that the new system will be the Game Icosahedron. It will be revolutionary in that it will be the first 20-sided game system ever. How will Sony and Microsoft compete with that?
Think of how many tabletop gamers would buy one just because it's shaped like a d20.
Seriously, if I ever did that to him, he would go in and delete all of my WoW characters. And I would totally deserve it. Smashing a window on a car is one thing, deleting a character is another. At least you can replace the windshield fairly easily.
I agree that the article needs more information. I don't find it interesting that there are "come and get me" smells that make mosquitos bite me. I'd much rather know what these chemicals are, although I realize that they're probably not releasing that information due to publications, etc. that are pending.
Personally, I don't ever use bug spray. I let the mosquitos bite. Most of my family has developed a tolerance to mosquito bites so that they don't really itch anymore (mosquito bites itch basically because of an allergic reaction to chemicals that the mosquitos secrete and leave on your skin).
Sorry, you're wrong here - Macs are just not gaming machines, unfortunately.
Sorry, but I think you're wrong here. I think Macs make fine gaming machines. I have a PowerBook G4 with a 128 MB video card and 512 MB of RAM. I play World of Warcraft and Warcraft III all the time. It looks and runs better (graphics are smoother) on my computer than on my friends' who are running similar systems.
Granted, I could probably use a little more RAM, but who couldn't?
The University of Wisconsin has a foundation (The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation - or WARF) that takes care of patenting research and then allocating the profits. Yes, the University of Wisconsin is state funded, but that doesn't cover the entire cost of a student's eduation. The profits of patents go back in to the University. The professor will not get all of the profits. The majority will go back into the school to help prevent major tuition raises.
It's a pretty good system (the first of it's kind) and a lot of other schools have set up similar systems.
The question is more a matter of what people are willing to do certain kinds of jobs. Right now, we have illegal aliens who are doing jobs that citizens of the US (even those on welfare) don't want to do. I'm not saying that applies to every person on welfare or every illegal alien, but certainly to enough. I'm all for people on welfare working instead of receiving government assistance. Unfortunately, no one has figured out a way to make people work. You can refuse to give them money and get them a job, but you can't ensure that they'll show up every day. So, we have a lot of jobs that need doing, but have no one to do them. Why not let the people who have proven they are willing to work become citizens instead of deporting them?
I think one of the main problems with stem cell and embryonic research is the amount of bad information that is out there. Here are some things I've learned through several seminars on the topics:
There are three sources of embryonic stem cells: creating new ones specifically for research, using existing embryos, and cloning embryos.
Using existing embryos involves getting leftover embryos from fertility clinics. There are approximately 400,000 frozen embryos in the US, 200,000 of which are over 7 years old and would never be used for implantation. Approximately 1,000 embryos are destroyed every day by couples doing IVF who don't want to freeze the extra embryos.
There are some scientists who believe that it is isn't possible to clone humans. There have been successful clones of animals like sheep and cows, but never any "higher" organisms like chimps, orangutangs, etc. So, we may be able to clone embryos, but those cloned embryos may never be able to become people.
I, personally, am very in favor of embryonic stem cell research. One of the biggest critiscisms I hear is that there are already stem cell lines out there that can be used. True, there are 23 (not 40) stem cell lines in existence for research. But, these cells were grown on mouse cells, so they could never be used in humans. If we (the US) continue on the policies that President Bush has established, we will never be able to do clinical trials of stem cell research. Other countries, including England and Singapore, have much more leniant policies towards stem cell research and spend way more than the US does on it. They will surpass the US in research if policies here don't change. (Not a bad thing, but I'd like to be able to do research without moving to another country).
I think this should be presented on VH1. They do lots of other "Top 100" Lists - 100 Hottest Men in Film, 100 Greatest Guitar Players, etc. It would be really entertaining to see how many people would watch the Top 100 Physics Papers just because they couldn't find anything else to watch (in addition to the people who would watch it because they're actually interested).
One of the several Titan arum plants that are at UW-Madison is also blooming this week (called "Little Stinker"). The link has daily updates on this specific plant and also some general information on the species.
The iPod will be forgotten at some point, just as I threw out my last poncho the other day.
I think you threw out your poncho a little prematurely. Walking through the junior's department of major department stores, you'll find that ponchos are again popular and are being pushed as a fashion trend for this fall.
A given fashion may be forgotten, but it's generally only temporary. Major fashion trends usually come back in style. So, yes, the iPod may be forgotten, but there will always be people who use it and, chances are, it will come back in to fashion.
I personally think that Sony will have a hard time coming into the market. They'll have to work to get people away from their iPods. Conveniently for them, they have a lot of money to throw at that marketing challenge.
It's incredibly simple. They divide. They don't do a perfect job when copying themselves. Occasionally they fuck up the bits that control their internal processes, like how fast they divide. All the wonderful chemicals we've surrounded ourselves with make 'em screw up more.
Unfortunately, it's not incredibly simple. Under normal circumstances, a cell has many checkpoints and regulatory processes to ensure that it doesn't divide too often and begin growing out of control. Cancerous cells have mutations or deficiencies at these control points. If you lose one or two of the control points, the cell can usually compensate. If you lose too many, the cell will divide out of control because growth will no longer be regulated - at this point, it's cancerous.
The checkpoints are lost through a few factors: chemicals and other carcinogens, genetic problems, and sometimes the cell just doesn't copy the DNA correctly. There's not just one cause for cancer in a cell. Usually, it's a combination of several factors.
The main problem with cancer is that it's so good at avoiding the body's immune system until the cancerous growth is fairly large. The cancer cells will stay away from the blood stream for a while, which lets it get big enough to cause a problem before it spreads to other parts of the body. That's why medicine has been pushing preventive screening - it's a lot easier to treat isolated cancer (which is harder to detect) than systemic cancer.
Biologists have a pretty good understanding of how cells turn cancerous, but that doesn't result in clear and obvious treatments.
Biologists have a good idea of what causes cancer in general, but not necessarily for a given individual. There are many causes to cancer - carcinogens, genetic predisposition, etc. - and often several of these factors will combine before someone gets cancer.
In fact, the body has the ability to kill cancer cells if it recognizes that there is a problem and if the cancer hasn't become too large or encapsulated. All those crude methods help shift the balance back in the body's favor.
Usually, the cell isn't actually cancerous at this point. Rather, it has some damaged DNA (or other problem) that is potentially hazardous. So, instead of taking the chance, the body gets rid of the cell. Often, once a cell actually becomes cancerous and is growing out of control, it's too late for the body to do anything.
I don't know how we're going to restrict the spread of advanced biotech knowledge, but I wish I did. Yeah, information wants to be free -- I agree, until that information can kill people. In fifteen years an undergrab microbio degree will be enough to create a plague. The methods won't require particularly exotic reagents and the equipment won't be hard to get.
Depending on what you define as "a plague," it's already incredibly easy for anyone with a undergrad microbiology degree to create one. In my high school AP Biology class, we made Ampicillin E. coli. In my undergrad microbiology and biochemistry labs, we did similar experiments and also a lot of bacterial cloning. We're already at the point where it's very easy for someone with basic knowledge of a microbiology lab to manipulate bacteria and viruses. From my experience, the reagents and equipment are not exotic nor difficult to aquire. So, from this standpoint, nothing will change. Maybe you should be more worried about unqualified people getting this information.
Additionally, publishing something potentially dangerous like the ebola genome will more likely be beneficial. You can't create a vaccine or treatment that is tailored to a particular virus or bacteria without knowledge of its structure. You need to know how its genome, and therefore its proteins, are different from a human's so that any treatment you create will target those different proteins and not harm the person. Having the genome will allow researchers to target just ebola instead of ebola and the human like many chemotherapy medicines do.
One researcher in the article is quoted as saying, We have almost no information about what kind of problems caffeine can cause in nature. It is a poison and at very high concentrations it can affect the nervous system. We don't know the kind of environmental effect caffeine can have on the ecosystem and this is something that should be thoroughly investigated.
Based on what I know about biochemistry, this isn't necessarily going to be a big problem for humans. Assuming that the concentration of seawater is 100 micrograms (.0001 g) per liter and the lethal dose (LD) of caffeine is 4 grams in humans, one human would have to drink 40,000 litres of seawater to reach the lethal dose. That excludes the decomposition of caffeine in the body that would occur while drinking that much seawater.
Of course, there could be problems with biomagnification. If fish or other sea animals can't break down the caffeine, it may stay absorbed in their fat. Then, people who eat those sea creatures will have much larger of doses of caffeine at one time.
Personally, I wouldn't be concerned until they take into consideration all of the other factors that are involved. There are high concentrations of many molecules in seawater, but that isn't necessarily a problem.
Bubble Bobble? I don't even want to think about the number of hours I played that game when I was little. Or how excited I got when I found the arcade version in the Student Union.
I guess that's part of what makes Nintendo so cool - the sense of nostalgia that comes along with getting to play a game you haven't played in years. Or, being able to meet people you didn't grow up with, but talking about video games and how cool Excitebike was. I'm sure the same thing will happen with Playstation 2 when it becomes archaic technology.
Does this remind anyone else of a James Bond movie?
I can hear the advertisements now: "You too can fight the henchmen of evil geniuses with our Ocean Glider. Help fight terrorism above and below the waves!"
For one science course I took in college, we were told that we could find a source online, but then find it in hardcopy (ie, look up an article on the web, but then also make sure to look it up in a journal). Apparently, there were some issues with students who found information on the web that looked reliable (it was cited from a journal), but the information had been changed by whomever posted the article on a personal site. The professor wasn't interested in trusting scientific articles that students found online after that happened unless you could prove that you verified the same article in text.
I agree that LCDs are much easier on the eyes. I was using one 17" LCD and one 17" CRT at work, but had to switch to two LCDs because of the strain on my eyes. Conveniently, my company was willing to pay for it.
However, in some ways I preferred the CRT because it seemed to be much better at displaying contrast. I've noticed that any web pages that have a light color on a white background don't look very good on a LCD. There's not enough contrast (even when I adjust the screen contrast), which makes it somewhat difficult to do my job when I have to check graphics. Overall, I think the image quality on my LCD is much better - they're newer and have better resolution than the old CRT I was using.
Both have their problems. If money wasn't an issue, I'd take an LCD over a CRT any day.
A virus can't self-replicate. It's a bit like a parasite in that it needs a host. Basically, all that composes a virus is a piece of DNA encapsulated by some protein. It can't reproduce because it doesn't contain the necessary organelles, such as ribosomes to make proteins and mitochondria to provide energy, that a cell has. So, when a virus infects a cell, it incorporates itself into the host's DNA. Then, when the host DNA gets replicated, the virus DNA gets replicated along with it. From there, the DNA will either get turned into more DNA (to make new cells that have the virus DNA) or make proteins (which can cause infection by making toxins and more viruses). The virus DNA can also be dormant in the host for awhile by not incoporating itself into the host DNA.
In regards to this synthetic virus, my main question is whether or not the researchers have looked what happens to cells that get infected by the virus. You can't kill a virus like you can a bacterial cell. Basically, your body has to recognize the virus as foreign and make antibodies to kill it, which is why we have to get immunizations. That's a little frightening to me - the possibility that they've created somthing horrible lytic that no one has ever been exposed to.
It is true that once you have been infected by a virus, you can't be infected again. However, the same virus can mutate and then you can have the infection again. Consider a flu vaccine. Each year, you get vaccinated with dead flu virus. This protects against the majority of strains. A virus can still mutate and you get the flu. The next year, you have to get a flu shot again because the viruses mutate so much each year that the previous year's vaccine is no longer effective.
In this case, there is a probability that people who have been exposed to the virus before will not be able to have an effective viral drug. The only real way to test this would be to check an individual's antibodies, which will determine the immunity. If exposed to a particular strain (or a close enough strain), there would be antibodies. If not, it's fairly likely that this treatment would be effective.
I don't know about other schools, but UW-Madison has been patenting the research of professors and other researchers on campus since 1925. There is a private, non-profit organization called the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Basically, they hold patents and license them out. The money that is collected is used to fund the university and other research on campus.
Check out http://www.warf.ws for more information.
Escaflowne, El Hazard, and Evangelion are actually relatively easy to find as of late. Suncoast stores (in lots of malls) as well as animevillage.com carry all three of the series. In addition, I've found that most stores that carry a fair amount of anime will at least be able to order these, if not have them in stock.+AAU-
Slashdot Mirror
that the new system will be the Game Icosahedron. It will be revolutionary in that it will be the first 20-sided game system ever. How will Sony and Microsoft compete with that?
Think of how many tabletop gamers would buy one just because it's shaped like a d20.
...wasn't Gran Turismo 4 one of the most anticipated games of 2004?
for another way to threaten my husband.
Seriously, if I ever did that to him, he would go in and delete all of my WoW characters. And I would totally deserve it. Smashing a window on a car is one thing, deleting a character is another. At least you can replace the windshield fairly easily.
I agree that the article needs more information. I don't find it interesting that there are "come and get me" smells that make mosquitos bite me. I'd much rather know what these chemicals are, although I realize that they're probably not releasing that information due to publications, etc. that are pending.
Personally, I don't ever use bug spray. I let the mosquitos bite. Most of my family has developed a tolerance to mosquito bites so that they don't really itch anymore (mosquito bites itch basically because of an allergic reaction to chemicals that the mosquitos secrete and leave on your skin).
Sorry, you're wrong here - Macs are just not gaming machines, unfortunately.
Sorry, but I think you're wrong here. I think Macs make fine gaming machines. I have a PowerBook G4 with a 128 MB video card and 512 MB of RAM. I play World of Warcraft and Warcraft III all the time. It looks and runs better (graphics are smoother) on my computer than on my friends' who are running similar systems.
Granted, I could probably use a little more RAM, but who couldn't?
The University of Wisconsin has a foundation (The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation - or WARF) that takes care of patenting research and then allocating the profits. Yes, the University of Wisconsin is state funded, but that doesn't cover the entire cost of a student's eduation. The profits of patents go back in to the University. The professor will not get all of the profits. The majority will go back into the school to help prevent major tuition raises.
It's a pretty good system (the first of it's kind) and a lot of other schools have set up similar systems.
For more information, check out the WARF website: http://www.warf.org/
The question is more a matter of what people are willing to do certain kinds of jobs. Right now, we have illegal aliens who are doing jobs that citizens of the US (even those on welfare) don't want to do. I'm not saying that applies to every person on welfare or every illegal alien, but certainly to enough. I'm all for people on welfare working instead of receiving government assistance. Unfortunately, no one has figured out a way to make people work. You can refuse to give them money and get them a job, but you can't ensure that they'll show up every day. So, we have a lot of jobs that need doing, but have no one to do them. Why not let the people who have proven they are willing to work become citizens instead of deporting them?
I, personally, am very in favor of embryonic stem cell research. One of the biggest critiscisms I hear is that there are already stem cell lines out there that can be used. True, there are 23 (not 40) stem cell lines in existence for research. But, these cells were grown on mouse cells, so they could never be used in humans. If we (the US) continue on the policies that President Bush has established, we will never be able to do clinical trials of stem cell research. Other countries, including England and Singapore, have much more leniant policies towards stem cell research and spend way more than the US does on it. They will surpass the US in research if policies here don't change. (Not a bad thing, but I'd like to be able to do research without moving to another country).
welcome our new super-ant overlords!
I think this should be presented on VH1. They do lots of other "Top 100" Lists - 100 Hottest Men in Film, 100 Greatest Guitar Players, etc. It would be really entertaining to see how many people would watch the Top 100 Physics Papers just because they couldn't find anything else to watch (in addition to the people who would watch it because they're actually interested).
One of the several Titan arum plants that are at UW-Madison is also blooming this week (called "Little Stinker"). The link has daily updates on this specific plant and also some general information on the species.
http://www.news.wisc.edu/titanarum2004/index.html
The iPod will be forgotten at some point, just as I threw out my last poncho the other day.
I think you threw out your poncho a little prematurely. Walking through the junior's department of major department stores, you'll find that ponchos are again popular and are being pushed as a fashion trend for this fall.
A given fashion may be forgotten, but it's generally only temporary. Major fashion trends usually come back in style. So, yes, the iPod may be forgotten, but there will always be people who use it and, chances are, it will come back in to fashion.
I personally think that Sony will have a hard time coming into the market. They'll have to work to get people away from their iPods. Conveniently for them, they have a lot of money to throw at that marketing challenge.
It's incredibly simple. They divide. They don't do a perfect job when copying themselves. Occasionally they fuck up the bits that control their internal processes, like how fast they divide. All the wonderful chemicals we've surrounded ourselves with make 'em screw up more.
Unfortunately, it's not incredibly simple. Under normal circumstances, a cell has many checkpoints and regulatory processes to ensure that it doesn't divide too often and begin growing out of control. Cancerous cells have mutations or deficiencies at these control points. If you lose one or two of the control points, the cell can usually compensate. If you lose too many, the cell will divide out of control because growth will no longer be regulated - at this point, it's cancerous.
The checkpoints are lost through a few factors: chemicals and other carcinogens, genetic problems, and sometimes the cell just doesn't copy the DNA correctly. There's not just one cause for cancer in a cell. Usually, it's a combination of several factors.
The main problem with cancer is that it's so good at avoiding the body's immune system until the cancerous growth is fairly large. The cancer cells will stay away from the blood stream for a while, which lets it get big enough to cause a problem before it spreads to other parts of the body. That's why medicine has been pushing preventive screening - it's a lot easier to treat isolated cancer (which is harder to detect) than systemic cancer.
Biologists have a pretty good understanding of how cells turn cancerous, but that doesn't result in clear and obvious treatments.
Biologists have a good idea of what causes cancer in general, but not necessarily for a given individual. There are many causes to cancer - carcinogens, genetic predisposition, etc. - and often several of these factors will combine before someone gets cancer.
In fact, the body has the ability to kill cancer cells if it recognizes that there is a problem and if the cancer hasn't become too large or encapsulated. All those crude methods help shift the balance back in the body's favor.
Usually, the cell isn't actually cancerous at this point. Rather, it has some damaged DNA (or other problem) that is potentially hazardous. So, instead of taking the chance, the body gets rid of the cell. Often, once a cell actually becomes cancerous and is growing out of control, it's too late for the body to do anything.
I don't know how we're going to restrict the spread of advanced biotech knowledge, but I wish I did. Yeah, information wants to be free -- I agree, until that information can kill people. In fifteen years an undergrab microbio degree will be enough to create a plague. The methods won't require particularly exotic reagents and the equipment won't be hard to get.
Depending on what you define as "a plague," it's already incredibly easy for anyone with a undergrad microbiology degree to create one. In my high school AP Biology class, we made Ampicillin E. coli. In my undergrad microbiology and biochemistry labs, we did similar experiments and also a lot of bacterial cloning. We're already at the point where it's very easy for someone with basic knowledge of a microbiology lab to manipulate bacteria and viruses. From my experience, the reagents and equipment are not exotic nor difficult to aquire. So, from this standpoint, nothing will change. Maybe you should be more worried about unqualified people getting this information.
Additionally, publishing something potentially dangerous like the ebola genome will more likely be beneficial. You can't create a vaccine or treatment that is tailored to a particular virus or bacteria without knowledge of its structure. You need to know how its genome, and therefore its proteins, are different from a human's so that any treatment you create will target those different proteins and not harm the person. Having the genome will allow researchers to target just ebola instead of ebola and the human like many chemotherapy medicines do.
One researcher in the article is quoted as saying, We have almost no information about what kind of problems caffeine can cause in nature. It is a poison and at very high concentrations it can affect the nervous system. We don't know the kind of environmental effect caffeine can have on the ecosystem and this is something that should be thoroughly investigated .
Based on what I know about biochemistry, this isn't necessarily going to be a big problem for humans. Assuming that the concentration of seawater is 100 micrograms (.0001 g) per liter and the lethal dose (LD) of caffeine is 4 grams in humans, one human would have to drink 40,000 litres of seawater to reach the lethal dose. That excludes the decomposition of caffeine in the body that would occur while drinking that much seawater.
Of course, there could be problems with biomagnification. If fish or other sea animals can't break down the caffeine, it may stay absorbed in their fat. Then, people who eat those sea creatures will have much larger of doses of caffeine at one time.
Personally, I wouldn't be concerned until they take into consideration all of the other factors that are involved. There are high concentrations of many molecules in seawater, but that isn't necessarily a problem.
Bubble Bobble? I don't even want to think about the number of hours I played that game when I was little. Or how excited I got when I found the arcade version in the Student Union.
I guess that's part of what makes Nintendo so cool - the sense of nostalgia that comes along with getting to play a game you haven't played in years. Or, being able to meet people you didn't grow up with, but talking about video games and how cool Excitebike was. I'm sure the same thing will happen with Playstation 2 when it becomes archaic technology.
Does this remind anyone else of a James Bond movie?
I can hear the advertisements now: "You too can fight the henchmen of evil geniuses with our Ocean Glider. Help fight terrorism above and below the waves!"
Ahhh...the dual nature of the internet: can't find the things you want, yet can't get rid of the things you don't want. I love it.
For one science course I took in college, we were told that we could find a source online, but then find it in hardcopy (ie, look up an article on the web, but then also make sure to look it up in a journal). Apparently, there were some issues with students who found information on the web that looked reliable (it was cited from a journal), but the information had been changed by whomever posted the article on a personal site. The professor wasn't interested in trusting scientific articles that students found online after that happened unless you could prove that you verified the same article in text.
I agree that LCDs are much easier on the eyes. I was using one 17" LCD and one 17" CRT at work, but had to switch to two LCDs because of the strain on my eyes. Conveniently, my company was willing to pay for it.
However, in some ways I preferred the CRT because it seemed to be much better at displaying contrast. I've noticed that any web pages that have a light color on a white background don't look very good on a LCD. There's not enough contrast (even when I adjust the screen contrast), which makes it somewhat difficult to do my job when I have to check graphics. Overall, I think the image quality on my LCD is much better - they're newer and have better resolution than the old CRT I was using.
Both have their problems. If money wasn't an issue, I'd take an LCD over a CRT any day.
A virus can't self-replicate. It's a bit like a parasite in that it needs a host. Basically, all that composes a virus is a piece of DNA encapsulated by some protein. It can't reproduce because it doesn't contain the necessary organelles, such as ribosomes to make proteins and mitochondria to provide energy, that a cell has. So, when a virus infects a cell, it incorporates itself into the host's DNA. Then, when the host DNA gets replicated, the virus DNA gets replicated along with it. From there, the DNA will either get turned into more DNA (to make new cells that have the virus DNA) or make proteins (which can cause infection by making toxins and more viruses). The virus DNA can also be dormant in the host for awhile by not incoporating itself into the host DNA.
In regards to this synthetic virus, my main question is whether or not the researchers have looked what happens to cells that get infected by the virus. You can't kill a virus like you can a bacterial cell. Basically, your body has to recognize the virus as foreign and make antibodies to kill it, which is why we have to get immunizations. That's a little frightening to me - the possibility that they've created somthing horrible lytic that no one has ever been exposed to.
It is true that once you have been infected by a virus, you can't be infected again. However, the same virus can mutate and then you can have the infection again. Consider a flu vaccine. Each year, you get vaccinated with dead flu virus. This protects against the majority of strains. A virus can still mutate and you get the flu. The next year, you have to get a flu shot again because the viruses mutate so much each year that the previous year's vaccine is no longer effective.
In this case, there is a probability that people who have been exposed to the virus before will not be able to have an effective viral drug. The only real way to test this would be to check an individual's antibodies, which will determine the immunity. If exposed to a particular strain (or a close enough strain), there would be antibodies. If not, it's fairly likely that this treatment would be effective.
I don't know about other schools, but UW-Madison has been patenting the research of professors and other researchers on campus since 1925. There is a private, non-profit organization called the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Basically, they hold patents and license them out. The money that is collected is used to fund the university and other research on campus.
Check out http://www.warf.ws for more information.
Escaflowne, El Hazard, and Evangelion are actually relatively easy to find as of late. Suncoast stores (in lots of malls) as well as animevillage.com carry all three of the series. In addition, I've found that most stores that carry a fair amount of anime will at least be able to order these, if not have them in stock.+AAU-