The main reason these mushrooms are eaten is that they are misidentified as some similar looking edible species. The most frequent victims for these mushrooms are immigrants that mistake them for an edible species that they would find back where they were originally from. In the US on the west coast, that most often means immigrants from eastern Asia mistaking them for Volvariella, volavacea, commonly sold in supermarkets in cans as "Paddy Straw Mushrooms".
As far as being deadly, their lethality depends mostly on how much of them you eat. In a very general sense, if you eat some and don't seek medical treatment, your odds of dying are around 50%. With treatment (before the milk thistle extract), the survival rate was more like 90%.
There are lots of other mushrooms that also produce the same toxins in potentially deadly quantities. The ones that produce the most poisonings are Galerinas (especially G. marginata), since they resemble some of the hallucinogenic species of Psilocybe and can grow in the same habitats, at the same time, and even side by side with them. Lepiotas and Conocybes (Pholiotinas) can also be deadly in the same way, but don't generally resemble other mushrooms that most would want to eat.
There are lots of safe mushrooms and groups of mushrooms that are easy to identify accurately enough to eat without significant risk. Members of the genus Amanita (the ones these deadly ones belong to) don't fall into that category, unless you're a real expert. A lot of the "experts" that are referred to as such are people that can identify a few species (or maybe a few dozen species) in the woods - not somebody we should treat as a real expert. It's a bit like calling somebody who has done a "Hello World" program in a couple languages a programming expert.
If you want to learn enough to forage for your own wild mushrooms, you should contact a local mycological society. You can meet people who can show you how to identify some of the easier, safer mushrooms in your area.
Actually, if you read the article, that globular cluster is actually one of M31's clusters. The brightest globulars around M31 are about 13th magnitude, so they are visible in amateur telescopes (although they look like faint stars).
It does show impressively how good the resolution of the photograph is.
It doesn't work because there are known counterexamples.Orchids come to mind first off. Almost any orchid you can purchase at a greenhouse is a hybrid. They even produce fertile offspring with crosses from different genera.
Here is a list of genera, including what they call them when they are intergenus crosses (and just for the letter "A"). If you take the genus "Allenara", it is a hybrid of the naturally occuring genera Cattleya, Diacrium, Epidendrum, and Laelia. You get a cross of four genera by making two hybrids (say Cattleya x Diacrium and Epidendrum x Laelia) and then crossing the two hybrids.
Maybe that definition will work for most things, but it's a mystery to me how they decide that this orchid is a different (or the same) species from that one, much less that they should be in different genera.
I've seen tempura chefs pluck the cooked food out of the oil with their fingers without getting burned. Not something you want to try at home, but impressive to watch.
We take one today, we take one next year, they look identical.
Actually, for objects within our galaxy, many of them change visibly on time scales ranging from days to years (and not just brightness). The best example, from the Hubble Telescope, is the Crab Nebula Movie they did a few years ago. Note that the age of the Crab Nebula was originally determined by comparing photographs taken about 10 years apart, measuring the expansion of the nebula, and extrapolating backward to get an approximate year. Then, a check of historical records shows that there was a supernova in that area of the sky in 1054. Another object which has been known for a long time to show changes visible in a normal telescope is Hubble's Variable Nebula (OK, no cool animation).
You've got it backwards. Corporations issue notices like this because it gives them legal protection. This email will have been sent out as an official reminder that corporate policy bans any such software and makes violation of the policy a firing offense. If the company gets caught with somebody running the banned software, the company fires the responsible people. If it somehow got to court, they would present to the judge the facts that they have a published policy, employees were found in violation of the policy, and the employees were fired for violationg the policy. The judge would then have to say that the company is taking reasonable precautions to avoid violating the law. It's exactly the same as company policies about sexual harrassment and things like that.
Did anybody else notice that in the bear photo in the article that the chunk of ice in the lower right corner which obscures part of the bear looks like it was drawn by somebody. It looks like they wanted to obscure part of the bear for some reason. Now, why would anybody want to do that?
The sensor has other uses too. Since it changes colour with any chemical that acts like an opiate, it could be used to screen chemical compounds for useful opiate drugs, says Bayley.
I would have thought that this was more valuable to society - the ability to rapidly screen thousands of compounds for potential activity of a specific type. The process sounds like it may lend itself to similar screening of compounds of other types which bind to cell membrane receptors. But these researchers apparent first thought was about how they could use it to identify evil drug abusers, including people abusing something never before seen which has the same effects. Maybe there's more money in helping find drug abusers.
While you did find references to the modern insect sometimes called a water scorpion, it is not at all what is being referred to here. Water scorpion is an alternative name for sea scorpion, both common names for the eurypterids. One type of them also happens to be the state fossil of New York. While we probably can't say with real certainty just how nasty they might have been, I'd certainly be cautious around any 2 meter long, predatory arthropod.
You might be getting it from a movie, but it's actually correct. Unfortunately, Mars' atmosphere would be considered a usable vacuum here for many purposes. Even more unfortunately, it's probably not correctable over the long term. Mars lacks a significant magnetic field. This results in erosion of the atmosphere by the solar wind. Unless a way is found to create a large enough magnetic field to protect an artificial atmosphere, it will bleed off into space as the original one did. This also leaves inhabitants much more vulnerable to radiation from solar flares and similar events.
Wrong. In the state of Colorado death sentences can only be given by a panel of three judges. The jury has only the power to find a defendant guilty or not.
Who gives the death sentence varies from state to state.
I stayed out for about two hours and watched (in southeast Denver - limiting mag about 5) and some of the brighter meteors were definitely colored. The majority were white (whether because they really were white or because they were too faint to detect color in), but some of the brighter ones were definitely greenish or bluish in color. Also, a nucleus was visible at the head of a few of the meteors which was usually orange, but sometimes yellow. In any event, I should be able to verify colors through some of the color photos I took. I was going to get them developed today, but I only had time to go to one place and their developing machine was out of order. So tomorrow night I'll be scanning negatives and seeing how much color they show.
I just got back from watching for about an hour. For most of the time there was just a greenish glow to the north and occaisional red patches that would fade after a minute or so. Then for about 10 minutes it went nuts. The green area developed prominent vertical streaks, and the red patches covered about half the sky. All thru the red were bright rays which would brighten and fade over a period of about 15 seconds. As quickly as it began it has quieted down. Here's hoping it does a bit more. I'm going back outside.
Not as much as you might think. My mother told me she once substituted some duck eggs under a chicken. The ducklings hatched, and followed the hen about as chicks or ducklings follow their mother. When it rained and some big puddles formed, the ducklings went right into the water and started swimming about, while their "mother" hen went crazy trying to get them to come out of the water. Apparently the ducklings grew up behaving like any of the other ducks they had. The biggest deal was probably the hen who couldn't figure out why her chicks kept doing things chickens don't do.
From the article, it would appear that "exceeding expectations" consists mainly of surviving more than two months. It probably also means not having all the problems Barney Clark had (I'm not whoring so I won't post the first OK looking link off Google). Given that the candidate patients are facing a 20% or less chance of survivng the next month, they'll probably go along with anything. Research like this eventually has to be done in actual people, I just hope it doesn't end up being me or anybody I know.
There is. At this office it consists of the people waiting patiently until the firefighters or police come up and evacuate them. They use something that sort of resembles a hand truck. They probably had the same system in place there. It's difficult to imagine a more hopeless feeling than what those people experienced. Maybe this will prompt somebody to invent something better.
better than making the land totally uninhabitable for thousands of years.
What are you talking about? In the situations where a neutron bomb is an option a regular atomic bomb doesn't leave the area "totally uninhabitable for thousands of years." The places this would be used is where the bomb would be set off in the air. Have you ever been to Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Other than the areas where they have worked to preserve visible signs of what happened, you can't tell an atom bomb ever went off there. They used to take the grade school kids out with geiger counters once a year to find radioactive rocks left over from the blast. They had to stop because they couldn't find any of them any more.
That's not to say that nuclear weapons can't be used to make an area uninhabitable. Surface bursts or deliberate "fizzles" will result in extensive contamination of the area. The main reason for a surface or subsurface burst is to destroy a hardened target (like a missile silo or command center).
The neutron bomb was killed off because somebody thought it was somehow inhumane to just kill off a bunch of people with radiation poisoning instead of burning them to death and destroying eveything around them. Neither one sounds very good to me.
Actually, the boiling point of nitrogen is -196C (about 70 K), well below the temperature required for this superconductivity. Ya gotta love when articles use degrees Fahrenheit as the units in a scientific article. It never fails to confuse somebody.
In A Brief History of Time, Steve Hawking gave another amusing answer to the question of what the turtle is standing on - "It's turtles all the way down."
When he coined the term, he was trying to make up a derisive, emabarassing name for the theory. Unfortunately for him, the name turned out to be catchy and subscribers to the theory took advantage of that.
There's also how you react towards the police from then on. In Los Angeles once, at a traffic light a police car pulled up behind me. He hit the lights and siren and used the bullhorn to tell me to pull over into a nearby empty lot. So I pulled into the lot and killed the engine and found myself surrounded by three cop cars - all the cops hiding behind their doors with guns drawn and pointed at me. They said to get out of the car, keep my hands where they could see them and make no sudden moves. For obvious reasons, I complied. One of them came up and frisked me, checked ID, and decided I wasn't the person they were looking for. They were actually polite, if you ignored having revolvers and shotguns levelled at you. It turned out they were looking for a stolen car which happened to match the description of the car I was in. Yeah, nobody was hurt, etc., but you don't ever think the same about somebody who has pointed a gun at you and made it clear that you could be dead in a very short time.
Actually, that won't protect you. The states and feds have been busting pedophiles who take those trips to southeast asia where they can indulge their sick fantasies with children and not be violating the law there. When they get back, they discover that US law applies to US citizens at all times anywhere in the world. In many cases there will be no prosecution because of jurisdiction, but many people are serving long prison terms who thought that being outside the US meant that US law no longer applied to them.
In any event, Sklyarov is being busted for selling his program in this country via the internet (through a third party). That is a violation of the DMCA, and, unfortunately, "ignorance of the law is no excuse". While it would be good to see the DMCA overturned, that will take years. Probably the best outcome for Sklyarov would be finding him guilty (which the first court will probably do) then deciding to expel him from the country rather than holding him (at considerable expense) in prison.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason these mushrooms are eaten is that they are misidentified as some similar looking edible species. The most frequent victims for these mushrooms are immigrants that mistake them for an edible species that they would find back where they were originally from. In the US on the west coast, that most often means immigrants from eastern Asia mistaking them for Volvariella, volavacea, commonly sold in supermarkets in cans as "Paddy Straw Mushrooms".
As far as being deadly, their lethality depends mostly on how much of them you eat. In a very general sense, if you eat some and don't seek medical treatment, your odds of dying are around 50%. With treatment (before the milk thistle extract), the survival rate was more like 90%.
There are lots of other mushrooms that also produce the same toxins in potentially deadly quantities. The ones that produce the most poisonings are Galerinas (especially G. marginata), since they resemble some of the hallucinogenic species of Psilocybe and can grow in the same habitats, at the same time, and even side by side with them. Lepiotas and Conocybes (Pholiotinas) can also be deadly in the same way, but don't generally resemble other mushrooms that most would want to eat.
There are lots of safe mushrooms and groups of mushrooms that are easy to identify accurately enough to eat without significant risk. Members of the genus Amanita (the ones these deadly ones belong to) don't fall into that category, unless you're a real expert. A lot of the "experts" that are referred to as such are people that can identify a few species (or maybe a few dozen species) in the woods - not somebody we should treat as a real expert. It's a bit like calling somebody who has done a "Hello World" program in a couple languages a programming expert.
If you want to learn enough to forage for your own wild mushrooms, you should contact a local mycological society. You can meet people who can show you how to identify some of the easier, safer mushrooms in your area.
Who would've thought we could start to resolve the diameters of other stars within our lifetimes??
Considering that Albert Michelson (yes, that Michelson) made the first measurement of another star (not the Sun) in 1920 (about a third or the way down the page for that detail), the question is probably more like how old are you? My parents weren't born yet when that happened.
Actually, if you read the article, that globular cluster is actually one of M31's clusters. The brightest globulars around M31 are about 13th magnitude, so they are visible in amateur telescopes (although they look like faint stars).
It does show impressively how good the resolution of the photograph is.
It doesn't work because there are known counterexamples.Orchids come to mind first off. Almost any orchid you can purchase at a greenhouse is a hybrid. They even produce fertile offspring with crosses from different genera.
Here is a list of genera, including what they call them when they are intergenus crosses (and just for the letter "A"). If you take the genus "Allenara", it is a hybrid of the naturally occuring genera Cattleya, Diacrium, Epidendrum, and Laelia. You get a cross of four genera by making two hybrids (say Cattleya x Diacrium and Epidendrum x Laelia) and then crossing the two hybrids.
Maybe that definition will work for most things, but it's a mystery to me how they decide that this orchid is a different (or the same) species from that one, much less that they should be in different genera.
I've seen tempura chefs pluck the cooked food out of the oil with their fingers without getting burned. Not something you want to try at home, but impressive to watch.
We take one today, we take one next year, they look identical.
Actually, for objects within our galaxy, many of them change visibly on time scales ranging from days to years (and not just brightness). The best example, from the Hubble Telescope, is the Crab Nebula Movie they did a few years ago. Note that the age of the Crab Nebula was originally determined by comparing photographs taken about 10 years apart, measuring the expansion of the nebula, and extrapolating backward to get an approximate year. Then, a check of historical records shows that there was a supernova in that area of the sky in 1054. Another object which has been known for a long time to show changes visible in a normal telescope is Hubble's Variable Nebula (OK, no cool animation).
You've got it backwards. Corporations issue notices like this because it gives them legal protection. This email will have been sent out as an official reminder that corporate policy bans any such software and makes violation of the policy a firing offense. If the company gets caught with somebody running the banned software, the company fires the responsible people. If it somehow got to court, they would present to the judge the facts that they have a published policy, employees were found in violation of the policy, and the employees were fired for violationg the policy. The judge would then have to say that the company is taking reasonable precautions to avoid violating the law. It's exactly the same as company policies about sexual harrassment and things like that.
Did anybody else notice that in the bear photo in the article that the chunk of ice in the lower right corner which obscures part of the bear looks like it was drawn by somebody. It looks like they wanted to obscure part of the bear for some reason. Now, why would anybody want to do that?
The last paragraph of the article says:
The sensor has other uses too. Since it changes colour with any chemical that acts like an opiate, it could be used to screen chemical compounds for useful opiate drugs, says Bayley.
I would have thought that this was more valuable to society - the ability to rapidly screen thousands of compounds for potential activity of a specific type. The process sounds like it may lend itself to similar screening of compounds of other types which bind to cell membrane receptors. But these researchers apparent first thought was about how they could use it to identify evil drug abusers, including people abusing something never before seen which has the same effects. Maybe there's more money in helping find drug abusers.
While you did find references to the modern insect sometimes called a water scorpion, it is not at all what is being referred to here. Water scorpion is an alternative name for sea scorpion, both common names for the eurypterids. One type of them also happens to be the state fossil of New York. While we probably can't say with real certainty just how nasty they might have been, I'd certainly be cautious around any 2 meter long, predatory arthropod.
You might be getting it from a movie, but it's actually correct. Unfortunately, Mars' atmosphere would be considered a usable vacuum here for many purposes. Even more unfortunately, it's probably not correctable over the long term. Mars lacks a significant magnetic field. This results in erosion of the atmosphere by the solar wind. Unless a way is found to create a large enough magnetic field to protect an artificial atmosphere, it will bleed off into space as the original one did. This also leaves inhabitants much more vulnerable to radiation from solar flares and similar events.
Wrong. In the state of Colorado death sentences can only be given by a panel of three judges. The jury has only the power to find a defendant guilty or not.
Who gives the death sentence varies from state to state.
I stayed out for about two hours and watched (in southeast Denver - limiting mag about 5) and some of the brighter meteors were definitely colored. The majority were white (whether because they really were white or because they were too faint to detect color in), but some of the brighter ones were definitely greenish or bluish in color. Also, a nucleus was visible at the head of a few of the meteors which was usually orange, but sometimes yellow. In any event, I should be able to verify colors through some of the color photos I took. I was going to get them developed today, but I only had time to go to one place and their developing machine was out of order. So tomorrow night I'll be scanning negatives and seeing how much color they show.
I just got back from watching for about an hour. For most of the time there was just a greenish glow to the north and occaisional red patches that would fade after a minute or so. Then for about 10 minutes it went nuts. The green area developed prominent vertical streaks, and the red patches covered about half the sky. All thru the red were bright rays which would brighten and fade over a period of about 15 seconds. As quickly as it began it has quieted down. Here's hoping it does a bit more. I'm going back outside.
Pigs... In... Space...!!1!
Not as much as you might think. My mother told me she once substituted some duck eggs under a chicken. The ducklings hatched, and followed the hen about as chicks or ducklings follow their mother. When it rained and some big puddles formed, the ducklings went right into the water and started swimming about, while their "mother" hen went crazy trying to get them to come out of the water. Apparently the ducklings grew up behaving like any of the other ducks they had. The biggest deal was probably the hen who couldn't figure out why her chicks kept doing things chickens don't do.
From the article, it would appear that "exceeding expectations" consists mainly of surviving more than two months. It probably also means not having all the problems Barney Clark had (I'm not whoring so I won't post the first OK looking link off Google). Given that the candidate patients are facing a 20% or less chance of survivng the next month, they'll probably go along with anything. Research like this eventually has to be done in actual people, I just hope it doesn't end up being me or anybody I know.
There is. At this office it consists of the people waiting patiently until the firefighters or police come up and evacuate them. They use something that sort of resembles a hand truck. They probably had the same system in place there. It's difficult to imagine a more hopeless feeling than what those people experienced. Maybe this will prompt somebody to invent something better.
better than making the land totally uninhabitable for thousands of years.
What are you talking about? In the situations where a neutron bomb is an option a regular atomic bomb doesn't leave the area "totally uninhabitable for thousands of years." The places this would be used is where the bomb would be set off in the air. Have you ever been to Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Other than the areas where they have worked to preserve visible signs of what happened, you can't tell an atom bomb ever went off there. They used to take the grade school kids out with geiger counters once a year to find radioactive rocks left over from the blast. They had to stop because they couldn't find any of them any more.
That's not to say that nuclear weapons can't be used to make an area uninhabitable. Surface bursts or deliberate "fizzles" will result in extensive contamination of the area. The main reason for a surface or subsurface burst is to destroy a hardened target (like a missile silo or command center).
The neutron bomb was killed off because somebody thought it was somehow inhumane to just kill off a bunch of people with radiation poisoning instead of burning them to death and destroying eveything around them. Neither one sounds very good to me.
Actually, the boiling point of nitrogen is -196C (about 70 K), well below the temperature required for this superconductivity. Ya gotta love when articles use degrees Fahrenheit as the units in a scientific article. It never fails to confuse somebody.
In A Brief History of Time, Steve Hawking gave another amusing answer to the question of what the turtle is standing on - "It's turtles all the way down."
When he coined the term, he was trying to make up a derisive, emabarassing name for the theory. Unfortunately for him, the name turned out to be catchy and subscribers to the theory took advantage of that.
Juries do not get to decide if a law if legal.
Apparently you've never heard of jury nullification. You most certainly *do* have the right to decide if a law is legal when you are on a jury.
There's also how you react towards the police from then on. In Los Angeles once, at a traffic light a police car pulled up behind me. He hit the lights and siren and used the bullhorn to tell me to pull over into a nearby empty lot. So I pulled into the lot and killed the engine and found myself surrounded by three cop cars - all the cops hiding behind their doors with guns drawn and pointed at me. They said to get out of the car, keep my hands where they could see them and make no sudden moves. For obvious reasons, I complied. One of them came up and frisked me, checked ID, and decided I wasn't the person they were looking for. They were actually polite, if you ignored having revolvers and shotguns levelled at you. It turned out they were looking for a stolen car which happened to match the description of the car I was in. Yeah, nobody was hurt, etc., but you don't ever think the same about somebody who has pointed a gun at you and made it clear that you could be dead in a very short time.
Actually, that won't protect you. The states and feds have been busting pedophiles who take those trips to southeast asia where they can indulge their sick fantasies with children and not be violating the law there. When they get back, they discover that US law applies to US citizens at all times anywhere in the world. In many cases there will be no prosecution because of jurisdiction, but many people are serving long prison terms who thought that being outside the US meant that US law no longer applied to them.
In any event, Sklyarov is being busted for selling his program in this country via the internet (through a third party). That is a violation of the DMCA, and, unfortunately, "ignorance of the law is no excuse". While it would be good to see the DMCA overturned, that will take years. Probably the best outcome for Sklyarov would be finding him guilty (which the first court will probably do) then deciding to expel him from the country rather than holding him (at considerable expense) in prison.