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Prions Observed Jumping Species Barrier
palegray.net writes "Nature is reporting on new findings that prions jump species barriers. Believed to be responsible for ailments such as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and 'mad cow' disease, prions are thought to disrupt biological processes by causing normal proteins to fold abnormally. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have observed infectious prions from hamsters causing abnormal protein development in mice, along with a range of other observations on prion actions in test tube environments. From the article: '... they also found that when a prion jumps species, it produces a new kind of prion. "This is very worrisome," says Claudio Soto, who led the research, published in Cell. "The universe of possible prions could be much larger than we thought."' Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."
Considering that we force feed cows and chickens the meat bi-products of the industry, we're actually causing a great deal of this to happen. In a perfect world we'd not feed herbivores rudiments and accelerate this type of process. But then again, garbage in garbage out, we deserve what we get.
For those with access to the journal Cell, you can view The Castilla, et al, paper online (this abstract should be available for all). The nature link in the summary goes to a write-up about the article, not the actual article itself.
Those with subscriptions to Cell can also get the full text, Full Text in PDF, and the Supplementary Data.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Mods, note that the parent post is NOT offtopic. It's talking about mad cows.
Instead of donating energy to run Folding on your inefficient PC, where the results have to be triple-checked - consider just donating money directly to the project instead of via your power bill.
Runtime on a trusted supercomputer / local cluster is going to be an order of magnitude more efficient in terms of data crunched per watt-hour.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
It's like every /. article is an opportunity to espouse the same posts in a previous article. Let me save all the future posters their breathe...
Dirty energy is bad.
Global Warming.
Creationists are dumb.
DMCA is stoopid.
OMG zero day is here!
There, someone e-mail me when there's a comment worth reading.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Nature is reporting on new findings that prions jump species barriers
It's confirmed. Our planet (i.e. Nature) is sentient and into science journalism!
That's a good point, I've never thought about that route before.
Or do both. I think they'll be glad for any CPU and especially any GPU cycles.
lol: You see no door there!
That's nothing. I have peons swarming my village.
"The universe of possible prions could be much larger than we thought."' Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."
Can I donate my spare prions instead?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
While I certainly wouldn't want to get any of the prion diseases, they are all rather nasty, I find the existence of prions fascinating. They are arguably even less alive than viruses, though not by much, and yet they multiply(in a sense), and exist in all sorts of variants.
It seems like any sufficiently complex system(biological proteins in this case), is at considerable risk of having something analogous to life spring up and cause trouble.
My CPU is usually idle, but I don't like listening to the fan when it is running full tilt.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Your email isn't shown publicly, so I have decided to reply instead.
There is a very insightful comment here
So prions can make proteins into prions in other species, e.a. cross the species barrier? Big deal. We knew this in the nineties when the whole mad-cow disease was all over the news.
I'm sure it has some scientific significance, but I think the real question is how (ingested) prions reach the central nervous system, where the damage is done. And why it takes so long or doesn't happen at all in most cases.
Now that would shed some light on the amount of risk that eating a possibli infected piece of meat would pose. That would be news.
I guess prions take the Folding@Home idea a bit too literally.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I work for one of Claudio Soto's former PhD students. From my brief skimming of this paper, it seems to be a simple proof-of-concept transmission between mice and hampsters. The discussion section, like a lot of science, is pure speculation - logical, but no need for slashdotters to scream "OMG we're all going to die!"
I'm an avid MN deer hunter (and consumer...) and I've done a significant amount of work with PrP infected mice. While not worried about going crazy and having my brain melt in 15 years, I have quit giving blood to the Red Cross. In my opinion, nobody has any "28 days" type fears to raise.
I'm sorry, but Creutzfeld-Jakob disease is a bit more than an "ailment." It's deadly and incurable. I think a slightly stronger word would be in order.
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Just as long as it's not folding@mybrain!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Prof. Charles Francis Xavier:
"This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward."
"We called them, X-Prions"
to the old saying "you are what you eat"
No problem. Just post your email address here, and I'm sure someone will be happy to let you know...
Worrisome for who? The cannibals? Stop eating brains!
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
>Runtime on a trusted supercomputer / local cluster is going to be an order of magnitude more efficient in terms of data crunched per watt-hour.
Problem is, there ain't no such thing on this planet.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
"On September 16, 2007, the Folding@home project officially attained a performance level higher than one petaFLOPS, becoming the first computing system of any kind to do so, although it had briefly peaked above one petaFLOPS in March 2007.[14][15]. In comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the world (as of June 2008, IBM's Roadrunner) peaks at 1.026 petaFLOPS[16]. In early May 2008 the project attained a sustained performance level higher than two petaFLOPS, again being the first computing system of any kind to do so. Now Folding@home computing cluster operates at above 2 petaFLOPS at all times, with a large majority of the performance coming from PlayStation 3 and GPU clients.[2] On August 20, 2008, the Folding@home project broke the three petaFLOPS milestone, once again being the first computing project of any kind in history to ever do so.[2]"
I couple of years back, I did a lot of reading on Mad Cow. There were so many examples of it jumping the species barrier...and some of them many, many years old.
Here is an example from 18 years ago:
-=-=-=
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-111779850.html
WASHINGTON -- Eighteen years before last week's first confirmed case of mad cow disease in the United States, investigators concluded that an epidemic of a brain-wasting disease on a Wisconsin mink farm was probably caused by a malady similar to mad cow disease.
The Wisconsin farmer had fed his mink a steady supply of "downer" cows -- too sick or injured to move on their own -- like the one that tested positive for mad cow disease in Washington state last week. On Tuesday, the Department of Agriculture banned such animals for human consumption.
Long before the USDA action, the mink industry began discouraging farmers ..
-=-=-=
It is basically that anyone who did a little study would know that it could jump the species barrier...but it just can't do that until some people in white coats tell us it can do that...then it can.
transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Depends on when you run it. Coal plants burn more coal at night than they need for electricity to keep the furnaces hot for peak usage periods. If you run F@H between 9PM and 6AM, you're actually not having much impact on fossil fuel use, pollution or carbon footprint.
That's why electric utilities and some companies are developing programs to make the best use of off-peak power. Electric cars, for example, are exciting because they could engage timers that charge them only during off-peak.
F@H could do the same in principle, with a check-box to run only during late hours. I don't know if they have that feature now.
It made me wonder, if it changes when it jumps species, maybe prion diseases are something new, so I did some quick checking on Wikipedia. I didn't track down more stuff yet, but I plan on following up. I didn't realize this, but it appears that a lot of prion diseases are fairly recent developments. Scrapie showed up in 1732, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the 1800s, CJD showed up around 1920, Kuru in 1957, Chronic Wasting Disease in 1967, Feline Spongiform Enecephalopathy 1990.
And these are more than half of the diseases caused by prions, I believe. That's more than a bit disconcerting.
... Mark Purdey was, of course, the British beef farmer who had a different theory about Mad Cow. In the 80's the British government required all cattle to be dosed with an Organo-phostate pesticide, to combat a warble fly epidemic (these bugs punch holes in cattle skin, making the hides less suitable for leather seats).
Purdey was an organic farmer, and sued to protect his right to keep synthetic pesticides away from his herd. He won. A few years later Chernobyl went off, and some time after that the first Mad Cow epidemic occured. Purdey's cows were mostly immune. He had a few mad cows, but these were mostly transplants to his herd which had, presumably, been dosed with the pestacide.
As the years went by, Purdey turned into a scientist himself, doing the research that the british government wouldn't do because of their potential liability in having caused the mad-cow epidemic (by require farmers to poison their herds).
Basically, the pesticide used chellated (removed) copper from the treated body. Somehow manganese substitutes for copper, but it isn't a good subsitute. The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl didn't help things either. It's been years since I first read Purdey's site, so I don't remember the details.
He commented that the Mad Cow in Washington (the northwest state) came from a copper-deficient pasture in Canada, into an area where quite a bit of nuclear weapons research had been done in decades past. The mad deer in Colorado also occupy a site with extensive radiologic environmental poisoning.
So basically, Purdey's theory is that prions are an effect of environmental poisoning, not the cause of Mad-Cow-esque disease.
Purdey is deceased now (brain cancer?), but his site's still live. Definitely recommended reading.
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rodent would be the genus, hamster would be the species.
Many of the proteins of the mammals are qu7ite in common except sometimes for a few details. If those few details make no difference to the attack site of the prion, it ain't that surprising that other similar brain protein can similarly badly in other mammals. Sooooo we should simply ban utterly to feed other dead mammals protein to other specy which are for human consumption (cue the sales of meat carcass into pet food....).
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visit randi.org
It's like every /. article is an opportunity to espouse the same posts in a previous article. Let me save all the future posters their breathe...
Dirty energy is bad.
Global Warming.
Creationists are dumb.
DMCA is stoopid.
OMG zero day is here!
There, someone e-mail me when there's a comment worth reading.
I think there's some inherent vulnerability of internet discussion sites to virulent memes. If you look at Digg at the moment it's got to the point where 50% of the stories on the front page are some dubious looking slur on Palin. A few months ago 50% of them where dubious looking slurs on Hilary. And a few months before that they were all posts containing that 09 F9 magic key. 4chan is plagued by self replicating javascripts because it doesn't have a CAPTCHA, but digg and slashdot get a different sort of replicator, one which needs human interaction to spread.
It's like someone posts a meme, people mod/digg it up, there is a backlash, then more people digg it up and post it. People that disagree are eventually forced out. Eventually the meme uses up 50% of the bandwidth.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Then maybe your problem is that your CPU has a fan. ;)
More seriously: I cool my PC passively trough convection. Sure the convectors are huge, but in a place where i don't see them anyway. And I don't need to turn on the radiator of the room.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Just build a giant wall between our species and the rest. Use lots of high tech things like cameras, UAVs, and the like. That'll work.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Become a vegetarian and loose the risk of contracting a scary prion disease from your food. Prion diseases are awful- I'd take an STD or physical handicap any day over one of those. Now I understand that the USA only randomly checks 1% of cattle for mad cow disease. Since we HAVE had cattle found with it before that stands to reason that cattle with prion diseases have made it into the food supply. The scariest part is these prion diseases can have incubation periods in both cattle and humans for many years. If a cow does not show symptoms it is not likely to be checked for the disease even if it carries it. A tainted burger your parents bought you from McDonald's (containing meat from who knows how many different cows) when you were 10 might not show symptoms till you're 40+ and at that point how could anyone ever trace it to any particular time/place/meal? No- I'm not a vegetarian, but I am seriously considering dropping all animals from my diet except birds and fish.
Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."
So the public is donating a lot of computing time and electrical energy. What does the public get back?
If Folding@Home goes towards lining the pockets of a university endowment or a drug company's coffers, count me out. If the research product is required to be free from patents, and available for public good...full speed ahead. Somehow, I seriously doubt that any successful results will be freely available.
Please help metamoderate.
Or do all four: both, twice.
After all, I am strangely colored.
There is not such a thing as "spare CPU cycles" since when you run a *@home program, CPU power consumption pikes.
In a laptop, when running any CPU intensive distributed program, battery level is stuck since all the power goes to the CPU instead of charging the battery.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Am I the only one who read that as "prisons" and immediately wondered why we started locking up animals?
:(){
Eventually the meme uses up 50% of the bandwidth.
In Soviet Russia, bandwidth is 50% of memes!
which is totally what she said
For this issue Rosetta at home (Boinc) might be a better choice for protein structure. It's already wokring on the prion problem.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Jim the crowbar is in my prion.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Wow, that's one of the most informative comments I've seen on Slashdot in a while. I've tended to run distributed computing clients on servers during off-peak processing hours (typically at night), and it looks like that choice is both good for business and the environment. Thanks for the info!
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
They eat normal protien. Bad protien is both offspring and a waste product.
While Mark Purdey may not be right about organophosphates (although they may have been a contributing factor) he is (was) correct that the scientific orthodoxy about CJ-like diseases is wrong.
Although prions are not directly my area of research, I have been an interested observer. It is my belief that the idea tha prions are a self-reproducing pathogenic protein (the idea that won Stanley Prusiner a Nobel Prize) is fundamentally wrong. So called "prion diseases" do, in fact, have have nucleic acid genome.
Now, there are not many people who are willing to go up against a Nobel Prize winner and 20 years of research - getting funding for such heretical ideas is not easy.
However, I do believe and hope that the truth of the situation will become apparent and "Science" will have some serious questions to ask itself... how can we have been so wrong about this for so long..?
So, while some of the results of Folding@Home are pretty amazing, spending any CPU time on the structure of prion proteins is utterly pointless.
BTW, if you want to play with protein structures, check out FoldIt (fold.it), it's made by the same people who made Folding@Home, it's pretty cool (there is no "Linux" version - so not that cool (it does run under Wine though)).
Where can I find parts/info on convection cooling a PC or server?
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
The prion hypothesis was developed many years ago. The term is the condensed form of the "protein only" theory, prion... Whereby CJD developed presumably from scrapie or MCD... Which involved the transfer across the species barrier and made headlines... And now in 2008 you slashdot nerds have come across a new revelation that prions cross species barriers when that is how the term was originally coined... Deary me. Perhaps someone will discover that the world is really round.
Folding@Home is now at 3.4 Petaflops mostly due to the rise of the GPU as a processing device. It's time to re-evaluate your statement.
My folding PC has a theoretical power of about 1.5 Teraflops alone, harbouring 4 nVidia GPUs. Power consumption is a mere 500 Watts.
So yes desktop system have become very efficient in terms of Flops/Watt, if one can accept the restrictions of a GPU based programming model (they're not as versatile as a CPU).
--- Eat my sig.
All hail the Prions Of Ori!
Or better yet, don't.
Considering you've been here all of about a month and you're already complaining, save us some time and go fuck yourself.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The jumping accross species is known and documented for quite some time, specially regarding prions from mad cow disease.
Similarily, I remember reading articles in 3rd year medicine(*) about difference in prion foldings between species (explain the initial slow development of inter-species spreading compared to intra-specie spreading) and emergence of newer folding pattern (after a while a new more efficient pattern emerges)
I fail to see how this is news worthy, except maybe some lab trying to justify spending the grant it has obtained.
Oh yeah, I know. /. is all about dupes and they found a new meta-dupe : two /. entries giving the same info but sourced in different articles :-P
---
*: And just to show how it is old : since then I graduated and had even had time to get a 2nd master.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's like the Republican convention, without the funny hats.
You are welcome on my lawn.
no dude I am married.
--- Eat my sig.
Clearly not by many years yet. :)
I'm not sure what you point is. Your story has a very complex entity (God) creating life. My story has something much simpler than life doing it.
Some versions of Intelligent Design have the Designer doing it all through initial conditions. But you're right in that such out of band effects are irrelevant for science.
It's a laptop, so that probably isn't an option.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
an even better reason to go vegetarian. Or at least not eat beef.
oh, you're paying for it all right. we all are.
Now that I am at work, where I have access to cell, I can read the article and attempt to explain its significance. I will attempt to do this without violating copyright - although I see the work was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, which requires that the papers be released to the public (within a certain time frame).
The paper mentions that the species barrier has been crossed by some prions (BSE) but not others (scrapies). They are looking for a way to show cross-species interactions without having to use whole organisms. One of their findings was a "novel" prion by using cell extract of two different species (mouse and hamster).
They also commented that there is no current method for predicting which prions will cross species barriers - after all it is driven by a protein-protein interaction, as the prion-based conditions carry no genetic component of infection.
They further mentioned that their in vitro work showed prions can move across the species barriers without cellular material, generating unique prions in this manner. From my perspective, I would say this could be one of the more significant parts of the study - it could mean that the prions are stable enough to not need a cellular carrier, and could potentially be picked up through secondary contact.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
don't stand don't stand so close to me ......
The accusations fly
Its no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by nabakov ...
Dont stand, dont stand so
Dont stand so close to me
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
That would be silly... Either giving them money is more efficient or running their program is more efficient by a "work done per dollar" metric.
If as the GP claims giving them money gets more work done than spending that same amount of money on your power bill for the extra processing then you wouldn't do both - instead of donating money and running the software, you'd donate more money.
If running the software is actually more efficient (there would be administrative overhead associated with just giving them money after all) then yes donating additional money after you use up all your available cycles is reasonable, but that's not the GP's claim.
then they wouldnt be spare cpu cycles then, would they?
and with processor frequency scaling, i admittedly have even less of these "spare" cycles to spare.
wouldnt it make more sense to use ACPI to power off my pc when im not using it? id be donating spare kw/hr's to research labs in the area. not to mention a bit of spare bandwidth.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Shot of a Prius with a monster-truck lift kit,
driven by some hayseed from Appalachia,
head and arm sticking out the window,
coming down a huge hill to pick up speed,
bearing down on cattle arranged along a riverbank,
hitting a ramp and sailing over the 'species barrier',
with a triumphant 'Woo hoo!'
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Some people already leave PCs up and running with programs that keep disks spinning and monitors on. If so the loss is probably not really noticeable.
lol: You see no door there!
One more step toward the titorian worldline!
we'll see if mccain gets elected and starts ww3 with russia (also looking probable)
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Mutating in species jumps!
Dude, if you're married, you're paying more per lay than anyone.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Here is a shop in Germany: http://www.webshop-innovatek.de/assets/s2dmain.html?http://www.webshop-innovatek.de/00000094271139704/000000942713b3501/50142494350d4401b/index.html
These are the radiators.
I don't know where to get them in the USA tough.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You *could* do it. It just would not ...ehem... look that cool. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Cynicism is the perfect philosophy for a man without a soul, as Wilde said. A lot of marriages are quite different from favour exchanges.
No, they don't.
The Incremental Heat Rate of the generators is higher at night when the load is low. This is why Pumped Storage is sometimes used to reduce the effective diversity in the load.
Milalwi
The 2006 election, when the D's took over both houses of congress, there were dozens of pro-life Democratic congressional candidates.
Last wednesday, at the RNC, there were SIXTEEN black people on the floor of the convention hall out of nearly 15 thousand.
Archangel Michael, you are simply not paying attention. Maybe it's because you're listening to too much talk radio or something, but you are so wrong.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You should see what the Black community says about Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas and Michael Steele. See what they said about Bill Cosby, when he called to task his own community. It is no wonder that most are (D).
I am paying attention, I just understand that the black leadership is mostly (D) because it enslaves another generation of blacks to failed politics of race baiting and class warfare. As if the (D) party has done anything to actually help get people out of the Gettos.
Talk about failed leadership. The problem is that everyone still expects the government to hand them something for "nothing" and then squanders it. Katrina Cash cards are a great example. Being spent on strippers and guns and ...... rather than buying things to improve one's life (computer, education ....)
The failed leadership of BOTH (R) and (D) in this regard is HUGE. Government being Paternal to a whole race is just evil. It is modern Slavery and Racist. It is sick.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This was originally suspected, then researched in the seventies to early eighties. Prions (or whatever undiscovered mini virus that causes them.) were first discovered and named at that time. They were first seen to be infective in a disease called Kuru in a tribe in New Guinea and was later linked to how they prepared their dead, as part of the ritual involved the women relatives of the deceased eating a piece of the deceased brain. Then they showed up in the UK (plaque forming encephalic disease called 'scrapie' in sheep, to animal protein in feed, feed to cow, MAD COW, cow to meatpacker, cow to beef, beef to hamburger, hamburger to humans) then later in the US: (researching a disproportionate ratio of Creutzfeldt-Jakob among families whom had a member who hunted to provide extra food on the table, researchers started testing the animals that these families were known to eat. It was found that in the southern states where it was a custom to fry and eat the brains of squirrels, 'mad squirrel' was in abundance in the wild squirrel population. and a plaque forming encephalic disease similar to scrapie and mad cow was common among the elk and deer populations throughout.
All Nature or the lab in question seems to be attempting to build up hype and fear mongering, and they are misrepresenting the actual research they have done as new and unique.
I can't actually tell atm which of the parties is responsible as the article is behind a "You need to pay for a subscription to read this article in full" barrier, I usually get my Nature mags at the library book sale for a quarter a piece.
-Magdalene --"there are 10 types of people in the world, those who read binary, and those who don't"