All this arguing about would you be able to see a black hole or not to me indicates that the single most important thing we can do with this collider is make as big a black hole as we can and put someone inside to see if they can see it or not.
with almost 40,000 people working on it and so many guns, they might be planning on shooting down all the clouds. Heck, with that many people, they could almost just stand in a big group on top of the mountain range and all blow really hard to make the clouds go away.
Disclaimer: You're right, that wouldn't work at all, I'm sorry.
They collected saliva from a whopping 23 people to come up with this wonder list of proteins. Ever heard of genetic variation?
No, I'm sure they have never ever heard of genetic variation. Being biochemists, they are probably completely ignorant of the basics of biology.
There are over a thousand proteins in spit apperantly, identifying them from one individual alone is no easy or cheap thing. 23 is a good canvassing given the state of funding of the sciences and how much this must have cost. And how much genetic variation in spit do you expect? You're not likely to have even 100 proteins different between any two individuals. There are probably proteins out there that are in some people's saliva but weren't in the 23 due to genetic variation, but that will be pretty low.
A bigger issue would be threshold of detection, how do you know that these proteins actually have functions in spit as opposed to just being detectable in spit? And I would bet good money that non-genetic variation would make the biggest difference. A poster below brought up pre and post menopausal women. Given the immune system's links to mucosal layers, I would think that having a cold would also signficantly change your salivary makeup.
Again though, they have undoubtedly thought long and hard about these issues and might even talk about it in the paper.
Otherwise...is this a slashvertisement? Yet another of hundreds of online gaming sites...what's the news for nerds in this? No, seriously, I really want to know
There is a breed of nerds, the game biz nerds, who would be interested in this. The same people who argue passionately about computer chips from so and so, and who make online petitions to prevent EA from buying are probably interested in this.
As a science/videogame nerd, I have to say this is actually more interesting to me than the bulk of the linux/microsoft/computer hardware/blahblahblah stories posted here.
Looks like we can do more for mice, than for humans
You could do more for humans if there weren't all these "ethical objections" to research which would probably kill people, or to making transgenic humans. Fortunately, only humans object to human research, (just as only mice and hippies object to mouse research) and so our human probing experiments are proceeding as planned.
Go on then, with all the money that science gets for R&D, why doesn't the scientific community use a tiny part of it to launch its own channel covering 'proper' science.
But, oh no, scientists everywhere suddenly claim poverty and, anyway, are far too busy tinkering with the LHC, latest mega-laser and juggling bacteria.
Someone overestimates how much funding is given to scientists and underestimates how much money it costs to set up a TV channel, and also underestimates restrictions on funding. Also overestimates the importance of Joe Couchpotato being up on the latest physics research.
Er... uh... yeah, so I realize they're not using cows as surrogates, they're making hybrids. I guess that's different. I do have to say that if the hybrids were viable, that might still be a good solution.
I still think my analysis holds, since presumably it would be much harder to obtain whale eggs (requiring surgery) than whale sperm (requiring... well I honestly don't know), and cow eggs would be easier to obtain. A lot of species when artificially hybridized like that develop to a point.
It's fairly common in labs studying the basics of fertilization to create "humsters" which are hamster eggs with some of the outer layers removed (the zona I think) fertilized with human sperm. They undergo fertilization although I don't know how much further than that they go. They definitely don't implant it in a human or hamster.
But creating a hybrid to "troubleshoot" some of the early developmental barriers to growing a whale in a cow would be a cheaper way to go about it than using up whale eggs, only to find out after pouring hundreds of thousands into it that in order to get something fertilized with a whale sperm to implant into a cow you need to add something like a growth factor or a certain whale hormone.
So the japanese have a huge demand for whale meat, people are willing to pay quite a premium for it. Problem: whales are becoming rare, and consequently the rest of the world is putting pressure on them to quit hunting whales. That presents an opportunity though, it's quite feasible that if there is a ban on whaling, the price of whale meat would go sky high, making alternative methods of harvesting whale meat possible.
It would be nice to farm whales, but there's a problem: you would have to domesticate whales or at least catch a whole bunch live and make them mate... which they don't do in captivity.
Alright, how about artificial impregnation? That would work, except you still have the problem of having very few whales. You'd want to have maybe a hundred whales, and artificial impregnation is not too terribly efficient, and the impregnated whales would need a huge "grazing" area.
Well, then what about using another species as surrogates for whale embryos, letting them grow to a point in captivity, then eating them? Still expensive, but demand is very high, it's a lucrative possibility.
Problem: what animals to use as surrogates? It's going to be even lower efficiency than if you were doing it with whales, so you would want to have a lot of them availiable, they should be well studies animals too with established health guidelines, and most obviously must be able to support a whale of a fetus. Mice? People?
Cows are the pretty obvious choice. If the study had shown that you can use cows as surrogates for whales with few problems, we wouldn't have to worry about whale extinction, the japanese could enjoy their whale meat, problem solved. The only issue would be the inevitable animal rights activists, but those people all have something wrong with their heads anyway.
Okay, I think we've covered extensively that take two has other games. About 10 times in fact. The original point was that GTA is probably why EA is making this move right now. At the very least, Take two's stock will be much higher AFTER the release than before, possibly even more than this hostile takeover bid. They aren't making this move entirely to get GTA, but it's probably the reason the blob is moving now.
They never do anything small on mars, do they? They have that red dot that's apperantly something like 1000 times worse than any earth hurricane ever, they have two moons as opposed to our one. And now this 60 kilometer long avalanche visible from orbit. It wouldn't suprise me if someone responds with a link to a story that your average marsquake would be about 80 on the richter scale.
Mark this in the slashdot history, finally an application of that tag where it makes sense (as opposed to, for example, the observation that DNA tends to associate with homologous sequences).
Live viruses have been used for medical purposes already though. Vaccina, a strain of virus related to smallpox, is administered to vaccinate against smallpox. More importantly, I've heard about attempts to treat brain tumors by applying modified herpesvirus to infect the tumor cells, then using an anti-herpes medication. Not sure how those trials went.
This development makes me wonder whether we already have other natural, benign viruses helping us out.
I do remember there being some conjecture that certain DNA elements may have started out as viral elements. I've never heard of those elements or viruses having a beneficial effect.
Among mice in the wild, there is a virus that is usually inherited at birth (can't remember the name). When it is inherited at birth, it has no known negative effect. If a mouse is born without the virus and is not exposed to it until adulthood, the mouse will mount an immune response to it that is lethal (to the mouse).
One way to speed things up would be to have people pass through a metal detector before the real thing. Maybe have a conveyor belt without the X-ray where people put their metal things and such into the trays, they walk through the metal detector. A practice run. If they set it off they don't have to hold the line up, you can continue on. If they set off the second one that is actually the checkpoint, they get sent off to be waved down.
Of course, there are some problems here. Doubling the number of metal detectors for one.
Why go to all the trouble to put a rover on the moon? Get some binoculars, you'll be able to see everything a multi-million dollar robot on the surface would.
I am planning on failing my midterms. I expect to fail this midterm by significantly more points (100x per my plans) than previous failures. I am doing this in search of hydrogen deposits in the poles.
Well, sure, we don't have the ability to completely destroy it now, but give us one more arms race, a few more conservative presidents, and we will have a hand grenade that can split the earth. You know, mutually assured destruction done right. I hope we call it a "super mega holy anti-matter hand grenade 9000."
We joke, but someone at monsanto undoubtedly at least thought about ways to steal a patent on this. See the link to the blog. The submitter talks about how monsanto is claiming they contributed. Maybe they were thinking "Step one, sneak a comment in there about how we contributed. Step two, use that lie as a basis for claiming we should get patent. Step three, anyone who has eaten corn owes us annual royalties, since you are what you eat."
Quit blogging and hurry up with the chicken and platypus sequencing!
I use chickens for my research. Platypi are wierd. I do think they would make an interesting model organism, if only to study platypi. Either way, I want them both by the end of the week.
Creepy, no one is saying "Lets start transplanting embryonic stem cell derived tissues to patients! We can just put them on anti-rejection drugs, no problems there!" You're really jumping the gun. ESC research is still in its early stages.
To make an analogy, this would be about the stage of the wright brothers research where they were trying to develop a wing shape in a wind tunnel that would provide lift. How ridiculous would it have been to come into their shop, see a little foot-wide section of wing blowing in the wind and say "That's way too small to lift people! Flight is never going to happen!"
Furthermore, embryonic stem cell research is not only aimed at making transplants. It's teaching us a lot about cellular differentiation, and has great potential to make good non-animal testing models.
Slashdot Mirror
All this arguing about would you be able to see a black hole or not to me indicates that the single most important thing we can do with this collider is make as big a black hole as we can and put someone inside to see if they can see it or not.
with almost 40,000 people working on it and so many guns, they might be planning on shooting down all the clouds. Heck, with that many people, they could almost just stand in a big group on top of the mountain range and all blow really hard to make the clouds go away.
Disclaimer: You're right, that wouldn't work at all, I'm sorry.
Edit: "You're not likely to have even 100 proteins different between any two individuals..." should have continued "because of genetic variation."
No, I'm sure they have never ever heard of genetic variation. Being biochemists, they are probably completely ignorant of the basics of biology.
There are over a thousand proteins in spit apperantly, identifying them from one individual alone is no easy or cheap thing. 23 is a good canvassing given the state of funding of the sciences and how much this must have cost. And how much genetic variation in spit do you expect? You're not likely to have even 100 proteins different between any two individuals. There are probably proteins out there that are in some people's saliva but weren't in the 23 due to genetic variation, but that will be pretty low.
A bigger issue would be threshold of detection, how do you know that these proteins actually have functions in spit as opposed to just being detectable in spit? And I would bet good money that non-genetic variation would make the biggest difference. A poster below brought up pre and post menopausal women. Given the immune system's links to mucosal layers, I would think that having a cold would also signficantly change your salivary makeup.
Again though, they have undoubtedly thought long and hard about these issues and might even talk about it in the paper.
There is a breed of nerds, the game biz nerds, who would be interested in this. The same people who argue passionately about computer chips from so and so, and who make online petitions to prevent EA from buying are probably interested in this.
As a science/videogame nerd, I have to say this is actually more interesting to me than the bulk of the linux/microsoft/computer hardware/blahblahblah stories posted here.
This is just not as exciting as the other X-prizes. Maybe more valuable, but still. Just saying.
Did he take the secret of WHAT THE HELL DOES THE LAST HALF OF SPACE ODESSY 2001 MEAN to the grave with him?
Someone overestimates how much funding is given to scientists and underestimates how much money it costs to set up a TV channel, and also underestimates restrictions on funding. Also overestimates the importance of Joe Couchpotato being up on the latest physics research.
Good point. For every 5 hours of cable news, theres' maximum of 5 minutes of real news. One of those is apperantly science-related.
Er... uh... yeah, so I realize they're not using cows as surrogates, they're making hybrids. I guess that's different. I do have to say that if the hybrids were viable, that might still be a good solution.
I still think my analysis holds, since presumably it would be much harder to obtain whale eggs (requiring surgery) than whale sperm (requiring... well I honestly don't know), and cow eggs would be easier to obtain. A lot of species when artificially hybridized like that develop to a point.
It's fairly common in labs studying the basics of fertilization to create "humsters" which are hamster eggs with some of the outer layers removed (the zona I think) fertilized with human sperm. They undergo fertilization although I don't know how much further than that they go. They definitely don't implant it in a human or hamster.
But creating a hybrid to "troubleshoot" some of the early developmental barriers to growing a whale in a cow would be a cheaper way to go about it than using up whale eggs, only to find out after pouring hundreds of thousands into it that in order to get something fertilized with a whale sperm to implant into a cow you need to add something like a growth factor or a certain whale hormone.
But yeah, this isn't the best science.
So the japanese have a huge demand for whale meat, people are willing to pay quite a premium for it. Problem: whales are becoming rare, and consequently the rest of the world is putting pressure on them to quit hunting whales. That presents an opportunity though, it's quite feasible that if there is a ban on whaling, the price of whale meat would go sky high, making alternative methods of harvesting whale meat possible.
It would be nice to farm whales, but there's a problem: you would have to domesticate whales or at least catch a whole bunch live and make them mate... which they don't do in captivity.
Alright, how about artificial impregnation? That would work, except you still have the problem of having very few whales. You'd want to have maybe a hundred whales, and artificial impregnation is not too terribly efficient, and the impregnated whales would need a huge "grazing" area.
Well, then what about using another species as surrogates for whale embryos, letting them grow to a point in captivity, then eating them? Still expensive, but demand is very high, it's a lucrative possibility.
Problem: what animals to use as surrogates? It's going to be even lower efficiency than if you were doing it with whales, so you would want to have a lot of them availiable, they should be well studies animals too with established health guidelines, and most obviously must be able to support a whale of a fetus. Mice? People?
Cows are the pretty obvious choice. If the study had shown that you can use cows as surrogates for whales with few problems, we wouldn't have to worry about whale extinction, the japanese could enjoy their whale meat, problem solved. The only issue would be the inevitable animal rights activists, but those people all have something wrong with their heads anyway.
Okay, I think we've covered extensively that take two has other games. About 10 times in fact. The original point was that GTA is probably why EA is making this move right now. At the very least, Take two's stock will be much higher AFTER the release than before, possibly even more than this hostile takeover bid. They aren't making this move entirely to get GTA, but it's probably the reason the blob is moving now.
They never do anything small on mars, do they? They have that red dot that's apperantly something like 1000 times worse than any earth hurricane ever, they have two moons as opposed to our one. And now this 60 kilometer long avalanche visible from orbit. It wouldn't suprise me if someone responds with a link to a story that your average marsquake would be about 80 on the richter scale.
Live viruses have been used for medical purposes already though. Vaccina, a strain of virus related to smallpox, is administered to vaccinate against smallpox. More importantly, I've heard about attempts to treat brain tumors by applying modified herpesvirus to infect the tumor cells, then using an anti-herpes medication. Not sure how those trials went.
This development makes me wonder whether we already have other natural, benign viruses helping us out.
I do remember there being some conjecture that certain DNA elements may have started out as viral elements. I've never heard of those elements or viruses having a beneficial effect.
Among mice in the wild, there is a virus that is usually inherited at birth (can't remember the name). When it is inherited at birth, it has no known negative effect. If a mouse is born without the virus and is not exposed to it until adulthood, the mouse will mount an immune response to it that is lethal (to the mouse).
Linux is also something that is just not as interesting as people here seem to think.
Was this like a "on the lighter side" in this journal? And really, who would need a weekly report on death? Does it really change that much in a week?
One way to speed things up would be to have people pass through a metal detector before the real thing. Maybe have a conveyor belt without the X-ray where people put their metal things and such into the trays, they walk through the metal detector. A practice run. If they set it off they don't have to hold the line up, you can continue on. If they set off the second one that is actually the checkpoint, they get sent off to be waved down.
Of course, there are some problems here. Doubling the number of metal detectors for one.
Why go to all the trouble to put a rover on the moon? Get some binoculars, you'll be able to see everything a multi-million dollar robot on the surface would.
I am planning on failing my midterms. I expect to fail this midterm by significantly more points (100x per my plans) than previous failures. I am doing this in search of hydrogen deposits in the poles.
And there it is, the last star wars quote ever on /.
Well, sure, we don't have the ability to completely destroy it now, but give us one more arms race, a few more conservative presidents, and we will have a hand grenade that can split the earth. You know, mutually assured destruction done right. I hope we call it a "super mega holy anti-matter hand grenade 9000."
We joke, but someone at monsanto undoubtedly at least thought about ways to steal a patent on this. See the link to the blog. The submitter talks about how monsanto is claiming they contributed. Maybe they were thinking "Step one, sneak a comment in there about how we contributed. Step two, use that lie as a basis for claiming we should get patent. Step three, anyone who has eaten corn owes us annual royalties, since you are what you eat."
Quit blogging and hurry up with the chicken and platypus sequencing!
I use chickens for my research. Platypi are wierd. I do think they would make an interesting model organism, if only to study platypi. Either way, I want them both by the end of the week.
Phil
Creepy, no one is saying "Lets start transplanting embryonic stem cell derived tissues to patients! We can just put them on anti-rejection drugs, no problems there!" You're really jumping the gun. ESC research is still in its early stages.
To make an analogy, this would be about the stage of the wright brothers research where they were trying to develop a wing shape in a wind tunnel that would provide lift. How ridiculous would it have been to come into their shop, see a little foot-wide section of wing blowing in the wind and say "That's way too small to lift people! Flight is never going to happen!"
Furthermore, embryonic stem cell research is not only aimed at making transplants. It's teaching us a lot about cellular differentiation, and has great potential to make good non-animal testing models.