Cauliflower mosaic virus infects various different plants that you eat (yes, even non-gmo "organically grown" ones) including turnips.
You already get fully formed protein VI in any of them you eat that were infected. So, this isn't something new. We've been eating the protein they're upset about for millenia at least.
The sequence for protein VI overlaps part of this 35S promoter that's used in some genetics work. It's not normally expressed (changed from DNA into the active protein) and in fact they couldn't find any evidence that it ever was.
So, they asked the question "what if" this thing we never see happen did by some miracle happen. And when they did, they still couldn't find anything that looked dangerous. But, being scientists, they said they couldn't absolutely, completely, absitively and posolutely rule out any effects on the plants themselves.
So, there you have it. The thing we never see happen, even if it did happen is the same as something that already happens all the time for the past millenia with no known ill effects.
One thing I like about racists. They confirm their ignorance regularly.
Go learn something about Africa. And then learn something about what stone age means.
Yes, there are a tiny tiny minority that could be considered stone age (like there are in areas of South America and some other isolated areas), but thankfully they'd still be far better dinner company than you.:)
Sure sounds like trolling. Especially the "I know I'm better" part.
(I'm more amused than anything else, as it reminded me of a scene in the movie Mulholland Falls where someone is saying "I'm better than you!" just before he gets tossed out of an airplane. Ironically, in this case, it was a military type saying it.)
"it won't be the direct chemical effects of the fluid that will harm me."
Yes it will. Assuming you don't catch fire, the n-hexane can cause periperal neuropathy. Various of the volatiles will cause stupor. And some of the PAHs in it are carcinogens, etc, etc.
And even if it does catch fire before that let me give you a shocker. I know it's hard to believe, but fire is a chemical reaction. And (wait for it) the heat from the fire damages you via chemical reactions.
The oddball crazy ones you can just have some low level staffer dismiss as not serious. The ones that are funny and you get points for answering in a humorous way like the Death Star one are great PR.
It's the ones that present more thorny issues, and or are being asked by people who are serious but you disagree with that are the problem.
You can't ignore them completely if they get the required number.
You also can't just have them brushed off with a "thank you please come again" reply. It's an official response, and can be quoted against you if it's thoughtlessly or flippantly written. And just writing "no comment" could be even worse.
So, it's better for them to have a higher bar for having to answer.
Just because someone isn't developing doesn't neccessarily mean they aren't aging.
She may be accumulating some of the various types of damage that we all undergo as part of aging, but just not progressing in maturing to an adult state.
When a child develops from the reproductive cells of the parents effectively all or nearly all of the changes of aging present in the parents are undone. Brooke's genetic makeup may only be blocking SOME of those aging related changes along with blocking maturation.
As time goes on, assuming she stays alive and healthy enough for the studies (Gads, that sounds so cold and clinical. She's a human being with health difficulties not just a research object.) the researchers can see if some aging processes start becoming evident. But, 20 years old is still awfully young to be able to detect those.
What may be possible is to see what genetic changes she has and then try to recreate similar ones in lab animals that age faster than humans.
The writer wants greater influence from scientists who agree with him.
I suspect that given the chance to have given Edward Teller or William Shockley greater influence on global security, he might decline.
On the other hand, he might have wanted more influence by someone like Linus Pauling.
All three mentioned were good scientists in their fields. So, the criterion becomes what their positions are rather than just that they are good scientists.
Network connected computers are powerful and dangerous items can be used to do illegal and "damaging" things (like leak classified diplomatic cables or video evidence pertaining to a rape) or commit property crimes (like downloading a digital copy of the music you already own on vinyl, but have no digital rights to).
They already contain powerful microprocessors and comm gear that could be required to submit each network related action to a central clearing authority for approval.
It would be easy to modify the existing hardware to create cryptographic systems built into the chips to prevent legitimate users from bypassing this requirement. This would remove any idle temptation to commit a crime on the part of the good law abiding people.
Obviously, criminals would not be detered from modifying their machines, but we would have raised the bar and thus eliminated many of the criminal acts and forced a higher degree of sophistication to be used
(Sarcasm flags activated for the clueless. It's obvious how the examples transfer to the subject at hand and all the problems thus arising.)
The line between a dose that will reliably put a random person out against their will and what can shut down breathing or perhaps cause vomit aspiration is famously thin when you don't know about drug interactions, medical conditions, if they drank a couple beers on the way home, etc. etc.
If they'd drank the whole thing, maybe they'd have been alright, but then again maybe not.
"I bet you've never had to go into a small company and try and reconstruct its' last 2 or 3 years' accounts"
Bad bet. That's part of how I got a multilevel promotion from a part time night operator at that company to the lead sysadmin.
(And basically gave up finishing my PhD in order to take the job. It was 3 times what I'd ever made, and to a grad student in debt with student loans that's hard to pass up.)
I was part of reconstructing the inventory/receivable accounts that got lost due to bad backups and disk failure combined with poor paper records policies.
As usual, much stupidity and complacency was involved in the lead up to that.
The entire sysadmin team (two, it was a small place) left shortly after the initial cleanup (It was management's fault for the mess, not theirs). I can't say I blame them.
Needless to say, solid tested backups were the first thing implemented when I took over as lead sysadmin. The budget to put that in place was a condition of my accepting the job.
I was still fighting the residues of the fallout from that fiasco when that office shut down some years later.
The reports that I was referring to were duplicated in multiple other ways, and were derived data, rather than being directly useful for reconstruction of the original data.
The multiple copies of the largely useless info and the lack of backups on the actual data led to a surreal situation.
It was effectively like the plastic forks were stored in a vault and the fine silverware was tossed randomly into a corner.
"I think hard copies are wonderful things"
I think so too. But that assumes they're copies of the right information in the first place.
When I still worked in IT for a small financial company, I had to make sure tens of thousands of sheets of paper were printed daily for just our little company (50 or so). (Much of it reports that would be stored for N years, never looked at and then shredded. Aren't hard copy retention policies wonderful?)
So, it might be a pretty reasonable estimate when averaged over less paper intensive companies.
"Yes, but radiation dose is a cumulative dose. The effect may not be exactly the same as receiving it all at once in a microburst, but the chance for DNA mutation is probably statistically close to being the same."
You get the same damages, but you also have DNA repair mechanisms and other cellular repair mechanisms that can handle a certain amount of trouble. Yes, you might get unlucky and get a mutation that makes that cell go immediately cancerous (Think of it as a golden BB). But, what happens more often is the damage builds up faster in large numbers of cells than it can be repaired and causes a cascade of problems.
A fast dose acts differently than a cumulative one over time. (That's not saying either is good. They're just different.)
Also, there are a number of effects that could be happening. Alzheimers only becomes symptomatic after a fair bit of damage. You have a neuronal reserve capability that can deal with some damage and still keep working fine. This is why drinking alcohol doesn't immediately cause neurological deficits. Though some cells are killed, the brain is redundant and other cells can pick up the slack as it were. After many years of heavy drinking, enough damage has been done that problems start to show up.
Almost anything that depletes neuronal reserve would be expected to accelerate alzheimers as it thus takes less damage from alzheimers itself to become symptomatic. This is why things like mild brain injury or chronic alcoholism would be expected increase the risk of alzheimers. (That's definitely seen for mild brain injury. Alcoholic dementia is similar to alzheimers in some ways and is thus hard to separate and get good cause and effect data so it can only be said to "probably" increase thge risk.)
The mice are already prone to alzheimers, so they have a major head start and may well react far more to something that kille some brain cells.
This study is an indication that there may be trouble of this kind. Further work is needed to determine whether this is likely to happen in significant amounts to human astronauts exposed at lower rates over longer times.
I hope there's a way to block this. For example, the following $1 message comes to mind:
"Hi, I'm the one who was sent to prison due to your testimony about me repeatedly beating your daughter while she lived with me. I just wanted to let you know that I've been released and am thinking of you. Much love!"
The treaty was a result of proposals from many different countries including the US that were voted on in the meetings over the last several days. The language that is most being objected to was inserted in a late night session just before the end.
Attempting to force a whole US written treaty on the proceedings outside of the normal UN channels would be a far greater act of disregarding the ITU process than just refusing to sign the final version.
There's an amazing amount of misunderstanding in your post for it being so short.
I ordered 3 wireless routers from NewEgg and got an offer that I could get a copy of Win 8 Pro sold to me with each, but with a %100 discount, i.e. free.
Now, since it was "sold" to me with a "discount", I'm sure my "purchase" was included in that inflated figure of Win 8 sales that was put out recently.
I might install one on a swappable drive just to try it, but they're currently collecting dust and two of them probably will continue to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
May Maisy have an amazing maize maze, Aunt May?
Cauliflower mosaic virus infects various different plants that you eat (yes, even non-gmo "organically grown" ones) including turnips.
You already get fully formed protein VI in any of them you eat that were infected. So, this isn't something new. We've been eating the protein they're upset about for millenia at least.
The sequence for protein VI overlaps part of this 35S promoter that's used in some genetics work. It's not normally expressed (changed from DNA into the active protein) and in fact they couldn't find any evidence that it ever was.
So, they asked the question "what if" this thing we never see happen did by some miracle happen. And when they did, they still couldn't find anything that looked dangerous. But, being scientists, they said they couldn't absolutely, completely, absitively and posolutely rule out any effects on the plants themselves.
So, there you have it. The thing we never see happen, even if it did happen is the same as something that already happens all the time for the past millenia with no known ill effects.
"They're stuck in the stone age"
One thing I like about racists. They confirm their ignorance regularly.
Go learn something about Africa. And then learn something about what stone age means.
Yes, there are a tiny tiny minority that could be considered stone age (like there are in areas of South America and some other isolated areas), but thankfully they'd still be far better dinner company than you. :)
So...
How do you make "gourmet" horseburgers?
That'd even keep Wimpy fed!
Sure sounds like trolling. Especially the "I know I'm better" part.
(I'm more amused than anything else, as it reminded me of a scene in the movie Mulholland Falls where someone is saying "I'm better than you!" just before he gets tossed out of an airplane. Ironically, in this case, it was a military type saying it.)
"I have a purpose in life"
Trolling slashdot?
"it won't be the direct chemical effects of the fluid that will harm me."
Yes it will. Assuming you don't catch fire, the n-hexane can cause periperal neuropathy. Various of the volatiles will cause stupor. And some of the PAHs in it are carcinogens, etc, etc.
And even if it does catch fire before that let me give you a shocker. I know it's hard to believe, but fire is a chemical reaction. And (wait for it) the heat from the fire damages you via chemical reactions.
Wanna try again for a better example?
"I run screaming from a TV when I see just the Fox logo."
I wish some of my coworkers were like that. Just hold up an LCD screen with that on it and they leave immediately.
Kind of like a glyph or warding.
It's not the bogus ones that are the problem.
The oddball crazy ones you can just have some low level staffer dismiss as not serious. The ones that are funny and you get points for answering in a humorous way like the Death Star one are great PR.
It's the ones that present more thorny issues, and or are being asked by people who are serious but you disagree with that are the problem.
You can't ignore them completely if they get the required number.
You also can't just have them brushed off with a "thank you please come again" reply. It's an official response, and can be quoted against you if it's thoughtlessly or flippantly written. And just writing "no comment" could be even worse.
So, it's better for them to have a higher bar for having to answer.
Just because someone isn't developing doesn't neccessarily mean they aren't aging.
She may be accumulating some of the various types of damage that we all undergo as part of aging, but just not progressing in maturing to an adult state.
When a child develops from the reproductive cells of the parents effectively all or nearly all of the changes of aging present in the parents are undone. Brooke's genetic makeup may only be blocking SOME of those aging related changes along with blocking maturation.
As time goes on, assuming she stays alive and healthy enough for the studies (Gads, that sounds so cold and clinical. She's a human being with health difficulties not just a research object.) the researchers can see if some aging processes start becoming evident. But, 20 years old is still awfully young to be able to detect those.
What may be possible is to see what genetic changes she has and then try to recreate similar ones in lab animals that age faster than humans.
The writer wants greater influence from scientists who agree with him.
I suspect that given the chance to have given Edward Teller or William Shockley greater influence on global security, he might decline.
On the other hand, he might have wanted more influence by someone like Linus Pauling.
All three mentioned were good scientists in their fields. So, the criterion becomes what their positions are rather than just that they are good scientists.
I'm wearing a t-shirt from Woot and have an old Bloom County cartoon of Opus doing battle with a Ronco ad spouting TV set stuck on my mini-fridge.
Does that count?
"I'd challenge anyone to show me any idea anywhere that has been fool-proof."
Nature's idea/invention of aging leading to death in higher animals.
That may change, but so far it's absolute as far as humans.
Network connected computers are powerful and dangerous items can be used to do illegal and "damaging" things (like leak classified diplomatic cables or video evidence pertaining to a rape) or commit property crimes (like downloading a digital copy of the music you already own on vinyl, but have no digital rights to).
They already contain powerful microprocessors and comm gear that could be required to submit each network related action to a central clearing authority for approval.
It would be easy to modify the existing hardware to create cryptographic systems built into the chips to prevent legitimate users from bypassing this requirement. This would remove any idle temptation to commit a crime on the part of the good law abiding people.
Obviously, criminals would not be detered from modifying their machines, but we would have raised the bar and thus eliminated many of the criminal acts and forced a higher degree of sophistication to be used
(Sarcasm flags activated for the clueless. It's obvious how the examples transfer to the subject at hand and all the problems thus arising.)
"I am not a doctor"
It shows.
The line between a dose that will reliably put a random person out against their will and what can shut down breathing or perhaps cause vomit aspiration is famously thin when you don't know about drug interactions, medical conditions, if they drank a couple beers on the way home, etc. etc.
If they'd drank the whole thing, maybe they'd have been alright, but then again maybe not.
"I bet you've never had to go into a small company and try and reconstruct its' last 2 or 3 years' accounts"
Bad bet. That's part of how I got a multilevel promotion from a part time night operator at that company to the lead sysadmin.
(And basically gave up finishing my PhD in order to take the job. It was 3 times what I'd ever made, and to a grad student in debt with student loans that's hard to pass up.)
I was part of reconstructing the inventory/receivable accounts that got lost due to bad backups and disk failure combined with poor paper records policies.
As usual, much stupidity and complacency was involved in the lead up to that.
The entire sysadmin team (two, it was a small place) left shortly after the initial cleanup (It was management's fault for the mess, not theirs). I can't say I blame them.
Needless to say, solid tested backups were the first thing implemented when I took over as lead sysadmin. The budget to put that in place was a condition of my accepting the job.
I was still fighting the residues of the fallout from that fiasco when that office shut down some years later.
The reports that I was referring to were duplicated in multiple other ways, and were derived data, rather than being directly useful for reconstruction of the original data.
The multiple copies of the largely useless info and the lack of backups on the actual data led to a surreal situation.
It was effectively like the plastic forks were stored in a vault and the fine silverware was tossed randomly into a corner.
"I think hard copies are wonderful things"
I think so too. But that assumes they're copies of the right information in the first place.
Be careful what you ask for. On a slow day on slashdot, a petition to lauch all the anonymous cowards to space would be an easy sell. ;)
When I still worked in IT for a small financial company, I had to make sure tens of thousands of sheets of paper were printed daily for just our little company (50 or so). (Much of it reports that would be stored for N years, never looked at and then shredded. Aren't hard copy retention policies wonderful?)
So, it might be a pretty reasonable estimate when averaged over less paper intensive companies.
You remember when they told us about the "paperless office" the last time round?
They lied!
"Just send people who are already stupid. There's plenty of 'em"
C. M. Kornbluth already wrote a scifi story about that.
"Yes, but radiation dose is a cumulative dose. The effect may not be exactly the same as receiving it all at once in a microburst, but the chance for DNA mutation is probably statistically close to being the same."
You get the same damages, but you also have DNA repair mechanisms and other cellular repair mechanisms that can handle a certain amount of trouble. Yes, you might get unlucky and get a mutation that makes that cell go immediately cancerous (Think of it as a golden BB). But, what happens more often is the damage builds up faster in large numbers of cells than it can be repaired and causes a cascade of problems.
A fast dose acts differently than a cumulative one over time. (That's not saying either is good. They're just different.)
Also, there are a number of effects that could be happening. Alzheimers only becomes symptomatic after a fair bit of damage. You have a neuronal reserve capability that can deal with some damage and still keep working fine. This is why drinking alcohol doesn't immediately cause neurological deficits. Though some cells are killed, the brain is redundant and other cells can pick up the slack as it were. After many years of heavy drinking, enough damage has been done that problems start to show up.
Almost anything that depletes neuronal reserve would be expected to accelerate alzheimers as it thus takes less damage from alzheimers itself to become symptomatic. This is why things like mild brain injury or chronic alcoholism would be expected increase the risk of alzheimers. (That's definitely seen for mild brain injury. Alcoholic dementia is similar to alzheimers in some ways and is thus hard to separate and get good cause and effect data so it can only be said to "probably" increase thge risk.)
The mice are already prone to alzheimers, so they have a major head start and may well react far more to something that kille some brain cells.
This study is an indication that there may be trouble of this kind. Further work is needed to determine whether this is likely to happen in significant amounts to human astronauts exposed at lower rates over longer times.
I hope there's a way to block this. For example, the following $1 message comes to mind:
"Hi, I'm the one who was sent to prison due to your testimony about me repeatedly beating your daughter while she lived with me. I just wanted to let you know that I've been released and am thinking of you. Much love!"
The treaty was a result of proposals from many different countries including the US that were voted on in the meetings over the last several days. The language that is most being objected to was inserted in a late night session just before the end.
Attempting to force a whole US written treaty on the proceedings outside of the normal UN channels would be a far greater act of disregarding the ITU process than just refusing to sign the final version.
There's an amazing amount of misunderstanding in your post for it being so short.
I ordered 3 wireless routers from NewEgg and got an offer that I could get a copy of Win 8 Pro sold to me with each, but with a %100 discount, i.e. free.
Now, since it was "sold" to me with a "discount", I'm sure my "purchase" was included in that inflated figure of Win 8 sales that was put out recently.
I might install one on a swappable drive just to try it, but they're currently collecting dust and two of them probably will continue to do so.