The issue that smallfries reports seems to have gone away. I could read the "ReadCube"-ed version of the paper.
Not your problem I know, but the fact that I can't save a PDF of the paper is vastly annoying. I do actually like to go back and think over these things when I'm at work and don't have internet access. It's hugely insulting that Macmillan (IIRC, the international publishing house that own Nature) take the results of publicly-funded research and paywall it. At least in astrophysics, Arxiv has long been accepted as a way to let people actually read and use research without feeding publishing houses.
OOL (Origin[s] Of Life) research needs t get their own section on Arxiv. Or something equivalent - but why re-invent the wheel. Or in this case, one of Eigen's "hyper-cycles".
oxidation of thiols to disulfides is not 100% perfect. There are some side products (sulfenic and sulfinic acids) which accumulate
Could you include a mineral with an -OH rich surface to scavenge these byproducts from the (solution) part of the system?
Oh noes! I'm channelling Cairns-Smith again! Clay minerals! Clay minerals! All is clay minerals! (ISBN-10: 0521346827)
[Ha ha. I actually saw AGCS lecture when I was an undergrad. Very passionate lecture, and at the time I thought that this was possibly one of the more important lectures of my life.]
Which is why, in their model system, they add monomers ("food") and remove macromolecules ("organisms").
A real world system would be in an environment which did this. Here the chemists have to put their baby to the tit, and wipe it's arse. You could say, they're taking "baby steps".
No they're not. They reproduce, but with a non-zero copying error rate. After separation, the two daughter bacteria from a single parent bacterium are different from each other, and both from their parent. They might be the three most closely related organisms on the planet (even if one of them no longer exists, except as a recorded genome), but the odds are high that none of the genomes will be identical.
In computing, we like to think that the error rate on digital copying is 0 errors per (however many) bits copied, but in reality there is a non-zero error rate. On the order of one error per gigabyte copied. Which is not zero. For the somewhat more complex copying procedure for DNA (16S ribozymal RNA and all that jazz) the error rate is higher - on the order of one error per million or so baud (our genetic system packs two bits per baud, of course).
Both bacteria and electronics have error correcting mechanisms to detect and reduce the error rates, but they too have error rates. Say your bacterium has a genome of a million base pairs and duplicates every hour (not a maximal rate, but an achievable rate) ; at an error rate of 10^-7 after error-correction, you'll get about 2 genome changes per day, or a more-or-less complete genome change every half-million days - 1400 years. That's more than sufficient for evolution.
This is the stuff of evolution in prokaryotes which aren't indulging in sex. Adding sex to the mix can considerably increase the effective evolution rate by mixing more-or-less self-contained "code modules" (genes) without mucking up the contents (much). Eukaryotes have additional error mechanisms.
Corollary : techniques like "reading a genome" and "getting a DNA match" in forensic context also have non-zero error rates. I've never seen CSI itself, but the Cop-TV I do watch doesn't deal with the statistics of genetic analysis. I wonder why.
... what follows may or may not be true. However, Nowak and colleagues are chemists at the bench and find it very difficult to simultaneously have reducing conditions in their bucket ("reaction vessel") to promote separation of their macromolecules into monomers ("food") and to have oxidising conditions to promote assembly of monomers into macromolecules under the influence of the existing macromolecules.
This is an operational constraint, not a theoretical one.
In a practical system, one might achieve the cycling by (say) cycling the reaction between regions of differing temperatures as part of a convection cell.
Theoretical considerations are important at the experimental design stage, but this is about actual real-world chemical systems.
You've got some major formatting problems with your import into WP there, but on a quick scan, you seem to be getting the hang of understanding the interplay of chemistry, physics and geology that go into this complex problem. It's not publication-ready though.
The probabilistic constraint on a dependent sequence of events occurring is the step with the -lowest- probability.
There's a slippery assumption creeping in there. You're assuming that there is only one way of having "life". We don't know that. We do know that the number of ways of producing the behaviours that we describe is not less than 1, but that's not the same thing.
The one thing that advocates for crypto backdoors completely fail to understand is that what you gain from the ability to monitor traffic comes at an enormous cost, which is the indroduction of a systemic flaw in our entire information infrastructure,
... unless of course, the NSA (or other TLA) recommends that secure US systems (e.g. for diplomatic telegrams) are brought from a reliable, backdoor-free supplier. Like Huwaei.
Compared to the Great Depression - not too badly. Once Stalin got his system going, it started to go off the rails, but in the 1930s it was increasingly obvious that communism was posing a real alternative to untrammelled capitalism. No wonder the powers of Capital were delighted to stoke Stalin's paranoia.
Since then, things haven't gone so well. Though the 2008-to-today financial crash is again showing some of the horrible problems with Capitalism.
Long before tele-surgery becomes common enough to be accepted, the use of tele-sex will have driven this low-latency, haptic feedback systems. Unless you buy the vagina-dentata attachment for your fleshlight, or the woman on the other end uses the "come like Superman" attachment ("faster than a speeding bullet" : that'll be a rail gun ejaculator then. Messy!), then the worst that's going to happen is that you need to remove the batteries and vent the hydraulics.
And no one has said "tele-dldonics" yet. Shame, Slashdot!
After automated butchery - I gather that many armies are gearing up for that.
Oh, hang on. Looking down thread, an AC says:
by Anonymous Coward on 2016-01-05 4:08 (#51239739)
Physics dictates you aren't getting 1ms latency outside of a very, VERY short distance.
Shoot these snakeoil salesmen right now.
The AC is right - for "short distance" under 300km (one way or round trip, depending whether you're talking about one-way or round-trip times). But I think he's found a group of people who are vigorously signing up to be test cases for tele-surgery. Far better than just shooting them.
In about 1970 a Russian base had a case of appendicitis after going into lockdown because of weather. The "GP" (who was not your average GP, but one carefully chosen for resourcefulness and experience, because this was a base going into a winter lockdown with temperatures going down to about -90degC ; not your average GP) examined the patient, worked through the options, tried antibiotic treatment, but eventually had to concur that it''s appendicitis. And operation is the only option (because the antibiotics didn't work.
So the "GP" did the appendicetomy. No great drama. First appendicetomy that he'd done, but the patient survived.
The "GP" wrote it up into the formal press. The novel part of the procedure was the arrangement of mirrors that the "GP" constructed in order to be able to see the operation site (a sort of analogue far-off-vision (Greek-Latin : TELE-vision) system ; also he had to be very careful with the application of drugs to suppress sensation in the patient without rendering the "GP" unconscious. In case you hadn't guessed, the patient was the "GP".
Getting 1ms latency from ANY hospital (on soil) to anywhere (on soil or non-floating ice) in Antarctica would also require a re-write of physics. The Drake Passage is about 3 times too wide for that to be possible.
... which is why EVERY time you rent a car, you take the hiring agent around the vehicle, photographing the agent with the vehicle and all dents and dings, then photograph the agent with the "dent diagram" before you sign for the vehicle.
It means nothing in law, probably. But it means that if they need to make their "repair fee" quota for the day, they're going to try it with some schmuck who doesn't look to be expecting a scam like that.
Feel free to save yourself the 5 minutes at vehicle collection. It'll put you between me and the scam. Thanks!
It remains a serious offence for someone who is not duly authorised to interfere with or intercept the mail. but for people who are authorised (e.g., police, some council officials, some government officials), that's not a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Not your problem I know, but the fact that I can't save a PDF of the paper is vastly annoying. I do actually like to go back and think over these things when I'm at work and don't have internet access. It's hugely insulting that Macmillan (IIRC, the international publishing house that own Nature) take the results of publicly-funded research and paywall it. At least in astrophysics, Arxiv has long been accepted as a way to let people actually read and use research without feeding publishing houses.
OOL (Origin[s] Of Life) research needs t get their own section on Arxiv. Or something equivalent - but why re-invent the wheel. Or in this case, one of Eigen's "hyper-cycles".
Pericles tried it. The results weren't good.
Could you include a mineral with an -OH rich surface to scavenge these byproducts from the (solution) part of the system?
Oh noes! I'm channelling Cairns-Smith again! Clay minerals! Clay minerals! All is clay minerals! (ISBN-10: 0521346827)
[Ha ha. I actually saw AGCS lecture when I was an undergrad. Very passionate lecture, and at the time I thought that this was possibly one of the more important lectures of my life.]
A real world system would be in an environment which did this. Here the chemists have to put their baby to the tit, and wipe it's arse. You could say, they're taking "baby steps".
No they're not. They reproduce, but with a non-zero copying error rate. After separation, the two daughter bacteria from a single parent bacterium are different from each other, and both from their parent. They might be the three most closely related organisms on the planet (even if one of them no longer exists, except as a recorded genome), but the odds are high that none of the genomes will be identical.
In computing, we like to think that the error rate on digital copying is 0 errors per (however many) bits copied, but in reality there is a non-zero error rate. On the order of one error per gigabyte copied. Which is not zero. For the somewhat more complex copying procedure for DNA (16S ribozymal RNA and all that jazz) the error rate is higher - on the order of one error per million or so baud (our genetic system packs two bits per baud, of course).
Both bacteria and electronics have error correcting mechanisms to detect and reduce the error rates, but they too have error rates. Say your bacterium has a genome of a million base pairs and duplicates every hour (not a maximal rate, but an achievable rate) ; at an error rate of 10^-7 after error-correction, you'll get about 2 genome changes per day, or a more-or-less complete genome change every half-million days - 1400 years. That's more than sufficient for evolution.
This is the stuff of evolution in prokaryotes which aren't indulging in sex. Adding sex to the mix can considerably increase the effective evolution rate by mixing more-or-less self-contained "code modules" (genes) without mucking up the contents (much). Eukaryotes have additional error mechanisms.
Corollary : techniques like "reading a genome" and "getting a DNA match" in forensic context also have non-zero error rates. I've never seen CSI itself, but the Cop-TV I do watch doesn't deal with the statistics of genetic analysis. I wonder why.
... what follows may or may not be true. However, Nowak and colleagues are chemists at the bench and find it very difficult to simultaneously have reducing conditions in their bucket ("reaction vessel") to promote separation of their macromolecules into monomers ("food") and to have oxidising conditions to promote assembly of monomers into macromolecules under the influence of the existing macromolecules.
This is an operational constraint, not a theoretical one.
In a practical system, one might achieve the cycling by (say) cycling the reaction between regions of differing temperatures as part of a convection cell.
Theoretical considerations are important at the experimental design stage, but this is about actual real-world chemical systems.
You've got some major formatting problems with your import into WP there, but on a quick scan, you seem to be getting the hang of understanding the interplay of chemistry, physics and geology that go into this complex problem. It's not publication-ready though.
There's a slippery assumption creeping in there. You're assuming that there is only one way of having "life". We don't know that. We do know that the number of ways of producing the behaviours that we describe is not less than 1, but that's not the same thing.
But you're a deuterostome. Before there was a brain to house a "you" in any shape or form, your body had an arsehole.
Its crap. The gorilla got free.
Since then, things haven't gone so well. Though the 2008-to-today financial crash is again showing some of the horrible problems with Capitalism.
And no one has said "tele-dldonics" yet. Shame, Slashdot!
After automated butchery - I gather that many armies are gearing up for that.
Oh, hang on. Looking down thread, an AC says :
The AC is right - for "short distance" under 300km (one way or round trip, depending whether you're talking about one-way or round-trip times). But I think he's found a group of people who are vigorously signing up to be test cases for tele-surgery. Far better than just shooting them.
On my previous ship, the telemedicine equipment sat unused most of the time. But I was still glad it was there.
Whoa! Now that is a pressure environment!
They play bingo with IT workers? How do they stop the IT-things from moving around the card? Glue?
In about 1970 a Russian base had a case of appendicitis after going into lockdown because of weather. The "GP" (who was not your average GP, but one carefully chosen for resourcefulness and experience, because this was a base going into a winter lockdown with temperatures going down to about -90degC ; not your average GP) examined the patient, worked through the options, tried antibiotic treatment, but eventually had to concur that it''s appendicitis. And operation is the only option (because the antibiotics didn't work.
So the "GP" did the appendicetomy. No great drama. First appendicetomy that he'd done, but the patient survived.
The "GP" wrote it up into the formal press. The novel part of the procedure was the arrangement of mirrors that the "GP" constructed in order to be able to see the operation site (a sort of analogue far-off-vision (Greek-Latin : TELE-vision) system ; also he had to be very careful with the application of drugs to suppress sensation in the patient without rendering the "GP" unconscious. In case you hadn't guessed, the patient was the "GP".
Getting 1ms latency from ANY hospital (on soil) to anywhere (on soil or non-floating ice) in Antarctica would also require a re-write of physics. The Drake Passage is about 3 times too wide for that to be possible.
Most (not all, but most) hookers in the Netherlands are not Dutch. At least, of the samples I've sampled.
... of a soul-less original.
It means nothing in law, probably. But it means that if they need to make their "repair fee" quota for the day, they're going to try it with some schmuck who doesn't look to be expecting a scam like that.
Feel free to save yourself the 5 minutes at vehicle collection. It'll put you between me and the scam. Thanks!
It remains a serious offence for someone who is not duly authorised to interfere with or intercept the mail. but for people who are authorised (e.g., police, some council officials, some government officials), that's not a problem.
A mis-trained or un-trained spelling checker.
Don't let this degenerate matter degenerate into something that matters.
Which part of "science reporting" did you misunderstand?