The "robbing a bank" analogy is horrible in this context. We're talking about making discoveries that could conceivably make a difference in people's lives. So basically, it's like if I come to you and borrow your car, you're not giving me consent to pick up a dying man from the side of the road and drive him to the hospital.
And no, many medical researchers aren't doctors in the sense you mean. Sure, they have a PhD, and possibly an MD, too. But they don't make a physician's or surgeon's salary. Instead, the lead researcher probably only makes $50-70k. The people working under him the lab, possibly also PhDs, probably make somewhere under 50k.
Pure research isn't at all the lucrative field you seem to think it is.
You know, I hadn't thought about research that might be done regarding beneficial sporadic mutations....I suppose those would definitely be unique to *you* and possibly have great scientific importance.
However, would you really want to restrict research on something that could help everyone just because you want a patent on your own tissue? That would mean all labs that want to work with the tissue would have to pay you some sort of fee on top of the already hugely expensive cost of chemicals. Just yesterday I paid $200 for WATER from a supply company (given, it was 18L of guaranteed protease-, RNAse-, and DNAse-free water).
The point made in later posts that, "If they're going to patent anyway, I want my cut" has to be addressed, too. Imagine this situation: when you give a biopsy, all you do is sit back and let them cut a little piece out of you. The scientist that uses the tissue for research then spends the next 10 years analyzing some undiscovered property of all human cells that he found in your biopsy. Whe the scientist finally feels he has enough to publish, he tries to patent his amazing discovery (let's leave the issue of whether or not patenting the discovery is right alone for now). What many people are saying on this forum is that, even though all they did was let someone take a chunk of them, they want a cut of the profits. Even though they had nothing to do with the 10 years of 40-80 hour work weeks, they want their hard-earned money, damn it! To me, that sounds like some greedy get-rich-quick scheme. Rewarding someone for for doing nothing at the expense of a researcher's life work just feels wrong.
Just a random connection I made in my brain while reading a paper where they used immortalized rat hepatocyte cells....
Immortalizing cell lines, growing them up, running expt.'s, and then expanding the results to almost all cells of the same type is pretty common these days (with some reservations). But it just struck me as funny that we're taking results from what are basically cancer cells and applying them to healthy cells that can be found in a tissue/organ. Yes, I realize that often there's only one or two differences between the immortalized and normal cells....but what if that difference is in a cell-cycle control that does many other things, too (c-Mos, for example)?
By the way, at this point I'm actually curious and hoping people will post some answer...is there any way to control for just how wacked-out immortalized cells are? How do you make sure that whatever factor makes them immortalized isn't interfering with the work you're doing?
OK, first off, that's a horribly worded reference to the article. It makes it sound as if doctors are taking the biopsies themselves with out permission. What's really going on is that doctors need to take some tissue anyway to do some test for a disease; and then they're done, rather than just throwing the rest of the tissue away they pass it on to other scientists that need to work with the same kind of tissue.
It's not as if they're patenting chemicals/cells that can only be found in *you*. Things like that would be next to useless, since the only person that could possibly use discoveries related to the "unique" thing would be yourself.
In this context, they're referring to chemicals/cells that haven't been discovered yet. These things are probably ubiquitous molecules (present in every other human being) that no one has looked for yet.
Therefore, scientists aren't trying to find extra-special bits of you to *steal* (as the article and first few posts seem to suggest). All they're trying to do is save a little money by skipping the costs of figuring out legal language for a consent form, etc. Whatever is biopsied from you is only used in the capacity of representing human cells, not your own.
To me, downloading copyrighted music could be viewed as a protest against the exorbitant prices charged by the music industry. When CDs first appeared everyone was shocked at the high price, but the RIAA promised that it was only so expensive because it was a new technology, and that it was worth it for the increased sound quality.
It's now how many years later, and CDs actually cost the same amount of money (if not more) than when they debuted. And don't try to tell me that making CDs is just as expensive now as when CDs appeared.
I believe that downloading copyrighted songs says, "I'm sick and tired of paying $16-20 for a CD it cost the recording industry $1-$5 to make. I refused to be taken advantage of just because the alternative method of distribution is under attack by the RIAA's own lawyer-goons."
2cooltek.com. All your cooling desires, satisfied in one place. And if you want a shock, check out the high-output 120mm fans and the Black Label 80mm fan. So loud, it's hard to be heard over them, but if you want high cfm, they're the way to go.
We take them for granted, but just think about what a chipset fan does...Runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (at least mine does), makes almost no noise, and only wears out after several years. That's at least 17,250 hours of use, continually spinning at 7200rpm.
Now consider that out of all the fan manufacturers, Sunon is well-known as a one of the best, supplying not only normal fans, but also ultra-high-output and/or super-quiet varieties.
Scoff scoff, just a fan.
And CmdrTaco is "just a programmer."
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I'm willing to bet they already have.
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Spidergoats
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If it were just a matter of producing some proteins and seperating them from a mixture, you could genetically engineer bacteria to do it.
Actually, they did. I don't have a link to the original article, but there's mention of it here.
There's a nice very in-depth paper regarding self-assembling biomolecular structures here. Figure 6 is especially pertinent, since it shows the current model for how the glycine and alanine residues are oriented in spider silk.
But don't get me wrong, I very much agree with you that going from a bunch of subunits to a strand of silk isn't as simple as they make it sound. I can only assume that the researchers have found some way to make it work (no other reason to spend all the time and money making the goats) but are keeping it secret, probably because they're not quite ready to publish yet.
Retroviruses don't harm us? Perhaps you've never heard of a sarcoma virus. There are a whole lot of them out there, and a several are so well understood that they're used as vectors for genetic recombination. So they're pretty useful...
But they can cause cancer. Gee, I'd say that's pretty harmful, wouldn't you? And don't even try to disagree with me about sarcoma viruses causing cancer. Go read any microbiology textbook if you're feeling uppity.
And don't start on the "killing a host is suicide" kick. That's utter bullshit and pseudo-science. Compare the lifespan of a microorganism and a human. Killing a host is only suicide if the lifespan of the human after infection becomes shorter than the time it would take for the virus to infect another host. But guess what....it takes 10-20 years for HIV to cause AIDS. Not only do single virus particles not "live" that long, there is plenty of time to pass on progeny to other individuals.
Latency: there is none. Instead, there's a 10/20 year lag before onset of symptoms simply because your body fights a losing battle. Your immune system is constantly fighting against HIV infection, but the act of resistance causes the virus to spread between immune cells (macrophages and T cells, especially). So the infection is progressing IMMEDIATELY, but you only see symptoms 10-years down the line because at first your immune system is quite healthy, but over time HIV manages to kill off almost all of your helper-T cells (which are responsible for keeping your immune system active). When that happens, AIDS symptoms set in. The virus HIV has no symptoms of its own, except for destruction of immune response. Everything else is associated with AIDS is a symptom of secondary infections.
Admittedly, there is a lot HIV that we don't know. And I agree that it might be advantageous to look into some more radical lines of research.
But I think it's a travesty that a homophobe like Duesbirg can influence people like you in an attempt to draw research money away from real attempts to solve this problem. You did know that's why most people ignore him now, right? He decided to put his own personal distaste for homosexuals before scientific objectivity. But now that many, many heterosexuals have been infected, he's still spewing an extremist line. I wish he'd shut up.
Hmmm....now I'm starting to doubt the theatre that you saw the movie in. The blacks were well-balanced when I saw the film. So well-balanced, in fact, that whenever you (rarely) saw actual sunlight in the film, it hurt your eyes because you were so used to pitch black.
I was actually amazed at the some of the cinematography (separate from photography) used in the film. As for the photography, I was pretty puzzled about the graininess myself. But I believe that the lack of detail in the shadows was both intentional and brilliant. One scene in particular struck me, when the crew is bringing back the first photographer after his collapse. The entire screen is almost totally black except for the barely-visible floating heads of the main characters, vieweed from slightly below.
The end result is a huge amount of the screen that could contain anything. Monsters, things that go bump in the night, etc. Creeeepy.
A few people I saw the movie with me commented on the same thing, but didn't like it. So I'm going to guess that it's all a matter of personal preference. *shrug*
I interpreted the opening as a sort of mini-statement on films as they relate to reality. As the credits begin we see the outside of what could be an opulent movie house, and scratchy movie-soundtrack music begins to play. We begin to move towards the front door of the theater. As we pass it, the music loses its scratchiness and becomes real. We begin to see realistic faces, but they are horrible and twisted. The credits climax with a man on horseback killing a helpless naked man. After that, we begin to pull back, until we finally emerge from the front door of the theatre and the music becomes scratchy and "fake" again.
The credits are roughly analogous to the movie Nosferatu if we take the events in Shadow of the Vampire to be true. Whenever we watch Nosferatu we are amazed at how real Shreck's performance is and how surrealy creepy everything is. But we still think it's a movie (hence the scratchy movie-soundtrack music outside the theatre represents the belief that we're just watching a production). But if you really look inside what happened (travel inside the theater) you see that everything is horrifyingly real (music loses its scratchiness).
OR, Merhige could be making an observation on the suspension of disbelief that occurs while watching a movie. Outside the theatre you know it's just a movie (scratchy music) but once you get inside and the movie begins you are completely transported inside the movie, and believe, if only for 2 hours, that the events occuring are/were real. Murnau's final speech in Shadow of the Vampire also suggests this theme: (paraphrashing) "No longer will people say, 'You had to be there,' " thus suggesting that those who see a movie will have actually been there in some capacity.
So there's my little analysis of the credits. What does everyone else think?
A little-known fact about A.I. is that Kubrick was initially working with Chris Cunningham on it. Cunningham (a film prodigy who designed creatures for Clive Barker's Nightbreed at age 16) is best-known for directing several music videos, including ones for Aphex Twin (Come to Daddy and Windowlicker), Bjork (All is Full of Love), Madonna (Frozen), Squarepusher (Come on My Selector), Portishead (Only You), Leftfield (Africa Shoxx), and several Auteurs videos.
Cunningham was working with Kubrick on A.I. for about a year and a half, and now he's working on a film version of Gibson's Neuromancer. Personally, I can't think of anyone who I'd rather have work on Neuromancer, especially since I'm sure Cunningham would kill anyone who even suggested he make it like that POS Johnny Mnemonic. It's too bad that he didn't continue work on A.I., as his artistic style could have doubtless made it a mind-blowing experience.
I agree with you on some points. Making a virus that interferes with the reproductive cycle of a species is so totally short-sighted that I'm horrified they even thought of it.
However, I'm not so sure the bioengineer/alchemist comparison is fair. It is true that large pieces of the puzzle are missing. However, through bold experimentation large pieces of the puzzle have also been filled in. The problem is the sheer size of the puzzle. With billions and billions of pieces, we never appear to know very much.
Random experimentation is not used. At all. To do research, you need grants. And to get grants, you need to write proposals. And if the proposal is, "We want to do X, even though we don't have any idea what it will do," then you don't get the grant. I have no doubt that the researchers who engineered the virus were almost positive they knew what it would do. However, cellular interactions on an organismal scale are incredibly hard to predict, and they guessed wrong. But that does not mean that we should stop guessing and just sit there poking at things we're sure about! Really exciting discoveries aren't made when you already know the answer, but when you're trying to find the answer.
One last nitpicking thing: Mad cow disease isn't a mutation to infect other animals. There's a lot of contention on the subject right now, but it appears to be some sort of inorganic agent that causes a specific neuronal protein to refold and form amyloid plaques. The neuronal protein is present in all mammals, but is slightly different between some groups. For example, cows and humans have similar forms of the protein and can infect eachother, but mice and humans have slightly different forms of the protein and cannot infect eachother.
Computer models have to (obviously) be programmed. Therefore, the programmer must already know all of the factors that might come into play in the model, and what value each factor can have. Ecological computer models work decently enough because there are only a few hundred to a few thousand variables to be considered. In an organism, there are not only millions of variables, but we still don't know how a large percentage of the variables interact with one another.
Therefore, it's impossible for us to ask a program "What would happen if I introduced X into the organism?" and get consisitently accurate responses. To get answers, we still have to perform experiments.
Judging from your post, it sounds like you're just making up having a rough childhood from things you've seen on TV.
If you're a smart kid in elementary- to middle-school today (or within the last 10 years), you most likely have problems unless you're also a natural social butterfly.
Sadly, part of school is dominance games. Some kids rise to the top of the pecking order. And to maintain that status, they have to show how much power they have over other kids. But they couldn't pick on anyone who's too high up on the social ladder, or they'd be seen as an asshole.
And guess who's usually lacking in social skills during those formative years? You got it....the different kids. I'm talking about anyone who's a little weird, in any way. And people with smarts are different.
Because of that, smart kids don't have to be smart-asses to be picked on. It doesn't take announcing the answer first to be targeted. All it takes is getting most of the answers right.
You're right, it does sound like you were a smart-ass, by announcing the answer to a problem before anyone else had started working. But most smart kids, including me, werent. In fact, I never talked during class unless called upon by a teacher. However, the other kids started to catch on to the fact that I always knew the answer. And that's when trouble starts.
Hmmmm....since the entire human genome is around 3 billion bp, you'd have to grab 3,000 megabase chunks. That's certainly doable, but would take some coordinating to organize who grabbed what, and how to finally composite the whole thing. And with that kind of planned work, Celera would have excellent grounds for a lawsuit.
Hopefully you get this question before the topic is buried. I, sadly, don't have a personal subscription to Science. Do you have the reference to that chirality selection article?
PNAS Paper:
Brown, Rau, Johnson, Bacote, Gibbs, and Gajdusck. New studies on the heat resistance of hamster-adapted scrapie agent: Threshold survival after ashing at 600 degree C suggests an inorganic template of replication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.97: 3418-3421.
I had heard of chemistry paralleling theoretical prebiotic chem occurring in interstellar clouds, but had never heard of actual amino acids occuring within them...whoah. Is it possible to detect which aa's are present and in which proportions?
Also, have nucleic acids been detected in these clouds? If they're shielded from UV and other ionizing radioations, it could theoretically be possible. But if they haven't been detected, that would suggest a sort of switcharoo evolution of biotic informational chemistry. ie - amino acid chains carrying information, then a switch to RNA carrying info, then a switch to DNA carrying info while amino acid chains start doing all the diry work.
The idea of seeding has always intrigued me, and I think it would be great for a/. story. There are all sorts of questions to be asked/commented on. Of course, we'd have to limit the discussion quite a bit. Possibly narrow things down to the actual origin of life (what starts accretion in the clouds, for example) as opposed to the origin of life on earth. If we try that, though, we don't have much evidence to go on. So maybe switch things around to what form life might have been in when thrust onto earth? Just throwing out some ideas.
It would be great to have a lot of people commenting on this. I know there are some exosci's out there, and any organic or biochemists could no doubt lend expertise on the feasibility of synthesis of certain compounds via accretion.
Who the fuck are we to say that we know how we should evolve, when it's been working pretty damn good without our intervention for the past few eons......I'll instead just say "We shouldn't play Nature." There's sooo much we will never know about the ecosystem as a whole. We will never really know enough to where we can intelligently control our own evolution without royally fucking it all up.
One big problem with with your central idea there. Humans been evolving themselves ever since we figured out how to keep Nature from killing a majority of us off.
Nature selects for traits by killing off individuals before they are able to reproduce. But you may have noticed recently that modern medical science keeps that from happening in the majority of cases. Near-sighted Timmy is no longer unable to findfood, and thus survives. Little Susie, born with a genetic defect that will paralyze her from the wait down by the time she is 10, can still get around in a wheelchair.
If Nature were still the dominant evolutionary force in our lives, these people would be DEAD long before they had a chance to pass on their genome.
Currently, the only thing evolving humans is social pressure. We are evolving ourselves through our own social likes and dislikes. For example, it's an accepted fact that the human race is slowly growing taller. Nature can also cause a shift towards height, but only in high-temperature climes (to promote heat dissipation). But if we want heat dissipation, we turn on the AC, so Nature has nothing to do with it. Instead, we're getting taller because height seems to be socially desirable. Simply, tall people have more kids that survive to reproduce than short people.
So now everyone's in a tiff because we're going to start actively participating in our own evolution. They think we don't know enough to be having a hand in things, and are afraid that we're going to fuck things up for the rest of the ecosystem BULLSHIT.
We have been unconsciously evolving ourselves for centuries.
Evolution doesn't care about the ecosystem. In nature, if a trait comes along that puts another organism so far ahead that it takes over, then that organism will take over. No ifs ands or buts. And that organism will stay dominant until another organism evolves something to bring that other organism under control.
Constant "supplementing" of our own evolution is the only thing that keeps the entire human race from being wiped off the face of the earth. We have been doing a good job keeping microorganisms under control for a while, but recent mutations have brought some supreme badasses onto the playing field. Biochemically, there is no way for our own immune system to deal with viruses like HIV. Even with gene therapy, it's doubtful that we'll ever be totally immune to HIV. If you want to talk evolution, without constant meddling viruses would kill the entire population in less than a century. That's because HIV hits after reproductive maturity, so there's no way for natural evolution to select against it. Without behavior modification (social influence on evolution), HIV alone could kill us all. Not to mention all those other cool retroviruses.
Some people talk like Nature is some all-knowing force that's trying to keep everything in balance. Nature doesn't care about balance. Nature is. Things happen. And every organism on the face of the planet is trying to survive what's happening, while possibly making life very hard for all the other organisms.
Sorry to switch gears a little, but you reminded me of a question that I'm hoping others will have thoughts on. In relatively recent history there was a school of thought that traced the origin of life to clay templates. For a while people scoffed, but then the idea started to catch on. But lately there's been some nay-saying, because people haven't found any examples of inorganics acting as templates for organics, and the clay mineral theory suggested that the phenomenon may still be occurring.
Quick segue into prions. These are really weird diseases of the brain that people were starting to think were replicating proteins (flying in the face of the Central Dogma of Biology). Now, in the June issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), it was found that prions are still infectious after exposure to 600 degrees C. No organic molecule can withstand that, so the researchers speculated this might be an example of an inorganic template for biological replication (no clues yet as to what it could be).
SO, what do you guys think about the possibility of an inorganic origin of organic life? We've obviously got some people that have done some origin-of-life research (or at least thought about the question), and I'm interested to hear everyone's opinion. All the above was just background, not to be considered any sort of answer to the question.
Now hold on a second. You're misinterpreting me here. My point wasn't that 2.7bya was some piddling little number. My point was that the earliest known complex life is a billion years older than what the (misleading) headline claimed was the oldest known life.
if there were terrestrial microbial communities, there was almost certainly an ozone layer (to protect them from the otherwise-deadly UV radiation), and an ozone layer can only develop if there's a significant amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere.
The rapid development of early life just amazes me. Only a few hundred million years after Heavy Bombardment, there's evidence of prevelant bacterial life in the oceans. Meaning that as soon as life could move to the oceans, it evolved to completely fill the niche. While that life may seem relatively simple now, it's an incredible leap forward from assembly of organic molecules.
Now that researchers are starting to push back the date of life on land (and this research pushes it pretty far back), those organisms living in the oceans must have evolved oxygenic photosynthesis (a rather complicated metabolic pathway) relatively early in their evolutionary history.
Coupled with the recent research related to modern salmon evolution in response to pressure we're putting on them, think of what this means for the pace of evolution! We usually think of evolution as a slow accretion of traits that's almost imperceptibly slow. But now it appears that early bacteria evolved an entirely new metabolic pathway within a relatively short period of time.
Given, it might seem a little weird to be thinking of millions of years as a "short" period of time, but just think about what humans were doing millions of years ago. And look at what sort of behaviors we've evolved since then.
(just a little discussion-hook to get any non-scientists interested again).
Reading the article again, I assumed that they used C12:C13 to determine biological origin (it's pretty standard). Instead, they used reduced carbon analysis, something that I'm not familiar with. It looks like they used the C12:C13 data to prove that it was from land rather than ocean. I'd be interested to know exactly how they did that, though...
Oh well. I guess my little science-spiel was informative, but not totally geared towards the findings.
Actually, they're not talking about C13 dating. Instead, they're referring to C12/C13 ratios. Enzymes preferentially use lighter isotopes over heavier ones, and thus organisms end up taking in and carrying around a lot more C12 than C13.
Therefore, wherever an organism has died (as long as it had enzymes), you'll find a higher ratio of C12:C13 than you'd normally expect. Since these aren't radioactive isotopes, they don't decay, and you can use them to check for life loooong ago.
That's one of the major pieces of evidence allowing the 3.8 billion-year old stromatolites (see an earlier post of mine) to be assigned biological origins: much higher C12:C13 ratios than anything surrounding them.
Summary-- the main difference between C12:C13 and C13-dating is that C12:C13 can only be used to find out if something was biologically formed, while C-13 can be used to find out how old something biological was.
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The "robbing a bank" analogy is horrible in this context. We're talking about making discoveries that could conceivably make a difference in people's lives. So basically, it's like if I come to you and borrow your car, you're not giving me consent to pick up a dying man from the side of the road and drive him to the hospital.
And no, many medical researchers aren't doctors in the sense you mean. Sure, they have a PhD, and possibly an MD, too. But they don't make a physician's or surgeon's salary. Instead, the lead researcher probably only makes $50-70k. The people working under him the lab, possibly also PhDs, probably make somewhere under 50k.
Pure research isn't at all the lucrative field you seem to think it is.
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You know, I hadn't thought about research that might be done regarding beneficial sporadic mutations....I suppose those would definitely be unique to *you* and possibly have great scientific importance.
However, would you really want to restrict research on something that could help everyone just because you want a patent on your own tissue? That would mean all labs that want to work with the tissue would have to pay you some sort of fee on top of the already hugely expensive cost of chemicals. Just yesterday I paid $200 for WATER from a supply company (given, it was 18L of guaranteed protease-, RNAse-, and DNAse-free water).
The point made in later posts that, "If they're going to patent anyway, I want my cut" has to be addressed, too. Imagine this situation: when you give a biopsy, all you do is sit back and let them cut a little piece out of you. The scientist that uses the tissue for research then spends the next 10 years analyzing some undiscovered property of all human cells that he found in your biopsy. Whe the scientist finally feels he has enough to publish, he tries to patent his amazing discovery (let's leave the issue of whether or not patenting the discovery is right alone for now). What many people are saying on this forum is that, even though all they did was let someone take a chunk of them, they want a cut of the profits. Even though they had nothing to do with the 10 years of 40-80 hour work weeks, they want their hard-earned money, damn it! To me, that sounds like some greedy get-rich-quick scheme. Rewarding someone for for doing nothing at the expense of a researcher's life work just feels wrong.
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Just a random connection I made in my brain while reading a paper where they used immortalized rat hepatocyte cells....
Immortalizing cell lines, growing them up, running expt.'s, and then expanding the results to almost all cells of the same type is pretty common these days (with some reservations). But it just struck me as funny that we're taking results from what are basically cancer cells and applying them to healthy cells that can be found in a tissue/organ. Yes, I realize that often there's only one or two differences between the immortalized and normal cells....but what if that difference is in a cell-cycle control that does many other things, too (c-Mos, for example)?
By the way, at this point I'm actually curious and hoping people will post some answer...is there any way to control for just how wacked-out immortalized cells are? How do you make sure that whatever factor makes them immortalized isn't interfering with the work you're doing?
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OK, first off, that's a horribly worded reference to the article. It makes it sound as if doctors are taking the biopsies themselves with out permission. What's really going on is that doctors need to take some tissue anyway to do some test for a disease; and then they're done, rather than just throwing the rest of the tissue away they pass it on to other scientists that need to work with the same kind of tissue.
It's not as if they're patenting chemicals/cells that can only be found in *you*. Things like that would be next to useless, since the only person that could possibly use discoveries related to the "unique" thing would be yourself.
In this context, they're referring to chemicals/cells that haven't been discovered yet. These things are probably ubiquitous molecules (present in every other human being) that no one has looked for yet.
Therefore, scientists aren't trying to find extra-special bits of you to *steal* (as the article and first few posts seem to suggest). All they're trying to do is save a little money by skipping the costs of figuring out legal language for a consent form, etc. Whatever is biopsied from you is only used in the capacity of representing human cells, not your own.
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To me, downloading copyrighted music could be viewed as a protest against the exorbitant prices charged by the music industry. When CDs first appeared everyone was shocked at the high price, but the RIAA promised that it was only so expensive because it was a new technology, and that it was worth it for the increased sound quality.
It's now how many years later, and CDs actually cost the same amount of money (if not more) than when they debuted. And don't try to tell me that making CDs is just as expensive now as when CDs appeared.
I believe that downloading copyrighted songs says, "I'm sick and tired of paying $16-20 for a CD it cost the recording industry $1-$5 to make. I refused to be taken advantage of just because the alternative method of distribution is under attack by the RIAA's own lawyer-goons."
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2cooltek.com. All your cooling desires, satisfied in one place. And if you want a shock, check out the high-output 120mm fans and the Black Label 80mm fan. So loud, it's hard to be heard over them, but if you want high cfm, they're the way to go.
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We take them for granted, but just think about what a chipset fan does...Runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (at least mine does), makes almost no noise, and only wears out after several years. That's at least 17,250 hours of use, continually spinning at 7200rpm.
Now consider that out of all the fan manufacturers, Sunon is well-known as a one of the best, supplying not only normal fans, but also ultra-high-output and/or super-quiet varieties.
Scoff scoff, just a fan.
And CmdrTaco is "just a programmer."
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If it were just a matter of producing some proteins and seperating them from a mixture, you could genetically engineer bacteria to do it.
Actually, they did. I don't have a link to the original article, but there's mention of it here.
There's a nice very in-depth paper regarding self-assembling biomolecular structures here. Figure 6 is especially pertinent, since it shows the current model for how the glycine and alanine residues are oriented in spider silk.
But don't get me wrong, I very much agree with you that going from a bunch of subunits to a strand of silk isn't as simple as they make it sound. I can only assume that the researchers have found some way to make it work (no other reason to spend all the time and money making the goats) but are keeping it secret, probably because they're not quite ready to publish yet.
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Retroviruses don't harm us? Perhaps you've never heard of a sarcoma virus. There are a whole lot of them out there, and a several are so well understood that they're used as vectors for genetic recombination. So they're pretty useful...
But they can cause cancer. Gee, I'd say that's pretty harmful, wouldn't you? And don't even try to disagree with me about sarcoma viruses causing cancer. Go read any microbiology textbook if you're feeling uppity.
And don't start on the "killing a host is suicide" kick. That's utter bullshit and pseudo-science. Compare the lifespan of a microorganism and a human. Killing a host is only suicide if the lifespan of the human after infection becomes shorter than the time it would take for the virus to infect another host. But guess what....it takes 10-20 years for HIV to cause AIDS. Not only do single virus particles not "live" that long, there is plenty of time to pass on progeny to other individuals.
Latency: there is none. Instead, there's a 10/20 year lag before onset of symptoms simply because your body fights a losing battle. Your immune system is constantly fighting against HIV infection, but the act of resistance causes the virus to spread between immune cells (macrophages and T cells, especially). So the infection is progressing IMMEDIATELY, but you only see symptoms 10-years down the line because at first your immune system is quite healthy, but over time HIV manages to kill off almost all of your helper-T cells (which are responsible for keeping your immune system active). When that happens, AIDS symptoms set in. The virus HIV has no symptoms of its own, except for destruction of immune response. Everything else is associated with AIDS is a symptom of secondary infections.
Admittedly, there is a lot HIV that we don't know. And I agree that it might be advantageous to look into some more radical lines of research.
But I think it's a travesty that a homophobe like Duesbirg can influence people like you in an attempt to draw research money away from real attempts to solve this problem. You did know that's why most people ignore him now, right? He decided to put his own personal distaste for homosexuals before scientific objectivity. But now that many, many heterosexuals have been infected, he's still spewing an extremist line. I wish he'd shut up.
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Hmmm....now I'm starting to doubt the theatre that you saw the movie in. The blacks were well-balanced when I saw the film. So well-balanced, in fact, that whenever you (rarely) saw actual sunlight in the film, it hurt your eyes because you were so used to pitch black.
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I was actually amazed at the some of the cinematography (separate from photography) used in the film. As for the photography, I was pretty puzzled about the graininess myself. But I believe that the lack of detail in the shadows was both intentional and brilliant. One scene in particular struck me, when the crew is bringing back the first photographer after his collapse. The entire screen is almost totally black except for the barely-visible floating heads of the main characters, vieweed from slightly below.
The end result is a huge amount of the screen that could contain anything. Monsters, things that go bump in the night, etc. Creeeepy.
A few people I saw the movie with me commented on the same thing, but didn't like it. So I'm going to guess that it's all a matter of personal preference. *shrug*
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I interpreted the opening as a sort of mini-statement on films as they relate to reality. As the credits begin we see the outside of what could be an opulent movie house, and scratchy movie-soundtrack music begins to play. We begin to move towards the front door of the theater. As we pass it, the music loses its scratchiness and becomes real. We begin to see realistic faces, but they are horrible and twisted. The credits climax with a man on horseback killing a helpless naked man. After that, we begin to pull back, until we finally emerge from the front door of the theatre and the music becomes scratchy and "fake" again.
The credits are roughly analogous to the movie Nosferatu if we take the events in Shadow of the Vampire to be true. Whenever we watch Nosferatu we are amazed at how real Shreck's performance is and how surrealy creepy everything is. But we still think it's a movie (hence the scratchy movie-soundtrack music outside the theatre represents the belief that we're just watching a production). But if you really look inside what happened (travel inside the theater) you see that everything is horrifyingly real (music loses its scratchiness).
OR, Merhige could be making an observation on the suspension of disbelief that occurs while watching a movie. Outside the theatre you know it's just a movie (scratchy music) but once you get inside and the movie begins you are completely transported inside the movie, and believe, if only for 2 hours, that the events occuring are/were real. Murnau's final speech in Shadow of the Vampire also suggests this theme: (paraphrashing) "No longer will people say, 'You had to be there,' " thus suggesting that those who see a movie will have actually been there in some capacity.
So there's my little analysis of the credits. What does everyone else think?
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A little-known fact about A.I. is that Kubrick was initially working with Chris Cunningham on it. Cunningham (a film prodigy who designed creatures for Clive Barker's Nightbreed at age 16) is best-known for directing several music videos, including ones for Aphex Twin (Come to Daddy and Windowlicker), Bjork (All is Full of Love), Madonna (Frozen), Squarepusher (Come on My Selector), Portishead (Only You), Leftfield (Africa Shoxx), and several Auteurs videos.
Cunningham was working with Kubrick on A.I. for about a year and a half, and now he's working on a film version of Gibson's Neuromancer. Personally, I can't think of anyone who I'd rather have work on Neuromancer, especially since I'm sure Cunningham would kill anyone who even suggested he make it like that POS Johnny Mnemonic. It's too bad that he didn't continue work on A.I., as his artistic style could have doubtless made it a mind-blowing experience.
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I agree with you on some points. Making a virus that interferes with the reproductive cycle of a species is so totally short-sighted that I'm horrified they even thought of it.
However, I'm not so sure the bioengineer/alchemist comparison is fair. It is true that large pieces of the puzzle are missing. However, through bold experimentation large pieces of the puzzle have also been filled in. The problem is the sheer size of the puzzle. With billions and billions of pieces, we never appear to know very much.
Random experimentation is not used. At all. To do research, you need grants. And to get grants, you need to write proposals. And if the proposal is, "We want to do X, even though we don't have any idea what it will do," then you don't get the grant. I have no doubt that the researchers who engineered the virus were almost positive they knew what it would do. However, cellular interactions on an organismal scale are incredibly hard to predict, and they guessed wrong. But that does not mean that we should stop guessing and just sit there poking at things we're sure about! Really exciting discoveries aren't made when you already know the answer, but when you're trying to find the answer.
One last nitpicking thing: Mad cow disease isn't a mutation to infect other animals. There's a lot of contention on the subject right now, but it appears to be some sort of inorganic agent that causes a specific neuronal protein to refold and form amyloid plaques. The neuronal protein is present in all mammals, but is slightly different between some groups. For example, cows and humans have similar forms of the protein and can infect eachother, but mice and humans have slightly different forms of the protein and cannot infect eachother.
Computer models have to (obviously) be programmed. Therefore, the programmer must already know all of the factors that might come into play in the model, and what value each factor can have. Ecological computer models work decently enough because there are only a few hundred to a few thousand variables to be considered. In an organism, there are not only millions of variables, but we still don't know how a large percentage of the variables interact with one another.
Therefore, it's impossible for us to ask a program "What would happen if I introduced X into the organism?" and get consisitently accurate responses. To get answers, we still have to perform experiments.
Judging from your post, it sounds like you're just making up having a rough childhood from things you've seen on TV.
If you're a smart kid in elementary- to middle-school today (or within the last 10 years), you most likely have problems unless you're also a natural social butterfly.
Sadly, part of school is dominance games. Some kids rise to the top of the pecking order. And to maintain that status, they have to show how much power they have over other kids. But they couldn't pick on anyone who's too high up on the social ladder, or they'd be seen as an asshole.
And guess who's usually lacking in social skills during those formative years? You got it....the different kids. I'm talking about anyone who's a little weird, in any way. And people with smarts are different.
Because of that, smart kids don't have to be smart-asses to be picked on. It doesn't take announcing the answer first to be targeted. All it takes is getting most of the answers right. You're right, it does sound like you were a smart-ass, by announcing the answer to a problem before anyone else had started working. But most smart kids, including me, werent. In fact, I never talked during class unless called upon by a teacher. However, the other kids started to catch on to the fact that I always knew the answer. And that's when trouble starts.
Hmmmm....since the entire human genome is around 3 billion bp, you'd have to grab 3,000 megabase chunks. That's certainly doable, but would take some coordinating to organize who grabbed what, and how to finally composite the whole thing. And with that kind of planned work, Celera would have excellent grounds for a lawsuit.
Hopefully you get this question before the topic is buried. I, sadly, don't have a personal subscription to Science. Do you have the reference to that chirality selection article?
PNAS Paper:
/. story. There are all sorts of questions to be asked/commented on. Of course, we'd have to limit the discussion quite a bit. Possibly narrow things down to the actual origin of life (what starts accretion in the clouds, for example) as opposed to the origin of life on earth. If we try that, though, we don't have much evidence to go on. So maybe switch things around to what form life might have been in when thrust onto earth? Just throwing out some ideas.
Brown, Rau, Johnson, Bacote, Gibbs, and Gajdusck. New studies on the heat resistance of hamster-adapted scrapie agent: Threshold survival after ashing at 600 degree C suggests an inorganic template of replication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 97: 3418-3421.
I had heard of chemistry paralleling theoretical prebiotic chem occurring in interstellar clouds, but had never heard of actual amino acids occuring within them...whoah. Is it possible to detect which aa's are present and in which proportions?
Also, have nucleic acids been detected in these clouds? If they're shielded from UV and other ionizing radioations, it could theoretically be possible. But if they haven't been detected, that would suggest a sort of switcharoo evolution of biotic informational chemistry. ie - amino acid chains carrying information, then a switch to RNA carrying info, then a switch to DNA carrying info while amino acid chains start doing all the diry work.
The idea of seeding has always intrigued me, and I think it would be great for a
It would be great to have a lot of people commenting on this. I know there are some exosci's out there, and any organic or biochemists could no doubt lend expertise on the feasibility of synthesis of certain compounds via accretion.
What do you say, tesserae....want to submit it?
One big problem with with your central idea there. Humans been evolving themselves ever since we figured out how to keep Nature from killing a majority of us off.
Nature selects for traits by killing off individuals before they are able to reproduce. But you may have noticed recently that modern medical science keeps that from happening in the majority of cases. Near-sighted Timmy is no longer unable to findfood, and thus survives. Little Susie, born with a genetic defect that will paralyze her from the wait down by the time she is 10, can still get around in a wheelchair.
If Nature were still the dominant evolutionary force in our lives, these people would be DEAD long before they had a chance to pass on their genome.
Currently, the only thing evolving humans is social pressure. We are evolving ourselves through our own social likes and dislikes. For example, it's an accepted fact that the human race is slowly growing taller. Nature can also cause a shift towards height, but only in high-temperature climes (to promote heat dissipation). But if we want heat dissipation, we turn on the AC, so Nature has nothing to do with it. Instead, we're getting taller because height seems to be socially desirable. Simply, tall people have more kids that survive to reproduce than short people.
So now everyone's in a tiff because we're going to start actively participating in our own evolution. They think we don't know enough to be having a hand in things, and are afraid that we're going to fuck things up for the rest of the ecosystem BULLSHIT.
- We have been unconsciously evolving ourselves for centuries.
- Evolution doesn't care about the ecosystem. In nature, if a trait comes along that puts another organism so far ahead that it takes over, then that organism will take over. No ifs ands or buts. And that organism will stay dominant until another organism evolves something to bring that other organism under control.
- Constant "supplementing" of our own evolution is the only thing that keeps the entire human race from being wiped off the face of the earth. We have been doing a good job keeping microorganisms under control for a while, but recent mutations have brought some supreme badasses onto the playing field. Biochemically, there is no way for our own immune system to deal with viruses like HIV. Even with gene therapy, it's doubtful that we'll ever be totally immune to HIV. If you want to talk evolution, without constant meddling viruses would kill the entire population in less than a century. That's because HIV hits after reproductive maturity, so there's no way for natural evolution to select against it. Without behavior modification (social influence on evolution), HIV alone could kill us all. Not to mention all those other cool retroviruses.
Some people talk like Nature is some all-knowing force that's trying to keep everything in balance. Nature doesn't care about balance. Nature is. Things happen. And every organism on the face of the planet is trying to survive what's happening, while possibly making life very hard for all the other organisms.Sorry to switch gears a little, but you reminded me of a question that I'm hoping others will have thoughts on. In relatively recent history there was a school of thought that traced the origin of life to clay templates. For a while people scoffed, but then the idea started to catch on. But lately there's been some nay-saying, because people haven't found any examples of inorganics acting as templates for organics, and the clay mineral theory suggested that the phenomenon may still be occurring.
Quick segue into prions. These are really weird diseases of the brain that people were starting to think were replicating proteins (flying in the face of the Central Dogma of Biology). Now, in the June issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), it was found that prions are still infectious after exposure to 600 degrees C. No organic molecule can withstand that, so the researchers speculated this might be an example of an inorganic template for biological replication (no clues yet as to what it could be).
SO, what do you guys think about the possibility of an inorganic origin of organic life? We've obviously got some people that have done some origin-of-life research (or at least thought about the question), and I'm interested to hear everyone's opinion. All the above was just background, not to be considered any sort of answer to the question.
Now hold on a second. You're misinterpreting me here. My point wasn't that 2.7bya was some piddling little number. My point was that the earliest known complex life is a billion years older than what the (misleading) headline claimed was the oldest known life.
if there were terrestrial microbial communities, there was almost certainly an ozone layer (to protect them from the otherwise-deadly UV radiation), and an ozone layer can only develop if there's a significant amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere.
The rapid development of early life just amazes me. Only a few hundred million years after Heavy Bombardment, there's evidence of prevelant bacterial life in the oceans. Meaning that as soon as life could move to the oceans, it evolved to completely fill the niche. While that life may seem relatively simple now, it's an incredible leap forward from assembly of organic molecules.
Now that researchers are starting to push back the date of life on land (and this research pushes it pretty far back), those organisms living in the oceans must have evolved oxygenic photosynthesis (a rather complicated metabolic pathway) relatively early in their evolutionary history.
Coupled with the recent research related to modern salmon evolution in response to pressure we're putting on them, think of what this means for the pace of evolution! We usually think of evolution as a slow accretion of traits that's almost imperceptibly slow. But now it appears that early bacteria evolved an entirely new metabolic pathway within a relatively short period of time.
Given, it might seem a little weird to be thinking of millions of years as a "short" period of time, but just think about what humans were doing millions of years ago. And look at what sort of behaviors we've evolved since then.
(just a little discussion-hook to get any non-scientists interested again).
Reading the article again, I assumed that they used C12:C13 to determine biological origin (it's pretty standard). Instead, they used reduced carbon analysis, something that I'm not familiar with. It looks like they used the C12:C13 data to prove that it was from land rather than ocean. I'd be interested to know exactly how they did that, though...
Oh well. I guess my little science-spiel was informative, but not totally geared towards the findings.
Actually, they're not talking about C13 dating. Instead, they're referring to C12/C13 ratios. Enzymes preferentially use lighter isotopes over heavier ones, and thus organisms end up taking in and carrying around a lot more C12 than C13.
Therefore, wherever an organism has died (as long as it had enzymes), you'll find a higher ratio of C12:C13 than you'd normally expect. Since these aren't radioactive isotopes, they don't decay, and you can use them to check for life loooong ago.
That's one of the major pieces of evidence allowing the 3.8 billion-year old stromatolites (see an earlier post of mine) to be assigned biological origins: much higher C12:C13 ratios than anything surrounding them.
Summary-- the main difference between C12:C13 and C13-dating is that C12:C13 can only be used to find out if something was biologically formed, while C-13 can be used to find out how old something biological was.