I tuned in and out of this show last night (Spike wore me down with a flood of advertising during their CSI reruns), and one of the things that struck me is that they gave away half of their really important awards in that part of the show where they mention a dozen winners without bothering with nominees or anything so as to keep the show moving along. Now, most awards shows do that with some of the more obscure technical achievement awards. The Spike VGAs did this for "Developer of the Year." That'd be like the Grammys just mentioning who won Album of the Year with no fanfare, no, "And the nominees are..." some time in the middle of the broadcast. From what I saw, the giving out of awards with the usual business of mentioning nominees and having the winner come up on stage and thank everyone, were almost totally limited to awards where people who are already celebrities could win.
Now, I understand that Samuel L. Jackson is going to be a bit more telegenic onstage than J. Random Programmer, who just spent 70+ hours a week in a darkened room coding a game and whose social skills may have atrophied somewhat, and I also welcome giving recognition to actors, famous or not, who provide voice/mo-cap talents to a video game and bring characters to life. However, I think this awards show did a remarkably poor job of honoring the people who actually make video games possible. There just wasn't an examination of what video games are about on either a technical or creative level, so awards just stuck to easy, obvious categories borrowed from other awards shows. Not that I was expecting too much- after all, awards shows generally are a pretense to packing a bunch of attractive celebrities in a room, playing some music, and scheduling wild after-parties. The only sin committed this time was having the rap concert/photo op pose as something geeks might be interested in watching. I also wasn't expecting too much because original programming on Spike TV can generally be assumed to be garbage.
And in reply to another post: Yeah, what exactly is the deal with Corporate Shill Snoop? Am I the only one who remembers when he cut rhymes about doing drugs and gunning people down in the street? Am I the only one who remembers when he stood trial for murder? I can deal with him mellowing out, but AOL commercials? Hosting awards shows? Ugh.
Obviously, their two next concert tours will be held only in Japan, and will be called Final Fantasy Concert II and III. They will then hold another tour in the US, but pretend the Japanese tours never happened and refer to it as "Final Fantasy Concert II." The music will also be less technically demanding for the US dates than for the shows in Japan, which will be called Final Fantasy Concert IV.
Confusing, yes, but not nearly as confusing as it will be when the fourth concert series to play in the US is titled Final Fantasy Concert VII, or when Final Fantasy Concert X is so popular that a second tour is held and is named X-2, which is distinct from Final Fantasy Concert XI, which will be held over the internet. Not to mention Final Fantasy Concert Tactics.
The salaries for major college coaches, especially as they've skyrocketed in recent years, are an interesting issue. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly agree with the parent that the money involved is obscene, less from the actual amount involved than in the disproportionality of salaries. What is being said when a college football coach makes 10-20 times what most tenured college professors do? When the coach makes more than the chancellor, more than the university president? Particularly given that the coach is ostensibly coaching an amateur team of unpaid (yeah, I know) players. There are quite a few colleges that bleed red ink and never seem to have money for anything when it comes to the general student body or the faculty and staff, and yet would never even consider doing away with their millionaire coaches, their gigantic stadiums, or the 85 scholarships allotted to Division I-A football teams. It's the bread and circuses approach to university administration, only it's really just circuses, no bread.
On the other hand, as another poster wrote, when a big-time college sports program is successful, all of that gets swept aside. I had some exceptional professors in college. None, however, could be expected to pack in 70,000+ paying customers to attend their lectures each week- and certainly not to draw a TV audience in the millions. The sponsorships, the increased alumni support, the increased visibility of your school on national television- and even more directly, the huge sums of money that come with success. If Urban Meyer leads the Gators back to BCS-bowl glory just once, he makes 14 million dollars instantly for the University of Florida, paying off their investment in him. Also, while it may sometimes seem that way, there's no reason a school's academic and athletic achievement need to be negatively correlated. Look at Cal this year- did they put academics on the back burner over in Berkeley so they could have a great football season? Duke and Stanford have terrible academic reputations because they put together good basketball teams each year, right? Heck, my alma mater currently has the #1 men's basketball program in the nation, and I'd argue that all of the media attention they've been getting for it is a major positive for the school. (I will not discuss the Illini football program at this time.)
I will admit that Americans take our sports too seriously, and unfortunately we don't limit ourselves to taking highly paid "professionals" (the word belongs in quotes until athletes prove themselves worthy of the term again), but make way too much of games played by college students and even children. You hate to crush dreams, but it needs to be impressed on kids that all the "professional" athletes in the U.S. put together wouldn't fill the seats at an NBA arena. The question is, though, how do you change a child's heroes? I played football in high school, and had fun, but I never considered college ball, much less pro- I wouldn't have made the pros unless there was a lockout, and then the replacement players walked out, and their replacements walked out and so did their replacements. And probably not even then. I mean, I wanted to be a scientist pretty much since about the fourth grade. That's what I was excited about, and I made choices appropriate to making that happen. How we can get everyone else excited by math and science- not just creating mindset of it leading to a decent, sensible job, but making it genuinely exciting in the way that sports are, I wish I knew.
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
The real mystery to this number, which the article hints at, is that it can be defined in a variety of interesting ways, including as (charge of an electron)^2 over (4 pi epsilon-naught h-bar c)- a formula that involves quantum mechanical (Planck's constant), relativistic (c) and mathematical (pi) constants produces a dimensionless number in the neighborhood of 1/137. The number itself is not so important (except to a bunch of people who have applied numerological methods to its study, most notably Arthur Eddington); rather, the issue figuring out the relationship between the fundamental constants that pop up everywhere in calculations (like h, c, and pi) and the universe that these calculations describe.
I personally like CSI, though I only catch it once in a while. As an analytical chemist, I can often tell whether the forensic science is legit on CSI or a similar show, and while CSI is far from being completely realistic, I usually cut it slack because the errors tend to be matters of degree rather than utter fabrications. I mean, they could have just written a magical "crimeputer" into the show where evidence goes in one end and the name of the guilty party prints out at the other. Instead, they do make an effort to get science right, but with the caveat that sometimes the science must be squeezed into the storytelling. For shows like CSI, but also for detective shows in general, the case needs to be wrapped up within an episode (or 2 for the big To Be Continued... episodes popular around sweeps). So just as a show like "Law and Order" usually fast forwards through the more mundane legal proceedings in order to get to the dramatic clinching testimony and verdict, CSI makes complicated assays take minutes instead of hours or days so they can hurry to the point where the investigators march up to the suspect with infallible evidence in hand. It's marketed as entertainment, I can understand that- if anything, I think the science can serve as a starting point for viewers, who after the show just might google for some technique they saw and actually learn something.
They at least talk about doing real things like Western blots and mass spec- once while flipping channels I caught a minute of Navy NCIS where someone mentioned doing an ELISA. In particular, these shows tend to do a nice job of explaining the principles behind a test while they perform it- occasionally I learn new things, though occasionally there will be something explained where I'm thinking, "um, it's not exactly how you say,"- I'm sure the same is true for medical professionals who watch "ER," cops who watch "NYPD Blue," etc. Now, once again, I say that as a chemist- people in other fields may have more of an issue with how their work is represented on such shows- for one, I'm sure that as is usual for television, the capabilities and use of computers are misrepresented. What personally bugs me more than the science itself on CSI and its ilk is the budget that these crime labs seem to have. If anything, these shows might give people the idea that forensics labs have infinite time, money, and resources to ensure justice is done in each and every case.
It'd be nice, though, if once in a while they'd use a couple of minutes at the end of the show to mention real forensics and the shortcuts they took during the episode- and possibly mention that in reality, sometimes the results are inconclusive, even if everyone did their jobs right.
Oh, and second the parent- Diamond Evolution One are some nice gloves- though I prefer the MicroGrip purple nitriles myself.
It was proffered a long time ago. The news is that it doesn't work. May I suggest punctured?
A couple years ago, there was a proposed proof to the Poincare conjecture- not the Perelman proof which AFAIK still holds together, but another attempt which was soon found to have an insurmountable problem. When the proof was first announced, the Mathworld news item ran, Poincaré Conjecture Purportedly Proved, and when the hole in the proof (essentially, an unproven step used in the proof) came to light, the headline was Poincaré Conjecture Purported Proof Perforated.
Well, until recently, there was really no official link between colors and parties- media outlets just chose a scheme and provided a legend for their readers/viewers. Sometimes a party was red, sometimes blue or white. In recent memory, generally presidental elections haven't been terribly close, so the winner would have a huge carpet of states in the same color. In general, red was more popular for the Democrats, likely for the reason you mentioned, that red is identified with leftist parties and causes worldwide, but there was no absolute rhyme or reason to it- in fact, some outlets deliberately blue so as not to associate the Democrats with socialism. In 2000, it happened that most major television networks used blue for the Democrats and red for the Republicans, with white or yellow or even stripes of blue and red to denote undecided states. The closeness of that election and the dialogue regarding electoral votes and swing states was such a big deal that pundits started talking about "red states" and "blue states" as though they had always meant Republicans and Democrats.
The colors are not official party colors at all ( in terms of a party featuring just red or just blue), and generally signs, banners, bumper stickers, etc. for both parties feature some scheme of red, white, and blue.
If you go to the New York Times website, you can look at their rather interesting representation of the map, with dark red and blue for solidly Republican or Democratic states, light shades of those colors for states that are not sure bets for a party, but still noticeably lean one way or another, and yellow, for the five truly undecided "swing states."
But how come everyone gets excited when methane is detected on a planet like mars for example? Or is it that methane occurs naturally AND is a byproduct of plants/animals?
Well, yes, it does. The reason why finding methane on Mars would be more exciting than methane on Titan is that on Mars, atmospheric methane is not expected to be stable, as it reacts with hydroxyl ions in the presence of sunlight to produce carbon dioxide and water (it should be noted that if the data concerning methane on Mars is right, the concentration is around 10-15 ppb, so don't expect a greenhouse effect and rain clouds any time soon). The methane on Mars would have disappeared within a few hundred years were it not replenished somehow- and the question then, is "How is methane on Mars replenished?"
The two possibilities (and both could be correct) are outgassing from geologic processes or production by methane-producing organisms. Either possibility is actually pretty exciting, as Mars as we know it now is geologically dead- it has the largest volcano in the Solar System, but no evidence of active or recent vulcanism, but of course the possibility that colonies of methanogens similar to terrestrial Archaea are producing methane on Mars would be a much more momentous discovery.
The methane and ethane on Titan, OTOH, has been there for billions of years and is almost certainly from nonliving processes, just as the methane in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets has nothing to do with organisms. It is interesting, still, though, because methane and ethane, gases on earth, may exist as liquid on Titan. A moon larger than Pluto and Mercury with seas of simple organic compounds (and possibly a "snow" of various hydrocarbon and nitrile compounds). A atmosphere denser than earth's composed of 94% nitrogen. Possibly large quanitities of water ice. All definitely reasons to go explore.
Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that life has developed on Titan, simply because it is far too cold (about 94K). The basically opaque atmosphere and distance from the sun make really interesting chemistry very difficult, in particular, keeping any water locked up as ice rather than making it available as liquid or vapor. There may be some interesting stuff going on in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, though, as UV breaks down methane and nitrogen gas to produce a variety of polyacetylene and polynitrile compounds which fall as a waxy precipitate (the aforementioned "snow").
The geology of Titan is essentially still a question mark, owing again to the orange-brown veil. If anything like the deep-sea vents of earth exist on Titan, they could provide the rest of the requirements for life- they'd inject heat into the ecosystem, possibly freeing up water vapor and oxygen from the ice, and could provide elements like phosphorus and sulfur (giving the sought-after CHONPS). Also, Saturn produces tremendous tidal forces on Titan. While on the one hand, the development of life on earth was helped substantially by the presence of intertidal areas (which still feature incredible diversity), the tides on Titan may so strong as to quickly erode continental features. There are a lot of mysteries that will be solved after Cassini-Huygens, and no doubt a stack of new ones will be found.
UIUC is my alma mater as well, and while I too was somewhat disappointed, I understand the reasons why we never do well in these sorts of listings. UIUC is far too large, both in terms of acreage and student population to be effectively wired- as the name implies, a single city was not sufficient to contain its bulk. Setting up wi-fi access points to cover the campus would be a formidable task- while the university has been making strides, I've sure it gets killed on issues like, "What percentage of the campus is wireless accessible?" Especially if you count all the space taken up by things like farms and that certain cornfield. Also, a university of its size can often suffer from massive bureaucratic inertia- once an initiative gets rolling, things can get done with remarkable speed, but getting it started is a major challenge. While I was surprised to see a few large state schools on the list (Georgia springs to mind), this sort of ranking really does favor smaller polytechnics that can roll out new tech initiatives faster and with greater flexibility than the gigantic land grant colleges. Also, smaller colleges can get away with mandates (like everyone must bring a computer to school) that are harder to swallow when you have 40,000 students, the majority of whom have no deep geekish interest in computers. I mean, if you plan to come to Illinois for CS or ECE, for example, you don't need to worry- the tech resources are there. It's just, like the future, not evenly distributed yet. You have old and busted in some places, new hotness in others. I suspect the same is true at many other universities.
And while I mean no disrespect to any of the schools that did actually make the top 25, I have to argue that "wired level" should play a very small role when it comes to evaluating a college- in many ways it is more of a quality of life issue than a quality of education one- I mean, it's gotten to the point where almost every institution offers broadband access in the dorms, online instead of paper registration, email accounts and webspace (UIUC seems to get nicked for not offering webpages to students, even though they do- oh well though, from the comments, it seems like there's a ton of wrong results), and most are working on some sort of wireless access. It's somewhat a measure of the level of services a university is willing to provide to its students, but I'd rather not forgo something like competent professors or well-maintained buildings in order to pay for some gimmickly buzzword technology. Lastly, given that many traditional "geek" schools aren't on the list (MIT has received mention several times already), I think it correlates poorly with the overall computing culture of the school.
On the subject of considering the WWW was pretty much started there (netscape), while I am quite proud of having attended the university that brought forth NCSA Mosaic (and many other accomplishments), by claiming that as the birth of the WWW you have opened yourself up to a dozen inevitable posts about CERN and Tim Berners-Lee, some of which may be posted by the time I finish this (overly long) post.
It has been known for some time that despite commonly being thought of as "female" hormones, estrogens are responsible for many of the behavioral qualities of "maleness." Studies done with male knockout mice missing estrogen receptors produce individuals that fail to develop normal male sexual behavior patterns. In the brain, testosterone is converted to estrogens through the action of an enzyme called P450 aromatase, and it is the estrogens that interact with cellular receptors and produce effects. The brains of most female fetuses are not masculinized by estrogens because alpha-fetoprotein binds to estrogens and prevents them from entering the brain.
Male fetuses have alpha-fetoprotein as well, but it does not bind to testosterone (which is of course present to a much larger degree in normal male fetuses than in females), and while the steroid testosterone can pass through the blood-brain barrier, alpha-fetoprotein cannot, so testosterone passes into the brain, where aromatase converts it to estrogens and it then carries out its effects.
Of course, having sexual dimorphism tied to the levels of certain hormones brings you naturally to the results obtained in this particular study, that is to say, there is room for tremendous variation in the phenotypes of persons with the same sexual genotype. Your biological "sex" (in a more overall sense that includes physical and behavioral characteristics of the mature organism)is determined only at a rough level by the count of X and Y chromosomes; they are a starting point for the complex web of genes, proteins, and signalling cascades- as well as conditions in utero, a long neglected aspect of human development finally starting to be recognized- that produce an end result. As a result, while we may be on gross observation "male" or "female," internally we may lie somewhere on a continuum. Individuals with an outwardly male appearances but with female brains are possible, and vice versa. This idea is taken to the the extreme in cases like 5-alpha reductase syndrome, where XY males lack or cannot correctly produce an enzyme that converts testosterone into 5-DHT, which is far more potent in developing secondary sex characteristics- individuals have female genitalia (the default option), but attempts to raise them as female have generally been terrible failures. In other words, our sex isn't digital; it's analog.
I think in order to make an omni-directional magnetic field generator, you would need magnetic monopoles, which are forbidden under Maxwell's equations which govern electromagnetism. If they existed, these would be particles which are in essence "north" or "south" in the manner that charged particles are positive or negative. It's worth noting, though, that a few proposed unified field theories require the existence of monopoles to work out, so I wouldn't rate it an absolute "no" yet.
The problem with using a celestial body's magnetic field as a force is that in many cases, the field is far too weak or nonexistent. The moon and Mars lack magnetic fields, for instance, and the earth has a magnetic field of about 0.5 gauss. In comparison, powerful magnets used in NMR generally are in the 10-20 Tesla range (100,000-200,000 gauss). Which is to say, the earth's magnetic field is great for turning compass needles and deflecting the solar wind, but not nearly strong enough to repel magnets at reasonable velocities. The overall energy of the earth's magnetic field is of course enormous- we're talking about 100 billion billion tons of iron acting as a dynamo, but the field strength- perhaps better called the flux density is not very high- lines of magnetic force are spaced too far apart. Despite being many orders of magnitude weaker in terms of absolute force strength, gravity predominates over electromagnetism as the major force we encounter from a planet. The problem is that almost every object in the universe that produces a gigantic magnetic field is also extraordinarily massive, so that the attractive force of gravity competes with the magnetic field- and dipole magnetic field strength falls off as the third power of distance versus gravity, which follows an inverse square law.
Your idea might actually work around a neutron star, which can produce a field in the 100,000,000 Tesla range, which might be enough to escape the immense gravity. You probably would not be able to survive this, however.
Also, while such a design would not use an fuel in the manner that a rocket would, you would need to expend energy to create the very powerful field required. Frankly, given the requirements of the scenario, which demand an object with very strong magnetic field and a ship that can produce a very strong magnetic field, there are better options. If you have an object like the sun putting out a solar wind, solar sails are a possibility. If you have an enormous electromagnet at your disposal, well, an idea like the one the story proposes, an ion drive of some sort, a railgun system- lots of options.
This seems somewhat like a what a polymerized azide ((N3)- ion)compound would be like, perhaps with many similar properties- I can see the uses as a high explosive, as sodium azide is generally the explosive in airbags- a couple grams of the salt is sufficient to generate over 50L of nitrogen gas quite rapidly. The rearrangement of this network solid into triple-bonded gas molecules should release an enormous amount of energy. I wonder if this is nearly as sensitive to shock as the azides are though.
My apologies on the comment then- something half-remembered from an endocrinology textbook- a mention of "Laron pituitary dwarfism" being treated with recombinant IGF-1. Very sorry if I got something wrong though, and thanks for setting the record straight.
Yeah, good point, I was somewhat surprised too. I should have mentioned her in my post, actually- endosymbiosis, which I did mention, is her idea, and along with James Lovelock, so is the Gaia Hypothesis (which admittedly I'm less hot on). The idea of complex organisms as "superorganisms" in symbiosis with their own ecosystem of microbes fits nicely in scale between her two major ideas, one of which is about the relationship between a cell and some of its organelles and the other of which is about the relationship of the entire biosphere to all of its inhabitants.
I think the mitochondria argument is in reference to the idea of "endosymbiosis," which suggests that mitochondria (and chloroplasts) were originally independent prokaryotic organisms that were at some stage incorporated into eukaryotic cells, the primary evidence for this being that these organelles have their own DNA. They then became highly specialized at a certain task (aerobic respiration, photosynthesis) and discarded the machinery required for independent survival. The eukaryotic cell benefited by gaining sets of powerful new energy pathways in nice self-contained packages, and the organelles benefited by being passed on whenever eukaryotic organisms reproduced (you have your mother to thank for your mitochondria, as yours descend from the mitochondria of her egg cell). As to whether mitochondria are alive, well, biology has a way of making airtight definitions very difficult- after all, there are plenty of complex species which are completely dependent on other species in order to live and reproduce; we call them parasites.
Now, despite that, I'm personally in the "not an organism" boat, as mitochondria are really not much different from other "opportunistic" pieces of DNA like viruses and plasmids. It just happens that the bag the DNA comes in is extraordinarily useful to the host cell. Indeed, while mitochondria are completely dependent on host cells to reproduce, life on earth would be far different- there'd be no way an ATP-guzzler like the human brain could have evolved without the benefit of aerobic respiration, for instance.
In reference to the whole "humans are superorganisms" idea, one of the things I got from a microbiology course I took in college was the ubiquity of microorganisms on and in the human body- and how their relationship to the host organism can be anything from beneficial to deadly. I think that considering the other billion residents of the body when examining avenues of treatment is a wise move.
Tivo --- Cheap, works, easy to use, easy to setup.
MythTV --- Cheap, works, easy to use, difficult to setup.
MCE --- Expensive, works, easy to use, modertly difficult to setup.
The only problem with your otherwise insightful analysis is that the MCE "works" only for a rather limited definition of "working" compared to the functionality of the other products on the market. It does less and costs more, and Microsoft's principal argument for you to purchase one seems to be, "Hey, we're Microsoft. You may be familiar with some of our other products."
It should be noted that the mice used in this experiment were knockouts for the Id1, Id2, and Id3 genes, which causes underproliferation of myocardial cells- the walls of the heart are too thin, and the mice generally die about 13.5 days into gestation (mentioned in the Science article, but not the Salon writeup). IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1) and WNT5a (wingless-type, a carryover from Drosophila studies) are both relatively small proteins that act as signaling molecules which act to spur cells to grow and proliferate. As the Science article notes, it would be interesting to know how much "rescue" of tissues comes from the stem cells themselves, and how much from the potent growth and proliferation factors they secrete. This is especially important in light of "the potential of ES cells to induce the formation of teratomas (fetal tissue tumors)." Which, by the way, are among the most awful things you could ever see.
Could IGF-1 and/or WNT5a be used in human therapies? Perhaps- after all they are already produced by healthy humans- and IGF-1 is already in use to treat some kinds of dwarfism- and by athletes, illegally, for its anabolic effects which are similar to growth hormone. IGF-1 does have the drawback of being structually similar to insulin (duh), so an overabundance can cause glucose intolerance, and since both are regulators of cell proliferation, both may increase the risks of certain cancers themselves.
I love the "invasive alien species" which were deliberately introduced to a foreign environment by humans in order to control a pest (often another invasive alien species) and of course themselves became pests- I think much of that has been due to poor understanding of predator-prey relationships within the larger framework of an ecosystem.
When you release beetles to consume aphids, for instance, it is a bad assumption to think that the beetles will take care of the aphid problem, and then having exhausted their food source, will then simply die off or dwindle to an acceptable-to-humans number- more likely, they'll choose alternate food sources, which may include things humans did not intend for them to eat. I'm certainly not the sort to suggest that all human modification of the environment is awful and we must leave all of nature pristine- for one thing, it's not as though animals and plants themselves leave nature unspoiled. Also, in certain cases like food crops and game animals, invasive species have been extremely beneficial to humans. While they might have made the list here, I think many humans are perfectly fine with lakes and rivers brimming with largemouth bass and trout. In the same way, while "invasive," and sometimes even destructive, few humans would put the domestic cat on the same level of infamy as Dutch elm disease, kudzu, or fire ants- in fact, they've traditionally been valued for controlling populations of two of the other members on the list. But, we must remember that animals and plants are not machines that can be operated to do the will of humanity- however much we may think ourselves their masters, at a higher level they obey their genes. And their genes want them to reproduce without limit.
On the subject of deliberately introduced invasive species, this entry sounds like a truly amazing creature:
The predatory "rosy wolf snail" (also known as the "cannibal snail") is native to the south-eastern United States, especially Florida. It has been introduced to islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, also to Bermuda and the Bahamas, as a putative biological control agent for another alien species, the giant African snail (Achatina fulica). There is no good evidence that control of A. fulica has been effected, but E. rosea has caused the extinction of numerous endemic partulid tree snails in French Polynesia and has been heavily implicated in the extinction or at least decline of other species of snails wherever it has been introduced, notably in Hawaii.
Common Names: cannibal snail, Rosige Wolfsschnecke, rosy wolf snail
I mean, I just would like to see this thing in action- you tend to think of most predatory animals as made for pursuit, capable of bursts of speed to chase down prey. Then you have this snail....
Well, most of those "premium malt beverages" like Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi O3, etc. are labeled as "flavored beer." I'll admit that transparency and cloying fruit sweetness are also not characteristics I seek out in beer, but these products are correctly classified as such- at least in the United States. Obviously they don't fly under restrictions like Germany's Purity of Beer Act, but then again, there are a number of real quality brews that get excluded, not because of inferior ingredients, but rather for unusual ones.
As for "Berry!=Beer," though, give a Belgian-style "framboise" a try- hopefully you'd come to agree that, under the right circumstances, beer is exactly where berries should go.
I REALLY hate to point out that the place that had the most coverage, and the timeliest, was Fox News.
Well, let's think about this for a second here. Recently, Scaled Composites signed a much-publicized deal with Virgin, and SpaceShipOne wore the Virgin Galactic logo on today's flight. Virgin is of course owned by Richard Branson, who will have a much-advertised reality TV series premiering this fall...on Fox- which depends on his reputation as a maverick tycoon figure. Keeping Sir Richard and his business ventures in the news thus helps advertise the show.
It's not a blatant or inappropriate advertisement-I mean, this is definitely a newsworthy story that can stand on its own merit, but currently, what's good for Branson is good for Fox, and this was very good for Branson. It'd be about the same if NBC paid a bit more attention to some Donald Trump megadeal in the news than the other networks.
The proposed site isn't really just some spot in the middle of the ocean- it's some spot in the middle of the ocean, on the Equator. Not only does this make it possible to place a station on the cable at a geostationary orbit, but it confers the added bonus of being in a place where hurricanes are actually extremely rare- hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons tend (but not always) to originate in belts called Intertropical Convergence Zones that flank the Equator, but do not stretch over it- in fact, the Equator lies in the band of low wind and calm seas aptly referred to as the doldrums.
-Flesh of creature A, including malformed protein, is consumed by creature B. (Consumption is apparently part of the mechanism of infection.)
-Malformed protein avoids chemical breakdown in digestive system. This is quite possible as prions are acid and protease resistant.
-Malformed protein is taken up by Peyer's patches, sites of lymphoid tissue in the intestinal lining (Heppner, et al. in Nature Medicine, Transepithelial prion transport by M cells.) These patches normally "sample" substances from the intestinal lumen, and are instrumental in triggering an immune response if you eat something you shouldn't.
-However, your immune system doesn't find the malformed protein too threatening, possibly because it mistakes it for the very similar properly folded protein hanging out on GPI anchors all over your body's neurons. If it were recognized as dangerous, the usual method of dealing with a misfolded protein, degradation in a lysosome, wouldn't work, once again on account of prions being highly resistant to the sort of enviroment that disintegrates most proteins.
-The misfolded protein is taken up by the vagus nerve, which ennervates the gut (and does many other important things). Now, the vagus nerve may be familiar to some of you as the Tenth Cranial Nerve. So the prion rides up the long axons of the vagus to the brain.
-The prion gets to the brain, bad stuff happens and you die in a horrible manner.
Now, I can't completely assure you this is the mechanism by which prion uptake occurs, it is currently the Best Idea We Have, and I think there is evidence that it certainly could happen this way, though no guarantee that it actually does. I just wanted to mention that the gut isn't exactly an impenetrable barrier for antigens, and that it's quite possible for stuff you eat to make its way to the brain surprisingly intact. Also, how exactly do you believe the South Fore and those Britons contracted spongiform encephalopathy? They didn't stick syringes of brain matter into their heads, you know. Even a "slow virus" theory of TSE would have to take oral transmissibility into account. The studies of the Fore, for instance, note that only those who took part in funeral feasts, and then only those who ate certain parts, contracted kuru. When the feasts ended, so did the disease. Likewise, the bans and herd destructions were accompanied by a sharp dropoff in vCJD cases.
I understand that correlation does not imply causation, but I see tremendous circumstantial evidence that something these people orally ingested gave them a TSE- I mean, the natural rate for CJD is about one in a million, and then there was this sudden outbreak among people half the usual age for victims, whose only commonality was the consumption of beef, beef from cows which had consumed sheep offal...- and this experiment offers highly suggestive evidence that the agent in question was a prion.
The term comes from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (at least, I know of no earlier discussion), and while often translated as "happiness," it's not happiness in the sense of "bliss" or "joy," but rather is the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment obtained by striving for excellence and through perfect use of one's capacities- in fact, Aristotle is careful to differentiate the concept from happiness obtained through idle amusement. In Aristotelian philosophy, it is held as the highest good of all, a perfect and complete end.
As a side note, I'm pretty sure I first encountered the term a few years ago, prior to reading any serious philosophy, while playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri- it's on the tech tree, as a matter of fact, and comes complete with a quote from the Nicomachean Ethics. You could even designate that your society act in accordance with the aims of achieving eudaimonia, though cruel and unjust leader that I am, I generally preferred the Cybernetic or Thought Control options.
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Now, I understand that Samuel L. Jackson is going to be a bit more telegenic onstage than J. Random Programmer, who just spent 70+ hours a week in a darkened room coding a game and whose social skills may have atrophied somewhat, and I also welcome giving recognition to actors, famous or not, who provide voice/mo-cap talents to a video game and bring characters to life. However, I think this awards show did a remarkably poor job of honoring the people who actually make video games possible. There just wasn't an examination of what video games are about on either a technical or creative level, so awards just stuck to easy, obvious categories borrowed from other awards shows. Not that I was expecting too much- after all, awards shows generally are a pretense to packing a bunch of attractive celebrities in a room, playing some music, and scheduling wild after-parties. The only sin committed this time was having the rap concert/photo op pose as something geeks might be interested in watching. I also wasn't expecting too much because original programming on Spike TV can generally be assumed to be garbage.
And in reply to another post: Yeah, what exactly is the deal with Corporate Shill Snoop? Am I the only one who remembers when he cut rhymes about doing drugs and gunning people down in the street? Am I the only one who remembers when he stood trial for murder? I can deal with him mellowing out, but AOL commercials? Hosting awards shows? Ugh.
Confusing, yes, but not nearly as confusing as it will be when the fourth concert series to play in the US is titled Final Fantasy Concert VII, or when Final Fantasy Concert X is so popular that a second tour is held and is named X-2, which is distinct from Final Fantasy Concert XI, which will be held over the internet. Not to mention Final Fantasy Concert Tactics.
On the other hand, as another poster wrote, when a big-time college sports program is successful, all of that gets swept aside. I had some exceptional professors in college. None, however, could be expected to pack in 70,000+ paying customers to attend their lectures each week- and certainly not to draw a TV audience in the millions. The sponsorships, the increased alumni support, the increased visibility of your school on national television- and even more directly, the huge sums of money that come with success. If Urban Meyer leads the Gators back to BCS-bowl glory just once, he makes 14 million dollars instantly for the University of Florida, paying off their investment in him. Also, while it may sometimes seem that way, there's no reason a school's academic and athletic achievement need to be negatively correlated. Look at Cal this year- did they put academics on the back burner over in Berkeley so they could have a great football season? Duke and Stanford have terrible academic reputations because they put together good basketball teams each year, right? Heck, my alma mater currently has the #1 men's basketball program in the nation, and I'd argue that all of the media attention they've been getting for it is a major positive for the school. (I will not discuss the Illini football program at this time.)
I will admit that Americans take our sports too seriously, and unfortunately we don't limit ourselves to taking highly paid "professionals" (the word belongs in quotes until athletes prove themselves worthy of the term again), but make way too much of games played by college students and even children. You hate to crush dreams, but it needs to be impressed on kids that all the "professional" athletes in the U.S. put together wouldn't fill the seats at an NBA arena. The question is, though, how do you change a child's heroes? I played football in high school, and had fun, but I never considered college ball, much less pro- I wouldn't have made the pros unless there was a lockout, and then the replacement players walked out, and their replacements walked out and so did their replacements. And probably not even then. I mean, I wanted to be a scientist pretty much since about the fourth grade. That's what I was excited about, and I made choices appropriate to making that happen. How we can get everyone else excited by math and science- not just creating mindset of it leading to a decent, sensible job, but making it genuinely exciting in the way that sports are, I wish I knew.
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
The real mystery to this number, which the article hints at, is that it can be defined in a variety of interesting ways, including as (charge of an electron)^2 over (4 pi epsilon-naught h-bar c)- a formula that involves quantum mechanical (Planck's constant), relativistic (c) and mathematical (pi) constants produces a dimensionless number in the neighborhood of 1/137. The number itself is not so important (except to a bunch of people who have applied numerological methods to its study, most notably Arthur Eddington); rather, the issue figuring out the relationship between the fundamental constants that pop up everywhere in calculations (like h, c, and pi) and the universe that these calculations describe.
They at least talk about doing real things like Western blots and mass spec- once while flipping channels I caught a minute of Navy NCIS where someone mentioned doing an ELISA. In particular, these shows tend to do a nice job of explaining the principles behind a test while they perform it- occasionally I learn new things, though occasionally there will be something explained where I'm thinking, "um, it's not exactly how you say,"- I'm sure the same is true for medical professionals who watch "ER," cops who watch "NYPD Blue," etc. Now, once again, I say that as a chemist- people in other fields may have more of an issue with how their work is represented on such shows- for one, I'm sure that as is usual for television, the capabilities and use of computers are misrepresented. What personally bugs me more than the science itself on CSI and its ilk is the budget that these crime labs seem to have. If anything, these shows might give people the idea that forensics labs have infinite time, money, and resources to ensure justice is done in each and every case.
It'd be nice, though, if once in a while they'd use a couple of minutes at the end of the show to mention real forensics and the shortcuts they took during the episode- and possibly mention that in reality, sometimes the results are inconclusive, even if everyone did their jobs right.
Oh, and second the parent- Diamond Evolution One are some nice gloves- though I prefer the MicroGrip purple nitriles myself.
A couple years ago, there was a proposed proof to the Poincare conjecture- not the Perelman proof which AFAIK still holds together, but another attempt which was soon found to have an insurmountable problem. When the proof was first announced, the Mathworld news item ran, Poincaré Conjecture Purportedly Proved, and when the hole in the proof (essentially, an unproven step used in the proof) came to light, the headline was Poincaré Conjecture Purported Proof Perforated.
The colors are not official party colors at all ( in terms of a party featuring just red or just blue), and generally signs, banners, bumper stickers, etc. for both parties feature some scheme of red, white, and blue.
If you go to the New York Times website, you can look at their rather interesting representation of the map, with dark red and blue for solidly Republican or Democratic states, light shades of those colors for states that are not sure bets for a party, but still noticeably lean one way or another, and yellow, for the five truly undecided "swing states."
Well, yes, it does. The reason why finding methane on Mars would be more exciting than methane on Titan is that on Mars, atmospheric methane is not expected to be stable, as it reacts with hydroxyl ions in the presence of sunlight to produce carbon dioxide and water (it should be noted that if the data concerning methane on Mars is right, the concentration is around 10-15 ppb, so don't expect a greenhouse effect and rain clouds any time soon). The methane on Mars would have disappeared within a few hundred years were it not replenished somehow- and the question then, is "How is methane on Mars replenished?"
The two possibilities (and both could be correct) are outgassing from geologic processes or production by methane-producing organisms. Either possibility is actually pretty exciting, as Mars as we know it now is geologically dead- it has the largest volcano in the Solar System, but no evidence of active or recent vulcanism, but of course the possibility that colonies of methanogens similar to terrestrial Archaea are producing methane on Mars would be a much more momentous discovery.
The methane and ethane on Titan, OTOH, has been there for billions of years and is almost certainly from nonliving processes, just as the methane in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets has nothing to do with organisms. It is interesting, still, though, because methane and ethane, gases on earth, may exist as liquid on Titan. A moon larger than Pluto and Mercury with seas of simple organic compounds (and possibly a "snow" of various hydrocarbon and nitrile compounds). A atmosphere denser than earth's composed of 94% nitrogen. Possibly large quanitities of water ice. All definitely reasons to go explore.
Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that life has developed on Titan, simply because it is far too cold (about 94K). The basically opaque atmosphere and distance from the sun make really interesting chemistry very difficult, in particular, keeping any water locked up as ice rather than making it available as liquid or vapor. There may be some interesting stuff going on in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, though, as UV breaks down methane and nitrogen gas to produce a variety of polyacetylene and polynitrile compounds which fall as a waxy precipitate (the aforementioned "snow").
The geology of Titan is essentially still a question mark, owing again to the orange-brown veil. If anything like the deep-sea vents of earth exist on Titan, they could provide the rest of the requirements for life- they'd inject heat into the ecosystem, possibly freeing up water vapor and oxygen from the ice, and could provide elements like phosphorus and sulfur (giving the sought-after CHONPS). Also, Saturn produces tremendous tidal forces on Titan. While on the one hand, the development of life on earth was helped substantially by the presence of intertidal areas (which still feature incredible diversity), the tides on Titan may so strong as to quickly erode continental features. There are a lot of mysteries that will be solved after Cassini-Huygens, and no doubt a stack of new ones will be found.
And while I mean no disrespect to any of the schools that did actually make the top 25, I have to argue that "wired level" should play a very small role when it comes to evaluating a college- in many ways it is more of a quality of life issue than a quality of education one- I mean, it's gotten to the point where almost every institution offers broadband access in the dorms, online instead of paper registration, email accounts and webspace (UIUC seems to get nicked for not offering webpages to students, even though they do- oh well though, from the comments, it seems like there's a ton of wrong results), and most are working on some sort of wireless access. It's somewhat a measure of the level of services a university is willing to provide to its students, but I'd rather not forgo something like competent professors or well-maintained buildings in order to pay for some gimmickly buzzword technology. Lastly, given that many traditional "geek" schools aren't on the list (MIT has received mention several times already), I think it correlates poorly with the overall computing culture of the school.
On the subject of considering the WWW was pretty much started there (netscape), while I am quite proud of having attended the university that brought forth NCSA Mosaic (and many other accomplishments), by claiming that as the birth of the WWW you have opened yourself up to a dozen inevitable posts about CERN and Tim Berners-Lee, some of which may be posted by the time I finish this (overly long) post.
Male fetuses have alpha-fetoprotein as well, but it does not bind to testosterone (which is of course present to a much larger degree in normal male fetuses than in females), and while the steroid testosterone can pass through the blood-brain barrier, alpha-fetoprotein cannot, so testosterone passes into the brain, where aromatase converts it to estrogens and it then carries out its effects.
Of course, having sexual dimorphism tied to the levels of certain hormones brings you naturally to the results obtained in this particular study, that is to say, there is room for tremendous variation in the phenotypes of persons with the same sexual genotype. Your biological "sex" (in a more overall sense that includes physical and behavioral characteristics of the mature organism)is determined only at a rough level by the count of X and Y chromosomes; they are a starting point for the complex web of genes, proteins, and signalling cascades- as well as conditions in utero, a long neglected aspect of human development finally starting to be recognized- that produce an end result. As a result, while we may be on gross observation "male" or "female," internally we may lie somewhere on a continuum. Individuals with an outwardly male appearances but with female brains are possible, and vice versa. This idea is taken to the the extreme in cases like 5-alpha reductase syndrome, where XY males lack or cannot correctly produce an enzyme that converts testosterone into 5-DHT, which is far more potent in developing secondary sex characteristics- individuals have female genitalia (the default option), but attempts to raise them as female have generally been terrible failures. In other words, our sex isn't digital; it's analog.
The problem with using a celestial body's magnetic field as a force is that in many cases, the field is far too weak or nonexistent. The moon and Mars lack magnetic fields, for instance, and the earth has a magnetic field of about 0.5 gauss. In comparison, powerful magnets used in NMR generally are in the 10-20 Tesla range (100,000-200,000 gauss). Which is to say, the earth's magnetic field is great for turning compass needles and deflecting the solar wind, but not nearly strong enough to repel magnets at reasonable velocities. The overall energy of the earth's magnetic field is of course enormous- we're talking about 100 billion billion tons of iron acting as a dynamo, but the field strength- perhaps better called the flux density is not very high- lines of magnetic force are spaced too far apart. Despite being many orders of magnitude weaker in terms of absolute force strength, gravity predominates over electromagnetism as the major force we encounter from a planet. The problem is that almost every object in the universe that produces a gigantic magnetic field is also extraordinarily massive, so that the attractive force of gravity competes with the magnetic field- and dipole magnetic field strength falls off as the third power of distance versus gravity, which follows an inverse square law.
Your idea might actually work around a neutron star, which can produce a field in the 100,000,000 Tesla range, which might be enough to escape the immense gravity. You probably would not be able to survive this, however.
Also, while such a design would not use an fuel in the manner that a rocket would, you would need to expend energy to create the very powerful field required. Frankly, given the requirements of the scenario, which demand an object with very strong magnetic field and a ship that can produce a very strong magnetic field, there are better options. If you have an object like the sun putting out a solar wind, solar sails are a possibility. If you have an enormous electromagnet at your disposal, well, an idea like the one the story proposes, an ion drive of some sort, a railgun system- lots of options.
"O brave new world, that has such cloned embryos in't!"
-Miranda102336, "The Stem Cell Tempest"
This seems somewhat like a what a polymerized azide ((N3)- ion)compound would be like, perhaps with many similar properties- I can see the uses as a high explosive, as sodium azide is generally the explosive in airbags- a couple grams of the salt is sufficient to generate over 50L of nitrogen gas quite rapidly. The rearrangement of this network solid into triple-bonded gas molecules should release an enormous amount of energy. I wonder if this is nearly as sensitive to shock as the azides are though.
My apologies on the comment then- something half-remembered from an endocrinology textbook- a mention of "Laron pituitary dwarfism" being treated with recombinant IGF-1. Very sorry if I got something wrong though, and thanks for setting the record straight.
Yeah, good point, I was somewhat surprised too. I should have mentioned her in my post, actually- endosymbiosis, which I did mention, is her idea, and along with James Lovelock, so is the Gaia Hypothesis (which admittedly I'm less hot on). The idea of complex organisms as "superorganisms" in symbiosis with their own ecosystem of microbes fits nicely in scale between her two major ideas, one of which is about the relationship between a cell and some of its organelles and the other of which is about the relationship of the entire biosphere to all of its inhabitants.
Now, despite that, I'm personally in the "not an organism" boat, as mitochondria are really not much different from other "opportunistic" pieces of DNA like viruses and plasmids. It just happens that the bag the DNA comes in is extraordinarily useful to the host cell. Indeed, while mitochondria are completely dependent on host cells to reproduce, life on earth would be far different- there'd be no way an ATP-guzzler like the human brain could have evolved without the benefit of aerobic respiration, for instance.
In reference to the whole "humans are superorganisms" idea, one of the things I got from a microbiology course I took in college was the ubiquity of microorganisms on and in the human body- and how their relationship to the host organism can be anything from beneficial to deadly. I think that considering the other billion residents of the body when examining avenues of treatment is a wise move.
MythTV --- Cheap, works, easy to use, difficult to setup.
MCE --- Expensive, works, easy to use, modertly difficult to setup.
The only problem with your otherwise insightful analysis is that the MCE "works" only for a rather limited definition of "working" compared to the functionality of the other products on the market. It does less and costs more, and Microsoft's principal argument for you to purchase one seems to be, "Hey, we're Microsoft. You may be familiar with some of our other products."
Could IGF-1 and/or WNT5a be used in human therapies? Perhaps- after all they are already produced by healthy humans- and IGF-1 is already in use to treat some kinds of dwarfism- and by athletes, illegally, for its anabolic effects which are similar to growth hormone. IGF-1 does have the drawback of being structually similar to insulin (duh), so an overabundance can cause glucose intolerance, and since both are regulators of cell proliferation, both may increase the risks of certain cancers themselves.
When you release beetles to consume aphids, for instance, it is a bad assumption to think that the beetles will take care of the aphid problem, and then having exhausted their food source, will then simply die off or dwindle to an acceptable-to-humans number- more likely, they'll choose alternate food sources, which may include things humans did not intend for them to eat. I'm certainly not the sort to suggest that all human modification of the environment is awful and we must leave all of nature pristine- for one thing, it's not as though animals and plants themselves leave nature unspoiled. Also, in certain cases like food crops and game animals, invasive species have been extremely beneficial to humans. While they might have made the list here, I think many humans are perfectly fine with lakes and rivers brimming with largemouth bass and trout. In the same way, while "invasive," and sometimes even destructive, few humans would put the domestic cat on the same level of infamy as Dutch elm disease, kudzu, or fire ants- in fact, they've traditionally been valued for controlling populations of two of the other members on the list. But, we must remember that animals and plants are not machines that can be operated to do the will of humanity- however much we may think ourselves their masters, at a higher level they obey their genes. And their genes want them to reproduce without limit.
On the subject of deliberately introduced invasive species, this entry sounds like a truly amazing creature:
The predatory "rosy wolf snail" (also known as the "cannibal snail") is native to the south-eastern United States, especially Florida. It has been introduced to islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, also to Bermuda and the Bahamas, as a putative biological control agent for another alien species, the giant African snail (Achatina fulica). There is no good evidence that control of A. fulica has been effected, but E. rosea has caused the extinction of numerous endemic partulid tree snails in French Polynesia and has been heavily implicated in the extinction or at least decline of other species of snails wherever it has been introduced, notably in Hawaii. Common Names: cannibal snail, Rosige Wolfsschnecke, rosy wolf snail
I mean, I just would like to see this thing in action- you tend to think of most predatory animals as made for pursuit, capable of bursts of speed to chase down prey. Then you have this snail....
As for "Berry!=Beer," though, give a Belgian-style "framboise" a try- hopefully you'd come to agree that, under the right circumstances, beer is exactly where berries should go.
Well, let's think about this for a second here. Recently, Scaled Composites signed a much-publicized deal with Virgin, and SpaceShipOne wore the Virgin Galactic logo on today's flight. Virgin is of course owned by Richard Branson, who will have a much-advertised reality TV series premiering this fall...on Fox- which depends on his reputation as a maverick tycoon figure. Keeping Sir Richard and his business ventures in the news thus helps advertise the show.
It's not a blatant or inappropriate advertisement-I mean, this is definitely a newsworthy story that can stand on its own merit, but currently, what's good for Branson is good for Fox, and this was very good for Branson. It'd be about the same if NBC paid a bit more attention to some Donald Trump megadeal in the news than the other networks.
The proposed site isn't really just some spot in the middle of the ocean- it's some spot in the middle of the ocean, on the Equator. Not only does this make it possible to place a station on the cable at a geostationary orbit, but it confers the added bonus of being in a place where hurricanes are actually extremely rare- hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons tend (but not always) to originate in belts called Intertropical Convergence Zones that flank the Equator, but do not stretch over it- in fact, the Equator lies in the band of low wind and calm seas aptly referred to as the doldrums.
-Flesh of creature A, including malformed protein, is consumed by creature B. (Consumption is apparently part of the mechanism of infection.)
-Malformed protein avoids chemical breakdown in digestive system. This is quite possible as prions are acid and protease resistant.
-Malformed protein is taken up by Peyer's patches, sites of lymphoid tissue in the intestinal lining (Heppner, et al. in Nature Medicine, Transepithelial prion transport by M cells.) These patches normally "sample" substances from the intestinal lumen, and are instrumental in triggering an immune response if you eat something you shouldn't.
-However, your immune system doesn't find the malformed protein too threatening, possibly because it mistakes it for the very similar properly folded protein hanging out on GPI anchors all over your body's neurons. If it were recognized as dangerous, the usual method of dealing with a misfolded protein, degradation in a lysosome, wouldn't work, once again on account of prions being highly resistant to the sort of enviroment that disintegrates most proteins.
-The misfolded protein is taken up by the vagus nerve, which ennervates the gut (and does many other important things). Now, the vagus nerve may be familiar to some of you as the Tenth Cranial Nerve. So the prion rides up the long axons of the vagus to the brain.
-The prion gets to the brain, bad stuff happens and you die in a horrible manner.
Now, I can't completely assure you this is the mechanism by which prion uptake occurs, it is currently the Best Idea We Have, and I think there is evidence that it certainly could happen this way, though no guarantee that it actually does. I just wanted to mention that the gut isn't exactly an impenetrable barrier for antigens, and that it's quite possible for stuff you eat to make its way to the brain surprisingly intact. Also, how exactly do you believe the South Fore and those Britons contracted spongiform encephalopathy? They didn't stick syringes of brain matter into their heads, you know. Even a "slow virus" theory of TSE would have to take oral transmissibility into account. The studies of the Fore, for instance, note that only those who took part in funeral feasts, and then only those who ate certain parts, contracted kuru. When the feasts ended, so did the disease. Likewise, the bans and herd destructions were accompanied by a sharp dropoff in vCJD cases.
I understand that correlation does not imply causation, but I see tremendous circumstantial evidence that something these people orally ingested gave them a TSE- I mean, the natural rate for CJD is about one in a million, and then there was this sudden outbreak among people half the usual age for victims, whose only commonality was the consumption of beef, beef from cows which had consumed sheep offal...- and this experiment offers highly suggestive evidence that the agent in question was a prion.
As a side note, I'm pretty sure I first encountered the term a few years ago, prior to reading any serious philosophy, while playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri- it's on the tech tree, as a matter of fact, and comes complete with a quote from the Nicomachean Ethics. You could even designate that your society act in accordance with the aims of achieving eudaimonia, though cruel and unjust leader that I am, I generally preferred the Cybernetic or Thought Control options.
"One mistake now, and Bender will be forever trapped between the already ill-defined robot sexes!"
-Prof. Farnsworth