put in place several regulations to control oil speculation.
Actually, you've hit on the precise reason for the brief drop in US gasoline prices - politics. The oil and financial sectors vote with the price of our commodities. No valid long-term conclusions can be drawn from a small dip that occurs just months before a US election.
It's ironic that this result is being publicized just as we are starting to unravel the _symbiotic_ relationship between natural foodborne bacteria and the immune system. Many microbiologists and immunologists are reconsidering the benefits of locally-grown organic foods that we, as scientists, have dismissed for generations. Food is more than a chemical concoction, and your body comprises about 100 times as many non-human cells as human ones. It may be that the major benefits of organic foods are not in the pesticides that are _not_ present but in the microorganisms that _are_ present in these foods.
You must think that the coding strand of a start codon is "ATG,", When of course it has to be TAC in order to code for "AUG" (a start codon)in the message.
>>why is it worded in such a way as to imply the different bacteria is the reason that one is obese and the other isn't, instead of the type of bacteria changed because being obese (and the eating that goes along with it) favor one type over the other.... Because if you read the Scientific literature, there is very good reason to believe that's the way it works.
Whoa - This compound they are claiming all these properties for - algeferin - is apparently unknown to the Scientific Literature. What we are debating here is one poster at a regional conference by a graduate student, that shows a sponge extract inhibits a few types of bacteria in laboratory cultures.
Like most articles on Science in the popular press, this article is oversimplified to the point of not being true anymore.
Epigenetics is a relatively new field that deals with several new layers of the language of DNA that are only recently beginning to be understood. The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Fire and Mello for their work in uncovering a phenomenon known as RNA interference that is a key part of epigenetic inheritance.
Imprinting happens during gamete formation. It is a process of modulating the level of expression of one or both of the 2 copies of a gene in a diploid organism, and it can apply to cells in a specific tissue type or globally throughout the organism. Imprinting in some cases can be reversed if the remaining copy of a gene is damaged, in other cases it is irreversable. Sometimes the organism reads only the copy of a gene inherited from the male parent and sometimes only from the female parent, sometimes bothe are expressed but the LEVEL of expression differs between the 2 copies.
(For the genetically literate, genes are imprinted by converting euchromatin to heterochromation, and/or by moving genes to silencing compartments within the nucleus during cell differentiation where transcription does not take place).
Imprinting is one reason why cloned organisms have genetic problems. During normal gamete formation, imprinting is removed and genes are re-imprinted in a different manner. Scientists are working on understanding how this is done and what the rules are, in order to produce adult-origin stem cells and for cancer treatment, among other things.
The bottom line is we are at the stage of knowing that it exists, and a reasonable amount about the mechanism, but we don't grok the language of imprinting yet. If you actually want to learn about the current understanding of this topic, you have to go to the scientific literature because very few textbooks even mention it yet, and those that do are using a outdated understanding of the concept. Anything published before 2005 on this topic is likely to contain information that we now know isn't true.
NOVA did a special on Epigenetics (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/) (PBS.ORG) that was only slightly oversimplified.
Parent post (and its parent post) is not insightful. It is in fact OFFTOPIC - the topic is not the controversy but THE ACTUAL SCIENCE. That's the crux of the problem between science and religion, there are a few people on both sides who spend too much time worrying about discrediting the other point of view instead of refining their own. This (TFA) is fascinating from a molecular biology point of view because it has implications for DNA repair mechanisms and meiotic recombination
Where did you ever hear that journals PAY scientists to publish their work?? Quite the contrary; several of the top journals charge a per page charge to cover the cost of publication.
This will mainly affect big name multi-journal publishers Like the Nature Publishing Group (who are actually somewhat reasonable about letting things out after a period and giving student discounts)-
Sinauer press who are pretty tight about it...
And Springer-Verlaag (hiss, boo) who never let you even think about seeing any information for free.
As a college educator and a recipient of education grants from both NSF and USDOEd, I would like to point out that this article sidesteps the real issue in science education. The purpose of science education is NOT to fill the job market with bodies, but to produce graduates who understand science. In this realm we have failed miserably for the last 10-15 years.
Our high school graduates fall far behind high school graduates from almost all industrialized nations in mathematics skills and understanding of basic scientific principles. Anyone who has taught at the college/university level can tell you this. Our undergraduate scientists are still about par with the rest of the world (which is a source of great pride to people who teach at this level, because we are taking far less qualified students and still bringing them up to a reasonable level). Our MS and PhD graudates are still among the best in the world, and it is only in this advanced realm that we are producing more graduates than the market will bear. Thus you have MS and PhD holders competing for jobs that once were held by BS graduates, and the glut appears to be at the BS level.
However, if you look to the future, it will soon be impossible for us to continue to bring substandard high school grads up to a reasonable level, especially in the biological sciences, where our level of understanding has changed fundamentally in the last 10 years. Almost ALL high school teachers, and MOST college biology educators lack a current understanding of biological science. That's why NSF and the department of Ed pay teams like mine to retrain teachers and bring current science to high school students.
Articles such as this one are very damaging because they will feed into the rhetoric in congress and the white house, resulting in further budget cuts to our basic scientific research support. The United States now produces nothing that the rest of the world wants except for skilled people, intellectual property and voracious consumers. This is the the true supply. If we continue to fall short on the first two products, the supply of the third will certainly dry up.
This is not real science. Go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ (National Center for Biotechnology Information) and type in "Ceragenin" in ENTREZ, and you will find zero hits. Anyone who knows how to search the scientific literature will tell that this means this is almost certainly a hoax.
For those who know how to use Google advanced search, instead of relying on Google Images, the photos are simple to find. Google has simply chosen not to promote them by serving them up in Google Images, which has always been a very small subset of the photos indexed by Google.
Just use "abu ghraib" in the "exact phrase" (string) field, and "image photo gif jpeg picture" in the "at least one of the words" (boolean OR) field. All of the top sites listed have the photos available (until Slashdotted in 10...9...8...7...6...)
This is typical anti-Biotech luddite FUD. The article drops a couple of names, even invokes the rice genome sequencing project (Biotechnology if there ever was), but in the end, not one verifiable statement in the whole article. Try and find ONE serious peer-reviewed work that suggests that "Most crop plants have latent resistance genes that can be activated." People scream because we can specifically insert a known gene, but have no problem with the idea of blindly crashing whole genomes together to see what drops out, just because "that's the way we've always done it."
All crop plants have been genetically engineered by trial and error. None existed before we created them, and none of the "natural" organic strains could survive without human intervention.
Be very skeptical of any news article on a scientific subject for which you can't find the underlying scientific article. That's not the way scientists are supposed to announce things, and often it means that their claims are vaporware.
I am unable to find any scientific articles which have been published about this technique, and from the point of view of a molecular biologist there are a number of huge problems that would have to be addressed, not the least of which is that your skin is covered with enzymes that quickly degrade DNA and RNA...
If you are over 25, it's more likely than not that you are alive because of modern medicine. The way we developed modern medicine is through research. The original case of using someone's cells was a woman named Helen Lane in the 1950's. From her cancer, scientists developed a cell line, HeLa cells, that have been used as tools in hundreds of important experiments that have told us a lot about how the human body, and in particular cancer cells work. She did not receive compensation, but all of humanity potentially benefits from her contribution.
If you want a really useful issue, try finding a way for us rich and healthy slobs to subsidize medicines and treatments for the third world.
And out of this $118M, that would be, lets see, carry the 2, umm, NOT ONE THIN DIME for the supposed "victims" of this heinous piracy, the poor starving artists.
You're entitled to all the justice you can afford.
- Clayski
Slashdot Mirror
{insert favorite politician here} ...
put in place several regulations to control oil speculation.
Actually, you've hit on the precise reason for the brief drop in US gasoline prices - politics. The oil and financial sectors vote with the price of our commodities. No valid long-term conclusions can be drawn from a small dip that occurs just months before a US election.
This concept has been the subject of several review articles in the scientific journal Nature - as early as 2007to my knowledge.
It's ironic that this result is being publicized just as we are starting to unravel the _symbiotic_ relationship between natural foodborne bacteria and the immune system. Many microbiologists and immunologists are reconsidering the benefits of locally-grown organic foods that we, as scientists, have dismissed for generations. Food is more than a chemical concoction, and your body comprises about 100 times as many non-human cells as human ones. It may be that the major benefits of organic foods are not in the pesticides that are _not_ present but in the microorganisms that _are_ present in these foods.
You must think that the coding strand of a start codon is "ATG,", When of course it has to be TAC in order to code for "AUG" (a start codon)in the message.
>>why is it worded in such a way as to imply the different bacteria is the reason that one is obese and the other isn't, instead of the type of bacteria changed because being obese (and the eating that goes along with it) favor one type over the other. ... Because if you read the Scientific literature, there is very good reason to believe that's the way it works.
Whoa - This compound they are claiming all these properties for - algeferin - is apparently unknown to the Scientific Literature. What we are debating here is one poster at a regional conference by a graduate student, that shows a sponge extract inhibits a few types of bacteria in laboratory cultures.
Your statement is false. Please keep your misinformed opinions to yourself.
Like most articles on Science in the popular press, this article is oversimplified to the point of not being true anymore.
Epigenetics is a relatively new field that deals with several new layers of the language of DNA that are only recently beginning to be understood. The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Fire and Mello for their work in uncovering a phenomenon known as RNA interference that is a key part of epigenetic inheritance.
Imprinting happens during gamete formation. It is a process of modulating the level of expression of one or both of the 2 copies of a gene in a diploid organism, and it can apply to cells in a specific tissue type or globally throughout the organism. Imprinting in some cases can be reversed if the remaining copy of a gene is damaged, in other cases it is irreversable. Sometimes the organism reads only the copy of a gene inherited from the male parent and sometimes only from the female parent, sometimes bothe are expressed but the LEVEL of expression differs between the 2 copies.
(For the genetically literate, genes are imprinted by converting euchromatin to heterochromation, and/or by moving genes to silencing compartments within the nucleus during cell differentiation where transcription does not take place).
Imprinting is one reason why cloned organisms have genetic problems. During normal gamete formation, imprinting is removed and genes are re-imprinted in a different manner. Scientists are working on understanding how this is done and what the rules are, in order to produce adult-origin stem cells and for cancer treatment, among other things.
The bottom line is we are at the stage of knowing that it exists, and a reasonable amount about the mechanism, but we don't grok the language of imprinting yet. If you actually want to learn about the current understanding of this topic, you have to go to the scientific literature because very few textbooks even mention it yet, and those that do are using a outdated understanding of the concept. Anything published before 2005 on this topic is likely to contain information that we now know isn't true.
NOVA did a special on Epigenetics (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/) (PBS.ORG) that was only slightly oversimplified.
Parent post (and its parent post) is not insightful. It is in fact OFFTOPIC - the topic is not the controversy but THE ACTUAL SCIENCE. That's the crux of the problem between science and religion, there are a few people on both sides who spend too much time worrying about discrediting the other point of view instead of refining their own. This (TFA) is fascinating from a molecular biology point of view because it has implications for DNA repair mechanisms and meiotic recombination
Where did you ever hear that journals PAY scientists to publish their work?? Quite the contrary; several of the top journals charge a per page charge to cover the cost of publication.
This will mainly affect big name multi-journal publishers Like the Nature Publishing Group (who are actually somewhat reasonable about letting things out after a period and giving student discounts)-
Sinauer press who are pretty tight about it...
And Springer-Verlaag (hiss, boo) who never let you even think about seeing any information for free.
As a college educator and a recipient of education grants from both NSF and USDOEd, I would like to point out that this article sidesteps the real issue in science education. The purpose of science education is NOT to fill the job market with bodies, but to produce graduates who understand science. In this realm we have failed miserably for the last 10-15 years.
Our high school graduates fall far behind high school graduates from almost all industrialized nations in mathematics skills and understanding of basic scientific principles. Anyone who has taught at the college/university level can tell you this. Our undergraduate scientists are still about par with the rest of the world (which is a source of great pride to people who teach at this level, because we are taking far less qualified students and still bringing them up to a reasonable level). Our MS and PhD graudates are still among the best in the world, and it is only in this advanced realm that we are producing more graduates than the market will bear. Thus you have MS and PhD holders competing for jobs that once were held by BS graduates, and the glut appears to be at the BS level.
However, if you look to the future, it will soon be impossible for us to continue to bring substandard high school grads up to a reasonable level, especially in the biological sciences, where our level of understanding has changed fundamentally in the last 10 years. Almost ALL high school teachers, and MOST college biology educators lack a current understanding of biological science. That's why NSF and the department of Ed pay teams like mine to retrain teachers and bring current science to high school students.
Articles such as this one are very damaging because they will feed into the rhetoric in congress and the white house, resulting in further budget cuts to our basic scientific research support. The United States now produces nothing that the rest of the world wants except for skilled people, intellectual property and voracious consumers. This is the the true supply. If we continue to fall short on the first two products, the supply of the third will certainly dry up.
This is not real science. Go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ (National Center for Biotechnology Information) and type in "Ceragenin" in ENTREZ, and you will find zero hits. Anyone who knows how to search the scientific literature will tell that this means this is almost certainly a hoax.
For those who know how to use Google advanced search, instead of relying on Google Images, the photos are simple to find. Google has simply chosen not to promote them by serving them up in Google Images, which has always been a very small subset of the photos indexed by Google.
Just use "abu ghraib" in the "exact phrase" (string) field, and "image photo gif jpeg picture" in the "at least one of the words" (boolean OR) field. All of the top sites listed have the photos available (until Slashdotted in 10...9...8...7...6...)
Information just wants to be free.
This is typical anti-Biotech luddite FUD. The article drops a couple of names, even invokes the rice genome sequencing project (Biotechnology if there ever was), but in the end, not one verifiable statement in the whole article. Try and find ONE serious peer-reviewed work that suggests that "Most crop plants have latent resistance genes that can be activated." People scream because we can specifically insert a known gene, but have no problem with the idea of blindly crashing whole genomes together to see what drops out, just because "that's the way we've always done it."
All crop plants have been genetically engineered by trial and error. None existed before we created them, and none of the "natural" organic strains could survive without human intervention.
Be very skeptical of any news article on a scientific subject for which you can't find the underlying scientific article. That's not the way scientists are supposed to announce things, and often it means that their claims are vaporware.
I am unable to find any scientific articles which have been published about this technique, and from the point of view of a molecular biologist there are a number of huge problems that would have to be addressed, not the least of which is that your skin is covered with enzymes that quickly degrade DNA and RNA...
There is already a term for this condition.
Ignoranus: A person who is ignorant and also an asshole.
If you are over 25, it's more likely than not that you are alive because of modern medicine. The way we developed modern medicine is through research. The original case of using someone's cells was a woman named Helen Lane in the 1950's. From her cancer, scientists developed a cell line, HeLa cells, that have been used as tools in hundreds of important experiments that have told us a lot about how the human body, and in particular cancer cells work. She did not receive compensation, but all of humanity potentially benefits from her contribution.
If you want a really useful issue, try finding a way for us rich and healthy slobs to subsidize medicines and treatments for the third world.
Maybe I'm missing something. Even his example packet DOESN'T WORK!! It says right on the page that he never received a response...
And out of this $118M, that would be, lets see, carry the 2, umm, NOT ONE THIN DIME for the supposed "victims" of this heinous piracy, the poor starving artists. You're entitled to all the justice you can afford. - Clayski