Good luck having it spread far enough... Perhaps if you put something along the lines of "Brittney_Spears_naked_with_LolCAts" in the title, it might get distributed...
Exactly. Just look at the last "terrorist" - what did we have there? Some bozo setting his pants on fire, some other bozo strapping fireworks to a propane bottle? Jesus, I can come up with better plots while drunk like a bloody skunk. We are expected to be afraid of that freak show passing for terrorists these days? Gimme a break.
As much as I tend to encourage people to do a bit of science on the side, I have to make a couple of remarks on this, being a biochemist myself. First - your conclusion is wrong. You at best showed that penicillin stays active when stored in dry powdered form. Drawing conclusions to any arbitrary substance is a bit far-fetched. That is a very important thing that you have to learn when doing science properly - how to assess what conclusions you can actually draw from your data.
Second - what where the concentrations you used? If you applied the penicillin at significant "overkill" concentration, you would basically see the statistical average amount of resistant cultures left in both cases. To be sure, you gotta do the experiment at different concentrations, and you gotta duplicate the plates for the experiment and the control, so you can compare the patterns of kill-off.
Third, even if you showed that the potency stays roughly the same, you did not show if there are degradation products which could possibly be harmful for a patient - you would need to do a toxicity assay to be sure that it stays harmless for the patient.
Forth, regarding the remaining colonies - did they survive because of innate resistance or because the antibiotic concentration was too low?
Generally I think your conclusion is probably right, but the data you showed are not sufficient to make that conclusion. What you did is great for a college-level experiment, but in reality, there are more factors that you have to check for. That's why I sunk a couple of years of my life into studying that stuff. As I said, this is not to discourage you - doing science at home is great fun and you can learn a lot, but you gotta be careful evaluating your data. The most important part about science is, at least to me, that you gotta be aware that a single experiment might answer one question, but raises 10 others, on which you gotta follow up.
A few hundred feet probably won't do it - the sediment layer is huge in the gulf, and you definitely want to collapse the solid rock beneath. On the topic of the headquarters, yeah, it would probably be an overreaction to nuke London, I like the place, too. I am European, btw - and in my opinion, the place of origin of the corporation in question is irrelevant - there are no European or American corporations, those entities hold no loyalty or allegiance to their place of origin anyway, they exist in a whole different universe...
The guys over at The Oil Drum forums have done some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on a frame-by-frame analysis of the videos that have been released, basically trying to judge the outflow velocity of the oil from the leak. Most of them end up in the 20k-30k barrel per day range. For some reason, I trust them more than the official figures. Most of the more vocal posters there are petro engineers themselves and know what they are talking about.
On a related note, why exactly does BP have a say in who gets to do what at the spill site? Why do we let them control this?
So, what's up with the South these days? I mean, comments from BP like this just call for a good old-fashioned lynching... Come on, guys, you are supposed to be good at that. Having a couple of bastards like this Mueller guy dangling from trees would probably speed up the efforts...
You can't just drop a nuke on the seafloor and expect it to close the well. All it'll gonna do is blow away the sediment, leaving the well open. In order to close it, you'll have to drill into solid rock, lower the nuke down there and blow it to collapse the original well. At this point, you can as well do a relief drilling and shut it down with mud. Nuking a blowout makes sense only when you don't have the capability to geo-steer a relief drill precisely enough to hit the original hole. We can do that now, and it won't take much more time than drilling for a nuke. We could nuke the BP headquarters, though - that might help...
I don't know the exact composition of the dispersants. But in all likelihood, they are just tensids - they do not "break down" the oil, they just help with forming an emulsion of tiny droplets rather than an oil slick on the surface. Out of sight, out of mind...
If that is indeed the main mechanism, I fail to see how they would help with bacterial breakdown of the oil. Sure, the emulsion presents a larger surface, but that surface is not actually oil, but a monolayer of the dispersant molecules encapsulating the oil droplets. If the bacterial breakdown still works, the consequences depend on the nature of the bacteria at question. If they are aerobic, i.e. oxygen breathing, your scenario might actually be a problem - eutrophy, oxygen depletion, formation of death zones. The gulf has enough of those already anyway fed by the runoff of the Mississippi.
Yeah, I heard the same from automotive engineers I have been talking to. They actually thought about artificial sound design for the engine, so the driver gets the impression that the engine is revving up or down. Psychology is a non-negligible force, I guess.
It is indeed similar to the planetary gear coupling boxes in parallel hybrids. And yeah, you are basically right - a 6-gear box holds you sufficiently close to the optimum rpm anyway for practical use. CVTs really shine in heavy machinery, but are not that important for personal cars. Still nice technology, though. To hell with practical importance - all hail those engineering efforts done for the heck of it!
Yeah, but that's basically the working principle of any planetary gear system. If you don't hold any of the components locked in a planetary gear, you can configure the output to be proportional to the ration of the inputs. Combine a CVT with a planetary, and you get an infinitely variable transmission. That's used in hybrid vehicles all the time, and doable with gears only, not using friction components. From quickly skimming over the video, I definitely see a planetary gear setup there. As I said above, I'd love to see more technical detail on that one, TFA does not really make clear what is actually new about this.
Yeah, thanks - I missed that video. I am slightly too hungover to wrap my head around a video demonstration at the moment, though... Gotta have a look if his patent is already published later.
Hydrostatic transmissions sure are nice technology, basically a pair of swash-plate compressors coupled together. I am not exactly an expert on the method, but I think they are rather slow-reacting. Works well for heavy machinery, not so well for cars with fast load changes on the transmission.
They are actually comparing it to other times of CVTs, which use friction belts driving a pair of cones. Nothing to do with the clutch. The device from TFA uses only gears, in particular a set of planetary gears, so they say that the advantage would be no danger of slippage compared to friction driven CVTs. From what I know, in the usual designs, the slippage problem is not really limiting anyway, though.
Actually electric motors have a pretty good efficiency over a wide range of power levels. It is ICEs that have a small band of optimal efficiency around a certain rotational speed. So, conventional combustion engines do profit most from this. Besides, electric motors have a rather flat torque curve, so you usually do not need a gearbox for them at all.
Well, obviously this is not "frictionless" - it just appears not to use friction as the main force of transmission, like friction-cone type CVTs do. There are other types of CVTs that do not use friction - for example chain-driven CVTs or hydraulic-type CVTs. Theoretical infinite torque is also not exactly new - look at hydristors, for example. I'd love to see more technical detail about what the guy actually invented there, TFA is not exactly helpful when it comes to the inner workings of his gearbox.
We have an online petition system in Germany? God, I am behind the times... Gotta check that out. Anyway, you are right, of course - if you put up well-designed minimum requirements, this could work indeed. Such a barrier is crucial, however.
Along with research done by Mark Roth with H2S, this could save lots of people.
What's with the mods today? What exactly is redundant about this? Mark Roth is working about suspended animation using controlled oxygen depletion with H2S and CO, work which has shown quite some promise in various animal models. Interesting stuff that is completely on topic. The main problem with suspended animation, be it of whole organisms or of tissues, is oxygen damage. Mark Roth depletes the oxygen in a controlled manner, the work cited in TFA is based on adding dichloroacetate, which has been shown to prevent ischemic damage in tissue. Not sure how the two would complement each other, as I am not much of a metabolism guy. Anyway, someone mod up the parent, that downmod is undeserved.
Another NMR guy? What are you working on? I share your pain - did way too much work on PrP for my own sanity, while I was still in academia. Not much fun when 95% precipitates during one experiment... Anyway, you are right, that medium is actually astonishing simple. As for the dichloroacetate, it usually stimulates the PDC, so it should stimulate the aerobic metabolism. It has been shown to protect tissue against ischemic damage (Peeling, et al. Protective effect of dichloroacetate in a rat model of forebrain ischemia. Neuroscience Letters. 1996; 208: 21-24) - so I guess this is its main role in keeping the heart alive in this setup.
Oh, a member of the Church of Amiga! This brings up sad memories. Brother, I have sinned. I sold my Amiga 2000 8 years ago. I was young, broke and needed the money. Can I ever be cleansed of that guilt, Brother? What shall I do for penitence, Brother?
The comment system is a nice idea, but you have to avoid spam that swamps the examiner completely. If you look at patent discussions on/., you'll find about 50 cries of "prior art! prior art!" in the comments, most of them from people who just read the abstract and not TF claims, and pointing to stuff that mostly is not even remotely prior art to the subject-matter at issue. If you submit that to the PTO, they would probably just lock up due to DDOS...:P
Proving prior art by demonstration can indeed be hard and expensive, but it is often used as a powerful tool. I am working as patent engineer in Europe, and I am currently in the process of tracking down a certain model of oldtimer to show a technical feature which is clearly prior art in an ongoing patent case, but which has for some reason never been documented in any written piece I could get my hands on. Not exactly an easy task, indeed, but sometimes it is the best way. It is a purely mechanical feature, though, and I share your sentiment regarding software patents.
Usual disclaimer, IANAL and this is no legal advice.
It's like in coding, I guess - there's efficient code and there's obfuscated code and the two share a small set. I work as a patent engineer, and I always try to keep the inventors closely in the loop when writing a draft. As I said, the compromise between broadness and precision is the main goal here. The problem is two-fold - if I draft a vague, obfuscated patent, it might be useful for trolling, but for the serious inventor, this is not what he needs. He needs clear protection for his invention, and obfuscation, vagueness and lack of clarity actually endangers that - no good service to the customer, from my point of view. You are right of course that there are badly worded patents out there, and that some are indeed intentionally vague with the purpose of trolling.
From my (European) point of view, a big problem in the US resides not with the patent system in particular, but rather with the legal system as such. For example, around here we have a special patent court, which helps tremendously. The majority of the judges there are so-called "technical judges" - not lawyers by profession, but engineers and scientists who worked in the patent business for a couple of years before joining the court. They actually know what they are talking about in their rulings, and, in my experience, it is a very, very bad idea to try to bullshit these guys with obfuscation. I have seen quite a number of patents invalidated by technical judges on grounds of lack of clarity and lack of reproducibility. This does wonders for the general sanity of the patent system.
A second factor, in my opinion, is legal costs - patent litigation is way cheaper around here, compared to the US. This makes it rather hard to impossible for a troll to squash a small business just with the threat of legal action - the small business can actually afford the defense. This help a lot against abuse, too.
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Good luck having it spread far enough... Perhaps if you put something along the lines of "Brittney_Spears_naked_with_LolCAts" in the title, it might get distributed...
Exactly. Just look at the last "terrorist" - what did we have there? Some bozo setting his pants on fire, some other bozo strapping fireworks to a propane bottle? Jesus, I can come up with better plots while drunk like a bloody skunk. We are expected to be afraid of that freak show passing for terrorists these days? Gimme a break.
As much as I tend to encourage people to do a bit of science on the side, I have to make a couple of remarks on this, being a biochemist myself. First - your conclusion is wrong. You at best showed that penicillin stays active when stored in dry powdered form. Drawing conclusions to any arbitrary substance is a bit far-fetched. That is a very important thing that you have to learn when doing science properly - how to assess what conclusions you can actually draw from your data.
Second - what where the concentrations you used? If you applied the penicillin at significant "overkill" concentration, you would basically see the statistical average amount of resistant cultures left in both cases. To be sure, you gotta do the experiment at different concentrations, and you gotta duplicate the plates for the experiment and the control, so you can compare the patterns of kill-off.
Third, even if you showed that the potency stays roughly the same, you did not show if there are degradation products which could possibly be harmful for a patient - you would need to do a toxicity assay to be sure that it stays harmless for the patient.
Forth, regarding the remaining colonies - did they survive because of innate resistance or because the antibiotic concentration was too low?
Generally I think your conclusion is probably right, but the data you showed are not sufficient to make that conclusion. What you did is great for a college-level experiment, but in reality, there are more factors that you have to check for. That's why I sunk a couple of years of my life into studying that stuff. As I said, this is not to discourage you - doing science at home is great fun and you can learn a lot, but you gotta be careful evaluating your data. The most important part about science is, at least to me, that you gotta be aware that a single experiment might answer one question, but raises 10 others, on which you gotta follow up.
A few hundred feet probably won't do it - the sediment layer is huge in the gulf, and you definitely want to collapse the solid rock beneath. On the topic of the headquarters, yeah, it would probably be an overreaction to nuke London, I like the place, too. I am European, btw - and in my opinion, the place of origin of the corporation in question is irrelevant - there are no European or American corporations, those entities hold no loyalty or allegiance to their place of origin anyway, they exist in a whole different universe...
On a related note, why exactly does BP have a say in who gets to do what at the spill site? Why do we let them control this?
So, what's up with the South these days? I mean, comments from BP like this just call for a good old-fashioned lynching... Come on, guys, you are supposed to be good at that. Having a couple of bastards like this Mueller guy dangling from trees would probably speed up the efforts...
You can't just drop a nuke on the seafloor and expect it to close the well. All it'll gonna do is blow away the sediment, leaving the well open. In order to close it, you'll have to drill into solid rock, lower the nuke down there and blow it to collapse the original well. At this point, you can as well do a relief drilling and shut it down with mud. Nuking a blowout makes sense only when you don't have the capability to geo-steer a relief drill precisely enough to hit the original hole. We can do that now, and it won't take much more time than drilling for a nuke. We could nuke the BP headquarters, though - that might help...
I don't know the exact composition of the dispersants. But in all likelihood, they are just tensids - they do not "break down" the oil, they just help with forming an emulsion of tiny droplets rather than an oil slick on the surface. Out of sight, out of mind...
If that is indeed the main mechanism, I fail to see how they would help with bacterial breakdown of the oil. Sure, the emulsion presents a larger surface, but that surface is not actually oil, but a monolayer of the dispersant molecules encapsulating the oil droplets. If the bacterial breakdown still works, the consequences depend on the nature of the bacteria at question. If they are aerobic, i.e. oxygen breathing, your scenario might actually be a problem - eutrophy, oxygen depletion, formation of death zones. The gulf has enough of those already anyway fed by the runoff of the Mississippi.
Yeah, I heard the same from automotive engineers I have been talking to. They actually thought about artificial sound design for the engine, so the driver gets the impression that the engine is revving up or down. Psychology is a non-negligible force, I guess.
It is indeed similar to the planetary gear coupling boxes in parallel hybrids. And yeah, you are basically right - a 6-gear box holds you sufficiently close to the optimum rpm anyway for practical use. CVTs really shine in heavy machinery, but are not that important for personal cars. Still nice technology, though. To hell with practical importance - all hail those engineering efforts done for the heck of it!
Yeah, but that's basically the working principle of any planetary gear system. If you don't hold any of the components locked in a planetary gear, you can configure the output to be proportional to the ration of the inputs. Combine a CVT with a planetary, and you get an infinitely variable transmission. That's used in hybrid vehicles all the time, and doable with gears only, not using friction components. From quickly skimming over the video, I definitely see a planetary gear setup there. As I said above, I'd love to see more technical detail on that one, TFA does not really make clear what is actually new about this.
Yeah, thanks - I missed that video. I am slightly too hungover to wrap my head around a video demonstration at the moment, though... Gotta have a look if his patent is already published later.
Hydrostatic transmissions sure are nice technology, basically a pair of swash-plate compressors coupled together. I am not exactly an expert on the method, but I think they are rather slow-reacting. Works well for heavy machinery, not so well for cars with fast load changes on the transmission.
They are actually comparing it to other times of CVTs, which use friction belts driving a pair of cones. Nothing to do with the clutch. The device from TFA uses only gears, in particular a set of planetary gears, so they say that the advantage would be no danger of slippage compared to friction driven CVTs. From what I know, in the usual designs, the slippage problem is not really limiting anyway, though.
Actually electric motors have a pretty good efficiency over a wide range of power levels. It is ICEs that have a small band of optimal efficiency around a certain rotational speed. So, conventional combustion engines do profit most from this. Besides, electric motors have a rather flat torque curve, so you usually do not need a gearbox for them at all.
Well, obviously this is not "frictionless" - it just appears not to use friction as the main force of transmission, like friction-cone type CVTs do. There are other types of CVTs that do not use friction - for example chain-driven CVTs or hydraulic-type CVTs. Theoretical infinite torque is also not exactly new - look at hydristors, for example. I'd love to see more technical detail about what the guy actually invented there, TFA is not exactly helpful when it comes to the inner workings of his gearbox.
We have an online petition system in Germany? God, I am behind the times... Gotta check that out. Anyway, you are right, of course - if you put up well-designed minimum requirements, this could work indeed. Such a barrier is crucial, however.
Along with research done by Mark Roth with H2S, this could save lots of people.
What's with the mods today? What exactly is redundant about this? Mark Roth is working about suspended animation using controlled oxygen depletion with H2S and CO, work which has shown quite some promise in various animal models. Interesting stuff that is completely on topic. The main problem with suspended animation, be it of whole organisms or of tissues, is oxygen damage. Mark Roth depletes the oxygen in a controlled manner, the work cited in TFA is based on adding dichloroacetate, which has been shown to prevent ischemic damage in tissue. Not sure how the two would complement each other, as I am not much of a metabolism guy. Anyway, someone mod up the parent, that downmod is undeserved.
Another NMR guy? What are you working on? I share your pain - did way too much work on PrP for my own sanity, while I was still in academia. Not much fun when 95% precipitates during one experiment... Anyway, you are right, that medium is actually astonishing simple. As for the dichloroacetate, it usually stimulates the PDC, so it should stimulate the aerobic metabolism. It has been shown to protect tissue against ischemic damage (Peeling, et al. Protective effect of dichloroacetate in a rat model of forebrain ischemia. Neuroscience Letters. 1996; 208: 21-24) - so I guess this is its main role in keeping the heart alive in this setup.
Oh, a member of the Church of Amiga! This brings up sad memories. Brother, I have sinned. I sold my Amiga 2000 8 years ago. I was young, broke and needed the money. Can I ever be cleansed of that guilt, Brother? What shall I do for penitence, Brother?
Thanks for reminding me of my age... Ohhh, Samantha pics on the C64... Now help me get those damn kids of my lawn, would you, please?
The comment system is a nice idea, but you have to avoid spam that swamps the examiner completely. If you look at patent discussions on /., you'll find about 50 cries of "prior art! prior art!" in the comments, most of them from people who just read the abstract and not TF claims, and pointing to stuff that mostly is not even remotely prior art to the subject-matter at issue. If you submit that to the PTO, they would probably just lock up due to DDOS... :P
Proving prior art by demonstration can indeed be hard and expensive, but it is often used as a powerful tool. I am working as patent engineer in Europe, and I am currently in the process of tracking down a certain model of oldtimer to show a technical feature which is clearly prior art in an ongoing patent case, but which has for some reason never been documented in any written piece I could get my hands on. Not exactly an easy task, indeed, but sometimes it is the best way. It is a purely mechanical feature, though, and I share your sentiment regarding software patents.
Usual disclaimer, IANAL and this is no legal advice.
It's like in coding, I guess - there's efficient code and there's obfuscated code and the two share a small set. I work as a patent engineer, and I always try to keep the inventors closely in the loop when writing a draft. As I said, the compromise between broadness and precision is the main goal here. The problem is two-fold - if I draft a vague, obfuscated patent, it might be useful for trolling, but for the serious inventor, this is not what he needs. He needs clear protection for his invention, and obfuscation, vagueness and lack of clarity actually endangers that - no good service to the customer, from my point of view. You are right of course that there are badly worded patents out there, and that some are indeed intentionally vague with the purpose of trolling.
From my (European) point of view, a big problem in the US resides not with the patent system in particular, but rather with the legal system as such. For example, around here we have a special patent court, which helps tremendously. The majority of the judges there are so-called "technical judges" - not lawyers by profession, but engineers and scientists who worked in the patent business for a couple of years before joining the court. They actually know what they are talking about in their rulings, and, in my experience, it is a very, very bad idea to try to bullshit these guys with obfuscation. I have seen quite a number of patents invalidated by technical judges on grounds of lack of clarity and lack of reproducibility. This does wonders for the general sanity of the patent system.
A second factor, in my opinion, is legal costs - patent litigation is way cheaper around here, compared to the US. This makes it rather hard to impossible for a troll to squash a small business just with the threat of legal action - the small business can actually afford the defense. This help a lot against abuse, too.
And yet the GP is eating up that "interesting" mods and you get the "flamebait". Teabagger mod brigade on patrol again?