Titan gets to poach off the magnetosphere of a little thing called Saturn.
Mars has enough gravity to hold on to some atmosphere. Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind. It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure.
Mars is a shitty place to live, and has fundamental attributes that will continue to make it a shitty place to live. If you have self-sufficient, hermetically sealed habs for a Mars settlement, you are much better off sticking them in Barstow CA. At least then you can still get Amazon Prime.
Sure it is. How is that Austin rollout going Google? I only ask because I live there and at the rate I'm seeing, I'm gonna get it around the year 2525. If man is still alive.
It might be some comfort then that such products have never, ever been sold commercially. Monsanto didn't even invent it, they happened to acquire it as part of Delta Pine and Land, which they bought because they wanted to get into the cotton business.
I've always wanted to take a derelict submarine, ship it to Barstow, California and sell 1-year+ stays to these folks and see how it affects their opinion on colonization.
All the "we must escape the cradle" arguments for colonization ignore the fact that it is really, REALLY hard to imagine a catastrophe that will render Earth as inhospitable as Mars or the Moon. As bad as the K-T extinction event was, Earth had plenty of flora and even megafauna that survived. Mars? Maybe can support some microbial life. Maybe.
If you can build a hermetically sealed, relatively self-sustaining habitat, why not plop them all over Antarctica, the Gobi or even the continental shelves?
So this time will it be headed somewhere with an endgame in mind, or will it simply be more filler because the writers have no idea how to make all the threads pay off in the end?
I'm not bitter or anything.
Ah yes. Genes that ruin reproductive success really are a serious problem when they escape into the wild populations.
Can you just take five minutes from conspiracy land and think about how that would work in the context of natural selection?
No, they happened to buy the company (which just happened to be the largest provider of cotton seed around, Delta Pine and Land) which had patented the technology. A patent which expries mid-2015, so, probably not the main reason they bought DP&L.
Hell, Monsanto NEVER sold Terminator seeds.
I find that people who rant about them as an example of the evils of Monsanto invariably don't know what the hell they are talking about. It is a nice bellwether.
My folks had the same car when I was a kid. It was great because we never had to beg the parents for the keys if we wanted to go wait in the car when we were somewhere, we just had the code.
I still read magazines but do so on my iPad
Wired, Vanity Fair, The Economist, Field and Stream. What? I like fishing.
I also read the iPad version of the NYT every morning with my coffee.
Hello person on the internet who can't descriminate a real news story from a story on a website that bills itself as "Canada's Best Satirical Newspaper". For other hard hitting facts to base your well though-out world view on, I recommend www.theonion.com
You can patent "life" (at least in the US in the form of organisms modified by humans). That ship has sailed a long time ago, see the US Supreme Court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty.
You might make a MORAL case that you should not be able to patent things this way. Your statement however, is demonstrably wrong from a legal standpoint.
FTFA: "BGI, based in China, is the world’s largest genomics research institute, with 167 DNA sequencers producing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day."
This is true, but doesn't really capture the types of experiments that are being done in many cases. Yes, your genome can be stored on a CD. However, next gen sequencing is usually done with a high degree of overlapping coverage, to catch any mistakes in the sequencing, which is still basically a biochemical process despite geting large text files as the end result. So any genome is sequenced multiple times: say 8x coverage as fairly standard. That is if you are interested in sequencing a single genome.
If you are interested in sequencing all the mRNAs that tell you which genes are active in which tissue and cell type, expect that you need to do a similar amount of sequencing for each tissue and cell type in the human body. Now imagine doing that with different experimental conditions: disease states, environmental factors etc. Of course, on top of that, you will need replicates of each experimental condition in order to have statistical power to say anything meaningful. On top of that there is the sequencing that you can do to identify differences in the epigenome: how the DNA is marked with things like methyl-groups, how it is wrapped around histones, all of which we are finding has a huge functional difference.
Having the a genome sequence is a lot like having the total word list of the english language. It is huge and powerful, but there is a lot more information you need before you can write Shakespeare.
As far as herbicides farmers use, Roundup (Glyphosate) is pretty damn innocuous to humans. It's why you can buy it buy the gallon at your local megamart and sprayed by Joe SixPack in the same grass where their kids play, when many others are highly regulated.
And if you think that farmers don't douse their crops in herbicide before they made the switch to round up, I have a little wake up call for you. Farmers have been dumping selective herbicides on crops for ever and a day now. I'm growing broadleaf plants? Dump herbicide that is toxic to grasses. Growing a grass species? Dump herbicide that is toxic to broadleaves. Either way, we are getting plants that have been thoroughly doused in chemicals. The advantage to the farmer is that instead of having to choose between selective herbicides that will still leave some weeds, a nonspecific herbicide like RoundUp can be used and take care of his weed problems. We win because a friendlier herbicide is used.
As for the Terminator system. Yes, one advantage to Monsanto was that you would have to buy seed from them every year. Don't like it? DON'T USE MONSANTO SEED. No one forced them to sign the licensing agreement. If the cost benefit isn't there, why buy the seed? The argument is sort of moot anyway: In the industrialized world farmers are buying new hybrid seed every year ANYWAY, and Terminator technology never made it into a comercial product. Mores the shame, it's a powerful technology to severely reduce the possibility of cross pollination of GM and non-gm lines. You would think the organic farmers would be all over it for their neighbors fields.
Oh well. I suppose it is easier to throw your hands in the air and go wailing "FRANKENFOOOOOOOODS!!!!!"
Percy Schmeiser lost his case because he collected seed that was obviously patented, and planted it all over his land and then made use of that trait. The only reason a farmer would plant seed in a field and then spray it with round up would be because he 1) wanted to kill all his plants or 2)Because he knew that it was round up ready seed and wanted to make use of the the trait.
If it was accidental contamination and pollen blowing in from neighboring farms, the round up contribution to his fields gene pool should have been very small. Even assuming that he didn't intentionally "swipe the seed" (which is reasonable) and plant it, he most certainly knowingly propagated those plants selectively and made use of the the trait. THAT is why he lost.
It's like if I found a copy of the White Album on my lawn. The right course of action would be to find the asshole who threw it there and charge them for littering. Instead I go and make millions of copies and sell them, and then claim ignorance because I don't know how it got in the first place there and that I have never heard of the Beatles.
Global warming is NOT about destroying the planet. You are 100% correct that climate has changed in drastic ways in the past, and that regardless of what we do with regards to greenhouse gasses, the world will tick on. The planet has tolerated having no ice at the poles and palm trees in Canada.
What you are missing is that the unprecedented RATE is what is problematic. It is like saying that drastic decreases in biodiversity don't matter because species have gone extinct in the past. The migration rate for a forest or coral reef is pretty damn slow, and that is what we are talking about: Entire ecosystems needing to relocate. And the effects on the human populace that are of such concern are directly tied to the rate as well
"One person's DNA code can be as much as 10 percent different from another's, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that questions the idea that everyone on Earth is 99.9 percent identical genetically."
It doesn't call it into question at all. The simple matter is that how you define "different" and measure the percentages makes a big difference. The human genome is ~3 billion base pairs. You can have a singe nucleotide change in a gene of say 5000 base pairs. When you compare a given gene between individuals, do you count the whole gene as being entirely different? Or do you say that it is 99.98% (4999/5000) the same?
Slashdot Mirror
Titan gets to poach off the magnetosphere of a little thing called Saturn. Mars has enough gravity to hold on to some atmosphere. Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind. It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure. Mars is a shitty place to live, and has fundamental attributes that will continue to make it a shitty place to live. If you have self-sufficient, hermetically sealed habs for a Mars settlement, you are much better off sticking them in Barstow CA. At least then you can still get Amazon Prime.
Sure it is. How is that Austin rollout going Google? I only ask because I live there and at the rate I'm seeing, I'm gonna get it around the year 2525. If man is still alive.
In that case the residents of the other 49 states would like to talk to you about their cut.
It might be some comfort then that such products have never, ever been sold commercially. Monsanto didn't even invent it, they happened to acquire it as part of Delta Pine and Land, which they bought because they wanted to get into the cotton business.
I've always wanted to take a derelict submarine, ship it to Barstow, California and sell 1-year+ stays to these folks and see how it affects their opinion on colonization. All the "we must escape the cradle" arguments for colonization ignore the fact that it is really, REALLY hard to imagine a catastrophe that will render Earth as inhospitable as Mars or the Moon. As bad as the K-T extinction event was, Earth had plenty of flora and even megafauna that survived. Mars? Maybe can support some microbial life. Maybe. If you can build a hermetically sealed, relatively self-sustaining habitat, why not plop them all over Antarctica, the Gobi or even the continental shelves?
So this time will it be headed somewhere with an endgame in mind, or will it simply be more filler because the writers have no idea how to make all the threads pay off in the end? I'm not bitter or anything.
Ah yes. Genes that ruin reproductive success really are a serious problem when they escape into the wild populations. Can you just take five minutes from conspiracy land and think about how that would work in the context of natural selection?
No, they happened to buy the company (which just happened to be the largest provider of cotton seed around, Delta Pine and Land) which had patented the technology. A patent which expries mid-2015, so, probably not the main reason they bought DP&L.
Hell, Monsanto NEVER sold Terminator seeds. I find that people who rant about them as an example of the evils of Monsanto invariably don't know what the hell they are talking about. It is a nice bellwether.
My folks had the same car when I was a kid. It was great because we never had to beg the parents for the keys if we wanted to go wait in the car when we were somewhere, we just had the code.
I still read magazines but do so on my iPad Wired, Vanity Fair, The Economist, Field and Stream. What? I like fishing. I also read the iPad version of the NYT every morning with my coffee.
Yeah, I use those while hosteling in Europe or staying in dodgy places at conferences (Grad Student). Love them.
Hello person on the internet who can't descriminate a real news story from a story on a website that bills itself as "Canada's Best Satirical Newspaper". For other hard hitting facts to base your well though-out world view on, I recommend www.theonion.com
Terminator genes have never been in a comercial product. EVER.
But can they do a BANANA shaped venn? http://boingboing.net/2012/07/12/just-look-at-that-banana-genom.html
You can patent "life" (at least in the US in the form of organisms modified by humans). That ship has sailed a long time ago, see the US Supreme Court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty. You might make a MORAL case that you should not be able to patent things this way. Your statement however, is demonstrably wrong from a legal standpoint.
FTFA: "BGI, based in China, is the world’s largest genomics research institute, with 167 DNA sequencers producing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day."
This is true, but doesn't really capture the types of experiments that are being done in many cases. Yes, your genome can be stored on a CD. However, next gen sequencing is usually done with a high degree of overlapping coverage, to catch any mistakes in the sequencing, which is still basically a biochemical process despite geting large text files as the end result. So any genome is sequenced multiple times: say 8x coverage as fairly standard. That is if you are interested in sequencing a single genome. If you are interested in sequencing all the mRNAs that tell you which genes are active in which tissue and cell type, expect that you need to do a similar amount of sequencing for each tissue and cell type in the human body. Now imagine doing that with different experimental conditions: disease states, environmental factors etc. Of course, on top of that, you will need replicates of each experimental condition in order to have statistical power to say anything meaningful. On top of that there is the sequencing that you can do to identify differences in the epigenome: how the DNA is marked with things like methyl-groups, how it is wrapped around histones, all of which we are finding has a huge functional difference. Having the a genome sequence is a lot like having the total word list of the english language. It is huge and powerful, but there is a lot more information you need before you can write Shakespeare.
Odd that the only device that automatically sent images to a locked down cloud was the Microsoft Kin. I think you are rocking some tinfoil there.
And pray it never, ever gets scratched or dinged.
As far as herbicides farmers use, Roundup (Glyphosate) is pretty damn innocuous to humans. It's why you can buy it buy the gallon at your local megamart and sprayed by Joe SixPack in the same grass where their kids play, when many others are highly regulated. And if you think that farmers don't douse their crops in herbicide before they made the switch to round up, I have a little wake up call for you. Farmers have been dumping selective herbicides on crops for ever and a day now. I'm growing broadleaf plants? Dump herbicide that is toxic to grasses. Growing a grass species? Dump herbicide that is toxic to broadleaves. Either way, we are getting plants that have been thoroughly doused in chemicals. The advantage to the farmer is that instead of having to choose between selective herbicides that will still leave some weeds, a nonspecific herbicide like RoundUp can be used and take care of his weed problems. We win because a friendlier herbicide is used. As for the Terminator system. Yes, one advantage to Monsanto was that you would have to buy seed from them every year. Don't like it? DON'T USE MONSANTO SEED. No one forced them to sign the licensing agreement. If the cost benefit isn't there, why buy the seed? The argument is sort of moot anyway: In the industrialized world farmers are buying new hybrid seed every year ANYWAY, and Terminator technology never made it into a comercial product. Mores the shame, it's a powerful technology to severely reduce the possibility of cross pollination of GM and non-gm lines. You would think the organic farmers would be all over it for their neighbors fields. Oh well. I suppose it is easier to throw your hands in the air and go wailing "FRANKENFOOOOOOOODS!!!!!"
Percy Schmeiser lost his case because he collected seed that was obviously patented, and planted it all over his land and then made use of that trait. The only reason a farmer would plant seed in a field and then spray it with round up would be because he 1) wanted to kill all his plants or 2)Because he knew that it was round up ready seed and wanted to make use of the the trait. If it was accidental contamination and pollen blowing in from neighboring farms, the round up contribution to his fields gene pool should have been very small. Even assuming that he didn't intentionally "swipe the seed" (which is reasonable) and plant it, he most certainly knowingly propagated those plants selectively and made use of the the trait. THAT is why he lost. It's like if I found a copy of the White Album on my lawn. The right course of action would be to find the asshole who threw it there and charge them for littering. Instead I go and make millions of copies and sell them, and then claim ignorance because I don't know how it got in the first place there and that I have never heard of the Beatles.
Global warming is NOT about destroying the planet. You are 100% correct that climate has changed in drastic ways in the past, and that regardless of what we do with regards to greenhouse gasses, the world will tick on. The planet has tolerated having no ice at the poles and palm trees in Canada. What you are missing is that the unprecedented RATE is what is problematic. It is like saying that drastic decreases in biodiversity don't matter because species have gone extinct in the past. The migration rate for a forest or coral reef is pretty damn slow, and that is what we are talking about: Entire ecosystems needing to relocate. And the effects on the human populace that are of such concern are directly tied to the rate as well
No one is ever going to play online multiplayer games alone in their room. I expect the genre to die off before it really gets off the ground.
"One person's DNA code can be as much as 10 percent different from another's, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that questions the idea that everyone on Earth is 99.9 percent identical genetically." It doesn't call it into question at all. The simple matter is that how you define "different" and measure the percentages makes a big difference. The human genome is ~3 billion base pairs. You can have a singe nucleotide change in a gene of say 5000 base pairs. When you compare a given gene between individuals, do you count the whole gene as being entirely different? Or do you say that it is 99.98% (4999/5000) the same?