The BBC article (which is misreporting the endosymbiont hypothesis badly enough to make Lynn roll in her grave were she not still alive) was actually reporting on an article investigating homologies of cellulose synthases in several species of cyanobacteria. Curiously, the current U of Texas at Austin is not about harnessing native cellulose production by some cyanobacterium but rather about "Transgenic expression of Gluconacetobacter xylinus strain ATCC 53582 cellulose synthase genes in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus leopoliensis strain UTCC 100". I guess that they decided that inserting required cellulose biosynthetic enzymes from an organism (apparently) known to produce a lot of cellulose was easier than trying to optimize the miserly levels of cellulose biosynthesis in some cyanobacterium.
It looks like they they need to control the simple sugar secretion problem. This is not only an organism which wastes energy (from its "perspective") for no good reason by making cellulose but also an organism which is considerate enough to potential competitors to give them an easy to use energy source in the form of simple sugars.
The former (the part we want) makes the organism weak but might be manageable. The latter, makes the organism "stupid" and, if it produces large enough quantities of simple sugars to sustain high densities of other microbes feasting on simple sugars, suicidal since secondary metabolites (or simply overwhelmingly high numbers of competitors) will probably make a population of this organism unsustainable.
Individual strands recognize each other by hydrogen bonds called Watson-Crick base pairing (forming the well known C-G & A-T base pairs). The sequence recognition between two double helices is something else which has been known to happen for a long time. The assumption would have been that it is mediated by various proteins such as recA in E. coli. It seems to be the case that non-Watson-Crick base pairing might be involved. Finding out that this is the case and that it need not be mediated by some recombination protein is kind of cool. I'm sure that, as a matter of course, various proteins are always going to be involved to optimize this in living cells nowadays but showing that it can happen without accessory proteins does kind of show how such a process might have evolved.
Re:A few interesting things about the bird flu
on
Cod Enzyme Kills Bird Flu
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are at least a dozen _known_ diseases that will just as gleefully sicken or even kill the human animal. Why we're so upset about the bird flu and what makes it special, I don't know, except of course that the entire subject is pushed into our faces and through our ears nonstop through the media. (Just to forestall some comments: The rabies virus could mutate too and become airborne for all we know. Gnade uns Gott should that ever happen).
That's a pretty fucking awful example to pick.
It is bloody unlikely that rabies will mutate into an airborne virus anytime soon. It would essentially have to become a completely different virus.
Influenza, on the other hand, is known for it's amazing mutational and recombinational "ability".
Rabies is not known for causing great pandemics associated producing very substantial mortality.
Influenza, on the other hand, is known for causing great pandemics producing very substantial mortality.
Rabies does not truly have the potential to create massive epidemics in livestock animals which may serve as a reservoirs from whence a human disease outbreak may start.
Avian influenza, on the other hand, does.
Rabies does not truly have the potential to create massive epidemics in wild animals which may serve as widespread infectious sources for domestic animals and as a reservoir from whence a human disease outbreak may start.
Avian influenza, on the other hand, does.
Animal infected by rabies are very rarely (if ever) the types to engage in the sorts of great migrations which may sometimes literally span the globe.
Animals infected by avian influenza, on the other hand, sometimes are.
I could probably go on (or maybe not --but I'm not about to try).
As a guess, I would assume that this would involve much further study to determine why the enzyme was so successful in the first place and then try to make it much more potent; essentially, they see the possibility of making a cure from this but it is not ready yet.
As a wild assed guess, it is so successful in the first place because it is probably some fairly potent and fairly non selective protease. The fact that it kills viruses in a test tube means almost nothing. For this to be effective as a drug it must be able to kill these viruses in a living organism and it must do so while producing minimal damage to said living organism.
Someone I went to high school with passed away due to a drug addiction. He was in his early 30's. I didn't know him all that well but he was a good friend of a relative of mine. Apparently he had been fighting this addiction for many years.
So in your schoolmate's particular case, prohibition did not work terribly well. What makes you think that legalization would work so much worse than that so as to not make up for not having all of the very substantial costs incurred in a prohibitionist regime?
I already see a lot of posts of people shouting "legalize them!" and I have to disagree. Is it fairly easy to get them even though they are illegal? Yes, I guess but it depends on who you know. I don't associate with anyone who takes illegal drugs so I wouldn't know where to start and it would be fairly difficult for me to attain them. Now, if they were legal and I could walk into a store any time I want to purchase them removes some hoops I'd have to jump through making them even more attainable. So, are they just as attainable now than if they were legal? Not necessarily.
Would you be lining up to buy the stuff if it were legalized? What makes you think that everyone else who is not presently buying the stuff would be lining up to buy in a legalized scenario?
Many people who champion the cause of legalization attribute it to recreational use and people should have dominion over what they put into their own bodies. Yes and no. How many recreation alcohol consumers kill children, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters each year? Did the right to dominion over their own bodies also include a right over someone else's?
Would prohibition of alcohol fix that? Why or why not? Would prohibition of alcohol cause more problems than it solves? Why or why not.
The problems go much deeper than whether or not legalize. Drugs are glamourized in a sense and this would be the case whether they were legal or not. Music, movies, television all play a part in it. Same goes for alcohol. However, most people are not hooked on alcohol as quickly as they are with crack and meth. If they were, I'd think it would be reasonable to outlaw alcohol again.
Even if I were to accept that, the fact is that there exist many more drugs which are illegal than just crack and methamphetamines. Indeed, some of these illegal drugs have extremely low addiction potentials. Even with something like cannabis, it is virtually impossible to get laboratory animals to self administer this substance (this is a standard way of looking at the addiction potential of a drug by using animal models).
Personally, I don't want to be around these drugs. I made that choice in my life and I feel I am better for it. Legalize them and you shove them in my face and make them even more attainable so kids who might have never done it think hey, its legal maybe I should try it. Has anyone thought that having them outlawed may actually deter some people?
It certainly might. However, there is reason to believe that if this very intuitive effect exists, it might be surprisingly small. It is even possible that there may be no net deterrence (though I am not really sure how that would work --I guess others would bring up the whole forbidden fruit aspect).
I guess that doesn't matter though because if you want them legalized you see no problem with people trying to have fun by distorting their thought processes or covering up problems by blocking them with a "high". And before anyone starts in with "what about alcohol, its a drug!" or "what about cigarettes!" trying to turn my opinions around...ban them all. There are too many adverse effects to using any of them.
But you willfully ignore the fact that banning these drugs also has many adverse effects (and it
Nitpick: Cannabinoids are not alkaloids (cannabinoid molecules would have to include a nitrogen in their chemical structure to be classifiable as alkaloids). Apparently, they are classified as terpenoids.
Looks like I goofed. As can be seen by reading the English version of the article that someone posted here, the article truly is talking about partly human cell aggregates. However, the Ananova piece still constitutes bad reporting since "Ministers hope the move will lead to transplant organs being produced in specially-bred animals." clearly makes it seem like the guidelines are approving of the creation of chimeric animals which they are not.
I find this disturbing. And I'm one of the people who can't understand at all why people are bothered by the idea of 'regular' cloning; I mean it really makes no sense to me. But allowing chimeras to be created?
This is Slashdot. The Ananova article is probably misreporting on the Japanese article. The Japanese are probably not giving the O.K. to partly human chimeras. If I am right, they are probably giving the O.K. to animals expressing human proteins which is something that has been going on for years and should not be seen as a big deal by anybody (whether from Slashdot or Ananova).
Whether this is scientifically feasible is a trivial question compared to the ethics of such an endeavor.
There are no gigantic moral issues at stake here. What the article is talking about is undoubtedly animals expressing a human protein or two (which is nothing new). The bad reporting makes it seem as if they are dealing with a human-non-human hybrid or perhaps a human-non-human chimera but I would not bet on it.
Superficial reading of the Ananova article would give one the impression that they are talking about a partly human chimera (it is hard to read "combined human-animal embryos" any other way); which would be a horribly unethical monstrosity.
What they're undoubtedly talking about (though I can't verify it since I can't read Japanese) are transgenic animals which express human proteins which is nothing new and posses no real ethical challenges (other than those involving the safety issues of xenotransplantation such as the real posibility for introducing various pathogens into the human population).
Err... I think the point is that the cells have been used in all sorts of biological experiments in outer-space, around the world, etc.
Exactly. I've also read that they've been known to replace other cultures acting as accidental contaminants because they are so hardy and aggressive to the point of causing serious problems for researchers because they end up unknowingly working with something different than what they're supposed to be working with. I remember that a book was written about these cultures quite a few years ago (the book title I remember is probably A Conspiracy of Cells).
If a few pounds of plutonium were any sort of problem, we'd already be dead. They blew so many *tons* of plutonium (and worse) into the air in the 1950s that we'd have died off before SDI was even a dream...
Not only that, you also have to look at the context. The context here is that some might find the alternative (nuclear explosion) slightly more objectionable (unless one is looking for a really quick way to get a suntan).
> The military learned a lot about faking demos from the Sheridan "tank" and the Sgt York gun air defense system. They don't do that any more. It hurts too much when they get caught.
Agreed. Not just for the bad PR, but because it also hurts the troops when the weapons don't work.
> What really sucks about this case is that they were open and proactive about admitting what parts of the test were not the same as the proposed operational system, and they're STILL getting beaten up over it.
Amen, brother. Chalk up another "victory" for the media using the public's ignorance in order to further its own agenda.
> the successful destruction of that missle (plus the decoy avoidence) is impressive - and legit.
Amen again. The test demonstrated that if you have a functioning tracking system, you can pull off kinetic kill. The next step is to build a tracking system while simultaneously refining your kinetic kill capabilities.
(Yeah, if it were me designing the thing, I'd go for "blows up somewhere near the target with sufficient force that 'close enough' is good enough to destroy the missile", as opposed to a pure kinetic kill approach. But it doesn't take away from the fact that the ability to do KK means you've built some fscking impressive tech.)
Hitting a bullet with a bullet is indeed extremely imnpressive, but you completely miss the point about the criticism of this test
I'd have no trouble with calling this limited test a success if there had been no pretense made about it testing the ability of the system to discriminate between a true warhead and a dummy warhead. If any GPS telemetry was being used at all when the two objects were in view, that is sufficient to render that part of the test (discriminating between real and fake targets) completely meaningless.
The problem is that (if there really was a beacon of any kind on the target or telemetry generated from within it --like GPS) the target discrimination aspect of the test was 100% for public relations (precisely to counter criticism regarding the fact that the system is unable to discriminate real targets from fake ones). That is not honest! An honest test would not have deployed a decoy (since the ability to discriminate the real decoy was not being tested)
It seems just about every damn virus nowadays spreads via Outlook or Outlook Express which is too bad
But has anybody (specially Timothy) actually paid any attention to the damn stories?
Nowhere in these stories is it claimed that Sircam uses Outlook to spread! Maybe Timothy got the idea from reading thisCNN article.
Geez, people, do you believe everything that CNN says? It's not like I really expect CNN to get this right, but/. readers are supposed to be better than that!
In fact, the Wired news clearly says that the virus serves as it's own SMTP client. A lot about this virus in fact resembles how the Judge Disemboweler virus operates.
The only thing that can be interpreted as using Outlook to spread itself is the fact that it takes its e-mail addresses from Windows Address Book files; however it will also try to get addresses from some files in the 'Temporary Internet Files' folder. This means it should be able to spread without any need for Outlook (just some e-mail client and a user naive enough to run the attachment) and without Windows Address Files.
All the usual sources of virus information seem to agree about this virus serving as its own SMTP client. Please check for yourselves:
Except that sometimes only the dexo-rotary appears naturally, and only the levo-rotary (hope those two terms are right. It's been nine years since organic) can be made. Or vice-versa.
Certainly there's no reason to say that "Natural substances cannot be reproduced" as the original poster stated.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the taurine were produced by some fermentation process using some taurine overproducing mutant of some bacterium or fungus (their web site states it is made synthetically for Red Bull, but whether the statement is meant to reassure the public that no bull testicles were harmed in the making of this drink or whether it is meant to inform the reader that no biosynthetic processes whatsoever were involved in the making of the taurine, I cannot tell). If that were the case (which is probably not that unlikely), then the taurine they are using is natural taurine (not that there would be any difference between the same isomers synthetically produced or produced by some living organism) so the original gentle poster's faulty point would be rendered moot.
By the way, though it is not easy, there are ways of separating racemic mixtures into the L for and the D form (I believe it is done enzymatically).
So surely any immortality device can easily produce a 5-year-old mouse. So where is it?
While I'm sure Alex Chiu's massive (some might even say cyclopean) Einstein like intelect must have though about this and will surely be ready with an answer, I, a mere mortal, would like to know what it is.
This is why I think the parent of this post should be moderated upwards
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC article (which is misreporting the endosymbiont hypothesis badly enough to make Lynn roll in her grave were she not still alive) was actually reporting on an article investigating homologies of cellulose synthases in several species of cyanobacteria. Curiously, the current U of Texas at Austin is not about harnessing native cellulose production by some cyanobacterium but rather about "Transgenic expression of Gluconacetobacter xylinus strain ATCC 53582 cellulose synthase genes in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus leopoliensis strain UTCC 100". I guess that they decided that inserting required cellulose biosynthetic enzymes from an organism (apparently) known to produce a lot of cellulose was easier than trying to optimize the miserly levels of cellulose biosynthesis in some cyanobacterium.
We can't make enough vats to make this practical.
It looks like they they need to control the simple sugar secretion problem. This is not only an organism which wastes energy (from its "perspective") for no good reason by making cellulose but also an organism which is considerate enough to potential competitors to give them an easy to use energy source in the form of simple sugars.
The former (the part we want) makes the organism weak but might be manageable. The latter, makes the organism "stupid" and, if it produces large enough quantities of simple sugars to sustain high densities of other microbes feasting on simple sugars, suicidal since secondary metabolites (or simply overwhelmingly high numbers of competitors) will probably make a population of this organism unsustainable.
You are 20 days too late to take these lying clowns seriously.
Individual strands recognize each other by hydrogen bonds called Watson-Crick base pairing (forming the well known C-G & A-T base pairs). The sequence recognition between two double helices is something else which has been known to happen for a long time. The assumption would have been that it is mediated by various proteins such as recA in E. coli. It seems to be the case that non-Watson-Crick base pairing might be involved. Finding out that this is the case and that it need not be mediated by some recombination protein is kind of cool. I'm sure that, as a matter of course, various proteins are always going to be involved to optimize this in living cells nowadays but showing that it can happen without accessory proteins does kind of show how such a process might have evolved.
Note: I have not read the journal article.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
That's a pretty fucking awful example to pick.
It is bloody unlikely that rabies will mutate into an airborne virus anytime soon. It would essentially have to become a completely different virus.
Influenza, on the other hand, is known for it's amazing mutational and recombinational "ability".
Rabies is not known for causing great pandemics associated producing very substantial mortality.
Influenza, on the other hand, is known for causing great pandemics producing very substantial mortality.
Rabies does not truly have the potential to create massive epidemics in livestock animals which may serve as a reservoirs from whence a human disease outbreak may start.
Avian influenza, on the other hand, does.
Rabies does not truly have the potential to create massive epidemics in wild animals which may serve as widespread infectious sources for domestic animals and as a reservoir from whence a human disease outbreak may start.
Avian influenza, on the other hand, does.
Animal infected by rabies are very rarely (if ever) the types to engage in the sorts of great migrations which may sometimes literally span the globe.
Animals infected by avian influenza, on the other hand, sometimes are.
I could probably go on (or maybe not --but I'm not about to try).
As a wild assed guess, it is so successful in the first place because it is probably some fairly potent and fairly non selective protease. The fact that it kills viruses in a test tube means almost nothing. For this to be effective as a drug it must be able to kill these viruses in a living organism and it must do so while producing minimal damage to said living organism.
Cod works in mysterious ways.
WTF? Bleach also kills H5N1 viruses. That does not make bleach a cure for the bird flu.
So in your schoolmate's particular case, prohibition did not work terribly well. What makes you think that legalization would work so much worse than that so as to not make up for not having all of the very substantial costs incurred in a prohibitionist regime?
Would you be lining up to buy the stuff if it were legalized? What makes you think that everyone else who is not presently buying the stuff would be lining up to buy in a legalized scenario?
Would prohibition of alcohol fix that? Why or why not? Would prohibition of alcohol cause more problems than it solves? Why or why not.
Even if I were to accept that, the fact is that there exist many more drugs which are illegal than just crack and methamphetamines. Indeed, some of these illegal drugs have extremely low addiction potentials. Even with something like cannabis, it is virtually impossible to get laboratory animals to self administer this substance (this is a standard way of looking at the addiction potential of a drug by using animal models).
It certainly might. However, there is reason to believe that if this very intuitive effect exists, it might be surprisingly small. It is even possible that there may be no net deterrence (though I am not really sure how that would work --I guess others would bring up the whole forbidden fruit aspect).
But you willfully ignore the fact that banning these drugs also has many adverse effects (and it
I for one welcome our new cold fusion heating overlords!
Nitpick: Cannabinoids are not alkaloids (cannabinoid molecules would have to include a nitrogen in their chemical structure to be classifiable as alkaloids). Apparently, they are classified as terpenoids.
A reply to that at http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/dvorak2.html
A more detailed refutation at http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/dissent.html
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.htm
Looks like I goofed. As can be seen by reading the English version of the article that someone posted here, the article truly is talking about partly human cell aggregates. However, the Ananova piece still constitutes bad reporting since "Ministers hope the move will lead to transplant organs being produced in specially-bred animals." clearly makes it seem like the guidelines are approving of the creation of chimeric animals which they are not.
Superficial reading of the Ananova article would give one the impression that they are talking about a partly human chimera (it is hard to read "combined human-animal embryos" any other way); which would be a horribly unethical monstrosity.
What they're undoubtedly talking about (though I can't verify it since I can't read Japanese) are transgenic animals which express human proteins which is nothing new and posses no real ethical challenges (other than those involving the safety issues of xenotransplantation such as the real posibility for introducing various pathogens into the human population).
Exactly. I've also read that they've been known to replace other cultures acting as accidental contaminants because they are so hardy and aggressive to the point of causing serious problems for researchers because they end up unknowingly working with something different than what they're supposed to be working with. I remember that a book was written about these cultures quite a few years ago (the book title I remember is probably A Conspiracy of Cells ).
Not only that, you also have to look at the context. The context here is that some might find the alternative (nuclear explosion) slightly more objectionable (unless one is looking for a really quick way to get a suntan).
Hitting a bullet with a bullet is indeed extremely imnpressive, but you completely miss the point about the criticism of this test
I'd have no trouble with calling this limited test a success if there had been no pretense made about it testing the ability of the system to discriminate between a true warhead and a dummy warhead. If any GPS telemetry was being used at all when the two objects were in view, that is sufficient to render that part of the test (discriminating between real and fake targets) completely meaningless.
The problem is that (if there really was a beacon of any kind on the target or telemetry generated from within it --like GPS) the target discrimination aspect of the test was 100% for public relations (precisely to counter criticism regarding the fact that the system is unable to discriminate real targets from fake ones). That is not honest! An honest test would not have deployed a decoy (since the ability to discriminate the real decoy was not being tested)
It seems just about every damn virus nowadays spreads via Outlook or Outlook Express which is too bad
But has anybody (specially Timothy) actually paid any attention to the damn stories?
Nowhere in these stories is it claimed that Sircam uses Outlook to spread! Maybe Timothy got the idea from reading this CNN article.
Geez, people, do you believe everything that CNN says? It's not like I really expect CNN to get this right, but /. readers are supposed to be better than that!
In fact, the Wired news clearly says that the virus serves as it's own SMTP client. A lot about this virus in fact resembles how the Judge Disemboweler virus operates.
The only thing that can be interpreted as using Outlook to spread itself is the fact that it takes its e-mail addresses from Windows Address Book files; however it will also try to get addresses from some files in the 'Temporary Internet Files' folder. This means it should be able to spread without any need for Outlook (just some e-mail client and a user naive enough to run the attachment) and without Windows Address Files.
All the usual sources of virus information seem to agree about this virus serving as its own SMTP client. Please check for yourselves:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sir cam.worm@mm.html
http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=99141&
http://www.antivirus.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/defaul t5.asp?VName=TROJ_SIRCAM.A
http://www.antivirus.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/defaul t5.asp?VName=TROJ_SIRCAM.A
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32sircam a.html
http://www.europe.f-secure.com/v-descs/sircam.shtm l
http://service.pandasoftware.es/servlet/panda.pand aInternet.EntradaDatosInternet?operacion=FichaViru s&idVirusFicha=1911&pestanaFicha=1
http://support.centralcommand.com/cgi-bin/command. cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_refno=010718-000010
Certainly there's no reason to say that "Natural substances cannot be reproduced" as the original poster stated.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the taurine were produced by some fermentation process using some taurine overproducing mutant of some bacterium or fungus (their web site states it is made synthetically for Red Bull, but whether the statement is meant to reassure the public that no bull testicles were harmed in the making of this drink or whether it is meant to inform the reader that no biosynthetic processes whatsoever were involved in the making of the taurine, I cannot tell). If that were the case (which is probably not that unlikely), then the taurine they are using is natural taurine (not that there would be any difference between the same isomers synthetically produced or produced by some living organism) so the original gentle poster's faulty point would be rendered moot.
By the way, though it is not easy, there are ways of separating racemic mixtures into the L for and the D form (I believe it is done enzymatically).
While I'm sure Alex Chiu's massive (some might even say cyclopean) Einstein like intelect must have though about this and will surely be ready with an answer, I, a mere mortal, would like to know what it is.
This is why I think the parent of this post should be moderated upwards