never...
You know, I've given up on puns. So far I've made about ten puns on slashdot to see if at least one of them would cause a humorous reply, but alas no pun in ten did.
So great, the replaced a completely crazy over-the-top law with a slightly less crazy but still pretty rediculous one.
No doubt, it's an improvement but that doesn't make it a good law. For the sake of an analogy: Even if having Hemorrhoids is much better than having morbus crohn it doesn't change the fact that it's still a pain in the rear end.
pubmed results for
"hair loss": 2.554 research papers
baldness: 14.919 research papers
"erectile dysfunction": 16.292 research papers
malaria: 59.503 research papers
HIV: 229.598 research papers
Just a rough approximation, but it seems there IS research on malaria and HIV going on after all...
No, actually it's even easier...
4 M urea, 10% (wt/vol) glycerol and 0.1% (wt/vol) Triton X-100
Which, seriously now, is really stuff you'll find in pretty much any biological lab.
Instead, the thread is full of "ZOMG THE IRANIANS ARE MONKEYS LOL!" as you've put it.
I mean... FFS... It's such a lame xenophobic approach, particularly since the first monkey in space was American.
Most I've seen so far are comments about two very specific Iranians being monkeys. Seeing how there seem to be quite a few Iranians who wouldn't mind seeing at least one of these two accompany the unfortunate animal, preferably strapped to the outside of the rocket, I wouldn't call it racism. Or is it racism against Americans to call Bush Jr. an idiot?
Personally I'd also prefer if we all had personal flying unicorns to allow us to commute with minimal CO2 and without needing fossil fuels...
Or more to the point: ain't gonna happen in his lifetime. Not a bleeding chance in hell. The stem cell thing can be VERY roughly compared to the following: we know there is "metal" in this thing called the computer to conduct electricity which leads to information flow. We hardly have any idea how a computer works whatsoever, except that it seems to be build around "transistors" and has different areas to compute different things (graphics card, ram etc..). We now know how to theoretically produce "metal" that might be like the one we see in there. We have no friggin idea where it should go or how it is connected, but yay, we have a possibility to maybe insert additional "metal".
I know this comparison is not correct in a lot of ways but still. Even if we were able to make perfect stem cells, we would have no idea how to get them to do the right thing. If you just throw em in there and wait what happens you'll most likely end up with a brain that, ontop of the brain damage, also has cancer. Yay.
If I were in his situation I'd probably donate my body to science or experimental treatments with the option to just kill myself if it doesn't work out/goes wrong. But being a neuroscientist I'm probably a bit biased there. Still, not a pretty thing... I absolutely adore his books.
They will just bury such "consent" in the EULA, privacy policy, terms and conditions, legal notices, and other such crud that no one reads.
Actually that's not even that important, because right now pretty much no member state cares for the fact that it should put this into local legislature.
Britain is the first state to actually implement the directive, all others are lagging hopelessly behind and still want further discussion with the EU about the details. With the ad-lobbyists heads firmly stuck to their backsides they will probably delay it until IP6 comes along or some other loophole (flashcookies...) is left in the directive/laws...
A lot of proteins in these worms really are, but still, it's insane to jump at these conclusions so quickly...
The article here also has a link to a paper of him from 2009 which seems to be about mice, but then again it's in a low-impact-factor journal. Since his findings would be of great interest for a broad audience this might be a sign of shabby/incomplete research (interesting enough for a big paper but not good enough)...
Can't say more before I'm on a computer with access to the journal to actually read it though.
The cells are harvested from a rat foetus. They're grown in a special vessel, where they're in contact with an array of electrodes. They spontaneously arrange themselves into a neural network. The difficult part is training that network to do anything useful.
Which is exactly why it is NOT wired to a rat brain. These are cultured cells, seperated and grown in culture. So it's rat NEURONS but not a rat's brain.
Calling it a rat brain would be like calling a heap of randomly wired intel-made-transistors a core2duo.
Those German highways without speed limits are dangerous and demand the driver's full attention...
Because highways with speed limits are safe and you should feel free to talk, phone, text, eat, put on make-up, etc?
How about people just assume that every drive, no matter how seemingly safe, was actually dangerous and required their full attention.
Because people tend to just not do that and it seems almost impossible to change it. At least as long as they are lulled by boredom and the feeling that nothing can possibly happen on these endless straight, wide roads with low speeds.
However, put them in an environment where it is completely obvious that not paying attention might lead to sudden demise and you have the right motivation to stay alert.
It's even worse than that. It's not 20% false positives - it's 19 out of 20 positives are false. FTFA:
This is only true if you scan a random population without any initial suspition for a case of ASD.
Then, with a estimate of some 1% prevalence of ASD roughly 19 out of 20 are indeed false.
However I guess (hope) such a scan will only be used in combination with other methods and on persons that are suspected to have ASD.
If I got this right during skimming through the article, the test will produce roughly 20% false positives. So let's just hope it will not be used for mass screening...
Hmmm, there's some person making a very interesting statement about human nature and its influence big ambitious projects and in response slashdot's finest starts bean counting wether a $320 comcast bill is justified.
Just don't yet know if I should find this hilarious or sad...
Get the Aldi/Medionmobile stick. You can buy the stick for 49,99€ in every aldi, the simcard is 12.99€ with 10€ already loaded onto the card (so the card itself is 2.99).
A one-day dataflat is 1.99, 30 days cost 14.99 after 1GB (dayflat) or 5GB(30day-flat) they will reduce your speed to 56K, but apart from that it's probably the best you'll get for your money out there.
While it IS true that there are mechanisms to reduce the mutation rate (which have nothing to do with disinfection or re-seeding), bacteria still mutate a lot.
Second, while it IS true that a mutation that actually gives you a new ability is more than just a bit rare and will take almost forever (new ability as in "specific and unlikely modifications in some not-really-necessary other metabolic pathway that will lead to the production of a substance that kills the guy eating the yogurt" or something) a loss of function is very VERY simple. In the extreme cases, just a change of one or two specific basepairs in the DNA is enough (e.g. premature stop codon).
let's say you have a mutation possibility of 10 to the power of -8 per basepair per cycle (estimated for bacteria) and a genome size of 12-15 to the power of 6 basepairs (Calothrix sp.) then on average you have a mutation on roughly every 100th devision.
Now say that you have a density of 2661093 cells/ml (vasconcelos 2001, water research volume 35), that would mean something like 26611 mutations per ml per devision-cycle. Whoops.
Most of the mutations change nothing due to redundancy in the genetic code, a few will lead to the loss of a function. This might also change nothing if this function is not needed. In the most extreme cases it means instant death to the mutated bacterium.
However, if some researcher equipped a bacterium with a protein that's harmful for it and all it needs to do to improve is break it, heck that's easy.
Just the same with us humans: Becoming superman (gain of function) is quite impossible, getting cancer (e.g. loss of function in cell-cycle/migration mecanisms) is easy as cake.
all of the above is just VERY much simplified, the main points are: mutations happen. a lot. most of them do nothing almost all of the others damage something, which might or might not be a problem, depending on whether you needed the damaged bit
so doing damage is easy and if you damage the (purely artificial) construct that some scientist put into you to eventually kill you, congratulations, you win.
The Problem arises when you have a processing stage that runs continously and is not emptied, cleaned and refilled inbetween. You might get a culture in there that interfers with your fuel-harvesting.
And let's just hope that they will not out-reproduce them in the growth-tank, cleaning everything and starting a fresh culture can be a royal pain. Plus it takes some time (thaw them, wait till they recover from the freezing and start reproducing again, wait till you have a sufficient density) which means lost money.
And if some of these bacteria get into spaces that are harder to clean (tubes, sealings etc...) it will be a regular problem.
Slashdot Mirror
... go nuts ...
HAH! pun intended?
never...
You know, I've given up on puns. So far I've made about ten puns on slashdot to see if at least one of them would cause a humorous reply, but alas no pun in ten did.
very simple, it'd probably go nuts on every JGO (junk grabbing official) at the airport screening center...
So great, the replaced a completely crazy over-the-top law with a slightly less crazy but still pretty rediculous one.
No doubt, it's an improvement but that doesn't make it a good law.
For the sake of an analogy: Even if having Hemorrhoids is much better than having morbus crohn it doesn't change the fact that it's still a pain in the rear end.
This Julijonas Urbonas must be Le Chuck in disguise.....
Only sad he left out the lava thingie to cut the costs.
pubmed results for
"hair loss": 2.554 research papers
baldness: 14.919 research papers
"erectile dysfunction": 16.292 research papers
malaria: 59.503 research papers
HIV: 229.598 research papers
Just a rough approximation, but it seems there IS research on malaria and HIV going on after all...
Kerosene, propylene glycol, artificial sweeteners, sulphuric acid, rum, acetone, red dye no2, Scumm, axle grease, battery acid and/or pepperoni.
No, actually it's even easier...
4 M urea, 10% (wt/vol) glycerol and 0.1% (wt/vol) Triton X-100
Which, seriously now, is really stuff you'll find in pretty much any biological lab.
Plus you can easily make targeted experiments to verify/falsify your model without having to fly to kuba, china or something like that...
And the link is dead already? That was quick...
>
Instead, the thread is full of "ZOMG THE IRANIANS ARE MONKEYS LOL!" as you've put it. I mean... FFS... It's such a lame xenophobic approach, particularly since the first monkey in space was American.
Most I've seen so far are comments about two very specific Iranians being monkeys. Seeing how there seem to be quite a few Iranians who wouldn't mind seeing at least one of these two accompany the unfortunate animal, preferably strapped to the outside of the rocket, I wouldn't call it racism. Or is it racism against Americans to call Bush Jr. an idiot?
Personally I'd also prefer if we all had personal flying unicorns to allow us to commute with minimal CO2 and without needing fossil fuels...
Or more to the point: ain't gonna happen in his lifetime. Not a bleeding chance in hell. The stem cell thing can be VERY roughly compared to the following: we know there is "metal" in this thing called the computer to conduct electricity which leads to information flow. We hardly have any idea how a computer works whatsoever, except that it seems to be build around "transistors" and has different areas to compute different things (graphics card, ram etc..). We now know how to theoretically produce "metal" that might be like the one we see in there. We have no friggin idea where it should go or how it is connected, but yay, we have a possibility to maybe insert additional "metal".
I know this comparison is not correct in a lot of ways but still. Even if we were able to make perfect stem cells, we would have no idea how to get them to do the right thing. If you just throw em in there and wait what happens you'll most likely end up with a brain that, ontop of the brain damage, also has cancer. Yay.
If I were in his situation I'd probably donate my body to science or experimental treatments with the option to just kill myself if it doesn't work out/goes wrong. But being a neuroscientist I'm probably a bit biased there. Still, not a pretty thing... I absolutely adore his books.
Please mod parent up, wanted to clearify the reason for the data-collection myself but that post sums it up perfectly!
They will just bury such "consent" in the EULA, privacy policy, terms and conditions, legal notices, and other such crud that no one reads.
Actually that's not even that important, because right now pretty much no member state cares for the fact that it should put this into local legislature.
Britain is the first state to actually implement the directive, all others are lagging hopelessly behind and still want further discussion with the EU about the details. With the ad-lobbyists heads firmly stuck to their backsides they will probably delay it until IP6 comes along or some other loophole (flashcookies...) is left in the directive/laws...
Good thing that worms in a lab are so biologically analogous to humans. Time to stop eating tomatoes, broccoli, and spinach
A lot of proteins in these worms really are, but still, it's insane to jump at these conclusions so quickly...
The article here also has a link to a paper of him from 2009 which seems to be about mice, but then again it's in a low-impact-factor journal. Since his findings would be of great interest for a broad audience this might be a sign of shabby/incomplete research (interesting enough for a big paper but not good enough)...
Can't say more before I'm on a computer with access to the journal to actually read it though.
Actually the headline should say 'Slashdotter Rediscovers Paper from 1994 '
exactly... it's been a running gag in the biology department of our university probably ever since it came out back then
The cells are harvested from a rat foetus. They're grown in a special vessel, where they're in contact with an array of electrodes. They spontaneously arrange themselves into a neural network. The difficult part is training that network to do anything useful.
Which is exactly why it is NOT wired to a rat brain. These are cultured cells, seperated and grown in culture. So it's rat NEURONS but not a rat's brain. Calling it a rat brain would be like calling a heap of randomly wired intel-made-transistors a core2duo.
Because highways with speed limits are safe and you should feel free to talk, phone, text, eat, put on make-up, etc?
How about people just assume that every drive, no matter how seemingly safe, was actually dangerous and required their full attention.
Because people tend to just not do that and it seems almost impossible to change it. At least as long as they are lulled by boredom and the feeling that nothing can possibly happen on these endless straight, wide roads with low speeds.
However, put them in an environment where it is completely obvious that not paying attention might lead to sudden demise and you have the right motivation to stay alert.
It's even worse than that. It's not 20% false positives - it's 19 out of 20 positives are false. FTFA:
This is only true if you scan a random population without any initial suspition for a case of ASD.
Then, with a estimate of some 1% prevalence of ASD roughly 19 out of 20 are indeed false. However I guess (hope) such a scan will only be used in combination with other methods and on persons that are suspected to have ASD.
If I got this right during skimming through the article, the test will produce roughly 20% false positives.
So let's just hope it will not be used for mass screening...
Hmmm,
there's some person making a very interesting statement about human nature and its influence big ambitious projects and in response slashdot's finest starts bean counting wether a $320 comcast bill is justified.
Just don't yet know if I should find this hilarious or sad...
Oh my god, best pun I've heard in a long time.
But poor guy, here's another round of putting his real name on the web, as if the stupid Gizmodo stunt wasn't enough...
Here in Germany they still expect me to pay 13-16 euro for most new cds. Mind you according to Google, that's 17,65$ to 21,65$...
And they seem honestly surprised why I'm not willing to pay that much...
Get the Aldi/Medionmobile stick. You can buy the stick for 49,99€ in every aldi, the simcard is 12.99€ with 10€ already loaded onto the card (so the card itself is 2.99).
A one-day dataflat is 1.99, 30 days cost 14.99
after 1GB (dayflat) or 5GB(30day-flat) they will reduce your speed to 56K, but apart from that it's probably the best you'll get for your money out there.
more info on www.medionmobile.de
Sorry, but no, just no.
While it IS true that there are mechanisms to reduce the mutation rate (which have nothing to do with disinfection or re-seeding), bacteria still mutate a lot.
Second, while it IS true that a mutation that actually gives you a new ability is more than just a bit rare and will take almost forever (new ability as in "specific and unlikely modifications in some not-really-necessary other metabolic pathway that will lead to the production of a substance that kills the guy eating the yogurt" or something) a loss of function is very VERY simple. In the extreme cases, just a change of one or two specific basepairs in the DNA is enough (e.g. premature stop codon).
let's say you have a mutation possibility of 10 to the power of -8 per basepair per cycle (estimated for bacteria) and a genome size of 12-15 to the power of 6 basepairs (Calothrix sp.) then on average you have a mutation on roughly every 100th devision.
Now say that you have a density of 2661093 cells/ml (vasconcelos 2001, water research volume 35), that would mean something like 26611 mutations per ml per devision-cycle. Whoops.
Most of the mutations change nothing due to redundancy in the genetic code, a few will lead to the loss of a function. This might also change nothing if this function is not needed. In the most extreme cases it means instant death to the mutated bacterium.
However, if some researcher equipped a bacterium with a protein that's harmful for it and all it needs to do to improve is break it, heck that's easy.
Just the same with us humans: Becoming superman (gain of function) is quite impossible, getting cancer (e.g. loss of function in cell-cycle/migration mecanisms) is easy as cake.
all of the above is just VERY much simplified, the main points are: mutations happen. a lot.
most of them do nothing
almost all of the others damage something, which might or might not be a problem, depending on whether you needed the damaged bit
so doing damage is easy and if you damage the (purely artificial) construct that some scientist put into you to eventually kill you, congratulations, you win.
The Problem arises when you have a processing stage that runs continously and is not emptied, cleaned and refilled inbetween. You might get a culture in there that interfers with your fuel-harvesting.
And let's just hope that they will not out-reproduce them in the growth-tank, cleaning everything and starting a fresh culture can be a royal pain. Plus it takes some time (thaw them, wait till they recover from the freezing and start reproducing again, wait till you have a sufficient density) which means lost money.
And if some of these bacteria get into spaces that are harder to clean (tubes, sealings etc...) it will be a regular problem.