Um....plague is caused by a bacterium. HIV is a virus. They're not even the same Kingdom. They aren't even remotely related. HIV particles don't even have DNA....
No flaming...it's a retrovirus, the genome is RNA, not DNA, in the virion.
FIV is more contagious than HIV, but not as deadly. My mom had 2 cats with it, they both lived pretty long (about 16, I think). One caught it on the prowl after he was neutered, and the other (his mother) caught it from him. I'd rather not think she contracted it that way, even if they are just cats.
I think it's about as contagious as HepC; Prolonged casual contact, like living together, is enough. I think that's right, I'm no vet.
Got a chance to read the article (the real one, not the CNN article)
The CO2 production/recovery by plants issue is well addressed in the first reply.
As for the 50% figure....
Glucose is C6O6H14, not H12. Sugars are CnOnH(2n+2) in these conditions. The H12 refers to the ring structure. They're saying they get almost, but not quite, 100% of the H2 recovered if they use glucose.
On other stuff in the letter (it's not a full paper)....
The guy even proposes a complete system, with their reactor connected to a fuel cell working at 50% efficiency (Engineers.....Is that realistic?). He states that based on the rate of H2 formation that they got at conditions for optimal efficiency, you could get 1kW of electrical power per liter reactor volume. The reactor would use bio waste (wood, grain chaff, etc).
He says the main drawback is the use of Pt as a catalyst; he says there may be better and/or cheaper ones.
The thing that really got me was the first line:
We consider production of hydrogen by low-temperature reforming (at 500K)
That's the beauty of it, we can get H2 from a easily renewable resource. Apparently, the only waste product that is even marginally dangerous is CO2, which will be used up by all the extra plants we would have growing for fuel. It fits right into the earth's carbon cycle.
One really good way they could do it would be to use food waste; apple cores, orange peels, etc. These all contain lots of cellulose, which is just a polymer of glucose. Cellulose can be purified from these sources, and it can't be too hard to do, they sell ultrapure cellulose pretty cheap.
The glucose can be liberated enzymatically (or possible otherwise...chemists?) and then used to make H2
I guess if all of your Google strings consist of "Penguin schlong" + "Anna Kournakova" then yes, that's all it's good for.
I'm in school (long ways from elementary school, but still school) and about 50% of my education is net based. And no, I'm not in a field related to computers.
The net is a wonderful source of education if you actually learn how to use it.
Reminds me of a cancer bio class I took. One speaker started off with the proclomation that cancer could easily be stopped. After a pause to let that statement sink in, he added "with a liberal application of gasoline".
He then went on to lecture on drug side effects.
I'm sitting for my candidacy exam next month, and I am in the throes of writing & re-writing my proposal. I therefore have allowed my inner-procrastinator to come forward & take the helm. After visiting this place He has taken full control.
The letter writing campaigns aren't working. The protests aren't working. The websites, newsgroups, and forum bitching aren't working. DoS on the xxIAA isn't going to work, either.
So what do we do?
As it stands right now, the xxIAA will win this because the Joe Schmuckatellis of the world don't understand anything about the DMCA or DRM. In fact, most of them don't even know about it.
Why?
Because WE are the ones complaining about it. And the only ones we complain about it to are each other. Sure, we write the lawmakers, but wtf do they care about a few thousand geeks distributed all over the country? Our vote is meaningless to them; we're relatively small in numbers and scattered over a few hundred districts. And we don't have the pockets to buy them off.
So what do we do? We have to get the word out. Joe Schmuckatelli doesn't go to slashdot, the Reg, fsf.org or digitalspeech.org. Even if they did, they'd leave in 30 seconds; it's all too cryptic to the uninitiated.
What we need is a good way to communicate the dangers of DMCA to those who don't know about it. Think about the non-tech people you know....people like your Mom... or someone like your brother who calls you for help every time he gets an attachment in his e-mail. What website, what resource would you send them to so they could keep up with this stuff?
I have yet to meet a non-techie that wasn't outraged by what the DMCA does, once it was explained to them so that they could understand. If we get the word out properly, in a way that the average person can understand, we can beat this.
I haven't got a clue, I don't know the answer. I do know, however, that this is crucial to the movement. If it stays in here, with us, it will die.
We have to get the word out, and get it out in a way that the average person can understand.
The article doesn't talk about engineering new bugs, but looking for exsisting ones and using those. For practically every substance there is, there is a bug that can eat it (even granite).
And as a point of order, cloning is the reproduction of what already exsists. That's not making anything new, either.
Beacuse the international court is not so pure and pretty (not saying the US is pure & pretty...).
Personally, I believe that the court's construction lends itself to corruption. If the crimes were more rigorously defined, and the levying of charges required a bit more effort, then I might be for it.
There are many countries with functional legal systems that at least try to do right. However, on the whole, the corrupt ones woefully outnumber the at least halfway decent ones. In that situation, the corrupt ones will wind up taking over this court.
"They had inferior force, so they used speed and mobility."
OK with France, I agree. Spain as well. But Poland? Germany (Panzer, Luftwaffe) vs Poland (mounted cavalry, WWI era cannon)...can't quite say that Germany was an inferior force there.
As far as the wars that formed the US, civilians were the combatants; it was a rebellion. The concept of total war was pioneered by Sherman in the Civil War.
Cruise missles are more accurate than a soldier with a gun. Tell a soldier to hit a 0.5m target that is more than 1-2 km away, and he probably can't do it withot some pretty specialized weaponry. A TLAM-C can hit a 0.5m target from over 1000km away. A GBU with a laser guidance pack can hit a 1m target from an altitude of 5km in clear weather.
I understand your point, however, about the "solider at 100yards"...there's a political cost to that 100 yards, though.
An added benefit of an air war is that you never have to put ground troops on forgein soil. Kinda helps counter imperialism claims. Landing ground troops takes a lot of politcal capital. Also, look at the history of getting ground troops involved. Once you get in, it is VERY difficult to leave. Korea, Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Even getting the troops there doesn't always help. With cruise missles, you have a calm detached person looking at recon photos. Pick the target, hit the button. With ground troops, you have a team of people in a hostile area trying to find their target and surpress any inbound fire. Stress increases the frequency of error.
Fats: long hydroCARBON chains with a carboxylic acid at one end
Protein: Amino acid chains, comprised of mostly carbon (by mass)
The things on this planet that don't use carbon based compounds as their primary energy source are the exotic ones.
It's being done already. for example, there's a group at MD Anderson that is using an adenovirus that specifically takes out cells with a mutation in a certain oncogene (p53). Cells that lack that protein are killed by the virus, those that have the protein survive.
In theory, it works great. In mice, it cures cancer. In humans, it works sometimes. Viral delivery is one of the methods behind gene therapy. A lot of people are doing it
Yep...costs about $0.75 / base for a small prep. Theoretical limit is about 400-500 bases per artificial sequence, but you can take several of those & link them together pretty easily.
Well, of course I think that my beliefs are correct.
If I thought otherwise, I would alter my beliefs.
If challenged, I will try to convince others that I am right. I also fully expect others to do the same. It's not that I think there is no chance that I could be wrong, it's just that I have reasons for thinking the way I do. If an opposing view has rational arguments that refute the foundations of what I believe, then I will alter my way of thinking.
I am an American, and although I cannot speak for all of my fellow countrymen, the vast majority of the Americans I know feel the same way. Oddly, some of these same people hold the same belief as you.
I agree that many Americans think the way you described. But so do many French, Brits, Indians, Russians, Chinese, and Australians.
The difference is not so much in the thought processes, but the actions that follow. Americans talk. If we think a certain way, we say so. Other people just think "God, what a thick headed moron". Americans say "God, you're a thick headed moron." Insensitive, yes. Patently offensive, most likely. It's just as offensive as the other method (smile & nod) is deceitful.
I am a Christian, and IMO if someone wants to blaspheme anything about what I believe, let 'em. That's the whole idea of free speech. You can speak your mind.
Trying to silence critics like this is not only morally wrong, it makes you look like a frightened idiot.
Do you doubt the validity of your own beliefs so much that you have to silence those that refute it?
That would assume that removal of caffeine from the beans gives a selective benefit. Most likely, caffeine evolved to be in coffee beans for a reason, and gives some benefit.
IOW, caffiene increases your Darwinian fitness!
Two organisms are different species if they cannot produce viable offspring. A GM coffee plant crossed with a non-GM coffee plant will produce viable coffee plants. In this case, the offspring will appear either normal or "half-caff", depending on the status of the gene affected in the modification.
Therefore, these two plants are not different species. GM does not produce a new species by any current definition of the term "species"
PubMed is just part of the database. I should have labeled it more properly, it's really NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information). IT consists of BLAST , GENBANK, PubMed , OMIM , Entrez, taxonomy information, and structural databases. You can also link out to more specialized databases from NCBI. Some of these are incredible; you can find out (for example) all that is known about tissue distribution of protein X. Or all gene products found in, say, the kidney. Or the cortex of the kidney. Or the distal tubule.
There is also OVID, which is an online database of journals available at most universities. Not completely opensource, but for all practical purposes (at least from the perspective of the scientist), it is "open source"
"policy of scientific journals to not publish that has been "published" previously"
Science literally changes hourly. There are things I thought were true on Monday, that I know are patently untrue today (seriously, specific things). There's no point in writing them down until you reach a reasonable degree of certainty. Publication is the last step before it leaves your hands entirely, it finalizes what you have say.
Presentation at conferences, retreats and workshops; poster sessions, informal review (passing your manuscript around to all of your buddies before publication), and the all important coffee room are what comprise the "open source" community of science for works in progress. Sharing prior to publication is like sharing prior to ever trying to compile your code. You'd look like an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
No flaming...it's a retrovirus, the genome is RNA, not DNA, in the virion.
I think it's about as contagious as HepC; Prolonged casual contact, like living together, is enough. I think that's right, I'm no vet.
Sunshine units? I've never heard that one. Rads, cpm, Curies, yes. But "sunshine units"?
The CO2 production/recovery by plants issue is well addressed in the first reply.
As for the 50% figure....
Glucose is C6O6H14, not H12. Sugars are CnOnH(2n+2) in these conditions. The H12 refers to the ring structure. They're saying they get almost, but not quite, 100% of the H2 recovered if they use glucose.
On other stuff in the letter (it's not a full paper)....
The guy even proposes a complete system, with their reactor connected to a fuel cell working at 50% efficiency (Engineers.....Is that realistic?). He states that based on the rate of H2 formation that they got at conditions for optimal efficiency, you could get 1kW of electrical power per liter reactor volume. The reactor would use bio waste (wood, grain chaff, etc).
He says the main drawback is the use of Pt as a catalyst; he says there may be better and/or cheaper ones.
The thing that really got me was the first line:
We consider production of hydrogen by low-temperature reforming (at 500K)
Since when is 227 degrees C a low temperature?
If you don't have a subscription to Nature, the absract is here If the link is busted, go to NCBI and search for "Dumesic glucose" under Pubmed.
That's the beauty of it, we can get H2 from a easily renewable resource. Apparently, the only waste product that is even marginally dangerous is CO2, which will be used up by all the extra plants we would have growing for fuel. It fits right into the earth's carbon cycle.
One really good way they could do it would be to use food waste; apple cores, orange peels, etc. These all contain lots of cellulose, which is just a polymer of glucose. Cellulose can be purified from these sources, and it can't be too hard to do, they sell ultrapure cellulose pretty cheap.
The glucose can be liberated enzymatically (or possible otherwise...chemists?) and then used to make H2
And thereby release the CO2 themselves through normal metabolism.....
I'm in school (long ways from elementary school, but still school) and about 50% of my education is net based. And no, I'm not in a field related to computers.
The net is a wonderful source of education if you actually learn how to use it.
Reminds me of a cancer bio class I took. One speaker started off with the proclomation that cancer could easily be stopped. After a pause to let that statement sink in, he added "with a liberal application of gasoline". He then went on to lecture on drug side effects.
Great. I'm screwed.
So what do we do?
As it stands right now, the xxIAA will win this because the Joe Schmuckatellis of the world don't understand anything about the DMCA or DRM. In fact, most of them don't even know about it.
Why?
Because WE are the ones complaining about it. And the only ones we complain about it to are each other. Sure, we write the lawmakers, but wtf do they care about a few thousand geeks distributed all over the country? Our vote is meaningless to them; we're relatively small in numbers and scattered over a few hundred districts. And we don't have the pockets to buy them off.
So what do we do? We have to get the word out. Joe Schmuckatelli doesn't go to slashdot, the Reg, fsf.org or digitalspeech.org. Even if they did, they'd leave in 30 seconds; it's all too cryptic to the uninitiated.
What we need is a good way to communicate the dangers of DMCA to those who don't know about it. Think about the non-tech people you know....people like your Mom... or someone like your brother who calls you for help every time he gets an attachment in his e-mail. What website, what resource would you send them to so they could keep up with this stuff?
I have yet to meet a non-techie that wasn't outraged by what the DMCA does, once it was explained to them so that they could understand. If we get the word out properly, in a way that the average person can understand, we can beat this.
I haven't got a clue, I don't know the answer. I do know, however, that this is crucial to the movement. If it stays in here, with us, it will die.
We have to get the word out, and get it out in a way that the average person can understand.
"We can rebuild him. We have the technology."
The article doesn't talk about engineering new bugs, but looking for exsisting ones and using those. For practically every substance there is, there is a bug that can eat it (even granite).
And as a point of order, cloning is the reproduction of what already exsists. That's not making anything new, either.
Personally, I believe that the court's construction lends itself to corruption. If the crimes were more rigorously defined, and the levying of charges required a bit more effort, then I might be for it.
There are many countries with functional legal systems that at least try to do right. However, on the whole, the corrupt ones woefully outnumber the at least halfway decent ones. In that situation, the corrupt ones will wind up taking over this court.
OK with France, I agree. Spain as well. But Poland? Germany (Panzer, Luftwaffe) vs Poland (mounted cavalry, WWI era cannon)...can't quite say that Germany was an inferior force there.
As far as the wars that formed the US, civilians were the combatants; it was a rebellion. The concept of total war was pioneered by Sherman in the Civil War.
Cruise missles are more accurate than a soldier with a gun. Tell a soldier to hit a 0.5m target that is more than 1-2 km away, and he probably can't do it withot some pretty specialized weaponry. A TLAM-C can hit a 0.5m target from over 1000km away. A GBU with a laser guidance pack can hit a 1m target from an altitude of 5km in clear weather.
I understand your point, however, about the "solider at 100yards"...there's a political cost to that 100 yards, though.
An added benefit of an air war is that you never have to put ground troops on forgein soil. Kinda helps counter imperialism claims. Landing ground troops takes a lot of politcal capital. Also, look at the history of getting ground troops involved. Once you get in, it is VERY difficult to leave. Korea, Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Even getting the troops there doesn't always help. With cruise missles, you have a calm detached person looking at recon photos. Pick the target, hit the button. With ground troops, you have a team of people in a hostile area trying to find their target and surpress any inbound fire. Stress increases the frequency of error.
Yeah, it's called ALGAE. It's just a minor one, though. Probably just the most common orgsanism on the planet by biomass.
As for the "trees where it is barren today" I'm all for it, provided those barren areas are the places we made barren
Carbohydrates: CnOnH2n
Fats: long hydroCARBON chains with a carboxylic acid at one end
Protein: Amino acid chains, comprised of mostly carbon (by mass) The things on this planet that don't use carbon based compounds as their primary energy source are the exotic ones.
Yes, plants included.
It's being done already. for example, there's a group at MD Anderson that is using an adenovirus that specifically takes out cells with a mutation in a certain oncogene (p53). Cells that lack that protein are killed by the virus, those that have the protein survive. In theory, it works great. In mice, it cures cancer. In humans, it works sometimes. Viral delivery is one of the methods behind gene therapy. A lot of people are doing it
Yep...costs about $0.75 / base for a small prep. Theoretical limit is about 400-500 bases per artificial sequence, but you can take several of those & link them together pretty easily.
If I thought otherwise, I would alter my beliefs.
If challenged, I will try to convince others that I am right. I also fully expect others to do the same. It's not that I think there is no chance that I could be wrong, it's just that I have reasons for thinking the way I do. If an opposing view has rational arguments that refute the foundations of what I believe, then I will alter my way of thinking.
I am an American, and although I cannot speak for all of my fellow countrymen, the vast majority of the Americans I know feel the same way. Oddly, some of these same people hold the same belief as you.
I agree that many Americans think the way you described. But so do many French, Brits, Indians, Russians, Chinese, and Australians.
The difference is not so much in the thought processes, but the actions that follow. Americans talk. If we think a certain way, we say so. Other people just think "God, what a thick headed moron". Americans say "God, you're a thick headed moron." Insensitive, yes. Patently offensive, most likely. It's just as offensive as the other method (smile & nod) is deceitful.
Trying to silence critics like this is not only morally wrong, it makes you look like a frightened idiot.
Do you doubt the validity of your own beliefs so much that you have to silence those that refute it?
That would assume that removal of caffeine from the beans gives a selective benefit. Most likely, caffeine evolved to be in coffee beans for a reason, and gives some benefit. IOW, caffiene increases your Darwinian fitness!
You mean like they already do with herbal remedies?
Two organisms are different species if they cannot produce viable offspring. A GM coffee plant crossed with a non-GM coffee plant will produce viable coffee plants. In this case, the offspring will appear either normal or "half-caff", depending on the status of the gene affected in the modification. Therefore, these two plants are not different species. GM does not produce a new species by any current definition of the term "species"
There is also OVID, which is an online database of journals available at most universities. Not completely opensource, but for all practical purposes (at least from the perspective of the scientist), it is "open source" "policy of scientific journals to not publish that has been "published" previously"
Science literally changes hourly. There are things I thought were true on Monday, that I know are patently untrue today (seriously, specific things). There's no point in writing them down until you reach a reasonable degree of certainty. Publication is the last step before it leaves your hands entirely, it finalizes what you have say.
Presentation at conferences, retreats and workshops; poster sessions, informal review (passing your manuscript around to all of your buddies before publication), and the all important coffee room are what comprise the "open source" community of science for works in progress. Sharing prior to publication is like sharing prior to ever trying to compile your code. You'd look like an idiot.