3. You're calling bullshit on the wrong side. Creationists/IDers are the ones trying to bypass the scientific debate (since they've lost for the last hundred years) to go directly into textbooks.
Actually if you would take time to look into it, you would find the extraordinary efforts those in control go to in order to remove any scientist that presents a solid basis for creationism or intelligent design.
Other people have pointed out the major flaw with that statement, but moreover, even if there were a conspiracy to keep creationism and ID down, what does that show? That there is an establishment among scientists who is not completely open-minded?
A conspiracy dedicated to opposing a scientific theory would not validate that scientific theory.
ID (in some form or another) has been a very large part of our history, and it is most certainly controversial. Thus, this seems like the perfect place for it. If you want to pretend that people never believed anything other than evolution throughout history, you are more full of shit than the people you so flippantly criticize.
There are many failed scientific theories that were widely held throughout history, why teach this particular idiotic one? No one is saying students should be well versed in the theory of spontaneous generation, that's much more historically important than ID, was much more widely accepted in it's time, and is just as wrong.
ID can be mentioned in schools. Teaching students that "A valid scientific theory is that science is completely wrong, God created us, don't question it" on the other hand is a thoroughly stupid idea, regardless of how one tries to spin it.
Yes, democratically run education systems will sometimes disagree with what I think is right. Scientific fact however is not democratic. Intelligent design is just plain wrong, no matter how many people like it. As a scientific theory, it's failed completely.
That's my rationale for arguing, to a democratic society, that ID should not be taught in schools. "sucking it up" and letting ignorance prevail is not something we do in working democratic societies.
If you want to teach it as a disproved theory, I got no problem.
I do, because intelligent design being taught in schools is little more than an attempt to allow prosthelytizing in the public school system. The goal there is to replace education with saving the children's souls from us evil secular scientists.
They don't care about science, this is all about "I have it in my little head that God wants me to spam everyone with advertising, and I'm willing to destroy education to do so."
Frankly, I'd prefer students be exposed to advertising for coca-cola or McDonalds. Even though that's generally less healthy than being a christian fundamentalist, it's far less annoying.
If embryonic stem cell research hadn't been banned by Republicans pandering to theocrats and drug corps for so long, this technique that finally unleashes stem cells for therapies might have been developed 8 years earlier.
I'm a cell biologist, a staunch democrat, and was astounded at how stupid Bush's actions were, but that's not exactly fair.
First and foremost, this is not a startling new discovery, the same group published a paper in 2008 showing that -mouse- embryonic stem cells grew fine on this one protein. The basic discovery didn't take place until just prior to 2008, the federal funding rules didn't affect mouse embryonic stem cell research obviously. It could have been discovered in mouse embryonic stem cells even with the funding rules under Bush, by chance it was not. Had we discovered it in mouse in, say, 2003, and then been unable to show it went for human cells too, that would be another case.
Second, embryonic stem cells being cultured without feeder layers would not have been much cause for hope, major barriers to treatment still existed and continue to exist outside of how to grow the cells. Research into overcoming those barriers would not have been directly impacted by the ban.
One barrier was that mbryonic stem cells were never very promising for therapeutic purposes, since you can't get ESC from a non-embryo patient. ESC from anything other than a clone could face tissue rejection issues. Within the last 3 years though, induced pluripotent stem cells were discovered/made, which would overcome those problems. I don't believe the research that went into that was significantly impacted by the ban, since again the mechanism was first identified in mouse. If your friend died last year, that would have already been discovered and is in my mind is the biggest breakthrough on spinal cord injuries we've ever seen. Recently, they've even done it without viral transfection.
Another barrier, and possibly the biggest one remaining, is that with this method or without, we still aren't 100% capable of taking a plate of stem cells or pluripotent cells and turning them all into neurons to repair the spinal cord. Last I heard, we could get most of them to mature, but not 100% to turn from stem cell to neuron. That's unacceptable for therapy. Any undifferentiated cells injected into your spinal cord would produce tumors, and in one of the worst places to get them. Once we get there, there's still likely to be the barrier of organization, how to get these cells to make a functional cord instead of just disorganized neurons all over the place. This may have been affected somewhat by the ban, but again, mouse studies continued and we're still not there.
Bush hindered our understanding of stem cell biology with his ignorant hypocritical meddling, but putting the blame on him is misplaced. I'm sorry about your friend, but it wasn't Bush that destroyed his hopes, we biologists failed him on our own.
Some important background that this article doesn't specifically mention (another one I read did), in 2008, that same lab had shown this was possible with mouse stem cells. That's not to knock them, just it's important to point out that these things don't just come from out of the blue, nor does biology move as quick as we would like. This group has been working on showing this goes on in human stem cells for at least 2 years, who knows how long it took them to find this out in mice, or narrow down this one specific protein. Those years between when they discovered it in mice and showing it in humans probably also represents a lot of work. Science is hard.
I would guess that the next step, maybe one they're already working on, is to show that induced pluripotent stem cells can be cultured on this same protein. IPsC are when they take cells from your own body and make them revert back to a similar state to embryonic stem cells, to where they can then be turned into any cell type you want (the advantage there being they're your cells so you wouldn't get tissue rejection like you would with embryonic stem cells.)
Three big barriers to using IPsC for therapy were/are 1. that they were made using viral transfection of cancer-causing genes, 2. culturing them required feeder cells which the article describes why that's bad, and 3. it's hard to completely differentiate a population of pluripotent cells into one cell type you're trying to get. There have been some breakthroughs on 1, last I heard a group had shown you can just culture with modified proteins to induce pluripotency. This is a breakthrough on 2. Unfortunately 3 might be harder. You want to be sure you've differentiated all the stem cells before you put them into a patient. If you inject stem cells into a patient, they're going to get one of the worst types of tumors: teratomas, so you want to be absolutely sure you've gotten them all. And each different cell type seems to differentiate in different ways. We might figure out how to turn stem cells completely into skin cells, but that may not help us learn how to turn a culture of stem cells into brain cells.
Nonetheless, this was an important 2 part solution to a barrier to using stem cells to their full potential. Double kudos to them, they've made a real contribution here.
Today IS quit facebook day. More about their privacy stuff, but this fits too.
It's kind of like they're goading me on. "Oh, you're thinking about quitting? Yeah right. I'm still gonna basically keep treating you like crap, selling all private information about you that comes my way to anyone. But you can't break up with me. Look, I'm going to sell out to fucking Pakistan, but all your friends are here, what are you going to do? That's right, nothing. Bitch."
From what I skimmed in the article, there wasn't much difference between 3g and 4g (except for those people marketing it) so I'm just going to pretend I have like an 8G.
I don't see any evidence for that. Again, obesity and lack of self-control causing obesity is mostly non-genetic, so there's no genes to be selected against. Furthermore, once you've reproduced in our society, from an evolutionary standpoint you're a success. If you aren't around to raise your grandchildren, those grandchildren are still going to live and pass on their genes (which, again, do not confer obesity or lack of self control).
If a fat couple has 5 kids, raises them with poor diet habits (making them obese) and then dies by the age of 50, they're still more competitive than a healthy couple who never reproduces, or who only has one child.
Obesity will not be eliminated by evolutionary forces. Even if it were, all the problems with obesity I mentioned would still be a problem for all of us, it would take multiple generations to work, it wouldn't kill off all the fat people by my next billing cycle for my health insurance.
This is why it's in our interest to fix it ourselves, as opposed to letting some non-existent evolutionary mechanism lower our health insurance bills for us.
It amazes me that in a forum full of highly educated technical people, no one understands the basics of evolution.
Indeed. No one seems to understand punctuated equilibrium here. Almost a decade ago, Stephen Jay Gould was writing huge books on how individuals within a species don't evolve, that evolution is really driven by extinction of whole species and speciation events. Yet, without fossil evidence, slashdotters still cling to this antiquated notion that "weak individuals in a species dying causes the species to evolve in a direction over time."
Obesity is not self correcting. First of all, the obesity epidemic is not based in genetics, it's a societal issue. Second, extreme childhood obesity leading to death before one can reproduce could theoretically "correct itself," but overweight individuals are having kids.
There's no evolution going on there. If you die at the age of 50 of a heart attack because you ate cheeseburgers every day, you still had ample time to pass on your genes. Genes which do not really cause you to be obese.
There is absolutely no possibility they won't get made.
If it gets delayed until 2012, some would argue there's a very good possibility it won't get made regardless of how profitable it would be. Because that's when Sauron is prophesied to come back, and he has a really good legal team.
Sometimes people will become so emotionally-invested in a scientific "fact" that they will refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary.
Even if the evidence is gathered by the most rigorous scientific methodologies and the global scientific community as a whole accepts the new fact as an update to the old.
Citation needed... though as a scientist who is emotionally-invested in the idea that scientists are infallible, I'm going to refuse to accept the evidence anyway.
There is no need to go screwing around with the basic chemistry of food.
Simply man up and learn a little self control.
It's not working. Self-control is an option now, and yet we still have people who -aren't- controlling their own diets. It negatively affects us all, most directly through increased health insurance costs, but in other ways too.
Since it's not working, it's in everyone's interest, even those of us who do exercise self control, to develop alternative junk foods that won't make people fat.
If you don't have self-control problems, then you can continue eating your homemade organic mayo (keep in mind commercial mayo is loaded with plenty of artificial additives: the chemistry there is already quite screwed up so that you won't get food poisoning.)
Why don't we focus on improving our diets so that they actually include healthy foods?
We've all had that option all along, yet diet related heart disease and obesity still exist, indirectly driving up everyone's health insurance costs even if you do eat healthy. Technical advances that improve the quality of food doesn't distract from your ability to eat natural healthy foods either (unless you happen to be a food researcher and are too busy researching to eat right I guess).
There are some people who are never going to give up the taco bell, and they're never going to lose weight as a consequence. So we may as well make healthier junk food so at least they won't get heart attacks and make my health insurance go up.
Why would anyone want low-fat mayonnaise? Fat is what mayonnaise is about
It always manages to surprise me when people say "The point of X is Y bad thing." If something tastes like mayo but doesn't make you fat, that's a good thing to many people. I mean, I'm assuming you don't have weight issues, but surely you can grasp the concept that other people do.
There's nothing you can do to make potato chips healthier; there's nothing healthy in potato chips to enhance.
What kind of reasoning is that? Reduce the amount of sodium, fat, cholesterol required to make them taste good and bam, it's healthier.
Now instead of a walmart tracphone. you buy a "clean" prepaid phone from vito that is registered to a 14 year old cheerleader in the hamptons.
See, you had me until you pointed out that under the status quo, walmart gets paid, and under this proposed law walmart won't be selling as much and some rich 14 year old bimbo loses her phone.
Is the buyer really going to come back and demand a refund when it doesn't work?
While I'd guess it's not impossible to just fake the account details, and maybe people do that, it could just be that these particular people found it is just more profitable to be legitimate after stealing the account for a variety of reasons. These are legitimate auction sites according to TFA.
Just guessing, but you see a account you'd like to get on the auction site, check to see if that character is actually good or has good equipment on WOW or whatever. If it isn't, no bid. If you buy it and the login doesn't work, I guess you first might cancel the transaction on your credit card or report it to paypal, the auction house bans that user from selling again, they'd have to start over with a new auction account with a lower user feedback rating.
Will it get the Hollywood treatment and everything we know and love about it is raped and murdered before our eyes?
I've never understood the sentiment that "if it's turned into a movie, that ruins the source material." The movie mario bros was bad even by videogame movie standards, yet over a decade later I'm still loving Mario games. It didn't ruin anything. No matter how bad the movie is, Mass Effect is out there, it can't be "murdered" by a movie.
And they really need to change some things about it. Specifically the elevators.
Slashdot Mirror
You MUST waste time dealing with bullshit claims from retards if you want people to accept your system of peer review for things you claim are true.
1. Evolutionary biologists HAVE for over a hundred and fifty years, since before "On the Origin of Species" was published.
2. There is nothing that says "Scientists must take all contrary claims, regardless of credibility or evidence, seriously." The creationist scientists saying they were discriminated against generally seem to be making excuses for their failures, or were otherwise unconvincing.
3. You're calling bullshit on the wrong side. Creationists/IDers are the ones trying to bypass the scientific debate (since they've lost for the last hundred years) to go directly into textbooks.
Actually if you would take time to look into it, you would find the extraordinary efforts those in control go to in order to remove any scientist that presents a solid basis for creationism or intelligent design.
Other people have pointed out the major flaw with that statement, but moreover, even if there were a conspiracy to keep creationism and ID down, what does that show? That there is an establishment among scientists who is not completely open-minded?
A conspiracy dedicated to opposing a scientific theory would not validate that scientific theory.
ID (in some form or another) has been a very large part of our history, and it is most certainly controversial. Thus, this seems like the perfect place for it. If you want to pretend that people never believed anything other than evolution throughout history, you are more full of shit than the people you so flippantly criticize.
There are many failed scientific theories that were widely held throughout history, why teach this particular idiotic one? No one is saying students should be well versed in the theory of spontaneous generation, that's much more historically important than ID, was much more widely accepted in it's time, and is just as wrong.
ID can be mentioned in schools. Teaching students that "A valid scientific theory is that science is completely wrong, God created us, don't question it" on the other hand is a thoroughly stupid idea, regardless of how one tries to spin it.
Yes, democratically run education systems will sometimes disagree with what I think is right. Scientific fact however is not democratic. Intelligent design is just plain wrong, no matter how many people like it. As a scientific theory, it's failed completely.
That's my rationale for arguing, to a democratic society, that ID should not be taught in schools. "sucking it up" and letting ignorance prevail is not something we do in working democratic societies.
If you want to teach it as a disproved theory, I got no problem.
I do, because intelligent design being taught in schools is little more than an attempt to allow prosthelytizing in the public school system. The goal there is to replace education with saving the children's souls from us evil secular scientists.
They don't care about science, this is all about "I have it in my little head that God wants me to spam everyone with advertising, and I'm willing to destroy education to do so."
Frankly, I'd prefer students be exposed to advertising for coca-cola or McDonalds. Even though that's generally less healthy than being a christian fundamentalist, it's far less annoying.
If embryonic stem cell research hadn't been banned by Republicans pandering to theocrats and drug corps for so long, this technique that finally unleashes stem cells for therapies might have been developed 8 years earlier.
I'm a cell biologist, a staunch democrat, and was astounded at how stupid Bush's actions were, but that's not exactly fair.
First and foremost, this is not a startling new discovery, the same group published a paper in 2008 showing that -mouse- embryonic stem cells grew fine on this one protein. The basic discovery didn't take place until just prior to 2008, the federal funding rules didn't affect mouse embryonic stem cell research obviously. It could have been discovered in mouse embryonic stem cells even with the funding rules under Bush, by chance it was not. Had we discovered it in mouse in, say, 2003, and then been unable to show it went for human cells too, that would be another case.
Second, embryonic stem cells being cultured without feeder layers would not have been much cause for hope, major barriers to treatment still existed and continue to exist outside of how to grow the cells. Research into overcoming those barriers would not have been directly impacted by the ban.
One barrier was that mbryonic stem cells were never very promising for therapeutic purposes, since you can't get ESC from a non-embryo patient. ESC from anything other than a clone could face tissue rejection issues. Within the last 3 years though, induced pluripotent stem cells were discovered/made, which would overcome those problems. I don't believe the research that went into that was significantly impacted by the ban, since again the mechanism was first identified in mouse. If your friend died last year, that would have already been discovered and is in my mind is the biggest breakthrough on spinal cord injuries we've ever seen. Recently, they've even done it without viral transfection.
Another barrier, and possibly the biggest one remaining, is that with this method or without, we still aren't 100% capable of taking a plate of stem cells or pluripotent cells and turning them all into neurons to repair the spinal cord. Last I heard, we could get most of them to mature, but not 100% to turn from stem cell to neuron. That's unacceptable for therapy. Any undifferentiated cells injected into your spinal cord would produce tumors, and in one of the worst places to get them. Once we get there, there's still likely to be the barrier of organization, how to get these cells to make a functional cord instead of just disorganized neurons all over the place. This may have been affected somewhat by the ban, but again, mouse studies continued and we're still not there.
Bush hindered our understanding of stem cell biology with his ignorant hypocritical meddling, but putting the blame on him is misplaced. I'm sorry about your friend, but it wasn't Bush that destroyed his hopes, we biologists failed him on our own.
Some important background that this article doesn't specifically mention (another one I read did), in 2008, that same lab had shown this was possible with mouse stem cells. That's not to knock them, just it's important to point out that these things don't just come from out of the blue, nor does biology move as quick as we would like. This group has been working on showing this goes on in human stem cells for at least 2 years, who knows how long it took them to find this out in mice, or narrow down this one specific protein. Those years between when they discovered it in mice and showing it in humans probably also represents a lot of work. Science is hard.
I would guess that the next step, maybe one they're already working on, is to show that induced pluripotent stem cells can be cultured on this same protein. IPsC are when they take cells from your own body and make them revert back to a similar state to embryonic stem cells, to where they can then be turned into any cell type you want (the advantage there being they're your cells so you wouldn't get tissue rejection like you would with embryonic stem cells.)
Three big barriers to using IPsC for therapy were/are 1. that they were made using viral transfection of cancer-causing genes, 2. culturing them required feeder cells which the article describes why that's bad, and 3. it's hard to completely differentiate a population of pluripotent cells into one cell type you're trying to get. There have been some breakthroughs on 1, last I heard a group had shown you can just culture with modified proteins to induce pluripotency. This is a breakthrough on 2. Unfortunately 3 might be harder. You want to be sure you've differentiated all the stem cells before you put them into a patient. If you inject stem cells into a patient, they're going to get one of the worst types of tumors: teratomas, so you want to be absolutely sure you've gotten them all. And each different cell type seems to differentiate in different ways. We might figure out how to turn stem cells completely into skin cells, but that may not help us learn how to turn a culture of stem cells into brain cells.
Nonetheless, this was an important 2 part solution to a barrier to using stem cells to their full potential. Double kudos to them, they've made a real contribution here.
Today IS quit facebook day. More about their privacy stuff, but this fits too.
It's kind of like they're goading me on. "Oh, you're thinking about quitting? Yeah right. I'm still gonna basically keep treating you like crap, selling all private information about you that comes my way to anyone. But you can't break up with me. Look, I'm going to sell out to fucking Pakistan, but all your friends are here, what are you going to do? That's right, nothing. Bitch."
Apple doesn't have a 4G and you're jealous.
From what I skimmed in the article, there wasn't much difference between 3g and 4g (except for those people marketing it) so I'm just going to pretend I have like an 8G.
So I win.
I don't see any evidence for that. Again, obesity and lack of self-control causing obesity is mostly non-genetic, so there's no genes to be selected against. Furthermore, once you've reproduced in our society, from an evolutionary standpoint you're a success. If you aren't around to raise your grandchildren, those grandchildren are still going to live and pass on their genes (which, again, do not confer obesity or lack of self control).
If a fat couple has 5 kids, raises them with poor diet habits (making them obese) and then dies by the age of 50, they're still more competitive than a healthy couple who never reproduces, or who only has one child.
Obesity will not be eliminated by evolutionary forces. Even if it were, all the problems with obesity I mentioned would still be a problem for all of us, it would take multiple generations to work, it wouldn't kill off all the fat people by my next billing cycle for my health insurance.
This is why it's in our interest to fix it ourselves, as opposed to letting some non-existent evolutionary mechanism lower our health insurance bills for us.
It amazes me that in a forum full of highly educated technical people, no one understands the basics of evolution.
Indeed. No one seems to understand punctuated equilibrium here. Almost a decade ago, Stephen Jay Gould was writing huge books on how individuals within a species don't evolve, that evolution is really driven by extinction of whole species and speciation events. Yet, without fossil evidence, slashdotters still cling to this antiquated notion that "weak individuals in a species dying causes the species to evolve in a direction over time."
Obesity is not self correcting. First of all, the obesity epidemic is not based in genetics, it's a societal issue. Second, extreme childhood obesity leading to death before one can reproduce could theoretically "correct itself," but overweight individuals are having kids.
There's no evolution going on there. If you die at the age of 50 of a heart attack because you ate cheeseburgers every day, you still had ample time to pass on your genes. Genes which do not really cause you to be obese.
There is absolutely no possibility they won't get made.
If it gets delayed until 2012, some would argue there's a very good possibility it won't get made regardless of how profitable it would be. Because that's when Sauron is prophesied to come back, and he has a really good legal team.
At least now they won't have to worry about lubricating the wheel.
Sometimes people will become so emotionally-invested in a scientific "fact" that they will refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary.
Even if the evidence is gathered by the most rigorous scientific methodologies and the global scientific community as a whole accepts the new fact as an update to the old.
Citation needed... though as a scientist who is emotionally-invested in the idea that scientists are infallible, I'm going to refuse to accept the evidence anyway.
There is no need to go screwing around with the basic chemistry of food.
Simply man up and learn a little self control.
It's not working. Self-control is an option now, and yet we still have people who -aren't- controlling their own diets. It negatively affects us all, most directly through increased health insurance costs, but in other ways too.
Since it's not working, it's in everyone's interest, even those of us who do exercise self control, to develop alternative junk foods that won't make people fat.
If you don't have self-control problems, then you can continue eating your homemade organic mayo (keep in mind commercial mayo is loaded with plenty of artificial additives: the chemistry there is already quite screwed up so that you won't get food poisoning.)
The experimenters gave one group of rats glucose and another group saccharine. The rats who ate saccharine gained more weight.
That one case doesn't prove that all substitutes as a rule are going to be counter-effective, it just proves that one particular substitute is bad.
I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: religion.
A psychology degree may have helped you realize that non-religious people ignore science as well.
Why don't we focus on improving our diets so that they actually include healthy foods?
We've all had that option all along, yet diet related heart disease and obesity still exist, indirectly driving up everyone's health insurance costs even if you do eat healthy. Technical advances that improve the quality of food doesn't distract from your ability to eat natural healthy foods either (unless you happen to be a food researcher and are too busy researching to eat right I guess).
There are some people who are never going to give up the taco bell, and they're never going to lose weight as a consequence. So we may as well make healthier junk food so at least they won't get heart attacks and make my health insurance go up.
Why would anyone want low-fat mayonnaise? Fat is what mayonnaise is about
It always manages to surprise me when people say "The point of X is Y bad thing." If something tastes like mayo but doesn't make you fat, that's a good thing to many people. I mean, I'm assuming you don't have weight issues, but surely you can grasp the concept that other people do.
There's nothing you can do to make potato chips healthier; there's nothing healthy in potato chips to enhance.
What kind of reasoning is that? Reduce the amount of sodium, fat, cholesterol required to make them taste good and bam, it's healthier.
Now instead of a walmart tracphone. you buy a "clean" prepaid phone from vito that is registered to a 14 year old cheerleader in the hamptons.
See, you had me until you pointed out that under the status quo, walmart gets paid, and under this proposed law walmart won't be selling as much and some rich 14 year old bimbo loses her phone.
I call that "win-win!"
Is the buyer really going to come back and demand a refund when it doesn't work?
While I'd guess it's not impossible to just fake the account details, and maybe people do that, it could just be that these particular people found it is just more profitable to be legitimate after stealing the account for a variety of reasons. These are legitimate auction sites according to TFA.
Just guessing, but you see a account you'd like to get on the auction site, check to see if that character is actually good or has good equipment on WOW or whatever. If it isn't, no bid. If you buy it and the login doesn't work, I guess you first might cancel the transaction on your credit card or report it to paypal, the auction house bans that user from selling again, they'd have to start over with a new auction account with a lower user feedback rating.
Will it get the Hollywood treatment and everything we know and love about it is raped and murdered before our eyes?
I've never understood the sentiment that "if it's turned into a movie, that ruins the source material." The movie mario bros was bad even by videogame movie standards, yet over a decade later I'm still loving Mario games. It didn't ruin anything. No matter how bad the movie is, Mass Effect is out there, it can't be "murdered" by a movie.
And they really need to change some things about it. Specifically the elevators.
But it can be dangerous - political activist taking picture of police beating subject for example,
Out of curiosity, is that theoretical, or are there examples of police beatings being documented and then traced like this?
Don't worry, I have no desire to start a post in the title.
Such a great line it makes me sad to know the next opportunity I have to use it IRL, I'll probably waste it with some valid question.
Fortunately, I'm a cell biologist, so another one will probably come along eventually.