sort of true. The earth's magnetic field deflects most of the charged stuff away, with only a small amount of the total solar wind hitting the north and south poles.
I wouldn't be so worried about exobiology coming down to eat us, but the point about the genesis capsule was to get outside our magnetosphere and see what was out there.
If only we had a robot version of the shuttle. We could have parked the capsule in orbit and then analysed it in the science module in the shuttle bay. Then we could have beamed back the data, before attempting re-entry. That way, if it burns up, we get the data back. No people on the robot shuttle, and no big loss if we lose the original artifiact because we have some more data out of the mission in addition to what genesis already sent while it was en-route back to earth.
I heard that the shuttle has an autopilot ability. We could retrofit them to run unmanned and get some use out of them.
Fortunately the headsets I'm talking about are not nvgs but data displays. Of course you can route nvg images through them. read about a representative system here here. The 5000 hour life was a figure I got back in 2002, mostly based on how long it took the blue oled to burn out. Maybe liteye might have improved since then.
At the moment, "self assembling" means that we don't have to push the nanodots together after we make them. That's all. You still need to ablate a carefully prepared target with a laser to etch the structures we want.
Personally, I'm excited about their solid state lighting idea.
from the article The most interesting application may be the development of energy-efficient, low-cost, solid-state lighting. By creating a matrix of layers of varying sizes of nanodots embedded in a transparent medium such as aluminum oxide, Narayan can create a chip that glows with white light. Solid-state lighting would use about one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years.
Looks like my LCD monitor is about to become obsolete: there's no reason why these solid state can't be made the size of a pixel and tied to active matrix display electronics. Maybe the us military might be able to replace their $30,000+ individual soldier helmet monocles which are currently using 5000 hour MTBF organic led technology with durable, bright and efficient nano-leds and save taxpayer money while we're at it.
That's the exact thing that people are considering doing with cochlear implants. Doctor checks if the baby has a cochlear and no ear canal for instance, implants the baby and the baby learns to hear and talk. Of course, the baby will never be a "native" sign language speaker, but the baby will be able to avoid backing trucks.
If a nanite was infecting you, the eric drexler idea is that carbon atoms are guided into covalent bonds by mechanical rather than chemical processes. Hence his whole "dimonds for dirt" concept. This allows you to spend more energy more efficiently synthesising compounds, because you rely on controlled trajectories, rather than brownian motion or loosely constrained molecules that biological life relies on so heavily.
HIV beats the immune response by killing the cells that are supposed to kill cells infected by it. We still have an immune response to HIV we make antibodies against it. People are tested to see if they are "antibody positive" because there are so many more antibodies present relative to actual viral particles. Even though the immune response is at the moment futile, it does slow down the disease relative to a person who has no immune system at all.
To mount an effective immune response, you'd have to be able to come up with a vaccine that pre-empts HIV infection and prevents it from killing those T-Cells. The HIV vaccine is still being persued.
We can only hope that engineered diseases would at least give us the human immune system as toe hold in the fight against them.
If the engineered disease happened to be caused by microscopic particles made of diamond that no protease could cut, we would be truly in trouble.
for perspective, consider that asbestos dust can never be expelled from the lungs and can never be degraded, because it is chemically and physically able to defeat the body's normal ways of clearing pulmonary debris. If antibodies could deactivate it and then macrophages could just eat it, the way antibodies and macrophages sometimes deal with proten based threats, it wouldn't be a problem.
Good question. I don't know the answer to that - you'd have to subscribe to the Nature Immunology journal to hear the latest.
My guess would be that it takes lots molecules of the same protein to raise an immune response, and only one viral particle is required to start an infection. A shotgun vaccine might have to include large quantites of protein injected into your blood to work, more than your body could tolorate.
That's only a guess though. A modified version of the idea (like getting a lot of different haptens each bearing one epitope conjugated onto a carrier protein to raise an immune response) may yet work.
Damn good point. The expensive licencing scheme under the guise of "protecting you from bioterror" could be used to crush the fledgeling attempts of poor countries to enter the biotech game. "Nothing to see here, we're just decommissioning the illegal bioweapons lab... No it held dangerous organisms, not cheap easy to grow grain."
There's a big difference between that fun expreiment of changing F- E.Coli into F+ where the bacteria help you to infect them with the plasmid in question, to making your own plasmid of arbitary sequence, putting it into the bacteria, screening them to see if your plasmid took, checking if they have the properties you want...
I'll assume that your massive breeding ground for HIV is "All of Humanity."
The one thing about HIV is that it's very succeptible to oxidation. Any kind of oxidising agent, like bleach or strong disinfectants or even some mouthwashes, will render a puddle of HIV infected blood safe to clean up within minutes. Faster if you mix it, but please dont.
To get airborne, the HIV would first need to borrow some viral trickery from other diseases to reproduce in the lungs and mucous membranes as well as its usual home of in the lymphatic system, and then once expelled on a person's breath it would need a new coat to protect it from the toxic levels of oxygen in the air.
All this, while keeping the size of the genome down to a managable length so you can stuff it into its protein coat.
If you can engineer both those capabilities into HIV, you would have Airborne AIDS. Quite a puzzle though.
I remember reading in the news that one way african communities deal with ebola infection is that when one town discovers it has ebola, it sets up roadblocks of dry wood on all the approaches to the town and sets them alight. Then they go back to their homes to see if they live or die.
Now I'm not advocating to do this with humans, but if a robotic factory happened to produce something that you couldn't eventually immunise against (and the HIV vaccines are still showing promise, there is a mixture of the difficulty of the science problems and politics of various nations that promotes hiv spread) then you should have some kind of contingency plan to contain the whole facility. Permanently.
The two really interesting parts are the adaptive immune system where there are the cell mediated (killer T-cell) and humoral (antibody) immune responses.
Both use the principle of making molecules that will stick to bad molecules, and if they do triggering a cascade of events that eventually winds up destroying the bad molecule and the things affected by it, and leaving healthy tissue behind untouched (we hope).
The really really good part is that you're right, if the viral coat proteins have the same chemical surface at specific regions called epitopes, then the same antibodies will be able to bind all of them, even if they're different in other places.
Most molecules have several epitopes on them, although sometimes you have to bind most or all of these before a response is raised.
Viruses in the wild beat this by mutating every time they reproduce inside a cell by using error prone replication techniques. After all, if you make a billion particles and only 2% work, you can still infect your next host quite smartly.
That means that two individuals with the same disease, one catching it off the other, might have sufficiently different viral particles that an immunisation against one set of epitopes is ineffective. That's what happens with the common cold.
Good points: anything that we design that is made of protein could be countered by our immune response.
After all the point of having a lot of different kinds of Major Histocompatibility Complex alleles in the population is that somebody in the population will have the right combination of MHC genes to be a responder to an arbitary infection and so survive to breed.
There's another way to fix this, and Eric Drexler proposed it for nanomachines in Engines of Creation: Wrap the fabrication facility in a blanket of incendary explosives many times more massive than the fabrication facility. If things go sideways, light it up and the tiny nasties are burned back into carbondioxide before they can escape.
Slashdot Mirror
sort of true. The earth's magnetic field deflects most of the charged stuff away, with only a small amount of the total solar wind hitting the north and south poles.
I wouldn't be so worried about exobiology coming down to eat us, but the point about the genesis capsule was to get outside our magnetosphere and see what was out there.
If only we had a robot version of the shuttle. We could have parked the capsule in orbit and then analysed it in the science module in the shuttle bay. Then we could have beamed back the data, before attempting re-entry. That way, if it burns up, we get the data back. No people on the robot shuttle, and no big loss if we lose the original artifiact because we have some more data out of the mission in addition to what genesis already sent while it was en-route back to earth.
I heard that the shuttle has an autopilot ability. We could retrofit them to run unmanned and get some use out of them.
Fortunately the headsets I'm talking about are not nvgs but data displays. Of course you can route nvg images through them. read about a representative system here here. The 5000 hour life was a figure I got back in 2002, mostly based on how long it took the blue oled to burn out. Maybe liteye might have improved since then.
Don't sweat it, he's cursing at himself for being a fair few orders of magnitude out when he said that a terrabit was 1000 bits.
Nanite powered mousetrap. Now that is a genuinely scary idea.
Billy:"Hey Mom, what's this strange piece of cardboard that has a lead to the wall socket?"
Mom:"No Billy! Don't Touch That!!!"
*WHACK*
Mom cleans up what's left of Billy's hand with a dust pan.
A few thousand rounds? Oh well. You could sacrifice some accuracy and get a chrome plated barrel. Low tech, but it works.
At the moment, "self assembling" means that we don't have to push the nanodots together after we make them. That's all. You still need to ablate a carefully prepared target with a laser to etch the structures we want.
Personally, I'm excited about their solid state lighting idea.
from the article The most interesting application may be the development of energy-efficient, low-cost, solid-state lighting. By creating a matrix of layers of varying sizes of nanodots embedded in a transparent medium such as aluminum oxide, Narayan can create a chip that glows with white light. Solid-state lighting would use about one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years.
Looks like my LCD monitor is about to become obsolete: there's no reason why these solid state can't be made the size of a pixel and tied to active matrix display electronics. Maybe the us military might be able to replace their $30,000+ individual soldier helmet monocles which are currently using 5000 hour MTBF organic led technology with durable, bright and efficient nano-leds and save taxpayer money while we're at it.
Seeing that the top link on your homepage was audaciously called Me and the WORLD'S LARGEST ORGAN, I had to click it.
Unfortunately, I think that any regular slashdot reader will be disappointed.
damn straight.
That's the exact thing that people are considering doing with cochlear implants. Doctor checks if the baby has a cochlear and no ear canal for instance, implants the baby and the baby learns to hear and talk. Of course, the baby will never be a "native" sign language speaker, but the baby will be able to avoid backing trucks.
Oh?
NTG's Geordi La Forge - Extended vision with his glasses on, blind after you remove his visor.
Fox news, and their infamous "The presidential race is not split 50%, 50%. It is split 40%, 40, 10%, and the 10% are going to make a difference."
The question is, do they think it's the 10% that swing vote, or the 10% that don't vote?
I always thought that Fox was a few cents short of a dollar between the ears.
I hope that they don't mount sidewinders on those things.
when the bomb was actually dropped?
where can I find this diary and personal presidential letter collection? online?
Thankyou for working on spam assassin.
If somebody who was born with no immune system was infected with HIV, the virus would probably feast on the miroglia, which are important support cells in the brain.
If a nanite was infecting you, the eric drexler idea is that carbon atoms are guided into covalent bonds by mechanical rather than chemical processes. Hence his whole "dimonds for dirt" concept. This allows you to spend more energy more efficiently synthesising compounds, because you rely on controlled trajectories, rather than brownian motion or loosely constrained molecules that biological life relies on so heavily.
HIV beats the immune response by killing the cells that are supposed to kill cells infected by it. We still have an immune response to HIV we make antibodies against it. People are tested to see if they are "antibody positive" because there are so many more antibodies present relative to actual viral particles. Even though the immune response is at the moment futile, it does slow down the disease relative to a person who has no immune system at all.
To mount an effective immune response, you'd have to be able to come up with a vaccine that pre-empts HIV infection and prevents it from killing those T-Cells. The HIV vaccine is still being persued.
We can only hope that engineered diseases would at least give us the human immune system as toe hold in the fight against them.
If the engineered disease happened to be caused by microscopic particles made of diamond that no protease could cut, we would be truly in trouble.
for perspective, consider that asbestos dust can never be expelled from the lungs and can never be degraded, because it is chemically and physically able to defeat the body's normal ways of clearing pulmonary debris. If antibodies could deactivate it and then macrophages could just eat it, the way antibodies and macrophages sometimes deal with proten based threats, it wouldn't be a problem.
Good question. I don't know the answer to that - you'd have to subscribe to the Nature Immunology journal to hear the latest.
My guess would be that it takes lots molecules of the same protein to raise an immune response, and only one viral particle is required to start an infection. A shotgun vaccine might have to include large quantites of protein injected into your blood to work, more than your body could tolorate.
That's only a guess though. A modified version of the idea (like getting a lot of different haptens each bearing one epitope conjugated onto a carrier protein to raise an immune response) may yet work.
Damn good point. The expensive licencing scheme under the guise of "protecting you from bioterror" could be used to crush the fledgeling attempts of poor countries to enter the biotech game. "Nothing to see here, we're just decommissioning the illegal bioweapons lab... No it held dangerous organisms, not cheap easy to grow grain."
How much does it cost to connect medical grade solenoid valves and pumps to a serial port of a PC?
There's a big difference between that fun expreiment of changing F- E.Coli into F+ where the bacteria help you to infect them with the plasmid in question, to making your own plasmid of arbitary sequence, putting it into the bacteria, screening them to see if your plasmid took, checking if they have the properties you want...
I'll assume that your massive breeding ground for HIV is "All of Humanity."
The one thing about HIV is that it's very succeptible to oxidation. Any kind of oxidising agent, like bleach or strong disinfectants or even some mouthwashes, will render a puddle of HIV infected blood safe to clean up within minutes. Faster if you mix it, but please dont.
To get airborne, the HIV would first need to borrow some viral trickery from other diseases to reproduce in the lungs and mucous membranes as well as its usual home of in the lymphatic system, and then once expelled on a person's breath it would need a new coat to protect it from the toxic levels of oxygen in the air.
All this, while keeping the size of the genome down to a managable length so you can stuff it into its protein coat.
If you can engineer both those capabilities into HIV, you would have Airborne AIDS. Quite a puzzle though.
I remember reading in the news that one way african communities deal with ebola infection is that when one town discovers it has ebola, it sets up roadblocks of dry wood on all the approaches to the town and sets them alight. Then they go back to their homes to see if they live or die.
Now I'm not advocating to do this with humans, but if a robotic factory happened to produce something that you couldn't eventually immunise against (and the HIV vaccines are still showing promise, there is a mixture of the difficulty of the science problems and politics of various nations that promotes hiv spread) then you should have some kind of contingency plan to contain the whole facility. Permanently.
there's a really good reference on the human immune system here at http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BUGL/immune.htm
The two really interesting parts are the adaptive immune system where there are the cell mediated (killer T-cell) and humoral (antibody) immune responses.
Both use the principle of making molecules that will stick to bad molecules, and if they do triggering a cascade of events that eventually winds up destroying the bad molecule and the things affected by it, and leaving healthy tissue behind untouched (we hope).
The really really good part is that you're right, if the viral coat proteins have the same chemical surface at specific regions called epitopes, then the same antibodies will be able to bind all of them, even if they're different in other places.
Most molecules have several epitopes on them, although sometimes you have to bind most or all of these before a response is raised.
Viruses in the wild beat this by mutating every time they reproduce inside a cell by using error prone replication techniques. After all, if you make a billion particles and only 2% work, you can still infect your next host quite smartly.
That means that two individuals with the same disease, one catching it off the other, might have sufficiently different viral particles that an immunisation against one set of epitopes is ineffective. That's what happens with the common cold.
Good points: anything that we design that is made of protein could be countered by our immune response.
After all the point of having a lot of different kinds of Major Histocompatibility Complex alleles in the population is that somebody in the population will have the right combination of MHC genes to be a responder to an arbitary infection and so survive to breed.
There's another way to fix this, and Eric Drexler proposed it for nanomachines in Engines of Creation: Wrap the fabrication facility in a blanket of incendary explosives many times more massive than the fabrication facility. If things go sideways, light it up and the tiny nasties are burned back into carbondioxide before they can escape.