Slashdot Mirror
Arsenic-Friendly Microbe Now Seems Unlikely
The Associated Press (as carried by the Washington Post) reports that the controversial report of arsenic-based life-forms in a California lake (much hyped by NASA) look suddenly less controversial, but in a way that will disappoint those who hoped that such an unexpected thing had actually been found on earth. Instead, the journal Science "released two papers that rip apart the original research. They 'clearly show' that the bacteria can't use arsenic as the researchers claimed, said an accompanying statement from the journal." USA Today's version of the story points out that the claim, and subsequent considered rejection of that claim as unsupportable, "looks like a case study in how science corrects its mistakes."
Try school locker rooms there are lots of friendly bacteria there.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
It's nice to see that the matter was cleared up relatively quickly(the media circus wasn't pretty; but it could have been worse).
On the minus side, arsenic-crazed bacteria are a rather cool theory to have dashed against the rocks of callous empiricism. Hopefully some sort of selective breeding experiment can succeed where nature has failed, and give us an organism that substitutes some or all of its phosphorus for arsenic...
and unfortunately a win for the nutters who say that we (the earth) are the only life made by God.
Baseless claim followed by ludicrous proposal followed by religious nuttery. 2/10 troll.
slow on the draw there, I see.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
It's too bad. The author of the original research was totally hot.
Just to give you perspective, the entire wealth of Bill Gates would fund the federal government for 5 days. It's kind of depressing how little the richest man in the world could actually accomplish.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Space Elevators and Arsenic friendly bacteria... These are the examples provided by those who advocate wealth confiscation as superior appropriations of the earth's limited resources than would otherwise be made by the proposed victim of asset forfeiture... Bill Gates, you know? The philanthropist and founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, a charity which has squandered the money in question on such petty causes as CURING MALARIA!
If you were looking you could not find a better example of why social engineered redistribution of wealth is less beneficial to society than leaving it the hands of the people who accumulated it in the first place.
Just in case anyone thought the above morons were on to something, the nationalization of private property would cause an instant market panic which would destabilize the economy and translate in to a DECREASE in government revenues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Curing malaria is compounding the "limited resources" problem. Applying your reasoning suggests we should confiscate more, not less.
Judge it by the number of comments. THe other day I did about the same thing except I spent a little more time on it, and I got about 70 comments. Today I slacked off, granted.
ROFL
Thanks for that.
I find it reassuring, actually. I don't want to live in a world where any one man has so much wealth that he can fund a country of over three hundred million for a significant length of time. Wealth disparity in this country is bad enough as is.
Of course we should keep in mind that his "wealth" is represented largely by stocks in a company that he helped build and presently employs thousands of people. At this point in the chain, it becomes less an issue of Mr Gates owning such a large % of a company, but whether the existence and business practices of that company are having a net benefit to society relative to not having ever existed at all. Secondly, had it been some other company that ended up taking their place in the market, if their CEO would have ended up performing the same degree of philanthropy that Mr. Gates presently does.
I can think of better things to with billions of dollars than create strange bacteria. The space elevator comes to mind.
Craig Venter already made an artificial bacterium. Pretty sure there has been at least one slashdot story covering it. Making artificial life is kind of a "We are going to land on the moon" type achievement. A lot was learned or will be learned along the way, like how to manipulate large amounts of DNA sequences, and requirements for life. The longer term goal seems to be to make bacteria that will eat oil spills, or make oil or whatever else we want. Organic nanomachines.
I don't know a whole lot about it, there's plenty of information out there about it that I'm not too interested in reading, but I do know it can't be simply written off as useless. In fact, from what I know, it could be more useful than a space elevator. Space elevators have little chance of reversing global warming, for example, but it's conceivable that we could make microbes that would eat up the excess carbon. Lets not get into an argument about which future technology will be useful, obviously.
Anyway, progress on the two are hardly mutually exclusive.
Space Elevators and Arsenic friendly bacteria... These are the examples provided by those who advocate wealth confiscation as superior appropriations of the earth's limited resources than would otherwise be made by the proposed victim of asset forfeiture... Bill Gates, you know? The philanthropist and founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, a charity which has squandered the money in question on such petty causes as CURING MALARIA!
If you were looking you could not find a better example of why social engineered redistribution of wealth is less beneficial to society than leaving it the hands of the people who accumulated it in the first place.
Just in case anyone thought the above morons were on to something, the nationalization of private property would cause an instant market panic which would destabilize the economy and translate in to a DECREASE in government revenues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
He should have called it the Arthur curve.
"...the claim, and subsequent considered rejection of that claim as unsupportable "looks like a case study in how science corrects its mistakes."..."
You mean that the original proposers banded together, refused to make their research data available to people who wanted to check it and then tried to prevent any opposing discussion in the journals by rejecting all dissenting papers, and pressuring committees to sack any editor who objected to this?
Oh, sorry, I was thinking about climate 'science'....
That is the one thing great about science. Science admits its wrongs...
Religion simply can not do that because GOD IS NEVER WRONG...grrrrr blarggggg ahhhhhhh
"That's right...I said it."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/07/06/science.1219861 and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/07/06/science.1218455
That artificial bacteria is a modded bacteria. 100% re-sequenced means modded, starting from existing stuff. Very useful for scientific purposes, irrelevant philosophically, like an arsenic based life form would have been.
A better approach is design an abstraction, a simulation, which ultimately leads to self conscious beings. That is achievable IMHO, for sufficiently complex simulation rules running for sufficient time.
But, even that doesn't necessarily imply an atheistic model of this universe. Sure it would be acclaimed as a big victory against religions (instead, life as a product of transformations of matter in time is still compatible with a creator that obviously belongs outside the space/time he is in charge of).
But in the long run, playing god would instead be useful as a change of perspective.
The original study was published in Science, one of the most prestigious journals with high rejection rate. Just another proof highly selective journals by commercial publishers don't decide to publish based on technical correctness but on trendiness. Sensationalistic papers are accepted even if they are technically incorrect, technically correct but non trendy ones are rejected because they're too boring. This is the biggest problem with commercial scientific publishing, they have no incentive to publish correct science, only incentives to publish science that get them in the newpapers.
America the false research paper company.
I never said we should do it. I'm just saying that the space elevator would be an extremely useful device vaulting America into the next era of space technology and discovery. It's actually technologically possible right now. It just requires a large investment of capital. The payoff would be a ridiculously cheaper and safer way to get cargo into outer space. Right now, all we have the shuttle which costs over 10,000 a pound to lift cargo up and blows up approximately 1% of the time.
I don't buy in to the "more humans = bad" paradigm. It's well known that the highest birth rates are in impoverished countries that have high infant mortality. Humans are instinctively driven to grow population levels so the unintended consequence to 3rd world living conditions is an increased growth rate relative to 1st world countries. John the middle class only-child has n-resources required in his upbringing, while if 6 children die before John VII the Sub-Saharan African child survives, he has N*7 resources necessary to bring him to adulthood.
If the middle class child consumes some multiple of N beyond the requirement, it is not a fundamental flaw in human existence, but an opportunity created by the market inefficiency of 3rd world child-rearing. John the middle class child will likely contribute significantly more to society in the form of taxes than it cost to raise him making him financially exothermic. Meanwhile, based on the same idea of human capital, John the African child is likely endothermic based on the broken window fallacy type destruction resulting from the spread of disease caused by his & his 6 predecessors infected blood.
Bottom line, if the average human consumed more than they produced, we would all be starving. The majority of humanity may be useless wastes of flesh, but the ones who get off their ass and earn even a modest paycheck contribute a surprising amount to government revenues, even if only by proxy through the taxation of the goods they purchase and the associated incomes that went in to their production.
A trivial investment in education and basic preventative medicine yields a stunningly high ROI from tax revenues on the economic activity created. Malaria medication and mosquito netting are literally worth their weight in gold, even if the dividends are hard to track or quantify.
My point is, when everyone shows up to the government coffers with their pet project's hand out, including my malaria tin cup, you quickly find tax revenues allocated to more pet projects than can be sustained, and quite like a credit addicted american consumer, no one wants to pay for yesterday's shiny pet project financed with easy tomorrow dollars today. Democracy is not a practical way of allocating resources which is a job best left to markets and philanthropy. Not the kind with other people's money.
I never said we should do it. I'm just saying that the space elevator would be an extremely useful device vaulting America into the next era of space technology and discovery. It's actually technologically possible right now. It just requires a large investment of capital. The payoff would be a ridiculously cheaper and safer way to get cargo into outer space. Right now, all we have the shuttle which costs over 10,000 a pound to lift cargo up and blows up approximately 1% of the time..
Yes science is very good at correcting mistakes in controversial ideas. That is why everyone can be assured that things like the evolution theory are well proven now.
Where I sometimes have my doubts is about claims that sound logical, but are not really proven.
The original study was flawed to its core and was believed by noone with a little bit of expertise... all the "controversy" thingy was just the media having fun.
A scientist
To keep those fat grant checks rolling in.
Yes, yes, Good Science has corrected Bad Science, but the people that did that Bad Science should go and consult on Discovery Channel "docu-dramas" rather than stinking up academia with their attention whoring claims.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think you need to go back to economics school. If the all property were nationalized, sure the income tax would decrease, but that doesn't mean that GDP has stopped or decreased. In fact I assume that if the government were tax the money people used for consumer spending, and instead invest the money into capital infrastructure, that it would increase our productivity, employment, and after tax income vs CPI.
When you have billions (in value or cash), it's easy to be philanthropic.
I'm infinitely more impressed by the guy who was earning 20k and had pledged to give a million away within ten years. And was doing it.
Right now, all we have the shuttle
No, you don't
You are such a rube if you think that someone who in 10 years earns $200k can donate $1 million and live. Perhaps if he was living in a monastery and on the charity of others and he was involved in a huge ponzi scheme he could pull that off. And if you are talking about someone who heads up a charitable organization and that's his take-home while he guides other people's money into some cause somewhere, then I can also guarantee you that he is living off of someone else's money somewhere in the chain, either in his living arrangement (either rent controlled or belonging to someone else) or via some other annuity that he gained from someone else (inheritance) or from his own work and investment. Either way he's pulling down more than $20k somewhere. This is also known as simple math.
Wasn't this article about arsenic? You should try some. I hear it's delicious.
Sounds like these folks made the same error as the original author. Let us not speculate on weather the arsenic has been assimilated into critical molecules inside the organism. Let them instead determine the chemical composition of the actual molecules in the organism and say definitively what is going on. I for one took the original research as somewhat speculative since they had not done this, and hence a call to others to do proper analysis. So now the others have apparently done more incomplete research. I may be misinterpreting that "can't use arsenic" is not the same as "does not use arsenic". It's hard to tell without reading the original works.
Confusion is one of the effects of arsenic poisoning; I suggest the AC go to the doctor immediately.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
...she apparently published a paper in 2009 talking about how arsenic may have been used in the past and might be used now. Then in 2010 she happens to find an example?
She isn't good looking, she has a square jaw and looks ten years older than her 33 years.
She also has an atrocious personality, the way she handled herself in light of criticism, and to think that she made a Times 100 list.
Fucking atrocious. This is why I hate it when "Science" is used an an anthropomorphism for a group of gallant and intelligent people in white coats working around the clock.
Newsflash: Most people are stupid, this also applies to people who are following scientific methodology to some degree, to find answer to something for someone.
Stop the intellectual vanity, stop the bullshit.
You liar.
> That is the one thing great about science. Science admits its wrongs...
"Science" as a group of people in a loosely related industry, is as pious and religious as any other group of people.
She didn't admit any mistake, question any methods, she gripped onto her statements with ego and a religious fanaticism. And it happens every day.
Stop the intellectual vanity, stop the bullshit.
Spreading rumors about nationalization of an industry is the type of thing people do when shorting a stock. The type of eminent domain compensation we gave to General Motors isn't realistic when the property being seized is money. Asset forfeiture on the scale of taking the entire fortune of one of the world's most prominent philanthropists would shake the foundations of confidence in US property rights and instantly undermine the value of any company based in the United States, as well as the US dollar. If they did it on a Monday, the DJIA would be down 1000 points by Friday. Everyone except retail investors would be pulling the plug out of the bathtub as they made a run on the stock market in an attempt to movie their money in to the Asian Markets/elsewhere.
You argue against the confiscation of wealth by referencing how much good was done with a tiny fraction of that wealth when voluntarily surrendered? Added to how much we're finding out about the Gates Foundation's self-centered investments, I don't think you thought your cunning argument all the way through.
Apparently you didn't notice that the Shuttles are now on their way to various museums around the country. Damn, stupid, ignorant AND uninformed. That's quite a combination you've got going there.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Thank you for the article, Timothy. I would have never seen the retraction without it. I would have kept on believing that bacteria can grow in any planetary environment. In 1996, NASA claimed Cyanobacteria where found in Meteorites - debunked in same magazine ( http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2057461,00.html ). I am tired of scientists who foist their beliefs on us. In 1994, at the University of Bonn, Guido Zadel was found spiking the chemical solution in an experiment "proving" earth's magnetic field could select the correct building blocks of life. (Science, July 1, 1994). To explain, all living organisms are built out of left-handed amino acids enantiomers (See 1). But in a theorized prebiotic soup, right handed D (dextro) amino acids are ever-present in the solution 50/50. Like a poison to life, they produce useless malformed proteins because the amino acid chains fold in the wrong direction when proteins are manufactured. Currently, only fully-formed life can efficiently select L amino acids on the scale required to feed a living ( reproducing ) manufacturing plants of manufacturing machines that we call a cell. Breitmaier and Zadel were trying to "solve the problem" with a hoax and gain notoriety for doing so. Hoaxes require a motive. I think they are desperately trying to prop up their dead theory until they find that elusive evidence that exonerates it. In 1808, John Dalton started modern atomic theory. Decade after decade, it opened up avenues of research. We consistently generated scientific laws based on the initial premise — ultimately finding the Higgs Boson to complete the standard model. Darwin proposed evolution in 1859. By now, we should have scientific laws culled from the initial premise. We should not be finding lethal problems with the initial theory. Scientists are still mucking about with failed fruit fly experiments. They are on the 600th generation ( see 2 ). Anyone who claims to know the truth about the origins of life is following a religion no matter if it is disguised in the language of science. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiral#Chemistry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid#Isomerism 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844486
He is not the richest man in the world. That guy lives in Mexico. I doubt that will help your depression.
Bill Gates, you know? The philanthropist and founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, a charity which has squandered the money in question on such petty causes as CURING MALARIA!
If you were looking you could not find a better example of why social engineered redistribution of wealth is less beneficial to society than leaving it the hands of the people who accumulated it in the first place.
Just in case anyone thought the above morons were on to something, the nationalization of private property would cause an instant market panic which would destabilize the economy and translate in to a DECREASE in government revenues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
So let me get this straight: Bill breaks off a little chump-change from the mountain of ill-gotten gains he has horded over the years, stealing from his betters, and you want to drop to your knees and suck his dick? Christ you're a fucking faggot. The money he philanthropically donates a tiny fraction of DOES NOT BELONG TO HIM, and in any non-fucked-up, society where the legal branch of the government's calling itself "the justice system" isn't ironic, he'd be in fucking JAIL right next to Madoff. He'd be in the next cell, locked the fuck up where he belongs, instead of having people fawn over him. What a joke.
A "news" conference by the principles of the original Science paper flanked by a NASA Program Mgr are refuting the refuters according to a story on msnbc.com (even a principle refuter in one of the new papers called NASA's actions ... "cowardly".
OH BOY! $$$$ at stake (NASA and NSF).
LoL
A standard space elevator isn't actually technologically possible right now. We still don't have materials strong enough to make a tether that can reach that far without breaking under its own weight, even with an optimal shape. Don't say graphene, by the way. It might be strong enough, but we still can't actually manufacture it in enough quantity to even test the idea. Also, since graphene is naturally a sheet, you'd have to roll it up into tubes, in which case it's just carbon nanotubes, which we've know about even longer than graphene and which we can't make in sufficient quantity or length to test either.
Believe me, I'm all for a space elevator or some similar technology to make access to space either, but we're just not there yet. We do, however, have all of the actual technology (if not the practical experience, which we'll have to learn by doing) to make various other technologies for accessing space more easily. Skyhooks, for example, might allow us to boost cargo launched on high-altitude planes or dirigibles. We might also be able to construct a launch loop. We probably also have all the necessary tech to build a space elevator that anchors to an orbital ring a hundred kilometers up rather than at geosynchronous orbit.
Hmm, couldn't resist posting myself, but I have to point out that all of this is in response to a ridiculous troll post. It's probably unhealthy to contribute to the off-topic thread.
Apparently you didn't notice that the Shuttles are now on their way to various museums around the country. Damn, stupid, ignorant AND uninformed. That's quite a combination you've got going there.
I agree, the gradual, ever-increasing slide into the abyss of mediocrity...SQUIRREL!!!
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Cutting through the Chaff on this:
The original 2010 paper is:
a) fraud
b) just wrong (with NASA, NFS, Reviewers, several Universities and Science Mag Shit Faced in a serious way, i.e. money loosing way).
So, Arsenic based life does not exist just as the Anthropocene does not exist.
Err ... except in the minds of the ... worshipers, i.e. true believers.
Church service at 9:30 am and general worship at 11:00 am. Y'all cum.
LoL