Sorry, but you aren't going to be able to see thermal IR: your own body heat would jam it. At best, you could see "optical" IR like your remote control puts out. Unless you are trying to break into a security area that uses IR detectors, or you like watching your Palm talk to your Furby (get your minds out of the gutter, you trolls, and into the sewer with the rest of us) this would be of little use.

According to an article in Science News (sorry, the article itself isn't online, but here's the references for the article), about 70% of the genes that code for chemoreceptors in our olfactory bulbs are faulty (in the average person. For some people it's worse). For dogs, the number of genes is roughly the same as humans, but all of theirs work.

The question is, what would happen if you modified a human embryo to correct this? ( patch -d1 <good_genes.diff) Would you get a human with a dog's level of scent-awareness? Would some other sense suffer (less visual acutity/worse hearing/???) Remember that even in humans, the olfactory bulb is wired in pretty fundamentally (down in the reptile part of our brain.) Consider how smells can trigger memories. What then?

Also, most folks here have been talking about having infrared. Sorry, but you aren't going to be able to see thermal IR: your own body heat would jam it. At best, you could see "optical" IR like your remote control puts out. Unless you are trying to break into a security area that uses IR detectors, or you like watching your Palm talk to your Furby (get your minds out of the gutter, you trolls, and into the sewer with the rest of us) this would be of little use.

At Northwestern University Medical School they have removed lamprey eel brains, stuck them in oxygen rich saline solution, wired them to a little robot with complete with light sensors, and let it drive around the lab either seeking or avoiding light.

This has just got B movie science fiction coolness all over it. I wonder if they can make the saline solution bubble like it did in all the movies of the brains in jars?

(They are mostly studying how to make connections to the brain and how the brain adapts to those connections. The little robot is probably just for media pizzaz or the grad students got drunk and made a bet.)

Whole article is at sciencenews.org.

It's good that someone is doing something to help keep our planet clean, but you also have to understand the economics behind IBM's move here. Companies like Micro Metallics have been extracting gold and other precious metals from discarded computers for many years now: with yields of as much as 20oz/ton, compared to 1oz/ton of ore from a typical gold mine. For $20, you're basically purchasing the "right" to have IBM make money off your valuable commodities. It's one thing to make a cash-for-service exchange, but it's an entirely different thing to make a cash-for-service-which-makes-cash exchange.

And don't forget Envirocycle's role in this operation. Besides being on their way to a solid monopoly in the computers-recycling industry, they pose a serious unrecognized risk of corporate espionage. As this Science News article pointed out as far back as 1995, in the course of recycling proprietary circuit boards and chips, Envirocycle is being given privileged access to industry leaders' intellectual property. Usually, Envirocycle is instructed to destroy those chips, but just think how little it would cost for a competitor to buy (or even just steal) those chips out from under their own competitors' noses.

Recycling is ultimately a good thing, but there need to be strong industry-ethics standards in place to assure that in saving the environment, we don't give up important rights and privileges. I'm wary that this industry (like so many others) cannot be expected to regulate its own behavior, but the solution is left as an exercise to the reader.

These planes look like a first step on the control side of what's required for the Soldierboys in that book (and in _Forever_War_, which I didn't like as well). The lamprey cyborg is a first step on the neural interface side. How worried should we be?

The nanobacteria subject is fascinating but it's another example of a story that is sometimes associated with extra-terrestrial life - probably to gain publicity.

Hmmmm... interesting take, but I don't follow the logic. Robert Folk ruined his reputation with the original "nannobacteria" proposals, and has only recently been supported somewhat by McKay et al. with the "martian fossils", Kajander and his collegues with nanobacteria as a cause for kidney stones, Miller-Hjelle and her collegues with nanobacteria as a cause for polycystic kidney disease, Uwi ns and her findings on nanobes growing on Triassic and Jurassic sandstones collected from petroleum exploration boreholes offshore Western Australia. The American Society for Microbiology has paid serious attention to the controversy, as might be expected. All in all, it's only been recently that "nanobacteria" findings have provided any good publicity at all; mostly, it's been the ruin of the discoverer (in fact, Folk has been described as "coming out of the closet" with his first papers, some 20 years ago -- strong prejudice exists!).

But now things are changing: there are more findings, and more support for the concept. This might even be a scientific paradigm change... and this was my earlier point, that "common sense" arguments are inherently flawed, because the universe is stranger than we imagine.

When was the tectonic plate theory accepted? They must have been interesting times. Certainly my father thinks it's a lot of nonsense...

Alfre d Wegener proposed the theory in 1912, but it didn't receive much support (in the U.S., at least) until post-WWII. My college geology text has a chapter written in '65, which concludes "Although the subject is now a respectable one in scientific circles of the Northern Hemisphere, the question is still far from settled." (Physical Geology, Leet and Judson, 3rd Edition; Prentice-Hall, NJ, 1965)

Wilson, a Canadian geologist, brought everything together around '65 with his model of seafloor spreading, which happened to explain the Pacific seafloor magnetic anomalies found in '61 by Raff and Mason (these are reversed-magnetic-polarity stripes, which are embedded in the newly-created seafloor by the Earth's magnetic field, which periodically reverses -- creating alternating stripes which aren't explainable except by tectonic plate theory). This all but cinched it, but it took years for general acceptance to happen -- in '67, my geology prof wasn't yet convinced, and spent a lecture period arguing against it (the students, OTOH, tended to see the light right away, based on the evidence presented). In '68, Pinchon worked out the plate positions, and by the mid-70's, plate tectonic theory was accepted as correct by all but a few lingering die-hards. (It's interesting that similar remnant-field reversals have been discovered on Mars, isn't it?)

Yes, they were interesting times. Overthrow of "established scientific fact" is always interesting, yet it happens often... that's how science progresses, after all. Only some of the time do the revolutionaries get burned at the stake; the rest of the time, they are merely ridiculed in print and reviled in person.

I guess it is the weakest point. When weighing up evidence like this I guess we rely on our own experiences and yours are different from mine. Having worked in string theory related stuff for a few years I know what it is like to have a sceptical audience. But I generally tend to make guarded statements like "Assuming string theory is a good model then...". I would never make a statement like the following from the NASA press release:

METEORITE YIELDS EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE LIFE ON EARLY MARS
A NASA research team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center and at Stanford University has found evidence that strongly suggests primitive life may have existed on Mars more than 3.6 billion years ago. (My italics)

I guess that's the difference between your opinion and theirs: they figured they had good evidence, and you figure they don't. Dave McKay (of NASA) still sticks pretty much by the findings, and Kathie Thomas-Keprta (Lockheed Martin) very strongly supports them; time will tell who is right. My point is that science never advances without people going out on a limb with their conviction that a new interpretation is correct, rather than the conventional wisdom. This is not the equivalent of perpetrating a hoax! -- even if they are subsequently proven wrong.

Given the doubt over the interpretation of 'nanobacteria' fossils it seems to me that the most reasonable interpretation of part of this 'evidence' is that it is a demonstration that such 'fossils' can be produced by inorganic processes in a sterile environment but of course you don't get big bucks for a finding like this.

On the contrary: some people are getting funding to disprove the "martian fossil" findings. The ASM link quotes some of them. With any discovery, confirmation or refutation of the findings is critical to its acceptance, and the controversy is the process through which the findings on all sides are integrated by the scientific community; Mari on Anderson's lecture is a good summary of this particular controversy, and concludes (correctly, in my opinion) "The main drawback to this story is the media focus on such sensational news. Media hype may increase public awareness of science, but the problem is that the complexities get lost in the glare of the spotlights." Her last couple of sections are well worth reading.

I think the jury's still out, and I think you're prematurely making up your mind. But, hey, it's your mind -- do with it what you will.

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• Glue and PVA also work well.
• Another fun slime is made from 5 parts cornstarch to 1-2 parts water, by volume. This one is very slimy, but becomes rigid under abrupt pressure.
• From a chemistry teacher's standpoint, even hard-wheat flour (bread flour) is great stuff. Take bread flour, add water, and stir. Watch the lovely gluten threads intermingle as the starch becomes slimy. Add more water for more slime, or keep stirring for more gluten and bounce.

There have been some cool articles on polymers and slimes at Science News and ACS, but that hagfish was news to me. Oooooh!

• Glue and PVA also work well.
• Another fun slime is made from 5 parts cornstarch to 1-2 parts water, by volume. This one is very slimy, but becomes rigid under abrupt pressure.
• From a chemistry teacher's standpoint, even hard-wheat flour (bread flour) is great stuff. Take bread flour, add water, and stir. Watch the lovely gluten threads intermingle as the starch becomes slimy. Add more water for more slime, or keep stirring for more gluten and bounce.

There have been some cool articles on polymers and slimes at Science News and ACS, but that hagfish was news to me. Oooooh!

Any geek worth his NaCl should have a subscription to Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org). It's a weekly publication, and covered this a couple of weeks ago.

It also covered a possible loophole in the second law of thermodynamics that might make a perpetual motion machine of the second type possible, using Quantum Dynamics.

Go take a look.

It doesn't seem the article itself is online. The references are all that are linked from the Science News homepage. A subscription is probably required to get the actual story.

-Erf C.

From browsing this thread, I have the idea that this discovery of distant planets is being taken as a first-time thing by some people. I thought it imperative to fill that void in the collective knowledge base.

We've found approx. 35 such planets to date: here's one found in Nov 1999, a whole system found in April 1999, one in 1998, and here, and here...

We've found Jupiter-sized planets at Jupiter-like distances, which is neat because it means we could detect our own solar system...

-Jason

From browsing this thread, I have the idea that this discovery of distant planets is being taken as a first-time thing by some people. I thought it imperative to fill that void in the collective knowledge base.

We've found approx. 35 such planets to date: here's one found in Nov 1999, a whole system found in April 1999, one in 1998, and here, and here...

We've found Jupiter-sized planets at Jupiter-like distances, which is neat because it means we could detect our own solar system...

-Jason

From browsing this thread, I have the idea that this discovery of distant planets is being taken as a first-time thing by some people. I thought it imperative to fill that void in the collective knowledge base.

We've found approx. 35 such planets to date: here's one found in Nov 1999, a whole system found in April 1999, one in 1998, and here, and here...

We've found Jupiter-sized planets at Jupiter-like distances, which is neat because it means we could detect our own solar system...

-Jason

From browsing this thread, I have the idea that this discovery of distant planets is being taken as a first-time thing by some people. I thought it imperative to fill that void in the collective knowledge base.

We've found approx. 35 such planets to date: here's one found in Nov 1999, a whole system found in April 1999, one in 1998, and here, and here...

We've found Jupiter-sized planets at Jupiter-like distances, which is neat because it means we could detect our own solar system...

-Jason

From browsing this thread, I have the idea that this discovery of distant planets is being taken as a first-time thing by some people. I thought it imperative to fill that void in the collective knowledge base.

We've found approx. 35 such planets to date: here's one found in Nov 1999, a whole system found in April 1999, one in 1998, and here, and here...

We've found Jupiter-sized planets at Jupiter-like distances, which is neat because it means we could detect our own solar system...

-Jason

No, not very likely.

The ancestors of homo sapiens can be traced back in time further than that.

Besides, the meteorite theory is only one theory. I lend more credibility to the theory that activities in the earth core were the cause of dinosaur extiction (scientific american, oct 1990, Courtillot, A Volcanic Eruption) (as well as the rise of them). Still, that might be triggered by comet inpacts of course.



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Nope. Radiodurans has lots of genetic-repair mechanisms built in to repair DNA that's broken by high-energy encounters. Check out this Science News Online article on Radiodurans' survival strategies.

On the other hand, the article did note that the bacteria that fared less well looked like the cells had actually ruptured. But I suppose that could be due to dysfunctional metabolism and other products of severe genetic damage.

- Michael Cohn

Nothing new about this. Oooh, it's color. I bet that's just a *huge* accomplishment. Develop the technology in black, then change it to RGB and overlay them.

If I remember correctly, some researchers at MIT developed "digital ink" at least a couple years ago. Basically, a flexible thin display that you controlled in a similar fashion to an LCD screen.

Hey look, here's a link to a story on ScienceNews about it.
And look, it's the research papers from the IBM guys working on it!
Wow, and here's a Company that's developing electronic ink

Guess it's not such a new idea after all.

-Todd

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Rather use this link - it has the missing explanations.

And this link explains integer relations.

--

Science News had a really good article about the pursuit of new insulators for use in semiconductors last week.

Yeah, I guess it is dense... but then, my degree's in physics. I don't know offhand where to suggest you go for a lay explanation; the subject matter is moderately esoteric. You might try the online version of Science News where a more user-friendly version could appear within the next few weeks.

Otherwise, if I find something I'll post it here.

---

Chocolate is mostly a food, but it does contain small quantities of drug compounds, including caffeine and THC-like chemicals. I've heard that you'd need to eat many pounds of chocolate to be equivalent to one joint, but then marijuana usage among my friends varies by probably two orders of magnitude, so perhaps some people are more sensitive than others. Also, empirical data suggests that women are much more sensitive to chocolate's mood-altering effects than men.

For more info, here are some choice links from this Google search:

• Exploring Chocolate
• Science News Online
• Psychiatric News

While I'm glad to see this "news" hit Slashdot, I have to wonder why it wasn't considered newsworthy back in July. Check out the old news at sciencenews.org.

You are confused because because the article is, shall we say, less than clear. Here is a better one from Science News. Note that this is a year old. The gene sequence appears to be underway or near completion. There have been no results of the remediation studies posted to the web. Here is the ab stract of the study referred to by the CNN article. It's fairly preliminary. The researchers have made the bug and done a few lab tests. Now they need to do some field trials.

The US DOE has a huge problem; they need to clean up thousands of contaminated sites, all with significant radiation levels. Cleaning up the heavy metals and organo-chlorines is tough enough without the radiation hazard.

The brute-force-and-ignorance approach is to "scoop and bag", remove the contaminated soil and put it in a sealed landfill. This is enormously expensive.

Bio-remediation offers a partial solution. You clean up the organic compounds, mostly clenaing fluids very similar to dry-cleaning solvent, by breaking them down on site. Heavy metal clean-up involves changing the chemical form of the pollutant to something less toxic or easy to get out of the soil by washing. The microbes have no effect on radioactivity. You still need to remove the radiation hazards, it's just less (chemically) toxic after the bugs have chewed on it.

New strains of D. radiodurans have been engineered to do both jobs. In optimal conditions with a really good innoculum, microbial remediation can almost entirely destroy the pollutants. In poor conditions (cold, no food or water) or with the wrong bugs, very little may happen. Training innocula, as microbial cultures are called, for a specific pollutant is time consuming and difficult.

Kind Regards,

You are confused because because the article is, shall we say, less than clear. Here is a better one from Science News. Note that this is a year old. The gene sequence appears to be underway or near completion. There have been no results of the remediation studies posted to the web. Here is the ab stract of the study referred to by the CNN article. It's fairly preliminary. The researchers have made the bug and done a few lab tests. Now they need to do some field trials.

The US DOE has a huge problem; they need to clean up thousands of contaminated sites, all with significant radiation levels. Cleaning up the heavy metals and organo-chlorines is tough enough without the radiation hazard.

The brute-force-and-ignorance approach is to "scoop and bag", remove the contaminated soil and put it in a sealed landfill. This is enormously expensive.

Bio-remediation offers a partial solution. You clean up the organic compounds, mostly clenaing fluids very similar to dry-cleaning solvent, by breaking them down on site. Heavy metal clean-up involves changing the chemical form of the pollutant to something less toxic or easy to get out of the soil by washing. The microbes have no effect on radioactivity. You still need to remove the radiation hazards, it's just less (chemically) toxic after the bugs have chewed on it.

New strains of D. radiodurans have been engineered to do both jobs. In optimal conditions with a really good innoculum, microbial remediation can almost entirely destroy the pollutants. In poor conditions (cold, no food or water) or with the wrong bugs, very little may happen. Training innocula, as microbial cultures are called, for a specific pollutant is time consuming and difficult.

Kind Regards,

If you dig a little past the article linked to, you can find the Science News folks giving way to a little bit of levity...

Check out this interview with the 2-million-year-old man from their "Top Stories of the Millennium", for example.

Science News is a publication for those people interested in intellectual pursuits, but who are not technical enough in nature to read a peer-reviewed journal such as Science or Nature. Science News, IMHO, is a very good publication for children, as it will keep them intellectually stimulated every week. It also provides a written history of most major achievements, giving an alternate view of historical events as they happen.

Another neat thing about Science News, is that they recently 'discovered' a number of older documents from the last millenium and published these in their most recent issue. An online version is at http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/ 12_18_99b/.

I'm no biologist, so there's a good chance i don't know what the hell i'm talking about.

[1] General science news, not the magazine known as Science News.

Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer

The owners of the computer, or the authors of the software? In cases where patents have been rewarded (Linden's antenna algorithms) it seems to have been the author of the software, rather than the owner of the hardware who gets the patent.

This was reported on in Science News a few months ago. Unfortunately it only appeared in the pulp-and-staples publication, not the online one. But a little search through the patent office turned up only a patent on the algorithms themselves, not on the antennas that the algorithm invented. Unless I really misunderstood the abstract.

A recent science news article mentioned that they were hoping to get the shuttle up there to fix it between Dec. 2 and Dec. 14 because they were worried about Y2K problems with the docking software. Apparently they didn't get up there quite fast enough.

(OT) What's happening with the idea of a next-generation space telescope?

I neglected to read this article until this morning. I just thought it was confirmation that one was completed. I was surprised no SlashDot readers were familiar with at least the concept or remember reading it on slashdot before (search using the word twinkle). I originally read about it in an article from the Volume 155, Number 23 (June 5, 1999) issue of Science News. There is a paper Written by Adi Shamir from the Weizmann Institute of Science (which is in Israel) about the device. I wrote an e-mail to Adi Shamir but I haven't gotten a response. Here Is the Abstract of the paper for those that don't want to dl the paper.

Abstract The current record in factoring large RSA keys is the factorization of a 465 bit (140 digit) number achieved in February 1999 by running the Number Field Sieve on hundreds of workstations for several months. This paper describes a novel factoring technique which is several orders of magnitude more efficient. It is based on a very simple and held optoelectronic device which can analyse 100,000,000 large integers, and determine in less than 10 milliseconds which ones factor completely over a prime base consisting of the first 200,000 prime numbers. The new technique can increase the size of factorable numbers by 100 to 200 bits, and in particular can make 512 bit RSA keys (which protect 95% of today's E-commerce on the Internet) very vulnerable

I neglected to read the original article. I just thought it was confirmation that one was completed. I was surprised no SlashDot readers were familiar with at least the concept or remember reading it on slashdot before (search using the word twinkle). I originally read about it in an article from the Volume 155, Number 23 (June 5, 1999) issue of Science News. There is a paper Written by Adi Shamir from the Weizmann Institute of Science (which is in Israel) about the device. I wrote an e-mail to Adi Shamir but I haven't gotten a response. Here Is the Abstract of the paper for those that don't want to dl the paper.

Abstract The current record in factoring large RSA keys is the factorization of a 465 bit (140 digit) number achieved in February 1999 by running the Number Field Sieve on hundreds of workstations for several months. This paper describes a novel factoring technique which is several orders of magnitude more efficient. It is based on a very simple and held optoelectronic device which can analyse 100,000,000 large integers, and determine in less than 10 milliseconds which ones factor completely over a prime base consisting of the first 200,000 prime numbers. The new technique can increase the size of factorable numbers by 100 to 200 bits, and in particular can make 512 bit RSA keys (which protect 95% of today's E-commerce on the Internet) very vulnerable

This appeared as a side-bar to an article about circuits designed using genetic algorithms. Unfortunately, the article isn't available online, but you can see the references here. The article itself reported on using FPGAs to evolve an electronic circuit.

I saw the New Scientist article, too; it claims that Benford's Law describes the (only) scale independent distribution. Another description can be found in this Mathland column.

Barring nanotechnology and smart paper, I think this would be a great use of electric Ink's product along with some embedded surface mount technology for storage/conversion to display. Memory is getting cheap enough that storing a book on chip shouldn't bee a major issue.