Much is spent every year on drugs (and research for drugs) that deliver medicine directly to certain parts of the alimentary tract. For instance - some drugs for the relatively common Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis (both which can affect the small and large bowel), travel through the digestive system in order to deliver their payloads to the diseased areas topically. It seems to me that such a device could not only be used as a diagnostic tool, but could also be used to deliver meds directly in such cases.
Just a thought.
Evolutionary Biologists have long known some of the mechanisms of speciation. And any freshman in any college intro to Population Biology class knows these quite well...
For instance, one of these mechanisms is spatial segregation, in which some members of a single population become physically separated from another group of that population, by some phenomenon (think changing tidal patterns/river flow paths). This physical separation causes reproductive segregation/separation that leads to speciation by non-shared mutation.
Another is behavioral segregation, which has been mentioned in this thread (orcas hunting fish vs hunting mammals), which leads to social exclusion and, again, reproductive segregation.
Finally, there is selective segregation, which refers to segregation of members of a population due to proficiency at some task necessary for survival. For instance, the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos Islands are under quite strong selective pressure surrounding the size and shape of their beaks. Some finches with long and thin beaks are able to feed on fruit that has small holes in the fruit body, while other members of the same species have larger and stronger beaks that they may use to crack open other kinds of seeds. When food is plentiful, both phenotypes are able to get along just fine on seeds and fruits that lie inbetween these extremes, but when selective pressure is applied (in the form of a famine, perhaps), this small phenotypic difference in beak size/shape results in survival for these two, now more genetically distinct, genotypes, while those finches that fall inbetween the two extremes tend to not survive. If such a selective pressure (famine) lasts for long enough, the two resultant populations may achieve speciation.
All of these mechanisms have something in common, they all require reproductive segregation of some sort. This research is all at least 10 years old, and this article is just scientific fluff.
For an extremely interesting and pertinent read, try The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner.
I'm a part of a student org called SIN (Student Information Network) here at William and Mary that runs a set of services for the campus community, http://sin.wm.edu. We've been running for around 5 or so years. The current site is written in PHP and PostGreSQL.
We have an online book exchange that is decently popular, and a bunch of other services.
As far as the source, we arn't quite ready to open up the source, but we are working towards that goal!
Actually, civilian GPS units' accuracy hasn't been that bad for a few years.
Unaugmented GPS receivers have an accuracy of about 10m. What the poster was referring to was back in the day when SA or "Selective Availability" was still in effect. Clinton terminated SA in 2000, and it hasn't been put back into effect since the military can enforce theatre-based SA.
Augmented GPS (via coast gaurd DGPS or FAA WAAS) often has an accuracy of 3m.
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Much is spent every year on drugs (and research for drugs) that deliver medicine directly to certain parts of the alimentary tract. For instance - some drugs for the relatively common Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis (both which can affect the small and large bowel), travel through the digestive system in order to deliver their payloads to the diseased areas topically. It seems to me that such a device could not only be used as a diagnostic tool, but could also be used to deliver meds directly in such cases. Just a thought.
Evolutionary Biologists have long known some of the mechanisms of speciation. And any freshman in any college intro to Population Biology class knows these quite well...
For instance, one of these mechanisms is spatial segregation, in which some members of a single population become physically separated from another group of that population, by some phenomenon (think changing tidal patterns/river flow paths). This physical separation causes reproductive segregation/separation that leads to speciation by non-shared mutation.
Another is behavioral segregation, which has been mentioned in this thread (orcas hunting fish vs hunting mammals), which leads to social exclusion and, again, reproductive segregation.
Finally, there is selective segregation, which refers to segregation of members of a population due to proficiency at some task necessary for survival. For instance, the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos Islands are under quite strong selective pressure surrounding the size and shape of their beaks. Some finches with long and thin beaks are able to feed on fruit that has small holes in the fruit body, while other members of the same species have larger and stronger beaks that they may use to crack open other kinds of seeds. When food is plentiful, both phenotypes are able to get along just fine on seeds and fruits that lie inbetween these extremes, but when selective pressure is applied (in the form of a famine, perhaps), this small phenotypic difference in beak size/shape results in survival for these two, now more genetically distinct, genotypes, while those finches that fall inbetween the two extremes tend to not survive. If such a selective pressure (famine) lasts for long enough, the two resultant populations may achieve speciation. All of these mechanisms have something in common, they all require reproductive segregation of some sort. This research is all at least 10 years old, and this article is just scientific fluff.
For an extremely interesting and pertinent read, try The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner.
I'm a part of a student org called SIN (Student Information Network) here at William and Mary that runs a set of services for the campus community, http://sin.wm.edu. We've been running for around 5 or so years. The current site is written in PHP and PostGreSQL. We have an online book exchange that is decently popular, and a bunch of other services. As far as the source, we arn't quite ready to open up the source, but we are working towards that goal!
Actually, civilian GPS units' accuracy hasn't been that bad for a few years.
Unaugmented GPS receivers have an accuracy of about 10m. What the poster was referring to was back in the day when SA or "Selective Availability" was still in effect. Clinton terminated SA in 2000, and it hasn't been put back into effect since the military can enforce theatre-based SA.
Augmented GPS (via coast gaurd DGPS or FAA WAAS) often has an accuracy of 3m.
Interesting you bring this up, as the student group I am in developed this backend before we started on the publishing system!