My understanding is that much of the coal is from when plants evolved lignin but before microbes evolved enzymes that could digest it. So, lots of carbon was sequestered in indigestible compounds that couldn't break down except via geology, like the floating plastic junk in the oceans.
In that sense, then, no amount of time would recreate the fossil fuel reserves again.
While using apps to compare prices on groceries while shopping, it occurred to me that it would seem to be the sort of task an AI would be good at. Right now Siri tries to take you to iTunes when you ask about music, and I imagine Alexa offers to let you order all kinds of things from Amazon, but an AI not tethered to a vendor would be much more useful. It would be extremely disruptive to retailers and advertising would be extremely difficult. Imagine dictating a shopping list to an AI that could compare price per unit, have a whitelist of brand names that you consider interchangeable, and would be able to target 'free shipping' price minimums.
I have the cheap Slacker plan at $5/mo and while you can only have one stream active, you can cache to somewhere around 5 devices, as I recall, so everyone can listen to a cached station simultaneously without any additional fee. I've not directly compared to Spotify, which I read has a larger library, but I've been pleased enough with it.
The destroy plan for biological specimens can be fancy but in your examples, cutting the power to the cold storage units and just letting it rot for a week is as good as anything else.
You can start a research program with clinical samples, but it would be hard to get enough material if you couldn't culture the virus. To develop a vaccine you'll need virus stocks to develop the animal model, as controls for assays, and to check for drift in the infected population, among other things. Given stability issues you aren't going to be able to just drain all the bodily fluids from the deceased and you can only get so much at a time from a living person.
It'll take you years to get from a gene sequence back to a functional virus with which to build a research program to look into the 'new variant' or whatever concern made growing smallpox again worthwhile. And there'd still be some doubt about if you got it right since some virus particles grab important proteins from the host cell that aren't encoded in their own genome.
It is a matter of how long it would take to get a research program back up and running. If someone released 'new smallpox' and I needed to get setup to culture it, then I would culture up 'old smallpox' which is well known, perfect my technique, and then try with the new one and tweak as needed. Without the reference of the old one, or with needing to hope I reconstructed it correctly, by the time I've gotten the culture techniques ready for 'new smallpox' it has been a few years.
Funnier still is that while a cardboard box in a fridge sounds scary, most viruses are not stable enough to just sit in a fridge for very long at all before they break down. I'm not sure off the top of my head about smallpox, but I'd be shocked if what was in that box was infectious.
Monkeypox is related to smallpox and the vaccination (cowpox) protects you from each. It isn't hard to imagine someone weaponizing monkeypox or it naturally evolving into something more like smallpox in terms of human infectiousness.
We learn useful things like antibiotics all the time studying Earth life. The amount of things we could learn studying alien life are incalculable. Small example: alternative metabolisms could be used to efficiently make chemicals or extract minerals from substrate where Earth life would not be able to.
They wouldn't have made the antibody until they were already infected. Once infection has set, it is difficult to clear the infection fully because HIV gets into long-lived cells in your immune system and hides. They could potentially clear themselves in 10 years or so.
The stamp collecting phases of research for physics and chemistry have reached plateaus because we filled out the periodic table and have to keep building bigger particle accelerators. For biology there's such a variety of possibilities that there's plenty of discovery to be made of what all exists in our own gut to allow the stamp collecting to occur alongside all of the experimental research. We still find new mammals from time to time. That the former can happen doesn't mean that we don't do classical science, as well.
It is even worse with radio: in the rare instance when I'm listening to broadcast radio the ads seem so jarring since I've become accustomed to internet radio where I can skip actual content at a whim, let alone noise.
If you're watching a show it is just a block to show you what episode is going to play next. When you reach the end of a series or movie it then similarly shows you something it thinks you might like.
I've seen information about some amphibians (particularly salamanders) being able to regenerate limbs, but not lizards. I would appreciate a link if you have one handy.
Most regeneration in animals is either very simple animals like flatworms or imperfect regeneration in some amphibians and reptiles. To get an actual usable organ or limb studying how they grow is the best way. Regrowing a finger without any bones like a lizard replaces its tail isn't going to help much.
Generally you can't observe these sorts of things continuously, so you'd do 60 min +/- 5 minute intervals and then have some shifts but maybe not enough to cover each hour round the clock.
Slashdot Mirror
True, selectable filters would be ideal... you could even shoot for better materials or durability.
When our cells get this sort of short-term self-interest, we refer to them as 'cancer' and do our best to get rid of them.
My understanding is that much of the coal is from when plants evolved lignin but before microbes evolved enzymes that could digest it. So, lots of carbon was sequestered in indigestible compounds that couldn't break down except via geology, like the floating plastic junk in the oceans. In that sense, then, no amount of time would recreate the fossil fuel reserves again.
While using apps to compare prices on groceries while shopping, it occurred to me that it would seem to be the sort of task an AI would be good at. Right now Siri tries to take you to iTunes when you ask about music, and I imagine Alexa offers to let you order all kinds of things from Amazon, but an AI not tethered to a vendor would be much more useful. It would be extremely disruptive to retailers and advertising would be extremely difficult. Imagine dictating a shopping list to an AI that could compare price per unit, have a whitelist of brand names that you consider interchangeable, and would be able to target 'free shipping' price minimums.
It does make me wonder if Disney might just buy Netflix, though.
I have the cheap Slacker plan at $5 /mo and while you can only have one stream active, you can cache to somewhere around 5 devices, as I recall, so everyone can listen to a cached station simultaneously without any additional fee. I've not directly compared to Spotify, which I read has a larger library, but I've been pleased enough with it.
The destroy plan for biological specimens can be fancy but in your examples, cutting the power to the cold storage units and just letting it rot for a week is as good as anything else.
You can start a research program with clinical samples, but it would be hard to get enough material if you couldn't culture the virus. To develop a vaccine you'll need virus stocks to develop the animal model, as controls for assays, and to check for drift in the infected population, among other things. Given stability issues you aren't going to be able to just drain all the bodily fluids from the deceased and you can only get so much at a time from a living person.
It'll take you years to get from a gene sequence back to a functional virus with which to build a research program to look into the 'new variant' or whatever concern made growing smallpox again worthwhile. And there'd still be some doubt about if you got it right since some virus particles grab important proteins from the host cell that aren't encoded in their own genome.
It is a matter of how long it would take to get a research program back up and running. If someone released 'new smallpox' and I needed to get setup to culture it, then I would culture up 'old smallpox' which is well known, perfect my technique, and then try with the new one and tweak as needed. Without the reference of the old one, or with needing to hope I reconstructed it correctly, by the time I've gotten the culture techniques ready for 'new smallpox' it has been a few years.
Funnier still is that while a cardboard box in a fridge sounds scary, most viruses are not stable enough to just sit in a fridge for very long at all before they break down. I'm not sure off the top of my head about smallpox, but I'd be shocked if what was in that box was infectious.
Smallpox vaccination occurs via scarification, it wouldn't have been added to an MMR cocktail.
Monkeypox is related to smallpox and the vaccination (cowpox) protects you from each. It isn't hard to imagine someone weaponizing monkeypox or it naturally evolving into something more like smallpox in terms of human infectiousness.
We learn useful things like antibiotics all the time studying Earth life. The amount of things we could learn studying alien life are incalculable. Small example: alternative metabolisms could be used to efficiently make chemicals or extract minerals from substrate where Earth life would not be able to.
They wouldn't have made the antibody until they were already infected. Once infection has set, it is difficult to clear the infection fully because HIV gets into long-lived cells in your immune system and hides. They could potentially clear themselves in 10 years or so.
Sometimes somebody says something that offends people and then they get publicly shamed! But otherwise, yes, I assume it is run by PR agents.
Learning how to tweak the microbiome will likely be as important and useful as antibiotics.
The stamp collecting phases of research for physics and chemistry have reached plateaus because we filled out the periodic table and have to keep building bigger particle accelerators. For biology there's such a variety of possibilities that there's plenty of discovery to be made of what all exists in our own gut to allow the stamp collecting to occur alongside all of the experimental research. We still find new mammals from time to time. That the former can happen doesn't mean that we don't do classical science, as well.
If you really want the top end package you should at least call and haggle with them... you could be buying a car with that money...
It is even worse with radio: in the rare instance when I'm listening to broadcast radio the ads seem so jarring since I've become accustomed to internet radio where I can skip actual content at a whim, let alone noise.
I surf my phone during commercials when watching broadcast. I glance up for movie trailers sometimes.
If you're watching a show it is just a block to show you what episode is going to play next. When you reach the end of a series or movie it then similarly shows you something it thinks you might like.
I've seen information about some amphibians (particularly salamanders) being able to regenerate limbs, but not lizards. I would appreciate a link if you have one handy.
Most regeneration in animals is either very simple animals like flatworms or imperfect regeneration in some amphibians and reptiles. To get an actual usable organ or limb studying how they grow is the best way. Regrowing a finger without any bones like a lizard replaces its tail isn't going to help much.
Generally you can't observe these sorts of things continuously, so you'd do 60 min +/- 5 minute intervals and then have some shifts but maybe not enough to cover each hour round the clock.