I took a slightly extended lunch break today and went down to the university library to grab the original paper. There's some truly interesting things about your citing of Dalrymple. First off, you (or whoever your source is--in my experience creationists rarely read the original) didn't read the table right. The numbers that you present are actually the concentration of Ar-40 found in the sample, in 10^-12 mol Ar-40/g sample. The apparent age is in the third column of table 2 on page 51--I won't give them here (you'll have to look it up yourself) but they are much higher than the known age of the rock sample. However in the very first page of the article, Dalrymple states "The use of historic samples for these studies has two important advantages: (1) the ages of the flows are unambiguous, and (2) the material is so young that it is not necessary to make any correction for the 40Ar that is generated by the decay of 40K since the rock formed(emphasis mine)." The point of the study was a check of the methodology for K-Ar dating by looking at original levels of 40Ar present in the sample, not to date the rock sample itself. This is obvious--the half life of K-40 to Ar-40 is ~1.3 billion years so there should be very little Ar-40 in the sample produced by radioactive decay, which is exactly what we find. The most anomolously elevated level of Ar-40 is in the Hualalai sample, with 1.60x10^-12 mol Ar-40/g sample. In table 1 on page 50 we see that that the total amount of Ar-40 in this sample is 115x10^-12 moles, meaning that in this sample there is 1.4% more Ar-40 than is expected. What Dalrymple says about dating young rocks is this: "...anomalous 40Ar/36Ar ratios could be a problem in dating very young rocks. If the present data are representative, argon of slightly anomalous composition can be expected in approximately one out of three volcanic rocks (emphasis mine)." on page 52, meaning that the method would be inappropriate to apply to young samples--thus the USGS' 10,000-year limit (and I imagine the error bars here are still large). However as the rock grows older more Ar-40 will build up as K-40 decays. The more Ar-40 there is, the less that initial anomalous amount of Ar-40 will matter as its percentage of the total Ar-40 present in the rock drops--meaning that (to quote Dalrymple again on pg 52): "...the amounts of excess 40Ar and 36Ar found in the flows with anomalous 40Ar/36Ar ratios were too small to cause serious errors in potassium-argon dating of rocks a few million years old or older." (pg 52) ie. for old samples, the method is perfectly valid.
Who gives a rip about major league anymore anyway? The games are boring as hell, your tickets cost at least $50, a beer and a brat another $12 or worse...and who only wants one beer at a ballgame. And who could forget the lovely seating for the fans...half a mile from the damn diamond.
You want real damn baseball, you go to your hometown minor league club. Sit right behind homeplate for $6. $3 for a brat and another $2.50 for a great American MACRObrew. None of that microbrew shit where some pretentious nitwit makes comments like "..a deliciously hoppy body and a crisp bite on the tongue. The nose is that of lemon rinds, and the tasting follows through with a light citrus flavor that cleanses and refreshes the palate..." wanker. Cheer when the pitcher beans a batter in the head for the 7th time in the game. Jump in your seat when a popup fly clangs into the roof of the stands. Get pissed drunk. Taunt the other team and listen to them curse. Moon the mascot if there is one. Yell at the kids. Then stagger home. Minor league's all about mom apple pie and america (and beer). Major's about subway series where no matter what New freakin' York wins, corporate greed, and rich assholes on the team, owning the team, and in the good seats. Screw 'em.
To answer the third question first: organism have a truly massive number of proteins encoded in their genome, (almost) all of which have a specific and well-defined 3-dimensional structure. Currently the structures for several thousand proteins have been determined, and the structures are deposited at the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Most of these are solved using xray crystallography, which is part of what I'm studying. We've learned that if you are carefull, you can coax purified protein to crystallize rather than just fall out of solution in an uniteresting and useless glop. Hampton Research is one company specializing in supplies relating to the crystallization of proteins, and has some pictures of protein crystals on their site. It had been known for a long time that if you put a nice ordered object (like a crystal) into an xray beam, you would get a diffraction pattern from it. The diffraction pattern can tell you some information about the internal makeup of the crystal, such as how big the repeating unit of the crystal is (crystals are made up of a large number of small units that are stacked next to each other in a lattice). Eventually it was found that you could rotate the crystal in the beam and collect many diffraction patterns from different angles and with a large amount of effort calculate the structure of the molecules in the crystal. In the bad old days in the 60's this meant that you hired a couple of math majors to be human calculators and after five years you would have your protein structure. With computers you can go from data collection to solved structure in only a few months.
I don't quite get the "20 years" thing either. The Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Berkeley was built in 1942, or at least the original building was. It has naturally gone through a number of upgrades, the last being a totally new synchrotron built in 1987-93?. I don't know about wear and tear on the facility but we've found that as far as macromolecular crystallography (usually meaning proteins) goes, xray intensity is no longer an issue. A complete data set collected at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne Nat'l Labs took me less than an hour. That's just 1 second exposures to xrays as opposed to up to an hour or more on our lab's xray source. The big change occuring at synchrotrons for macromolecular crystallography is automation--it takes more time for a newbie to get trained and get set up for their first collection than to actually collect their data, but robotics for this kind of thing are relatively new--also data processing and structure determination is still very time consuming. Structural genomics (basically have structures of all the proteins in an organism determined) is also taking off and automation is a Very Big Thing for them as they screen 100,000's of protein crystals--Syrrx is probably the most advanced at this so far. Of course the problem with structural genomics is that you generate 100's of structures that lay around uniterpreted--a process that still requires a human touch. Anyway, hope that's some help.
Blarg. Yeah I got a little confused as to what the nanotube's for. My labmate went back to the old-fashioned straight beam kind--the deal was that they just noticed the old cantilevers worked a little better and went about their experiments thinking it was just an oddity with their equipment. Amazing how close you can be to something important and just...not...quite...get it.
Re:And now for a comment from someone who knows...
on
Speeding up Evolution
·
· Score: 1
Even better, some people who have had gene therapy come down with a bad case of leukemia (there or google it yerself). So what happens when only a fraction of the cells in a muscle start cranking out IGF, I wonder? Does the muscle loose some cohesion?
Sorry, but I just despise the "playing god" line even though you're obviously pro-science and tech. How is this playing god? We're fiddling with a piece of DNA and in effect changing some lines of code. It's not like we're creating matter out of nothing or smiting the Canaanites with the ouch and the hey hey it hurts me. Yet with many scientific or technical advances we get accused of playing god. I wonder who was the first to say that statement...was it way back when Og made fire?
I don't do AFM, but my labmate has. He said that this flaw was well-known, and that most people dumped the v-shaped cantilevers in favor of nanotubes (I think) or straight cantilevers. Cool thing he said was that to get a tip, very popular was the gunk that piles up after you clean an electron microscope. One man's trash is another's treasure, I suppose.
Cool...sounds like it might be genechip version 2.0. But it also sounds like (I don't have access to Nature Materials and I'm not gonna pay $15 for the article) they PT Barnumed their article a bit. I don't study pathology, but I don't know how much DNA fragments anthrax will leave around. And sarin? Geeze...yeah you can make it from Castor beans but will your end product definitely won't have DNA remaining. But like the blurp said, it's preliminary.
Title sums it up. Is this thing set up with short stretches of DNA that recognize pathogen DNA stretches or just detect anything that can bind to and distort DNA? Just from reading the blurb the latter seems possible. The different bases A,T,C,G of DNA have a largish flat ring structure which are stacked if DNA's in a double helix. If something comes along and binds DNA by intercalating, or slipping between the stacked bases the DNA may have to bend to accomodate the foreign compound. Such a bend might be used for a detection system if there is a big enough mechanical signal. Not saying that's how this thing works, just kinda thinking...uh...outloud? Anybody got an better reference?
bad for them, goodish for us
on
Humans Make Ozone
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As the article states, ozone is produced by neutrophils as a part of an immune response. Not too surprising; redox chemistry is critically important and we've evolved ways of protecting ourselves from harmful oxidation. For example the enzyme catalase converts hydrogen peroxide into water and hydrogen, while superoxide dismutase is a free radical scavenger. I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a specialized anti-ozone protein as well. Anyway, neutrophils engulf bacteria (and other things) and the engulfed matter ends up in an intracellular compartment called a phagosome. The neutrophil pumps in various nasty compounds--I imagine ozone may be one of them--to kill whatever it engulfed. I'd imagine that neutrophils have higher than normal expression levels for catalase and other protective enzymes to protect itself...from itself.
There were three back to back papers published in Nature (1953, No. 4356 pages 737-741): "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acids" by J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids" by M.H.F Wilkins, A.R. Stokes and H.R. Wilson, and lastly "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate" by Rosalind Franklin. Also available on Nature's website for free, as someone else has already linked in. At least Watson and Crick did put Rosalind Franklin (and Maurice Wilkins) in their acknowledgements, but then that was probably the most they could get away with and even then in their article they poo-poo the fibre diffraction patterns obtained by Franklin (and others) despite the wealth of information that was obtained. In her article she independently states "The structure is probably helical. The phosphate groups lie on the outside of the structural unit, on a helix of diameter about 20 angstroms. The structural unit probably consists of two co-axial molecules which are not equally spaced along the fibere axis..." Her view on DNA structure is based on data she collected. Watson and Crick's structure is largely based on the same data (which they obtained without her permission, ie they stole it) and they come to similar conclusions.
...almost made me spew Dr. Pepper all over my monitor. I'm a PC user. I would've NEVER been caught dead with a crappintosh as recent as two years ago. I mean, you could have had a computer that was: a) faster, b) cheaper, and c) with a more stable OS that d) gave you more control over your own computer that was e) put together with the parts you, not the manufacturer wanted....or you could have a Mac. Microsoft's OS, in my not-so-humble opinion, peaked around about Win 95 OSR2 or a late stable NT4. Windows 98: still waiting on that beta. Windows ME: abomination. Win2000: 5 years later, and it's almost as good as Win95. WinXP: spyware. And then...Apple releases OS X. A stable, usable GUI on top of...my god...A command line on a friggin' MAC! Couple that with a G4 powerbook (yeah its slower than the fastest wintel notebook. But not nearly enough to offset unix vs WinXP) and you've got the best *ever*. If I wasn't a poor student, instead of upgrading my PC two months ago I would've gotten the G4 powerbook. But someday I'll finally escape grad school and I'll be able to afford one--provided Apple doesn't "go out of business" again.
They better still have the sexy titanium powerbook line...and by then it'll be at least a G6.
Well I have to agree with it being a little over the top in hype, but if you want to get ahead in science not only do you have to do good work you also gotta have a little PT Barnum in you. However, the sparks don't have to produce many new organic molecules in order for things to get interesting. They just have to produce enough to outweigh their degredation so you have a net buildup. Over a long period of time things might get very interesting and Europa's no spring chicken.
Take this example of mine: I work on an enzyme that I have to store some samples of at -80 C for later experiments. I found that if it had been stored at -80 C for a long time (1-2 years) the enzyme is inactivated, but this is not due to the freezing process itself so some chemical change is occuring in ice at -80 C over a months to years timeframe. Pretty "cool" eh?
Well, it looks like it has in corals . Apparently the different species of corals can change in response to changes in sea currents. So a species seems to have time and location components to its definition, as well as genetic. Pretty cool; since my lab works on fluorescent proteins isolated from coral and jellyfish I'll look forward to reading the paper. This (and the homology among the fluorescent proteins we've been studying in a round about way) links into the fact that the more we learn about biology, the more evolution becomes an inescapable conclusion.
Not quite. In science you'd either throw out your theory or modify the theory to fit the new evidence. With the creationists, you change definitions or just use intentionally poorly defined terms but never give up your core religious belief in a "literal" Biblical creation. This announcement of yet another clear example of the evolution of a new species will change few so-called "scientific" creationist minds (even though it must if they're honest) because they'll lump it with the parent species in the poorly defined nonscientific word "kind." Someone in this thread probably has already done so.
Then there's also cats. The retractible claws are havens for all sorts of bacteria, a good fraction of which are opportunistic pathogens. Get scratched by a housecat, you get a bit of inflamation. Get mauled by a cougar, if it doesn't kill you outright you'll be on a heap of antibiotics from bacterial infections in your cuts and the infection still is supposed to be extremely nasty. While not strictly venemous, because of cat scratch fever big cats might as well be.
As others have said: airfields. Little used is not the same thing as abandoned, and abandoned doesn't necessarily mean unused. Go grab a state atlas: most states are dotted everywhere with airports and airstrips. In my home of Oregon, the southeastern quarter of the state is very sparsely populated: Harney county is the size of Connecticut and has at most 6,000 people, of which ~3,000 live in or nearby Burns but it has quite a few airfields. Outside of Burns, the rest live here and there on ranches and farms. Some of those ranches are huge, and if something bad happens to a ranch hand they'll need to get him/her out fast. Most/all have their own airstrip which this report would probably call abandoned. My personal favorite "airport" is the "Wagontire International Airport" located just outside of Wagontire, OR and is used by hunters to get in and out of the area. Population: 1 little old lady, two dogs, and a mule. She'll let you pet the mule if you ask nice.
So what do you do when serial/parallel/PS2/USB ports get obsolete? Do you continue to have them and add another port to the back of your head? Will your head eventually look like the back of my 'puter? Would it be cool or lame to have all those ports? Yeah man check out this cool retro AT keyboard connector I got implanted into my forehead last week. I type and words come out my mouth!
I can't find (didn't try very hard either) an actual journal article for this. Did the authors break down colon cancer by age group in their comparison of 1st world and 3rd world countries? Colon cancer is usually late onset, occuring in the 60's and 70's--age groups that 3rd world countries have proportionally much fewer citizens in.
Re:intracellular pathogens
on
Leprosy Genes
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· Score: 1
Well, M. tuberculosis and M. avium are two closely related pathogens (M. avium causes TB in birds, IIRC) that look like they utilize the same metabolic pathway in the course of disease. M. leprae is closely related to these two pathogens and has a similar "lifestyle" so it might also use the same pathway. Interestingly the pathway (the glyoxylate shunt enzymes isocitrate lyase and malate synthase) might also used by Candida albicans, an opportunistic pathogen responsible for most fungal infections in immunocompromised patients. Hell, there's even a plant pathogen where this pathway has been implicated as being important for virulence. Anyway, if indeed this pathway is required in TB or leprosy or whatever, then that's great since humans don't have either enzyme--which might make drug design a little easier if you can make the drug target these enzymes.
Gads, my reading list keeps on getting more bizarre--I'm a chemistry student, damnit!
intracellular pathogens
on
Leprosy Genes
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Before anybody asks how they're linked, one way is that they all at some point reside inside the cells of their unfortunate host: Mycobacterium leprae is the causative agent of leprosy aka Hansen's Disease and invades neurons. Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes tuberculosis, and during the course of infection can reside inside of macrophages. Plasmodium falciparum causes malaria, and invades red blood cells. Legionella pneumophila causes Legionnaire's Disease aka Legionellosis, and at one point in infection resides inside lung cells.
Interestingly, except for P. falciparum these pathogens are bacteria. P. falciparum is a single cellular eukaryote.
Slashdot Mirror
I took a slightly extended lunch break today and went down to the university library to grab the original paper. There's some truly interesting things about your citing of Dalrymple. First off, you (or whoever your source is--in my experience creationists rarely read the original) didn't read the table right. The numbers that you present are actually the concentration of Ar-40 found in the sample, in 10^-12 mol Ar-40/g sample. The apparent age is in the third column of table 2 on page 51--I won't give them here (you'll have to look it up yourself) but they are much higher than the known age of the rock sample. However in the very first page of the article, Dalrymple states "The use of historic samples for these studies has two important advantages: (1) the ages of the flows are unambiguous, and (2) the material is so young that it is not necessary to make any correction for the 40Ar that is generated by the decay of 40K since the rock formed(emphasis mine)." The point of the study was a check of the methodology for K-Ar dating by looking at original levels of 40Ar present in the sample, not to date the rock sample itself. This is obvious--the half life of K-40 to Ar-40 is ~1.3 billion years so there should be very little Ar-40 in the sample produced by radioactive decay, which is exactly what we find. The most anomolously elevated level of Ar-40 is in the Hualalai sample, with 1.60x10^-12 mol Ar-40/g sample. In table 1 on page 50 we see that that the total amount of Ar-40 in this sample is 115x10^-12 moles, meaning that in this sample there is 1.4% more Ar-40 than is expected. What Dalrymple says about dating young rocks is this: "...anomalous 40Ar/36Ar ratios could be a problem in dating very young rocks. If the present data are representative, argon of slightly anomalous composition can be expected in approximately one out of three volcanic rocks (emphasis mine)." on page 52, meaning that the method would be inappropriate to apply to young samples--thus the USGS' 10,000-year limit (and I imagine the error bars here are still large). However as the rock grows older more Ar-40 will build up as K-40 decays. The more Ar-40 there is, the less that initial anomalous amount of Ar-40 will matter as its percentage of the total Ar-40 present in the rock drops--meaning that (to quote Dalrymple again on pg 52): "...the amounts of excess 40Ar and 36Ar found in the flows with anomalous 40Ar/36Ar ratios were too small to cause serious errors in potassium-argon dating of rocks a few million years old or older." (pg 52) ie. for old samples, the method is perfectly valid.
Who gives a rip about major league anymore anyway? The games are boring as hell, your tickets cost at least $50, a beer and a brat another $12 or worse...and who only wants one beer at a ballgame. And who could forget the lovely seating for the fans...half a mile from the damn diamond.
You want real damn baseball, you go to your hometown minor league club. Sit right behind homeplate for $6. $3 for a brat and another $2.50 for a great American MACRObrew. None of that microbrew shit where some pretentious nitwit makes comments like "..a deliciously hoppy body and a crisp bite on the tongue. The nose is that of lemon rinds, and the tasting follows through with a light citrus flavor that cleanses and refreshes the palate..." wanker. Cheer when the pitcher beans a batter in the head for the 7th time in the game. Jump in your seat when a popup fly clangs into the roof of the stands. Get pissed drunk. Taunt the other team and listen to them curse. Moon the mascot if there is one. Yell at the kids. Then stagger home. Minor league's all about mom apple pie and america (and beer). Major's about subway series where no matter what New freakin' York wins, corporate greed, and rich assholes on the team, owning the team, and in the good seats. Screw 'em.
To answer the third question first: organism have a truly massive number of proteins encoded in their genome, (almost) all of which have a specific and well-defined 3-dimensional structure. Currently the structures for several thousand proteins have been determined, and the structures are deposited at the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Most of these are solved using xray crystallography, which is part of what I'm studying. We've learned that if you are carefull, you can coax purified protein to crystallize rather than just fall out of solution in an uniteresting and useless glop. Hampton Research is one company specializing in supplies relating to the crystallization of proteins, and has some pictures of protein crystals on their site. It had been known for a long time that if you put a nice ordered object (like a crystal) into an xray beam, you would get a diffraction pattern from it. The diffraction pattern can tell you some information about the internal makeup of the crystal, such as how big the repeating unit of the crystal is (crystals are made up of a large number of small units that are stacked next to each other in a lattice). Eventually it was found that you could rotate the crystal in the beam and collect many diffraction patterns from different angles and with a large amount of effort calculate the structure of the molecules in the crystal. In the bad old days in the 60's this meant that you hired a couple of math majors to be human calculators and after five years you would have your protein structure. With computers you can go from data collection to solved structure in only a few months.
I don't quite get the "20 years" thing either. The Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Berkeley was built in 1942, or at least the original building was. It has naturally gone through a number of upgrades, the last being a totally new synchrotron built in 1987-93?. I don't know about wear and tear on the facility but we've found that as far as macromolecular crystallography (usually meaning proteins) goes, xray intensity is no longer an issue. A complete data set collected at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne Nat'l Labs took me less than an hour. That's just 1 second exposures to xrays as opposed to up to an hour or more on our lab's xray source. The big change occuring at synchrotrons for macromolecular crystallography is automation--it takes more time for a newbie to get trained and get set up for their first collection than to actually collect their data, but robotics for this kind of thing are relatively new--also data processing and structure determination is still very time consuming. Structural genomics (basically have structures of all the proteins in an organism determined) is also taking off and automation is a Very Big Thing for them as they screen 100,000's of protein crystals--Syrrx is probably the most advanced at this so far. Of course the problem with structural genomics is that you generate 100's of structures that lay around uniterpreted--a process that still requires a human touch. Anyway, hope that's some help.
Blarg. Yeah I got a little confused as to what the nanotube's for. My labmate went back to the old-fashioned straight beam kind--the deal was that they just noticed the old cantilevers worked a little better and went about their experiments thinking it was just an oddity with their equipment. Amazing how close you can be to something important and just...not...quite...get it.
Even better, some people who have had gene therapy come down with a bad case of leukemia (there or google it yerself). So what happens when only a fraction of the cells in a muscle start cranking out IGF, I wonder? Does the muscle loose some cohesion?
Sorry, but I just despise the "playing god" line even though you're obviously pro-science and tech. How is this playing god? We're fiddling with a piece of DNA and in effect changing some lines of code. It's not like we're creating matter out of nothing or smiting the Canaanites with the ouch and the hey hey it hurts me. Yet with many scientific or technical advances we get accused of playing god. I wonder who was the first to say that statement...was it way back when Og made fire?
I don't do AFM, but my labmate has. He said that this flaw was well-known, and that most people dumped the v-shaped cantilevers in favor of nanotubes (I think) or straight cantilevers. Cool thing he said was that to get a tip, very popular was the gunk that piles up after you clean an electron microscope. One man's trash is another's treasure, I suppose.
Cool...sounds like it might be genechip version 2.0. But it also sounds like (I don't have access to Nature Materials and I'm not gonna pay $15 for the article) they PT Barnumed their article a bit. I don't study pathology, but I don't know how much DNA fragments anthrax will leave around. And sarin? Geeze...yeah you can make it from Castor beans but will your end product definitely won't have DNA remaining. But like the blurp said, it's preliminary.
Title sums it up. Is this thing set up with short stretches of DNA that recognize pathogen DNA stretches or just detect anything that can bind to and distort DNA? Just from reading the blurb the latter seems possible. The different bases A,T,C,G of DNA have a largish flat ring structure which are stacked if DNA's in a double helix. If something comes along and binds DNA by intercalating, or slipping between the stacked bases the DNA may have to bend to accomodate the foreign compound. Such a bend might be used for a detection system if there is a big enough mechanical signal. Not saying that's how this thing works, just kinda thinking...uh...outloud? Anybody got an better reference?
Arg. Yeah that's right.
As the article states, ozone is produced by neutrophils as a part of an immune response. Not too surprising; redox chemistry is critically important and we've evolved ways of protecting ourselves from harmful oxidation. For example the enzyme catalase converts hydrogen peroxide into water and hydrogen, while superoxide dismutase is a free radical scavenger. I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a specialized anti-ozone protein as well. Anyway, neutrophils engulf bacteria (and other things) and the engulfed matter ends up in an intracellular compartment called a phagosome. The neutrophil pumps in various nasty compounds--I imagine ozone may be one of them--to kill whatever it engulfed. I'd imagine that neutrophils have higher than normal expression levels for catalase and other protective enzymes to protect itself...from itself.
There were three back to back papers published in Nature (1953, No. 4356 pages 737-741): "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acids" by J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids" by M.H.F Wilkins, A.R. Stokes and H.R. Wilson, and lastly "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate" by Rosalind Franklin. Also available on Nature's website for free, as someone else has already linked in. At least Watson and Crick did put Rosalind Franklin (and Maurice Wilkins) in their acknowledgements, but then that was probably the most they could get away with and even then in their article they poo-poo the fibre diffraction patterns obtained by Franklin (and others) despite the wealth of information that was obtained. In her article she independently states "The structure is probably helical. The phosphate groups lie on the outside of the structural unit, on a helix of diameter about 20 angstroms. The structural unit probably consists of two co-axial molecules which are not equally spaced along the fibere axis..." Her view on DNA structure is based on data she collected. Watson and Crick's structure is largely based on the same data (which they obtained without her permission, ie they stole it) and they come to similar conclusions.
...ducks and covers in anticipation of the whole "nature vs nurture" argument
...almost made me spew Dr. Pepper all over my monitor. I'm a PC user. I would've NEVER been caught dead with a crappintosh as recent as two years ago. I mean, you could have had a computer that was: a) faster, b) cheaper, and c) with a more stable OS that d) gave you more control over your own computer that was e) put together with the parts you, not the manufacturer wanted....or you could have a Mac. Microsoft's OS, in my not-so-humble opinion, peaked around about Win 95 OSR2 or a late stable NT4. Windows 98: still waiting on that beta. Windows ME: abomination. Win2000: 5 years later, and it's almost as good as Win95. WinXP: spyware. And then...Apple releases OS X. A stable, usable GUI on top of...my god...A command line on a friggin' MAC! Couple that with a G4 powerbook (yeah its slower than the fastest wintel notebook. But not nearly enough to offset unix vs WinXP) and you've got the best *ever*. If I wasn't a poor student, instead of upgrading my PC two months ago I would've gotten the G4 powerbook. But someday I'll finally escape grad school and I'll be able to afford one--provided Apple doesn't "go out of business" again.
They better still have the sexy titanium powerbook line...and by then it'll be at least a G6.
Well I have to agree with it being a little over the top in hype, but if you want to get ahead in science not only do you have to do good work you also gotta have a little PT Barnum in you. However, the sparks don't have to produce many new organic molecules in order for things to get interesting. They just have to produce enough to outweigh their degredation so you have a net buildup. Over a long period of time things might get very interesting and Europa's no spring chicken.
Take this example of mine: I work on an enzyme that I have to store some samples of at -80 C for later experiments. I found that if it had been stored at -80 C for a long time (1-2 years) the enzyme is inactivated, but this is not due to the freezing process itself so some chemical change is occuring in ice at -80 C over a months to years timeframe. Pretty "cool" eh?
Well, it looks like it has in corals . Apparently the different species of corals can change in response to changes in sea currents. So a species seems to have time and location components to its definition, as well as genetic. Pretty cool; since my lab works on fluorescent proteins isolated from coral and jellyfish I'll look forward to reading the paper. This (and the homology among the fluorescent proteins we've been studying in a round about way) links into the fact that the more we learn about biology, the more evolution becomes an inescapable conclusion.
The 2nd law again? How does TdS = dU - PdV disprove evolution?
Hint: Do you have ice in your freezer?
Hint for the physics-illiterate: It doesn't.
Not quite. In science you'd either throw out your theory or modify the theory to fit the new evidence. With the creationists, you change definitions or just use intentionally poorly defined terms but never give up your core religious belief in a "literal" Biblical creation. This announcement of yet another clear example of the evolution of a new species will change few so-called "scientific" creationist minds (even though it must if they're honest) because they'll lump it with the parent species in the poorly defined nonscientific word "kind." Someone in this thread probably has already done so.
Then there's also cats. The retractible claws are havens for all sorts of bacteria, a good fraction of which are opportunistic pathogens. Get scratched by a housecat, you get a bit of inflamation. Get mauled by a cougar, if it doesn't kill you outright you'll be on a heap of antibiotics from bacterial infections in your cuts and the infection still is supposed to be extremely nasty. While not strictly venemous, because of cat scratch fever big cats might as well be.
As others have said: airfields. Little used is not the same thing as abandoned, and abandoned doesn't necessarily mean unused. Go grab a state atlas: most states are dotted everywhere with airports and airstrips. In my home of Oregon, the southeastern quarter of the state is very sparsely populated: Harney county is the size of Connecticut and has at most 6,000 people, of which ~3,000 live in or nearby Burns but it has quite a few airfields. Outside of Burns, the rest live here and there on ranches and farms. Some of those ranches are huge, and if something bad happens to a ranch hand they'll need to get him/her out fast. Most/all have their own airstrip which this report would probably call abandoned. My personal favorite "airport" is the "Wagontire International Airport" located just outside of Wagontire, OR and is used by hunters to get in and out of the area. Population: 1 little old lady, two dogs, and a mule. She'll let you pet the mule if you ask nice.
So what do you do when serial/parallel/PS2/USB ports get obsolete? Do you continue to have them and add another port to the back of your head? Will your head eventually look like the back of my 'puter? Would it be cool or lame to have all those ports? Yeah man check out this cool retro AT keyboard connector I got implanted into my forehead last week. I type and words come out my mouth!
I can't find (didn't try very hard either) an actual journal article for this. Did the authors break down colon cancer by age group in their comparison of 1st world and 3rd world countries? Colon cancer is usually late onset, occuring in the 60's and 70's--age groups that 3rd world countries have proportionally much fewer citizens in.
Well, M. tuberculosis and M. avium are two closely related pathogens (M. avium causes TB in birds, IIRC) that look like they utilize the same metabolic pathway in the course of disease. M. leprae is closely related to these two pathogens and has a similar "lifestyle" so it might also use the same pathway. Interestingly the pathway (the glyoxylate shunt enzymes isocitrate lyase and malate synthase) might also used by Candida albicans, an opportunistic pathogen responsible for most fungal infections in immunocompromised patients. Hell, there's even a plant pathogen where this pathway has been implicated as being important for virulence. Anyway, if indeed this pathway is required in TB or leprosy or whatever, then that's great since humans don't have either enzyme--which might make drug design a little easier if you can make the drug target these enzymes.
Gads, my reading list keeps on getting more bizarre--I'm a chemistry student, damnit!
Before anybody asks how they're linked, one way is that they all at some point reside inside the cells of their unfortunate host:
Mycobacterium leprae is the causative agent of leprosy aka Hansen's Disease and invades neurons.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes tuberculosis, and during the course of infection can reside inside of macrophages.
Plasmodium falciparum causes malaria, and invades red blood cells.
Legionella pneumophila causes Legionnaire's Disease aka Legionellosis, and at one point in infection resides inside lung cells.
Interestingly, except for P. falciparum these pathogens are bacteria. P. falciparum is a single cellular eukaryote.
A stone-age mascot for stone-age thinking, or just another tribute to Strom Thurman?