Yes, I know that you are kidding. I'm also familiar with the petition to ban DHMO, which garnered a substantial number of signatures.
However, you indirectly raise a real issue: efforts have been made to control the mosquito population by getting rid of swamps. It doesn't work.
The best way to control the mosquito population is to encourage the growth of dragonflies, and other predatory insects that eat mosquito larvae.
Over time, such practices as draining swamps and the use of pesticides on wetlands actually increase mosquito populations (this is the source of the recent epidemic in Africa, I believe,) because they kill off the dragon flies, and other natural predators far more effectively than they kill mosquitos - so the mosquito population may drop in the short term but if you have a wet year with no dragon flies, it skyrockets.
So - take your anti-environmentalist rhetoric and shove it.
Let my bias and background be clear - I am an ethnically Jewish atheist/humanist in graduate school in molecular biology.
Obviously - I am not concerned about the welfare of balls of cells roughly a millimeter in diameter. The creation of blastocysts, using in-vitro fertilization, to make clonal stem cells, does not trouble me in and of itself. No different from tumors or flakes of skin.
However, when this is done, women need to undergo egg donation. The health effects of this procedure may be severe; study has been inadequate. If we do find a medical application for this technology, economic pressure on young women to donate eggs, which can already be considerable, could increase. In underdeveloped nations, unscrupulous individuals could collect eggs using highly unsafe techniques.
If it were possible to grow entire organs in isolation, using these clonal stem cells, that would be my sole concern. In fact - I outright predict that this will be possible for some applications, and that blastocysts will be produced for this purpose.
As a result of stem cell research, we might figure out how to grow a Kidney in a tube from a single cell (or induce regeneration of bits of Kidney in a healthy adult, or what-have-you).
Otherwise, the way to get clonal organs would be to implant the blastocysts in a mother and bring the resultant embryos to term and then harvest the clonal individual for organs.
If the stem cell research which the pro-life crowd opposes is not done, or is not successful, this will be the only way to grow organs. Since I think there is a real, moral, distinction between early abortion and infanticide, I wish to avert this possibility.
Horror upon horror - It ought to be feasible to deliberately introduce horrible birth defects (especially if we can figure out how to fast-grow embroys in vats) such that the clonal individual didn't develop a brain. If you only needed to make a Kidney, you might kill all the embryo's nerve cells or something. Raise your hand if you think this is no worse than flushing a fertilized ovum down the toilet.
In addition to being gross, such technology, if widely adopted, would I think lead to the devaluation of human life; a charge which has been leveled, baselessly, against the practice of abortion, but which has real force in this case.
At this point in the discussion I would like to remind everyone - the original articles discusses applying molecular biology to the study of PARASITES, not people. While it might be possible to use clonal stem cells to fight malaria somehow, that is in no sense the technology that is being used.
Here's an explanation of what DNA microarrays (the technology being used in the original article) actually do.
Giving people the opportunity to remain physically active during the day (which Yoga does) should be part of treating your employees with dignity, especially people who sit at desks all day.
Obviously, anyone who mentions "increased brain waves" is a crank. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that doing Yoga is not good for you, or even that these are poor Yoga instructors they're hiring - some of the best physical therapists, chiropractors and martial arts instructors combine great skills with a variety of cranky beliefs. As long as he gets your employees motivated to stand up and wave their arms around, they will be healthier and happier - even if the particular motions emphasised in Yoga are complete and utter bunk (which I do not believe, but I can conceede the point for sake of argument.)
Also, a persons perception of being healthful or content is entirely driven by psychology. If you have flakes on your staff, you can probably help them feel better by having a certified crackpot with a mellow voice tell them that doing Yoga removes static from their brainwaves. I don't see the harm.
Bringing it all together
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 3, Funny
News from the future: July 23rd, 2008
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today upheld the Pre-emptive Piracy Prevention Act (PPPA), which gave the private armies employed by the sole remaining media corporation the power to declare and pursue war against individuals on US soil - who can then be designated as "enemy combatants" and tried by military tribunals created by our glorious leader, Grand Marshall Rupert Murdoch.
Omnimedia spokesmen hailed the ruling, calling it a victory for intellectual property rights, and saying that it vindicated their use of nuclear weapons against the city of Palo Alto, where their intelligence indicated that the source of all the world's pirated content, the so-called "Universal Inserter," was hiding.
Mere minutes after the blast, the Universal Inserter uploaded an illegal copy of Charlice's new video (purchase a license to view title) [goatse.cx], to his partner in crime, the Universal Downloader. Experts believe the upload is genuine.
The attorney representing the Universal Inserter, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, who has drawn considerable controversy for refusing to acknowledge that his client even exists, was unavailable for comment as he is being held on charges of aiding and abetting the enemy at the Omnimedia detention center in Gautonomo Bay.
If they could find the quality top management in the lower wage country, they would move this function as well.
Bullshit. "They" ARE the quality top management.
Do you really think that there aren't any smart, charismatic, suitably amoral businessmen in China?
Do I need to point out specific instances of managers lining their pockets at the expense (direct or otherwise,) of share-holders?
Now, how many instances do you know of where shareholders force out their overpayed management? I know of several instances where corporate raiders (themselves overpaid managers of a holding corporation,) have forced out reasonably paid upper management who weren't ruthless enough for their tastes, but I cannot, off hand, think of many share holder revolts that bankrupted a CEO - say it with me, "golden parachute". The only way market discipline can ever apply to upper management is if the people above them in the supposed pecking order - the shareholders - force it on them. Don't hold your breath.
Of course, I think market discipline is a vicious practice with no place in a civilized world, but don't pretend it applies to the rich.
Gee, if there are only two other people running freenet, that explains why I have so much trouble getting anything.
News from the future: July 21st, 2008
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today upheld the Pre-emptive Piracy Prevention Act (PPPA), which gave the private armies employed by the sole remaining media corporation the power to declare and pursue war against individuals on US soil - who can then be designated as "enemy combatants" and tried by military tribunals created by our glorious leader, Grand Marshall Rupert Murdoch.
Omnimedia spokesmen hailed the ruling, calling it a victory for intellectual property rights, and saying that it vindicated their use of nuclear weapons against the city of Palo Alto, where their intelligence indicated that the source of all the world's pirated content, the so-called "Universal Inserter," was hiding.
Mere minutes after the blast, the Universal Inserter uploaded an illegal copy of Charlice's new video (purchase a license to view title), to his partner in crime, the Universal Downloader. Experts believe the upload is genuine.
The attorney representing the Universal Inserter, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, who has drawn considerable controversy for refusing to acknowledge that his client even exists, was unavailable for comment as he is being held on charges of aiding and abetting the enemy at the Omnimedia detention center in Gautonomo Bay.
More likely, Congress will order the FBI to use Carnivore (or whatever it is called now) to track people downloading a particular file on Freenet, and to try and find out who they are. I don't remember how Freenet works, or how Carnivore works, but I'm sure with total control of the router infrastructure you could figure out who was downloading what, eventually..... although, every control message for freenet is encrypted, huh? Well, anyway they'd try.
Then, the RIAA will demand that congress give them the power to open up carnivore boxes and track down "pirates" without judicial oversight.
Our legislators have such a poor idea of how freenet works (worse even than mine,) that I don't think they *can* write a law against it. A law against software that enables two remote computers to connect to each other without both of them knowing who the other is?
Lower concentrations will also favor no match whatsoever, in general.
What matters is the relative concentration of the target DNA sequence, and of all other remotely similar sequences. Roughly speaking, for each base pair that is different between your ideal target and your actual target, you get a difference of a few kcal/mole in binding energy.
Every 1.36 kcal/mole (roughly) corresponds to a ten-fold decrease in binding affinity.
So, roughly speaking, a single-nucleotide mis-match is going to have 1/1000 times the binding affinity of a perfect match to the probe. This means, that under IDEAL circumstances, you can detect your target against a background of 1000-times its own concentration in single-base substitutions. Of course, under circumstances where your probe is long enough that random DNA will tend to bind indiscriminately, this won't work.
Contamination with single-stranded binding proteins, which do exist, might also be a confounding factor, either giving you a false positive or fouling up your probe.
Anyway, this may or may not be good enough for any particular application. I suspect that this technique will never actually be as sensitive as PCR, wherein the binding-affinity experiment is effectively "repeated" each replication cycle. If you choose a sequence carefully enough - and use a longer probe so that close matches are not so likely to appear at random (a ten nucleotide probe appears one in every 2^20 ~= 1/billion times, at random. The human genome is likely to include one instance of every decamer,) you might get performance good enough for the applications they describe.
When I was an undergrad, all my CS profs (some people in math, too) at UCSC got hand-written letters from this fellow, who happened to be in prison, claiming that he was recieving encoded, telepathic transmissions from the spider-like aliens who had landed at Roswell. He couldn't understand them, and he wanted help "decoding" the transmissions.
Fortunately, we can reassure the fellow that no such aliens exist, now that we have a crate full of declassified documents. This must be a great relief to all of the countries paranoid schizophrenics. I bet hardly any of the text has been blacked out!
[Firing people for unionising] may be illegal, but Bush and his cohorts are trying to legalize it, and good luck getting current laws enforced with Bushites running the DOL. Unionize and strike. I recommend the IWW.
That may be an unpopular sentiment, but it is not a troll - firstly, it is advice (clearly sincere) directed at the story author, and secondly, in so far as factual assertions are made, they are well documented in the literature on the subject; when the same group of people were in charge in 1980-1992 this is exactly what they did.
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/9708-UD-rel at ivity.html
Clinton had very similar policies, as I'm sure we're all aware, but failing to criticize past administrations the same breath hardly constitutes a Troll. If I had moderator access at the moment I'd report this as an abuse.
Personally, since there seem to be only about half a dozen workers in this case, collective bargaining seems un-necesarry. The story author and his coworkers should just walk out.
Convergence, people, convergence. (Closes TV show that he has running in another window.)
All of these boxes are just crippled computers. With the prices on a real computer nosediving - and all signs indicating they will keep doing so - the only thing these devices have going for them is "mindshare" married to consumer apathy or ignorance.
Now, as I close my TV show, I notice that I'm running windows, which goes to show you can go a long way with an overpriced, underpowered product and some mindshare (though I got windows free from school). However, I don't think either of these devices is going to be able to successfully compete with the TV enabled home PC, ten or even five years in the future.
Briefly, for those who went to high school here in the states:
Gene (DNA) -> RNA -> Protein
So, each Gene makes a single Protein product.
Reearchers have found the Gene that makes the protein product that causes a cell to behave as a stem cell. This Gene is found in every cell of your body, but, under normal circumstances, the protein product is found only in stem cells.
While I'm clearing things up I might as well explain some more.
Melanin, for example, is the pigment that turns your skin brown. The gene to make melanin is found in every cell of your body, however, the cornea (whites of the eyes) of a black person is not black. The gene to make melanin is inactive in those cells.
Likewise, this stem cell gene is inactive in most cells of your body.
Different forms of a gene (called alleles) make slight variations of the same Protein product, or make the same protein product under different circumstances.
For example, both a white person and a black person have the gene that makes the protein melanin, which is a dark brown pigment found in both skin and iris.
A white person, with brown eyes, has a gene which is less active in the skin, makes less melanin there, and the skin is paler (forms of melanin which are less dark also exist). A black person has a gene which is more active in the skin.
A white person with brown eyes, however, probably has every bit as much melanin in the iris (the colored part of the eye,) as the black person. So, the melanin gene is differentially active only under some circumstances.
This differential activity is mediated by transcription factors. Transcription factors are switches that turn genes on and off, they are present in some tissues but not others. The white person has an allele of melanin which doesn't not respond to the "on" switch (or responds weakly) found in the skin, but still responds to the seperate "on" switch found in the iris.
The gene this group has discovered (nanog) is an example of a transcription factor; more accurately, the protein product made by nanog is a transcription factor. It allows genes to be activated ("expressed" is the term) in a human embryo but not in an adult, or vice versa.
I have a poster of Card Captor Sakura on my wall because I harbor deeply unnatural feelings for cartoon characters, not because I care about authenticity!
Seriously, this resource has nothing to do with stopping "piracy"; you may claim that's an issue but what this is really about is *fraud* - which you should be opposed to even if you support piracy (as I do.) It does nothing to stop pirating of TMs or whatever, it just stops these pirated goods from being passed as licensed/authentic, which matters a lot to collectors.
He's the candidate of the "hindu nationalist" party; therefore I assumed he was a "hindu nationalist" in the sense of party affiliation. Evidently he is not.
He's an Indian Nationalist in an ideological sense - to the extent that he supports India having nuclear weapons, this bother me a lot. If you read his quotes he talks like a fascist, to boot.
Okay, I see your point, and to a good extent I agree with you. To the extent that Indian Nationalism means pursuing economic independence from the West - Linux, obviously, could play a big role in this - I agree with you totally, and President Kalam deserves our congratulations for his efforts toward that goal.
To the extent that Indian Nationalism (which I sometimes call Hindu Nationalism in my post above, which is particularly a misnomer given this particular proponent of Indian Nationalism is a Muslim,) means the proliferation of nuclear weapons in India, or the advancement of ultrarightists in India, who are fond of nationalist ideology, I am opposed to it.
Another quote from the President: "Unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. In this world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength."
I don't think he's talking about self sufficiency in pharmaceuticals here.
On the one hand, given what has happened in Iraq, it is difficult to criticize such a position. On the other hand, this strain of political thought leads to nuclear proliferation, particularly in President Kalam's case, which constitutes a direct threat to our survival as a species.
P.S. I know who this man is for two reasons. Firstly, I read about him in the article from the Indian Communist Party, which I linked to, some time ago. Secondly, I have his book of poetry, which is part of my collection of poetry by fellow scientists. The title is Yenudaya Prayana and I recommend it, although it can be a little frightening coming from a political leader.
The President of India is a symbolic position. The Prime Minister has the real power.
President Kalam is clearly a brilliant man, no question. So, of course he isn't fooled by Microsoft FUD, and he's a security minded hindu nationalist, so naturally he favors open source, which is more secure, and more independent of US influence.
Before he was President, he was the chief scientific advisor to the government for many years (decades, I believe.) He's been a major proponent of high tech military Indian Nationalism; he was the candidate of the hindu nationalist party, the right wing nuts who won't prosecute people for butchering muslims. He's been a major proponent of nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent, as well; he actually designed the missiles that would deliver an Indian nuke.
I wouldn't want Oppenheimer to be President, either:
"Dreams float on an impatient wind, A wind that wants to create a new order. An order of strength and thundering of fire." -- from a poem written by Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
How charmingly Vedic! The thunder and fire theme is reminiscent to some of history's best known rightist demagogues.
So, okay, he's one of us (one of us! one of us!) On the other hand, so is Ted Kaczynski, and I'm sure he favors Linux, too. These are endorsements I could live without.
to subsidize research - historically including automation, jet engines and of course information technology - that may be useful to the private sector.
So - what do we have here? We have the pentagon developing an incredibly sophisticated, expensive technology. No private sector entity could ever muster the resources - I mean expertise, not just the finances - to make a comprehensive project like this work. Not even Microsoft (they'd screw it up anyway.) ONLY the defensive department can do it.
I should qualify that - Total Information Awareness could be implemented as open source, if we had motivation to do so. However, that wouldn't serve the purposes of the administration's corporate backers, who's goals do not include clarity and transparency.
Technology much like this already exists in the hands of corporations ("unaccountable private tyrannies," the man can sure turn a phrase) but it is not sophisticated enough for their needs in predicting our behavior - almost everything you do has a commercial component, and would be of interest to someone business, so saying that this is restricted to commercial activities is facetious.
If your primary objection is to the government getting it's hands on the data in the first place, keep in mind that a host of completely unaccountable private organizations - international corporations - already have it. In order for the government to develop such a technology, they need the information in question - so they need new legal powers to get it. The same is not true of corporations, who can and do simply trade the information with eachother.
Once the technology is developed, however, it absolutely will become available as a tool for use by the private sector, who already have the information needed to make it work.
Spam filtering companies are proliferating at a rate almost akin to the growth of spam itself, and not all of them are going to survive.
Remember when there was a similar growth in companies delivering anti-virus solutions? Remember when several of them were caught propogating viruses?
Given how little it costs to Spam - especially if you're willing to accept a response rate of ZERO - I wonder how long it will be before some of these companies start hiring people to send out spam; spam tailored so that the anti-spam company has patented the most feasible defense!
"Contact" [geocities.com] gave him a little recognition only because the movie was made believable (and bias I might add)
What? Are you suggesting that the movie Contact, which was a fun movie, but also new age UFO-cult pop drivel, led to Carl Sagan being more respected among SCIENTISTS?
Contact was BIASED? It's a work of fiction! What shortcomings of impartiality did you detect?
Most TRUELY academic scientists will tell you there seems to be "some" evidence of a creator
Well, Carl Sagan, it is true, is not as highly regarded for his own, unique, scientific contributions as one might believe watching PBS.
However, he had mountains of respect compared to anyone who pointed to anything specific and said it was evidence for the existence of a creator. It is perfectly well regarded in respected circles to quote Einstein "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists", particularly if you are being harassed by religious nuts about your own beliefs - volunteering such sentiments in a TRUELY ACADEMIC setting is the mark of a crackpot, however.
To say that any particular observed phenomenon is evidence, however indirect or minor, of some sort of supernatural providence which exceeds our capacity to understand is the mark of a TRUELY desperate religious nut - not a TRUELY academic scientist.
Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds.
I'm a bioinformatician - you may be attempting to communicate something valid, but what you say is nonsense. If your odds of getting picked in a lotterry are one in a million, and you enter the loterry once, you have a one in a million chance of winning the loterry. If you have to enter the single, right loterry, and there are a million of them, the odds are one in a trillion (a million squared.) In any case, not "incalculable."
If you enter the loterry every day for a billion years and have a chance of winning each time, even vanishingly small odds
Furthermore, while it is true that the odds of life arising around any given star may be extremely small, even over a billion year timespan - Sagan's point remains valid, there are about a SEXTILLION (that's ten ^ 21) stars in known universe.
The reason that we don't have enough information to calculate the odds of life arising on an earth-like planet is because we don't have enough information. The one earth-like planet we observe, the Earth, has life on it, but we're here, so our single observation is hopelessly biased.
On the other hand - unless they are "TRUELY academic" - most scientists feel that life arose as a purely chemical process, from chemical laws which were the same at that time as they are today.
Now, we don't yet know all of the steps that need to occur in order for life to arise. However, even given our broad ignorance, we can conclude that you need organic monomers of some kind (assuming organic life such as ours - an entirely seperate question) is Step 1.
Whatever the probability of success of steps 2...n, the more likely you are to succeed at Step 1, the more likely the entire process is to succeed.
Stanley Miller showed that there conditions, conditions not inconceivable on a young, earthlike planet, under which the formation of these molecular monomers is highly likely.
Therefore, the entire series of steps becomes more likely. Groundbreaking work.
Not a single scientists has been able to prove 100% that life exists elsewhere, only propoganda and conjecture.
Entirely true. We may very well be alone in the universe. However, our best estimate is that we are not. Conjecture, yes, propoganda - only in so far as all scientific endeavor is propoganda against superstitious beliefs.
(May 9, 2003) -- One burst from the University of Rochester's Omega laser heats up its target to 100 million degrees Celsius in a quest to duplicate the power of the sun.
But the world's most powerful fusion research laser is about to get a lot more powerful.
Construction could start as soon as early July on a $70 million addition of a pair of petawatt lasers to UR's Laboratory for Laser Energetics Omega facility on East River Road.
The incredibly powerful petawatt would be the most destructive device in existence, capable of vaporizing an entire planet.
Researchers have a broad array of plans for the petawatt, including using bursts from it to disintegrate major landmarks.
Nuclear fusion is what powers stars, including the sun, and is the principle behind hydrogen bombs. Scientists have been trying for decades to replicate and control fusion for use as a cheap, pollution-free power source.
"They mocked my research!" said lab director Robert McCrory. "But I'll show them... I'll show them all!"
UR is planning for an 82,000-square-foot addition to the back of the laser lab. The town of Brighton Planning Board is having a special meeting at 5:15 p.m. May 19 at the laser lab. The meeting will include a tour for board members and neighboring residents and a demand for cash payments to stave off their imminent destruction.
UR estimates the lab could be fully operational in about four years. When Rebel forces attempt to destroy the shield generators protecting the installation, UR will reveal that it is already fully operational.
The U.S. Department of Energy has put up $13 million so far for the expansion plans, and UR expects to see $37 million more over the next few years. The university is putting $20 million of its own into the construction.
A petawatt laser could generate a pulse of up to a million billion watts of power, several hundred times more powerful than the Omega, and would enable the lab to hold the entire world hostage, said Steven Loucks, engineering director for the laser lab.
"This will be the most intense laser ever built," said Craig Sangster, a senior scientist at the laser lab.
With the petawatt, UR would leap into the emerging and promising field of "fast ignition" fusion. Hypothetically, a burst from the petawatt would serve as the metaphorical spark plug, igniting a fuel source and setting off a fusion reaction, destroying an entire planet. Researchers also foresee using the petawatt bursts to "see" into the plasma generated when the Omega laser array is fired at unsuspecting tourists, "which we'd love to do now, but we can't," Sangster said.
And the petawatt will help in one of the lab's primary jobs -- "stockpile stewardship" of the nation's nuclear weapon arsenal, Loucks said. The vast majority of the lab's $49 million annual operating budget comes from the Energy Department, which pays for study of death rays now that the nation no longer does nuclear testing.
The laser lab upgrade will add no more than a handful of jobs to the facility, which employs close to 250 people in stupid black helmets with wheels on them. But the petawatt will help ensure that federal money continues to flow to Rochester, McCrory said.
Added Lousch: "Do not be too proud of this technological terror you have constructed, for the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force."
The lab contributes about $20 million to the local economy, according to UR estimates.
One of the petawatt laser's main jobs will likely be to supplement the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility being built now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Sangster said. Livermore's 1.8 megajoule laser -- with power capacity far beyond UR's -- is expected to go online in about five years. Researchers will undoubtedly use UR's laser lab to "destroy all those who mocked" their research before annihilating Livermore, he said.
Why am I sceptical? Let me enumerate
on
Sniffing Out Cancer
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· Score: 4, Interesting
1) The New Scientist article which is the source of this story isn't nearly as upbeat about it.
Quoth:
But Richard Sullivan, head of clinical programmes for the charity Cancer Research UK, is sceptical. "Smell is very important for detecting disease and this is an interesting twist," he says. "But this study is much too small to mean anything."
Sullivan adds that even an extremely sensitive nose could only ever detect tumours on the surface of the lungs, so it could never replace the blood tests or scans needed to alert doctors to the onset of secondary tumours.
2) Biosensors and Bioelectronics is not a very disciplined journal, AFAIK (those in the field please correct me if I've been misinformed); you find a lot of good work in second tier journals, don't get me wrong, but you also find a lot of crap.
3) My dad does measurements of breath alkanes; ethane is produced by oxidized fatty acids, so it is a marker for patients with high tissue free radicals (what some people call "oxidative stress" even though there is no reason to think it is harmful, in and of itself.) They are highly variable - diabetics, for example, exhale a lot of them.
4) "e-nose"? Anyone who'd use that name has to be a sheister.
Re:It's life, Jim, but not as we know it...
on
Life on Mars? Why Not?
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· Score: 4, Informative
On the one hand, I agree with you totally. The earliest life on earth was not photosynthetic; even if Martian life is photosynthetic, there is no reason to expect that it would use chlorophyll to capture photons (carotenoids, for example, also work; any aromatic compound of about the same size could do in a pinch.)
On the other hand, your nomenclature is a bit confused.
Viruses are neither cells nor creatures. Furthermore, although they are not complex, they require fairly complex hosts in order to thrive. Martian cellular life might have useless or parasitic DNA, but I rate it unlikely that this DNA kills the hosts (which must be rare,) or packages itself into particles in order to spread. In any case, the viruses would have to be more difficult to detect than their hosts.
Amoeba are not simple, either. They are single celled, but they can sense and react to their environment in amazingly complex ways - early life almost certainly could not. They are, in fact, among the most complicated single-celled lifeforms on this planet.
Modern bacteria are turning out to have complex features, such as the ability to communicate with one another, which we had not suspected.
Nevertheless, ancient bacteria, or proto-bacteria, very ancient life on earth; things similar to that might be found on Mars.
Depending on how old you think such life or proto-life is (estimates vary from 2.5 to 5 billion years) it is conceivable that some sort of nasty event could have deposited some on another planet or vice versa - but I think this is highly unlikely, to say the least.
So, what should we be looking for? Nucleic acids, particularly RNA.
This is based on the RNA-world hypothesis. Basically, it says that before modern life evolved, which is characterised by the fundamental theorem of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes Protein
There was life that used only RNA. In this life, or proto-life, RNA served as both the store of genetic information (we use DNA for this) and as the catalytic workhorse of life (we use Protein for this). RNA has unique chemistry which may make it the only chemical, in the universe, capable of originating life - RNA can catalyze it's own synthesis, so it can reproduce all by itself.
So, this Martian life is probably descendended from RNA molecules, like we are, and probably still contains RNA, just like we do.
On the other hand, this argument is premised on the concept that any life we find must have a chemical origin similar to our own. Unfortunately, I think this is probably the case (so no aliens made of Quartz, sorry,) but maybe not. If it ISN'T the case, we have NO IDEA what to look for, so back to square one.
If RNA is the sole origin of life, then, basically, you need water to have life (RNA only has these desirable properties when dissolved in water.) This leads us back to the rather pedestrian xenobiology of trying to find evidence of liquid water in Mars' past.
On a final note, I think Io is probably a better bet to find extra-terran life. There is definitely liquid water, and it is rich in complex organic molecules (including RNA, I believe) it has a temperature comparable to that of the early earth, and it has rich sources of the sulfur and nitrogen compounds that early life probably used as food.
This raises a significant risk, however. There are living organisms on earth that could probably survive being transplanted to Io (the same is not true, by the way, of Mars.) So, we'd have to be extremely careful not to contaminate the place.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I know that you are kidding. I'm also familiar with the petition to ban DHMO, which garnered a substantial number of signatures.
However, you indirectly raise a real issue: efforts have been made to control the mosquito population by getting rid of swamps. It doesn't work.
The best way to control the mosquito population is to encourage the growth of dragonflies, and other predatory insects that eat mosquito larvae.
Over time, such practices as draining swamps and the use of pesticides on wetlands actually increase mosquito populations (this is the source of the recent epidemic in Africa, I believe,) because they kill off the dragon flies, and other natural predators far more effectively than they kill mosquitos - so the mosquito population may drop in the short term but if you have a wet year with no dragon flies, it skyrockets.
So - take your anti-environmentalist rhetoric and shove it.
Let my bias and background be clear - I am an ethnically Jewish atheist/humanist in graduate school in molecular biology.
Obviously - I am not concerned about the welfare of balls of cells roughly a millimeter in diameter. The creation of blastocysts, using in-vitro fertilization, to make clonal stem cells, does not trouble me in and of itself. No different from tumors or flakes of skin.
However, when this is done, women need to undergo egg donation. The health effects of this procedure may be severe; study has been inadequate. If we do find a medical application for this technology, economic pressure on young women to donate eggs, which can already be considerable, could increase. In underdeveloped nations, unscrupulous individuals could collect eggs using highly unsafe techniques.
If it were possible to grow entire organs in isolation, using these clonal stem cells, that would be my sole concern. In fact - I outright predict that this will be possible for some applications, and that blastocysts will be produced for this purpose.
As a result of stem cell research, we might figure out how to grow a Kidney in a tube from a single cell (or induce regeneration of bits of Kidney in a healthy adult, or what-have-you).
Otherwise, the way to get clonal organs would be to implant the blastocysts in a mother and bring the resultant embryos to term and then harvest the clonal individual for organs.
If the stem cell research which the pro-life crowd opposes is not done, or is not successful, this will be the only way to grow organs. Since I think there is a real, moral, distinction between early abortion and infanticide, I wish to avert this possibility.
Horror upon horror - It ought to be feasible to deliberately introduce horrible birth defects (especially if we can figure out how to fast-grow embroys in vats) such that the clonal individual didn't develop a brain. If you only needed to make a Kidney, you might kill all the embryo's nerve cells or something. Raise your hand if you think this is no worse than flushing a fertilized ovum down the toilet.
In addition to being gross, such technology, if widely adopted, would I think lead to the devaluation of human life; a charge which has been leveled, baselessly, against the practice of abortion, but which has real force in this case.
At this point in the discussion I would like to remind everyone - the original articles discusses applying molecular biology to the study of PARASITES, not people. While it might be possible to use clonal stem cells to fight malaria somehow, that is in no sense the technology that is being used.
Here's an explanation of what DNA microarrays (the technology being used in the original article) actually do.
Giving people the opportunity to remain physically active during the day (which Yoga does) should be part of treating your employees with dignity, especially people who sit at desks all day.
Obviously, anyone who mentions "increased brain waves" is a crank. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that doing Yoga is not good for you, or even that these are poor Yoga instructors they're hiring - some of the best physical therapists, chiropractors and martial arts instructors combine great skills with a variety of cranky beliefs. As long as he gets your employees motivated to stand up and wave their arms around, they will be healthier and happier - even if the particular motions emphasised in Yoga are complete and utter bunk (which I do not believe, but I can conceede the point for sake of argument.)
Also, a persons perception of being healthful or content is entirely driven by psychology. If you have flakes on your staff, you can probably help them feel better by having a certified crackpot with a mellow voice tell them that doing Yoga removes static from their brainwaves. I don't see the harm.
News from the future:
July 23rd, 2008
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today upheld the Pre-emptive Piracy Prevention Act (PPPA), which gave the private armies employed by the sole remaining media corporation the power to declare and pursue war against individuals on US soil - who can then be designated as "enemy combatants" and tried by military tribunals created by our glorious leader, Grand Marshall Rupert Murdoch.
Omnimedia spokesmen hailed the ruling, calling it a victory for intellectual property rights, and saying that it vindicated their use of nuclear weapons against the city of Palo Alto, where their intelligence indicated that the source of all the world's pirated content, the so-called "Universal Inserter," was hiding.
Mere minutes after the blast, the Universal Inserter uploaded an illegal copy of Charlice's new video (purchase a license to view title) [goatse.cx], to his partner in crime, the Universal Downloader. Experts believe the upload is genuine.
The attorney representing the Universal Inserter, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, who has drawn considerable controversy for refusing to acknowledge that his client even exists, was unavailable for comment as he is being held on charges of aiding and abetting the enemy at the Omnimedia detention center in Gautonomo Bay.
If they could find the quality top management in the lower wage country, they would move this function as well.
Bullshit. "They" ARE the quality top management.
Do you really think that there aren't any smart, charismatic, suitably amoral businessmen in China?
Do I need to point out specific instances of managers lining their pockets at the expense (direct or otherwise,) of share-holders?
Now, how many instances do you know of where shareholders force out their overpayed management? I know of several instances where corporate raiders (themselves overpaid managers of a holding corporation,) have forced out reasonably paid upper management who weren't ruthless enough for their tastes, but I cannot, off hand, think of many share holder revolts that bankrupted a CEO - say it with me, "golden parachute". The only way market discipline can ever apply to upper management is if the people above them in the supposed pecking order - the shareholders - force it on them. Don't hold your breath.
Of course, I think market discipline is a vicious practice with no place in a civilized world, but don't pretend it applies to the rich.
Gee, if there are only two other people running freenet, that explains why I have so much trouble getting anything.
News from the future:
July 21st, 2008
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today upheld the Pre-emptive Piracy Prevention Act (PPPA), which gave the private armies employed by the sole remaining media corporation the power to declare and pursue war against individuals on US soil - who can then be designated as "enemy combatants" and tried by military tribunals created by our glorious leader, Grand Marshall Rupert Murdoch.
Omnimedia spokesmen hailed the ruling, calling it a victory for intellectual property rights, and saying that it vindicated their use of nuclear weapons against the city of Palo Alto, where their intelligence indicated that the source of all the world's pirated content, the so-called "Universal Inserter," was hiding.
Mere minutes after the blast, the Universal Inserter uploaded an illegal copy of Charlice's new video (purchase a license to view title), to his partner in crime, the Universal Downloader. Experts believe the upload is genuine.
The attorney representing the Universal Inserter, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, who has drawn considerable controversy for refusing to acknowledge that his client even exists, was unavailable for comment as he is being held on charges of aiding and abetting the enemy at the Omnimedia detention center in Gautonomo Bay.
Of course, it might.
More likely, Congress will order the FBI to use Carnivore (or whatever it is called now) to track people downloading a particular file on Freenet, and to try and find out who they are. I don't remember how Freenet works, or how Carnivore works, but I'm sure with total control of the router infrastructure you could figure out who was downloading what, eventually..... although, every control message for freenet is encrypted, huh? Well, anyway they'd try.
Then, the RIAA will demand that congress give them the power to open up carnivore boxes and track down "pirates" without judicial oversight.
Our legislators have such a poor idea of how freenet works (worse even than mine,) that I don't think they *can* write a law against it. A law against software that enables two remote computers to connect to each other without both of them knowing who the other is?
Lower concentrations will also favor no match whatsoever, in general.
What matters is the relative concentration of the target DNA sequence, and of all other remotely similar sequences. Roughly speaking, for each base pair that is different between your ideal target and your actual target, you get a difference of a few kcal/mole in binding energy.
Every 1.36 kcal/mole (roughly) corresponds to a ten-fold decrease in binding affinity.
So, roughly speaking, a single-nucleotide mis-match is going to have 1/1000 times the binding affinity of a perfect match to the probe. This means, that under IDEAL circumstances, you can detect your target against a background of 1000-times its own concentration in single-base substitutions. Of course, under circumstances where your probe is long enough that random DNA will tend to bind indiscriminately, this won't work.
Contamination with single-stranded binding proteins, which do exist, might also be a confounding factor, either giving you a false positive or fouling up your probe.
Anyway, this may or may not be good enough for any particular application. I suspect that this technique will never actually be as sensitive as PCR, wherein the binding-affinity experiment is effectively "repeated" each replication cycle. If you choose a sequence carefully enough - and use a longer probe so that close matches are not so likely to appear at random (a ten nucleotide probe appears one in every 2^20 ~= 1/billion times, at random. The human genome is likely to include one instance of every decamer,) you might get performance good enough for the applications they describe.
When I was an undergrad, all my CS profs (some people in math, too) at UCSC got hand-written letters from this fellow, who happened to be in prison, claiming that he was recieving encoded, telepathic transmissions from the spider-like aliens who had landed at Roswell. He couldn't understand them, and he wanted help "decoding" the transmissions.
Fortunately, we can reassure the fellow that no such aliens exist, now that we have a crate full of declassified documents. This must be a great relief to all of the countries paranoid schizophrenics. I bet hardly any of the text has been blacked out!
That may be an unpopular sentiment, but it is not a troll - firstly, it is advice (clearly sincere) directed at the story author, and secondly, in so far as factual assertions are made, they are well documented in the literature on the subject; when the same group of people were in charge in 1980-1992 this is exactly what they did.
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/9708-UD-re
Clinton had very similar policies, as I'm sure we're all aware, but failing to criticize past administrations the same breath hardly constitutes a Troll. If I had moderator access at the moment I'd report this as an abuse.
Personally, since there seem to be only about half a dozen workers in this case, collective bargaining seems un-necesarry. The story author and his coworkers should just walk out.
Convergence, people, convergence. (Closes TV show that he has running in another window.)
All of these boxes are just crippled computers. With the prices on a real computer nosediving - and all signs indicating they will keep doing so - the only thing these devices have going for them is "mindshare" married to consumer apathy or ignorance.
Now, as I close my TV show, I notice that I'm running windows, which goes to show you can go a long way with an overpriced, underpowered product and some mindshare (though I got windows free from school). However, I don't think either of these devices is going to be able to successfully compete with the TV enabled home PC, ten or even five years in the future.
Briefly, for those who went to high school here in the states:
Gene (DNA) -> RNA -> Protein
So, each Gene makes a single Protein product.
Reearchers have found the Gene that makes the protein product that causes a cell to behave as a stem cell. This Gene is found in every cell of your body, but, under normal circumstances, the protein product is found only in stem cells.
While I'm clearing things up I might as well explain some more.
Melanin, for example, is the pigment that turns your skin brown. The gene to make melanin is found in every cell of your body, however, the cornea (whites of the eyes) of a black person is not black. The gene to make melanin is inactive in those cells.
Likewise, this stem cell gene is inactive in most cells of your body.
Different forms of a gene (called alleles) make slight variations of the same Protein product, or make the same protein product under different circumstances.
For example, both a white person and a black person have the gene that makes the protein melanin, which is a dark brown pigment found in both skin and iris.
A white person, with brown eyes, has a gene which is less active in the skin, makes less melanin there, and the skin is paler (forms of melanin which are less dark also exist). A black person has a gene which is more active in the skin.
A white person with brown eyes, however, probably has every bit as much melanin in the iris (the colored part of the eye,) as the black person. So, the melanin gene is differentially active only under some circumstances.
This differential activity is mediated by transcription factors. Transcription factors are switches that turn genes on and off, they are present in some tissues but not others. The white person has an allele of melanin which doesn't not respond to the "on" switch (or responds weakly) found in the skin, but still responds to the seperate "on" switch found in the iris.
The gene this group has discovered (nanog) is an example of a transcription factor; more accurately, the protein product made by nanog is a transcription factor. It allows genes to be activated ("expressed" is the term) in a human embryo but not in an adult, or vice versa.
I have a poster of Card Captor Sakura on my wall because I harbor deeply unnatural feelings for cartoon characters, not because I care about authenticity!
Seriously, this resource has nothing to do with stopping "piracy"; you may claim that's an issue but what this is really about is *fraud* - which you should be opposed to even if you support piracy (as I do.) It does nothing to stop pirating of TMs or whatever, it just stops these pirated goods from being passed as licensed/authentic, which matters a lot to collectors.
He's the candidate of the "hindu nationalist" party; therefore I assumed he was a "hindu nationalist" in the sense of party affiliation. Evidently he is not.
He's an Indian Nationalist in an ideological sense - to the extent that he supports India having nuclear weapons, this bother me a lot. If you read his quotes he talks like a fascist, to boot.
Okay, I see your point, and to a good extent I agree with you. To the extent that Indian Nationalism means pursuing economic independence from the West - Linux, obviously, could play a big role in this - I agree with you totally, and President Kalam deserves our congratulations for his efforts toward that goal.
To the extent that Indian Nationalism (which I sometimes call Hindu Nationalism in my post above, which is particularly a misnomer given this particular proponent of Indian Nationalism is a Muslim,) means the proliferation of nuclear weapons in India, or the advancement of ultrarightists in India, who are fond of nationalist ideology, I am opposed to it.
Another quote from the President:
"Unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. In this world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength."
I don't think he's talking about self sufficiency in pharmaceuticals here.
On the one hand, given what has happened in Iraq, it is difficult to criticize such a position. On the other hand, this strain of political thought leads to nuclear proliferation, particularly in President Kalam's case, which constitutes a direct threat to our survival as a species.
P.S. I know who this man is for two reasons. Firstly, I read about him in the article from the Indian Communist Party, which I linked to, some time ago. Secondly, I have his book of poetry, which is part of my collection of poetry by fellow scientists. The title is Yenudaya Prayana and I recommend it, although it can be a little frightening coming from a political leader.
The man is personally a MUSLIM.
I forgot that. Big, important, major point which I should not have left out. My bad.
The President of India is a symbolic position. The Prime Minister has the real power.
President Kalam is clearly a brilliant man, no question. So, of course he isn't fooled by Microsoft FUD, and he's a security minded hindu nationalist, so naturally he favors open source, which is more secure, and more independent of US influence.
Before he was President, he was the chief scientific advisor to the government for many years (decades, I believe.) He's been a major proponent of high tech military Indian Nationalism; he was the candidate of the hindu nationalist party, the right wing nuts who won't prosecute people for butchering muslims. He's been a major proponent of nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent, as well; he actually designed the missiles that would deliver an Indian nuke.
I wouldn't want Oppenheimer to be President, either:
"Dreams float on an impatient wind, A wind that wants to create a new order. An order of strength and thundering of fire." -- from a poem written by Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
How charmingly Vedic! The thunder and fire theme is reminiscent to some of history's best known rightist demagogues.
A little bio of the man, from a supporter.
So, okay, he's one of us (one of us! one of us!) On the other hand, so is Ted Kaczynski, and I'm sure he favors Linux, too. These are endorsements I could live without.
to subsidize research - historically including automation, jet engines and of course information technology - that may be useful to the private sector.
Yes, everything I say is Chomskyist.
So - what do we have here? We have the pentagon developing an incredibly sophisticated, expensive technology. No private sector entity could ever muster the resources - I mean expertise, not just the finances - to make a comprehensive project like this work. Not even Microsoft (they'd screw it up anyway.) ONLY the defensive department can do it.
I should qualify that - Total Information Awareness could be implemented as open source, if we had motivation to do so. However, that wouldn't serve the purposes of the administration's corporate backers, who's goals do not include clarity and transparency.
Technology much like this already exists in the hands of corporations ("unaccountable private tyrannies," the man can sure turn a phrase) but it is not sophisticated enough for their needs in predicting our behavior - almost everything you do has a commercial component, and would be of interest to someone business, so saying that this is restricted to commercial activities is facetious.
If your primary objection is to the government getting it's hands on the data in the first place, keep in mind that a host of completely unaccountable private organizations - international corporations - already have it. In order for the government to develop such a technology, they need the information in question - so they need new legal powers to get it. The same is not true of corporations, who can and do simply trade the information with eachother.
Once the technology is developed, however, it absolutely will become available as a tool for use by the private sector, who already have the information needed to make it work.
Spam filtering companies are proliferating at a rate almost akin to the growth of spam itself, and not all of them are going to survive.
Remember when there was a similar growth in companies delivering anti-virus solutions? Remember when several of them were caught propogating viruses?
Given how little it costs to Spam - especially if you're willing to accept a response rate of ZERO - I wonder how long it will be before some of these companies start hiring people to send out spam; spam tailored so that the anti-spam company has patented the most feasible defense!
Help make virtual black mail legal.
"Contact" [geocities.com] gave him a little recognition only because the movie was made believable (and bias I might add)
What? Are you suggesting that the movie Contact, which was a fun movie, but also new age UFO-cult pop drivel, led to Carl Sagan being more respected among SCIENTISTS?
Contact was BIASED? It's a work of fiction! What shortcomings of impartiality did you detect?
Most TRUELY academic scientists will tell you there seems to be "some" evidence of a creator
Well, Carl Sagan, it is true, is not as highly regarded for his own, unique, scientific contributions as one might believe watching PBS.
However, he had mountains of respect compared to anyone who pointed to anything specific and said it was evidence for the existence of a creator. It is perfectly well regarded in respected circles to quote Einstein "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists", particularly if you are being harassed by religious nuts about your own beliefs - volunteering such sentiments in a TRUELY ACADEMIC setting is the mark of a crackpot, however.
To say that any particular observed phenomenon is evidence, however indirect or minor, of some sort of supernatural providence which exceeds our capacity to understand is the mark of a TRUELY desperate religious nut - not a TRUELY academic scientist.
Lottery = your chances in getting picked out the pool may be one in a million, but your chances of picking the right number on the right day and being that one in a million are impossible odds.
I'm a bioinformatician - you may be attempting to communicate something valid, but what you say is nonsense. If your odds of getting picked in a lotterry are one in a million, and you enter the loterry once, you have a one in a million chance of winning the loterry. If you have to enter the single, right loterry, and there are a million of them, the odds are one in a trillion (a million squared.) In any case, not "incalculable."
If you enter the loterry every day for a billion years and have a chance of winning each time, even vanishingly small odds
Furthermore, while it is true that the odds of life arising around any given star may be extremely small, even over a billion year timespan - Sagan's point remains valid, there are about a SEXTILLION (that's ten ^ 21) stars in known universe.
The reason that we don't have enough information to calculate the odds of life arising on an earth-like planet is because we don't have enough information. The one earth-like planet we observe, the Earth, has life on it, but we're here, so our single observation is hopelessly biased.
On the other hand - unless they are "TRUELY academic" - most scientists feel that life arose as a purely chemical process, from chemical laws which were the same at that time as they are today.
Now, we don't yet know all of the steps that need to occur in order for life to arise. However, even given our broad ignorance, we can conclude that you need organic monomers of some kind (assuming organic life such as ours - an entirely seperate question) is Step 1.
Whatever the probability of success of steps 2...n, the more likely you are to succeed at Step 1, the more likely the entire process is to succeed.
Stanley Miller showed that there conditions, conditions not inconceivable on a young, earthlike planet, under which the formation of these molecular monomers is highly likely.
Therefore, the entire series of steps becomes more likely. Groundbreaking work.
Not a single scientists has been able to prove 100% that life exists elsewhere, only propoganda and conjecture.
Entirely true. We may very well be alone in the universe. However, our best estimate is that we are not. Conjecture, yes, propoganda - only in so far as all scientific endeavor is propoganda against superstitious beliefs.
Oops. Actually, the landover baptist matrix review is here. I don't know why there isn't a link from the main movies page.
Sure, the Matrix is blasphemously co-opting Christ's passion to sell cherry pepsi and black trenchcoats.
However, this is nothing new.
Seriously, the similarities between this CSM article and the joke pieces at landover baptist are stunning. Satire is rendered irrelevant.
UR plans to build world's most powerful laser
... I'll show them all!"
By Matthew Daneman
Democrat and Chronicle
(May 9, 2003) -- One burst from the University of Rochester's Omega laser heats up its target to 100 million degrees Celsius in a quest to duplicate the power of the sun.
But the world's most powerful fusion research laser is about to get a lot more powerful.
Construction could start as soon as early July on a $70 million addition of a pair of petawatt lasers to UR's Laboratory for Laser Energetics Omega facility on East River Road.
The incredibly powerful petawatt would be the most destructive device in existence, capable of vaporizing an entire planet.
Researchers have a broad array of plans for the petawatt, including using bursts from it to disintegrate major landmarks.
Nuclear fusion is what powers stars, including the sun, and is the principle behind hydrogen bombs. Scientists have been trying for decades to replicate and control fusion for use as a cheap, pollution-free power source.
"They mocked my research!" said lab director Robert McCrory. "But I'll show them
UR is planning for an 82,000-square-foot addition to the back of the laser lab. The town of Brighton Planning Board is having a special meeting at 5:15 p.m. May 19 at the laser lab. The meeting will include a tour for board members and neighboring residents and a demand for cash payments to stave off their imminent destruction.
UR estimates the lab could be fully operational in about four years. When Rebel forces attempt to destroy the shield generators protecting the installation, UR will reveal that it is already fully operational.
The U.S. Department of Energy has put up $13 million so far for the expansion plans, and UR expects to see $37 million more over the next few years. The university is putting $20 million of its own into the construction.
A petawatt laser could generate a pulse of up to a million billion watts of power, several hundred times more powerful than the Omega, and would enable the lab to hold the entire world hostage, said Steven Loucks, engineering director for the laser lab.
"This will be the most intense laser ever built," said Craig Sangster, a senior scientist at the laser lab.
With the petawatt, UR would leap into the emerging and promising field of "fast ignition" fusion. Hypothetically, a burst from the petawatt would serve as the metaphorical spark plug, igniting a fuel source and setting off a fusion reaction, destroying an entire planet. Researchers also foresee using the petawatt bursts to "see" into the plasma generated when the Omega laser array is fired at unsuspecting tourists, "which we'd love to do now, but we can't," Sangster said.
And the petawatt will help in one of the lab's primary jobs -- "stockpile stewardship" of the nation's nuclear weapon arsenal, Loucks said. The vast majority of the lab's $49 million annual operating budget comes from the Energy Department, which pays for study of death rays now that the nation no longer does nuclear testing.
The laser lab upgrade will add no more than a handful of jobs to the facility, which employs close to 250 people in stupid black helmets with wheels on them. But the petawatt will help ensure that federal money continues to flow to Rochester, McCrory said.
Added Lousch: "Do not be too proud of this technological terror you have constructed, for the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force."
The lab contributes about $20 million to the local economy, according to UR estimates.
One of the petawatt laser's main jobs will likely be to supplement the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility being built now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Sangster said. Livermore's 1.8 megajoule laser -- with power capacity far beyond UR's -- is expected to go online in about five years. Researchers will undoubtedly use UR's laser lab to "destroy all those who mocked" their research before annihilating Livermore, he said.
Quoth:
2) Biosensors and Bioelectronics is not a very disciplined journal, AFAIK (those in the field please correct me if I've been misinformed); you find a lot of good work in second tier journals, don't get me wrong, but you also find a lot of crap.
3) My dad does measurements of breath alkanes; ethane is produced by oxidized fatty acids, so it is a marker for patients with high tissue free radicals (what some people call "oxidative stress" even though there is no reason to think it is harmful, in and of itself.) They are highly variable - diabetics, for example, exhale a lot of them.
4) "e-nose"? Anyone who'd use that name has to be a sheister.
On the one hand, I agree with you totally. The earliest life on earth was not photosynthetic; even if Martian life is photosynthetic, there is no reason to expect that it would use chlorophyll to capture photons (carotenoids, for example, also work; any aromatic compound of about the same size could do in a pinch.)
On the other hand, your nomenclature is a bit confused.
Viruses are neither cells nor creatures. Furthermore, although they are not complex, they require fairly complex hosts in order to thrive. Martian cellular life might have useless or parasitic DNA, but I rate it unlikely that this DNA kills the hosts (which must be rare,) or packages itself into particles in order to spread. In any case, the viruses would have to be more difficult to detect than their hosts.
Amoeba are not simple, either. They are single celled, but they can sense and react to their environment in amazingly complex ways - early life almost certainly could not. They are, in fact, among the most complicated single-celled lifeforms on this planet.
Modern bacteria are turning out to have complex features, such as the ability to communicate with one another, which we had not suspected.
Nevertheless, ancient bacteria, or proto-bacteria, very ancient life on earth; things similar to that might be found on Mars.
Depending on how old you think such life or proto-life is (estimates vary from 2.5 to 5 billion years) it is conceivable that some sort of nasty event could have deposited some on another planet or vice versa - but I think this is highly unlikely, to say the least.
So, what should we be looking for? Nucleic acids, particularly RNA.
This is based on the RNA-world hypothesis. Basically, it says that before modern life evolved, which is characterised by the fundamental theorem of molecular biology:
DNA makes RNA makes Protein
There was life that used only RNA. In this life, or proto-life, RNA served as both the store of genetic information (we use DNA for this) and as the catalytic workhorse of life (we use Protein for this). RNA has unique chemistry which may make it the only chemical, in the universe, capable of originating life - RNA can catalyze it's own synthesis, so it can reproduce all by itself.
So, this Martian life is probably descendended from RNA molecules, like we are, and probably still contains RNA, just like we do.
On the other hand, this argument is premised on the concept that any life we find must have a chemical origin similar to our own. Unfortunately, I think this is probably the case (so no aliens made of Quartz, sorry,) but maybe not. If it ISN'T the case, we have NO IDEA what to look for, so back to square one.
If RNA is the sole origin of life, then, basically, you need water to have life (RNA only has these desirable properties when dissolved in water.) This leads us back to the rather pedestrian xenobiology of trying to find evidence of liquid water in Mars' past.
On a final note, I think Io is probably a better bet to find extra-terran life. There is definitely liquid water, and it is rich in complex organic molecules (including RNA, I believe) it has a temperature comparable to that of the early earth, and it has rich sources of the sulfur and nitrogen compounds that early life probably used as food.
This raises a significant risk, however. There are living organisms on earth that could probably survive being transplanted to Io (the same is not true, by the way, of Mars.) So, we'd have to be extremely careful not to contaminate the place.