You don't seem to realize that no matter what, you have to vote for a POLITICIAN for president.
Anyway, I'm sick of people acting like the presidential ballot is where the agenda is set and is where your voice gets heard. Yes, on a basic level it does represent the choice between two broad directions the government could go in, but if you don't participate at all in the primaries or try to get an issue national attention, you shouldn't expect to like either of the two directions in november.
The telecom issue is an example. The "other guys" didn't get this on the table by voting in a presidential election, they didn't get it on the table by telling Obama they would only vote for him if he endorsed their position, they undoubtedly have been lobbying for a long time.
It's not as easy as "pull the right or left lever in november and you get the government you want."
They were trying to get it to shake the dirt off? Doesn't exactly make sense to me. Maybe worried the martians would be unimpressed by our dirty fork thermometer and blow up earth.
Having not seen the arm itself and having no engineering expirence I also have to ask, why did they make an arm that could damage itself in the first place? It sounds like it was just going to twist too far, couldn't they have, say, put a pin there to keep it from rotating that far?
I think one way to make the meta modding a lot more effective is to allow it to be more tailored based on subject area and your own expertise.
I don't know squat about computers. I see things about OOXML or something marked interesting, my first reaction is "That is totally not at all interesting... UNFAIR." I resist that temptation, but I have no idea of what most of the posts even mean, so how can I metamoderate?
Biology though I have a fair amount of expertise, and think I could judge moderations much better on them than your average slashdotter.
Why assume they'll be primarily used for passenger travel? The article is talking about a heavy lifter. Cargo, in other words. Seven hours or twenty-four hours doesn't usually make a big difference to a box.
Well... no, I'm pretty sure they don't. The technique doesn't sound at all suited to remove the extra 21st chromesome from even one cell, let alone all the cells in a patient's body.
A treatment that could do that would still not be able to undo the developmental damage.
It's not all it can do. I didn't do an in-depth read, but it seems like for one thing this technique could be an extremely handy way to test chromesomal stability as affected by nucleotide sequence, chromatin structure, histones and modifications, etc.
Chromesomal instability could be a major cause of cancer. Nearly all cancerous cells have an abnormal number of chromesomes. It's not too hard to imagine that if you break part of your chromesome corresponding to the centromere and that cell divides, one of the cells won't get that chromesome, which may or may not have a lot of oncogenes which would suppress cancer, and that cell might become cancerous.
So it seems to me that this technique could be used to figure out what might give you cancer and treatments which might improve chromatin stability and keep you healthy. Still think it's hardly worth mentioning?
(I need to point out I'm not a cancer biologist, haven't read the paper too closely, and this is almost completely untested speculation, so take everything with a grain of salt but do realize the possibilities are greater than "do you have Down's syndrome?)
I find it funny that every minute thing about computer hardware is a big deal here on slashdot, wheras almost anything involving biology gets a "who cares" or a "no big deal" and 9 times out of 10 gets a doomsday prediction.
Come to think of it, I'm suprised no one has tagged this with "whatcouldpossiblygowrong." It DOES involve DNA, which will inevitably lead to a "I am Legend" type scenario...
Anyway, we biologists realize the importance of computers, even though they're generally less efficient and more finnicky than almost anything mother nature has developed. How come computer people can't recognize the importance of the biological sciences?
MS makes you buy their overpriced hard drive - if you want storage, but sony makes you buy a blu-ray player reguardless of what model you buy. I have no desire to shell out hundreds of dollars more for a player for a media format I don't have and don't want in the first place. Both consoles sell you more than you want.
Kinda reminds me of some elections: you can't vote based off of "are they good people" because they're both politicians, you have to pick which marketing strategy you prefer. You can't choose a console based off of which company scrooges you over: they're both trying to, you have to choose based on games.
(By the way, I have no delusions that there can be a company that charitably sells me exactly what I want for a fair price and that will stay in buisness for longer than a week, so don't call me naive.)
If there was a way to capture all the neural activity of those gamers and have detailed charts of emotional states and thought processes, that would be just fantastic..Some industries already attempt this. People have shown different adverts to people whilst inside MRI scanners. It's not science fiction.
What I would find entertaining is seeing marketing types trying to figure out the MRI data.
"So when we showed them the ad where the kid drinks Coke and smiles, this part lit up, so maybe that's the part of the brain that likes Coke?"
Oil? So if I paint my solar car orange it will actually work? I'm more worried about coal prices as far as the electrical socket goes. I've never really gotten the connection between oil and electricity if someone wants to fill me in?
A third problem is it doesn't protect against collection agencies. This wouldn't be a problem, except that where I live, apperantly every "recycled" number was registered to someone who owed someone money. If the phone is plugged in, the collection agencies call hourly, despite the number not being active for most of a year.
Telling them the person no longer lives there and the number is recycled at best gets a sympathetic "Sorry, I understand but I have no authority to do anything about it."
Come to think of it, does anyone know if I have any recourse (other than to just use my cell phone, which I do)?
I don't know about lives at stake. It's not like your surgeon is doing on-the-fly sequencing, looking up what genes you have, and making snap decisions based on that.
Any medical treatment relating to genetics should be based on more than a wiki article or even a single peer-reviewed article in a respected journal. If your doctor is giving you treatment based off of something he read in "Genes and Development" last month, he doesn't have any kind of medical license and he hasn't gotten proper approval to be doing human experiments. Remember that even primary research in peer-reviewed journals is often wrong, you need multiple sources.
If he's basing his treatment off of anything resembling this service, he really should be in jail.
Even researchers applying for funds base fundamental points off of more than one article, so vandalism isn't likely to even significantly affect research removed from medicine.
So the potential for incorrect information really is not unique to this thing. Only the Pope claims infallibility, and frankly he's never proven it.
But will wikigene be completely biological companies lying about their gene of interest and corrupt scientists trying to prove their research? Doubtful.
There's the safeguard of "everything remotely relevant when it comes to genes is published and independantly verifyable." At best this will be a quickly searcheable index with a little blurby summary and links to the actual information. If you're wondering what a gene is and if it might possibly be relevant to your research, this might be quicker than doing a pubmed search and finding a 20 page review article detailing everything known about it.
Of course, you can usually just read the intro or abstract to get that information, but it might be nice to have a more coherent summary page, which wiki is good for.
Another safeguard is "who is going to want to vandalize the page on EST 3200321?" It's going to be pretty technical by nature. As long as immature researchers don't try to resolve a controversy via wiki vandalism instead of research and logic, there won't be much. If you're going to vandalize something, you're probably going to want do do it on something with a wider audience, like the page on George Bush, not zebrafish fibroblast growth factor 21A.
Right, but Belvin's right on the money about E3 should be more fun and entertaining since it is about videogames. If I went to the national dentist's convention, I'd expect to be bored out of my mind and maybe see some teeth. If I go to the world adult entertainment convention, I expect to see some boobies. If I go to E3, I'm expecting to see some games.
If they want a buisness meeting, start fresh with a "Boring parts of the videogame industry yearly convention where we talk about boring stuff like marketing, sales, and nothing fun." E3 was for a while supposed to be what PAX is, it's no suprise that gamers feel annoyed with the transition.
Anyway, you know what would be better than PAX? Two PAXes, one called E3.
I could be wrong, but doesn't wiki allow you to submit your research as long as it's been published somewhere you can reference? If you discover a gene, you're going to publish it somewhere you can put on your CV.
Anyway, this will be pretty redundant. NCBI already has a gene database that is well crosslinked.
As this database is powered by published research and updated by a government sponsored organization, it also cannot easily be vandalized, unlike wiki.
Lastly, a lot of researchers put information about their favorite gene up on wiki currently. Example: reelin. I couldn't help noticing the last time I looked that one of the major contributors was referencing her own (peer-reviewed published) research on reelin.
With new brain cells there is an issue of "are the cells going to behave exactly as the cells they replace do?" that I don't know the answer to. I do think it's being investigated, and hopefully someone else knows more than me, my thinking is that no they don't even if they make the exact same synapses.
What I wanted to point out was that an issue that would come up prior to that is even if you can regenerate brain cells, how are you going to get them to integrate coherently? When you're an embryo, you produce way more neurons than you're going to need. Most of them are guided to a coherent layering organization by "radial glial cells" that act as tracks. It's my understanding that once they get there, the new neurons have a window of opportunity to synapse with their neighbors and "connect" coherently or else they die, and that's how the brain prunes itself and sets up the "circuits."
When you're an adult there still are some new neurons being made but not many. You also apperantly lack the radial glial cells which could guide the new brain cells to the right location. It's going to be tough to get young neurons to migrate into the spaces left in an aging brain without causing horrible brain tumors. Even if they do integrate, that's likely to be randomly adding parts to an already functioning brain, and might produce an effect similar to if you opened up your computer and just randomly spliced in some wires on your motherboard.
There is some indication that neurogenesis occours in adults around the ventricles, but it doesn't appear to contribute significantly to the population of brain cells, and it also appears unlikely that it can completely renew the whole brain.
Furthermore, mature neurons don't divide, there's been some suggestion that new neurons would have their own "personalities" and could not be integrated into the brain without affecting function.
The brain cells that you have when you're 20 are apperantly all you are going to have.
While neurons can survive for quite a long time, they eventually succumb to damage (not just from alchohol, also from normal cellular function.)
To sum up, once you're an adult you're constantly losing brain cells and they're not coming back.
My question is, if we do extend our lives much further, what is our mental state going to be? A lot of the mental decline among seniors might be due to other health problems, but at some point, aren't we going to be noticably brain-damaged? Is there any indication at what point this might become a factor for "healthy" individuals?
Slashdot Mirror
You don't seem to realize that no matter what, you have to vote for a POLITICIAN for president.
Anyway, I'm sick of people acting like the presidential ballot is where the agenda is set and is where your voice gets heard. Yes, on a basic level it does represent the choice between two broad directions the government could go in, but if you don't participate at all in the primaries or try to get an issue national attention, you shouldn't expect to like either of the two directions in november.
The telecom issue is an example. The "other guys" didn't get this on the table by voting in a presidential election, they didn't get it on the table by telling Obama they would only vote for him if he endorsed their position, they undoubtedly have been lobbying for a long time.
It's not as easy as "pull the right or left lever in november and you get the government you want."
They were trying to get it to shake the dirt off? Doesn't exactly make sense to me. Maybe worried the martians would be unimpressed by our dirty fork thermometer and blow up earth.
Having not seen the arm itself and having no engineering expirence I also have to ask, why did they make an arm that could damage itself in the first place? It sounds like it was just going to twist too far, couldn't they have, say, put a pin there to keep it from rotating that far?
I think one way to make the meta modding a lot more effective is to allow it to be more tailored based on subject area and your own expertise.
I don't know squat about computers. I see things about OOXML or something marked interesting, my first reaction is "That is totally not at all interesting... UNFAIR." I resist that temptation, but I have no idea of what most of the posts even mean, so how can I metamoderate?
Biology though I have a fair amount of expertise, and think I could judge moderations much better on them than your average slashdotter.
It means that you play many games, but you don't expect to buy it and you don't have to call the game the next day.
Well... no, I'm pretty sure they don't. The technique doesn't sound at all suited to remove the extra 21st chromesome from even one cell, let alone all the cells in a patient's body.
A treatment that could do that would still not be able to undo the developmental damage.
It's not all it can do. I didn't do an in-depth read, but it seems like for one thing this technique could be an extremely handy way to test chromesomal stability as affected by nucleotide sequence, chromatin structure, histones and modifications, etc.
Chromesomal instability could be a major cause of cancer. Nearly all cancerous cells have an abnormal number of chromesomes. It's not too hard to imagine that if you break part of your chromesome corresponding to the centromere and that cell divides, one of the cells won't get that chromesome, which may or may not have a lot of oncogenes which would suppress cancer, and that cell might become cancerous.
So it seems to me that this technique could be used to figure out what might give you cancer and treatments which might improve chromatin stability and keep you healthy. Still think it's hardly worth mentioning?
(I need to point out I'm not a cancer biologist, haven't read the paper too closely, and this is almost completely untested speculation, so take everything with a grain of salt but do realize the possibilities are greater than "do you have Down's syndrome?)
I find it funny that every minute thing about computer hardware is a big deal here on slashdot, wheras almost anything involving biology gets a "who cares" or a "no big deal" and 9 times out of 10 gets a doomsday prediction.
Come to think of it, I'm suprised no one has tagged this with "whatcouldpossiblygowrong." It DOES involve DNA, which will inevitably lead to a "I am Legend" type scenario...
Anyway, we biologists realize the importance of computers, even though they're generally less efficient and more finnicky than almost anything mother nature has developed. How come computer people can't recognize the importance of the biological sciences?
MS makes you buy their overpriced hard drive - if you want storage, but sony makes you buy a blu-ray player reguardless of what model you buy. I have no desire to shell out hundreds of dollars more for a player for a media format I don't have and don't want in the first place. Both consoles sell you more than you want.
Kinda reminds me of some elections: you can't vote based off of "are they good people" because they're both politicians, you have to pick which marketing strategy you prefer. You can't choose a console based off of which company scrooges you over: they're both trying to, you have to choose based on games.
(By the way, I have no delusions that there can be a company that charitably sells me exactly what I want for a fair price and that will stay in buisness for longer than a week, so don't call me naive.)
What I would find entertaining is seeing marketing types trying to figure out the MRI data.
"So when we showed them the ad where the kid drinks Coke and smiles, this part lit up, so maybe that's the part of the brain that likes Coke?"
So not only can I spend money I don't have, I can also tell the bank that I didn't actually spend it when I did?!?! Credit cards are miracles!
Is this a metaphor for Hellgate? The first post is bug-ridden and then you're going to "go under?"
Oil? So if I paint my solar car orange it will actually work? I'm more worried about coal prices as far as the electrical socket goes. I've never really gotten the connection between oil and electricity if someone wants to fill me in?
A third problem is it doesn't protect against collection agencies. This wouldn't be a problem, except that where I live, apperantly every "recycled" number was registered to someone who owed someone money. If the phone is plugged in, the collection agencies call hourly, despite the number not being active for most of a year.
Telling them the person no longer lives there and the number is recycled at best gets a sympathetic "Sorry, I understand but I have no authority to do anything about it."
Come to think of it, does anyone know if I have any recourse (other than to just use my cell phone, which I do)?
I don't know about lives at stake. It's not like your surgeon is doing on-the-fly sequencing, looking up what genes you have, and making snap decisions based on that.
Any medical treatment relating to genetics should be based on more than a wiki article or even a single peer-reviewed article in a respected journal. If your doctor is giving you treatment based off of something he read in "Genes and Development" last month, he doesn't have any kind of medical license and he hasn't gotten proper approval to be doing human experiments. Remember that even primary research in peer-reviewed journals is often wrong, you need multiple sources.
If he's basing his treatment off of anything resembling this service, he really should be in jail.
Even researchers applying for funds base fundamental points off of more than one article, so vandalism isn't likely to even significantly affect research removed from medicine.
Not to say that wikigene will always be accurate and there NEVER will be vandalism.
Of course, this goes for peer-reviewed articles too. According to at least one guy, most of them are wrong.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1182327
So the potential for incorrect information really is not unique to this thing. Only the Pope claims infallibility, and frankly he's never proven it.
But will wikigene be completely biological companies lying about their gene of interest and corrupt scientists trying to prove their research? Doubtful.
There's the safeguard of "everything remotely relevant when it comes to genes is published and independantly verifyable." At best this will be a quickly searcheable index with a little blurby summary and links to the actual information. If you're wondering what a gene is and if it might possibly be relevant to your research, this might be quicker than doing a pubmed search and finding a 20 page review article detailing everything known about it.
Of course, you can usually just read the intro or abstract to get that information, but it might be nice to have a more coherent summary page, which wiki is good for.
Another safeguard is "who is going to want to vandalize the page on EST 3200321?" It's going to be pretty technical by nature. As long as immature researchers don't try to resolve a controversy via wiki vandalism instead of research and logic, there won't be much. If you're going to vandalize something, you're probably going to want do do it on something with a wider audience, like the page on George Bush, not zebrafish fibroblast growth factor 21A.
Right, but Belvin's right on the money about E3 should be more fun and entertaining since it is about videogames. If I went to the national dentist's convention, I'd expect to be bored out of my mind and maybe see some teeth. If I go to the world adult entertainment convention, I expect to see some boobies. If I go to E3, I'm expecting to see some games.
If they want a buisness meeting, start fresh with a "Boring parts of the videogame industry yearly convention where we talk about boring stuff like marketing, sales, and nothing fun." E3 was for a while supposed to be what PAX is, it's no suprise that gamers feel annoyed with the transition.
Anyway, you know what would be better than PAX? Two PAXes, one called E3.
That sounds like BLAST, which if you work in genetics you've undoubtedly heard of, so maybe I don't understand what you're talking about?
I could be wrong, but doesn't wiki allow you to submit your research as long as it's been published somewhere you can reference? If you discover a gene, you're going to publish it somewhere you can put on your CV.
Anyway, this will be pretty redundant. NCBI already has a gene database that is well crosslinked.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=gene
As this database is powered by published research and updated by a government sponsored organization, it also cannot easily be vandalized, unlike wiki.
Lastly, a lot of researchers put information about their favorite gene up on wiki currently.
Example: reelin. I couldn't help noticing the last time I looked that one of the major contributors was referencing her own (peer-reviewed published) research on reelin.
Funny, you don't SOUND very shocked.
Wait... sarcasm on slashdot about the RIAA?!?
Well, sure, if you're going to use "fuzzy" maths on me...
That's a point, but most porn sites still WANT your money.
With new brain cells there is an issue of "are the cells going to behave exactly as the cells they replace do?" that I don't know the answer to. I do think it's being investigated, and hopefully someone else knows more than me, my thinking is that no they don't even if they make the exact same synapses.
What I wanted to point out was that an issue that would come up prior to that is even if you can regenerate brain cells, how are you going to get them to integrate coherently? When you're an embryo, you produce way more neurons than you're going to need. Most of them are guided to a coherent layering organization by "radial glial cells" that act as tracks. It's my understanding that once they get there, the new neurons have a window of opportunity to synapse with their neighbors and "connect" coherently or else they die, and that's how the brain prunes itself and sets up the "circuits."
When you're an adult there still are some new neurons being made but not many. You also apperantly lack the radial glial cells which could guide the new brain cells to the right location. It's going to be tough to get young neurons to migrate into the spaces left in an aging brain without causing horrible brain tumors. Even if they do integrate, that's likely to be randomly adding parts to an already functioning brain, and might produce an effect similar to if you opened up your computer and just randomly spliced in some wires on your motherboard.
There is some indication that neurogenesis occours in adults around the ventricles, but it doesn't appear to contribute significantly to the population of brain cells, and it also appears unlikely that it can completely renew the whole brain.
Furthermore, mature neurons don't divide, there's been some suggestion that new neurons would have their own "personalities" and could not be integrated into the brain without affecting function.
The brain cells that you have when you're 20 are apperantly all you are going to have.
While neurons can survive for quite a long time, they eventually succumb to damage (not just from alchohol, also from normal cellular function.)
To sum up, once you're an adult you're constantly losing brain cells and they're not coming back.
My question is, if we do extend our lives much further, what is our mental state going to be? A lot of the mental decline among seniors might be due to other health problems, but at some point, aren't we going to be noticably brain-damaged? Is there any indication at what point this might become a factor for "healthy" individuals?
Given what feels like 20 years in grad school, can I get my PhD yet?