I was actually just thinking about this today, as graduate school has caused all sorts of stress in my life.
Some people exercise to reduce stress, some people drink, some people have sex, and the list goes on. Some people play video games to relieve stress, and you can't do that if you're forced to relax. The whole idea of relieving stress is to take out anger and frustration in ways that won't harm anyone. So this whole idea is crap.
As aside because I know someone will comment - certainly some ways are better than others - getting drunk because you hate your job and then getting in a car certainly causes risks to others, and I wouldn't advocate that. However, if you can take a bus home (like in many universities) or a cab (like in many cities) it's not inherently dangerous to others.
That assumes you are studying criminal or civil law. If you're studying something more focused, like laws related to technology, you're actually better off having a degree in engineering or science instead of one of English or Philosophy.
Yeah, because no site is gathering 4E information, and certainly never did for 3E either. Seriously, ENWorld is the best (and biggest non-WotC) D&D community on the net, and anyone who is a fan of any edition should be posting there.
What's interesting about this is the cell organelle contrast. Yes, you can view living cells without exogenous contrast. No, not many good techniques exist which can show internal structure very clearly, in vivo, with no exogenous contrast. Differential interference contrast (DIC) is nice (Interactive Java Tutorial demonstrating this common technique).
Organelle contrast, and being able to see the organelles is interesting, but I don't think that it's as useful as the article describes. In very specific circumstances, it may give hints as to what is going on, but that's it. It's like looking at a computer program as it's running, and saying you'll be able to figure out the code. You may be able to do it in some instances, but those are very limited.
I chose to respond to these comments to shed some light on the science. This, however, is just plain argumentative, short-sighted, etc etc. On a topic more accessible to the general public it would be obvious flamebait.
Perhaps, perhaps not. The article makes a point to mention that it can't take very large or thick images. That's quite a difficulty for people studying anything thicker than a single layer or two of cells. There's a lot of stuff out there that is more than that.
I agree, it's an excellent tool, but it will take a long time before it is fully utilized, and it does not cure cancer by itself. However, when fluorescence confocal microscopy came out, it had (and still does) many more problems. And yet, it revolutionized so many fields it would be impossible count them.
This should cost anything more than a good confocal microscope once the technology is refined. Most departments have at least one of those for common usage among labs (same for mass spectrometers, etc). In fact, it's one of the cheaper instruments I can think of, and extremely easy to maintain.
I wanted to combine these two points, because they're similar. You are correct in that everything has problems when it comes out, and costs large amounts of money. However, except in all but a few circumstances, I don't think that there's much of a tangible benefit to buying this. It certainly won't happen for a lab that might only have one or two projects benefiting from this. That's a cost-benefit ratio. Of course, as you stated, only time will tell what sorts of applications this could use.
While interesting, the article had several fallacies in it.
For one, cells can be viewed while alive - fixative isn't always necessary. Motility studies, for exmaple, don't actually kill the cells (or sperm). For another, dyes aren't the only technique to view cells - plasmid insertion into bacteria with a fluorescent marker not only allows cells to be seen, but doesn't harm the cell.
Secondly, I find it decidedly inconvenient that this can only view small images. My current research is in bacterial biofilms - living and dead. I haven't had any trouble viewing living biofilms under a fluorescent or confocal microscope. What if you want to study the chemotaxis of groups of cells? Most cells, eukaryote or prokaryote, talk to each other and can respond differentially to external signals.
Thirdly, even if you can view these cells, only in very specific instances will it give clues about functionality. Sure, that's better than nothing, but it's not the miraculous panacea that the article describes. The mechanics of drug interaction are much more complex than can be determined by simply looking at a cell.
Finally, from a research standpoint, I have to ask how much this costs. Is the cost-benefit ratio really that good that spending large amounts of money to get this is worth it? Especially considering how in reality it has such a limited usage? I would tend to assume no. There may be some very useful things you can do with this, but it just seems like much more of a toy than anything.
Secondly, this is exciting news, but not exactly surprising. The differentiation of cells starts in the bone marrow, and there are biochemical signals that start that process. It's not surprising that some of these would be in bone marrow.
Finally, must these articles always make a point to imply that obesity is cause by some random genetic/biochemical "magic bullet," instead of eating poorly and not exercising? I understand that they need funding, and implying you may be able to "cure" obesity is a great way to get it. Even so, I think there's something rather disingenious about it.
Yeah, and that's why I said a hypothetical cloning mechanism. Really, without a way to make differentiated cells undifferentiate, and then tell them to grow, and get them to grow, that's a lot of technology we don't have. The latter is the only one we're even close to, and far from any sort of scale that would allow for us to magically make dolphins.
That's a good call on the bacteria, however I don't think those things are absolutely critical, when the goal is just recreating the species. Humans can live without their gut flora, though they do offer digestive and protective functions. In theory though, we could conserve gut flora (just swab and freeze in appropriate media) a lot more easily than tissues and DNA, and perhaps that should be done as well.
See, there's a big difference between mostly extinct, and all extinct. Now, mostly extinct: they're slightly not-extinct. All extinct, well, with all extinct, there's usually only one thing that you can do...
In all seriousness, with so few members of the species, they're effectively extinct, and that's what counts. There may be one or two, but there's zero chance they'll balloon into a viable population. Even if we save genetic samples, we're decades, if not centuries, away from being able to reproduce an entire species, if we can even do that. Even if we have tissue samples from twenty different dolphins, and reproduce them through some hypothetical cloning technique, I'm not convinced that's enough genetic diversity to sustain the species.
Mitochondrial DNA is not something you want to be looking at when determining genetic diversity.
Firstly, mitochondrial DNA is significantly more stable than the host DNA. It's a highly efficient system which decreases energy production in all but the rarest of mutations, generally leading to cell death. On the other hand, host DNA undergoes much more mutation, a large degree of it benign - either it's junk DNA, or covered by your other allele, or what have you.
Furthermore, mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited - you always (well, almost) get your mitochondrial DNA from your mother. Contrast this with cell DNA, which is determined by two sets of alleles from both parents. You would expect mitochondrial DNA to be similar amongst groups of people.
This is nice in theory, however I don't see it really catching on.
For one thing, a stethescope is very cheap. Forty-thousand isn't a lot for a hospital, but if it's not necessary, they won't buy it. That money is better spent on salaries, or saving up for that high-tech imagine unit. Furthermore, even with an output from this, it's highly likely they'll order a CT or MRI anyway for a higher resolution picture.
I'm a little skeptical of this. Not so much the concept - artificial bones aren't terribly difficult, unless you're going for an exact copy of bone composition, which isn't strictly necessary. In fact, it may not be optimal, depending on what it's used for.
Where I'm skeptical is in the immune response. I just attended a talk by someone looking to join our biomaterials department, and there was an allergic reaction to hyaluronan, a common in cartilage and various joint fluids. Just because we all have it, doesn't mean we won't react to it, or to chemical markers which have been missed.
Now, if they can successfully implant this into a host creature without an immune reaction, this might be a little bit more encouraging.
So all that anecdotal evidence is finally backed up by numbers. Good to hear.
Really, this is no surprise at all - the majority (86.5%) of game-playing households aren't even playing a next-gen system. We're also seeing the unsurprising breakdown of players - about 60% play a 360, 30% play a Wii, and the remaining 10% are playing PS3.
I'm a bit surprised Wii numbers aren't higher - but then again the console is still effectively sold out, and is suffering from a lack of games still. The 360, by contrast, has been out longer and has more games. The PS3 continues to be the laughing stock of the gaming community as a whole - only the hardcore players are playing it.
This data will be more interesting as time passes, and trends can be mapped. Also, I think numbers for the XBox (and, snerk, GC) need to be collected, since they're collecting them for the PS2. That way we can see a complete picture of the current and last generation.
My guess would be that there's a sort of positive reinforcement when it comes to weight. If you're surrounded by fat people, you'll feel more comfortable with yourself, and you won't change. Contrast this with (in theory) goes on as far as negative reaction - reaction to scorn drives you to change.
Item D is especially the one that piques my interest. This isn't insider trading, but it is using inside information to influence stock prices. That he was doing it anonymously certainly indicates that he thought that it was ethically questionable. It will be interesting to see the legal implications of this.
Obviously the submitter doesn't understand the whole concept of development teams (of which, IIRC, Bioware has 3 or 4), and that this in no way affects the release of Mass Effect.
While this is somewhat interesting, the problem is that it doesn't matter at all. Neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray has managed to get any sort of decent penetration into the home market aside from enthusiasts. There are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, there's price. I'm not just talking the price of players here, though that is a factor right now. The big thing is that the vast majority of people do not own televisions that will benefit from a higher-quality format. The cost of having a television that will benefit from this has to be added on to the startup cost, and that price hasn't seemed like it's gone down at all. Sure, you can get high-def 22" sets - but with a set that small, the difference between DVD and HD-format is pretty nullified. Again, only enthusiasts will notice a difference.
Another big reason is customer fatigue. DVDs have only relatively recently obtained high penetration in the home market - in no part thanks to cheap players from Walmart and other discount stores. Now customers are being asked once again to spend money to upgrade their collections... and as I said above, the startup price is not trivial for marginal improvement in quality. No, there are no MPAA-Nazis... oh, there are. My point is, no one is forcing them to upgrade - but on the other hand, the mass amount of customers just don't care.
Another thing I might point out is that the major indicator of trends - the porn industry - hasn't chosen a format yet. In fact, they're pretty much eschewing physical media for the internet. So, were I to be a betting man, I'd say that an online format is going to be the next big thing - and we're already seeing that with sites like YouTube.
So, in the long run, this isn't really news at all, this is just a blip on the radar.
Especially since, in medicine at least, there's a right answer, but there's no straight line of reasoning between presentation and diagnosis. A question may ask about fatigue, and may ask what one test you'd order, but in real life there's absolutely no reason to order a TSH and a CBC, or for that matter, run a "Chem 7" as well to check electrolytes and glucose. In a modern medical laboratory, that can be done off of very little blood, for very little additional cost.
It's a pretty big disconnect between the test and practice, and that is why most of the "hard" tests are a sham - not because of any numerical analysis.
Part of the beauty of Fallout was the Action Point-based combat. It forced you to stop and think about what you were doing every "round." This sounds like a major step downward to me - a token AP system to appease the fans, while having a real-time system to draw the Oblivion-FPS crew.
That said, I do understand why they need to do this. Unfortunately, computer gaming in general and especially RPGs are on a downward trend as far as sales go. You have a couple of big names - Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights - and a bunch of smaller names that just get ignored. Why would a smaller company waste time on that when they could make a console game, where RPGs still enjoy a large following?
Bringing it around full circle, Fallout was a big brand back in the day, but by this point, I don't doubt that it will have been built up so much by people when it comes out that it will inevitably disappoint a large number of people. Better to just ignore all the hype until the game comes out.
I don't think there's any serious biologist, biochemist, or bioengineer that ever truly thought 90% of the genome was "junk." Even in general biology textbook, it's generally noted that the term junk-DNA is a misnomer of monumental proportion.
Since when is the Washington Post a respectable neuroscience journal? Now, if the author had even cited the original paper (PubMed) I might be impressed, because that would imply he read it.
That said, the original was published in PNAS (see link above), which is pretty prestigious, but I haven't actually read it, and I've seen some god-awful stuff get printed in PNAS (and Nature and Science) simply because it sounded cool.
I'm always impressed when people even know what intercalating means, let alone how it happens and what causes it. If you can grasp that, why can't you grasp the concept of proper punctuation?
I agree with publish/perish. I'm immediately leary of any scientist (myself being a bioengineer) that uses a press release (from which TFA was "adapted") to announce discoveries in an attention grab, rather than going through the proper journal process. It's important, because the journal process usually involves several rounds of peer review - a press release involves a PR guy making stuff sound good.
Also, based on TFA/press release, it sounds like this is a whole lot of speculation and conjecture without any actual study to back it up. Again, a bunch of... well, if this were a computer program, I'd call it vaporware.
I'll wait to read the actual paper published in a journal.
The problem is that somewhere along the line there was a shift in perception regarding consoles. Instead of playing games, suddenly it became about advertising features and... well, pretty much, it became a giant pissing contest.
There's a reason the Wii only costs $250. Okay, there's a couple, but a big one is that the Wii doesn't have a whole ton of extraneous stuff that adds very minimally to the most important thing - having fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely! It's wonderful to see such leaps in the technology of Engrish!
I was actually just thinking about this today, as graduate school has caused all sorts of stress in my life.
Some people exercise to reduce stress, some people drink, some people have sex, and the list goes on. Some people play video games to relieve stress, and you can't do that if you're forced to relax. The whole idea of relieving stress is to take out anger and frustration in ways that won't harm anyone. So this whole idea is crap.
As aside because I know someone will comment - certainly some ways are better than others - getting drunk because you hate your job and then getting in a car certainly causes risks to others, and I wouldn't advocate that. However, if you can take a bus home (like in many universities) or a cab (like in many cities) it's not inherently dangerous to others.
That assumes you are studying criminal or civil law. If you're studying something more focused, like laws related to technology, you're actually better off having a degree in engineering or science instead of one of English or Philosophy.
Yeah, because no site is gathering 4E information, and certainly never did for 3E either. Seriously, ENWorld is the best (and biggest non-WotC) D&D community on the net, and anyone who is a fan of any edition should be posting there.
Organelle contrast, and being able to see the organelles is interesting, but I don't think that it's as useful as the article describes. In very specific circumstances, it may give hints as to what is going on, but that's it. It's like looking at a computer program as it's running, and saying you'll be able to figure out the code. You may be able to do it in some instances, but those are very limited.
I chose to respond to these comments to shed some light on the science. This, however, is just plain argumentative, short-sighted, etc etc. On a topic more accessible to the general public it would be obvious flamebait.Perhaps, perhaps not. The article makes a point to mention that it can't take very large or thick images. That's quite a difficulty for people studying anything thicker than a single layer or two of cells. There's a lot of stuff out there that is more than that.
I agree, it's an excellent tool, but it will take a long time before it is fully utilized, and it does not cure cancer by itself. However, when fluorescence confocal microscopy came out, it had (and still does) many more problems. And yet, it revolutionized so many fields it would be impossible count them. This should cost anything more than a good confocal microscope once the technology is refined. Most departments have at least one of those for common usage among labs (same for mass spectrometers, etc). In fact, it's one of the cheaper instruments I can think of, and extremely easy to maintain.I wanted to combine these two points, because they're similar. You are correct in that everything has problems when it comes out, and costs large amounts of money. However, except in all but a few circumstances, I don't think that there's much of a tangible benefit to buying this. It certainly won't happen for a lab that might only have one or two projects benefiting from this. That's a cost-benefit ratio. Of course, as you stated, only time will tell what sorts of applications this could use.
While interesting, the article had several fallacies in it.
For one, cells can be viewed while alive - fixative isn't always necessary. Motility studies, for exmaple, don't actually kill the cells (or sperm). For another, dyes aren't the only technique to view cells - plasmid insertion into bacteria with a fluorescent marker not only allows cells to be seen, but doesn't harm the cell.
Secondly, I find it decidedly inconvenient that this can only view small images. My current research is in bacterial biofilms - living and dead. I haven't had any trouble viewing living biofilms under a fluorescent or confocal microscope. What if you want to study the chemotaxis of groups of cells? Most cells, eukaryote or prokaryote, talk to each other and can respond differentially to external signals.
Thirdly, even if you can view these cells, only in very specific instances will it give clues about functionality. Sure, that's better than nothing, but it's not the miraculous panacea that the article describes. The mechanics of drug interaction are much more complex than can be determined by simply looking at a cell.
Finally, from a research standpoint, I have to ask how much this costs. Is the cost-benefit ratio really that good that spending large amounts of money to get this is worth it? Especially considering how in reality it has such a limited usage? I would tend to assume no. There may be some very useful things you can do with this, but it just seems like much more of a toy than anything.
Firstly, this isn't Digg, can we please not link to blogs? The original paper from Cell is here: http://download.cell.com/pdfs/0092-8674/PIIS009286 7407007015.pdf.
Secondly, this is exciting news, but not exactly surprising. The differentiation of cells starts in the bone marrow, and there are biochemical signals that start that process. It's not surprising that some of these would be in bone marrow.
Finally, must these articles always make a point to imply that obesity is cause by some random genetic/biochemical "magic bullet," instead of eating poorly and not exercising? I understand that they need funding, and implying you may be able to "cure" obesity is a great way to get it. Even so, I think there's something rather disingenious about it.
Yeah, and that's why I said a hypothetical cloning mechanism. Really, without a way to make differentiated cells undifferentiate, and then tell them to grow, and get them to grow, that's a lot of technology we don't have. The latter is the only one we're even close to, and far from any sort of scale that would allow for us to magically make dolphins. That's a good call on the bacteria, however I don't think those things are absolutely critical, when the goal is just recreating the species. Humans can live without their gut flora, though they do offer digestive and protective functions. In theory though, we could conserve gut flora (just swab and freeze in appropriate media) a lot more easily than tissues and DNA, and perhaps that should be done as well.
See, there's a big difference between mostly extinct, and all extinct. Now, mostly extinct: they're slightly not-extinct. All extinct, well, with all extinct, there's usually only one thing that you can do...
In all seriousness, with so few members of the species, they're effectively extinct, and that's what counts. There may be one or two, but there's zero chance they'll balloon into a viable population. Even if we save genetic samples, we're decades, if not centuries, away from being able to reproduce an entire species, if we can even do that. Even if we have tissue samples from twenty different dolphins, and reproduce them through some hypothetical cloning technique, I'm not convinced that's enough genetic diversity to sustain the species.
Mitochondrial DNA is not something you want to be looking at when determining genetic diversity.
Firstly, mitochondrial DNA is significantly more stable than the host DNA. It's a highly efficient system which decreases energy production in all but the rarest of mutations, generally leading to cell death. On the other hand, host DNA undergoes much more mutation, a large degree of it benign - either it's junk DNA, or covered by your other allele, or what have you.
Furthermore, mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited - you always (well, almost) get your mitochondrial DNA from your mother. Contrast this with cell DNA, which is determined by two sets of alleles from both parents. You would expect mitochondrial DNA to be similar amongst groups of people.
This is nice in theory, however I don't see it really catching on.
For one thing, a stethescope is very cheap. Forty-thousand isn't a lot for a hospital, but if it's not necessary, they won't buy it. That money is better spent on salaries, or saving up for that high-tech imagine unit. Furthermore, even with an output from this, it's highly likely they'll order a CT or MRI anyway for a higher resolution picture.
I'm a little skeptical of this. Not so much the concept - artificial bones aren't terribly difficult, unless you're going for an exact copy of bone composition, which isn't strictly necessary. In fact, it may not be optimal, depending on what it's used for.
Where I'm skeptical is in the immune response. I just attended a talk by someone looking to join our biomaterials department, and there was an allergic reaction to hyaluronan, a common in cartilage and various joint fluids. Just because we all have it, doesn't mean we won't react to it, or to chemical markers which have been missed.
Now, if they can successfully implant this into a host creature without an immune reaction, this might be a little bit more encouraging.
So all that anecdotal evidence is finally backed up by numbers. Good to hear. Really, this is no surprise at all - the majority (86.5%) of game-playing households aren't even playing a next-gen system. We're also seeing the unsurprising breakdown of players - about 60% play a 360, 30% play a Wii, and the remaining 10% are playing PS3. I'm a bit surprised Wii numbers aren't higher - but then again the console is still effectively sold out, and is suffering from a lack of games still. The 360, by contrast, has been out longer and has more games. The PS3 continues to be the laughing stock of the gaming community as a whole - only the hardcore players are playing it. This data will be more interesting as time passes, and trends can be mapped. Also, I think numbers for the XBox (and, snerk, GC) need to be collected, since they're collecting them for the PS2. That way we can see a complete picture of the current and last generation.
My guess would be that there's a sort of positive reinforcement when it comes to weight. If you're surrounded by fat people, you'll feel more comfortable with yourself, and you won't change. Contrast this with (in theory) goes on as far as negative reaction - reaction to scorn drives you to change.
Item D is especially the one that piques my interest. This isn't insider trading, but it is using inside information to influence stock prices. That he was doing it anonymously certainly indicates that he thought that it was ethically questionable. It will be interesting to see the legal implications of this.
Obviously the submitter doesn't understand the whole concept of development teams (of which, IIRC, Bioware has 3 or 4), and that this in no way affects the release of Mass Effect.
While this is somewhat interesting, the problem is that it doesn't matter at all. Neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray has managed to get any sort of decent penetration into the home market aside from enthusiasts. There are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, there's price. I'm not just talking the price of players here, though that is a factor right now. The big thing is that the vast majority of people do not own televisions that will benefit from a higher-quality format. The cost of having a television that will benefit from this has to be added on to the startup cost, and that price hasn't seemed like it's gone down at all. Sure, you can get high-def 22" sets - but with a set that small, the difference between DVD and HD-format is pretty nullified. Again, only enthusiasts will notice a difference.
Another big reason is customer fatigue. DVDs have only relatively recently obtained high penetration in the home market - in no part thanks to cheap players from Walmart and other discount stores. Now customers are being asked once again to spend money to upgrade their collections... and as I said above, the startup price is not trivial for marginal improvement in quality. No, there are no MPAA-Nazis... oh, there are. My point is, no one is forcing them to upgrade - but on the other hand, the mass amount of customers just don't care.
Another thing I might point out is that the major indicator of trends - the porn industry - hasn't chosen a format yet. In fact, they're pretty much eschewing physical media for the internet. So, were I to be a betting man, I'd say that an online format is going to be the next big thing - and we're already seeing that with sites like YouTube.
So, in the long run, this isn't really news at all, this is just a blip on the radar.
It's a pretty big disconnect between the test and practice, and that is why most of the "hard" tests are a sham - not because of any numerical analysis.
Part of the beauty of Fallout was the Action Point-based combat. It forced you to stop and think about what you were doing every "round." This sounds like a major step downward to me - a token AP system to appease the fans, while having a real-time system to draw the Oblivion-FPS crew.
That said, I do understand why they need to do this. Unfortunately, computer gaming in general and especially RPGs are on a downward trend as far as sales go. You have a couple of big names - Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights - and a bunch of smaller names that just get ignored. Why would a smaller company waste time on that when they could make a console game, where RPGs still enjoy a large following?
Bringing it around full circle, Fallout was a big brand back in the day, but by this point, I don't doubt that it will have been built up so much by people when it comes out that it will inevitably disappoint a large number of people. Better to just ignore all the hype until the game comes out.
I don't think there's any serious biologist, biochemist, or bioengineer that ever truly thought 90% of the genome was "junk." Even in general biology textbook, it's generally noted that the term junk-DNA is a misnomer of monumental proportion.
I mean, people with big holes shout all the time.
Since when is the Washington Post a respectable neuroscience journal? Now, if the author had even cited the original paper (PubMed) I might be impressed, because that would imply he read it. That said, the original was published in PNAS (see link above), which is pretty prestigious, but I haven't actually read it, and I've seen some god-awful stuff get printed in PNAS (and Nature and Science) simply because it sounded cool.
I'm always impressed when people even know what intercalating means, let alone how it happens and what causes it. If you can grasp that, why can't you grasp the concept of proper punctuation?
I agree with publish/perish. I'm immediately leary of any scientist (myself being a bioengineer) that uses a press release (from which TFA was "adapted") to announce discoveries in an attention grab, rather than going through the proper journal process. It's important, because the journal process usually involves several rounds of peer review - a press release involves a PR guy making stuff sound good.
Also, based on TFA/press release, it sounds like this is a whole lot of speculation and conjecture without any actual study to back it up. Again, a bunch of... well, if this were a computer program, I'd call it vaporware.
I'll wait to read the actual paper published in a journal.
The problem is that somewhere along the line there was a shift in perception regarding consoles. Instead of playing games, suddenly it became about advertising features and... well, pretty much, it became a giant pissing contest. There's a reason the Wii only costs $250. Okay, there's a couple, but a big one is that the Wii doesn't have a whole ton of extraneous stuff that adds very minimally to the most important thing - having fun.