since your score is "0" i'll repost your comment... This is so typical of the libertarian slashdot crowd. Globalization doesn't in fact give 3rd world nations access to first world markets other than to open up their workers and resources to more efficient exploitation. Or am I wrong, are they making {computers, cell phones, any kind of consumer goods} in Zaire these days? It's cheaper to just suck up the resources of a 3rd world nation than to try to (for example) set up a chip fabrication plant there. If the country is really lucky, they'll get some jobs from stuff lower down the supply chain...but that's not really luck either, since you get almost no pay for the workers, but lots of pollution and industrial risks (Bhopal anyone?) And let's not forget the impact of viral American mass-culture on the culture of these 3rd world nations we're "helping"...
Anyway i won't attack you like your "libertarian" bash but...
Globalization doesn't in fact give 3rd world nations access to first world markets other than to open up their workers and resources to more efficient exploitation.
So then, let me get this straight: 3rd world nations benifit more from 1st world nations locking them out of their markets? If you're going to start talking about sweatshops and the like keep in mind that many companies (particularly clothing companies) have their sweat shops in US protectorites where fed. laws regarding wage and work conditions do not apply, but tarrifs need not be paid (ie in places generally out of the reach of the major goals of globalization proponents)...
And as for your comment on Zaire (which is no longer the country's name, it's actually on its second name since then...) answer this question and you'll rethink your rhetoric: how many civil wars has this country had in the past 30 years? Do they make Nokia, Intels, and carbon nano-tubes? of course they don't, are they able to make these? not currently. What do they make there? Gosh let's see... Grains, other food, etc. etc. Globalization doesn't mean exploitation just as Not globalizing doesn't mean forcing 1st world companies to open up high-tech multi-billion dollar outfits in 3rd world places where disgruntled thugs and corrupt governments have a penchant for burning down billion dollar 1st world assets (as one might surmise from reading your statement). Globalizing is about allowing the average poor person to be able to sell what he/she is capible of making/growing/providing to markets who value his/her produce at a higher monetary value than does his/her neighbor (who also happens to make about $0.75 per day)...
In response to: "Maybe we should give poor people in third-world countries the chance to rise above their current conditions, eh?"
From the linked article:
Project to ship a container of 230 refurbished computers to Ecuador to extend the technical capacity of civil society and the anti-globalization movement leading up to the anti-FTAA protests in early November.
While i'm all about helping people with noble causes who are less fortunate than i happen to be, supporting an anti-globalization movement isn't really my idea of helping all the poor people in their country who don't share their beliefs.
This is kind of an aside but globalization (i prefer "globalisation" myself) is a good thing for poor countries in that it allows 3rd world nations access to 1st world markets, such as agricultural markets (they don't currently have access to these markets as 1st world nations spend about $300,000,000,000 (yes, that's the correct number of zeros) per year on subsidising our own agricultural producers (ie artifical barriers to market presence). The same is true for textiles. i'm not saying Equador's economic/political woes would be cured by access to global markets, rather that non-global markets tend to hurt small and underdeveloped economies much more than it helps them. For every Mcdonalds that moves in there're a million farmers who are now able to sell their goods for a great deal more then they could have ever dreamed to have done in local street-markets...
Don't get my wrong, i'm not advocating throwing away computer parts instead of donating them, just to remember that helping "poor people" doesn't necessarily help *all* poor people. Yes we should be helping our brothren, but just keep in mind who we're supporting...:)
damnit, i hit [enter] instead of [tab] on my first attempt at posting:( !
anyway, dude read the article:
"increase security and reduce overall costs."
O'Donnell declined to specify the specific changes but said they include measures intended to boost security. "They (Microsoft's Xbox hardware team) know the hacker stuff that's out there, and they're always trying to increase security," she said.
it's obvious that their just increasing the security, you know, so it's like more secure and stuff. this is a good thing i think the micro$oft spokesbot says that somewhere, "this is a good thing, security is good" i believe were the words... i think i'm going to buy an xbox or two as soon as it's more secure, they will obviously be much better than the one i already have (ie: more secure)!
Assuming that they mean "selection" as in an evolutionary sense, I fail to see how this can be true. Isn't the whole genetic chemistry (ATCG, DNA, etc.) necessary before any selection can take place at all?
well you could always have multiple parallel mechanisms to achieve the same end, if some of them didn't work as well (ie. in different species of organisms) they could very well have been weeded out by those who worked better (the organisms that "worked better" outcompeted those that could not keep up). This is just speaking in theory of course, i have no idea if there were parallel genetic systems competeting against one another in the past...
But even if you buy into that, where did the repairing enzymes come from? Aren't enzymes encoded by... (drumroll...) DNA?
yes, encoding enzymes and (theoretically everything) is encoded in the genetic material, but that doesn't mean that different means of storing genetic data could not have been "competing" at the same time...
all and all while this "parity" idea is kind of interesting it's not any kind of huge breakthrough (not to mention it's kind of a misnomer), traditionally it has been thought that repair enzymes sense steric strain caused to the DNA molecule when the base pairs don't properly align (ie: they look for a bulge in the strand width) as opposed to looking 'inside' the molecule at the hydrogen bonds (which if they don't line up properly cause the bulge). Repair enzymes certainly look at the H bonds later but these are excision & repair enzymes which don't check for errors, rather pull out the offending nucleotide and replace it with the correct one after the error has been discovered by other enzymes...
This is what i've been tought anyway, but what we know does change...
just goes to show that we'd rather catch something in a net, throw it in a tank, and invite people to come look at it - then actually learning about what we're caging. sort of like how we treat minorities, except when the minorities reproduce it's considered a problem rather than a blessing...
A lot of the science fiction stories i read speak of living longer in zero/low g, since obviously theres less strain on most of the systems of the body.
i was sort of wondering about this as well, from the article ilnked to in the post on astrobio.net (link) it stated the following: Astronauts can suffer from motion sickness, bone loss, muscle degeneration (atrophy) and blood vessel problems during weightlessness.
so apparently the sci.fi is er. sci.fi...:) although if i remember correctly JR Hadden from "Contact" the movie based upon Sagan's book had said that the 0 gravity slowed his cancer, which probably has some biological merit if it were actually in the book (instead of just the movie), which it probably was as Sagan worked very closely with the screen writers et al. (i personally haven't read the book, but believe the movie was one of the last things Sagan took part in, and unfortunately he was unable to see the movie as he died of cancer shortly before its debut...). hmmm... offtopic, but yea,:)
to the best of my [limited] knowledge anyway, please correct me if i'm wrong.
Bush happens to be on the side the believes that a fetus has the spark of human life
Just as a counter to your statement a fetus and an embryo are not the same. Morality and politics should not be mutually exclusive although many religious advocates, and those who pander to them, would like to belive that morality is synonomous with religion, in that being agnostic or impartial is the same as amoral, which is clearly not the case. Along this train of thought the idea that Abortion up to full-term is legal while using cells from discarded embryonic tissue should not be legal is hypocritical, not amoral.
so good for Bush and the Witch-hunter general, they pander to conservative populations of people for votes, they aren't scientists, and neither are the vast majority of government policymakers. i don't have a problem with peoples' beliefs, but when these beliefs are held by policymakers who, quite frankly don't know anything about the nature of that which they are controlling, and it impacts people who do-then i have a problem.
Just think of all the bullshit legislation being kicked around regarding intellectual property, fair use, and other slashdot-type material, you know what?-it's the same damn thing, just a different medium.
"there are *two* sides to every arguement" (if there were less then there wouldn't be an arguement now would there be?). This commonly used phrase simply promotes the borderline personality-type debate that far too many people engage. there are (almost) always more than two sides, most real questions don't have simple "yes" and "no" answers. While the research community is almost always concerned with the ethics of their work and the question is "how much" or where to draw the line, conservative simpletons tend to answer with "no, never" or "yes, always" and back it up with "just because" or "because it's always been that way." this type of thinking does a great disservice to humanity, it is counterproductive, arrogant, and fickle.
ok,//end_rant
sorry, but i feel very strongly about our kakistocracy...
Are there any reasons to believe that newly added neurons can or cannot migrate to correct sites, achieve the correct functional state, and make the appropriate connections ?
Is there any reason not want to find out? Isn't the point of research to elucidate the answers to these questions? Regardless of what we find do you think that knowing the answers to these questions could make life worse for our future generations?-don't you think we owe it to our decendents to persue these endeavors?
i'm not sure that i understood the intent of your comment, and forgive me if i've misinterpreted, but it sounds an aweful lot like FUD to me... There is a huge body of knowledge growing from the very questions you have put forth, if you'd like to know what's going on a very limited lit.search pretty much anywhere will uncover a ton of publications:)
more than 70 percent of dial-up users cited cost as the main reason they aren't upgrading to faster access.
many of these are the same people who are paying $25/month for AOL dial-up. Otherwise there is a large number of 'normal' people (from what i've see anyway) who use "the internet" solely for work purposes and their place of employment functions as their ISP and they therefore pay nothing monthly for the service, in which case the difference between $0.00 and $35 montly is a pretty big difference...
the mu (as well as the other opiate receptors such as kappa, delta, etc-although these aren't necessarily analgesic) receptors show a huge degree of tolerance to extended dosage duration, people with end-stage cancer usually have been on opiates for a very long time and thus it's not uncommon for some patients to be using 1000mg + per day of morphine, whereas the normal dosage (lets say if you came into an ER after an auto accident) would generally only be 2-4 mg every 4 or so hours... if you're pushing the morphine dose for several months regardless of your pain level, i promise your tolerance will increase dramatically as well...
"Tylenol" is a brand name, so there is "Tylenol PM" which contains diphenhydramine (Benedryl) and probably other "Tylenol" variations, i am unsure if one of them contains caffeine however. this article is talking about APAP (acetaminophen), the active ingredient in traditional "Tylenol" not whatever name-brand product iterations you might find at whitetrashmart, er... i mean: Wal-mart.
you may be thinking of Excedrin, which generally contains APAP, ASA (aspirin) and Caffiene...
APAP (Acetaminophen) has long been known to be hepatotoxic, which is why it's generally stated to not take more than 3 grams (reg = 325mg, ES = 500mg, and arthritis = 650mg) per day chronically, or 4 grams per day acutely (less than a week or two), and AFAIK tylenol poisoning far outweighs all of the other poisonings in the US every year. one of the metabolites of APAP causes hepatic necrosis (liver damage), which could plausibly be its detriment to the snakes, especially if they're given 6 tablets, that's 2 grams at a minimum, compare the average 70kg person (unless you're in American, then you can tack on another 10-15kg) to the weight of the average brown snake, probalby not more than a couple of kg's. this is of course assuming that the drug is metabolised the same between the two species, which i don't know..
but I don't recall ever hearing about PCP being used as an anesthetic
PCP was actually origionally tried for anesthesia but due to the adverse effects of the drug after surgery was quckly written off for this purpose... FYI ketamine is still widely used in the vet. industry as it's 'safer' than traditional anesthetics in terms of respiratory depression and the like, a farmer can walk into a pasture with a syring full of ketamine, stab the cow with it, perform whatever on the cow, and walk away, the cow eventually wakes up... at least that's what one of my old Neuro profs had said once...
i had heard once that chickens and turkeys were having trouble breeding because their breasts were getting too big... is this then the same kind of thing?
sort of like engineering people to be fatter... oh wait, that's a work in progress...
I suppose it depends on how this would spread. Since this is a deliberate genetic failure, as opposed to a virus,
i never said, nor insinuated that this was a virus, but it's been long established that viruses (among others, but viruses are by far the most common) may serve as carriers of bits of DNA to and from different organisms, and alas, different species of organisms, so my question was regarding the feasibility of a (wild, not introduced) virus would/could carry the gene into other fish species.
The alteration should only take place at the fertilization or "sperm" level
obviously the 'alteration' will occur when the eggs are fertalized (2 copies of aromatase gene, maternal & fraternal, however a (presumably dominant) gene which codes for a negative RNA sequence to said gene, fraternal), but the fish will carry the gene throughout their lives, thus a virus could potentially carry it from the modified carp to other fish (or their eggs or whatever)...it's not highly probable that it would make its way into the germ lines of the non-intended fish, but i was asking about the odds as it cannot be considered an absolute impossibility.
Of course, the problem here is (as mentioned before) the alterned offspring cannot produce female offsping. Thus, the altered species may breed itself out before affecting the wild species.
i'm also not sure what this statement has to do with my original question, if i'm missing something please, enlighten me... the beautiful thing about this technique is that although each aromatase-inhibited individual organism is an eventual reproductive dead-end this doesn't stop it from breeding hordes of similar dead-end males, thus the species eventually dies by outbreeding by a population of fish much greater than that origionally introduced to the environment... while this institution's mathematical analysis of the number of fish required to successfully destroy or devistate a native fish population looks as though it were performed for carp, i would imagine other species would react differently due to particular qwerks of their species' breeding & lifestyle habbits... which is why my improbable aforementioned point was worthy of a supported answer.
my question is this...
what are the chances of this gene "jumping" via viruses et al. to other fish species?
otherwise i think that this is an excellent idea, it will be interesting to see whether these fish just upregulate their aromatase genes to overcome the non-sense RNA (anti-aromatase) gene, i wonder if these scientists placed the new gene immediately downstream from the gene it's blocking (so they both become transcribed at the same time), or saturated the upstream nonsense RNA gene region with retroviral promoters (it's advantageous for many retroviruses to trick the cell into overexpressing their genetic material for new virons) or something of the like... i'm curious to know...
Note, incidentally, that infectious mononucleosis probably was also devastating for human ancestors--very lethal and very easy to transmit. Today, it is a harmless disease only because of an odd quirk of the virus and the human immune system.
actually there was a family in Britain recently known as the "Duncans," (presumably their last name was "Duncan" ?? heh). they actually had a heridetary immune quirk that disallowed them from fighting EBV (epstein barr virus (the cause of "mono")). my old immunology prof. was telling me about it once, he couldn't remember if any of them were still alive though...
doesn't have much to do with HIV, but intersting nonetheless...
there are hundreds of known HIV strains, the level of confered immunity one strain gives against others is currently not well understood, however don't bet on anything; a recent article i read (i'm really sorry i've forgotten the source, might be Emerging Infectious Disease, August 2002, available online if you'd care to look) found that an american man infected with one strain seroconverted (ie. became infected) when exposed to another, not regarded as similar, strain. i'm not exactly sure about the individual effects of HIV strains, but AFAIK they act about the same in vivo (in a living animal), vectors are just people (possibly chimpanzees for HIV-1 as they may have SIV which may jump to humans, possibly some other primates like sooty mangabys and maybe some others...), effects include: death.
was William Gibson that guy in Australia who had HIV for like 18 years or something? - anyway there're better vaccination ideas than using live retroviruses, as they stay in your system (undetectable) forever and due to the high mutation rate of reverse transcriptase, have a huge chance to revert to wild-type...
just lay-off (like "rock-on" "rock-off") the sex for a while, i garantee that's easier than figuring out how to cure HIV:)
So how difficult would it be to purposefully change this one gene in an embryo?
what do you mean by difficult? - you mean in theory? - that'd be easy, just snip out ol' ccr5, ccr3, cxcr4, hack cd4 and off you go, you're cured!
oh, or did you mean difficult as in doing this to every embryo conceved in sub-saharan africa by people who don't even gross enough income over a lifetime to pay for the procedure?
theoretically it might not work anyway, the people with HIV who "don't get AIDS" (mutated ccr5) still have HIV, are they really any better off?
sure if you're a rich american you might even be able to pay someone to snag one of your stem cells, hack the genes, pump it up with some cytokines (to make it proliferate) and then inject it back into you and you'd have a cell-line to fight your HIV infection, but you'd still have HIV... i ask again, would you really be any better off?
boy the cost of "fixing" one embryo could sure prevent a hell of a lot of HIV in India, China, Russia, or Indonesia by jumpstarting an early HIV-provention program there...
-tid242
by the way some company "owns" the ccr5 gene already anyway so i'm sure they'd want some $$$ for your altruism.
yes, simian immunodeficiency virus = SIV, yes chimpanzee's may become infected with this virus, yes it is remarkably similar to HIV-1 and it is thought that HIV-1 originated from human contact with SIV, whereas HIV-2 originated from a human contact with sooty mangebys (sp?) (this is all off the top of my head, by the way, at a rellie's with only 56k connection:( )
no, it is not correct that chimpanzee's are immune to "the AIDS virus and it's counterparts" as scientists have been intentionally infecting chimps with SIV to use as a human/HIV equivalent, so i'm not entirely sure where this article gets it's.nfo... generally whenever articles are cited as "fact" with phrases like "it's a well known fact that..." or "everybody agrees that..." etc. etc. are gonna' be a bit "funny."
looking over some of the threads it's apparent that there's some confusion about the state of things so here goes a bit of a clarification:
HIV-1/HIV-2, SIV, BIV (bovine), FIV (feline), et al. are viruses which belong to retroviridae (retroviruses) and the subfamily 'lentiviride' (lentiviruses) just like: people, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangitangs (sp???) are all members of the great apes (lentiviruses) and also primates (retroviruses), it's interesting that these viruses all parasitize the immune system's CD4+ T-cells or their non-human equivalents ("helper T cells" the cells that coordinate the immune response (B-cells, plasma cells, CD8+T cells, Suppressor T cells, granulocytes, etc.))) of the different species and AFAIK, the only viruses to do so, specifically. historically retroviruses were mostly only of interest to oncologists (people who study cancer) because of their ability to cause cancer (ALV, avian leukemia virus, Raus sarcoma virus, etc.) and some of them even infect the immune system such as HTLV, human t-cell leukemia virus (CD8+ t-cells, which are the "killer T cells" HTLV is thought to possibly cause some sorts of blood dyscrasias), but in 1983 this all changed, and even today the word "Retrovirus" draws fear and awe the world over... anyway the reason why all these lentiviruses are different is because of their excuisite sensitivity to cytokine/chemokine (chemical mediators used for "immune system communication" (IL-2, IL-6, IL-12, IFN-alpha, et all (there're probably several hundred found by now...)) receptors located on the CD4+ T cells which act as co-receptors, and henceforth are oft known as the "HIV co-receptors." (CD4 is of course the receptor for HIV, i'm not sure if CD4 is the primary receptor for all of the Immunodeficiency lentiviruses, but you get the point...) For example the HIV co-receptors are CCR3, CC5, CxCR4, and sometimes some other ones are talked about as well. the individuals who "have HIV but don't get sick" are called "Chronic Long-Term Non-Progressors" in the medical/research community, and often their inability to "get sick" (develop AIDS) is due to a "defect" in the CCR5, making it extremely difficult for HIV to gain entry to their cells, although this doesn't necessarily preclude them getting sick later due to some (HIV) mutation or another, nor does it necessarily mean they can ever be cured of HIV infection as there is still some residual viral parasitization of their cells, and CD4+ T cells have an undefined lifetime, but is thought to be several years at a minimum... but anyway the co-receptors for different species are different and this is why it's very difficult to give a chimpanzee HIV, but relatively easy to successfully infect it with SIV, and presumably vise versa (although species jumps in one direction generally don't mean a whole lot about jumps in the other direction). there are still a lot of things that we just don't know about HIV/AIDS infection as it depends upon a million variables, for example while co-receptors are generally required for HIV-cell entry, they are not essential. make sense?-not totally. if one can bring the HIV titer (level of HIV in whatever fluid you're talking about (usually blood)) high enough you can infect cells with only CD4 (like mouse cells engineered to express CD4) without co-receptors. if you bring the titer higher still and make it persist you can infect nerve cells with HIV, which (i think???) don't have any CD4 receptors at all... and obviously the chronic long-term non-progressors with the mutated CCR5 receptor had to have acquired HIV somehow in the past, even though intuition would tell you that if HIV couldn't gain ready access to their cells how would an in infection ever have started?
anyway with a whole lot said, not really pertinent to any point whatso ever i'll just say that this article is not scientifically accurate:
This, combined with the knowledge that modern chimps are largely immune to the AIDS virus and its simian variants, pointed toward an AIDS-like disease as the culprit.
what exactly is "the AIDS virus?"
the CDC today estimates that huge numbers of chimpanzees in the wild are infected with SIV, so i'm not sure how exactly chimpanzees could be "immune" to it...
i'm no primate expert but last time i checked chimpanzees were animals which usually traveled with a "troop" or "family" if you will (of other chimpanzees), and thus the possiblity of *all* chimps acquiring a single virus, which is relatively difficult to spread (we're not talking about airborne/contact, we're talking about fighting at the very least) isn't really a foolproof one... this would be like saying it'd be easy for *all* secular people will get herpes which everyone has not, even though it's hugely contageous, ubiquitous (both moreso than SIV probably could have been) and even more importantly it's non-lethal. (herpes = HSV-1 & HSV-2)...
i could go on and on with this article... who pays these people anyway?-i want some of the crack they're smoking....
if you want my opinion: whether the research that this msnbc article is "reporting" on is actually decent or not doesn't change the fact that this msnbc piece of shit isn't worth your time of day (although i just spent the past 30 minutes typing this, do as i write, not as i do)...
i think we're all overly capible of misunderstanding naunces more often than we'd like... for instance: did i spell everything in that sentence correctly?-who knows?-not me, but i doubt it...:)
maybe i should try this karma protection scheme sometime.... heh.
my point was not that i agreed in some way that the degradation of quality through its transcription, on the contrary, my last post was to point out that such a dearth of proper information exists between newstand material and journal material (this is not to insinuate either that everything published in journals is necessarily quality information either).
public ignorance is a BIG, BIG problem in this country (and alas, worldwide), the intellectually 'elite' are advancing farther and further from the general public, i agree, and i feel that there's no plausable nor excusable reason for this, not in this nation, nor in this world, nor for this species...
Slashdot Mirror
This is so typical of the libertarian slashdot crowd. Globalization doesn't in fact give 3rd world nations access to first world markets other than to open up their workers and resources to more efficient exploitation. Or am I wrong, are they making {computers, cell phones, any kind of consumer goods} in Zaire these days? It's cheaper to just suck up the resources of a 3rd world nation than to try to (for example) set up a chip fabrication plant there. If the country is really lucky, they'll get some jobs from stuff lower down the supply chain...but that's not really luck either, since you get almost no pay for the workers, but lots of pollution and industrial risks (Bhopal anyone?) And let's not forget the impact of viral American mass-culture on the culture of these 3rd world nations we're "helping"...
Anyway i won't attack you like your "libertarian" bash but...
Globalization doesn't in fact give 3rd world nations access to first world markets other than to open up their workers and resources to more efficient exploitation.
So then, let me get this straight: 3rd world nations benifit more from 1st world nations locking them out of their markets? If you're going to start talking about sweatshops and the like keep in mind that many companies (particularly clothing companies) have their sweat shops in US protectorites where fed. laws regarding wage and work conditions do not apply, but tarrifs need not be paid (ie in places generally out of the reach of the major goals of globalization proponents)...
And as for your comment on Zaire (which is no longer the country's name, it's actually on its second name since then...) answer this question and you'll rethink your rhetoric: how many civil wars has this country had in the past 30 years? Do they make Nokia, Intels, and carbon nano-tubes? of course they don't, are they able to make these? not currently. What do they make there? Gosh let's see... Grains, other food, etc. etc. Globalization doesn't mean exploitation just as Not globalizing doesn't mean forcing 1st world companies to open up high-tech multi-billion dollar outfits in 3rd world places where disgruntled thugs and corrupt governments have a penchant for burning down billion dollar 1st world assets (as one might surmise from reading your statement). Globalizing is about allowing the average poor person to be able to sell what he/she is capible of making/growing/providing to markets who value his/her produce at a higher monetary value than does his/her neighbor (who also happens to make about $0.75 per day)...
-tid242
From the linked article: Project to ship a container of 230 refurbished computers to Ecuador to extend the technical capacity of civil society and the anti-globalization movement leading up to the anti-FTAA protests in early November.
While i'm all about helping people with noble causes who are less fortunate than i happen to be, supporting an anti-globalization movement isn't really my idea of helping all the poor people in their country who don't share their beliefs.
This is kind of an aside but globalization (i prefer "globalisation" myself) is a good thing for poor countries in that it allows 3rd world nations access to 1st world markets, such as agricultural markets (they don't currently have access to these markets as 1st world nations spend about $300,000,000,000 (yes, that's the correct number of zeros) per year on subsidising our own agricultural producers (ie artifical barriers to market presence). The same is true for textiles. i'm not saying Equador's economic/political woes would be cured by access to global markets, rather that non-global markets tend to hurt small and underdeveloped economies much more than it helps them. For every Mcdonalds that moves in there're a million farmers who are now able to sell their goods for a great deal more then they could have ever dreamed to have done in local street-markets...
Don't get my wrong, i'm not advocating throwing away computer parts instead of donating them, just to remember that helping "poor people" doesn't necessarily help *all* poor people. Yes we should be helping our brothren, but just keep in mind who we're supporting... :)
-tid242
anyway, dude read the article:
"increase security and reduce overall costs." O'Donnell declined to specify the specific changes but said they include measures intended to boost security. "They (Microsoft's Xbox hardware team) know the hacker stuff that's out there, and they're always trying to increase security," she said.
it's obvious that their just increasing the security, you know, so it's like more secure and stuff. this is a good thing i think the micro$oft spokesbot says that somewhere, "this is a good thing, security is good" i believe were the words... i think i'm going to buy an xbox or two as soon as it's more secure, they will obviously be much better than the one i already have (ie: more secure)!
-tid242
well you could always have multiple parallel mechanisms to achieve the same end, if some of them didn't work as well (ie. in different species of organisms) they could very well have been weeded out by those who worked better (the organisms that "worked better" outcompeted those that could not keep up). This is just speaking in theory of course, i have no idea if there were parallel genetic systems competeting against one another in the past...
But even if you buy into that, where did the repairing enzymes come from? Aren't enzymes encoded by... (drumroll...) DNA?
yes, encoding enzymes and (theoretically everything) is encoded in the genetic material, but that doesn't mean that different means of storing genetic data could not have been "competing" at the same time...
all and all while this "parity" idea is kind of interesting it's not any kind of huge breakthrough (not to mention it's kind of a misnomer), traditionally it has been thought that repair enzymes sense steric strain caused to the DNA molecule when the base pairs don't properly align (ie: they look for a bulge in the strand width) as opposed to looking 'inside' the molecule at the hydrogen bonds (which if they don't line up properly cause the bulge). Repair enzymes certainly look at the H bonds later but these are excision & repair enzymes which don't check for errors, rather pull out the offending nucleotide and replace it with the correct one after the error has been discovered by other enzymes...
This is what i've been tought anyway, but what we know does change...
-tid242
-tid242
}8^)-~
when in doubt-admit my igorance...
-tid242
i was sort of wondering about this as well, from the article ilnked to in the post on astrobio.net (link) it stated the following: Astronauts can suffer from motion sickness, bone loss, muscle degeneration (atrophy) and blood vessel problems during weightlessness.
so apparently the sci.fi is er. sci.fi... :) although if i remember correctly JR Hadden from "Contact" the movie based upon Sagan's book had said that the 0 gravity slowed his cancer, which probably has some biological merit if it were actually in the book (instead of just the movie), which it probably was as Sagan worked very closely with the screen writers et al. (i personally haven't read the book, but believe the movie was one of the last things Sagan took part in, and unfortunately he was unable to see the movie as he died of cancer shortly before its debut...). hmmm... offtopic, but yea, :)
to the best of my [limited] knowledge anyway, please correct me if i'm wrong.
-tid242
you're absolutely right, this is much worse than having them move to Europe or Japan...
Shifting the braindrain abroad is also much better than scientists moving from one coast to the other as well...
remember, if company X is not drawing down federal funds, then it may not necessarily be a whole lot better off than it was last week anyway...
-tid242
Just as a counter to your statement a fetus and an embryo are not the same. Morality and politics should not be mutually exclusive although many religious advocates, and those who pander to them, would like to belive that morality is synonomous with religion, in that being agnostic or impartial is the same as amoral, which is clearly not the case. Along this train of thought the idea that Abortion up to full-term is legal while using cells from discarded embryonic tissue should not be legal is hypocritical, not amoral.
so good for Bush and the Witch-hunter general, they pander to conservative populations of people for votes, they aren't scientists, and neither are the vast majority of government policymakers. i don't have a problem with peoples' beliefs, but when these beliefs are held by policymakers who, quite frankly don't know anything about the nature of that which they are controlling, and it impacts people who do-then i have a problem.
Just think of all the bullshit legislation being kicked around regarding intellectual property, fair use, and other slashdot-type material, you know what?-it's the same damn thing, just a different medium.
"there are *two* sides to every arguement" (if there were less then there wouldn't be an arguement now would there be?). This commonly used phrase simply promotes the borderline personality-type debate that far too many people engage. there are (almost) always more than two sides, most real questions don't have simple "yes" and "no" answers. While the research community is almost always concerned with the ethics of their work and the question is "how much" or where to draw the line, conservative simpletons tend to answer with "no, never" or "yes, always" and back it up with "just because" or "because it's always been that way." this type of thinking does a great disservice to humanity, it is counterproductive, arrogant, and fickle.
ok, //end_rant
sorry, but i feel very strongly about our kakistocracy...
-tid242
Is there any reason not want to find out? Isn't the point of research to elucidate the answers to these questions? Regardless of what we find do you think that knowing the answers to these questions could make life worse for our future generations?-don't you think we owe it to our decendents to persue these endeavors?
i'm not sure that i understood the intent of your comment, and forgive me if i've misinterpreted, but it sounds an aweful lot like FUD to me... There is a huge body of knowledge growing from the very questions you have put forth, if you'd like to know what's going on a very limited lit.search pretty much anywhere will uncover a ton of publications :)
-tid242
many of these are the same people who are paying $25/month for AOL dial-up. Otherwise there is a large number of 'normal' people (from what i've see anyway) who use "the internet" solely for work purposes and their place of employment functions as their ISP and they therefore pay nothing monthly for the service, in which case the difference between $0.00 and $35 montly is a pretty big difference...
just what i've seen :)
-tid242
the mu (as well as the other opiate receptors such as kappa, delta, etc-although these aren't necessarily analgesic) receptors show a huge degree of tolerance to extended dosage duration, people with end-stage cancer usually have been on opiates for a very long time and thus it's not uncommon for some patients to be using 1000mg + per day of morphine, whereas the normal dosage (lets say if you came into an ER after an auto accident) would generally only be 2-4 mg every 4 or so hours... if you're pushing the morphine dose for several months regardless of your pain level, i promise your tolerance will increase dramatically as well...
-tid242
you may be thinking of Excedrin, which generally contains APAP, ASA (aspirin) and Caffiene...
}8^)-~
-tid242
-tid242
PCP was actually origionally tried for anesthesia but due to the adverse effects of the drug after surgery was quckly written off for this purpose... FYI ketamine is still widely used in the vet. industry as it's 'safer' than traditional anesthetics in terms of respiratory depression and the like, a farmer can walk into a pasture with a syring full of ketamine, stab the cow with it, perform whatever on the cow, and walk away, the cow eventually wakes up... at least that's what one of my old Neuro profs had said once...
i concur with your morphine statement...
-tid242
sort of like engineering people to be fatter... oh wait, that's a work in progress...
-tid242
i never said, nor insinuated that this was a virus, but it's been long established that viruses (among others, but viruses are by far the most common) may serve as carriers of bits of DNA to and from different organisms, and alas, different species of organisms, so my question was regarding the feasibility of a (wild, not introduced) virus would/could carry the gene into other fish species.
The alteration should only take place at the fertilization or "sperm" level
obviously the 'alteration' will occur when the eggs are fertalized (2 copies of aromatase gene, maternal & fraternal, however a (presumably dominant) gene which codes for a negative RNA sequence to said gene, fraternal), but the fish will carry the gene throughout their lives, thus a virus could potentially carry it from the modified carp to other fish (or their eggs or whatever)...it's not highly probable that it would make its way into the germ lines of the non-intended fish, but i was asking about the odds as it cannot be considered an absolute impossibility.
Of course, the problem here is (as mentioned before) the alterned offspring cannot produce female offsping. Thus, the altered species may breed itself out before affecting the wild species.
i'm also not sure what this statement has to do with my original question, if i'm missing something please, enlighten me... the beautiful thing about this technique is that although each aromatase-inhibited individual organism is an eventual reproductive dead-end this doesn't stop it from breeding hordes of similar dead-end males, thus the species eventually dies by outbreeding by a population of fish much greater than that origionally introduced to the environment... while this institution's mathematical analysis of the number of fish required to successfully destroy or devistate a native fish population looks as though it were performed for carp, i would imagine other species would react differently due to particular qwerks of their species' breeding & lifestyle habbits... which is why my improbable aforementioned point was worthy of a supported answer.
-tid242
otherwise i think that this is an excellent idea, it will be interesting to see whether these fish just upregulate their aromatase genes to overcome the non-sense RNA (anti-aromatase) gene, i wonder if these scientists placed the new gene immediately downstream from the gene it's blocking (so they both become transcribed at the same time), or saturated the upstream nonsense RNA gene region with retroviral promoters (it's advantageous for many retroviruses to trick the cell into overexpressing their genetic material for new virons) or something of the like... i'm curious to know...
-tid242
that's really intersting i always thought they both grew on bushes...
-tid242
actually there was a family in Britain recently known as the "Duncans," (presumably their last name was "Duncan" ?? heh). they actually had a heridetary immune quirk that disallowed them from fighting EBV (epstein barr virus (the cause of "mono")). my old immunology prof. was telling me about it once, he couldn't remember if any of them were still alive though...
doesn't have much to do with HIV, but intersting nonetheless...
-tid242
was William Gibson that guy in Australia who had HIV for like 18 years or something? - anyway there're better vaccination ideas than using live retroviruses, as they stay in your system (undetectable) forever and due to the high mutation rate of reverse transcriptase, have a huge chance to revert to wild-type...
just lay-off (like "rock-on" "rock-off") the sex for a while, i garantee that's easier than figuring out how to cure HIV :)
-tid242
what do you mean by difficult? - you mean in theory? - that'd be easy, just snip out ol' ccr5, ccr3, cxcr4, hack cd4 and off you go, you're cured!
oh, or did you mean difficult as in doing this to every embryo conceved in sub-saharan africa by people who don't even gross enough income over a lifetime to pay for the procedure?
theoretically it might not work anyway, the people with HIV who "don't get AIDS" (mutated ccr5) still have HIV, are they really any better off?
sure if you're a rich american you might even be able to pay someone to snag one of your stem cells, hack the genes, pump it up with some cytokines (to make it proliferate) and then inject it back into you and you'd have a cell-line to fight your HIV infection, but you'd still have HIV... i ask again, would you really be any better off?
boy the cost of "fixing" one embryo could sure prevent a hell of a lot of HIV in India, China, Russia, or Indonesia by jumpstarting an early HIV-provention program there...
-tid242
by the way some company "owns" the ccr5 gene already anyway so i'm sure they'd want some $$$ for your altruism.
no, it is not correct that chimpanzee's are immune to "the AIDS virus and it's counterparts" as scientists have been intentionally infecting chimps with SIV to use as a human/HIV equivalent, so i'm not entirely sure where this article gets it's .nfo... generally whenever articles are cited as "fact" with phrases like "it's a well known fact that..." or "everybody agrees that..." etc. etc. are gonna' be a bit "funny."
looking over some of the threads it's apparent that there's some confusion about the state of things so here goes a bit of a clarification:
HIV-1/HIV-2, SIV, BIV (bovine), FIV (feline), et al. are viruses which belong to retroviridae (retroviruses) and the subfamily 'lentiviride' (lentiviruses) just like: people, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangitangs (sp???) are all members of the great apes (lentiviruses) and also primates (retroviruses), it's interesting that these viruses all parasitize the immune system's CD4+ T-cells or their non-human equivalents ("helper T cells" the cells that coordinate the immune response (B-cells, plasma cells, CD8+T cells, Suppressor T cells, granulocytes, etc.))) of the different species and AFAIK, the only viruses to do so, specifically. historically retroviruses were mostly only of interest to oncologists (people who study cancer) because of their ability to cause cancer (ALV, avian leukemia virus, Raus sarcoma virus, etc.) and some of them even infect the immune system such as HTLV, human t-cell leukemia virus (CD8+ t-cells, which are the "killer T cells" HTLV is thought to possibly cause some sorts of blood dyscrasias), but in 1983 this all changed, and even today the word "Retrovirus" draws fear and awe the world over... anyway the reason why all these lentiviruses are different is because of their excuisite sensitivity to cytokine/chemokine (chemical mediators used for "immune system communication" (IL-2, IL-6, IL-12, IFN-alpha, et all (there're probably several hundred found by now...)) receptors located on the CD4+ T cells which act as co-receptors, and henceforth are oft known as the "HIV co-receptors." (CD4 is of course the receptor for HIV, i'm not sure if CD4 is the primary receptor for all of the Immunodeficiency lentiviruses, but you get the point...) For example the HIV co-receptors are CCR3, CC5, CxCR4, and sometimes some other ones are talked about as well. the individuals who "have HIV but don't get sick" are called "Chronic Long-Term Non-Progressors" in the medical/research community, and often their inability to "get sick" (develop AIDS) is due to a "defect" in the CCR5, making it extremely difficult for HIV to gain entry to their cells, although this doesn't necessarily preclude them getting sick later due to some (HIV) mutation or another, nor does it necessarily mean they can ever be cured of HIV infection as there is still some residual viral parasitization of their cells, and CD4+ T cells have an undefined lifetime, but is thought to be several years at a minimum... but anyway the co-receptors for different species are different and this is why it's very difficult to give a chimpanzee HIV, but relatively easy to successfully infect it with SIV, and presumably vise versa (although species jumps in one direction generally don't mean a whole lot about jumps in the other direction). there are still a lot of things that we just don't know about HIV/AIDS infection as it depends upon a million variables, for example while co-receptors are generally required for HIV-cell entry, they are not essential. make sense?-not totally. if one can bring the HIV titer (level of HIV in whatever fluid you're talking about (usually blood)) high enough you can infect cells with only CD4 (like mouse cells engineered to express CD4) without co-receptors. if you bring the titer higher still and make it persist you can infect nerve cells with HIV, which (i think???) don't have any CD4 receptors at all... and obviously the chronic long-term non-progressors with the mutated CCR5 receptor had to have acquired HIV somehow in the past, even though intuition would tell you that if HIV couldn't gain ready access to their cells how would an in infection ever have started?
anyway with a whole lot said, not really pertinent to any point whatso ever i'll just say that this article is not scientifically accurate:
This, combined with the knowledge that modern chimps are largely immune to the AIDS virus and its simian variants, pointed toward an AIDS-like disease as the culprit.
what exactly is "the AIDS virus?"
the CDC today estimates that huge numbers of chimpanzees in the wild are infected with SIV, so i'm not sure how exactly chimpanzees could be "immune" to it...
i'm no primate expert but last time i checked chimpanzees were animals which usually traveled with a "troop" or "family" if you will (of other chimpanzees), and thus the possiblity of *all* chimps acquiring a single virus, which is relatively difficult to spread (we're not talking about airborne/contact, we're talking about fighting at the very least) isn't really a foolproof one... this would be like saying it'd be easy for *all* secular people will get herpes which everyone has not, even though it's hugely contageous, ubiquitous (both moreso than SIV probably could have been) and even more importantly it's non-lethal. (herpes = HSV-1 & HSV-2)...
i could go on and on with this article... who pays these people anyway?-i want some of the crack they're smoking....
if you want my opinion: whether the research that this msnbc article is "reporting" on is actually decent or not doesn't change the fact that this msnbc piece of shit isn't worth your time of day (although i just spent the past 30 minutes typing this, do as i write, not as i do)...
-tid242
}8^)-~
i think we're all overly capible of misunderstanding naunces more often than we'd like... for instance: did i spell everything in that sentence correctly?-who knows?-not me, but i doubt it...
maybe i should try this karma protection scheme sometime.... heh.
-tid242
public ignorance is a BIG, BIG problem in this country (and alas, worldwide), the intellectually 'elite' are advancing farther and further from the general public, i agree, and i feel that there's no plausable nor excusable reason for this, not in this nation, nor in this world, nor for this species...
my $2*10^(-2)
-tid242