I don't think the law can ever be clear because there is no single time at which human life begins. Even conception (which is probably the closest to an actual event) is not the start of life for your first cell, that was created when your mother was still a foetus.
Politicians seem to go for viability as a cut off, which seems reasonable, but that keeps moving earlier and earlier. Personally I would go for about ten weeks, but that isn't based on anything more scientific than a gut feeling.
Also I think the law should be driven by ethics, not the other way around!
I salute your 19th century soapbox rant about the 21st century! You sir, are the epitomy of human evolution!
Is that your best defense, for a continued use of mouse embryos over human embryos?
The best defense is that mouse embryos are a lot easier to make and are a reasonable human model for a lot of purposes.
I don't know how you would harvest human embryos but I can't imagine it's pleasant or particularly safe. Also in humans it's hard to do research on early stage embryos because often people don't know they're pregnant until it's too late. For example we only know about the prevalence of chromosomal abnormalities between about 12 weeks and birth, there's no way to find out how many conceptions are lost before then.
The article mentions tests on mouse embryos, but if we are trying to find information
about humans development and human DNA, then shouldn't we use human embryos? As long
as the tests can be completed before the 24th week (Yale is in Connecticut) or 28th
week (New York is nearby) then there shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not sure but I think IVF embryos can be used for research once they are no longer needed. Thing is it's much easier to actually get mouse embroys, even without the ethical implications.
Also the recent fuss in the UK about making human/animal hybrids has been trying to get around this, by putting human DNA which is easy to get into eggs from other animals.
It says a Trichoplax shares 80% of its DNA with humanity. Humans have 3 billion base pairs, and Trichoplaxes have 98 million. Thus, humans only share (9,800,000*80%)/3,000,000,000=2.6% of their DNA with a Trichoplax.
It says Trichoplax shares 80% of its genes with humanity. What I guess it means is that 80% of Trichoplax genes have a human ortholog (ie a gene with a sufficiently similar function and sequence).
That's a pretty good idea. Though it wouldn't need to be public as such to achieve the effect, only the system would need to remember which mods made which moderations. Having said that I haven't seen a better system that/. for moderating anywhere on the internet.
You can already. That's what watching TV is. I think you just need to increase the bandwidth (ie get a bigger TV)
Also, to store memories long term the brain has t physically change to accommodate them, so learning a load of new stuff takes serious time. Your best bet is holding out for a prosthetic. Some advances in memory prosthetics have been made (in making the interface with the rest of the brain) and with these new findings I think we're only a few years away from one that works.
the local councils have been using the CCTV networks to stalk people for things as trivial as checking whether they live where they said and are eligible for the school they've tried to register their kids at.
What's your problem with that, exactly? 'Council uses CCTV to prevent fraud' doesn't seem like such a shocking story to me.
How the hell can you say what anybody 'should be looking at' when you don't even know what question it is they are trying to address? By the way brain volume is a very important measure of cognitive function, and has the added advantage that you can actually measure it (relatively) easily.
Herons (and other birds) have also been known to learn to fish with bait. Since this is not a common behaviour, it is supposed that each bird has to figure it out for itself, possibly by watching what happens when people throw bread into duckponds.
Can't be bothered to post a link. Google 'heron bread fish' for more details.
There are hundreds of studies of brain size and intelligence in humans. Some find a positive correlation, some find no correlation. It seems to depend on how you define brain size (cranial volume, MRI or head circumference), and how you define intelligence. Taking all the evidence together there seems to be a small correlation. (Google scholar for brain size and intelligence if you are actually interested in the full picture, we could both cite references that support our relative points of view and that would be kind of pointless.)
Of course this will only account for a small amount of the variation in intelligence, and differences in structure (like in Einstein) will also play a role.
I know more about brain disease epidemiology than neuroscience however and there is no doubt that people with larger heads have less dementia, probably because of the increased brain reserve. It's a bit problematic to measure premorbid brain size any other way than head circumference in dementia studies, because as another poster pointed out a decrease in actual brain size is a pretty good correlate of loss of brain function (probably better than any other pathological measure of disease).
Slightly off-topic but within humans increased brain size does increase intelligence and cognitive reserve (ie resilience to brain diseases).
I would guess at the species level it has more to do with the number of neurons, the average number of connections for each neuron and the ways the different areas are connected, but I don't know.
Once this technology is available it will become available to everybody, good guys and bad guys. But it will probably help insurgents and guerilla fighters more than large conventional armies.
I suppose because the technology is designed with the sole aim of deception it's difficult to think of non-militray or non-criminal uses, but maybe I just haven't seen enough bad sci-fi.
If your high salt sugar and fat diet leads to a stroke then you have at least a 1 in 3 chance of ending your days with dementia of some sort (high blood pressure and cholesterol cause strokes and mini-strokes and are also thought to directly lead to Alzheimer's disease). So not only will you die young, you're alse likely to die disabled and demented.
There is a serious message there. There's no point thinking 'I don't want to get old so I don't get dementia', because if your lifestyle is unhealthy you'll suffer all of the negative consequences of age too early.
I saw a talk by Peter St George Hyslop on this subject a couple of weeks ago. The current thinking is that the presence of smaller beta amyloid oligomers lead to the formation pathogenic form of tau. Whether it's the tau or the beta-amyloid itself that leads to the cognitive impairment is still debated, while this work suggests that the tau is most important, one of my students is presenting work at the same meeting that suggests soluble beta amyloid concentrations (rather than plaques) are key. Neither conclusion to my mind is completely satisfactory.
If you want to reduce your risk of dementia, the best advice is to simply live healthily and be socially and intellectually active. Just as much dementia is caused by vascular disease as is caused by classical Alzheimer's disease, and being active (probably, we're not totally sure yet) increases your brain reserve so you can sustain more damage to your brain while retaining high levels of function.
While this treatment appears to be an important breakthrough you can't rely on it for prevention since it will not do anything about the general age-related atrophy or vascular disease that many older people will suffer
I agree with you entirely, we need to do more to learn how to deal with the emotional and communication issues caused by AD and other dementias that lead to behavioual problems. Treatment with anti-psychotics is disgraceful but it's easy to see how it happens.
These advances in treatment are great for those who will benefit (largely the younger onset cases) but will not prevent the majority of dementia that occurs in the very old without much relationship with tau-related disease. We will see in the future much more dementia caused by simple atrophy or ageing of the brain with very little associated disease.
Well my eye line is still perpendicular to the screen so that doesn't matter. I didn't know about the vertical shifting before but you're quite right, if I put the screen any more vertical I end up looking down on it and I get the colour inversion (unless I slouch or get much further away). This could be an indication that I'm too tall for the desk I'm working at.
I wonder why people don't simply stick the monitor/touchscreen directly inside the desk? It would be easy to cut a hole in the middle of a desk and stick the touchscreen in it, and that would fix the problem with arm fatigue. There's no reason why a screen needs to be vertical like a TV.
Doesn't anybody remember the old horizontal PAC-MAN and FROGGER gaming tables?
I always use my laptop screen at about 45 degrees off the horizontal (ie as low as it will go), which I find a lot more comfortable and is similar to the angles that calligraphers or draughtsmen have always used. I agree the vertical monitor thing is a legacy from the CRT, or maybe it's to save space.
I think the GP did a perfectly good job of explaining it. Doing mathematics is uncovering fundemental truths about the universe. You cannot copyright them but you can potentially copyright your particular description of them (eg in a mathematical paper). This does not stop somebody else explaining the same thing in a different way. In the same way artists do not copyright the aspects of the human condition that their work is aiming to describe, but do copyright the way in which they express them.
Slashdot Mirror
Two days of war?
Or more to the point less than the cost of cleaning up after one hurricane.
I don't think the law can ever be clear because there is no single time at which human life begins. Even conception (which is probably the closest to an actual event) is not the start of life for your first cell, that was created when your mother was still a foetus.
Politicians seem to go for viability as a cut off, which seems reasonable, but that keeps moving earlier and earlier. Personally I would go for about ten weeks, but that isn't based on anything more scientific than a gut feeling.
Also I think the law should be driven by ethics, not the other way around!
I salute your 19th century soapbox rant about the 21st century! You sir, are the epitomy of human evolution!
Is that your best defense, for a continued use of mouse embryos over human embryos?
The best defense is that mouse embryos are a lot easier to make and are a reasonable human model for a lot of purposes.
I don't know how you would harvest human embryos but I can't imagine it's pleasant or particularly safe. Also in humans it's hard to do research on early stage embryos because often people don't know they're pregnant until it's too late. For example we only know about the prevalence of chromosomal abnormalities between about 12 weeks and birth, there's no way to find out how many conceptions are lost before then.
The article mentions tests on mouse embryos, but if we are trying to find information about humans development and human DNA, then shouldn't we use human embryos? As long as the tests can be completed before the 24th week (Yale is in Connecticut) or 28th week (New York is nearby) then there shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not sure but I think IVF embryos can be used for research once they are no longer needed. Thing is it's much easier to actually get mouse embroys, even without the ethical implications.
Also the recent fuss in the UK about making human/animal hybrids has been trying to get around this, by putting human DNA which is easy to get into eggs from other animals.
It says a Trichoplax shares 80% of its DNA with humanity. Humans have 3 billion base pairs, and Trichoplaxes have 98 million. Thus, humans only share (9,800,000*80%)/3,000,000,000=2.6% of their DNA with a Trichoplax.
It says Trichoplax shares 80% of its genes with humanity. What I guess it means is that 80% of Trichoplax genes have a human ortholog (ie a gene with a sufficiently similar function and sequence).
That's a pretty good idea. Though it wouldn't need to be public as such to achieve the effect, only the system would need to remember which mods made which moderations. Having said that I haven't seen a better system that /. for moderating anywhere on the internet.
You can already. That's what watching TV is. I think you just need to increase the bandwidth (ie get a bigger TV)
Also, to store memories long term the brain has t physically change to accommodate them, so learning a load of new stuff takes serious time. Your best bet is holding out for a prosthetic. Some advances in memory prosthetics have been made (in making the interface with the rest of the brain) and with these new findings I think we're only a few years away from one that works.
Seems odd that they don't use an electric motor to avoid the problem of having to get air into the engine.
the local councils have been using the CCTV networks to stalk people for things as trivial as checking whether they live where they said and are eligible for the school they've tried to register their kids at.
What's your problem with that, exactly? 'Council uses CCTV to prevent fraud' doesn't seem like such a shocking story to me.
How the hell can you say what anybody 'should be looking at' when you don't even know what question it is they are trying to address? By the way brain volume is a very important measure of cognitive function, and has the added advantage that you can actually measure it (relatively) easily.
Herons (and other birds) have also been known to learn to fish with bait. Since this is not a common behaviour, it is supposed that each bird has to figure it out for itself, possibly by watching what happens when people throw bread into duckponds.
Can't be bothered to post a link. Google 'heron bread fish' for more details.
There are hundreds of studies of brain size and intelligence in humans. Some find a positive correlation, some find no correlation. It seems to depend on how you define brain size (cranial volume, MRI or head circumference), and how you define intelligence. Taking all the evidence together there seems to be a small correlation. (Google scholar for brain size and intelligence if you are actually interested in the full picture, we could both cite references that support our relative points of view and that would be kind of pointless.)
Of course this will only account for a small amount of the variation in intelligence, and differences in structure (like in Einstein) will also play a role.
I know more about brain disease epidemiology than neuroscience however and there is no doubt that people with larger heads have less dementia, probably because of the increased brain reserve. It's a bit problematic to measure premorbid brain size any other way than head circumference in dementia studies, because as another poster pointed out a decrease in actual brain size is a pretty good correlate of loss of brain function (probably better than any other pathological measure of disease).
Slightly off-topic but within humans increased brain size does increase intelligence and cognitive reserve (ie resilience to brain diseases).
I would guess at the species level it has more to do with the number of neurons, the average number of connections for each neuron and the ways the different areas are connected, but I don't know.
I guess you could design a spaceship that way, but who would you get to build or test it?
Thanks - no wonder I couldn't work out what Receiver Operating Characteristics had to do with anything.
Once this technology is available it will become available to everybody, good guys and bad guys. But it will probably help insurgents and guerilla fighters more than large conventional armies.
I suppose because the technology is designed with the sole aim of deception it's difficult to think of non-militray or non-criminal uses, but maybe I just haven't seen enough bad sci-fi.
Some bottles can't be refilled or resealed, I guess that's what the legislation means - otherwise they'd be banning bottled water.
If your high salt sugar and fat diet leads to a stroke then you have at least a 1 in 3 chance of ending your days with dementia of some sort (high blood pressure and cholesterol cause strokes and mini-strokes and are also thought to directly lead to Alzheimer's disease). So not only will you die young, you're alse likely to die disabled and demented.
There is a serious message there. There's no point thinking 'I don't want to get old so I don't get dementia', because if your lifestyle is unhealthy you'll suffer all of the negative consequences of age too early.
I saw a talk by Peter St George Hyslop on this subject a couple of weeks ago. The current thinking is that the presence of smaller beta amyloid oligomers lead to the formation pathogenic form of tau. Whether it's the tau or the beta-amyloid itself that leads to the cognitive impairment is still debated, while this work suggests that the tau is most important, one of my students is presenting work at the same meeting that suggests soluble beta amyloid concentrations (rather than plaques) are key. Neither conclusion to my mind is completely satisfactory.
If you want to reduce your risk of dementia, the best advice is to simply live healthily and be socially and intellectually active. Just as much dementia is caused by vascular disease as is caused by classical Alzheimer's disease, and being active (probably, we're not totally sure yet) increases your brain reserve so you can sustain more damage to your brain while retaining high levels of function.
While this treatment appears to be an important breakthrough you can't rely on it for prevention since it will not do anything about the general age-related atrophy or vascular disease that many older people will suffer
I agree with you entirely, we need to do more to learn how to deal with the emotional and communication issues caused by AD and other dementias that lead to behavioual problems. Treatment with anti-psychotics is disgraceful but it's easy to see how it happens.
These advances in treatment are great for those who will benefit (largely the younger onset cases) but will not prevent the majority of dementia that occurs in the very old without much relationship with tau-related disease. We will see in the future much more dementia caused by simple atrophy or ageing of the brain with very little associated disease.
Well my eye line is still perpendicular to the screen so that doesn't matter. I didn't know about the vertical shifting before but you're quite right, if I put the screen any more vertical I end up looking down on it and I get the colour inversion (unless I slouch or get much further away). This could be an indication that I'm too tall for the desk I'm working at.
I wonder why people don't simply stick the monitor/touchscreen directly inside the desk? It would be easy to cut a hole in the middle of a desk and stick the touchscreen in it, and that would fix the problem with arm fatigue. There's no reason why a screen needs to be vertical like a TV.
Doesn't anybody remember the old horizontal PAC-MAN and FROGGER gaming tables?
I always use my laptop screen at about 45 degrees off the horizontal (ie as low as it will go), which I find a lot more comfortable and is similar to the angles that calligraphers or draughtsmen have always used. I agree the vertical monitor thing is a legacy from the CRT, or maybe it's to save space.
...I'll rig my own parabolic signal booster if and when I feel like it.
That's my new sig sorted out then.
I think the GP did a perfectly good job of explaining it. Doing mathematics is uncovering fundemental truths about the universe. You cannot copyright them but you can potentially copyright your particular description of them (eg in a mathematical paper). This does not stop somebody else explaining the same thing in a different way. In the same way artists do not copyright the aspects of the human condition that their work is aiming to describe, but do copyright the way in which they express them.