They probably use adobe digital editions or equivalent. I'm pretty sure the adobe security has been broken and cracking scripts made that relatively low-tech-savviness persons could use, but I think that many of us still wish to do things legally (hence the popularity of overdrive vs pirate bay). I'm a big fan of my local tax money going to buy books (which supports authors, editors, publishers, etc...) and then lets me have an extremely large volume of quality work for a fraction of the cost without too much inconvenience in sharing it with the rest of the community. I'd be highly supportive of these people getting some government grants (funded by my taxes) to make a very large national electronic library.
You mean "normal" X-rays which is defined as the electromagnetic spectrum between 10 and 10,000 pm? As opposed to the backscatter X-rays which could range anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum between 10 and 10,000 pm? Attenuation (transmission) and backscatter are different techniques for X-ray imaging - but they both still use X-rays. It's like the difference of looking at a stain glass window from the inside or the outside of the church - in both cases it's sunlight that does the illumination.
It does get more complicated when you talk about specific wavelength, intensity, and etc... when you try to measure dosage. But all X-ray methods utilize ionizing radiation which is carcinogenic. Dose may be a very small portion of what you get every day, or in the case of the X-ray laser here, it may be enough to vaporize you.
If we assume a very efficient mouse consumption and digestion (E=mc^2) and take 30g as a typical mouse mass then you get about 2.696x10^15 Joules per mouse. After that first mouse, I bet the table could be quite the aggressive mouse hunter.
Depends on how you "burn" them. You might just have ionized gas particles (plasma) bearing a suggestively flyish spectral emission spectra. Or if you really "burn" them you could be left with a few subatomic particles and interesting curvy trails on the back side of your couch from anti-matter decay.
I'm sorry you have the sort of boss who would look at chair warning labels before sitting or might even go so far as to read the manual for said office chair.
Louis Daguerre and John Herschel both invented photography (of a type) in 1839. There was a high demand for this sort of technology, but I'd suggest that each of their work was unique (they came at it from different directions even). It seems to me that in most cases scientific understanding develops to a point where an expert only needs to make a small leap to a not quite "obvious" solution for a problem of high enough demand to warrant said experts time and resources. Technologies with no immediate demand may slip through the cracks until they are obvious.
That multiple entities develop a solution to an intellectual problem does not mean that a solution is obvious, it simply means that a solution is highly valued by multiple entities. Presumably anyone can invent anything given sufficient scientific understanding and resources.
Interestingly enough, the French government bought out the patent for daguerreotypes and made it public domain. It makes me wonder what would happen if today's patent offices had some budget for purchasing select high impact broad spectrum technologies (e.g. communication protocols/codecs, immunizations, etc...).
You're quite right. There's a lot of applications where you have plenty of time - such as locating areas where bomb building activities may be in progress, or searching out land mines. You could also (possibly) tell when a bag run through security contained explosives - I know people aren't usually checking bags three hours early, but you could still isolate the likely flights/destinations if in the realm of airport security.
Also, depending on the biological/kinetic pathways - that three hours may be very shorten-able. Use the easy plant for development, but then splice it into a venus fly-trap (ok - so that's not what would really happen, but it's an easy way for people to remember that sometimes plants do move fast).
The color fade may take three hours for a human to notice, but if you tag the process with a fluorescent or have an optical detector (electronics) check for a spectroscopic change (a clip on leaf spectrometer could probably be done for a few dollars), then the electronics could trigger an alarm much more quickly (and less publicly).
That would depend on the grade level in question. Most primary teaching certificates will require an elementary education degree, but secondary certificates typically require an education degree as well as a dual major in the field of their primary subject (or at least a boatload of credit hours).
What can (and often does happen) is that in a small school or cash strapped district (often both together) they don't have the resources to hire a biology teacher who might only have enough students to teach two out of the six periods in the day (and you certainly can't expect a teacher to move to town on 1/3rd of a entry level teaching salary). What happens then is a case where you might hire a chemistry teacher who also teaches biology, physics, and all of the math (often teaching multiple subjects in a single class - i.e. the kids on the left get trig while the kids on the right get algebra).
Even a child's mind is not that fragile (let alone a teenager's). Given the number of children and teenagers that play violent video games, the amount of them that are violent and possess minds that are that fragile appears to be abysmally small and not worth worrying about.
Really? You think you'd have the same opinion if your kid got knifed or caught a stray bullet due to an escalated situation caused by some other child's aggressive behavior?
Once again, we need some data and more importantly we need a good statistical analysis of the data done - i.e. separate out contributing factors so that we can say "x additional bloody nose fights, y additional emergency room admissions, and z additional deaths per year are casually linked to violent video games per played child hour."
Once we have that, then we need some studies correlating causal relationships to the benefits of violent video games played by children (i.e. improved test scores, lower resting heart rates, Saturday mornings parents get to sleep in, or whatever, etc...) and then we can discuss the cost benefit ratio. It'd also help to have other childhood activities available for a side by side comparison as a reference frame for our risk assessment (i.e. baseball, football, curling, etc...) We need the data as a reference frame because our perceptions of risk are often wrong (i.e. according to child mortality stats: homes with guns are safer than homes with swimming pools).
Just as many cities aren't surprised when they make a nice wide open road with a relatively low posted limit and drivers speed. That violation is a civil offense just like copyright infringement, and you know what? There's plenty of locations where this is done intentionally as a revenue source from the speeding tickets.
So, if we follow the example set by many of our small town governments (and not always small town governments), a great revenue source is to create a situation which naturally encourages copyright violations and then slap a civil penalty on the violator.
Heh - and some people think they're called pay-walls because the information is annoying to access without coughing up a menial fee (compared to lawyer fees and infringement penalties).
There is an exception to the Fourth Amendment when it comes to DUI investigations. That is why it is legal to have DUI checkpoints where they stop all traffic and perform whichever manner of sobriety test / breath check that they intend. For more information (with a strong point of view - but the information is there regardless of which side you agree with) read this.
If you could make it a public safety issue (i.e. chemical plant inspector certification exam) and demonstrate there was no better method of investigation, then your fears - while maybe justified - would likely have no bearing in a US court. How this applies to laws in Taiwan - I have no idea, but the ideological part of me generally likes to think of the US Bill of Rights to be an outline of some inalienable human rights and thus not subject to government permission.
To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.
I would suggest that denying our impulses is to deny acting as a nearly hairless chimpanzee* - thus the denial of our impulses is what in fact makes us human**. I would hope that procreation attempts on Mars, or anywhere else off planet are tempered by more than simple impulse.
Particularly if those impulses are denied through a mechanism other than simple behavioral conditioning
**Among other things of course - such as spending brain cycles on the metaphysics of soup utensils.
IANAL but I do know juries are made of humans... ruled by emotions, and when the judge tells them to strike the prosecutors innuendo - it's probably like telling someone not to think about a pink elephant.
Once again, why is The Guardian's app still in the store then?
The Guardian provides a lot of information, the heavily summarized, filtered and redacted cables being a very small part of that information. So does that mean you also think Apple should remove all web browsing capability because the internet contains classified information?
The difference is that the removed application is specifically designed to provide access to classified information which is in specific violation of the espionage act. News outlets have generally been protected by the First Amendment when challenged with violating espionage law in court. Technically any transfer, possession, aiding in transfer, etc... of classified information is illegal in the US. Public disclosure does not alter the security status of any document. Apple may very well not want to be the test case for a non-news outlet in a high profile espionage court case.
The government is powerful and embarrassed - a combination that generally doesn't allow for forgiveness without blood.
I would suggest that is why the Guardian Application is still in the store but this nugget of espionage isn't. (Plus the Guardian has the resources to hire lawyers and also to make a PR nightmare for Apple (at least in Europe) - possibly inflaming anti-trust cries in the (sometimes) more stringent Europe.
I don't agree with most of Apple's business ethics, but that doesn't mean I don't understand that to them, the biggest crime is scuffing the fruit before putting it on the teacher's desk for public display.
You've asked a very interesting question that hits at the fundamentals of intellectual property rights (especially on a national scale).
So, are you for or against this situation:
Entity A invents something that enhances communication, commerce, innovation, education, etc...
Entity A freely shares the invention with entities B-Z
Entities B-Z also greatly profit from Entity A's invention
Entities B-Z become very dependent on Entity A's invention - cannot imagine going back to "the way it was before"
Entities B-Z seek to wrest control and future development from Entity A for "the invention's own good"
Sure - that's only a part of the story, but it's the fundamental part in an IP discussion.
Once you've collected your opinion then try contrasting it with your thoughts on Sam Slater's theft of the cotton mill IP from Britain. British law regulating the cotton mill IP had been used to prevent the industrial revolution from spreading (in this case to the US). The situation in the US allowed the IP to take hold and explode with many new innovations.
So why does any of this history matter to your question? I would suggest that you can find an answer by asking whether the freedom of this invention will be best protected by the "rightful owner" and current regulator (such as there is regulation) and a group of invention dependent nations who at the least wish to ensure their continued access to the invention they have invested in (and possibly to promote their own ideas about how the invention should and should not be used).
Since some degree of regulation has to happen (at the router level if nothing else), this is more a very long way around to asking: which group do you trust more? but context is important:)
The cabinet drawers should have sturdy rails since you're likely going to have some dedicated to power supplies and some to solenoids and motors (you said robotics right?). Those things can be heavy enough on their own, wire can add up in weight too.
Lighting is key - get extra and make sure you've got decent bulbs. Even if you don't work with surface mount, small electronics work is so much better with good lighting (mine is jury-rigged). You might want to consider having one or two of those giant lenses on an arm - that may be an after addition though. Some are bench mountable.
I confess to being jealous - I've only recently won the right to retrofit an electronics bench in a small 9x9 lab which is split with a ceramics station. Congratulations
It's probably not a facilities thing, but make sure you've got lots and lots of boxes for small things. The facility design comes with making sure there's the right sized storage for lots of boxes of small parts. So either buy the cabinets to fit the boxes you have, or buy the boxes for the cabinets. Some of those stackable mini-drawers are good for benchtop access, but don't go overboard on things you plan to keep on the benchtop since you'll lose working space.
Well if the Sherman Antitrust Act doesn't eventually make the rounds; perhaps some enterprising individual would put up plans for DIY Sherman tanks. Thus empowering authors and readers to really "take the fight"to the publishers;)
Thanks for filling in the blanks. There's some things that I deal with so often that I forget I can sound a little weird when I get excited about science and open my mouth - phosphate is one of them.
But yeah - the short story is that phosphate (and arsenate) have three spots to kick hydrogen on or off with - and the number of hydrogens that hang out on a phosphate ion is very much related to the pH.
The long story (for anyone who cares) is that each of those hydrogens has a different equilibrium constant (pKa) at which it will pop off. H3PO4 is phosphoric acid but if you increase the amount of OH- in solution (or reduce the amount of H+) the first of those hydrogens will hook up with the OH- to make water which leaves H2PO4-. So the next hydrogen to take a hike will leave the phosphate at HPO4- - which means it's harder to leave and has a different pH (which is a fancy way of talking about the levels of H+ and OH- in water) it will hit equilibrium with. So on and so forth for each of the four phosphate species (0, -1, -2, -3 charge).
The really long version throws out concentration of the different species of phosphate and talks about activities, taking into account that the activity coefficient is affected by the square of the ion's charge... [We interrupt this chemistry lesson for the sake of sanity]
Strange - I forgot what I was talking about - but back to your question: yeah - DNA is both sex and acid
I know what you're talking about. The news about phosphate was really a kick in the fork.
I suspect that nitrogen and oxygen are safe on account of hydrogen bonding which doesn't translate down the periods, but taking the regicide of phosphorous as an example - carbon may not be as immune as we had previously thought. It's probably safe because of it's functionality at liquid water temperatures, but we're already seeing some pretty interesting silicon oils and materials.
Fluorine could play an interesting ET role due to it's ability to hydrogen bond - especially if we're talking about interactions with silicon, electronegativity is the key though - fluorine may never play nice with others at any temp.
Sounds good except for the fact that you're forgetting that arsenate is more reactive than phosphate which means the arsenate based backbone of DNA should be constantly getting ripped to shreds. Either this bacteria has found a way to protect the backbone or it has a hyper effective repair mechanism. Either would be very worth learning about. (Immortality anyone)?
Everything, although I suppose it happens with varying degrees of selectivity. From the Astrobiology article:
When Wolfe-Simon starved GFAJ-1 cells of phosphorus, while flooding them with arsenic, far more than enough arsenic to kill most other organisms, it grew and divided as though it had been offered its favorite snack. Wolfe-Simon, with assistance from colleagues in Ron Oremland’s group at the USGS in Menlo Park, California, have grown generation after generation of these bacteria. The bacteria continue to swim around in their test tubes, unconcerned, despite the fact that, since Wolfe-Simon first collected them more than a year ago, the only phosphorus they have had access to was whatever was present in the original colony of cells, plus tiny traces, far too little to sustain ongoing growth and cell division, present as impurities in the cells’ growth medium.
presumably if they're isolating, inoculating, and growing multiple generations their phosphate ratio is going to go down to very trace levels.
THIS IS BLOODY AMAZING! followed by a little more tempered cogitation:
Arsenate is a triprotic species just like phosphate, each has a valence of +5, and it's directly one period down on the table so available electron shells in ground state will appear very similar. However arsenic possesses filled d orbitals and is about 7% less electronegative than phosphorous - these factors, among others, tend to make arsenate a little more reactive than phosphate which would make it less stable as a backbone of DNA. So if the degree of replacement is as thorough as NASA claims (they said they cultured it with zero phosphorous present - so only trace impurities) the cell has either found a way to strengthen the backbone or has developed an amazing repair mechanism which can deal with frequent DNA damage.
Mary Voytek -- director, NASA Astrobiology program
Felisa Wolfe-Simon -- evolutionary biology including metallic enzymes, specifically the potential role of arsenic in DNA
Pamela Conrad -- biogeochemistry and organic chemical signatures of extremophiles
Steven Benner -- geobiology of RNA, including detection of DNA and RNA
James Elser -- the influence of nitrogen and phosphorus in biological processes including ecosystems, speciation and RNA
... Science is published on Fridays. Nature is published on Thursdays. It would seem like the paper is going to appear in Nature no matter what the exact announcement is.
Given that the list is more a set of people with expertise in extremophile and alternative "life support" I'm more willing to bet that the announcement is closer to home (how about a hot spring or something)? Arsenic is just one period below phosphorous so it shares a lot of properties. My vote is either for identifying an extremophile which uses an ATAs style of energy storage as opposed to ATP - they're both triprotic so it could work. Alternatively they could have found a way (hot springs or in the lab) to replace the phosphate backbone of DNA with an arsenate binder - that'd really throw people for a loop since "alien DNA" will splash big over the headlines - way more than "toxic polyprotic acid replaces traditional cell fuel."
You've hit the publication times dead on though - so if it's in one of those two it's probably pretty big
Slashdot Mirror
They probably use adobe digital editions or equivalent. I'm pretty sure the adobe security has been broken and cracking scripts made that relatively low-tech-savviness persons could use, but I think that many of us still wish to do things legally (hence the popularity of overdrive vs pirate bay). I'm a big fan of my local tax money going to buy books (which supports authors, editors, publishers, etc...) and then lets me have an extremely large volume of quality work for a fraction of the cost without too much inconvenience in sharing it with the rest of the community. I'd be highly supportive of these people getting some government grants (funded by my taxes) to make a very large national electronic library.
You mean "normal" X-rays which is defined as the electromagnetic spectrum between 10 and 10,000 pm? As opposed to the backscatter X-rays which could range anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum between 10 and 10,000 pm? Attenuation (transmission) and backscatter are different techniques for X-ray imaging - but they both still use X-rays. It's like the difference of looking at a stain glass window from the inside or the outside of the church - in both cases it's sunlight that does the illumination.
It does get more complicated when you talk about specific wavelength, intensity, and etc... when you try to measure dosage. But all X-ray methods utilize ionizing radiation which is carcinogenic. Dose may be a very small portion of what you get every day, or in the case of the X-ray laser here, it may be enough to vaporize you.
The table is anti-mice
If we assume a very efficient mouse consumption and digestion (E=mc^2) and take 30g as a typical mouse mass then you get about 2.696x10^15 Joules per mouse. After that first mouse, I bet the table could be quite the aggressive mouse hunter.
Depends on how you "burn" them. You might just have ionized gas particles (plasma) bearing a suggestively flyish spectral emission spectra. Or if you really "burn" them you could be left with a few subatomic particles and interesting curvy trails on the back side of your couch from anti-matter decay.
I'm sorry you have the sort of boss who would look at chair warning labels before sitting or might even go so far as to read the manual for said office chair.
But we're talking about intrastellar distances here so... oh wait.... ;)
Louis Daguerre and John Herschel both invented photography (of a type) in 1839. There was a high demand for this sort of technology, but I'd suggest that each of their work was unique (they came at it from different directions even). It seems to me that in most cases scientific understanding develops to a point where an expert only needs to make a small leap to a not quite "obvious" solution for a problem of high enough demand to warrant said experts time and resources. Technologies with no immediate demand may slip through the cracks until they are obvious.
That multiple entities develop a solution to an intellectual problem does not mean that a solution is obvious, it simply means that a solution is highly valued by multiple entities. Presumably anyone can invent anything given sufficient scientific understanding and resources.
Interestingly enough, the French government bought out the patent for daguerreotypes and made it public domain. It makes me wonder what would happen if today's patent offices had some budget for purchasing select high impact broad spectrum technologies (e.g. communication protocols/codecs, immunizations, etc...).
You're quite right. There's a lot of applications where you have plenty of time - such as locating areas where bomb building activities may be in progress, or searching out land mines. You could also (possibly) tell when a bag run through security contained explosives - I know people aren't usually checking bags three hours early, but you could still isolate the likely flights/destinations if in the realm of airport security.
Also, depending on the biological/kinetic pathways - that three hours may be very shorten-able. Use the easy plant for development, but then splice it into a venus fly-trap (ok - so that's not what would really happen, but it's an easy way for people to remember that sometimes plants do move fast).
The color fade may take three hours for a human to notice, but if you tag the process with a fluorescent or have an optical detector (electronics) check for a spectroscopic change (a clip on leaf spectrometer could probably be done for a few dollars), then the electronics could trigger an alarm much more quickly (and less publicly).
That would depend on the grade level in question. Most primary teaching certificates will require an elementary education degree, but secondary certificates typically require an education degree as well as a dual major in the field of their primary subject (or at least a boatload of credit hours).
What can (and often does happen) is that in a small school or cash strapped district (often both together) they don't have the resources to hire a biology teacher who might only have enough students to teach two out of the six periods in the day (and you certainly can't expect a teacher to move to town on 1/3rd of a entry level teaching salary). What happens then is a case where you might hire a chemistry teacher who also teaches biology, physics, and all of the math (often teaching multiple subjects in a single class - i.e. the kids on the left get trig while the kids on the right get algebra).
Even a child's mind is not that fragile (let alone a teenager's). Given the number of children and teenagers that play violent video games, the amount of them that are violent and possess minds that are that fragile appears to be abysmally small and not worth worrying about.
Really? You think you'd have the same opinion if your kid got knifed or caught a stray bullet due to an escalated situation caused by some other child's aggressive behavior?
Once again, we need some data and more importantly we need a good statistical analysis of the data done - i.e. separate out contributing factors so that we can say "x additional bloody nose fights, y additional emergency room admissions, and z additional deaths per year are casually linked to violent video games per played child hour."
Once we have that, then we need some studies correlating causal relationships to the benefits of violent video games played by children (i.e. improved test scores, lower resting heart rates, Saturday mornings parents get to sleep in, or whatever, etc...) and then we can discuss the cost benefit ratio. It'd also help to have other childhood activities available for a side by side comparison as a reference frame for our risk assessment (i.e. baseball, football, curling, etc...) We need the data as a reference frame because our perceptions of risk are often wrong (i.e. according to child mortality stats: homes with guns are safer than homes with swimming pools).
Just as many cities aren't surprised when they make a nice wide open road with a relatively low posted limit and drivers speed. That violation is a civil offense just like copyright infringement, and you know what? There's plenty of locations where this is done intentionally as a revenue source from the speeding tickets.
So, if we follow the example set by many of our small town governments (and not always small town governments), a great revenue source is to create a situation which naturally encourages copyright violations and then slap a civil penalty on the violator.
Heh - and some people think they're called pay-walls because the information is annoying to access without coughing up a menial fee (compared to lawyer fees and infringement penalties).
There is an exception to the Fourth Amendment when it comes to DUI investigations. That is why it is legal to have DUI checkpoints where they stop all traffic and perform whichever manner of sobriety test / breath check that they intend. For more information (with a strong point of view - but the information is there regardless of which side you agree with) read this.
If you could make it a public safety issue (i.e. chemical plant inspector certification exam) and demonstrate there was no better method of investigation, then your fears - while maybe justified - would likely have no bearing in a US court. How this applies to laws in Taiwan - I have no idea, but the ideological part of me generally likes to think of the US Bill of Rights to be an outline of some inalienable human rights and thus not subject to government permission.
To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.
I would suggest that denying our impulses is to deny acting as a nearly hairless chimpanzee* - thus the denial of our impulses is what in fact makes us human**. I would hope that procreation attempts on Mars, or anywhere else off planet are tempered by more than simple impulse.
Particularly if those impulses are denied through a mechanism other than simple behavioral conditioning
**Among other things of course - such as spending brain cycles on the metaphysics of soup utensils.
IANAL but I do know juries are made of humans... ruled by emotions, and when the judge tells them to strike the prosecutors innuendo - it's probably like telling someone not to think about a pink elephant.
Once again, why is The Guardian's app still in the store then?
The Guardian provides a lot of information, the heavily summarized, filtered and redacted cables being a very small part of that information. So does that mean you also think Apple should remove all web browsing capability because the internet contains classified information?
The difference is that the removed application is specifically designed to provide access to classified information which is in specific violation of the espionage act. News outlets have generally been protected by the First Amendment when challenged with violating espionage law in court. Technically any transfer, possession, aiding in transfer, etc... of classified information is illegal in the US. Public disclosure does not alter the security status of any document. Apple may very well not want to be the test case for a non-news outlet in a high profile espionage court case.
The government is powerful and embarrassed - a combination that generally doesn't allow for forgiveness without blood.
I would suggest that is why the Guardian Application is still in the store but this nugget of espionage isn't. (Plus the Guardian has the resources to hire lawyers and also to make a PR nightmare for Apple (at least in Europe) - possibly inflaming anti-trust cries in the (sometimes) more stringent Europe.
I don't agree with most of Apple's business ethics, but that doesn't mean I don't understand that to them, the biggest crime is scuffing the fruit before putting it on the teacher's desk for public display.
You've asked a very interesting question that hits at the fundamentals of intellectual property rights (especially on a national scale).
So, are you for or against this situation:
Entity A invents something that enhances communication, commerce, innovation, education, etc...
Entity A freely shares the invention with entities B-Z
Entities B-Z also greatly profit from Entity A's invention
Entities B-Z become very dependent on Entity A's invention - cannot imagine going back to "the way it was before"
Entities B-Z seek to wrest control and future development from Entity A for "the invention's own good"
Sure - that's only a part of the story, but it's the fundamental part in an IP discussion.
Once you've collected your opinion then try contrasting it with your thoughts on Sam Slater's theft of the cotton mill IP from Britain. British law regulating the cotton mill IP had been used to prevent the industrial revolution from spreading (in this case to the US). The situation in the US allowed the IP to take hold and explode with many new innovations.
So why does any of this history matter to your question? I would suggest that you can find an answer by asking whether the freedom of this invention will be best protected by the "rightful owner" and current regulator (such as there is regulation) and a group of invention dependent nations who at the least wish to ensure their continued access to the invention they have invested in (and possibly to promote their own ideas about how the invention should and should not be used).
Since some degree of regulation has to happen (at the router level if nothing else), this is more a very long way around to asking: which group do you trust more? but context is important :)
The cabinet drawers should have sturdy rails since you're likely going to have some dedicated to power supplies and some to solenoids and motors (you said robotics right?). Those things can be heavy enough on their own, wire can add up in weight too.
Lighting is key - get extra and make sure you've got decent bulbs. Even if you don't work with surface mount, small electronics work is so much better with good lighting (mine is jury-rigged). You might want to consider having one or two of those giant lenses on an arm - that may be an after addition though. Some are bench mountable.
I confess to being jealous - I've only recently won the right to retrofit an electronics bench in a small 9x9 lab which is split with a ceramics station. Congratulations
It's probably not a facilities thing, but make sure you've got lots and lots of boxes for small things. The facility design comes with making sure there's the right sized storage for lots of boxes of small parts. So either buy the cabinets to fit the boxes you have, or buy the boxes for the cabinets. Some of those stackable mini-drawers are good for benchtop access, but don't go overboard on things you plan to keep on the benchtop since you'll lose working space.
Well if the Sherman Antitrust Act doesn't eventually make the rounds; perhaps some enterprising individual would put up plans for DIY Sherman tanks. Thus empowering authors and readers to really "take the fight"to the publishers ;)
Thanks for filling in the blanks. There's some things that I deal with so often that I forget I can sound a little weird when I get excited about science and open my mouth - phosphate is one of them.
But yeah - the short story is that phosphate (and arsenate) have three spots to kick hydrogen on or off with - and the number of hydrogens that hang out on a phosphate ion is very much related to the pH.
The long story (for anyone who cares) is that each of those hydrogens has a different equilibrium constant (pKa) at which it will pop off. H3PO4 is phosphoric acid but if you increase the amount of OH- in solution (or reduce the amount of H+) the first of those hydrogens will hook up with the OH- to make water which leaves H2PO4-. So the next hydrogen to take a hike will leave the phosphate at HPO4- - which means it's harder to leave and has a different pH (which is a fancy way of talking about the levels of H+ and OH- in water) it will hit equilibrium with. So on and so forth for each of the four phosphate species (0, -1, -2, -3 charge).
The really long version throws out concentration of the different species of phosphate and talks about activities, taking into account that the activity coefficient is affected by the square of the ion's charge... [We interrupt this chemistry lesson for the sake of sanity]
Strange - I forgot what I was talking about - but back to your question: yeah - DNA is both sex and acid
I know what you're talking about. The news about phosphate was really a kick in the fork.
I suspect that nitrogen and oxygen are safe on account of hydrogen bonding which doesn't translate down the periods, but taking the regicide of phosphorous as an example - carbon may not be as immune as we had previously thought. It's probably safe because of it's functionality at liquid water temperatures, but we're already seeing some pretty interesting silicon oils and materials.
Fluorine could play an interesting ET role due to it's ability to hydrogen bond - especially if we're talking about interactions with silicon, electronegativity is the key though - fluorine may never play nice with others at any temp.
Sounds good except for the fact that you're forgetting that arsenate is more reactive than phosphate which means the arsenate based backbone of DNA should be constantly getting ripped to shreds. Either this bacteria has found a way to protect the backbone or it has a hyper effective repair mechanism. Either would be very worth learning about. (Immortality anyone)?
Everything, although I suppose it happens with varying degrees of selectivity. From the Astrobiology article:
presumably if they're isolating, inoculating, and growing multiple generations their phosphate ratio is going to go down to very trace levels.
My thoughts are as follows:
THIS IS BLOODY AMAZING! followed by a little more tempered cogitation:
Arsenate is a triprotic species just like phosphate, each has a valence of +5, and it's directly one period down on the table so available electron shells in ground state will appear very similar. However arsenic possesses filled d orbitals and is about 7% less electronegative than phosphorous - these factors, among others, tend to make arsenate a little more reactive than phosphate which would make it less stable as a backbone of DNA. So if the degree of replacement is as thorough as NASA claims (they said they cultured it with zero phosphorous present - so only trace impurities) the cell has either found a way to strengthen the backbone or has developed an amazing repair mechanism which can deal with frequent DNA damage.
NASA has two summaries here and here.
Astrobiology has an article here.
And http://www.sciencemag.org/">Science will release a paper later today.
Mary Voytek -- director, NASA Astrobiology program
Felisa Wolfe-Simon -- evolutionary biology including metallic enzymes, specifically the potential role of arsenic in DNA
Pamela Conrad -- biogeochemistry and organic chemical signatures of extremophiles
Steven Benner -- geobiology of RNA, including detection of DNA and RNA
James Elser -- the influence of nitrogen and phosphorus in biological processes including ecosystems, speciation and RNA
... Science is published on Fridays. Nature is published on Thursdays. It would seem like the paper is going to appear in Nature no matter what the exact announcement is.
Given that the list is more a set of people with expertise in extremophile and alternative "life support" I'm more willing to bet that the announcement is closer to home (how about a hot spring or something)? Arsenic is just one period below phosphorous so it shares a lot of properties. My vote is either for identifying an extremophile which uses an ATAs style of energy storage as opposed to ATP - they're both triprotic so it could work. Alternatively they could have found a way (hot springs or in the lab) to replace the phosphate backbone of DNA with an arsenate binder - that'd really throw people for a loop since "alien DNA" will splash big over the headlines - way more than "toxic polyprotic acid replaces traditional cell fuel."
You've hit the publication times dead on though - so if it's in one of those two it's probably pretty big