I remember learning that somewhere as well. But when I took microbiology, I was informed the name gonorrhea comes from gono - meaning seed (as in the gonad) and rhea - meaning to flow (as in diarrhea). In antiquity, it was thought the foul discharge of a gonorrhea infection was actually semen. In men, the disease was actually taken as a sign of virility.
In "The Diamond Age", sovereign powers and those with the means engage in (more or less) open conflict using nanomachines colloquially referred to as "mites". Particularly vicious "battles" in these conflicts manifest as smog-like pollution formed by mites of opposing factions destroying each other and leaving inert carcasses hanging in the air and settling over streets, building, etc. like a kind of artificial dust. Those unlucky enough to be caught outside during these times breath them in and have no end of resulting health problems. One of the secondary characters in the story actually ends up in a chronic/palliative care facility as a result of such ill health. Such are the collateral damages in this imagined world. Things like Stuxnet and now the subject of this article appears to be the manifestations of a software form of this type of "armed conflict" (if you can call it that.) Similarly, when non-targeted individuals become infected or otherwise gets caught in the cross-fire, collateral damages result in the form of lost productivity or perhaps just general nuisance. So......
Ask slashdot:
Can you think of an effective way for non-government affiliated denizens of the Internet to respond to such emerging scenarios where geo-politically driven cyber-conflicts have the potential to harm non-participants? For example, would it be appropriate to form an Internet version of the International Red Cross?
Which recent outbreaks are you referring to? Under the formal definition of an epidemic, even 20 cases is significant when considering the localization of the event. With something as virulent as Ebola, "minor" is not the most appropriate characterization under most circumstances. The upside, (if any can be considered as such) is that historic outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola burn so intensely and so quickly they usually burn themselves out even without much public health efforts. (ie. victims succumb quickly and expire before they can be effective in spreading it to others.) Granted, most past events have not been in urban areas with a high population density. In a developed country with modern transportation infrastructure to facilitate movement of (potentially infected) travelers, the result could be catastrophic without a strong effective response from public health services.
Kudos for being broad-minded and mature. But we ought to be old enough to not feed the trolls. The imbecile has already been modded to oblivion. All's well with slashdot.
.....
If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane?
Corporate PR, legal liabilities/regulatory compliance, international diplomacy -there are a host of legitimate reasons why the events should have unfolded just as it did. Having said that, the explanation FTFA is that some misinformation was communicated that lead the folks at the CDC taking a "worst case scenario" approach.
Could you provide some reference regarding non-HFCS fed bees being hit by CCD? I didn't see any mention of that particular detail in the linked article. Of all that *is* mentioned in the article, the description of the mortality profile of affected bees in the experiment suggests a stronger correlation than you suggest. From the article:
The characteristics of the dead hives were consistent with CCD, said Lu; the hives were empty except for food stores, some pollen, and young bees, with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse—such as disease or pests—many dead bees are typically found inside and outside the affected hives.
You take for granted the skin that acts as a physical barrier between the microbes that live on your body. For injuries such as severe burns and auto accidents involving road rash victims are not so lucky. This device sounds like an amazingly suitable solution that provides minimal interferance/physical contact. Although in this context, the irony of using a plasma to disinfect such wounds is not lost.
As a few has already mentioned, Bluetooth is an appropriate technical solution to the problem described. However, the environment you propose for this to be implemented suggests compliance with cGLP (current Good Laboratory Practices). In that case, whatever technical solution you implement will need to undergo qualification/validation to various degrees. This is somewhat more involved than finding (or slapping together some code of your own to create) an app to run/manage your equipment. If a potential vendor's offering has not already been certified, you're looking at extensive software testing/auditing in order to show compliance. My background is pharmaceutical manufacturing, so I can only speak to the availability of tools/resources that are compliant with FDA guidelines to that end. Given what is at stake, the validation process I was involved in was rather tedious and expensive. It would be wise for you to have your regulatory people speak with those who control the purse strings to determine exactly how much is necessary.
According to Jackson Lab’s TeHennepe, the feat BGI and NVIDIA pulled off was porting key genome analysis tools to NVIDIA’s GPU architecture, a nontrivial accomplishment that the open source community and others have been working toward.
Can anyone familiar with current efforts shed more light on this? Who is working on open source bioinformatics and how much work has been done?
This is not for generating power, the energy produced is a by-product. I doubt that the resultant energy would pay for it's own production. However, the electricity could be used to help pump water through the system, which is a neat trick and will help to reduce cleanup costs.
I very much doubt it would be even worth that much. The article source(s) are very scant on details, but one of the many tricky aspects of constructing any microbial battery is engineering a system that would effectively and efficiently separate charges in a way that can be usefully harnessed. But even if they should solve the problem of developing good cathode/anode pairs, the conditions these bugs are expected to work under would not be expected to approach a remotely useful energy density.
From one of the videos it looks like a tail caused by the star moving... Could there be star-sized comets in the universe?
It depends on what you want to call a comet. The "dirty snow balls" at the nucleus of all the comet pictures you'd normally see are no bigger than an asteroid. When activated by solar energy, they develop a coma of gaseous material that is several times larger than the nucleus, but still pretty small. If you count the tail that streams away from the star, then yes: it is possible to say a particularly large and active comet can conceivably approach the diameter of a star. However, even as such, no comets are observable with today's technology at stellar distances of the order those Hubble observations are made.
The way I see it, one problem is the solution to the other problem. Allow climate change to occur without interference. The heated atmosphere expands in volume, reaching higher in altitude providing increased drag resistance to all that space junk. As more and more space debris burn up in the atmosphere, they remain aloft, blocking out sunlight and begin a "nuclear winter"-like scenario that brings temperature back to normal. Problems solved!
In all seriousness, economic investments are at stake here for developed/developing nations that depend on space-based tools. communication satellites, weather monitoring, GPS/navigation, etc. I think it is feasible for not just NASA to accept responsibility, but bring forth an international agreement to solve the problem jointly in the interest of all who have a current (and perhaps future) stake in the matter.
Is this really that big of an advantage in the field? I am not a physician, but most of the life science work I've done on patient samples involving a microscope uses very established methods and procedures that pretty much take for granted you're using a transmission microscope. Things like serological analysis, for example. You may ultimately have the better point. However, one would at least venture a reasonable guess that to fully utilize an equipment of this nature, a significant amount of retraining may be in order.
If the first few comments are representative of today's/. audience, no wonder CmdrTaco bailed.
Well, some of us n00bs *are* trying to uphold the spirit of slashdot. You and other old-timers can help by participating more. Sheesh, even the occasional "Natalie Portman / naked and petrified / covered in hot grit" would be a welcomed change from some of the politically charged nonsense that irritates so many of us.
Wise up, folks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll . I'm new here and even I'm sensible enough to not feed the trolls. Seriously, guys like this are not worth your time.
The only thing that space provides is an extremely hostile environment;
My first thought was that space provides a sustained micro-gravity environment that is rather hard to achieve on Earth. IIRC, there has been a few experiments with growing crystals on shuttle missions. However, it isn't nearly the amount necessary to establish progress toward potential space industries such as materials manufacturing/fabrication. Yes, you'd have to deal with overhead costs, supply chain, logistics, etc. of any business venture. But all the complexity aside, my personal feeling is that it is to early to throw in the towel on space exploration for lack of vision/imagination. Throughout the course of human history, there has been will always be naysayers opposing the dreamers. Think of how impoverished we'd all be if all those dreamers lacked the ambition/courage/funding to get their ideas off the ground.
I can not speak for the original submitter, but I'd like to pose a "for example" for you: I've been trained as an electrical engineer. Most of the higher physics I've been taught have been the quantum mechanics stuff more relevant to semiconductors, microelectronics, etc. But I've always been interested in space/astronomy since I was a kid. During my Uni days, my course material would occasionally tease me with tid-bits like "....but relativistic effects become important in GPS applications where the system that generates and processes the signals need to compensate for the effects of the Earth's mass on the curvature of space-time....." I've always been left wondering how much an astronautical engineer needs to know about Relativity in order to be a practical problem solver in real world applications. So here's what we've got to work with: Someone with a fair amount of math under the belt. (ie enough familiarity with Maxwell's equations to not get lost talking about RF applications.) Probably less useful, but a good grasp of band-gaps, doping, circuit theory, etc. Any ideas on how I get from all that to the point where I can understand and work with the theory enough to, oh say - start engineering the payload on a hypothetical space probe with a mission to observe/explore a black hole up close?
Slashdot Mirror
I remember learning that somewhere as well. But when I took microbiology, I was informed the name gonorrhea comes from gono - meaning seed (as in the gonad) and rhea - meaning to flow (as in diarrhea). In antiquity, it was thought the foul discharge of a gonorrhea infection was actually semen. In men, the disease was actually taken as a sign of virility.
In "The Diamond Age", sovereign powers and those with the means engage in (more or less) open conflict using nanomachines colloquially referred to as "mites". Particularly vicious "battles" in these conflicts manifest as smog-like pollution formed by mites of opposing factions destroying each other and leaving inert carcasses hanging in the air and settling over streets, building, etc. like a kind of artificial dust. Those unlucky enough to be caught outside during these times breath them in and have no end of resulting health problems. One of the secondary characters in the story actually ends up in a chronic/palliative care facility as a result of such ill health. Such are the collateral damages in this imagined world. Things like Stuxnet and now the subject of this article appears to be the manifestations of a software form of this type of "armed conflict" (if you can call it that.) Similarly, when non-targeted individuals become infected or otherwise gets caught in the cross-fire, collateral damages result in the form of lost productivity or perhaps just general nuisance. So......
Ask slashdot:
Can you think of an effective way for non-government affiliated denizens of the Internet to respond to such emerging scenarios where geo-politically driven cyber-conflicts have the potential to harm non-participants? For example, would it be appropriate to form an Internet version of the International Red Cross?
Which recent outbreaks are you referring to? Under the formal definition of an epidemic, even 20 cases is significant when considering the localization of the event. With something as virulent as Ebola, "minor" is not the most appropriate characterization under most circumstances. The upside, (if any can be considered as such) is that historic outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola burn so intensely and so quickly they usually burn themselves out even without much public health efforts. (ie. victims succumb quickly and expire before they can be effective in spreading it to others.) Granted, most past events have not been in urban areas with a high population density. In a developed country with modern transportation infrastructure to facilitate movement of (potentially infected) travelers, the result could be catastrophic without a strong effective response from public health services.
Kudos for being broad-minded and mature. But we ought to be old enough to not feed the trolls. The imbecile has already been modded to oblivion. All's well with slashdot.
I'm a Christian Scientist, you insensitive clod!
..... If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane?
Corporate PR, legal liabilities/regulatory compliance, international diplomacy -there are a host of legitimate reasons why the events should have unfolded just as it did. Having said that, the explanation FTFA is that some misinformation was communicated that lead the folks at the CDC taking a "worst case scenario" approach.
Past research has shown that neonicotinoid pesticides, which target insects' central nervous system........
I suppose you'll have to do some leg work on your own if that doesn't satisfy.
The characteristics of the dead hives were consistent with CCD, said Lu; the hives were empty except for food stores, some pollen, and young bees, with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse—such as disease or pests—many dead bees are typically found inside and outside the affected hives.
You take for granted the skin that acts as a physical barrier between the microbes that live on your body. For injuries such as severe burns and auto accidents involving road rash victims are not so lucky. This device sounds like an amazingly suitable solution that provides minimal interferance/physical contact. Although in this context, the irony of using a plasma to disinfect such wounds is not lost.
As a few has already mentioned, Bluetooth is an appropriate technical solution to the problem described. However, the environment you propose for this to be implemented suggests compliance with cGLP (current Good Laboratory Practices). In that case, whatever technical solution you implement will need to undergo qualification/validation to various degrees. This is somewhat more involved than finding (or slapping together some code of your own to create) an app to run/manage your equipment. If a potential vendor's offering has not already been certified, you're looking at extensive software testing/auditing in order to show compliance. My background is pharmaceutical manufacturing, so I can only speak to the availability of tools/resources that are compliant with FDA guidelines to that end. Given what is at stake, the validation process I was involved in was rather tedious and expensive. It would be wise for you to have your regulatory people speak with those who control the purse strings to determine exactly how much is necessary.
According to Jackson Lab’s TeHennepe, the feat BGI and NVIDIA pulled off was porting key genome analysis tools to NVIDIA’s GPU architecture, a nontrivial accomplishment that the open source community and others have been working toward.
Can anyone familiar with current efforts shed more light on this? Who is working on open source bioinformatics and how much work has been done?
This is not for generating power, the energy produced is a by-product. I doubt that the resultant energy would pay for it's own production. However, the electricity could be used to help pump water through the system, which is a neat trick and will help to reduce cleanup costs.
I very much doubt it would be even worth that much. The article source(s) are very scant on details, but one of the many tricky aspects of constructing any microbial battery is engineering a system that would effectively and efficiently separate charges in a way that can be usefully harnessed. But even if they should solve the problem of developing good cathode/anode pairs, the conditions these bugs are expected to work under would not be expected to approach a remotely useful energy density.
From one of the videos it looks like a tail caused by the star moving... Could there be star-sized comets in the universe?
It depends on what you want to call a comet. The "dirty snow balls" at the nucleus of all the comet pictures you'd normally see are no bigger than an asteroid. When activated by solar energy, they develop a coma of gaseous material that is several times larger than the nucleus, but still pretty small. If you count the tail that streams away from the star, then yes: it is possible to say a particularly large and active comet can conceivably approach the diameter of a star. However, even as such, no comets are observable with today's technology at stellar distances of the order those Hubble observations are made.
The way I see it, one problem is the solution to the other problem. Allow climate change to occur without interference. The heated atmosphere expands in volume, reaching higher in altitude providing increased drag resistance to all that space junk. As more and more space debris burn up in the atmosphere, they remain aloft, blocking out sunlight and begin a "nuclear winter"-like scenario that brings temperature back to normal. Problems solved! In all seriousness, economic investments are at stake here for developed/developing nations that depend on space-based tools. communication satellites, weather monitoring, GPS/navigation, etc. I think it is feasible for not just NASA to accept responsibility, but bring forth an international agreement to solve the problem jointly in the interest of all who have a current (and perhaps future) stake in the matter.
Is this really that big of an advantage in the field? I am not a physician, but most of the life science work I've done on patient samples involving a microscope uses very established methods and procedures that pretty much take for granted you're using a transmission microscope. Things like serological analysis, for example. You may ultimately have the better point. However, one would at least venture a reasonable guess that to fully utilize an equipment of this nature, a significant amount of retraining may be in order.
If the first few comments are representative of today's /. audience, no wonder CmdrTaco bailed.
Well, some of us n00bs *are* trying to uphold the spirit of slashdot. You and other old-timers can help by participating more. Sheesh, even the occasional "Natalie Portman / naked and petrified / covered in hot grit" would be a welcomed change from some of the politically charged nonsense that irritates so many of us.
not until River Tam goes bonkers and start beating people up. Obligatory xkcd comic.
Wise up, folks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll . I'm new here and even I'm sensible enough to not feed the trolls. Seriously, guys like this are not worth your time.
The only thing that space provides is an extremely hostile environment;
My first thought was that space provides a sustained micro-gravity environment that is rather hard to achieve on Earth. IIRC, there has been a few experiments with growing crystals on shuttle missions. However, it isn't nearly the amount necessary to establish progress toward potential space industries such as materials manufacturing/fabrication. Yes, you'd have to deal with overhead costs, supply chain, logistics, etc. of any business venture. But all the complexity aside, my personal feeling is that it is to early to throw in the towel on space exploration for lack of vision/imagination. Throughout the course of human history, there has been will always be naysayers opposing the dreamers. Think of how impoverished we'd all be if all those dreamers lacked the ambition/courage/funding to get their ideas off the ground.
I can not speak for the original submitter, but I'd like to pose a "for example" for you: I've been trained as an electrical engineer. Most of the higher physics I've been taught have been the quantum mechanics stuff more relevant to semiconductors, microelectronics, etc. But I've always been interested in space/astronomy since I was a kid. During my Uni days, my course material would occasionally tease me with tid-bits like "....but relativistic effects become important in GPS applications where the system that generates and processes the signals need to compensate for the effects of the Earth's mass on the curvature of space-time....." I've always been left wondering how much an astronautical engineer needs to know about Relativity in order to be a practical problem solver in real world applications.
So here's what we've got to work with: Someone with a fair amount of math under the belt. (ie enough familiarity with Maxwell's equations to not get lost talking about RF applications.) Probably less useful, but a good grasp of band-gaps, doping, circuit theory, etc. Any ideas on how I get from all that to the point where I can understand and work with the theory enough to, oh say - start engineering the payload on a hypothetical space probe with a mission to observe/explore a black hole up close?