"5% cheaper earbuds for you is not worth trashing millions of cubic meters of ocean."
The more powerful magnets and better batteries needed to switch over to nonhydroelectric renewable evergy sources use those very same rare earths. In large quantities compared to ear buds. Ditto more energy efficient motors.
So, by never mining any of them, you help keep everyone chained to other sources.
Church et al may be planning something more limited than that. At least initially. (I've not had a chance to look at even the abstracts of actual papers, so this is a guess).
The virii that target bacteria (phage) tend to hijack the existing stretches of dna that the bacteria themselves use for incorporating new dna. This makes sense, as it's less likely to disrupt something else if it lands in a pre-prepared area where the surrounding sequences are more of a known item.
If you can fiddle with those regions, (And, of course, the proteins/rna etc that interact with them. Nothing's ever easy.) it might confer a good bit of resistance to various phages without such massive changes in the whole coding scheme.
But, that also makes it easier for the phages to adapt to the new landing areas.
I very much agree it's good interesting work. I tend to throw a little cold water on things scientific here on slashdot. When these things get written up in the popular press and press releases from the university PR types, they get hyped so much that it's a good idea to point out the limitations and problems.
We certainly need better methods of developing organisms with whole new sets of functionality rather than just one minor change.
It's just that this work is one piece, not the finished method as you mention. You have to be able to grow these large numbers of varieties and then recognize which ones are better at what you want. That culturing and analysing slows things way down. You might be able to do some of that by tagging the desired cells with something that flouresces and then sorting them with flow cytometry to eliminate the need to culture all of them and check individual colonies.
Once you have an organism that produces what you want, you have to make sure the strain keeps doing that. The microbes won't be so hot on wasting energy to pump out some product for humans unless they have to. They'll tend to eliminate the trait. So, you still have to link it with some sort of addiction module or find a way of eliminating those microbes that stop doing what you want.
(Blatant plug for a great podcast: see TWiM, This Week in Microbiology at microbeworld.org/twim episode 7 for a fascinating discussion of addiction modules. Vince Racaniello and company utterly rock.)
One little hiccup in the idea of only modifying the coding regions is that IIRC there are some parts of the genome that can have dual functions. At one point something can be small part of a coding region, and also a small part of a different regulatory region that overlaps. (I'm admittedly not a geneticist, and I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that happens.) You might be able to modify just the areas that a virus preferentially targets for its dna to get incorporated into. Admittedly that's only a partial solution.
That's a lot of the reason for letting the microbes and evolution work it out. There will be a lot of little gotchas, and having more than one working example will help greatly.
It's good work, but the ideas aren't "revolutionary" the way they are portrayed.
Lateral gene transfer in bacteria has been known for a long time. It's how resistance to antibiotics is spread among bacteria for example.
It's also been used a good deal already by microbiologists/biochem types (that line is getting a little blurred these days).
Church's group has found a way to automate this.
They can create large numbers of bacterial strains which have some or all of the desired characteristics in a short time.
The downside is the needle of the desired organism is in a haystack of partially successful or unsuccessful ones. In this case, it was linked to production of a bright red chemical. You could determine which was closer to the right one by color. That's easy to automate.
Most characteristics won't be that easy to screen or automate.
Church then goes into what's really an old idea. Encrypting the genome so that it's resistant to existing virus types. You then use a modified ribosome to translate that into proteins. I remember discussions of that in the late 80/early 90s on some of the transhumanist newsgroups (anyone remember usenet?).
The devil in the details here is that much of the information in the genome isn't for coding proteins directly, but for regulating gene expressions and other purposes. Much of that latter we still don't understand. It's hard to design an encryption to preserve a functionality you don't understand.
So, instead of throwing up their hands, Church et al appeal to using the above automated method and the microbes to sort out something that works, but again we really won't understand. At least at first.
It's an interesting idea. Sounds like a lot of work even if automated.
But, as anyone who was caught up in the genetic algorithms craze in computers can attest, it's not a guaranteed solution.
You can propose all you want, but does anyone seriously think that in the lead up to a presidential election year this has an ice cubes chance in the infernal regions of happening?
If the politicians don't change anything, they can be mildly criticized if there is a successful attack. They can point to all the money they're appropriating to the TSA, and hold congressional investigations and say how horrified they are and puff themselves up as the great protectors of the flying public. Regardless that they really did nothing.
If they change anything, especially a major change like this, any successful attack will be blamed on the change and in turn, them.
Why would they do something that has at least some chance of hurting them politically when they can do nothing and be safe?
I fix lab equipment at a university and I do a lot of resurrecting older gear that's been in a closet for decades. I've still got some spare nixie tubes in a drawer.
Often the old gear will work just as well for many things, but it's not "the hot setup".
For some things, you need the capabilities of newer equipment, though.
At this point, it's still a research and development project.
On the other hand, CIWS and the like are pretty effective. I'm guessing they are looking for something that doesn't have the flight time delay and can engage more targets in a given time. (Of course, just putting more CIWS and ammunition for them on the ship mitigates that last.)
I'm not sure the horizon limitation really matters for defending against incoming threats.
"Will we be blowing the dust off of the Iowa class yet again?"
Actually, that'd be kinda cool. The big problem is they were very expensive ships to maintain and man.
It's difficult to make a reflective coating that reflects well enough at a broad range of frequencies. The mirrors in the laser usually only work that well at one frequency, and they have cooling systems built into them. They also aren't moving, don't have weight limitations and don't have to deal with weathering and dirt.
It's also hard to make a reflective coating that reflects well enough in all directions that the laser can hit from. Your missile has to be able to home in some way. If you have IR windows for a seeker, that's an area that isn't very reflective.
You just have to get a tiny area burnt through and then the energy from the laser will heat what's behind it so much that it'll blow the rest of the coating off or mechanically disrupt whatever the coating is on.
It can help. A little. And it adds weight and problems to the missile. It's been looked at for some time and found not to be a cure all by any means. It sounds like a good idea, but turns out to not be terribly practical.
Same for the old idea of spinning an incoming missile to distribute the energy. That one is about like pirouetting in front of a shotgun. The energy comes in way faster than a mechanical movement.
Let's see. That was in 2001. And it wasn't a laser.
Or maybe you're talking about the one way back in 1984 that convinced the Soviets we were much closer to a working capability than we were? That also wasn't a laser.
I seem to remember several full up tests that worked. (Admittedly not all of them.) Of course they were hit to kill vehicles.
If what you say is true, it's funny that the Navy also was able to hit a malfunctioning satellite last year with a ship launched missile from an Aegis ship.
They were also able to target a small boat at several miles with a laser earlier this year. (It was linked here on slashdot). Not a big blow up and boom, but still interesting.
Could it be that you just really don't know what you're talking about?
I take a look at my enormous laser And my troubles start a-meltin' away (ba-doom bop bop) I take a look at my enormous laser And the happy times are comin' to stay (be-doo)
The drones are remote controlled, thus the idea seems to be that human soldiers are not put into a war zone.
But, by that measure, wouldn't a fully robotic attack, like a first strike with ICBMs also not be hostile? At least at the time it's launched, the missile crew isn't in a war zone. That may change rather quickly.
Does this also mean that if your artillery outranges the opposition by a goodly range it's not hostile as the gun crew isn't in a war zone? Does this change if the other side buys some improved base bleed shells that have longer range?
It's a very odd measure of "hostile" no matter how you slice it.
"true-blue believers in communism and Maoism in the government"
Yes, and we have Tea Party members in the US government. We also have people in the government that are somewhere between Trotsky and Bakunin.
Are they likely to be the dominant force in it?
About as likely as a quick return to the Cultural Revolution is in China.
Is there a thread to your arguments other than just to naysay whatever is said and then declare that it's all part of a world conspiracy to denounce China?
So, we should destroy the manufacturing centers that make a lot of the items that the West currently doesn't and thus start a ripple effect of economic disaster.
Add to that, we should forget about the missile systems that in some cases are in mountain valleys that western systems probably couldn't take out even with a surprise first strike.
So, how many western cities are you going to consider a good trade for the chance to murder millions of Chinese and spread fallout over a wide area of eastern Asia?
Some great strategic thinking there, bub. This isn't a video game where you can just press reset if it doesn't work out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd figure he'd be out campaigning against the RTGs with plutonium in them.
It's been converted to an oil drilling ship.
"5% cheaper earbuds for you is not worth trashing millions of cubic meters of ocean."
The more powerful magnets and better batteries needed to switch over to nonhydroelectric renewable evergy sources use those very same rare earths. In large quantities compared to ear buds. Ditto more energy efficient motors.
So, by never mining any of them, you help keep everyone chained to other sources.
Your choice, bub.
Church et al may be planning something more limited than that. At least initially. (I've not had a chance to look at even the abstracts of actual papers, so this is a guess).
The virii that target bacteria (phage) tend to hijack the existing stretches of dna that the bacteria themselves use for incorporating new dna. This makes sense, as it's less likely to disrupt something else if it lands in a pre-prepared area where the surrounding sequences are more of a known item.
If you can fiddle with those regions, (And, of course, the proteins/rna etc that interact with them. Nothing's ever easy.) it might confer a good bit of resistance to various phages without such massive changes in the whole coding scheme.
But, that also makes it easier for the phages to adapt to the new landing areas.
I very much agree it's good interesting work. I tend to throw a little cold water on things scientific here on slashdot. When these things get written up in the popular press and press releases from the university PR types, they get hyped so much that it's a good idea to point out the limitations and problems.
We certainly need better methods of developing organisms with whole new sets of functionality rather than just one minor change.
It's just that this work is one piece, not the finished method as you mention. You have to be able to grow these large numbers of varieties and then recognize which ones are better at what you want. That culturing and analysing slows things way down. You might be able to do some of that by tagging the desired cells with something that flouresces and then sorting them with flow cytometry to eliminate the need to culture all of them and check individual colonies.
Once you have an organism that produces what you want, you have to make sure the strain keeps doing that. The microbes won't be so hot on wasting energy to pump out some product for humans unless they have to. They'll tend to eliminate the trait. So, you still have to link it with some sort of addiction module or find a way of eliminating those microbes that stop doing what you want.
(Blatant plug for a great podcast: see TWiM, This Week in Microbiology at microbeworld.org/twim episode 7 for a fascinating discussion of addiction modules. Vince Racaniello and company utterly rock.)
One little hiccup in the idea of only modifying the coding regions is that IIRC there are some parts of the genome that can have dual functions. At one point something can be small part of a coding region, and also a small part of a different regulatory region that overlaps. (I'm admittedly not a geneticist, and I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that happens.) You might be able to modify just the areas that a virus preferentially targets for its dna to get incorporated into. Admittedly that's only a partial solution.
That's a lot of the reason for letting the microbes and evolution work it out. There will be a lot of little gotchas, and having more than one working example will help greatly.
This article is hyped up to the stars.
It's good work, but the ideas aren't "revolutionary" the way they are portrayed.
Lateral gene transfer in bacteria has been known for a long time. It's how resistance to antibiotics is spread among bacteria for example.
It's also been used a good deal already by microbiologists/biochem types (that line is getting a little blurred these days).
Church's group has found a way to automate this.
They can create large numbers of bacterial strains which have some or all of the desired characteristics in a short time.
The downside is the needle of the desired organism is in a haystack of partially successful or unsuccessful ones. In this case, it was linked to production of a bright red chemical. You could determine which was closer to the right one by color. That's easy to automate.
Most characteristics won't be that easy to screen or automate.
Church then goes into what's really an old idea. Encrypting the genome so that it's resistant to existing virus types. You then use a modified ribosome to translate that into proteins. I remember discussions of that in the late 80/early 90s on some of the transhumanist newsgroups (anyone remember usenet?).
The devil in the details here is that much of the information in the genome isn't for coding proteins directly, but for regulating gene expressions and other purposes. Much of that latter we still don't understand. It's hard to design an encryption to preserve a functionality you don't understand.
So, instead of throwing up their hands, Church et al appeal to using the above automated method and the microbes to sort out something that works, but again we really won't understand. At least at first.
It's an interesting idea. Sounds like a lot of work even if automated.
But, as anyone who was caught up in the genetic algorithms craze in computers can attest, it's not a guaranteed solution.
It wouldn't bump its butt when it hopped.
You can propose all you want, but does anyone seriously think that in the lead up to a presidential election year this has an ice cubes chance in the infernal regions of happening?
If the politicians don't change anything, they can be mildly criticized if there is a successful attack. They can point to all the money they're appropriating to the TSA, and hold congressional investigations and say how horrified they are and puff themselves up as the great protectors of the flying public. Regardless that they really did nothing.
If they change anything, especially a major change like this, any successful attack will be blamed on the change and in turn, them.
Why would they do something that has at least some chance of hurting them politically when they can do nothing and be safe?
"Why should anyone want to be in the USA?"
A: Because I've got a better overall standard of living for the work I do than I would have in many other countries.
B: It's home. My family and friends are here.
C: (Fill in one of a large number of reasons people stay in the country they were born in.)
You may have voted that way.
Obviously "all" or even most didn't or else the current crop of ReDemoPublicrats wouldn't still be in office.
(Ok, so we'd just have a different crop of similar critters, perhaps under differently named parties.)
Or, make really cheap decoys in large numbers and mix your real missiles in with them.
It's a standard way of defeating defenses, and it applies to all other systems like CIWS (AKA Phalanx) or missile based systems as well.
Send in targets faster than the system can respond to them, or send in so many that it runs out of ammunition.
I fix lab equipment at a university and I do a lot of resurrecting older gear that's been in a closet for decades. I've still got some spare nixie tubes in a drawer.
Often the old gear will work just as well for many things, but it's not "the hot setup".
For some things, you need the capabilities of newer equipment, though.
At this point, it's still a research and development project.
On the other hand, CIWS and the like are pretty effective. I'm guessing they are looking for something that doesn't have the flight time delay and can engage more targets in a given time. (Of course, just putting more CIWS and ammunition for them on the ship mitigates that last.)
I'm not sure the horizon limitation really matters for defending against incoming threats.
"Will we be blowing the dust off of the Iowa class yet again?"
Actually, that'd be kinda cool. The big problem is they were very expensive ships to maintain and man.
It's difficult to make a reflective coating that reflects well enough at a broad range of frequencies. The mirrors in the laser usually only work that well at one frequency, and they have cooling systems built into them. They also aren't moving, don't have weight limitations and don't have to deal with weathering and dirt.
It's also hard to make a reflective coating that reflects well enough in all directions that the laser can hit from. Your missile has to be able to home in some way. If you have IR windows for a seeker, that's an area that isn't very reflective.
You just have to get a tiny area burnt through and then the energy from the laser will heat what's behind it so much that it'll blow the rest of the coating off or mechanically disrupt whatever the coating is on.
It can help. A little. And it adds weight and problems to the missile. It's been looked at for some time and found not to be a cure all by any means. It sounds like a good idea, but turns out to not be terribly practical.
Same for the old idea of spinning an incoming missile to distribute the energy. That one is about like pirouetting in front of a shotgun. The energy comes in way faster than a mechanical movement.
Let's see. That was in 2001. And it wasn't a laser.
Or maybe you're talking about the one way back in 1984 that convinced the Soviets we were much closer to a working capability than we were? That also wasn't a laser.
I seem to remember several full up tests that worked. (Admittedly not all of them.) Of course they were hit to kill vehicles.
If what you say is true, it's funny that the Navy also was able to hit a malfunctioning satellite last year with a ship launched missile from an Aegis ship.
They were also able to target a small boat at several miles with a laser earlier this year. (It was linked here on slashdot). Not a big blow up and boom, but still interesting.
Could it be that you just really don't know what you're talking about?
I take a look at my enormous laser
And my troubles start a-meltin' away (ba-doom bop bop)
I take a look at my enormous laser
And the happy times are comin' to stay (be-doo)
"Fire the wiggle motion gun!"
If you look closely at the upper left in the 10th photo in the linked article, the one of the control room:
Is that a nixie tube display in the top slot of the third rack from the right?
It'll be at least as fun to watch this trainwreck as a three legged race at the triple amputee's convention.
Pop a beer and pass the popcorn.
The drones are remote controlled, thus the idea seems to be that human soldiers are not put into a war zone.
But, by that measure, wouldn't a fully robotic attack, like a first strike with ICBMs also not be hostile? At least at the time it's launched, the missile crew isn't in a war zone. That may change rather quickly.
Does this also mean that if your artillery outranges the opposition by a goodly range it's not hostile as the gun crew isn't in a war zone? Does this change if the other side buys some improved base bleed shells that have longer range?
It's a very odd measure of "hostile" no matter how you slice it.
"is all throughout western leftism"
I'm hardly a leftist.
"true-blue believers in communism and Maoism in the government"
Yes, and we have Tea Party members in the US government. We also have people in the government that are somewhere between Trotsky and Bakunin.
Are they likely to be the dominant force in it?
About as likely as a quick return to the Cultural Revolution is in China.
Is there a thread to your arguments other than just to naysay whatever is said and then declare that it's all part of a world conspiracy to denounce China?
No, you'll just have to buy a computer that has lots of hardware based DRM and will only run "approved" apps and OS's.
Oh wait. We've already got some of those and people are willing to wait in long lines and pay a premium for the newest models.
A.X.E
Advanced Hex Editor. Definitely software.
They'd probably consider it a hacking tool, too.
I assure you all my arguments are based in altruism and truly wanting the best for others. Unlike yours which are based in crass self interest.
Now, be reasonable and do it my way!
Ah. I see.
So, we should destroy the manufacturing centers that make a lot of the items that the West currently doesn't and thus start a ripple effect of economic disaster.
Add to that, we should forget about the missile systems that in some cases are in mountain valleys that western systems probably couldn't take out even with a surprise first strike.
So, how many western cities are you going to consider a good trade for the chance to murder millions of Chinese and spread fallout over a wide area of eastern Asia?
Some great strategic thinking there, bub. This isn't a video game where you can just press reset if it doesn't work out.
Yeah, but you'll have to borrow a Chinese composer's theme rather than Prokofiev for the same effect.