This is a bad way to maximize the flux of cars through the roadway. The three or two second rule is designed to maximize safety in relatively empty roadways; it would increase traffic congestion if applied in areas where many cars need to travel along a particular roadway in a constrained period of time.
Journals don't pay their authors, and even if they did, the amount of money involved would be insignificant compared to the cost of research.
The amount of research that goes into an average biology paper, including salaries, is probably on the order of $250k. Full costs for publishing are around $10k, and journals generally do only marginally better than break even.
Open access papers don't have anything to do with funding research--they are just a way for information to be widely disseminated.
The best short book I know of on the subject is Kaj Nielsen's "Math for Practical Use". It's out of print, but it's brief, clear, and contains just enough to get the point across. (Additional books for drills can be helpful if you want to be fast--and honestly, if you're too slow, you may as well not have the skill at all.)
At the other extreme, the VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics contains most math you'd want to know.
Finally, doing math is a skill, and it's cumulative. Practice. You may need to practice your algebra in order to do trigonometry. You may need to practice your fractions to do algebra. You may need to practice your arithmetic tables in order to do fractions.
The key to using technology effectively is to not think about the technology. Think about how to convey information to students. How long does it really take for a concept to sink in? Actually doing math or physics is a skill; it takes practice (i.e. homework), and it is a process not an answer. If you can use technology to show the process in action at a speed at which students can absorb it, you are using technology well.
Never use technology to avoid taking time to write something. Guess what? If you don't write it, they don't have time to either. And if you provide notes, then they won't even take the time to listen--why bother, your students will think, when I can just read the notes?
What you want to do is take them through the process, slowly, with examples, showing how to do the manipulations and explaining why at each stage a decision is made. (If you have to deal with moderate numbers of students who no longer remember how to do algebra--and you almost certainly will--you may need to elect to leave them behind; if you have huge numbers of such students, you'd better go through how to do algebra again!)
Here's one way that I've used a tablet to be helpful. You can start with a well-designed picture or graph, then draw all over it while you're explaining a concept. You can show a short movie of an interesting phenomenon, then dissect the process, e.g. by taking out frames and scribbling equations on them.
One big mistake that people make is thinking either that computers are useless and shouldn't be used for homework, or in thinking that the fundamentals are useless and you should just teach people to do derivatives with Mathematica. It's a waste of time for almost everyone to do math by hand these days if they have access to a symbolic package. But they had better understand _exactly_ how the operations work and under what conditions they fail, or they're liable to have the symbolic package perform nonsense.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with teaching is that students don't come in with the right background. And a tablet can't fix that.
The worm shown in the picture in the article is probably about 200 microns long, not 1 mm--the one shown is recently hatched, not an adult. You can tell because adult worms do not have a pharynx that takes up nearly half the length of the body. Also, in adults you'd be able to see reproductive structures (including eggs).
Sure. But you also have to consider how difficult it is to support something that one platform does really poorly.
For example, our Linux machines have a NFS server. Fast, completely transparent, utterly painless networked file handling. (Yes, NFS has problems in general, but in the environment we have they're not important.) As far as I know, NFS has generated zero support issues. Our Windows machines have a Samba server. If Samba had been our only file server, I would have had to call personally at least four times for various problems ranging from slow performance to certain versions of XP refusing to allow logging into multiple Samba shares as different users. But I can get most things done by using NFS under Linux instead.
As another example, I run expensive supposedly cross-platform software for data acquisition. Getting it to run under Linux or Windows is easy. Getting it to run and work properly is easy under Windows and I still haven't figured it out under Linux. I could submit a bunch of time-consuming support tickets, or I could just use the Windows version. I use the Windows version.
And then I need remote access to computational utilities and software while on trips (sometimes without fast connections). Linux again--or OS X for my colleagues who like the interface. Or we could try to use Windows and have support issues with VPN software and number of allowed users and so on.
So, yes, you need support people who understand multiple platforms. But you also don't need to support using the wrong software for your problem just because you have standardized on one platform.
Supporting four platforms and getting them to play nicely together if you are starting with a large base of one platform where everything that works has been done without regard to using other platforms. Switching to a multi-platform solution would be a nightmare, especially when the original base is commercial ("Vendor lock-in"). As a business strategy, it wouldn't make sense to switch.
But supporting four platforms when you start off with that as your goal is not as much of a nightmare. We have the same thing where I am, and other than occasional recurring problems involving Windows not understanding that everything else is not also Windows, the support is actually better than if it were a one-platform area, since each platform is used in that area where it does best.
If you need to run specialized commercial software for data capture or analysis, you need Windows. Very few companies support anything else. Those that do (e.g. National Instruments) offer only a subset of their tools which aren't well integrated into the platforms.
If you just need a computer that is pretty and powerful and you don't have to worry about, you need OS X. Stuff just works; you can forget about the computing and focus on the research.
If you are in research that involves computation or statistics, you need Linux. The standard tools are more powerful and flexible than anything you can find under Windows, and the headache of getting these to work on a Mac more than offsets the slightly smoother interface in some areas.
And from what I've seen, researchers' preferences in these fields tend to follow the needs above. (People who are mostly interested in data collection/hardware interface generally prefer Windows, biology researchers generally like Macs, bioinformatics folks like Linux, etc..)
But the gun nuts in Iraq are losing repeatedly against our professional military force: we go into an area, kill several hundred of them, and maybe lose two or three people.
The problem is that they keep fighting anyway, even if they ought to know that they will lose. And we don't have enough people to keep them from organizing anywhere. Nor can we do so by enacting harsh measures, because the more we do that the more we are a hostile occupying power, which drives more people into the insurgency.
Gravity, in the F=-G*m*M/R^2 sense, is pretty clearly defined (classically). If you have some other relationship--let's say F=-k*x--then you don't call it "gravity". If you can do something like that with God, then maybe you can get somewhere.
Of course, there are all sorts of really interesting effects that faith has upon people. It is well-documented that what people think and feel can impact their behavior and health considerably. So, if people are knocked off their feet "by God", and that's evidence, what about the meditative states of Buddhist monks? They certainly can do some pretty unusual things regarding respiration and heart rate and so on. You don't have to go very far to find rare, well-documented, kind of unusual outcomes from lots of faiths. Given that these faiths, collectively, have just about nothing whatsoever in common, I don't see how one could conclude that these things happen for the reasons that *any* of them think that they happen.
P.S. Do you believe that illness is caused by possession by the Devil (or demons or whatever)? Why not?
P.P.S. Yes, for me anyway, the Scientific Method is good enough because it provides the most accurate known method of uncovering how the world works and being able to predict how things will occur, and because although it has errors, those errors are within an acceptable margin.
They are, and if you were living in Iraq, owning firearms would make some difference in your ability to overthrow the government, should you choose to do that.
But we were speaking of the U.S.. The same is not true here.
The insurgents in Iraq are not a credible threat to our forces there, just a highly annoying source of ongoing low-level casualties that are undesired in an entirely optional overseas military deployment. And they only do significant damage when they use military-grade hardware or explosives that can be made from substances that are not regulated in the U.S.. My comment stands.
Unless you own military-grade hardware (RPGs, attack helicopters, etc.), it won't make much of a difference whether you have pepper spray or an M16. Any organized group with that level of firepower is not a credible threat to the government.
If you are a skilled professional in a certain area, and you need to earn a living with wages comparable to those you're receiving in the area of your profession, you're usually pretty stuck. You're being compensated for your professional skills. The primary option there is to switch into a management-related career track (initially managing the same thing you were doing hands-on before).
If you've acquired sufficient savings so that your career needs to only partially support you (or you're willing to live more modestly), and you're trying to optimize satisfaction/happiness, then you have to ask what you find satisfying. For example, if you find intellectual inquiry satisfying, switching to some sort of scientific field makes sense--and there are plenty of ways to take advantage of one's existing IT experience in many scientific areas (e.g. high performance computing is relevant to biophysics and bioinformatics and astrophysics and climate modeling; image processing is relevant to microscopy (optical and EM) and manufacturing (for defect detection, for instance) and biology (quantification of behavior, for instance)). If you have any hobbies that can be monetized, those are another class of options (cooking -> chef, travel -> tour guide, computer gaming -> computer games journalist, etc.).
If you've acquired enough savings so that your career doesn't need to support you at all, then the range of options is even wider. Start a company making a kind of widget that you always wished existed? Help the campaign of your favorite politician? Pick a social issue--genocide in Darfur? oppression in Zimbabwe? 128-bit numbers as an illegal circumvention device? sex slave trade?--and get involved with others who feel strongly about the issue and are trying to make a positive impact. These types of things tend to be quite satisfying, if you pick carefully, but they do not pay well at all (so you had better not need a robust income).
I am not a statistician, but r is the correlation coefficient. r^2 is the square of the correlation coefficient. However, unfortunately, people who frequently report r^2 instead of r tend to call r^2 the "correlation coefficient". So you generally have to look at the formula they're using, or hope that they give the variable name.
Yeah, I didn't check my calculations before posting (always a bad idea when saying that someone else is wrong--I had 16 instead of 12 in one spot). And I didn't check the Fisher exact test to see if they were close enough, which they weren't at all. Your numbers for the Fisher exact test look right.
You're also right about the experimental design being iffy. That isn't how I would have set it up. But given that that's how it was set up, one could at least do reasonable statistics.
Not only was MythBusters embarassingly statistics-free, but the "busting" was done using a wholly inappropriate statistical technique. Hansen used a correlation-based test, which assumes that the data follows a Normal distribution (which a bunch of 1s and 0s do not).
There is a very well-known test, the chi-square test, that deals with exactly this case. (Given the small sample sizes, the Fisher exact test may give better results.) Someone should point Hansen to the Wikipedia page on the topic.
For example, if there are 16 non-primed people, with 4 yawning and 12 not (for 25%), and there are 34 primed people, with 10 yawning and 24 not (for 29%), the chi square test gives a p value of 0.74.
The values Hansen supposes are significant 4,12 and 12,24 are not: p = 0.29.
You have to go all the way to 4,12 and 17,19 (i.e. 47% on a sample of 36) to get significance.
MythBusters was wrong to conclude that their results were significant, but Hansen was equally wrong to conclude that he had shown that Mythbusters was wrong.
Aren't we saying the same thing? I'm saying that Plasmodium will develop resistance if given a favorable environment in which to do so, and you are saying that it already has because we gave it too much of a chance.
Now, as to details of whether the SM1-expressing mosquitos will do the trick, if drug-resistant P. falciparum has spread widely it means both that the reproduction ratio has got to be pretty high *and* that humans represent a major source of infection for moquitos. So that means that to get a rapid die-off of P. falciparum, we'd need to have a very large effect on the reproduction ratio, which the current method doesn't have (infection is reduced by about 80% in carriers, and there are still going to be ~20% non-carriers). So it will give P. falciparum plenty of time to come up with a good mutation or two, and then those will spread just like the drug-resistance mutations have.
So alone it's unlikely to work. If used in combination with the widespread introduction of a new anti-malarial drug, for example, as I proposed before, we might (almost) eradicate malaria.
You make a good point, but keep in mind that Plasmodium is going to develop resistance since there will be extremely strong selective pressure on Plasmodium in this mixed environment. So you have to not just eventually eradicate the disease, but do so fast enough so that resistance can't develop before you've effectively destroyed it. So before deploying this as a solution, you at least want to have some idea about mutation rates, or use this as part of a multi-pronged strategy (e.g. kill 98% of mosquitos, then introduce these as the population starts to rebound, while simultaneously giving humans and livestock antimalarial drugs, and then when the population appears to have crashed to approximately zero, stop all these interventions so you don't provide a selective advantage for resistant survivors; if malaria comes back, repeat).
As far as I know, at that level, DDT is toxic to a lot of other things, too. And this is a case where bioaccumulation-type phenomena are important, since DDT preferentially partitions into fat.
The answer to all statements of the type "Just use (toxin)" is that you'll end up with (toxin)-resistant mosquitos, and then you're back where you started. In cases where you need some temporary relief, and the known toxic effects of DDT are less bad than the thing that you want relief from, sure, use it. But don't expect it to be a long-term solution.
The protein that is introduced is specific for malaria. And that is specific for the entry of Plasmodium, the protozoa (i.e. eukaryote) that causes malaria. I's not a virus, not even a bacterium. So your fears are unfounded, at least in the form that you stated them.
The PNAS study shows an additional effect that isn't quite covered by the blurb above: heterozygous mosquitos (those with only one copy of the gene) are more fit than homozygous mosquitos (those with two copies). This means that there is pressure to retain a large number of heterozygous individuals, which means there will be a mixed population of transgenic and non-transgenic mosquitos. While this might help humans in the short run (a smaller fraction of the mosquitos you're bitten by would carry Plasmodium, the malaria parasite), in the long run it pretty much guarantees that people will still get malaria, and the malaria parasite will have lots of opportunities to develop resistance to the introduced gene.
So it's a nice idea--and it would be more effective than releasing low-fitness transgenic mosquitos--but it's not quite there yet.
As to fears of biomagnification, mosquitos generally don't deal with stress by producing toxic compounds (unlike plants, who only have that option), and the transgenic protein is a protein and hence digestable. So it's very unlikely that there would be anything to magnify. Instead of worrying about creating toxic mosquitos, we should make sure that when we actually hit Plasmodium with drugs and modified mosquitos and so on, that we make things so difficult for it that it really devastates its population. Otherwise, we're just conducting a transgenic-mosquito-resistant Plasmodium breeding experiment. (Plasmodium has already developed at least some resistance to most common anti-malarial drugs).
You didn't actually read what I wrote, did you? Dissolving of anything changes membrane properties. Changed membrane properties can affect ion channels. If there is good evidence that anaesthetics do *not* change ion channel properties, then there might be a reason to think about solitons.
I'm not aware of the experiments showing membrane thickening. Please provide a reference. Likewise with the temperature decrease. Both of these sound very difficult to do correctly.
Also, insects run around just fine when switched between 15C and 30C (ever seen ants running on a stove?). That doesn't bode well for theories that require a temperature-sensitive phase transition to get action potential propagation.
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This is a bad way to maximize the flux of cars through the roadway. The three or two second rule is designed to maximize safety in relatively empty roadways; it would increase traffic congestion if applied in areas where many cars need to travel along a particular roadway in a constrained period of time.
Journals don't pay their authors, and even if they did, the amount of money involved would be insignificant compared to the cost of research.
The amount of research that goes into an average biology paper, including salaries, is probably on the order of $250k. Full costs for publishing are around $10k, and journals generally do only marginally better than break even.
Open access papers don't have anything to do with funding research--they are just a way for information to be widely disseminated.
The best short book I know of on the subject is Kaj Nielsen's "Math for Practical Use". It's out of print, but it's brief, clear, and contains just enough to get the point across. (Additional books for drills can be helpful if you want to be fast--and honestly, if you're too slow, you may as well not have the skill at all.)
At the other extreme, the VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics contains most math you'd want to know.
Finally, doing math is a skill, and it's cumulative. Practice. You may need to practice your algebra in order to do trigonometry. You may need to practice your fractions to do algebra. You may need to practice your arithmetic tables in order to do fractions.
The key to using technology effectively is to not think about the technology. Think about how to convey information to students. How long does it really take for a concept to sink in? Actually doing math or physics is a skill; it takes practice (i.e. homework), and it is a process not an answer. If you can use technology to show the process in action at a speed at which students can absorb it, you are using technology well.
Never use technology to avoid taking time to write something. Guess what? If you don't write it, they don't have time to either. And if you provide notes, then they won't even take the time to listen--why bother, your students will think, when I can just read the notes?
What you want to do is take them through the process, slowly, with examples, showing how to do the manipulations and explaining why at each stage a decision is made. (If you have to deal with moderate numbers of students who no longer remember how to do algebra--and you almost certainly will--you may need to elect to leave them behind; if you have huge numbers of such students, you'd better go through how to do algebra again!)
Here's one way that I've used a tablet to be helpful. You can start with a well-designed picture or graph, then draw all over it while you're explaining a concept. You can show a short movie of an interesting phenomenon, then dissect the process, e.g. by taking out frames and scribbling equations on them.
One big mistake that people make is thinking either that computers are useless and shouldn't be used for homework, or in thinking that the fundamentals are useless and you should just teach people to do derivatives with Mathematica. It's a waste of time for almost everyone to do math by hand these days if they have access to a symbolic package. But they had better understand _exactly_ how the operations work and under what conditions they fail, or they're liable to have the symbolic package perform nonsense.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with teaching is that students don't come in with the right background. And a tablet can't fix that.
--Rex
The worm shown in the picture in the article is probably about 200 microns long, not 1 mm--the one shown is recently hatched, not an adult. You can tell because adult worms do not have a pharynx that takes up nearly half the length of the body. Also, in adults you'd be able to see reproductive structures (including eggs).
Sure. But you also have to consider how difficult it is to support something that one platform does really poorly.
For example, our Linux machines have a NFS server. Fast, completely transparent, utterly painless networked file handling. (Yes, NFS has problems in general, but in the environment we have they're not important.) As far as I know, NFS has generated zero support issues. Our Windows machines have a Samba server. If Samba had been our only file server, I would have had to call personally at least four times for various problems ranging from slow performance to certain versions of XP refusing to allow logging into multiple Samba shares as different users. But I can get most things done by using NFS under Linux instead.
As another example, I run expensive supposedly cross-platform software for data acquisition. Getting it to run under Linux or Windows is easy. Getting it to run and work properly is easy under Windows and I still haven't figured it out under Linux. I could submit a bunch of time-consuming support tickets, or I could just use the Windows version. I use the Windows version.
And then I need remote access to computational utilities and software while on trips (sometimes without fast connections). Linux again--or OS X for my colleagues who like the interface. Or we could try to use Windows and have support issues with VPN software and number of allowed users and so on.
So, yes, you need support people who understand multiple platforms. But you also don't need to support using the wrong software for your problem just because you have standardized on one platform.
Supporting four platforms and getting them to play nicely together if you are starting with a large base of one platform where everything that works has been done without regard to using other platforms. Switching to a multi-platform solution would be a nightmare, especially when the original base is commercial ("Vendor lock-in"). As a business strategy, it wouldn't make sense to switch.
But supporting four platforms when you start off with that as your goal is not as much of a nightmare. We have the same thing where I am, and other than occasional recurring problems involving Windows not understanding that everything else is not also Windows, the support is actually better than if it were a one-platform area, since each platform is used in that area where it does best.
As a researcher, I think it depends on the field.
If you need to run specialized commercial software for data capture or analysis, you need Windows. Very few companies support anything else. Those that do (e.g. National Instruments) offer only a subset of their tools which aren't well integrated into the platforms.
If you just need a computer that is pretty and powerful and you don't have to worry about, you need OS X. Stuff just works; you can forget about the computing and focus on the research.
If you are in research that involves computation or statistics, you need Linux. The standard tools are more powerful and flexible than anything you can find under Windows, and the headache of getting these to work on a Mac more than offsets the slightly smoother interface in some areas.
And from what I've seen, researchers' preferences in these fields tend to follow the needs above. (People who are mostly interested in data collection/hardware interface generally prefer Windows, biology researchers generally like Macs, bioinformatics folks like Linux, etc..)
But the gun nuts in Iraq are losing repeatedly against our professional military force: we go into an area, kill several hundred of them, and maybe lose two or three people.
The problem is that they keep fighting anyway, even if they ought to know that they will lose. And we don't have enough people to keep them from organizing anywhere. Nor can we do so by enacting harsh measures, because the more we do that the more we are a hostile occupying power, which drives more people into the insurgency.
Gravity, in the F=-G*m*M/R^2 sense, is pretty clearly defined (classically). If you have some other relationship--let's say F=-k*x--then you don't call it "gravity". If you can do something like that with God, then maybe you can get somewhere.
Of course, there are all sorts of really interesting effects that faith has upon people. It is well-documented that what people think and feel can impact their behavior and health considerably. So, if people are knocked off their feet "by God", and that's evidence, what about the meditative states of Buddhist monks? They certainly can do some pretty unusual things regarding respiration and heart rate and so on. You don't have to go very far to find rare, well-documented, kind of unusual outcomes from lots of faiths. Given that these faiths, collectively, have just about nothing whatsoever in common, I don't see how one could conclude that these things happen for the reasons that *any* of them think that they happen.
P.S. Do you believe that illness is caused by possession by the Devil (or demons or whatever)? Why not?
P.P.S. Yes, for me anyway, the Scientific Method is good enough because it provides the most accurate known method of uncovering how the world works and being able to predict how things will occur, and because although it has errors, those errors are within an acceptable margin.
They are, and if you were living in Iraq, owning firearms would make some difference in your ability to overthrow the government, should you choose to do that.
But we were speaking of the U.S.. The same is not true here.
You got it. That sounds like exactly the reason.
The insurgents in Iraq are not a credible threat to our forces there, just a highly annoying source of ongoing low-level casualties that are undesired in an entirely optional overseas military deployment. And they only do significant damage when they use military-grade hardware or explosives that can be made from substances that are not regulated in the U.S.. My comment stands.
Unless you own military-grade hardware (RPGs, attack helicopters, etc.), it won't make much of a difference whether you have pepper spray or an M16. Any organized group with that level of firepower is not a credible threat to the government.
If you are a skilled professional in a certain area, and you need to earn a living with wages comparable to those you're receiving in the area of your profession, you're usually pretty stuck. You're being compensated for your professional skills. The primary option there is to switch into a management-related career track (initially managing the same thing you were doing hands-on before).
If you've acquired sufficient savings so that your career needs to only partially support you (or you're willing to live more modestly), and you're trying to optimize satisfaction/happiness, then you have to ask what you find satisfying. For example, if you find intellectual inquiry satisfying, switching to some sort of scientific field makes sense--and there are plenty of ways to take advantage of one's existing IT experience in many scientific areas (e.g. high performance computing is relevant to biophysics and bioinformatics and astrophysics and climate modeling; image processing is relevant to microscopy (optical and EM) and manufacturing (for defect detection, for instance) and biology (quantification of behavior, for instance)). If you have any hobbies that can be monetized, those are another class of options (cooking -> chef, travel -> tour guide, computer gaming -> computer games journalist, etc.).
If you've acquired enough savings so that your career doesn't need to support you at all, then the range of options is even wider. Start a company making a kind of widget that you always wished existed? Help the campaign of your favorite politician? Pick a social issue--genocide in Darfur? oppression in Zimbabwe? 128-bit numbers as an illegal circumvention device? sex slave trade?--and get involved with others who feel strongly about the issue and are trying to make a positive impact. These types of things tend to be quite satisfying, if you pick carefully, but they do not pay well at all (so you had better not need a robust income).
I am not a statistician, but r is the correlation coefficient. r^2 is the square of the correlation coefficient. However, unfortunately, people who frequently report r^2 instead of r tend to call r^2 the "correlation coefficient". So you generally have to look at the formula they're using, or hope that they give the variable name.
Yeah, I didn't check my calculations before posting (always a bad idea when saying that someone else is wrong--I had 16 instead of 12 in one spot). And I didn't check the Fisher exact test to see if they were close enough, which they weren't at all. Your numbers for the Fisher exact test look right.
You're also right about the experimental design being iffy. That isn't how I would have set it up. But given that that's how it was set up, one could at least do reasonable statistics.
Not only was MythBusters embarassingly statistics-free, but the "busting" was done using a wholly inappropriate statistical technique. Hansen used a correlation-based test, which assumes that the data follows a Normal distribution (which a bunch of 1s and 0s do not).
There is a very well-known test, the chi-square test, that deals with exactly this case. (Given the small sample sizes, the Fisher exact test may give better results.) Someone should point Hansen to the Wikipedia page on the topic.
For example, if there are 16 non-primed people, with 4 yawning and 12 not (for 25%), and there are 34 primed people, with 10 yawning and 24 not (for 29%), the chi square test gives a p value of 0.74.
The values Hansen supposes are significant 4,12 and 12,24 are not: p = 0.29.
You have to go all the way to 4,12 and 17,19 (i.e. 47% on a sample of 36) to get significance.
MythBusters was wrong to conclude that their results were significant, but Hansen was equally wrong to conclude that he had shown that Mythbusters was wrong.
Aren't we saying the same thing? I'm saying that Plasmodium will develop resistance if given a favorable environment in which to do so, and you are saying that it already has because we gave it too much of a chance.
Now, as to details of whether the SM1-expressing mosquitos will do the trick, if drug-resistant P. falciparum has spread widely it means both that the reproduction ratio has got to be pretty high *and* that humans represent a major source of infection for moquitos. So that means that to get a rapid die-off of P. falciparum, we'd need to have a very large effect on the reproduction ratio, which the current method doesn't have (infection is reduced by about 80% in carriers, and there are still going to be ~20% non-carriers). So it will give P. falciparum plenty of time to come up with a good mutation or two, and then those will spread just like the drug-resistance mutations have.
So alone it's unlikely to work. If used in combination with the widespread introduction of a new anti-malarial drug, for example, as I proposed before, we might (almost) eradicate malaria.
You make a good point, but keep in mind that Plasmodium is going to develop resistance since there will be extremely strong selective pressure on Plasmodium in this mixed environment. So you have to not just eventually eradicate the disease, but do so fast enough so that resistance can't develop before you've effectively destroyed it. So before deploying this as a solution, you at least want to have some idea about mutation rates, or use this as part of a multi-pronged strategy (e.g. kill 98% of mosquitos, then introduce these as the population starts to rebound, while simultaneously giving humans and livestock antimalarial drugs, and then when the population appears to have crashed to approximately zero, stop all these interventions so you don't provide a selective advantage for resistant survivors; if malaria comes back, repeat).
As far as I know, at that level, DDT is toxic to a lot of other things, too. And this is a case where bioaccumulation-type phenomena are important, since DDT preferentially partitions into fat.
The answer to all statements of the type "Just use (toxin)" is that you'll end up with (toxin)-resistant mosquitos, and then you're back where you started. In cases where you need some temporary relief, and the known toxic effects of DDT are less bad than the thing that you want relief from, sure, use it. But don't expect it to be a long-term solution.
The protein that is introduced is specific for malaria. And that is specific for the entry of Plasmodium, the protozoa (i.e. eukaryote) that causes malaria. I's not a virus, not even a bacterium. So your fears are unfounded, at least in the form that you stated them.
The PNAS study shows an additional effect that isn't quite covered by the blurb above: heterozygous mosquitos (those with only one copy of the gene) are more fit than homozygous mosquitos (those with two copies). This means that there is pressure to retain a large number of heterozygous individuals, which means there will be a mixed population of transgenic and non-transgenic mosquitos. While this might help humans in the short run (a smaller fraction of the mosquitos you're bitten by would carry Plasmodium, the malaria parasite), in the long run it pretty much guarantees that people will still get malaria, and the malaria parasite will have lots of opportunities to develop resistance to the introduced gene.
So it's a nice idea--and it would be more effective than releasing low-fitness transgenic mosquitos--but it's not quite there yet.
As to fears of biomagnification, mosquitos generally don't deal with stress by producing toxic compounds (unlike plants, who only have that option), and the transgenic protein is a protein and hence digestable. So it's very unlikely that there would be anything to magnify. Instead of worrying about creating toxic mosquitos, we should make sure that when we actually hit Plasmodium with drugs and modified mosquitos and so on, that we make things so difficult for it that it really devastates its population. Otherwise, we're just conducting a transgenic-mosquito-resistant Plasmodium breeding experiment. (Plasmodium has already developed at least some resistance to most common anti-malarial drugs).
You didn't actually read what I wrote, did you? Dissolving of anything changes membrane properties. Changed membrane properties can affect ion channels. If there is good evidence that anaesthetics do *not* change ion channel properties, then there might be a reason to think about solitons.
I'm not aware of the experiments showing membrane thickening. Please provide a reference. Likewise with the temperature decrease. Both of these sound very difficult to do correctly.
Also, insects run around just fine when switched between 15C and 30C (ever seen ants running on a stove?). That doesn't bode well for theories that require a temperature-sensitive phase transition to get action potential propagation.