You may think you're joking, but there is actually a microfab technique based on shrinky-dinks. Pattern some thermoplastic and then cook it to shrink the dimensions. It's more for creating micro-scale forms on the cheap, rather than for these sort of nano-scale silicon features, but the idea isn't totally crazy.
My girlfriend can produce a high-pitched meow that sounds rather kittenish. It's like a harpoon in her cat's brain; he has no choice to come over and investigate, regardless of where he was and what he was doing.
His brain is also kind of like an etch-a-sketch. If he's in a bad mood you can shake his head vigorously and he forgets what was going on.
Screw senator, he should run for president. If we're going to be mired in conflicts halfway around the world, I at least want to see our troops charging in to battle screaming "For the Horde" on CNN.
I believe the concept is:
- capitalism arises, people are able to do more than dirt farm and can even pursue their own businesses.
- wealth builds in the populace, people have more disposable income.
- as people get used to having some financial freedom and power, they come to desire personal/political freedom and power as well and pressure the government for it.
- the rulers are pressured on the one hand, but also enriched by taxes from their new, wealthier citizens. If they stamp out the demand, they risk stamping out their own riches, so they grudgingly give way before the demands.
- Depending on the pre-capitalist powerbase of the elite, they may also find themselves increasingly in debt/dependent on the successful merchants, who eventually just demand access to power on pain of no more loans.
Maybe split the difference between the proposals? Anything orbiting the sun with enough mass to assume a spherical shape (but not enough for fusion) is a planetoid, but only the dominant body in the region gets to be a planet. That way we can avoid busting Pluto all the way down to "piece of rock", but avoid a situation in 30 years when we end up with 74 "planets" in the solar system after they map the Kuiper Belt some more.
I'm enough of a sentimentalist that I'd like to see Pluto keep some status. It deserves a bit of historic recognition just for being the first KBO to be discovered, and so much earlier than the others.
His reasoning is that he doesn't want to put drugs in his body that he can't draw a molecular model of.
I enjoyed Zodiac a lot, and Sangoman's Principle was an interesting idea, but I think ultimately it's crap. With simple programs or simple machines, it's easier to tell what it does and how it works. With simple molecules in the body, you just get more chance of unexpected interactions. Alcohol is basically just a toxin that screws up your body in an amusing fashion at low doses. THC (active ingredient of marijuana) is actually a bioactive molecule, it binds nice and specifically to receptors in the brain. These receptors are not present in the parts of the brain that control breathing and the heart, so you don't end up with them shutting down from overdose as can happen with alcohol. All thanks to the complexity of the molecule.
Another way to think about it would be to consider that while you can use a simple molecule, you can't simplify your biology, so you're always dealing with a complex system. Give it the correct parts, don't just throw a handful of gravel into the machine.
I know he looks like a meathead, but a friend related this quote from an interview he gave:
Interviewer: "So you played D&D?" VD: "Yep." Interviewer: "Got your +1 sword and everything?" VD: "+1? Try +4 dancing, vorpal."
And that kind of authenticity is just hard to fake.
Re:Faithful to Tolkien's writings?
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 5, Informative
>> Ninja Ents: Was is just me or did the Ents ONLY redirect the river Isen in the book? The whole "Ents stomp!" fight was just unnecessary and left the already underexplained race feeling like some cheesy Disney reject. The book builds them up in to stately, dignified, sad characters who act in their own way. The movie abandons all of that. Granted, you have to make cuts for time, but cut the holywood added big Ent fight and leave the depth of character stuff.
Haven't gotten to see the movie yet, but I wanted to respond to this. In the book the ents did indeed run amok. They tore down the ring of isengard with their bare hands, cracked stone with their roaring, and threw whole sections of wall at orthanc (which did squat). Once they realized they couldn't actually damage orthanc and saruman kept occasionally using field artillery on them, they retreated and *then* redirected the river in as an alternate method of attack.
Ent are sad and stately only until they finally get pissed off. Having said all that, I haven't seen that scene yet, so I can't say whether I think it was well handled. Just that there was actually a fight.
Wow, no kidding. I just bailed from my status of PhD student in a bio lab. In all my 6 years of working as a tech or grad peon, I have watched water drip through a tube 14 - 18 hours a day while enjoying the brisk 4 degree weather in the coldroom (protein purification), made miles of little spots on nitrocellulose (DNA hybridization), and added slightly different amounts of colorless liquid to other colorless liquid in truckloads of 96 well plates (cytotoxicity assays). It fucking sucked. You get to use your brain for 15 minutes, write it down for 15 minutes, and carry it out for approximately 10,000 hours. After it fails or your results aren't quite like they should be, you get to skip the writing and thinking and go straight to the repetition. Heck, even if it works perfectly, you need confirmation that its reproducable don't you? Don't worry, it'll screw up next time.
I just talked to a much older friend, a professor of biology, who cut though my euphamisms with a flat "bio benchwork is boring as hell". Where the heck were you guys when I talked myself into doing this? =)
Well, I'm off to give chemistry or engineering a stab. At least my projects won't mutate slowly or die because someone sneezed in their culture dish before putting it in the incubator beside mine.
News of this project gave us something to talk about in the lab. We were trying to figure out, even theoretically how they might be planning to procede. For the non-scientists, here's a decent analogy:
You know that streets are made from asphault with lanes marked by lines of paint. You have learned to make streets from raw materials and a steamroller (PCR). You now feel ready to reconstruct New York using a stack of tourist photos from your last visit.
In crunchy technical terms:
DNA in the cell is in the form of chromosomes, which are millions and millions of nucleotides long. They are packaged into the cell's nucleus by wrapping them around proteins called histones, to form nucleosomes, classically described as 'pearls on a string'. This in turn is packaged into ever higher order structures (about which we get increasingly fuzzy in our understanding) all the way up to chromosomes. Humans have 23 pairs, with I believe, 3 billion bases between them. Large spans of chromosomes are full of repeating segments, the so called "junk" DNA. While it doesn't encode any genes, there is a very good chance it plays a role in structure and regulation, which we are largely oblivious to.
Considering this, you get some idea of how little it means that we can retreive genes using PCR. Even if we could sequence the entire genome from 100 year old pickled cells, we lack the capacity to assemble it into chromosomes. Conventional cloning has so far relied on being able to take a nucleus from a live donor cell and implant it into an egg. Although the specimins they have were stored in ethanol (which good at preserving DNA), they would have to find, extract, and "revive" an intact preserved nucleus. I'm not even sure what "revive" would mean in this case. Perhaps it could be rehydrated (ethanol replaced with aqueus buffer) and implanted into a living cell. Some cancer cell lines tolerate being multi-nucleated, and the cell's repair mechanisms might help restore the nucleus to working order. Or it might just apoptose (self-destruct). Regardless, this is speculation of the highest order.
Anyway, I could ramble a bit more, but hopefully I've made my point. I certainly wish them well, I think this is some really neat science.
I'm not sure how the idea came to be that there was a contract, written or unwritten, between viewers and broadcasters. There's a contract between advertizer and broadcaster, it goes something like this:
Your show has a large audience. Show our ad during it so that all those people will see it. We'll give you money in return, which you can use to keep making your show.
The viewers are under no obligation to watch the ad. That's what advertising is all about, you make some noise and hope to get people's attention. If you can't do something interesting enough to get it, tough shit for you. Just because you put out an ad, you're entitled to some of my attention span? I think not.
I am a grad student in molecular biology, and I've learned the hard way how nice this kind of journal would have been. I wrote a research proposal about something that, when it showed up in front of my committee, whas dismissed out of hand. Turns out that line of research ran into a dead end five years ago. People don't go back and publish "oh, btw, we were wrong". I, and apparently my advisor who gave me the topic, were too dumb to pick up that this was a discontinued line of research.
On the other hand, it would be a terminally dull read. And people would probably be afraid to publish in it, thinking it would hurt their career to be openly associated with failure.
I thought something similar to what you state. Entropy really pisses my off, and I would love to see proof for a universe in which there will alway be Something. Having read the article, it sounds like everything is being handled professionally. There is no fitting facts to desires.
I would hold out some hope about the degradation of the cycles of the universe, if in fact this model turns out to be true at all. Entropy is a statistical behavior of matter and energy, there is no physical law that decrees it. Not in the way there are laws that describe interactions between particles or fields. Its just something observed on the larger scale. Perhaps the branes of the universe are perfectly elastic, the energy oscillating through them moves around, but never disappates, because there is nowhere to disappate to? Just a notion. IAAMBNAC (I am a molecular biologist not a cosmologist)
Actually the idea of an adult TLD seems like a good idea. Pornography is a business, they want the people who desire their product to find them, buy it, and be pleased enough to come back for more. Give them a place to work from. They'll be happy and parents can filter it out for their kids if they want. Kids don't have credit cards, not like the porn industry will mind. It'll help separate legit adult businesses from child-porn and other "obscene" things (whatever that means to you), so its easier to target the things you feel must be suppressed without hitting everyone standing nearby.
Putting hate speach along with porn is just stupid. That turns the TLD into nothing but a dumping ground for anything censors don't like. Gay & Lesbian advocacy sites? Can't have children seeing those, file'em under porn, I mean they're talking about something sexual after all, must be porn...
Saw someone posting about the normally transient effects of gene therapy. This has certainly been an issue in the past. There's a cystic fibrosis treatment that uses an inhaler loaded with adenovirus (your basic 'cold') to add the gene to lung cells. Adenoviruses do not incorporate into the host DNA, so eventually the new gene is lost, takes a few months I believe.
Retroviruses, as used in this case, *do* incorporate into the host's DNA, so they can potentially be permanent changes. I say potentially, because the host can sometimes shut down or jettison it. If it couldn't, my current research project would be showing much better results.
The problem with any kind of gene therapy is to affect *all* of the target cells, and *only* the target cells. So far this has been pretty much impossible. What makes this case interesting, it that the doctors took the kid's own genetically-defective bone marrow cells and replaced the gene. Since this was done outside the body, they could select from culture only a healthy, properly working cell. Its not stated, but I assume they then irradiated him to destroy his bone marrow, and then let the altered cells repopulate.
As the article says, this disease can be cured with the help of a donor. The cleverness here is using gene therapy to turn the patient into his own donor. Pretty slick, IMHO.
I am inclined to agree with you on the subject of viruses. Bacteria or multicellular life might be a different issue. Since they are free-living organisms, unlike a virus, they would not need to match our biochemistry as closely to survive, if they can make use of things like sugars, amino acids, etc. The concern would be then if the kinds of defenses developed by terrestrial life were not well suited to coping with ET.
Random example: a lot of our antibiotics (and natural ones employed by a variety of organisms) function by disrupting the formation of the bacterial cell wall, causing the internal pressue of the cell to rupture it. Bacteria are developing resistance by making slight changes in the sugars the use and their arrangement in the cell wall. Our imaginary ET bug might not even have a cell wall, or may use a protein-analog, or some totally different system, against which the earthly one is worthless.
Just my thoughts, but given how little we can say with certainty about anything we bring home, why not overdose on precaution. The worse that happens is we laugh at our paranoia in fifty years.
Please read your own link, its certainly worth the time. The first of their hyptothetical drive systems is the 'collision sail', a generalization of the idea of a solar sail (in that they are not only considering light).
Just to toss out a suggestion (its late, citations are for the weak), parts of wood are non-living, much like your outer layer of skin or fingernails. The carbon count in those sections would be constant. Whether or not they persist for the whole life of the plant, I don't know. I only work with things smaller than a cell, none of that weirdo organismal stuff =)
There have been a number of posts asking about the effect of dumping these nanobots into the water, both on the marine ecology and anyone who might drink them. Well, first off, if you drink untreated salt water you have bigger problems than nanobots.
But yes, the effect needs to be addressed. Although, these aren't self-replicators it should be noted. The density of the bots will be crucial. Assuming they don't build up to a measurable level of "silt", I don't see an immediate problem. Organisms can cope with drinking grains of sand, and these will be comparable to that, or smaller. From what I can gather from the article, they are planning to use inorganic materials for the most part (metals, silicon). If that's the case, I would expect them to be treated much like any other piece of grit. Its the organic compounds that really stick with you.
I like this idea in general, but I'm a little dubious about how well it will work, regardless of side-effects. If you want to use antibodies, you'd better get the binding affinity just right, or you'll end up with a lot of false positives (low affinity) or a bot with all its sensors permanently clogged up (high affinity). Passing through fish digestive systems, getting sucked up by filter-feeders, and generally tossed about in a well-lit, ion-rich solution doesn't do much for long term operation. Are we planning to pump these things into the ocean nonstop?
Still, good luck to them. I'd love to see something like this made to work.
Ok, I'm going to be the crotchety scientist, you'll have to forgive me.
Ok, lets get some things straight. There's evidence that liquid water can exist in places outside our old 'habitable zone'. We know that organisms can thrive in boiling and subzeo (but still liquid) water, as well as surviving frozen inside ice (as happens annually in the ice shelves of antarctica).
So, this means that its *possible* for life as we know it to exist in these extraterrestrial oceans. No one is saying its there, just that its worth a look. Likewise, no one has proven that life can't exist without water. However, the only kind of life we *know* exists, does require water, and is carbon-based. I hope someday that we find that life exceeds this "narrow" category, but since we'd first just like to find any life at all, where do you think we're going to look? For the moment, time, energy, and resources are most likely to give results if we apply them according to our best information about life, however meager.
The stories of Master Li by Barry Hughart are quite enjoyable. At least judging by his name, I suspect they are not "authentic" but I thought he did a great job of capturing a very different flavor from western fantasy. The three books are _Bridge of Birds_, _Story of the Stone_ (the name is a parody of a famous chinese novel), and _The Eight Skilled Gentlemen_. Sadly all but the first are out of print.
Slashdot Mirror
You may think you're joking, but there is actually a microfab technique based on shrinky-dinks. Pattern some thermoplastic and then cook it to shrink the dimensions. It's more for creating micro-scale forms on the cheap, rather than for these sort of nano-scale silicon features, but the idea isn't totally crazy.
You guys get a beer volcano? That's way cooler than being pope. Man, I hope Eris won't smite me if I switch...
Ah yes, I see the Swiss delved too greedily and too deep...
My girlfriend can produce a high-pitched meow that sounds rather kittenish. It's like a harpoon in her cat's brain; he has no choice to come over and investigate, regardless of where he was and what he was doing.
His brain is also kind of like an etch-a-sketch. If he's in a bad mood you can shake his head vigorously and he forgets what was going on.
Screw senator, he should run for president. If we're going to be mired in conflicts halfway around the world, I at least want to see our troops charging in to battle screaming "For the Horde" on CNN.
I believe the concept is:
- capitalism arises, people are able to do more than dirt farm and can even pursue their own businesses.
- wealth builds in the populace, people have more disposable income.
- as people get used to having some financial freedom and power, they come to desire personal/political freedom and power as well and pressure the government for it.
- the rulers are pressured on the one hand, but also enriched by taxes from their new, wealthier citizens. If they stamp out the demand, they risk stamping out their own riches, so they grudgingly give way before the demands.
- Depending on the pre-capitalist powerbase of the elite, they may also find themselves increasingly in debt/dependent on the successful merchants, who eventually just demand access to power on pain of no more loans.
Maybe split the difference between the proposals? Anything orbiting the sun with enough mass to assume a spherical shape (but not enough for fusion) is a planetoid, but only the dominant body in the region gets to be a planet. That way we can avoid busting Pluto all the way down to "piece of rock", but avoid a situation in 30 years when we end up with 74 "planets" in the solar system after they map the Kuiper Belt some more.
I'm enough of a sentimentalist that I'd like to see Pluto keep some status. It deserves a bit of historic recognition just for being the first KBO to be discovered, and so much earlier than the others.
I enjoyed Zodiac a lot, and Sangoman's Principle was an interesting idea, but I think ultimately it's crap. With simple programs or simple machines, it's easier to tell what it does and how it works. With simple molecules in the body, you just get more chance of unexpected interactions. Alcohol is basically just a toxin that screws up your body in an amusing fashion at low doses. THC (active ingredient of marijuana) is actually a bioactive molecule, it binds nice and specifically to receptors in the brain. These receptors are not present in the parts of the brain that control breathing and the heart, so you don't end up with them shutting down from overdose as can happen with alcohol. All thanks to the complexity of the molecule.
Another way to think about it would be to consider that while you can use a simple molecule, you can't simplify your biology, so you're always dealing with a complex system. Give it the correct parts, don't just throw a handful of gravel into the machine.
I know he looks like a meathead, but a friend related this quote from an interview he gave:
Interviewer: "So you played D&D?"
VD: "Yep."
Interviewer: "Got your +1 sword and everything?"
VD: "+1? Try +4 dancing, vorpal."
And that kind of authenticity is just hard to fake.
>> Ninja Ents: Was is just me or did the Ents ONLY redirect the river Isen in the book? The whole "Ents stomp!" fight was just unnecessary and left the already underexplained race feeling like some cheesy Disney reject. The book builds them up in to stately, dignified, sad characters who act in their own way. The movie abandons all of that. Granted, you have to make cuts for time, but cut the holywood added big Ent fight and leave the depth of character stuff.
Haven't gotten to see the movie yet, but I wanted to respond to this. In the book the ents did indeed run amok. They tore down the ring of isengard with their bare hands, cracked stone with their roaring, and threw whole sections of wall at orthanc (which did squat). Once they realized they couldn't actually damage orthanc and saruman kept occasionally using field artillery on them, they retreated and *then* redirected the river in as an alternate method of attack.
Ent are sad and stately only until they finally get pissed off. Having said all that, I haven't seen that scene yet, so I can't say whether I think it was well handled. Just that there was actually a fight.
Wow, no kidding. I just bailed from my status of PhD student in a bio lab. In all my 6 years of working as a tech or grad peon, I have watched water drip through a tube 14 - 18 hours a day while enjoying the brisk 4 degree weather in the coldroom (protein purification), made miles of little spots on nitrocellulose (DNA hybridization), and added slightly different amounts of colorless liquid to other colorless liquid in truckloads of 96 well plates (cytotoxicity assays). It fucking sucked. You get to use your brain for 15 minutes, write it down for 15 minutes, and carry it out for approximately 10,000 hours. After it fails or your results aren't quite like they should be, you get to skip the writing and thinking and go straight to the repetition. Heck, even if it works perfectly, you need confirmation that its reproducable don't you? Don't worry, it'll screw up next time.
I just talked to a much older friend, a professor of biology, who cut though my euphamisms with a flat "bio benchwork is boring as hell". Where the heck were you guys when I talked myself into doing this? =)
Well, I'm off to give chemistry or engineering a stab. At least my projects won't mutate slowly or die because someone sneezed in their culture dish before putting it in the incubator beside mine.
News of this project gave us something to talk about in the lab. We were trying to figure out, even theoretically how they might be planning to procede. For the non-scientists, here's a decent analogy:
You know that streets are made from asphault with lanes marked by lines of paint. You have learned to make streets from raw materials and a steamroller (PCR). You now feel ready to reconstruct New York using a stack of tourist photos from your last visit.
In crunchy technical terms:
DNA in the cell is in the form of chromosomes, which are millions and millions of nucleotides long. They are packaged into the cell's nucleus by wrapping them around proteins called histones, to form nucleosomes, classically described as 'pearls on a string'. This in turn is packaged into ever higher order structures (about which we get increasingly fuzzy in our understanding) all the way up to chromosomes. Humans have 23 pairs, with I believe, 3 billion bases between them. Large spans of chromosomes are full of repeating segments, the so called "junk" DNA. While it doesn't encode any genes, there is a very good chance it plays a role in structure and regulation, which we are largely oblivious to.
Considering this, you get some idea of how little it means that we can retreive genes using PCR. Even if we could sequence the entire genome from 100 year old pickled cells, we lack the capacity to assemble it into chromosomes. Conventional cloning has so far relied on being able to take a nucleus from a live donor cell and implant it into an egg. Although the specimins they have were stored in ethanol (which good at preserving DNA), they would have to find, extract, and "revive" an intact preserved nucleus. I'm not even sure what "revive" would mean in this case. Perhaps it could be rehydrated (ethanol replaced with aqueus buffer) and implanted into a living cell. Some cancer cell lines tolerate being multi-nucleated, and the cell's repair mechanisms might help restore the nucleus to working order. Or it might just apoptose (self-destruct). Regardless, this is speculation of the highest order.
Anyway, I could ramble a bit more, but hopefully I've made my point. I certainly wish them well, I think this is some really neat science.
I'm not sure how the idea came to be that there was a contract, written or unwritten, between viewers and broadcasters. There's a contract between advertizer and broadcaster, it goes something like this:
Your show has a large audience. Show our ad during it so that all those people will see it. We'll give you money in return, which you can use to keep making your show.
The viewers are under no obligation to watch the ad. That's what advertising is all about, you make some noise and hope to get people's attention. If you can't do something interesting enough to get it, tough shit for you. Just because you put out an ad, you're entitled to some of my attention span? I think not.
I am a grad student in molecular biology, and I've learned the hard way how nice this kind of journal would have been. I wrote a research proposal about something that, when it showed up in front of my committee, whas dismissed out of hand. Turns out that line of research ran into a dead end five years ago. People don't go back and publish "oh, btw, we were wrong". I, and apparently my advisor who gave me the topic, were too dumb to pick up that this was a discontinued line of research.
On the other hand, it would be a terminally dull read. And people would probably be afraid to publish in it, thinking it would hurt their career to be openly associated with failure.
I thought something similar to what you state. Entropy really pisses my off, and I would love to see proof for a universe in which there will alway be Something. Having read the article, it sounds like everything is being handled professionally. There is no fitting facts to desires.
I would hold out some hope about the degradation of the cycles of the universe, if in fact this model turns out to be true at all. Entropy is a statistical behavior of matter and energy, there is no physical law that decrees it. Not in the way there are laws that describe interactions between particles or fields. Its just something observed on the larger scale. Perhaps the branes of the universe are perfectly elastic, the energy oscillating through them moves around, but never disappates, because there is nowhere to disappate to? Just a notion. IAAMBNAC (I am a molecular biologist not a cosmologist)
Actually the idea of an adult TLD seems like a good idea. Pornography is a business, they want the people who desire their product to find them, buy it, and be pleased enough to come back for more. Give them a place to work from. They'll be happy and parents can filter it out for their kids if they want. Kids don't have credit cards, not like the porn industry will mind. It'll help separate legit adult businesses from child-porn and other "obscene" things (whatever that means to you), so its easier to target the things you feel must be suppressed without hitting everyone standing nearby.
Putting hate speach along with porn is just stupid. That turns the TLD into nothing but a dumping ground for anything censors don't like. Gay & Lesbian advocacy sites? Can't have children seeing those, file'em under porn, I mean they're talking about something sexual after all, must be porn...
This kind of revenue-by-lawsuit MO by so many companies makes me feel like I'm trapped inside an Ayn Rand novel. Both parts of that disturb me.
Saw someone posting about the normally transient effects of gene therapy. This has certainly been an issue in the past. There's a cystic fibrosis treatment that uses an inhaler loaded with adenovirus (your basic 'cold') to add the gene to lung cells. Adenoviruses do not incorporate into the host DNA, so eventually the new gene is lost, takes a few months I believe.
Retroviruses, as used in this case, *do* incorporate into the host's DNA, so they can potentially be permanent changes. I say potentially, because the host can sometimes shut down or jettison it. If it couldn't, my current research project would be showing much better results.
The problem with any kind of gene therapy is to affect *all* of the target cells, and *only* the target cells. So far this has been pretty much impossible. What makes this case interesting, it that the doctors took the kid's own genetically-defective bone marrow cells and replaced the gene. Since this was done outside the body, they could select from culture only a healthy, properly working cell. Its not stated, but I assume they then irradiated him to destroy his bone marrow, and then let the altered cells repopulate.
As the article says, this disease can be cured with the help of a donor. The cleverness here is using gene therapy to turn the patient into his own donor. Pretty slick, IMHO.
Random example: a lot of our antibiotics (and natural ones employed by a variety of organisms) function by disrupting the formation of the bacterial cell wall, causing the internal pressue of the cell to rupture it. Bacteria are developing resistance by making slight changes in the sugars the use and their arrangement in the cell wall. Our imaginary ET bug might not even have a cell wall, or may use a protein-analog, or some totally different system, against which the earthly one is worthless.
Just my thoughts, but given how little we can say with certainty about anything we bring home, why not overdose on precaution. The worse that happens is we laugh at our paranoia in fifty years.
Please read your own link, its certainly worth the time. The first of their hyptothetical drive systems is the 'collision sail', a generalization of the idea of a solar sail (in that they are not only considering light).
Just to toss out a suggestion (its late, citations are for the weak), parts of wood are non-living, much like your outer layer of skin or fingernails. The carbon count in those sections would be constant. Whether or not they persist for the whole life of the plant, I don't know. I only work with things smaller than a cell, none of that weirdo organismal stuff =)
But yes, the effect needs to be addressed. Although, these aren't self-replicators it should be noted. The density of the bots will be crucial. Assuming they don't build up to a measurable level of "silt", I don't see an immediate problem. Organisms can cope with drinking grains of sand, and these will be comparable to that, or smaller. From what I can gather from the article, they are planning to use inorganic materials for the most part (metals, silicon). If that's the case, I would expect them to be treated much like any other piece of grit. Its the organic compounds that really stick with you.
I like this idea in general, but I'm a little dubious about how well it will work, regardless of side-effects. If you want to use antibodies, you'd better get the binding affinity just right, or you'll end up with a lot of false positives (low affinity) or a bot with all its sensors permanently clogged up (high affinity). Passing through fish digestive systems, getting sucked up by filter-feeders, and generally tossed about in a well-lit, ion-rich solution doesn't do much for long term operation. Are we planning to pump these things into the ocean nonstop?
Still, good luck to them. I'd love to see something like this made to work.
Ok, I'm going to be the crotchety scientist, you'll have to forgive me.
Ok, lets get some things straight. There's evidence that liquid water can exist in places outside our old 'habitable zone'. We know that organisms can thrive in boiling and subzeo (but still liquid) water, as well as surviving frozen inside ice (as happens annually in the ice shelves of antarctica).
So, this means that its *possible* for life as we know it to exist in these extraterrestrial oceans. No one is saying its there, just that its worth a look. Likewise, no one has proven that life can't exist without water. However, the only kind of life we *know* exists, does require water, and is carbon-based. I hope someday that we find that life exceeds this "narrow" category, but since we'd first just like to find any life at all, where do you think we're going to look? For the moment, time, energy, and resources are most likely to give results if we apply them according to our best information about life, however meager.
Rant over. Now get the hell off my lawn you kids!
The stories of Master Li by Barry Hughart are quite enjoyable. At least judging by his name, I suspect they are not "authentic" but I thought he did a great job of capturing a very different flavor from western fantasy. The three books are _Bridge of Birds_, _Story of the Stone_ (the name is a parody of a famous chinese novel), and _The Eight Skilled Gentlemen_. Sadly all but the first are out of print.
Oh my god, I haven't done my taxes in days. I don't think I can hold out much longer...