Maybe pay a consultant for a day's worth of advice instead of trying to do it on the cheap by "asking Slashdot" -- in the long run, it might save you some of that rare philanthropy cash which seems in danger of being spent in a panick purchase.
So the arXiv article (http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4192v1) cited in TFA is a little more accurate than the already-much-panned summary. But the authors of the arXiv article still use the term 'virtual infection' which is very misleading at best.
Basically there are a few (actually only two described in the paper) entries in one particular human genome database maintained at EMBL that appear to be mycoplasma-derived. Two out of 45,000 features on the Affymetrix Human U133 +2 oligonucleotide array, used to quantify mRNA levels in a given sample, appear to correspond to the mycoplasma sequences. So, at best, two of the genes you look at (out of 45,000) might be mycoplasma genes in that particular type of experiment.
It's not a big deal, so that's why the work isn't published in a peer-reviewed journal.
It just needs to be made entirely out of materials that are available to it. I don't think metal would be easy to come by for a machine like this. Or plastic, for that matter. The mining/manufacturing process is too difficult.
People get freaked out by the idea of replicators, but what the hell are WE? Or any life form, for that matter? The simplest ones can survive on light or heat or chemical energy alone, and as long as there is energy and a few new necessary building blocks about (C, O, N etc in various forms) a lot of types of bacteria will happily replicate indefinitely!!
All this grey goo and nanotech rubbish is pure paranoia! It has already happened! It's life, dammit!
Could somebody please enlighten me by answering this question:
If the 3D universe can be encoded on a 2D surface, would not that surface have to be curved i.e. be three dimensional itself?
Not that I have read TFA, but this is probably another plant with multiple copies of each chomosome. In which case it's not really a newsflash; this is the case for many plants. Sugar cane and many other monocots have extremely multiploid genomes.
Could is be possible that dark matter is just ordinary matter, made up of atoms and such, and that we just haven't found it yet because it absorbs the radiation we scan for?
Thankyou. I have often wondered the same thing. How exactly can we assume that all non-dark matter is detectable using today's instruments? Isn't it possible that there is one hell of a crapload of normal matter out there that we just can't see? That it isn't some mysterious force that we have to give a spooky name to?
Hope some cosmologists out there can shed some light on this, preferably in layperson's terms.
Just a suggestion and I haven't had time to check if someone else has also suggested this, but you might find that contacting an academic who works in a similar area and asking them to add their name to the author list as a corresponding author might give you a better chance of publishing the material in a decent journal. It's pretty normal to have at least two authors these days, even if the second author did next-to-nothing for the article. It helps in the case where a student does the work then moves elsewhere and is not contactable - the supervisor's contact details are not as likely to change (plus they usually contributed to the research by funding or providing equipment etc), so they get put on at the end of the author list as a point of contact.
In your case, there are a shitload of companies likely to profit if your algorithm is as good as you reckon it is, so I would support previous suggestions that you protect it in some way before releasing it to the public.
It's just not a well-designed feature. If you don't delete them manually, eventually all your apps are going to appear there, and what the hell is the use of that? There needs to be a way of quitting apps without adding them to the bar.
Here's a wacky thing: the plural form of someone else is actually someone's else.
Ah, I can see the reason for your disclaimer about not having good grammar. "Someone else's" isn't plural, it's possessive! Still an interesting fact though.. does it mean the possessive form of someone else is someone's else? Looks pretty wrong to me...
Not having read TFA, I could be wrong, but it sounds like an array-based detection system..
You absolutely cannot multiplex PCRs for that many targets, so it has to be an array, right?
There may be some non-specific PCR, or other form of 'amplification' i.e. in vitro transcription, done beforehand to amplify the starting matierial (in fact, this would probably be required since array sensitivity is crap compared to PCR).
Yeah, if you go with the big companies like Telstra, Optus etc. you will get screwed like you are getting screwed by Vodafone. Here in Australia the best ISPs are those that don't charge by usage, and have reasonable caps for ok money. i.e. mine (iiNet, at the risk of sounding like a salesdouche) is $50 a month for 100 GB (50GB peak and 50 off-peak), at ADSL2+.
Telstra would be asking a LOT more money for that, and they wonder why I keep telling them to where to go when they call me and ask for my custom.
Which is one of the reasons Telstra shares are plummeting.
Have you even read Ayn Rand? She may have been a right-wing cracker, but her utopian hideaways (e.g. in Atlas Shrugged) involved a payment system for hard work. Her little crew of elite businesspeople may have been snobs but they weren't thieves.
The fact that the genes are identical does not mean they're of the same origin.
Actually, if the genes are identical in terms of nucleotide sequence then it is absolutely irrefutable that they are of the same origin. Even genes that are evolutionarily conserved vary in sequence between members of the same genus, let alone organisms from completely different kingdoms of life.
I hear ya, it's exciting stuff... Just to add a twist, it should be noted that the vast majority of mutations found in tumours that have been fully sequenced so far occur outside protein coding regions. Not to say protein coding genes are not important, but it's likely that mutations in intergenic regions, promoters, noncoding RNA 'genes' and introns are also likely to play a major role in transformation to a cancerous phenotype in many cases.
The issue is going to be getting enough data for statistical robustness, even before any candidate mutations are investigated in the wet lab. I wonder how many thousands of each type of tumour should be sequenced? In any case, there will be buckets of data getting pumped out of the next generation of next-gen sequencers pretty soon, so plenty of work for bioinformatics nerds in the near future!
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're misunderestimating the author's vocabulary...
Maybe pay a consultant for a day's worth of advice instead of trying to do it on the cheap by "asking Slashdot" -- in the long run, it might save you some of that rare philanthropy cash which seems in danger of being spent in a panick purchase.
So the arXiv article (http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4192v1) cited in TFA is a little more accurate than the already-much-panned summary. But the authors of the arXiv article still use the term 'virtual infection' which is very misleading at best.
Basically there are a few (actually only two described in the paper) entries in one particular human genome database maintained at EMBL that appear to be mycoplasma-derived. Two out of 45,000 features on the Affymetrix Human U133 +2 oligonucleotide array, used to quantify mRNA levels in a given sample, appear to correspond to the mycoplasma sequences. So, at best, two of the genes you look at (out of 45,000) might be mycoplasma genes in that particular type of experiment.
It's not a big deal, so that's why the work isn't published in a peer-reviewed journal.
My eyes and brain must be getting old.. I read the title as "Turing machine Completes Hole Under Niagara Falls"...
It just needs to be made entirely out of materials that are available to it. I don't think metal would be easy to come by for a machine like this. Or plastic, for that matter. The mining/manufacturing process is too difficult.
People get freaked out by the idea of replicators, but what the hell are WE? Or any life form, for that matter? The simplest ones can survive on light or heat or chemical energy alone, and as long as there is energy and a few new necessary building blocks about (C, O, N etc in various forms) a lot of types of bacteria will happily replicate indefinitely!!
All this grey goo and nanotech rubbish is pure paranoia! It has already happened! It's life, dammit!
I for one.. ah, fuck it.
Could somebody please enlighten me by answering this question: If the 3D universe can be encoded on a 2D surface, would not that surface have to be curved i.e. be three dimensional itself?
Not that I have read TFA, but this is probably another plant with multiple copies of each chomosome. In which case it's not really a newsflash; this is the case for many plants. Sugar cane and many other monocots have extremely multiploid genomes.
... too, many, commas, in, this, summary.
Could is be possible that dark matter is just ordinary matter, made up of atoms and such, and that we just haven't found it yet because it absorbs the radiation we scan for?
Thankyou. I have often wondered the same thing. How exactly can we assume that all non-dark matter is detectable using today's instruments? Isn't it possible that there is one hell of a crapload of normal matter out there that we just can't see? That it isn't some mysterious force that we have to give a spooky name to?
Hope some cosmologists out there can shed some light on this, preferably in layperson's terms.
It is a rewrite and based on the Source engine, which has nothing to do with UT2004.
As are Half Life 2 and Portal, both of which are now playable on OSX.
Just a suggestion and I haven't had time to check if someone else has also suggested this, but you might find that contacting an academic who works in a similar area and asking them to add their name to the author list as a corresponding author might give you a better chance of publishing the material in a decent journal. It's pretty normal to have at least two authors these days, even if the second author did next-to-nothing for the article. It helps in the case where a student does the work then moves elsewhere and is not contactable - the supervisor's contact details are not as likely to change (plus they usually contributed to the research by funding or providing equipment etc), so they get put on at the end of the author list as a point of contact.
In your case, there are a shitload of companies likely to profit if your algorithm is as good as you reckon it is, so I would support previous suggestions that you protect it in some way before releasing it to the public.
It's just not a well-designed feature. If you don't delete them manually, eventually all your apps are going to appear there, and what the hell is the use of that? There needs to be a way of quitting apps without adding them to the bar.
Excellent! Now you just need a bad car analogy...
Nice try, grasshopper, but the correct response to all those with no sense of humour is.. "whoosh"!
mmmmm knee-jerky...
Here's a wacky thing: the plural form of someone else is actually someone's else .
Ah, I can see the reason for your disclaimer about not having good grammar. "Someone else's" isn't plural, it's possessive! Still an interesting fact though.. does it mean the possessive form of someone else is someone's else? Looks pretty wrong to me...
Yes, that's why it's so bright at night .
lol! Insightful! Krikkiters gonna getcha for that, modders!
Does that mean we may be able to see an early version of OUR OWN GALAXY?? o_0
Not having read TFA, I could be wrong, but it sounds like an array-based detection system..
You absolutely cannot multiplex PCRs for that many targets, so it has to be an array, right?
There may be some non-specific PCR, or other form of 'amplification' i.e. in vitro transcription, done beforehand to amplify the starting matierial (in fact, this would probably be required since array sensitivity is crap compared to PCR).
Yeah, if you go with the big companies like Telstra, Optus etc. you will get screwed like you are getting screwed by Vodafone. Here in Australia the best ISPs are those that don't charge by usage, and have reasonable caps for ok money. i.e. mine (iiNet, at the risk of sounding like a salesdouche) is $50 a month for 100 GB (50GB peak and 50 off-peak), at ADSL2+.
Telstra would be asking a LOT more money for that, and they wonder why I keep telling them to where to go when they call me and ask for my custom.
Which is one of the reasons Telstra shares are plummeting.
Have you even read Ayn Rand? She may have been a right-wing cracker, but her utopian hideaways (e.g. in Atlas Shrugged) involved a payment system for hard work. Her little crew of elite businesspeople may have been snobs but they weren't thieves.
The fact that the genes are identical does not mean they're of the same origin.
Actually, if the genes are identical in terms of nucleotide sequence then it is absolutely irrefutable that they are of the same origin. Even genes that are evolutionarily conserved vary in sequence between members of the same genus, let alone organisms from completely different kingdoms of life.
I hear ya, it's exciting stuff... Just to add a twist, it should be noted that the vast majority of mutations found in tumours that have been fully sequenced so far occur outside protein coding regions. Not to say protein coding genes are not important, but it's likely that mutations in intergenic regions, promoters, noncoding RNA 'genes' and introns are also likely to play a major role in transformation to a cancerous phenotype in many cases.
The issue is going to be getting enough data for statistical robustness, even before any candidate mutations are investigated in the wet lab. I wonder how many thousands of each type of tumour should be sequenced? In any case, there will be buckets of data getting pumped out of the next generation of next-gen sequencers pretty soon, so plenty of work for bioinformatics nerds in the near future!