One possibility mentioned on the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation website is that it may be spread by elk nibbling on bones infected with chronic wasting disease. This does make a lot of sense as bull elk will need to consume enough calcium each year to add upward of ten pounds of antler, which is essentially bone and requires a lot of calcium and that bone marrow can have a pretty heavy load of infectuous particles. Cow elk only have to give birth to a bouncing 15 pound calf with hooves;).
Another possibility I don't think anyone's really looked at is infection by contact with blood. Elk are huge, powerful animals: a big bull elk can weigh over half a ton. They scrape their antlers against trees to remove the velvet and I've seen scrapes start at a foot off the ground and extend to probably eight feet. Hell there's one in a place I go hunting that likes to snap 2 inch diameter trees in half with his antlers. Anyway, when they fight during the rut there's the potential for massive and even fatal injuries. It doesn't seem too far out of line that it could be transfered from one infected but early symptom bull to a healthy bull through their injuries.
Nit to pick: Ligers/Tigons can breed with each other or with either parent species, but the result in any case (barring freaks like the equivalent to the very rare fertile mule) is sterile. Personally I love this little fact as it helps to illustrate that biology's got exceptions to lots of little artificial rules and helps to muddy the definition of species a tad. Drives the (unmentionable combiners/perverters of science and religion) nuts.
I disagree. I have a friend who is starting out at med school, and the very first week they had her and her classmates assigned to a doctor to accompany him/her on their rounds and to get them started up taking blood pressure, reading charts, real basic stuff. What they were *really* supposed to be learning was how to act around patients with tact and confidence. Lets face it; if the Dr. acts like a schmuck when you come in for whatever, you're not going to trust them. Also, like you mentioned there is nothing quite like working on a cadaver--when I was an undergrad I had to dissect quite a few organisms to understand physiology and the computer simulations while good are not as good as the real thing. Plus if you're working on a cadaver, it hammers home that you're going to be working on *people* like no computer simulation ever could. As for the wrote memorization biochemistry for med students or whatnot, I don't know about you but my lecture/memorization courses were *always* accompanied by labs to help you understand the material in context. These online degrees are generally inferior and I sure as hell don't want my doctor to have been "educated" in one.
One point not mentioned yet is that many/most journals have free online access to articles older than ~one year. Journals that don't do this such as the Journal of Molecular Biology can come under a boycott (in their case primarily for double-billing I believe: paper and online subscription = 2 subscriptions according to them). Currently there are many labs/universities who are refusing to publish, purchase, or participate in refereeing in that particular journal. It's hard to say what the effect has been even though it's relatively easy to find a competing journal to submit your work to, in contrast with the concluding statement timothy wrote. I just hope that Brown's idea wouldn't place all publication under one roof--that would be too easy for someone to control and censor (ie the Bush administration's suggestion that materials and methods sections not be published).
It would have been great if he would have gotten into the NBC Nightly News teleprompter and put at the end of Tom Brokaw's lines "...and in other news, while visiting a low-income daycare center Dick Cheney bit the head off an infant. Additionally, I am a turnip, vroom vroom."
Both caffeine and EGCG are known antioxidants and oxidizing compounds are known to damage cells via protein or DNA oxidative damage which can be an ingredient in cancer. It's just so damn spiffy to see a big cellular- or organismal-level oxidative damage response like this. I couldn't find the original PNAS article online; anybody know if it's available yet?
Well I don't work with virii myself but they really don't tell "good" cells from "bad" cells so much as they just float about until they bump into something. All cells express a multitude of different proteins on their surfaces and these differ by cell species. Virii can recognize one or a small subset of cell membrane proteins as both the virus and the cell membrane proteins have specific shapes/charges/whathaveyou, forming a complex with the virus stuck to the side of the cell. The virus is either engulfed by the cell or "injects" its DNA/RNA into the cell which is now basically screwed.
If PlyG is truly anthrax-specific then it might also work on other closely related bacteria, but it seems unlikely that we would be in symbiosis with it. Another thing to remember is that we take antibiotics all the time with little or no ill effect so PlyG probably wouldn't be any worse.
I'll second that: many "environmentalist" groups are run and operated by far-left dimbulbs who live in downtown LA or New York and wouldn't know a wild animal if it bit them on the ass. Another excellent real conservation group is the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Started in the 80's by four guys who were pissed off about their favorite hunting grounds being turned into condos and ski resorts (most likely for the afforementioned dipshits) they put their money where there mouth was and started buying up land and getting conservation easements. The organization's since gotten freakin' huge, with branches in most states and several countries. They claim 89 cents on the dollar goes directly to conservation efforts; only 50 cents is considered good by most nonprofit organizations. It's not just about elk or hunting, it's for anybody who wants to keep some land wild and accessible to the public.
It's not so much that it's uncertain as the authors are couching their study in typical scientific language. The most top two-word phrases most commonly seen in research papers are: may be, might be, or could be.
All the replies to my message assume that I think that the entire theory of evolution is invalid. That is not what I think nor was it my point. What do you honestly expect to happen when you include links to creationists' websites? It's not that we get annoyed when people stray too far from accepted thinking (as I mentioned previously if you can't think for yourself you don't belong in science), it's when people do one or more of the following:
1. Misunderstand or distort what is currently understood,
2. "I don't believe it, therefore it isn't so,"
3. Combine science and religion even though science is concerned with the natural world while religion is concerned with the supernatural.
There are many world views, but science isn't concerned with any of them except the one that says we can reasonably trust our perceptions and use them to take stock of the universe in which we live. Your position as you have presented it contains the first and second errors, but what really strikes me as odd is that you know that the majority of the creationist's position is garbage but you chose to trust what they have to say over what is generally accepted by the scientific community on points you dislike. In science there is only one thing that is truly a career killer: intellectual dishonesty. This is because once anything suspect is found in that person's career, everything else is suspect as well. If the same was applied by supporters of creationism to their champions, there would be no more creationism short order.
I am member of that educated crowd (Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry, specializing in protein structure and biochemistry, not that anybody cares) who has a negative reaction to what the creationists put out but that's becuase when I was younger I spent about a year reading their books and tracts and comparing them to mainstream evolutionary books and papers while debating the matter on a local BBS. I was able to debunk everything that was thrown at me then and it's rather sad that your 20 questions by Dr. Brown (Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, a discipline not noted for its rigorous requirements in evolutionary or for that matter any biology) is the exact same as the stuff I waded through and debunked ten years ago. As for the Bombardier beetle, check here for the actual truth of the matter. Actually, read the whole talkorigins site to get what is currently believed in evolutionary biology rather than the strawmen arguments that have been fed to you by creationists. Although personal experience tells me that creationists never change their position no matter how much evidence is presented to them or how badly their arguments and even their champions are crushed please surprise me by being different and holding that "critical view" that you believe is lacking in us supporters of evolution.
One more thing: scientists are trained to be skeptical. It's our job to take a critical view of everything we read no matter what journal it got published in or who wrote it. Evolution is still the prevailing view because of its merits not because of some vast conspiracy or adherance to the status quo because if you can't ask original quesitons and attempt to find the answers you're not doing science; this is the very definition of breaking the status quo.
I checked out this link http://www.pccasegear.com.au/category45_1.htm from your site and it shows neon colored tubing that I think was used. There's lots of dyes out there that are say blue at low temp but red at high temp and are reversible. Finding one available on the market might be difficult, though.
If this guy wanted to be really cool he'd a a dye to the water cooler that changed color in response to temperature. Should be a good gradient to work with: 22 degrees C room temp and what, 90-100 degrees C right next to the chip?
There's no such thing as a slope so steep that it couldn't be logged. In Oregon, greater than 95% of the forests have been logged at least once, probably better than half has been logged twice. Since the trees live where the mountains live, slopes exceeding a 60% grade have been logged. In fact, a steep slope is easier to log. Start at the bottom and work your way up letting the logs roll or slide down the hill, causing a lot of damage (or use the cable system now). Hell we did lots of that using nothing more technologically advanced than mule teams. Should a 60% slope be logged? Of course not; about ten years later the roots will have rotted out and the hillside comes down with the next big rain. That's where intelligent regulation comes in. If you don't want your 400+ year old trees logged for peanuts, write your Congressman or whatever the down-under equivalent is. Start those petitions, agitate, hell sit in trees if necessary. Just don't gripe about the technological advances that may improve logging for people and ma nature because they just aren't to blame and won't let us log anything new.
Have you ever seen a logging operation in action? Didn't think so. The fact is that the tractors that are used tear up a good sized swath and compact the soil making it harder for the forest to re-assert itself. This six-legged beastie is a great idea if they can make it competetive with current logging vehicles as it will reduce the ecological impact that logging has and that's a good thing. It's not like all research put into logging tech is bad; for example the use of log skidders (bulldozers pushing logs from where they've been cut to where they're put on the truck) has been greatly reduced by stringing up huge cables at the top of the hill being logged. Logs are attached to said cable and are carried downhill to log landings to be put on waiting trucks. This results in less damage done to the log so less needs to be logged and fewer necessary roads and less use of skidders meaning lower environmental impact and quicker restoration of the forest.
This looks like an even grander attempt than the X-33 and the now-defunct Venturestar project. Venturestar was cancelled because it was too ambitious, wasn't it? Looks like some NASA vaporware...er vaporplane.
It may be a member of a family of significant human pathogens, but it doesn't follow that all members of that genus are pathogens. For example, Pseudomonas fluorescens is a broad group of bacteria that are not pathogenic but are commonly found in the soil and some acquatic environments.
I have personally done (some small) work on a protein isolated from a P. fluorescens strain from a WW II munitions plant that allowed it to munch on TNT and related explosive compounds. Note that this is a naturally occuring evolutionary adaptation to a contaminated environment! But wouldn't it be neat to take a little of this and drop it on, say a minefield where landmines are slowly decomposing and releasing small amounts of TNT, but local P. fluorescens strains lack this explosives-munching ability due to lower environmental pressure than at a highly contaminated munitions plant? Wouldn't be even cooler to engineer the little buggers to express GFP so that they glow? Clearing a minefield might then be much easier: spray the engineered P. fluorescens strain over the minefield, wait a couple days then go in with UV light to see where the mines are. If it's bright green, don't step there!
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Another possibility I don't think anyone's really looked at is infection by contact with blood. Elk are huge, powerful animals: a big bull elk can weigh over half a ton. They scrape their antlers against trees to remove the velvet and I've seen scrapes start at a foot off the ground and extend to probably eight feet. Hell there's one in a place I go hunting that likes to snap 2 inch diameter trees in half with his antlers. Anyway, when they fight during the rut there's the potential for massive and even fatal injuries. It doesn't seem too far out of line that it could be transfered from one infected but early symptom bull to a healthy bull through their injuries.
Nit to pick: Ligers/Tigons can breed with each other or with either parent species, but the result in any case (barring freaks like the equivalent to the very rare fertile mule) is sterile. Personally I love this little fact as it helps to illustrate that biology's got exceptions to lots of little artificial rules and helps to muddy the definition of species a tad. Drives the (unmentionable combiners/perverters of science and religion) nuts.
I disagree. I have a friend who is starting out at med school, and the very first week they had her and her classmates assigned to a doctor to accompany him/her on their rounds and to get them started up taking blood pressure, reading charts, real basic stuff. What they were *really* supposed to be learning was how to act around patients with tact and confidence. Lets face it; if the Dr. acts like a schmuck when you come in for whatever, you're not going to trust them. Also, like you mentioned there is nothing quite like working on a cadaver--when I was an undergrad I had to dissect quite a few organisms to understand physiology and the computer simulations while good are not as good as the real thing. Plus if you're working on a cadaver, it hammers home that you're going to be working on *people* like no computer simulation ever could. As for the wrote memorization biochemistry for med students or whatnot, I don't know about you but my lecture/memorization courses were *always* accompanied by labs to help you understand the material in context. These online degrees are generally inferior and I sure as hell don't want my doctor to have been "educated" in one.
One point not mentioned yet is that many/most journals have free online access to articles older than ~one year. Journals that don't do this such as the Journal of Molecular Biology can come under a boycott (in their case primarily for double-billing I believe: paper and online subscription = 2 subscriptions according to them). Currently there are many labs/universities who are refusing to publish, purchase, or participate in refereeing in that particular journal. It's hard to say what the effect has been even though it's relatively easy to find a competing journal to submit your work to, in contrast with the concluding statement timothy wrote. I just hope that Brown's idea wouldn't place all publication under one roof--that would be too easy for someone to control and censor (ie the Bush administration's suggestion that materials and methods sections not be published).
It would have been great if he would have gotten into the NBC Nightly News teleprompter and put at the end of Tom Brokaw's lines "...and in other news, while visiting a low-income daycare center Dick Cheney bit the head off an infant. Additionally, I am a turnip, vroom vroom."
I bet he'd say it.
Both caffeine and EGCG are known antioxidants and oxidizing compounds are known to damage cells via protein or DNA oxidative damage which can be an ingredient in cancer. It's just so damn spiffy to see a big cellular- or organismal-level oxidative damage response like this. I couldn't find the original PNAS article online; anybody know if it's available yet?
Well I don't work with virii myself but they really don't tell "good" cells from "bad" cells so much as they just float about until they bump into something. All cells express a multitude of different proteins on their surfaces and these differ by cell species. Virii can recognize one or a small subset of cell membrane proteins as both the virus and the cell membrane proteins have specific shapes/charges/whathaveyou, forming a complex with the virus stuck to the side of the cell. The virus is either engulfed by the cell or "injects" its DNA/RNA into the cell which is now basically screwed.
If PlyG is truly anthrax-specific then it might also work on other closely related bacteria, but it seems unlikely that we would be in symbiosis with it. Another thing to remember is that we take antibiotics all the time with little or no ill effect so PlyG probably wouldn't be any worse.
I'll second that: many "environmentalist" groups are run and operated by far-left dimbulbs who live in downtown LA or New York and wouldn't know a wild animal if it bit them on the ass. Another excellent real conservation group is the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Started in the 80's by four guys who were pissed off about their favorite hunting grounds being turned into condos and ski resorts (most likely for the afforementioned dipshits) they put their money where there mouth was and started buying up land and getting conservation easements. The organization's since gotten freakin' huge, with branches in most states and several countries. They claim 89 cents on the dollar goes directly to conservation efforts; only 50 cents is considered good by most nonprofit organizations. It's not just about elk or hunting, it's for anybody who wants to keep some land wild and accessible to the public.
It's not so much that it's uncertain as the authors are couching their study in typical scientific language. The most top two-word phrases most commonly seen in research papers are: may be, might be, or could be.
So if this becomes widespread, does that mean I'll be doubly-damned for photocopying books in the university library?
All the replies to my message assume that I think that the entire theory of evolution is invalid. That is not what I think nor was it my point. What do you honestly expect to happen when you include links to creationists' websites? It's not that we get annoyed when people stray too far from accepted thinking (as I mentioned previously if you can't think for yourself you don't belong in science), it's when people do one or more of the following:
1. Misunderstand or distort what is currently understood,
2. "I don't believe it, therefore it isn't so,"
3. Combine science and religion even though science is concerned with the natural world while religion is concerned with the supernatural.
There are many world views, but science isn't concerned with any of them except the one that says we can reasonably trust our perceptions and use them to take stock of the universe in which we live. Your position as you have presented it contains the first and second errors, but what really strikes me as odd is that you know that the majority of the creationist's position is garbage but you chose to trust what they have to say over what is generally accepted by the scientific community on points you dislike. In science there is only one thing that is truly a career killer: intellectual dishonesty. This is because once anything suspect is found in that person's career, everything else is suspect as well. If the same was applied by supporters of creationism to their champions, there would be no more creationism short order.
I am member of that educated crowd (Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry, specializing in protein structure and biochemistry, not that anybody cares) who has a negative reaction to what the creationists put out but that's becuase when I was younger I spent about a year reading their books and tracts and comparing them to mainstream evolutionary books and papers while debating the matter on a local BBS. I was able to debunk everything that was thrown at me then and it's rather sad that your 20 questions by Dr. Brown (Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, a discipline not noted for its rigorous requirements in evolutionary or for that matter any biology) is the exact same as the stuff I waded through and debunked ten years ago. As for the Bombardier beetle, check here for the actual truth of the matter. Actually, read the whole talkorigins site to get what is currently believed in evolutionary biology rather than the strawmen arguments that have been fed to you by creationists. Although personal experience tells me that creationists never change their position no matter how much evidence is presented to them or how badly their arguments and even their champions are crushed please surprise me by being different and holding that "critical view" that you believe is lacking in us supporters of evolution.
One more thing: scientists are trained to be skeptical. It's our job to take a critical view of everything we read no matter what journal it got published in or who wrote it. Evolution is still the prevailing view because of its merits not because of some vast conspiracy or adherance to the status quo because if you can't ask original quesitons and attempt to find the answers you're not doing science; this is the very definition of breaking the status quo.
I checked out this link http://www.pccasegear.com.au/category45_1.htm from your site and it shows neon colored tubing that I think was used. There's lots of dyes out there that are say blue at low temp but red at high temp and are reversible. Finding one available on the market might be difficult, though.
If this guy wanted to be really cool he'd a a dye to the water cooler that changed color in response to temperature. Should be a good gradient to work with: 22 degrees C room temp and what, 90-100 degrees C right next to the chip?
There's no such thing as a slope so steep that it couldn't be logged. In Oregon, greater than 95% of the forests have been logged at least once, probably better than half has been logged twice. Since the trees live where the mountains live, slopes exceeding a 60% grade have been logged. In fact, a steep slope is easier to log. Start at the bottom and work your way up letting the logs roll or slide down the hill, causing a lot of damage (or use the cable system now). Hell we did lots of that using nothing more technologically advanced than mule teams. Should a 60% slope be logged? Of course not; about ten years later the roots will have rotted out and the hillside comes down with the next big rain. That's where intelligent regulation comes in. If you don't want your 400+ year old trees logged for peanuts, write your Congressman or whatever the down-under equivalent is. Start those petitions, agitate, hell sit in trees if necessary. Just don't gripe about the technological advances that may improve logging for people and ma nature because they just aren't to blame and won't let us log anything new.
Have you ever seen a logging operation in action? Didn't think so. The fact is that the tractors that are used tear up a good sized swath and compact the soil making it harder for the forest to re-assert itself. This six-legged beastie is a great idea if they can make it competetive with current logging vehicles as it will reduce the ecological impact that logging has and that's a good thing. It's not like all research put into logging tech is bad; for example the use of log skidders (bulldozers pushing logs from where they've been cut to where they're put on the truck) has been greatly reduced by stringing up huge cables at the top of the hill being logged. Logs are attached to said cable and are carried downhill to log landings to be put on waiting trucks. This results in less damage done to the log so less needs to be logged and fewer necessary roads and less use of skidders meaning lower environmental impact and quicker restoration of the forest.
This looks like an even grander attempt than the X-33 and the now-defunct Venturestar project. Venturestar was cancelled because it was too ambitious, wasn't it? Looks like some NASA vaporware...er vaporplane.
It may be a member of a family of significant human pathogens, but it doesn't follow that all members of that genus are pathogens. For example, Pseudomonas fluorescens is a broad group of bacteria that are not pathogenic but are commonly found in the soil and some acquatic environments. I have personally done (some small) work on a protein isolated from a P. fluorescens strain from a WW II munitions plant that allowed it to munch on TNT and related explosive compounds. Note that this is a naturally occuring evolutionary adaptation to a contaminated environment! But wouldn't it be neat to take a little of this and drop it on, say a minefield where landmines are slowly decomposing and releasing small amounts of TNT, but local P. fluorescens strains lack this explosives-munching ability due to lower environmental pressure than at a highly contaminated munitions plant? Wouldn't be even cooler to engineer the little buggers to express GFP so that they glow? Clearing a minefield might then be much easier: spray the engineered P. fluorescens strain over the minefield, wait a couple days then go in with UV light to see where the mines are. If it's bright green, don't step there!