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A Step Closer to Creating Artificial Life
slick_shoes writes to mention that Italian researcher Giovanni Murtas has taken another step towards creating life in a test tube. "To the untrained eye, the tiny, misshapen, fatty blobs on Giovanni Murtas's microscope slide would not look very impressive. But when the Italian scientist saw their telltale green fluorescent glint he knew he had achieved something remarkable — and taken a vital step towards building a living organism from scratch. The green glow was proof that his fragile creations were capable of making their own proteins, a crucial ability of all living things and vital for carrying out all other aspects of life."
If this technique (as mentioned in the article) can be used to artificially create fuel it can eliminate oilspills, because fuel can be produced where it is needed. Saves lots of coastal birds.
If this can be used to create artificial meat (now I'm extrapolating) there's no more need to have hurdes of hamburgers grazing away at acres of former rainforest. Saves many of those endangered but unknown species you're talking about. Maybe it can even be used to grow artifical hardwood.
Sounds to me this is exactly the sort of research that eliminates the impact of human consumption on the environment by making it more efficient.
This new Bioshock game is pretty nice and all, but really does nothing to help those kids living with AIDS in South Africa. What the fuck.
That is a very close minded comment. By the same token I guess everybody working on computer science is wasting their time as they should be studying cancer research and trying to find a cure (and just running folding@home doesn't count).
The fact is, different people are good at different fields. Just because someone is a biologist or scientist in general does not mean that they studying all fields of biology. It is a highly specialized field with many different niches. Sure, the niches that some fill may not *seem* to be cutting edge high profile making the headlines ground breaking research. However, every bit of info that is documented may be useful someday.
And by the way... I think being able to build something from scratch is a pretty damn good way of learning out something works and how to help it.
People are made out of water, CO2, nitrogen and a dash of salt. Your computer, cell phone, etc are metal and sand. The magic isn't in the matter, it's the pattern it's been arranged in to.
Hey! It's called natural selection, and it's been going on for millions of years.
Natural selection, damn right, more like mass extinction. Calling it natural selection would be like saying that the dinosaurs died due to natural selection. Plus, how is that natural selection when elephants are getting killed for their ivory? If that's natural selection than I guess genocides are natural selection too and so maybe jews and darfurians are unfit to live on Earth..
Life moves on indeed!
You just got troll'd!
Well, it is Natural Selection, which only goes to show how insufficient an excuse natural selection is. Humans are a natural selection pressure force (unless you believe that we were placed here by divine or other supernatural powers...pleh) just like any other species. Humans are unlike most in that we can, if we choose, attempt to gain awareness of what our effects are, and modulate some of them with a bit of effort. That we can change things to accord to some moral conception of proper living within an ecology or not is a different issue, quite beyond the notion that it is, at base natural selection at work.
The problem here is you are identifying a normative impulse in the phrase Natural Selection (natural=good, artifical=bad...roughly) and then complaining that the normative meanings being assigned are insufficient to describe the actual moral consequences of the situation. I'd say it would be better to read "natural selection" as a descriptive term only, and take moral considerations where they belong, which is in identifying when and how human actions can be good or bad.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
"In an interview with Newsweek magazine earlier this year, Dr Venter claimed that a fuel-producing microbe could become the first billion- or trillion-dollar organism. The institute has already patented a set of genes for creating such a stripped-down creature." A fantastic money making idea. However, do we really need an unlimited supply or carbon positive fossil fuels? I can just see the motorways jammed with Stretch Humvees of all shapes and sizes, gracefully spewing that grayish black smoke into our already pissed off atmosphere. With cheaper fuel prices, why walk? why cycle? Everybody will drive. We'll need more and more roads to cope, how will we manage? Bulldose the already thinning vegetation on this planet to build that new bypass we all REALLY need. Shit, it'll be fine, they'll probably come up with an organism that can take carbon dioxide and produce oxygen! Now what a feat that would be, modern science today hey...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Extinction is great!
Gotta make some room for new species! Or would you like to keep the dinosaurs around as well as giant ferns and various animals that cannot even survive in today's atmosphere? Fact is, pretty much anything that have ever lived on earth is extinct. That's life.
Now, you need to focus on the real problem: Too damn many humans. Sure, redundancy is good, but this is fucking crazy.
I lost my sig.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
... if you have a sufficiently stable substrate with differences in energy potential, it is possible for an organized system to have quasi-nervous action, which leads to thought. (I was thinking of the nature of thought because I was answering my own hypothetical question, "How do angels or other immaterial creatures think?")Meaningless. Energy is part of the materialist universe, and in any case the existence of immaterial substances has never been demonstrated--any speculation on the quasi-physical properties of immaterial substances is simply fiction spun out of whole cloth.
Philosophy only gets us so far, as to either accept a First Mover or to deny all causality when a chain of thought is extended long enough. I accept a First Mover, because I believe in causality. (Note: this is not meant to be a rigorous analysis.)That's good, because there's no sufficiently rigorous analysis that would have gotten you to that conclusion. (Hint: what caused the prime mover?) The only thing I can suggest to you is a more thorough study of philosophy.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
The purpose of science is to achieve scientific understanding, not to learn truth. This is good because it's difficult to rigorously identify truth outside of logic and mathematics--a consistent scientific understanding may not be provably true, but it is consistent with all of our experiences as of yet, and that's the best we can do for the external world. If we believe in the second law of thermodynamics and understand it accurately, our observations of the external world will make more sense, and be more predictable.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199