This experiment no doubt sparks a bit of interest (pun intended) but the relationship between electrical stimulation and leg movement is fairly well known.
Luigi Galvani noticed way back in the 1700s that the legs of a dead frog would twitch if its sciatic nerve was hit by static electricity.
The idea that human's with spinal cord damage may be able to walk using this technique sounds to me fanciful, because the electricity needs to be directed. It seems more like a technique that would be able to provoke something similar to an epileptic seizure in these patients (which is of course caused by electrical discharges in the brain).
It may be useful for other reasons though. People with spinal cord damage can have their leg muscles waste away through disuse, meaning if a real cure is ever found, they may still be left unable to walk.
Perhaps this work will enable them to be more easily rehabilitated in the future, should it prove useful at stimulating dis-used muscles.
There are just not so many black people in Poland. Microsoft was probably right thinking that having black people in the ads would not connect in a 99.9% white population. Because white people can never connect with black people? It is thinking like that which meant the Rwandan genocide happened without the United Nations lifting a finger, and that the genocide in Sudan is heading the same way. I am not black, but I have no problems identifying with a black businessman, nor an Asian one. I can't imagine I am alone in this. I have black hair, and can also relate pretty well to people with red or brown hair.
For the life of me I can't see how this will be cost effective or environmentally friendly. I know sometime in the future there will be scarcity of oil, or peak oil (if we aren't there yet) but no-one seriously thinks that there will be so little fuel that a navy ship won't be supplied for many decades. Oil will become relatively more scarce through time, but at some point I think it will cease being used in cars and turbines, and used only for niche machinery and for making plastics. By the time there is no oil left for navy ships, I am betting another fuel source will have come along. Also, from TFA: "CO2's abundance, combined with concerns about global warming, make it an attractive potential feedstock, Dorner says. Although the gas forms only a small proportion of air - around 0.04 per cent - ocean water contains about 140 times that concentration, he says." Can someone smarter than me explain how it addresses concerns about global warming to get the highly CO2-concentrated sea water, convert it into fuel, that presumably is then sent via an exhaust stack into the air? Isn't it just like mining coal and sending it into the air, except this plan uses carbon in the oceans?
What exactly would we do to prepare for an earthquake that we don't already do(such as construct sturdier buildings or educate people on places where it's a good idea to take cover)? I am not sure if that is a serious question or not. The obvious answer is that so people can evacuate to somewhere safe. If I lived in an earthquake zone I would be much happier if I could be told ahead of time when a big one was expected.
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He isn't. News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites. He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't. It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all. So perhaps his plan is this: 1. Charge for access to all his news sites. 2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue). 3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view. 4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke. 5. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications 6. Close down newspaper print editions as readers migrate to paying for content online 7. Scoop up profits and increase influence
My question is what will happen next, if this motion is allowed. The implication of such a finding is that MediaSentry broke the law. As I understand it, state and federal laws. I would assume law enforcement agencies would be forced to act against MediaSentry. Would that mean the organisation packs up and moves to Russia (or some other less restrictive country) to conduct their operation, or would it continue operating in the USA with a different brief? Would any money MediaSentry has gathered from its clients be confiscated as proceeds of crime? Would any previous law suits agreed to be overturned by such evidence?
"And how bad would the AIDS epidemic be (in Africa or elsewhere) if people followed "oppressive" Christian teachings like keeping the sex in marriage (I'm no expert on Islam, but as far as I know, they too at least theoretically believe the same)?"
That won't do a hell of a lot for the people catching HIV from dirty needles or from breast feeding mothers. Monogamy in marriage is all fine and dandy, but lets not pretend HIV wouldn't exist if people could just forget millions of years of evolution and keep it in their pants.
"Mock and flame away. I'll pay attention when somebody proposes an actual drawback to monogamy." By reducing sexual partners, you limit the number of offspring you have and human kind evolves more slowly. But then again, your Christian teachings probably preclude you from believing evolution occurs.
PS Monogamy inside marriage is part of Islam, but in many Islamic societies men can take multiple wives. That is what I call having your cake and eating it too.
If the Bill of Rights is modelled on the US one, then no doubt people will want the right to keep trojans and viruses. In regards to what I think should be in an online Bill of Rights, the right to privacy is key. There is nothing worse than knowing google, echelon, the Chinese govt and god knows who else has programs trawling through every word you write and ready to cens
In natural law, the purpose of sex is procreation. Thus, anything that interferes with that is evil, such as masturbation or birth control.
Nature has a habit of throwing some curve balls at you. Many animals have sex for fun.
A friend's dog couldn't stop humping anything that moved, and I saw a documentary once where a cane toad was having sex with another toad that was squashed flat on a road.
Some life-forms also reproduce by means of cloning themselves. Does this mean that because asexual reproduction is "natural" that god won't have a problem with human cloning?
The Catholic church is widely regarded to be the most wealthy organization in the world, by a long shot.
I really doubt this is true. While it is impossible to value some of the ancient treasures the Catholic church owns, most of them would only fetch in the millions at most.
I have seen estimates of Catholic worth at about $100 billion, well short of, for instance, the Chinese Treasury, which has reserves of more than one trillion dollars.
Well, it looks like it is time to sink the boot into Thais again, and their over-the-top laws in relation to Lese Majesty (criticising the royals).
I agree that people should be free to criticise anyone in a free society, and that locking people up for up to 15 years for something as minor as criticising a royal is ludicrous, here are some facts you may not be aware of:
1. Thailand's king Bhumibol Adulyadej said a few years ago in a birthday speech that the law of lese majesty was outdated and he would pardon anyone found guilty of the crime. He has since kept his word.
2. The crime of lese majesty came about in Thailand because under their constitution it is illegal for the royal family (who are supposed to be above the rest of society) to comment on the day-to-day running of society. They cannot respond to political attacks, nor can they react if people personally attack their character.
3. Because the Thai royals cannot respond to attacks, and take legal action or comment at any defamatory comments about them, the crime of lese majesty was inserted into the country's constitution, as a safeguard against political attacks on the royals.
4. Every time there is a general election the parliament has to vote on whether to can the lese majesty laws. Despite the king saying the laws no longer need to be in existence, the Thai people revere the king, and would vote out of office any politician who voted to abandon the lese majesty laws, hence the laws remain.
People in Thailand do not have the same freedom of speech rights that people in the west do, but to portray the king as some sort of evil ogre who is so sensitive to criticms that he cannot deal with an insult is just ridiculous.
This website will no doubt create a bureaucratic headache for the king, but should not be seen as evidence that Thailand is a dictatorial state.
"The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." Well, the mammoth technology works because they can implant the fertilised egg into an elephant, which is a close relative of the mammoth.
What happens when you try to clone a Tasmanian tiger? Where do you put the fertilised egg? Tasmanian devils are probably the most closely related, but still very different. They are marsupials, so probably not such a huge issue carrying the foetus.
I would love to see an emu trying to crap out a Moa egg though? There are limitations to this technology. It won't work for any extinct animal for which DNA exists.
But for my money, the clone I would most like to see is Otzi everyone's favourite ice-man.
Kindle's wireless deliveries only work inside the USA. Likewise you can't buy content without a US credit card. This rules out a large chunk of their potential customers, and one of the huge benefits of buying a Kindle. It also means many overseas book sellers won't want their content used on Kindles. My mother (in Australia) wanted to get one, largely because she can adjust the text on the screen. Here eyes are not what they used to be and she gets stronger and stronger prescriptions on her glasses. It is the lack of access and the cost that are the biggest obstacles for her. To me is seems the Kindle is an American-only club that provides a good ebook reader at high cost. Those at Amazon really need to broaden their perspective if this is to take off.
If I had the choice of spending six billion euros on a quest to unlock some of the greatest mysteries on earth, or spend $US700 billion bailing out overpaid bankers and their cash-poor customers, I know what I would choose.
For three years Google News was in beta and it didn't seem to dent its popularity.
That being said, I usually look for a version that is close to X.0 or X.1 , the reason being you often get free upgrades within the version number, so if I get a low number, I know I will get lots of free upgrades.
If I get 1.8, I know they will shortly jump to 2.0, making any upgrades costly.
If the worms are indeed fleeing what they believe are burrowing moles, I wonder if the technique would work in places where moles do not exist?
In Australia for instance, we have plenty of earthworms, including the world's largest (which grow up to three metres long) yet we have no native moles. Logically you would expect the worms not to react, but perhaps worms in Australia would be trying to flee bandicoots or bilbies.
The thing is I don't know whether bandicoots or bilbies sound like burrowing moles. Perhaps you would need a smaller stake, or a longer saw. Could be an interesting experiment though.
When was the last time that an American was imprisoned or executed? It has been a while, at least back to the 1980s or so.
There were some Americans caughtby China after they crashed their plane in to a Chinese craft.
There was never any question that the US team were spies, on reconaissance in Chinese airspace.
I don't know if you could describe what happened to them as imprisonment, but they were certainly held in detention for a while before they were ultimately released.
It says in the article this cash back will only be for people in the USA. It is a shame. If I (in New Zealand) wanted to buy say, an iPod, I could be convinced to click on a Microsoft-affiliated retailer if I thought I would get a decent discount, considering they cost roughly the same everywhere. But how would Microsoft know I am living overseas, if I just use a Paypal account? Can anyone think of how I could circumvent this ban?
Slashdot Mirror
This experiment no doubt sparks a bit of interest (pun intended) but the relationship between electrical stimulation and leg movement is fairly well known.
Luigi Galvani noticed way back in the 1700s that the legs of a dead frog would twitch if its sciatic nerve was hit by static electricity.
The idea that human's with spinal cord damage may be able to walk using this technique sounds to me fanciful, because the electricity needs to be directed. It seems more like a technique that would be able to provoke something similar to an epileptic seizure in these patients (which is of course caused by electrical discharges in the brain).
It may be useful for other reasons though. People with spinal cord damage can have their leg muscles waste away through disuse, meaning if a real cure is ever found, they may still be left unable to walk.
Perhaps this work will enable them to be more easily rehabilitated in the future, should it prove useful at stimulating dis-used muscles.
I am not sure giving birth to deformed children qualifies as contraception.
There are just not so many black people in Poland. Microsoft was probably right thinking that having black people in the ads would not connect in a 99.9% white population.
Because white people can never connect with black people?
It is thinking like that which meant the Rwandan genocide happened without the United Nations lifting a finger, and that the genocide in Sudan is heading the same way.
I am not black, but I have no problems identifying with a black businessman, nor an Asian one.
I can't imagine I am alone in this. I have black hair, and can also relate pretty well to people with red or brown hair.
For the life of me I can't see how this will be cost effective or environmentally friendly.
I know sometime in the future there will be scarcity of oil, or peak oil (if we aren't there yet) but no-one seriously thinks that there will be so little fuel that a navy ship won't be supplied for many decades.
Oil will become relatively more scarce through time, but at some point I think it will cease being used in cars and turbines, and used only for niche machinery and for making plastics. By the time there is no oil left for navy ships, I am betting another fuel source will have come along.
Also, from TFA:
"CO2's abundance, combined with concerns about global warming, make it an attractive potential feedstock, Dorner says. Although the gas forms only a small proportion of air - around 0.04 per cent - ocean water contains about 140 times that concentration, he says."
Can someone smarter than me explain how it addresses concerns about global warming to get the highly CO2-concentrated sea water, convert it into fuel, that presumably is then sent via an exhaust stack into the air? Isn't it just like mining coal and sending it into the air, except this plan uses carbon in the oceans?
What exactly would we do to prepare for an earthquake that we don't already do(such as construct sturdier buildings or educate people on places where it's a good idea to take cover)?
I am not sure if that is a serious question or not. The obvious answer is that so people can evacuate to somewhere safe.
If I lived in an earthquake zone I would be much happier if I could be told ahead of time when a big one was expected.
Murdoch far to the left? That is one of the funniest things I have heard for a while. He is a union-busting arch-conservative and always has been.
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He isn't.
News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites.
He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't.
It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all.
So perhaps his plan is this:
1. Charge for access to all his news sites.
2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue).
3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view.
4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke.
5. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications
6. Close down newspaper print editions as readers migrate to paying for content online
7. Scoop up profits and increase influence
Like this girl?
My question is what will happen next, if this motion is allowed.
The implication of such a finding is that MediaSentry broke the law. As I understand it, state and federal laws.
I would assume law enforcement agencies would be forced to act against MediaSentry.
Would that mean the organisation packs up and moves to Russia (or some other less restrictive country) to conduct their operation, or would it continue operating in the USA with a different brief?
Would any money MediaSentry has gathered from its clients be confiscated as proceeds of crime?
Would any previous law suits agreed to be overturned by such evidence?
"And how bad would the AIDS epidemic be (in Africa or elsewhere) if people followed "oppressive" Christian teachings like keeping the sex in marriage (I'm no expert on Islam, but as far as I know, they too at least theoretically believe the same)?"
That won't do a hell of a lot for the people catching HIV from dirty needles or from breast feeding mothers.
Monogamy in marriage is all fine and dandy, but lets not pretend HIV wouldn't exist if people could just forget millions of years of evolution and keep it in their pants.
"Mock and flame away. I'll pay attention when somebody proposes an actual drawback to monogamy."
By reducing sexual partners, you limit the number of offspring you have and human kind evolves more slowly. But then again, your Christian teachings probably preclude you from believing evolution occurs.
PS Monogamy inside marriage is part of Islam, but in many Islamic societies men can take multiple wives. That is what I call having your cake and eating it too.
If the Bill of Rights is modelled on the US one, then no doubt people will want the right to keep trojans and viruses.
In regards to what I think should be in an online Bill of Rights, the right to privacy is key.
There is nothing worse than knowing google, echelon, the Chinese govt and god knows who else has programs trawling through every word you write and ready to cens
Ironically, I tried to click on the story, but it came up with a dead link.
Looks like the missing link is a missing link.
In other news, anyone who talks about "the common ancestor" is crazy.
There must be many common ancestors, or where did the common one identy come from?
If you were really interested in evolution, I think you would probably be looking for a common amoeba.
In natural law, the purpose of sex is procreation. Thus, anything that interferes with that is evil, such as masturbation or birth control.
Nature has a habit of throwing some curve balls at you. Many animals have sex for fun.
A friend's dog couldn't stop humping anything that moved, and I saw a documentary once where a cane toad was having sex with another toad that was squashed flat on a road.
Some life-forms also reproduce by means of cloning themselves. Does this mean that because asexual reproduction is "natural" that god won't have a problem with human cloning?
The Catholic church is widely regarded to be the most wealthy organization in the world, by a long shot.
I really doubt this is true. While it is impossible to value some of the ancient treasures the Catholic church owns, most of them would only fetch in the millions at most.
I have seen estimates of Catholic worth at about $100 billion, well short of, for instance, the Chinese Treasury, which has reserves of more than one trillion dollars.
Well, it looks like it is time to sink the boot into Thais again, and their over-the-top laws in relation to Lese Majesty (criticising the royals).
I agree that people should be free to criticise anyone in a free society, and that locking people up for up to 15 years for something as minor as criticising a royal is ludicrous, here are some facts you may not be aware of:
1. Thailand's king Bhumibol Adulyadej said a few years ago in a birthday speech that the law of lese majesty was outdated and he would pardon anyone found guilty of the crime. He has since kept his word.
2. The crime of lese majesty came about in Thailand because under their constitution it is illegal for the royal family (who are supposed to be above the rest of society) to comment on the day-to-day running of society. They cannot respond to political attacks, nor can they react if people personally attack their character.
3. Because the Thai royals cannot respond to attacks, and take legal action or comment at any defamatory comments about them, the crime of lese majesty was inserted into the country's constitution, as a safeguard against political attacks on the royals.
4. Every time there is a general election the parliament has to vote on whether to can the lese majesty laws. Despite the king saying the laws no longer need to be in existence, the Thai people revere the king, and would vote out of office any politician who voted to abandon the lese majesty laws, hence the laws remain.
People in Thailand do not have the same freedom of speech rights that people in the west do, but to portray the king as some sort of evil ogre who is so sensitive to criticms that he cannot deal with an insult is just ridiculous.
This website will no doubt create a bureaucratic headache for the king, but should not be seen as evidence that Thailand is a dictatorial state.
"The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA."
Well, the mammoth technology works because they can implant the fertilised egg into an elephant, which is a close relative of the mammoth.
What happens when you try to clone a Tasmanian tiger? Where do you put the fertilised egg? Tasmanian devils are probably the most closely related, but still very different. They are marsupials, so probably not such a huge issue carrying the foetus.
I would love to see an emu trying to crap out a Moa egg though? There are limitations to this technology. It won't work for any extinct animal for which DNA exists.
But for my money, the clone I would most like to see is Otzi everyone's favourite ice-man.
Actually, given in-breeding, if they wanted to get a viable population going, they would probably need a whole herd.
Kindle's wireless deliveries only work inside the USA. Likewise you can't buy content without a US credit card.
This rules out a large chunk of their potential customers, and one of the huge benefits of buying a Kindle. It also means many overseas book sellers won't want their content used on Kindles.
My mother (in Australia) wanted to get one, largely because she can adjust the text on the screen. Here eyes are not what they used to be and she gets stronger and stronger prescriptions on her glasses.
It is the lack of access and the cost that are the biggest obstacles for her. To me is seems the Kindle is an American-only club that provides a good ebook reader at high cost.
Those at Amazon really need to broaden their perspective if this is to take off.
If I had the choice of spending six billion euros on a quest to unlock some of the greatest mysteries on earth, or spend $US700 billion bailing out overpaid bankers and their cash-poor customers, I know what I would choose.
For three years Google News was in beta and it didn't seem to dent its popularity.
That being said, I usually look for a version that is close to X.0 or X.1 , the reason being you often get free upgrades within the version number, so if I get a low number, I know I will get lots of free upgrades.
If I get 1.8, I know they will shortly jump to 2.0, making any upgrades costly.
If the worms are indeed fleeing what they believe are burrowing moles, I wonder if the technique would work in places where moles do not exist?
In Australia for instance, we have plenty of earthworms, including the world's largest (which grow up to three metres long) yet we have no native moles. Logically you would expect the worms not to react, but perhaps worms in Australia would be trying to flee bandicoots or bilbies.
The thing is I don't know whether bandicoots or bilbies sound like burrowing moles. Perhaps you would need a smaller stake, or a longer saw. Could be an interesting experiment though.
When was the last time that an American was imprisoned or executed? It has been a while, at least back to the 1980s or so.
There were some Americans caughtby China after they crashed their plane in to a Chinese craft.
There was never any question that the US team were spies, on reconaissance in Chinese airspace.
I don't know if you could describe what happened to them as imprisonment, but they were certainly held in detention for a while before they were ultimately released.
I think you will find the Hubble can see a fair bit better than the human eye.
It says in the article this cash back will only be for people in the USA. It is a shame.
If I (in New Zealand) wanted to buy say, an iPod, I could be convinced to click on a Microsoft-affiliated retailer if I thought I would get a decent discount, considering they cost roughly the same everywhere.
But how would Microsoft know I am living overseas, if I just use a Paypal account? Can anyone think of how I could circumvent this ban?
*phew* that is great to know reusing nuclear waste over and over again can cut its half life so dramatically.
It is a bit of a bummer that in doing so you produce plutonium, which itself has a half life of 24,100 years.