As I am a hardcore geek, I go to movies solely to see the newest in special effects. I liked The Matrix for what it was- hard-core eye candy. Just because I criticized one of its plot elements doesn't mean I hated it or all other sci-fi movies. There are, however, science-fiction authors (Carl Sagan) who actually try to put believable science into the plot.
It is true that I have seen hundreds of cars explode and get quite bored with it. My favorite car wreck is from the Blues Brothers. At least that was original.
is the people in the movie The Matrix. What a crock! They somehow pump out more energy then they consume in "food" (nutrient solution or whatever). Perhaps it makes sense if you're taking one of those pills (what happens if you take red and blue at the same time?), but not in the real world.
What disturbs me even worse than the fact that the article is a dupe is that one of timothy's links, here(2), is an article on SARS, which is to the best of my knowledge completely unrelated to the mimivirus. Either there is a serious lack of editorial control or wild speculation.
A standard astronomer's joke begins or ends with the phrase "imagine a spherical cow." It's because they are constantly using mathematical shortcuts, like pretending something is spherical, even when it isn't, to guess its volume. A Volkswagen is the most spherical car around.
1. Not all nucleic acid is injected. At least one bacteriophage appears to be pulled into its host on a pilus. Other methods involve fusion of the viral envelope with the host's cytoplasmic membrane (like two bubbles coalescing into one), or the virus triggering the host into endocytosing it (it gets wrapped up in membrane and swallowed).
2. Some viruses use RNA instead of DNA.
3. Some are released from the host cell via non-lethal means (budding, though budding often is lethal). Many plant viruses require mechanical damage, often from the mouthparts of an insect, to get out. Another method for plant viruses is to travel through cytoplasmic connections between cells, a process that doesn't require lysis (how could a virus burst a plant cell wall anyway?).
4. Some viruses, instead of reproducing, go latent by integrating into the host DNA. Sometimes this triggers the host cell into becoming cancerous. In this case, the host, rather than bursting, becomes "immortal."
Re:It is only a matter of time...
on
World's Largest Virus
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It is in the best interest of a virus not to kill or severely impair its host. They're already evolving fast enough to keep pace with their hosts, so there's no need to invent a process to speed it up. HIV is actually not in evolutionary equilibrium with humans yet. It mutates so rapidly the immune system can't keep up with it. It will eventually learn to restrain itself, but not before it has killed millions more people.
As far as the amoebae they infect are concerned, it sucks. It's like having one of them alien thingys rip out of their... er.... chests.
But seriously, while humans were found to have antibodies against these macrovirii, it's quite possible it's because they are in the water supply and humans keep drinking them. There's no indication they produce active infections in human cells. I can't think of any viruses that switch between infecting one-celled organisms and mammals.
Since when have CCDs bled "in two perpendicular directions"? If I posted enough links of CCDs bleeding in only one dimension, would you eat a crow? From one of my favorite satellites, Yohkoh. From a random web page. A great shot of the infamous UFOs from SOHO. And finally, from the Hubble website itself, a great example of CCD bleed and diffraction spikes in the same photo! The CCD bleed is the bar, and the diffraction spikes are the crosshairs. Check your facts before you post.
From the paper in Nature, a list of the authors: H.E.Bond, A.Henden, Z.G.Levay, N.Panagia, W.B.Sparks, S.Starrfield, R.M.Wagner, R.L.M.Corradi & U.Munari
So either you're on the paper or you're not, depending on who you are.
"To create an outburst as sudden and as luminous as V838 Mon's, you have to do something pretty significant to the star," Kwitter said. "Right now we have no idea what. There are some interesting theories involving binary companion interactions or planet swallowing that may turn out to be relevant, but the truth is that nobody knows yet why this happened."
"This object got bigger and brighter and cooler, but we don't know why," Starrfield said today. "Right now we know the effects and we're trying to use the effects to determine the cause."
4. The illuminated portions of the nebula actually lie in front of the star. There hasn't been enough time to see reflections from the backs or sides of the shells. The ones we've seen are, after all, 4-7 lightyears in diameter.
5. Their distance estimate of 6 kpc was a lower limit. If anything it was even further away and brighter.
Surprise! The "star filter" effect is in the clean, unaltered image. Your small image is just too small to show them. The crosshair produced by each star is a result of diffraction of light in the telescope. Diffraction is the inevitable result of any optical system that isn't infinite in size and is often what limits the resolution of modern telescopes (in the old days it was our messy atmosphere). Diffraction from the aperture of a telescope results in pointlike light sources being resolved as a series of circles surrounding a central dot (Airy disk). The spikes come from the supports that hold the secondary mirror. They are in front of the primary mirror and therefore in the path of incoming light. You might argue that not all stars in Hubble photographs have them. This is because the stars had to be overexposed to capture the much fainter nebula.
A proper discussion would have involved momentum. I implicitly assumed the dust particles all had the same mass. It doesn't change the essence of the argument, however.
That's one of the wackiest theories I've ever heard.
1. If the star is moving at a certain velocity, then the average velocity of a particle in a cast-off shell of dust will be at the star's velocity. In other words, the star will stay centered in any spherical shell of material it gives off (yes, I know, some neutron stars get kicked out of their nebulae, but that's a far more energetic process). An interstellar wind, if present, would destroy the spherical shape of the nebula.
2. The nebula is acting as a reflector, no doubt, but it is so thin that the star is perfectly visible through it anyway. It's the red star in the photo(s).
3. The only way this could "magnify the apparent brightness" of the star is if the star and nebula were not resolvable as separate objects. Then light reflected from the nebula could be mistaken as light from the star (ignoring spectral techniques). But the photo is of a fully resolved nebula and star. A child could distinguish light from the star vs. reflected light from the nebula.
Hubble took a series of 4 photos, and you all have been looking only at the last of them. Also is a link in case you want large versions of each individual photo, and another for links for all the text, images, and video concerning the event. I'm surprised Doctor Fishboy never pointed this out.
If you want to tell the NYSE what you think about their efforts to tromp on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of information, etc., go here.
I thought 2 out of the 4 ideas were implausible. You think they all are. I might have worded things differently, because in my world being crazy ("off his nut") is not a pejorative, it is an asset. I appreciated Grinspoon's ideas enough that I responded by posting with my own kneejerk reactions to them. We certainly need thinking outside the box, but it is equally ok to point out how far outside the box an idea is.
Embryonic growth involves a complicated, precisely timed, and crucial exchange of regulatory signals between embryo and mother. The chances of accomplishing this without any living relatives (same genus) are vanishingly small. Even getting the right regulatory proteins to kick the process off in the "egg" sounds impossible. I don't believe this will work.
Slashdot Mirror
would have been nice. When's the launch window?
It is true that I have seen hundreds of cars explode and get quite bored with it. My favorite car wreck is from the Blues Brothers. At least that was original.
is the people in the movie The Matrix. What a crock! They somehow pump out more energy then they consume in "food" (nutrient solution or whatever). Perhaps it makes sense if you're taking one of those pills (what happens if you take red and blue at the same time?), but not in the real world.
What disturbs me even worse than the fact that the article is a dupe is that one of timothy's links, here(2), is an article on SARS, which is to the best of my knowledge completely unrelated to the mimivirus. Either there is a serious lack of editorial control or wild speculation.
A standard astronomer's joke begins or ends with the phrase "imagine a spherical cow." It's because they are constantly using mathematical shortcuts, like pretending something is spherical, even when it isn't, to guess its volume. A Volkswagen is the most spherical car around.
2. Some viruses use RNA instead of DNA.
3. Some are released from the host cell via non-lethal means (budding, though budding often is lethal). Many plant viruses require mechanical damage, often from the mouthparts of an insect, to get out. Another method for plant viruses is to travel through cytoplasmic connections between cells, a process that doesn't require lysis (how could a virus burst a plant cell wall anyway?).
4. Some viruses, instead of reproducing, go latent by integrating into the host DNA. Sometimes this triggers the host cell into becoming cancerous. In this case, the host, rather than bursting, becomes "immortal."
It is in the best interest of a virus not to kill or severely impair its host. They're already evolving fast enough to keep pace with their hosts, so there's no need to invent a process to speed it up. HIV is actually not in evolutionary equilibrium with humans yet. It mutates so rapidly the immune system can't keep up with it. It will eventually learn to restrain itself, but not before it has killed millions more people.
As far as the amoebae they infect are concerned, it sucks. It's like having one of them alien thingys rip out of their ... er.... chests.
But seriously, while humans were found to have antibodies against these macrovirii, it's quite possible it's because they are in the water supply and humans keep drinking them. There's no indication they produce active infections in human cells. I can't think of any viruses that switch between infecting one-celled organisms and mammals.
Since when have CCDs bled "in two perpendicular directions"? If I posted enough links of CCDs bleeding in only one dimension, would you eat a crow? From one of my favorite satellites, Yohkoh. From a random web page. A great shot of the infamous UFOs from SOHO. And finally, from the Hubble website itself, a great example of CCD bleed and diffraction spikes in the same photo! The CCD bleed is the bar, and the diffraction spikes are the crosshairs. Check your facts before you post.
Here's a link to Bond's paper in Nature.
So either you're on the paper or you're not, depending on who you are.
"To create an outburst as sudden and as luminous as V838 Mon's, you have to do something pretty significant to the star," Kwitter said. "Right now we have no idea what. There are some interesting theories involving binary companion interactions or planet swallowing that may turn out to be relevant, but the truth is that nobody knows yet why this happened."
"This object got bigger and brighter and cooler, but we don't know why," Starrfield said today. "Right now we know the effects and we're trying to use the effects to determine the cause."
5. Their distance estimate of 6 kpc was a lower limit. If anything it was even further away and brighter.
Surprise! The "star filter" effect is in the clean, unaltered image. Your small image is just too small to show them. The crosshair produced by each star is a result of diffraction of light in the telescope. Diffraction is the inevitable result of any optical system that isn't infinite in size and is often what limits the resolution of modern telescopes (in the old days it was our messy atmosphere). Diffraction from the aperture of a telescope results in pointlike light sources being resolved as a series of circles surrounding a central dot (Airy disk). The spikes come from the supports that hold the secondary mirror. They are in front of the primary mirror and therefore in the path of incoming light. You might argue that not all stars in Hubble photographs have them. This is because the stars had to be overexposed to capture the much fainter nebula.
A proper discussion would have involved momentum. I implicitly assumed the dust particles all had the same mass. It doesn't change the essence of the argument, however.
1. If the star is moving at a certain velocity, then the average velocity of a particle in a cast-off shell of dust will be at the star's velocity. In other words, the star will stay centered in any spherical shell of material it gives off (yes, I know, some neutron stars get kicked out of their nebulae, but that's a far more energetic process). An interstellar wind, if present, would destroy the spherical shape of the nebula.
2. The nebula is acting as a reflector, no doubt, but it is so thin that the star is perfectly visible through it anyway. It's the red star in the photo(s).
3. The only way this could "magnify the apparent brightness" of the star is if the star and nebula were not resolvable as separate objects. Then light reflected from the nebula could be mistaken as light from the star (ignoring spectral techniques). But the photo is of a fully resolved nebula and star. A child could distinguish light from the star vs. reflected light from the nebula.
Hubble took a series of 4 photos, and you all have been looking only at the last of them. Also is a link in case you want large versions of each individual photo, and another for links for all the text, images, and video concerning the event. I'm surprised Doctor Fishboy never pointed this out.
If you want to tell the NYSE what you think about their efforts to tromp on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of information, etc., go here.
I thought 2 out of the 4 ideas were implausible. You think they all are. I might have worded things differently, because in my world being crazy ("off his nut") is not a pejorative, it is an asset. I appreciated Grinspoon's ideas enough that I responded by posting with my own kneejerk reactions to them. We certainly need thinking outside the box, but it is equally ok to point out how far outside the box an idea is.
posted to wrong story
is here. It's not overly technical but quite detailed. And no, this stuff is not science fiction or metaphysics, it is quite real.
The "light" they were referring to was microwaves.
Superrotation caused by life? 820 degree F mountaintops covered by life? I know he's probably trying to drum up funding, but it sounds like babble.
Embryonic growth involves a complicated, precisely timed, and crucial exchange of regulatory signals between embryo and mother. The chances of accomplishing this without any living relatives (same genus) are vanishingly small. Even getting the right regulatory proteins to kick the process off in the "egg" sounds impossible. I don't believe this will work.
This was posted way back on March 13 here. There are links that don't require the intrusive NY Times registration. They are Spaceflightnow and Nature