I agree with the sentiment that we can't talk seriously about colonizing other worlds until we learn how to sustainably inhabit our own, but we need to develop the technology to move humans en masse alongside the capability to not ruin whatever place we land on. Not ruining planets is something we should be practicing on earth immediately, but as TFA points out, many people fail to recognize the economic benefits. Some day this world will be come uninhabitable (asteroid? zombies?) and it would be nice for the sake of our species to be able to move at least some of us to a new place and stay alive there. Why not work on this technology and prepare now? I think our descendants would thank us if they didn't have to attempt the long term survival of the human race in a hastily improvised tin can.
One of my favorite stories is Aesop's tale of the boar and the fox:
One day as he moved through the forest the fox came upon his friend the wild boar who was engaged vigorously sharpening his tusks against a large stone.
"My friend," started the fox, "Why do you exert yourself so, seeing there is no hunter about and no other danger from which to defend yourself on this day in the forest?"
To which the boar frankly replied, "The day will come when I have need of sharp tusks. I shall have no time to sharpen them then."
I would add that there are a couple of advantages of the antisense oligonucleotide therapies developed by Ionis and other companies over CRISPR:
1. Delivery. CRISPR currently requires a viral vector to deliver Cas9 protein as well as guide RNA molecules. Antisense oligos (ASOs) have already demonstrated clinical efficacy in delivery to motor neurons to treat spinal muscular atrophy (nusinersen).
2. CRISPR gene editing generates permanent changes in the genome and while accuracy is improving, off-target cutting is still a hurdle. It will be a while before permanent edits make their way into patients' brains, but the CRISPR hype machine may have the momentum to do it. There are RNA targeting varieties of CRISPR, but they face the delivery barrier and don't offer a significant advantage over ASOs.
The story of ASO drugs is actually really inspiring for anyone hoping to develop a brand new class of drugs that target formerly "undruggable" proteins like Huntingin. Ionis (formerly Isis) has been on the brink of collapse many times and had a few clinical flops before finally seeing some success. I think it's amazing that a devastating disease like Huntington's might actually turn into a manageable condition.
Of course, one of the "cheapest" ways to eliminate this disease from future generations is in vitro fertilization followed by genetic screening. Tens of thousands of dollars to ensure your offspring lack the offending gene vs. what will likely amount to hundreds of thousands per year for ASO (or $1 million+ for a one-off CRISPR viral therapy). Still, using genetic disease to understand and master the technology of gene-based drugs (CRISPR, ASOs etc) can help us to better treat genetic disease that arises de novo, especially cancer.
Base Editing is a CRISPR variant where the DNA-cutting activity of Cas9 protein has been modified with a mutation that disables its DNA cutting ability and a fusion to another protein called Cytidine Deaminase which converts "C" bases to "U" bases (which are read as "T"). It is still guided to the precise chromosomal location by a "guide RNA" that is complementary to the region you want to edit.
The CRISPR field is very wild-west like at the moment and everyone is fighting for their share of the spotlight (and the potential wealth) with these minor variants. Whether it's truly safer than vanilla CRISPR will be better demonstrated over time and hopefully by labs without a direct financial interest in the success of one competing platform over another.
I also recently finished Dune (a couple of months ago?) and finished Neuromancer this morning on my walk to work! I agree - the two books are very different, making for a funny sequence of mental space to wander through but well worth the journey. I am also 20% through Jurassic Park - a favorite from my childhood.
Yes! These de-clawed HIV vectors are known more broadly as therapeutic lentivirus. The problem is still efficiency - you have to not only hit every infected cell, but CRISPR editing has to go off without a hitch in those cells. Then there's the issue of turning off the transgene you've just delivered before "off target" cuts can induce chromosomal aberrations that can lead to cancer.
This isn't the first time researchers have used gene editing to tackle HIV infection. There is a clinical trial involving adenovirus delivery of zinc finger nucleases (a prior generation gene editing technology) to patient-derived blood stem cells to inactivate CCR5, an essential HIV receptor, on the surface of immune cells. Importantly, these cells are removed from patients, edited in the lab and returned to the body. This ensures that all NEW blood cells will be HIV resistant, but is also not a total genomic clearance of latent provirus.
I agree that a combination of approaches will probably be required to inactivate latent provirus as well as slow disease transmission. Public health approaches like needle exchanges and safe sex education are probably just as important for eliminating this disease.
While it's important the continue testing the limits of CRISPR technology in preclinical studies like this, the truth is that viral vector based delivery isn't quite up to the challenge (yet!) of a total genomic clearance of HIV in all infected cells.
From the news and views comment on the article:
several issues remain to be addressed prior to clinical trials. While an AAV serotype with broad tropism is ideal for proof-of-concept studies, replication competent HIV is rare (present only in one of every 10,000 to 1,000,000 CD4+ T cells), and thus identifying delivery vectors with high specificity to the HIV reservoir remains a significant hurdle. There is currently no known viral or non-viral agent that is capable of efficiently and selectively delivering and expressing transgenes in these cells. An ideal delivery candidate should possess the ability to carry a relatively large cargo to relevant reservoir cells and facilitate pharmacologically significant enzymatic activity. It should also exhibit little to no toxicity irrespective of the duration of its presence in vivo, whether transient or long term.
(emphasis mine)
Still, this is a very encouraging development toward a possible HIV cure.
My dad took my brother and me to see Jurassic Park in a huge but nearly empty movie theater. There were maybe 5 other people in the room. I was 10 years old and pretty much at the height of young boy dinosaur frenzy. I hadn't actually seen a trailer and had no idea what to expect from the movie. I was completely blown away and it has stuck with me over the years. My brother fell out of his seat when the raptors jumped to snag the kids out of the ventillation.
Incidentally. my career path (I'm a molecular biologist) is littered with the grown up kids who fell in love with biology and genetic engineering because of Jurassic Park.
Anyway, the reply to your post: Netbooks are awesome, perfect for writing books outside, for example.
I agree with this conclusion!
I had a 2nd gen EEEPC years ago that was great for surfing the web and writing for hours on end. Because it was so cheap it was also essentially a "throwaway" that I used to cut my teeth on (very) basic hardware hacking, like adding a touchscreen. I gave it away to a friend in 2009 when the netbook market was booming. I never did get another one but I have very fond memories.
The whole point being that dosage is critical in all of these cases.
"Formaldehyde is also produced naturally in the human body. It is essential for the production of some basic biological materials, such as certain amino acids. Amino acids are necessary for important life processes as they are the building blocks of proteins in the body."
It's normal but unnecessary for laypeople to be afraid of cell phones, just like it's normal but unnecessary for them to fear formaldehyde in small amounts. Now, as for that guy whose job it is to adjust active microwave relays...
That's a fair point. Just remember, according to that classification system cellphones are in the same group as Carpentry and Joinery (p.7).
Granted, I cherry picked that from the list but the reason for a 2B designation is that they don't have the statistical power from their study to rule it out as a cause of gliomas, which means that the incidence is very low in exposed vs. unexposed populations. I think it's safe to say that as long as laypeople are okay with living in a house made of carpentry then they should be okay with using a cell phone.
"Exposure to ionizing radiation, such as from x-rays, is known to increase the risk of cancer. However, although many studies have examined the potential health effects of non-ionizing radiation from radar, microwave ovens, cell phones, and other sources, there is currently no consistent evidence that non-ionizing radiation increases cancer risk (1).
"The only consistently recognized biological effect of radiofrequency energy is heating. The ability of microwave ovens to heat food is one example of this effect of radiofrequency energy. Radiofrequency exposure from cell phone use does cause heating to the area of the body where a cell phone or other device is held (ear, head, etc.). However, it is not sufficient to measurably increase body temperature, and there are no other clearly established effects on the body from radiofrequency energy."
Strains of bacteria defective for DNA repair enzymes have been used for years to accelerate lab studies of antibiotic resistance. There are even mutator strains of staph aureus that have been used for studies like this.
It should be pointed out that George church has a huge conflict of interest in making such a statement, as he and Zhang are still affiliated with editas, the company they founded together to capitalize on CRISPR technology. Doudna was part of the company for a time but left after the patent war blew up to found her own company, intellia.
His statement that it is "anything but obvious" to adapt CRISPR to eukaryotic cells from bacteria would be refuted by pretty much any first year molecular biology student. Basically to get CRISPR working in mammalian cells is as simple as changing the DNA regulatory elements that drive expression of the Cas9 enzyme and the targeting RNA molecules from prokaryotic to mammalian elements. These elements are well understood and available essentially as "off-the-shelf" components and have been used to express literally thousands of non-native genes in mammalian cells by researchers for decades. And yes, this WAS the very obvious next step in the research, evident to many biologists. The "news and views" perspective article in the same issue of Science describing the landmark paper from Doudna/Charpentier specifically points out the tantalizing possibility of genome editing for gene therapy:
"Jinek et al. realized that a highly specific, customizable RNA-directed DNA nuclease could be useful to edit whole genomes. Based on the 20-nucleotide guide section of the crRNA, the enzyme could theoretically introduce breaks at unique sites in any eukaryotic genome. As a proof of concept, the authors programmed Cas9 to cleave a plasmid carrying the gene encoding green fluorescent protein at predetermined loci using a single chimeric crRNA containing just the critical segment of the tracrRNA. DNA breaks induce cellular DNA repair pathways (9) and this can be harnessed to disrupt, insert, or repair specific genes of cells. Introducing DNA breaks at desired loci using just Cas9 and a chimeric crRNA would be a substantial improvement over existing gene-targeting technologies, such as zinc finger nucleases and transcription activator–like effector nucleases, as these require protein engineering for every new target locus (10). Efficient gene repair strategies in cells from patients, and the reintroduction of repaired cells, could become increasingly important for treating many genetic disorders."
The size of the egos and paydays involved precludes any hope of a logical conclusion to the patent fight.
"It all began in 2012, when UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and others, including Charpentier, published a seminal Science paper on CRISPR. In this paper, Doudna showed that the gene-editing technology can be used to cut DNA in a test tube at targeted sites. Later, Doudna filed a patent application for CRISPR."
"Then in 2013, in another Science paper, MIT bioengineer Feng Zhang and his team reported developing a CRISPR system that edited genomes in eukaryotic cells — the cells of animals and people. When Zhang filed his own patent application, he applied for the PTO to “fast track” its patent review process. The result was that although UC Berkeley filed first, the PTO actually awarded the patent to the Broad and MIT in April 2014. (The Broad and MIT were later awarded a bunch of other CRISPR patents.) So UC Berkeley asked for a so-called “interference proceeding” — an official reassessment to determine who was the first to invent the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9.
This is why many in the life science community feel that Doudna/Charpentier got short-changed. This all happened right before the switch to the current "first-to-file" rule in USPTO. Also, many in the life sciences are frustrated at claims that Zhang's application to eukaryotic cells wasn't obvious. Those aforementioned awards were given to D/C precisely because scientists recognized the (obvious) potential of CRISPR/Cas to revolutionize the treatment of human disease. While Zhang's group has done some groundbreaking later work in the CRISPR field, Doudna et al probably deserve the patent. But props to MIT/Zhang for having a better understanding of patent law. That counts for a lot these days.
My wife is in a California English Language Teaching certification course online with the University of Phoenix - they have a similar online writing based curriculum. From time to time, she lets me read some of the things her classmates are writing. From what I have seen, a substantial number of educators in the state of California often have terrible writing skills. Their spelling is not great, either. There are many schools in San Diego where school children receive little or no help at home with reading or writing, not to mention math, science, art, or history. Teachers are really the first and only line of defense between these kids and illiteracy. Since most students don't do much reading or writing on their own outside of facebook posts or texting, it is unlikely that they will learn writing skills by experiencing good writing. If their teachers haven't got it together, there is very little chance that anyone else is going to set them aright.
Naturally, these kids grow up and start applying to colleges. Some of them are accepted and must be responsible for the awful blog posts you're talking about.
I got my wife to start playing Portal first, then Portal 2. She has also enjoyed the Torchlight series.
Still doesn't play L4D. This is a slow process, but it has been fun.
The best way to keep her from being embarrassed by her comparative skill level is to never bring it up. Tips are okay, but only if she asks for them. Obviously everybody is different, but think how annoying gaming would have been to you if someone hovered over your shoulder while you were learning to play.
The fastest DNA polymerases can copy a template at around 250 bases/sec. Chemical DNA synthesis is much slower.
As for read speeds, DNA sequencing can be done serially (500-800 bases in a matter of hours - 1 cent per base) or massively parallel (100-200 bases per read; 100 million reads; overnight - $1000 per chip by year's end?)
Tools allowing for rapid synthesis (write) and sequencing (read) of DNA would enable a biotech revolution similar in scope and impact to the computing revolution of the last century. As far as I know, this technology is still incredibly far away, but definitely merits relentless R&D.
The fastest DNA polymerases can copy a template at around 250 bases/sec. Chemical DNA synthesis is much slower.
As for read speeds, DNA sequencing can be done serially (500-800 bases in a matter of hours - 1 cent per base) or massively parallel (100-200 bases per read; 100 million reads; overnight - $1000 per chip by year's end?)
Tools allowing for rapid synthesis (write) and sequencing (read) of DNA would enable a biotech revolution similar in scope and impact to the computing revolution of the last century. As far as I know, this technology is still incredibly far away, but definitely merits relentless R&D.
Yeah, we all know that/. is supposed to be "news" for nerds and stuff that "matters", but I think that we all need a good laugh every now and then. This seems to fit the bill quite nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the sentiment that we can't talk seriously about colonizing other worlds until we learn how to sustainably inhabit our own, but we need to develop the technology to move humans en masse alongside the capability to not ruin whatever place we land on. Not ruining planets is something we should be practicing on earth immediately, but as TFA points out, many people fail to recognize the economic benefits. Some day this world will be come uninhabitable (asteroid? zombies?) and it would be nice for the sake of our species to be able to move at least some of us to a new place and stay alive there. Why not work on this technology and prepare now? I think our descendants would thank us if they didn't have to attempt the long term survival of the human race in a hastily improvised tin can.
One of my favorite stories is Aesop's tale of the boar and the fox:
One day as he moved through the forest the fox came upon his friend the wild boar who was engaged vigorously sharpening his tusks against a large stone.
"My friend," started the fox, "Why do you exert yourself so, seeing there is no hunter about and no other danger from which to defend yourself on this day in the forest?"
To which the boar frankly replied, "The day will come when I have need of sharp tusks. I shall have no time to sharpen them then."
I would add that there are a couple of advantages of the antisense oligonucleotide therapies developed by Ionis and other companies over CRISPR:
1. Delivery. CRISPR currently requires a viral vector to deliver Cas9 protein as well as guide RNA molecules. Antisense oligos (ASOs) have already demonstrated clinical efficacy in delivery to motor neurons to treat spinal muscular atrophy (nusinersen).
2. CRISPR gene editing generates permanent changes in the genome and while accuracy is improving, off-target cutting is still a hurdle. It will be a while before permanent edits make their way into patients' brains, but the CRISPR hype machine may have the momentum to do it. There are RNA targeting varieties of CRISPR, but they face the delivery barrier and don't offer a significant advantage over ASOs.
The story of ASO drugs is actually really inspiring for anyone hoping to develop a brand new class of drugs that target formerly "undruggable" proteins like Huntingin. Ionis (formerly Isis) has been on the brink of collapse many times and had a few clinical flops before finally seeing some success. I think it's amazing that a devastating disease like Huntington's might actually turn into a manageable condition.
Of course, one of the "cheapest" ways to eliminate this disease from future generations is in vitro fertilization followed by genetic screening. Tens of thousands of dollars to ensure your offspring lack the offending gene vs. what will likely amount to hundreds of thousands per year for ASO (or $1 million+ for a one-off CRISPR viral therapy). Still, using genetic disease to understand and master the technology of gene-based drugs (CRISPR, ASOs etc) can help us to better treat genetic disease that arises de novo, especially cancer.
Base Editing is a CRISPR variant where the DNA-cutting activity of Cas9 protein has been modified with a mutation that disables its DNA cutting ability and a fusion to another protein called Cytidine Deaminase which converts "C" bases to "U" bases (which are read as "T"). It is still guided to the precise chromosomal location by a "guide RNA" that is complementary to the region you want to edit.
The CRISPR field is very wild-west like at the moment and everyone is fighting for their share of the spotlight (and the potential wealth) with these minor variants. Whether it's truly safer than vanilla CRISPR will be better demonstrated over time and hopefully by labs without a direct financial interest in the success of one competing platform over another.
I also recently finished Dune (a couple of months ago?) and finished Neuromancer this morning on my walk to work! I agree - the two books are very different, making for a funny sequence of mental space to wander through but well worth the journey. I am also 20% through Jurassic Park - a favorite from my childhood.
Yes! These de-clawed HIV vectors are known more broadly as therapeutic lentivirus. The problem is still efficiency - you have to not only hit every infected cell, but CRISPR editing has to go off without a hitch in those cells. Then there's the issue of turning off the transgene you've just delivered before "off target" cuts can induce chromosomal aberrations that can lead to cancer.
This isn't the first time researchers have used gene editing to tackle HIV infection. There is a clinical trial involving adenovirus delivery of zinc finger nucleases (a prior generation gene editing technology) to patient-derived blood stem cells to inactivate CCR5, an essential HIV receptor, on the surface of immune cells. Importantly, these cells are removed from patients, edited in the lab and returned to the body. This ensures that all NEW blood cells will be HIV resistant, but is also not a total genomic clearance of latent provirus.
I agree that a combination of approaches will probably be required to inactivate latent provirus as well as slow disease transmission. Public health approaches like needle exchanges and safe sex education are probably just as important for eliminating this disease.
several issues remain to be addressed prior to clinical trials. While an AAV serotype with broad tropism is ideal for proof-of-concept studies, replication competent HIV is rare (present only in one of every 10,000 to 1,000,000 CD4+ T cells), and thus identifying delivery vectors with high specificity to the HIV reservoir remains a significant hurdle. There is currently no known viral or non-viral agent that is capable of efficiently and selectively delivering and expressing transgenes in these cells. An ideal delivery candidate should possess the ability to carry a relatively large cargo to relevant reservoir cells and facilitate pharmacologically significant enzymatic activity. It should also exhibit little to no toxicity irrespective of the duration of its presence in vivo, whether transient or long term.
(emphasis mine)
Still, this is a very encouraging development toward a possible HIV cure.
My dad took my brother and me to see Jurassic Park in a huge but nearly empty movie theater. There were maybe 5 other people in the room. I was 10 years old and pretty much at the height of young boy dinosaur frenzy. I hadn't actually seen a trailer and had no idea what to expect from the movie. I was completely blown away and it has stuck with me over the years. My brother fell out of his seat when the raptors jumped to snag the kids out of the ventillation.
Incidentally. my career path (I'm a molecular biologist) is littered with the grown up kids who fell in love with biology and genetic engineering because of Jurassic Park.
By myself:
Adams - Dirk Gently 1 & 2
Plato - The Republic
Milton - Paradise Lost
With my kids:
Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events
Milne - Winnie the Pooh
Grahame - The Wind in the WIllows
Just finished Tea Time last week. Loved it.
Anyway, the reply to your post: Netbooks are awesome, perfect for writing books outside, for example.
I agree with this conclusion!
I had a 2nd gen EEEPC years ago that was great for surfing the web and writing for hours on end. Because it was so cheap it was also essentially a "throwaway" that I used to cut my teeth on (very) basic hardware hacking, like adding a touchscreen. I gave it away to a friend in 2009 when the netbook market was booming. I never did get another one but I have very fond memories.
The whole point being that dosage is critical in all of these cases.
"Formaldehyde is also produced naturally in the human body. It is essential for the production of some basic biological materials, such as certain amino acids. Amino acids are necessary for important life processes as they are the building blocks of proteins in the body."
It's normal but unnecessary for laypeople to be afraid of cell phones, just like it's normal but unnecessary for them to fear formaldehyde in small amounts. Now, as for that guy whose job it is to adjust active microwave relays...
That's a fair point. Just remember, according to that classification system cellphones are in the same group as Carpentry and Joinery (p.7).
Granted, I cherry picked that from the list but the reason for a 2B designation is that they don't have the statistical power from their study to rule it out as a cause of gliomas, which means that the incidence is very low in exposed vs. unexposed populations. I think it's safe to say that as long as laypeople are okay with living in a house made of carpentry then they should be okay with using a cell phone.
Cell Phones and Cancer Fact Sheet
"Exposure to ionizing radiation, such as from x-rays, is known to increase the risk of cancer. However, although many studies have examined the potential health effects of non-ionizing radiation from radar, microwave ovens, cell phones, and other sources, there is currently no consistent evidence that non-ionizing radiation increases cancer risk (1).
"The only consistently recognized biological effect of radiofrequency energy is heating. The ability of microwave ovens to heat food is one example of this effect of radiofrequency energy. Radiofrequency exposure from cell phone use does cause heating to the area of the body where a cell phone or other device is held (ear, head, etc.). However, it is not sufficient to measurably increase body temperature, and there are no other clearly established effects on the body from radiofrequency energy."
Sleep easily next to your smartphone tonight.
Strains of bacteria defective for DNA repair enzymes have been used for years to accelerate lab studies of antibiotic resistance. There are even mutator strains of staph aureus that have been used for studies like this.
It should be pointed out that George church has a huge conflict of interest in making such a statement, as he and Zhang are still affiliated with editas, the company they founded together to capitalize on CRISPR technology. Doudna was part of the company for a time but left after the patent war blew up to found her own company, intellia.
His statement that it is "anything but obvious" to adapt CRISPR to eukaryotic cells from bacteria would be refuted by pretty much any first year molecular biology student. Basically to get CRISPR working in mammalian cells is as simple as changing the DNA regulatory elements that drive expression of the Cas9 enzyme and the targeting RNA molecules from prokaryotic to mammalian elements. These elements are well understood and available essentially as "off-the-shelf" components and have been used to express literally thousands of non-native genes in mammalian cells by researchers for decades. And yes, this WAS the very obvious next step in the research, evident to many biologists. The "news and views" perspective article in the same issue of Science describing the landmark paper from Doudna/Charpentier specifically points out the tantalizing possibility of genome editing for gene therapy:
"Jinek et al. realized that a highly specific, customizable RNA-directed DNA nuclease could be useful to edit whole genomes. Based on the 20-nucleotide guide section of the crRNA, the enzyme could theoretically introduce breaks at unique sites in any eukaryotic genome. As a proof of concept, the authors programmed Cas9 to cleave a plasmid carrying the gene encoding green fluorescent protein at predetermined loci using a single chimeric crRNA containing just the critical segment of the tracrRNA. DNA breaks induce cellular DNA repair pathways (9) and this can be harnessed to disrupt, insert, or repair specific genes of cells. Introducing DNA breaks at desired loci using just Cas9 and a chimeric crRNA would be a substantial improvement over existing gene-targeting technologies, such as zinc finger nucleases and transcription activator–like effector nucleases, as these require protein engineering for every new target locus (10). Efficient gene repair strategies in cells from patients, and the reintroduction of repaired cells, could become increasingly important for treating many genetic disorders."
The size of the egos and paydays involved precludes any hope of a logical conclusion to the patent fight.
Important points from the article:
"It all began in 2012, when UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and others, including Charpentier, published a seminal Science paper on CRISPR. In this paper, Doudna showed that the gene-editing technology can be used to cut DNA in a test tube at targeted sites. Later, Doudna filed a patent application for CRISPR."
"Then in 2013, in another Science paper, MIT bioengineer Feng Zhang and his team reported developing a CRISPR system that edited genomes in eukaryotic cells — the cells of animals and people. When Zhang filed his own patent application, he applied for the PTO to “fast track” its patent review process. The result was that although UC Berkeley filed first, the PTO actually awarded the patent to the Broad and MIT in April 2014. (The Broad and MIT were later awarded a bunch of other CRISPR patents.) So UC Berkeley asked for a so-called “interference proceeding” — an official reassessment to determine who was the first to invent the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9.
This is why many in the life science community feel that Doudna/Charpentier got short-changed. This all happened right before the switch to the current "first-to-file" rule in USPTO. Also, many in the life sciences are frustrated at claims that Zhang's application to eukaryotic cells wasn't obvious. Those aforementioned awards were given to D/C precisely because scientists recognized the (obvious) potential of CRISPR/Cas to revolutionize the treatment of human disease. While Zhang's group has done some groundbreaking later work in the CRISPR field, Doudna et al probably deserve the patent. But props to MIT/Zhang for having a better understanding of patent law. That counts for a lot these days.
They are closer than you think.
http://health.ucsd.edu/clinicaltrials/sanford/Pages/default.aspx
They are merely exchanging long protein strings.
My wife is in a California English Language Teaching certification course online with the University of Phoenix - they have a similar online writing based curriculum. From time to time, she lets me read some of the things her classmates are writing. From what I have seen, a substantial number of educators in the state of California often have terrible writing skills. Their spelling is not great, either. There are many schools in San Diego where school children receive little or no help at home with reading or writing, not to mention math, science, art, or history. Teachers are really the first and only line of defense between these kids and illiteracy. Since most students don't do much reading or writing on their own outside of facebook posts or texting, it is unlikely that they will learn writing skills by experiencing good writing. If their teachers haven't got it together, there is very little chance that anyone else is going to set them aright.
Naturally, these kids grow up and start applying to colleges. Some of them are accepted and must be responsible for the awful blog posts you're talking about.
I got my wife to start playing Portal first, then Portal 2. She has also enjoyed the Torchlight series.
Still doesn't play L4D. This is a slow process, but it has been fun.
The best way to keep her from being embarrassed by her comparative skill level is to never bring it up. Tips are okay, but only if she asks for them. Obviously everybody is different, but think how annoying gaming would have been to you if someone hovered over your shoulder while you were learning to play.
It's worth mentioning that the guy who did the music for D1 and D2 is also at Runic..
Who can ever forget the reverberating guitar chord that welcomed you first into the world of Diablo?
The fastest DNA polymerases can copy a template at around 250 bases/sec. Chemical DNA synthesis is much slower.
As for read speeds, DNA sequencing can be done serially (500-800 bases in a matter of hours - 1 cent per base) or massively parallel (100-200 bases per read; 100 million reads; overnight - $1000 per chip by year's end?)
Tools allowing for rapid synthesis (write) and sequencing (read) of DNA would enable a biotech revolution similar in scope and impact to the computing revolution of the last century. As far as I know, this technology is still incredibly far away, but definitely merits relentless R&D.
thread fail. my bad
The fastest DNA polymerases can copy a template at around 250 bases/sec. Chemical DNA synthesis is much slower.
As for read speeds, DNA sequencing can be done serially (500-800 bases in a matter of hours - 1 cent per base) or massively parallel (100-200 bases per read; 100 million reads; overnight - $1000 per chip by year's end?)
Tools allowing for rapid synthesis (write) and sequencing (read) of DNA would enable a biotech revolution similar in scope and impact to the computing revolution of the last century. As far as I know, this technology is still incredibly far away, but definitely merits relentless R&D.
LOVE the disagree mail.
/. is supposed to be "news" for nerds and stuff that "matters", but I think that we all need a good laugh every now and then. This seems to fit the bill quite nicely.
Yeah, we all know that