Well, let's just say that if you were carefully regulated to recieve just enough food to not have any strong malnourishment symptoms but still be pretty damn hungry - unless you help with the move and get a pizza on top, then consent is maybe not the right word. You are by no means forced but you'll still be pretty motivated to help - much less than if you could just eat as much as you liked. Which can be seen by the fact that the mice were participating less on mondays - after they had free access to water on the weekend.
I'm not saying it's particularly cruel, especially since the tests appeared to be harmless, but still, it's a crude but effective way to ensure the mice don't just sit in the corner bored but actually do a high test repeat...
Disclaimer: I work in bioscience, so I actually know a thing or two about the process.
If there is a comparatively trivial way to produce stem cells THAT ACTUALLY WORKS, people will go heads over tail to do it themselves. I'd assume every lab that is even remotely connected to the stem cell field would set people on replicating this since the method is basically the equivalent of turning lead into gold. It is the holy grail. No matter how much money you have, no matter how much influence you have, you can't contain such a breakthrough, especially not after it's published. That is, if it actually is what it is claimed to be.
On the other hand, if you claim to have made such a breakthrough, everyone tries it out and no one can replicate it, weeeellll, you'll piss a few people off. Considerably more people than when you just say you found that protein X interacts in subcascade Y under conditions Z and it turns out it doesn't after all.
And if serious intentional misconduct is found, the result is burning at stake. I suggest having a look at http://retractionwatch.com/
And finally, Sasai wasn't the main author behind the whole thing but rather the seniour guy who slapped his seal of approval on it. So even IF the conspiracy nutjobs were true, it's the wrong man that's dead.
They are actually going to produce and sell a small number of them (250 I believe), though I fear the price might be a bit prohibitive for the mass market...
Then they apply electric current and study the connectivity.
Nope, that's no longer possible on such a brain. What you do is you inject special tracer substances (while the mouse is still alive). These substances will stain neurons at the site of injection and then cross the synapse to connected cells, either in the direction of the information flow or opposed to it, depending on the system used. These tracers are then imaged using the method that this article is about. To further aid you, you can do different stainings to see what type/subtype of neurons you are looking at. By combining this information with known functional properties of the found neuronal types, you can try to infer what is actually happening in the area you examine.
True, but the level of transparency wasn't that impressive with that method, it only worked up to 1-3mm of depth. BABB based protocols were a lot better in that regards.
The real story is the second part. You can stain for proteins and see where the localize. With SCALE, the previous method, you couldn't do that easily. Probably anyway, I never tried. You had to have fluorescent proteins expressing in the tissue, which isn't possible in human tissue samples from deceased patients unless you're trying some weird shit. Alternatively, you could stain sections, but that doesn't give you as good a 3D image of the 3D structure.
It's really interesting work. If it doesn't cost too much, I may have to try it in my lab (though I don't work on brains.)
Hell yes, that's the big one here. Plus, expressed fluorescent proteins in the tissue don't get degraded as much as with BABB et al. Definitely give it a shot, you probably have all the ingredients around the lab anyway. The clearing is done with PFA, acrylamide, bis-acrylamide, VA044 and PBS. The slices should then be immersed in glycerol, so nothing special there as far as I can see it. You only need to build a custom electrophoresis chamber to stain the brain, but even that shouldn't be too hard.
so what you are saying is that it has the potential to turn out like resident evil?
No, I was thinking of something still lethal but less freaky: cancer. Plus, even if one of the patients goes insane for whatever strange one-in-a-billion chance, it's not really infectious unless he's still capable of drilling a hole into your skull and injecting a tiny amount of purified virus into precisely the correct area of the brain (think micrometer precision). So no zombie apocalypse there, sorry.
Adult myogenesis in skeletal muscles isn't really happening much either.
As for integration into the genome, I was under the impression that you can actually chose the place in the genome it would integrate in, but that this is mostly irrelevant as adenoviral vectors are preferred over lentiviral ones.
True, but I would say that a few lost muscle cells are less problematic than a few neurons lost in the wrong part of the brain. AFAIK there is no reliable way to control the site of lentiviral integration. Plus, purifying lenti properly is nasty, the stuff can be either quite neurotoxic or not infectious at all if something goes wrong during that step.
Recombinant Adeno Associated Virus is much less problematic, it's dead simple to manufacture and only the potential protein overload problem remains (and in mice we're using them a lot without any apparent problems). However, in an adult brain, the effect of rAAV is only temporary since it doesn't integrate and gets degraded over time.
Gene therapy is not particularly hard, and there's clinical trials and decades old cases where it have had success. Why is this myth propagated?
Did the major fuckup and misconduct in the Jesse Gelsinger case really have that much publicity?
Though I guess, every religious nut, moral-code internet warrior, environmentalist nutcase and anti-GMO opinionist would of course latch onto this outlier case and present it as a rule rather than exception, because some delusion of purity is more important than saving and improving lives.
Disclaimer: I work in neuroscience and have used viral transfection quite a lot.
Myth? It's not trivial to get the infectous titer and purity of the virus right and it's even harder (read: almost impossible) to predict the exact expression levels that the virus will cause in an actual brain. Much less if such a potential overexpression of a non-native protein will mess up regular cell trafficking/function. Even if the protein is thought to be harmless (as is the case with Channelrhodopsin or Halorhodopsin), the sheer fact that the cell now has to produce, store and process large numbers of something it usually doesn't have can cause problems and take resources away from the normal function. Plus any virus that will stably integrate into the genome can cause all kinds of fuck up down the road since you don't know WHERE it will integrate and what other function it might overwrite.
Don't get me wrong, it is interesting, it is potentially very beneficial but I'd still be cautious when applying it in the brain (as opposed to applying it in muscle or skin cells) since adult neurogenesis isn't really happening much...
I personally have purchased a set of gaming dice 3d printed with stainless steel.
FTFY
It's a small but important distinction. The ability to print stainless steel would be revolutionary, while the ability to powder cast has been around for millennia. A hyped convolution of the mold making process is not going to change much besides the number of shitty knives and dice in pawn shop display cases.
It is indeed possible to print IN stainless steel, titanium etc.... Using a technique called selective laser sintering, fine metal powder is selectively melted/fused by a high power laser, allowing you to directly print custom parts from metal.
Simple solution: They shouldn't try to fool people into thinking they are actually BUYING the game. Rename it to say "license the game" or "rent for an unlimited time" or whatever. I'm fine with their non-transferable model as long as they do not try to tell me I'm actually buying the game. Because if I buy something I expect to actually own it and be able to give it away anytime I want.
What is the situation with the source/GPL?
"Any code touching the user interface created within this endeavor will be licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later (GPLv2+), possibly with an exception for the Windows Store if needed."
I remember vaguely that there once was a VLC for iOS around before some internal debate about whether or not this sort of port was acceptable with the GPL caused apple to remove it. Exception for Windows Store? How should that work out then?
Germany has them as well for landline, it's actually the standard option
for mobile, most german providers will slow you down to GPRS speed after a certain amount of data consumed per month (anywhere between 100MB and 30GB depending on the contract)
Mod parent up, it's spot on! The actual patching is not really hard, especially since it only seems to do "blind" patching (just guided by the electrical response).
The only things to add are
- Fighting with your pipette puller to deliver constant results, because either you have your own crappy little puller that is hideously unreliable or you have a fancy one which is shared, meaning there is a high risk of someone messing with the filament and/or settings. And if your pipettes are crap, neither you nor the robot are going to succeed...
- Finding out why you suddenly have massive noise in your recordings
- Not freaking out after matlab, igor et al crash halfway through your recording session taking all your data with it.
"Will you publish my paper? I'll give you 1000 dollars!"
It doesn't make a difference, anyone who wants his/her paper published will give the 1000 dollars (because they have to). And either way, I don't think science and nature will run out of people wanting to publish there...
But I fully agree that open reviews is a bad idea. In a field where almost all players know each other it would really hamper objectivity if you knew the person whose (bad) work you just shredded might come back to bite you.
But then, in some ways they still have a classic view: "Flame is described as enormously powerful and large, containing some 250,000 lines of code, making it far larger than other such cyberweapons." [...]
"But this new weapon is twenty times the size of earlier cyberbombs and far more powerful, making it practically an army on its own, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior security researcher with Kaspersky Labs."
Wait until they finish the TerraBomb, with it you can overload many a computer simply by copying the WEAPON to the HD. It doesn't even need to be launched (though you might need to copy it once or twice on machines with a larger HD...). Only downside is that the attack takes a considerable amount of time to carry out.
They'll just produce the cars for the asian market in china, which is nothing special. Or do you really think that e.g. a Volkswagen or a BMW sold in China is actually assembled in Germany?
Mod Parent up, that post is spot on. In fact, the law has been changed 2009 (if I remember rightly) to shift the liability towards the bank unless the customer acts grossly negligent (grob fahrlässig). The court did NOT decide whether the customer would have been liable according to the laws in place today.
Plus many banks in Germany phased out the iTAN system in favor of SMS-codes or TAN-generators that require the debit card to operate and are only valid for the transaction that was entered to generate the TAN (amount, target account etc...).
I honestly cannot remember when I've heard so much misguided pseudoscience stuff for the last time.
Let's start.
No papers sceptic on global warming? I was able to find a couple of 100 released since 2011 by just spending 5 minutes on scholar.google.com.
Non-coding DNA? There's an even simpler explanation: Regulatory sequences. LOADS of them. Each cell only needs a VERY small subset of the proteins encoded. How does the cell know which ones it should express and how many of them? How do the controlling proteins know which sequences they should control? Regulatory elements. (That was was oversimplified, but you get the idea). There is no high-level/low-level DNA, no compiler, no linker. There are epigenetic modifications and posttranslational modifications, but these are for ensuring correct amount and function/transport of the proteins.
The creationist thing is a strawman. Why would evolution set up a compiler as you suggested it? Because it would allow quicker changes to adapt to different environments which is beneficial for the one having such a thing. In fact HUGELY beneficial. In the same way you could argue that having eyes, ears, etc... is an argument for creationists
The way too complex parts of the genome? Sorry, citation needed.
The bacteria thing? They are much simpler in what they can do with their toolset. The thing they can do a lot better due to their simpler construction and high mutation rate (when you take bacteria as a group) is to adapt almost any condition. And in that respect they already "won". In our very own body, bacteria outnumber our own cells by a factor of 10 (wikipedia). Bacteria exist in practically any environment on this planet. So what was your point again?
I'm not into the transmitter/reciever thing so I can't comment on that other than "citation needed".
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let's just say that if you were carefully regulated to recieve just enough food to not have any strong malnourishment symptoms but still be pretty damn hungry - unless you help with the move and get a pizza on top, then consent is maybe not the right word. You are by no means forced but you'll still be pretty motivated to help - much less than if you could just eat as much as you liked. Which can be seen by the fact that the mice were participating less on mondays - after they had free access to water on the weekend.
I'm not saying it's particularly cruel, especially since the tests appeared to be harmless, but still, it's a crude but effective way to ensure the mice don't just sit in the corner bored but actually do a high test repeat...
If they didn't want to participate in the testing, they were free to do so by not sticking their noses in the start port.
Not strictly true. See, the trick is to just not put a water bottle into the cage and make water the reward.
Disclaimer: I work in bioscience, so I actually know a thing or two about the process.
If there is a comparatively trivial way to produce stem cells THAT ACTUALLY WORKS, people will go heads over tail to do it themselves. I'd assume every lab that is even remotely connected to the stem cell field would set people on replicating this since the method is basically the equivalent of turning lead into gold. It is the holy grail. No matter how much money you have, no matter how much influence you have, you can't contain such a breakthrough, especially not after it's published. That is, if it actually is what it is claimed to be.
On the other hand, if you claim to have made such a breakthrough, everyone tries it out and no one can replicate it, weeeellll, you'll piss a few people off. Considerably more people than when you just say you found that protein X interacts in subcascade Y under conditions Z and it turns out it doesn't after all.
And if serious intentional misconduct is found, the result is burning at stake. I suggest having a look at http://retractionwatch.com/
And finally, Sasai wasn't the main author behind the whole thing but rather the seniour guy who slapped his seal of approval on it. So even IF the conspiracy nutjobs were true, it's the wrong man that's dead.
Clicked the wrong entry while moderating, so posting this to undo it - please ignore.
Imagine something like that with the Occulus Rift... You could basically look around in the virtual space as if you were sitting there!
whooooosh
They are actually going to produce and sell a small number of them (250 I believe), though I fear the price might be a bit prohibitive for the mass market...
Then they apply electric current and study the connectivity.
Nope, that's no longer possible on such a brain. What you do is you inject special tracer substances (while the mouse is still alive). These substances will stain neurons at the site of injection and then cross the synapse to connected cells, either in the direction of the information flow or opposed to it, depending on the system used. These tracers are then imaged using the method that this article is about. To further aid you, you can do different stainings to see what type/subtype of neurons you are looking at. By combining this information with known functional properties of the found neuronal types, you can try to infer what is actually happening in the area you examine.
The headline is focusing on the wrong thingThere was already a process to make brains look like glass. It was really cheap and easy too: it's just urea basically.
True, but the level of transparency wasn't that impressive with that method, it only worked up to 1-3mm of depth. BABB based protocols were a lot better in that regards.
The real story is the second part. You can stain for proteins and see where the localize. With SCALE, the previous method, you couldn't do that easily. Probably anyway, I never tried. You had to have fluorescent proteins expressing in the tissue, which isn't possible in human tissue samples from deceased patients unless you're trying some weird shit. Alternatively, you could stain sections, but that doesn't give you as good a 3D image of the 3D structure. It's really interesting work. If it doesn't cost too much, I may have to try it in my lab (though I don't work on brains.)
Hell yes, that's the big one here. Plus, expressed fluorescent proteins in the tissue don't get degraded as much as with BABB et al. Definitely give it a shot, you probably have all the ingredients around the lab anyway. The clearing is done with PFA, acrylamide, bis-acrylamide, VA044 and PBS. The slices should then be immersed in glycerol, so nothing special there as far as I can see it. You only need to build a custom electrophoresis chamber to stain the brain, but even that shouldn't be too hard.
so what you are saying is that it has the potential to turn out like resident evil?
No, I was thinking of something still lethal but less freaky: cancer. Plus, even if one of the patients goes insane for whatever strange one-in-a-billion chance, it's not really infectious unless he's still capable of drilling a hole into your skull and injecting a tiny amount of purified virus into precisely the correct area of the brain (think micrometer precision). So no zombie apocalypse there, sorry.
Adult myogenesis in skeletal muscles isn't really happening much either. As for integration into the genome, I was under the impression that you can actually chose the place in the genome it would integrate in, but that this is mostly irrelevant as adenoviral vectors are preferred over lentiviral ones.
True, but I would say that a few lost muscle cells are less problematic than a few neurons lost in the wrong part of the brain. AFAIK there is no reliable way to control the site of lentiviral integration. Plus, purifying lenti properly is nasty, the stuff can be either quite neurotoxic or not infectious at all if something goes wrong during that step.
Recombinant Adeno Associated Virus is much less problematic, it's dead simple to manufacture and only the potential protein overload problem remains (and in mice we're using them a lot without any apparent problems). However, in an adult brain, the effect of rAAV is only temporary since it doesn't integrate and gets degraded over time.
Gene therapy is not particularly hard, and there's clinical trials and decades old cases where it have had success. Why is this myth propagated? Did the major fuckup and misconduct in the Jesse Gelsinger case really have that much publicity?
Though I guess, every religious nut, moral-code internet warrior, environmentalist nutcase and anti-GMO opinionist would of course latch onto this outlier case and present it as a rule rather than exception, because some delusion of purity is more important than saving and improving lives.
Disclaimer: I work in neuroscience and have used viral transfection quite a lot.
Myth? It's not trivial to get the infectous titer and purity of the virus right and it's even harder (read: almost impossible) to predict the exact expression levels that the virus will cause in an actual brain. Much less if such a potential overexpression of a non-native protein will mess up regular cell trafficking/function. Even if the protein is thought to be harmless (as is the case with Channelrhodopsin or Halorhodopsin), the sheer fact that the cell now has to produce, store and process large numbers of something it usually doesn't have can cause problems and take resources away from the normal function. Plus any virus that will stably integrate into the genome can cause all kinds of fuck up down the road since you don't know WHERE it will integrate and what other function it might overwrite.
Don't get me wrong, it is interesting, it is potentially very beneficial but I'd still be cautious when applying it in the brain (as opposed to applying it in muscle or skin cells) since adult neurogenesis isn't really happening much...
As interesting as ever:
Adam Curtis - The Power of Nightmares
It gives an interesting view of how this whole situation with evil states and global terrorist networks spiralled out of control.
If you have three hours of time that is... But it's definitely fascinating imho.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGo1DqmfHjY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0kNNqZk3mg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qATc5jRbVOA
I personally have purchased a set of gaming dice 3d printed with stainless steel.
FTFY
It's a small but important distinction. The ability to print stainless steel would be revolutionary, while the ability to powder cast has been around for millennia. A hyped convolution of the mold making process is not going to change much besides the number of shitty knives and dice in pawn shop display cases.
It is indeed possible to print IN stainless steel, titanium etc.... Using a technique called selective laser sintering, fine metal powder is selectively melted/fused by a high power laser, allowing you to directly print custom parts from metal.
Simple solution: They shouldn't try to fool people into thinking they are actually BUYING the game. Rename it to say "license the game" or "rent for an unlimited time" or whatever. I'm fine with their non-transferable model as long as they do not try to tell me I'm actually buying the game. Because if I buy something I expect to actually own it and be able to give it away anytime I want.
What is the situation with the source/GPL?
"Any code touching the user interface created within this endeavor will be licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later (GPLv2+), possibly with an exception for the Windows Store if needed."
I remember vaguely that there once was a VLC for iOS around before some internal debate about whether or not this sort of port was acceptable with the GPL caused apple to remove it. Exception for Windows Store? How should that work out then?
Germany has them as well for landline, it's actually the standard option
for mobile, most german providers will slow you down to GPRS speed after a certain amount of data consumed per month (anywhere between 100MB and 30GB depending on the contract)
Mod parent up, it's spot on! The actual patching is not really hard, especially since it only seems to do "blind" patching (just guided by the electrical response).
The only things to add are
- Fighting with your pipette puller to deliver constant results, because either you have your own crappy little puller that is hideously unreliable or you have a fancy one which is shared, meaning there is a high risk of someone messing with the filament and/or settings. And if your pipettes are crap, neither you nor the robot are going to succeed...
- Finding out why you suddenly have massive noise in your recordings
- Not freaking out after matlab, igor et al crash halfway through your recording session taking all your data with it.
Anyone wants to bet how long it'll take for "Pay 5000$ now or you'll hit that nice tree over there" style rootkits to appear? Scareware indeed...
It's worth noting that the Lumia 900 came out five months ago...
5 months ago? Vodafone Germany will START to sell them "in a couple of weeks". I'm sure it will be really popular here...
"Will you publish my paper? I'll give you 1000 dollars!"
It doesn't make a difference, anyone who wants his/her paper published will give the 1000 dollars (because they have to). And either way, I don't think science and nature will run out of people wanting to publish there...
But I fully agree that open reviews is a bad idea. In a field where almost all players know each other it would really hamper objectivity if you knew the person whose (bad) work you just shredded might come back to bite you.
But then, in some ways they still have a classic view:
"Flame is described as enormously powerful and large, containing some 250,000 lines of code, making it far larger than other such cyberweapons." [...] "But this new weapon is twenty times the size of earlier cyberbombs and far more powerful, making it practically an army on its own, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior security researcher with Kaspersky Labs."
Wait until they finish the TerraBomb, with it you can overload many a computer simply by copying the WEAPON to the HD. It doesn't even need to be launched (though you might need to copy it once or twice on machines with a larger HD...). Only downside is that the attack takes a considerable amount of time to carry out.
They'll just produce the cars for the asian market in china, which is nothing special. Or do you really think that e.g. a Volkswagen or a BMW sold in China is actually assembled in Germany?
Mod Parent up, that post is spot on. In fact, the law has been changed 2009 (if I remember rightly) to shift the liability towards the bank unless the customer acts grossly negligent (grob fahrlässig). The court did NOT decide whether the customer would have been liable according to the laws in place today.
Plus many banks in Germany phased out the iTAN system in favor of SMS-codes or TAN-generators that require the debit card to operate and are only valid for the transaction that was entered to generate the TAN (amount, target account etc...).
I honestly cannot remember when I've heard so much misguided pseudoscience stuff for the last time.
Let's start.
No papers sceptic on global warming? I was able to find a couple of 100 released since 2011 by just spending 5 minutes on scholar.google.com.
Non-coding DNA? There's an even simpler explanation: Regulatory sequences. LOADS of them. Each cell only needs a VERY small subset of the proteins encoded. How does the cell know which ones it should express and how many of them? How do the controlling proteins know which sequences they should control? Regulatory elements. (That was was oversimplified, but you get the idea). There is no high-level/low-level DNA, no compiler, no linker. There are epigenetic modifications and posttranslational modifications, but these are for ensuring correct amount and function/transport of the proteins.
The creationist thing is a strawman. Why would evolution set up a compiler as you suggested it? Because it would allow quicker changes to adapt to different environments which is beneficial for the one having such a thing. In fact HUGELY beneficial. In the same way you could argue that having eyes, ears, etc... is an argument for creationists
The way too complex parts of the genome? Sorry, citation needed.
The bacteria thing? They are much simpler in what they can do with their toolset. The thing they can do a lot better due to their simpler construction and high mutation rate (when you take bacteria as a group) is to adapt almost any condition. And in that respect they already "won". In our very own body, bacteria outnumber our own cells by a factor of 10 (wikipedia). Bacteria exist in practically any environment on this planet. So what was your point again?
I'm not into the transmitter/reciever thing so I can't comment on that other than "citation needed".