As I understand it, the attractiveness of a male is determined at least partially by what time of the month it is when he is being viewed.
I'm far too lazy to look up the study, but as I remember it, some programmers designed a program where you could adjust the physical and facial features of an on-screen avatar using a couple of dials. Participants in the study were told to adjust the dials until they had made the most attractive person they could. For the guys, the results were consistent across the board, minimal amounts of deviation from average. On the other hand, the women had results all across the spectrum (height was the only consistent characteristic, taller was better). This confused the researchers, so they had the same group of women come back in 2 weeks and redo the test. Surprisingly, the avatar a woman found most attractive was totally different than the one she had chosen earlier. After repeating this a couple of times, they found that what she was attracted to had a lot to do with whether or not she was ovulating.
So, if a girl is ovulating, she will find the scruffy, pickup-truck driving, impulsive jerk to be her ideal sexual fantasy. A week later, she wants the clean-shaven office worker in the suit.
Again, take this with a grain of salt, as I assume absolutely no liability for the accuracy of what I've written here; and even less responsibility for how you interpret it.
This reminds me of the problems with employers running criminal background checks on all applicants. I've known people personally who were denied offers because a record popped up in the search when they submitted a name to a background check agency. The record that popped up was, of course, someone who matched in name only; race, age, maiden name, and everything else didn't at all match. The location where it happened was over 2000 miles from their residence at the time. And to make it a little more ridiculous, it was a record of a simple misdemeanor; shoplifting $20 worth of clothes from a Belk.
It is of course, the applicants responsibility to verify these types of public records prior to seeking employment (when arguably they ought to be able to sue the background check agency for defamation instead). And now there's the problem of having to check whether the government even considers you alive.
What's worse is that now this reputable report will be circulated to the gullible. I can see this being circulated to people via e-mail with a spoofed link in it to "Make sure the government still has you listed correctly in their IRS database." All it would ask for is a few relevant details: name, birthday, address, SSN, bank account numbers, etc... No better way to sell a scam than to bank on paranoia.
Generally speaking, we don't consider viruses to be alive. The reasoning for this is that they are not capable of replication anywhere outside of a host cell. They don't really metabolize anything; they don't reproduce on their own. To be more specific, there has yet to be a virus whose genetic makeup includes the genes to construct a ribosome (IIRC, genes for most other organelles have been found in viral genomes - see mimivirus). Without a ribosome RNA instructions cannot be translated into a protein structure.
A virus is essentially genetic material (RNA or DNA) coupled with a few enzymes, all wrapped in an envelope (protein with or without a lipid membrane). However, despite being non-living, they do evolve, and evolutionary trees for viruses have been constructed. They're just separate from the three-domain model we're talking about here.
Good point. However, the results page does tell you which issues you agreed on and disagreed on for each candidate.
As a side note, I was fairly surprised by the results it gave me. Ron Paul and Mitt Romney at the top of the list was expected, HRC at number 3 was not.
Imagine the Gamefaqs walkthrough on games like these: "If you're running into too many Orcs, try moving across the state, or hiding in the woods. No, not your in-game avatar. You physically. Oh, and never play in crowded cities or subways, that's just asking for hurt."
I had a longer response to this typed up, but it was nearly incomprehensible. Here are the main points:
1: There's only about 20k-25k protein-coding genes (ORFs - open reading frames) in the genome.
2: There's a lot more going on in our cells than we know about. About a third of the mRNA transcripts in a cell can't be adequately explained by our current understanding of transcription.
3: Of the genetic diseases we know of, they can all (AFAIK) be explained by polymorphisms in the ORFs, or their associated regulatory elements. In other words, point #2 may not be as big of a deal as you'd think.
4: Sequencing your entire genome is entirely impractical. First, because a complete transcript is nearly impossible (centromeres and telomeres especially, but SINE and LINE elements as well); and Second, because our current tools wouldn't be able to pick out the unexplainable transcripts anyway. Then there's the matter of cost...
5: Due to the fact that they're targeting SNPs, I'm assuming that they're using a variation of Affymetrix or Nimblegen's microarray technology. SNPs alone won't explain some genetic conditions like Angelman and Prader Willi syndromes, which are due to genomic imprinting rather than coding sequences. (Same mutation, totally different phenotype - the difference is which parent passes the gene on to you). Diseases arising due to methylation or histone modification won't necessarily be detected in a SNP analysis.
In short, depending on how the SNPs were selected, the 550k may not be as limited as it sounds, and it's a big improvement over other available options. Having the sequence in its entirety may not have any real advantage over just checking the 550k SNPs. As far as privacy concerns go, proceed with caution.
First of all, I think it's amusing that that the first post was modded as "redundant", but on to the topic at hand:
Biology has at least 1 famous 'Surfer Dude'; Kary Mullis. The guy was granted the Nobel prize for inventing PCR (polymerase chain reaction) which is arguably the most important processe in modern genetics or biotechnology. From what I know of the guy, he's a complete whack-job as well, claiming that hallucinogenic drugs led him to the discovery. He surfs frequently as well. Add in a few alien abduction stories and some other relatively crazy stuff and you get an idea of what he's like. Still, it's hard to argue with a Nobel prize winner.
My guess is that democracy represents some kind of religion for them
Democracy is the national religion. Think about it this way: Vietnam and the war in Iraq are just another crusade to force democracy on the heathens. The book or the sword indeed.
{sarcasm}
Oh! Maybe they blame the scientists for screwing up the mice for that many generations (too many weird chemicals in the lab). After all, scientists aren't examining nature (in which animals don't evolve) in this study. They're examining mice that they trained to evolve! Scientists are making up the so-called evidence right? Yeah, they make freaky mice in a laboratory, but that doesn't mean that everything else evolves does it? {/sarcasm}
I find it strange that organisms would allow *any* viruses etc. to tinker with its DNA.
That's kinda what viruses do. The virus by itself cannot reproduce (that's why it's normally not considered to be 'alive') - it has to hijack a cell's reproduction machinery to do the reproducing for it. In order to hijack the cell, it inserts its own viral DNA (or RNA - depends on the virus) into the cell's genomic DNA, and reprograms the cell to make more viruses.
Often, if the cell doesn't die from the infection, it passes on the viral genes as well when the cell reproduces. Our own human genome has a significant amount of viral DNA in it; most of it has been inactivated, but we still produce some viral proteins in very small amounts (reverse transcriptase for instance). I once heard the estimate that a full 15% of our genome has viral origins, but cannot find any reference to verify this claim at the moment - take it with a large grain of salt.
Now, cells do have several mechanisms that they use to defend against viral attacks. Most notably, restriction endonucleases. These are enzymes that chop up the DNA at certain sites. We use these enzymes all the time in genetics work. If you've seen images of agarose or acrylamide gels with patterns of lines on them, that's usually DNA that's been chopped into pieces by some of these endonucleases, and then separated by size. Restriction endonucleases are commonly found in bacteria, but can also be found in lower eukaryotes like yeasts. Another method for defending against viral attacks is RNAses (enzymes that chew up RNA). This primarily works against viruses that use RNA as their genetic material. There's also the trick of marking your own genes with methyl groups so that you can tell the difference between it and foreign DNA, (if it's not marked, destroy it). Eukaryotes typically destroy any DNA found in the cytoplasm. So yeah, the cell does have several methods to defend against viral attack.
But I suppose it may spend more energy to defend the sensitive areas such that those areas that are more flexible to mutations are not as well protected; meaning they get hit more.
Once the virus genes have been inserted, removing them is quite difficult. Generally, viruses don't have a specific site that they insert to either, it's typically inserted at random. The reason that our own genes don't get significantly interrupted is that the majority of our genome doesn't code for anything; viruses insert themselves into areas we aren't using anyhow.
It's been known for quite a while that certain sections of the genome mutate faster than others. Areas where the genes are less likely to mutate are typically referred to as 'conserved' regions, and most genome browsers will even indicate which regions they are. The UCSC genome browser is great for checking things like this (http://genome.ucsc.edu/). With that browser, you can look up genes and compare them to the coding sequences in other animals.
For very highly conserved genes such as the homeobox sequences, the degree of conservation is enormous. Nearly everything has the homeobox -or 'hox' sequence, and the sequence itself hasn't changed significantly (in comparison to most other genes). tRNA sequences as well don't change significantly; neither do ribosomal genes. Some stuff you simply can't change without experiencing lethal (or at least highly detrimental) results.
Other regions such as non-coding regions, and introns to a lesser extent, can be mutated significantly without any change to the phenotype of the organism. In fact, this is what a lot of DNA fingerprinting is based on - big variations in sequence lengths and other polymorphisms between individuals. These variations don't occur frequently enough within coding sequences to be of any use in identification. Rather, they check the non-coding areas and other mutational hotspots for differences. Conversely, changes in the protein-coding regions can be used to determine the relatedness between species (say, human and chimp differences, or rat and mouse) on a much longer scale.
Now, having said that, there are always exceptions. Some organisms have entirely novel mutation patterns. The influenza virus (admittedly, not an organism in the traditional sense) mutates almost exclusively in the coding areas of its envelope proteins. Even stranger, only 1 strain of the virus seems to survive every year to propagate the next. (See the 2001 article by Bull and Wichman entitled "Applied Evolution" in the journal 'Annual Review of Ecological Systems".)
Basically, what I'm saying is that the fact that some parts of the genome mutate faster than others is something we already know. This isn't necessarily news. The only way I can think that this would be significant is that lab mice are generally thought to be basically genetically identical. They're normally inbred for about 20 generations (most don't survive past 7) to ensure the homozygosity of the mice. Inbred mice like this are valuable because the way they react is consistent and reproducible (traits that are mainstays of science). If they're mutating faster than we expected, it may have an affect on the reliability of the studies done with these mice.
It's not with the video games but rather in the toy section with the board games and dolls.
Hate to point this out here, but not all wal-marts stock their stores according to the standard motif. There's 2 wal-marts in my town here (State College, PA) and while one of them has it with the knockoffs and board games, the other store stocks it on the rack across the aisle from the Wii games*. There's a clear intention to deceive.
If you buy a cheap LCD game and somehow think you've bought a Wii, then you probably needed to do a little more research before leaving the house.
That would be great as long as you were fluent in the local language. I've known many immigrant families who have been fooled simply because the packaging wasn't in a language they could immediately understand. To further the problem, once these people realize that they've made an error, returning the item is an exercise in frustration. Explaining the reason for the return when the bigoted customer service drone doesn't even try to understand you is an act akin to public humiliation. Stores are more than happy to take your money, but they don't like to give it back.
These types of items are designed with deceit as their purpose; taking advantage of the gullible and those too embarrassed to defend themselves. In a way, it reminds me of the penis pills. It's something you purchase in either wild hope or simple ignorance. Even though it's defective, getting a return is totally unfeasible (no refund from the supplier, and the gatekeeper to recompense requires that you humiliate yourself).
*at leas that's where it was when I was there 2 days ago.
Chuck Palahniuk (same guy who wrote fight club) actually wrote a book (entitled "Lullaby") with this concept behind it.
One of the characters is a real estate agent who intentionally works with houses that are haunted. She sells the house to a couple and collects her relator fees. As the hauntings get worse, the couple contacts her and try to move somewhere else. She tells them that unless they can *prove* that the house is haunted, and that the previous owner knew it was haunted when they sold it, there's no way to get out of the contract without taking a loss. The couple decides to sell the house, and once again she collects her realator fees.
One of her goals is to collect enough of these high turnover rate houses that she can live off of all the fees.
Perhaps they're attempting to set a precedent that will allow them to sue virtually everyone (though I'm honestly unsure if the UK law works that way).
Why not use the old RIAA trick and just sue speaker manufacturers for "making available" the copyrighted material? Deeper pockets there anyhow.
It's not just about having media to install from, it's that the windows installer will *only* accept media from a floppy drive. No USB drives (unless your BIOS allows you to map it as a floppy). No CDs. No files from another Hard drive. No networked or internet files.
I assume that Microsoft fixed this in Vista, but years of dealing with it in XP has been a source of sufficient frustration that my next install will likely be Ubuntu.
The compact unit can be used to: (1) take cell samples, (2) extract the DNA, (3) perform polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification to generate copies of the DNA, (4) perform electrophoresis to measure the spacing between DNA bands (to create the genetic fingerprint), and (5) perform short tandem repeat (STR) analysis to create a unique genetic profile for the individual,"
As I'm currently a grad student in biotechnology (and am performing similar processes in the lab), I feel compelled to respond to their claims on processing time. Taken step by step; 1: simple enough, although some cells are more suitable to DNA work than others. 2: the main obstacles in extracting DNA are proteins and prokaryotic contamination in the sample. DNA is almost always complexed with proteins like polymerases and histones. These proteins effectively prevent the DNA from migrating through agarose or acrylamide; the resulting electrophoresis bands would be almost meaningless. Prokaryotes are pretty much ubiquitous. The problem is that they carry their own DNA which can confuse results, and they carry endonucleases which chop apart most any DNA they come in contact with; destroying the reliability of the gel electrophoresis. Endonuclease digestion of DNA is standard fare for genetics, and I'm assuming that it's performed here, but the contamination of unknown endonucleases from uncharacterized bacteria causes problems regardless. Time required to separate the DNA from the proteins: 1 hour at best. 3: PCR incubation time depends on the length of the DNA chains being amplified, and the initial size of your sample. 10 minutes would be a best case scenario, and that's with ideally sized DNA fragments (whole-genome DNA is far too large), and a large initial sample (not likely). 4: As mentioned previously, protein contamination can make the electrophoresis results almost unreadable. Furthermore, moving that much DNA through a gel in such a short time requires very high voltages. The banding which results from high voltages is generally very blurred, making the 'fingerprint" unreadable. Moreover, whole-genome DNA doesn't really separate into bands; it makes big long smears, so standard staining practice is useless for diagnostics. The last gel I ran with genomic DNA (corn in this case) required about 45 minutes, and that was a small gel using high voltage. 5: STR analysis is touchy. Basically, you use a radioactive or chemoluminescent probe on both the genomic DNA, and a DNA with known STR lengths and compare how bright the sample is compared to the standard. An accurate reading requires a fairly precise estimate of the amount of DNA in your sample; a measure that usually requires a well-calibrated photospectrometer that also needs time to warm up and be calibrated. To further complicate matters, your DNA is in a gel. Getting the tagged probe into the gel (or getting the sample DNA back out of the gel) so that annealing can occur takes time. A southern blot (process involving the removal of DNA from a gel) is usually allowed to run overnight. After annealing takes place, the extra probe molecules are washed away. If excess stray probe is allowed to sit around, or if the annealing isn't complete in the first place, the measurement becomes unreliable. The minimum time I would think feasible for this step would be an hour. In a lab, the labeling alone is normally a 3 hour process. Accuracy would suffer tremendously as time decreases.
So yeah, in conclusion, their time frame for getting results is obscenely short. Severly truncated time frames produce equally severe errors. I don't personally know any scientist who would vouch for the validity of these results.
I got you beat on that one. Assuming that the punctuation hasn't changed between the copy I have in front of me and the original, the King James version of the Bible beats your poem by about 100 years. According to Wikipedia, the KJV was first published in 1611.
Here's a list of a few places where it occurs: Matt 6:32 Matt 24:15 Mark 5:13 (this one's a winking smiley) Mark 15:41 Acts 18:2 Romans 2:15 2 Corinthians 5:7 2 Samuel 14:26 1 Kings 8:39,42 1 Chronicles 5:2 1 Chronicles 6:10 Psalms 7:4 Ecclesiastes 8:16
The smiley is found in many other locations in both the New and the Old Testaments. Truth be told, finding and highlighting the things was one of the only tricks that allowed me to get through the Old Testament. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to stay awake. I've tried searching for them using various Bible search engines, but the string is just too short. I concede that their presence in the text may be an artifact unique to the edition I have (printed in 1979). However, I can provide scans to verify my claims, (though there still is the big assumption that my text here uses the same punctuation as the original).
Due to the fact that we live in a republic, and the continued existence of the electoral college, your vote has already been sold.
What I mean is that our votes don't directly influence the decisions about who goes into office, or what laws get ratified. In a true democracy, that would be the case. However, we live in a republic where we vote for individuals who theoretically share our interests. In essence, by electing a politician, we grant that politician custody of our voting rights. We let them do the politicking while we go about our daily lives.
Summary: Your vote has already been sold. You gained no monetary profit thereby. And you didn't really have a whole lot of choice on who it was sold to.
Now, I know this rant doesn't answer the question you asked (as I read it anyway). I just saw it as an opportunity to point out how insubstantial our relationship to our governors really is. Go ahead and mod me as flamebait.
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...a qualifying version, including 95/98/Me...
Interestingly enough, even the first gen "XP Pro Corporate" disc qualifies as valid media. At least it does when installing XP home SP2 upgrade.
As I understand it, the attractiveness of a male is determined at least partially by what time of the month it is when he is being viewed.
I'm far too lazy to look up the study, but as I remember it, some programmers designed a program where you could adjust the physical and facial features of an on-screen avatar using a couple of dials. Participants in the study were told to adjust the dials until they had made the most attractive person they could. For the guys, the results were consistent across the board, minimal amounts of deviation from average. On the other hand, the women had results all across the spectrum (height was the only consistent characteristic, taller was better). This confused the researchers, so they had the same group of women come back in 2 weeks and redo the test. Surprisingly, the avatar a woman found most attractive was totally different than the one she had chosen earlier. After repeating this a couple of times, they found that what she was attracted to had a lot to do with whether or not she was ovulating.
So, if a girl is ovulating, she will find the scruffy, pickup-truck driving, impulsive jerk to be her ideal sexual fantasy. A week later, she wants the clean-shaven office worker in the suit.
Again, take this with a grain of salt, as I assume absolutely no liability for the accuracy of what I've written here; and even less responsibility for how you interpret it.
Well, you just need a new line then. Here's one courtesy of bash.org:
{Edofnor} #1 pickup line of all time: "Hey, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
you would lose the offer with zero recourse.
This reminds me of the problems with employers running criminal background checks on all applicants. I've known people personally who were denied offers because a record popped up in the search when they submitted a name to a background check agency. The record that popped up was, of course, someone who matched in name only; race, age, maiden name, and everything else didn't at all match. The location where it happened was over 2000 miles from their residence at the time. And to make it a little more ridiculous, it was a record of a simple misdemeanor; shoplifting $20 worth of clothes from a Belk.
It is of course, the applicants responsibility to verify these types of public records prior to seeking employment (when arguably they ought to be able to sue the background check agency for defamation instead). And now there's the problem of having to check whether the government even considers you alive.
What's worse is that now this reputable report will be circulated to the gullible. I can see this being circulated to people via e-mail with a spoofed link in it to "Make sure the government still has you listed correctly in their IRS database." All it would ask for is a few relevant details: name, birthday, address, SSN, bank account numbers, etc... No better way to sell a scam than to bank on paranoia.
Generally speaking, we don't consider viruses to be alive. The reasoning for this is that they are not capable of replication anywhere outside of a host cell. They don't really metabolize anything; they don't reproduce on their own. To be more specific, there has yet to be a virus whose genetic makeup includes the genes to construct a ribosome (IIRC, genes for most other organelles have been found in viral genomes - see mimivirus). Without a ribosome RNA instructions cannot be translated into a protein structure.
A virus is essentially genetic material (RNA or DNA) coupled with a few enzymes, all wrapped in an envelope (protein with or without a lipid membrane). However, despite being non-living, they do evolve, and evolutionary trees for viruses have been constructed. They're just separate from the three-domain model we're talking about here.
Good point. However, the results page does tell you which issues you agreed on and disagreed on for each candidate.
As a side note, I was fairly surprised by the results it gave me. Ron Paul and Mitt Romney at the top of the list was expected, HRC at number 3 was not.
Imagine the Gamefaqs walkthrough on games like these: "If you're running into too many Orcs, try moving across the state, or hiding in the woods. No, not your in-game avatar. You physically. Oh, and never play in crowded cities or subways, that's just asking for hurt."
A comment from the poll in question is likely what caused this story to be posted anyway.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=383149&cid=21618577
So we can't really call it a coincidence either.
I had a longer response to this typed up, but it was nearly incomprehensible. Here are the main points:
1: There's only about 20k-25k protein-coding genes (ORFs - open reading frames) in the genome.
2: There's a lot more going on in our cells than we know about. About a third of the mRNA transcripts in a cell can't be adequately explained by our current understanding of transcription.
3: Of the genetic diseases we know of, they can all (AFAIK) be explained by polymorphisms in the ORFs, or their associated regulatory elements. In other words, point #2 may not be as big of a deal as you'd think.
4: Sequencing your entire genome is entirely impractical. First, because a complete transcript is nearly impossible (centromeres and telomeres especially, but SINE and LINE elements as well); and Second, because our current tools wouldn't be able to pick out the unexplainable transcripts anyway. Then there's the matter of cost...
5: Due to the fact that they're targeting SNPs, I'm assuming that they're using a variation of Affymetrix or Nimblegen's microarray technology. SNPs alone won't explain some genetic conditions like Angelman and Prader Willi syndromes, which are due to genomic imprinting rather than coding sequences. (Same mutation, totally different phenotype - the difference is which parent passes the gene on to you). Diseases arising due to methylation or histone modification won't necessarily be detected in a SNP analysis.
In short, depending on how the SNPs were selected, the 550k may not be as limited as it sounds, and it's a big improvement over other available options. Having the sequence in its entirety may not have any real advantage over just checking the 550k SNPs. As far as privacy concerns go, proceed with caution.
First of all, I think it's amusing that that the first post was modded as "redundant", but on to the topic at hand:
Biology has at least 1 famous 'Surfer Dude'; Kary Mullis. The guy was granted the Nobel prize for inventing PCR (polymerase chain reaction) which is arguably the most important processe in modern genetics or biotechnology. From what I know of the guy, he's a complete whack-job as well, claiming that hallucinogenic drugs led him to the discovery. He surfs frequently as well. Add in a few alien abduction stories and some other relatively crazy stuff and you get an idea of what he's like. Still, it's hard to argue with a Nobel prize winner.
My guess is that democracy represents some kind of religion for them
Democracy is the national religion. Think about it this way: Vietnam and the war in Iraq are just another crusade to force democracy on the heathens. The book or the sword indeed.
Reminds me of a joke I heard (while working with drosophila in the lab coincidentally):
Q: What do you call a fly with no wings?
A: A crawl.
Maybe the religious types have earlier bedtimes?
{sarcasm}
Oh! Maybe they blame the scientists for screwing up the mice for that many generations (too many weird chemicals in the lab). After all, scientists aren't examining nature (in which animals don't evolve) in this study. They're examining mice that they trained to evolve! Scientists are making up the so-called evidence right? Yeah, they make freaky mice in a laboratory, but that doesn't mean that everything else evolves does it?
{/sarcasm}
I find it strange that organisms would allow *any* viruses etc. to tinker with its DNA.
That's kinda what viruses do. The virus by itself cannot reproduce (that's why it's normally not considered to be 'alive') - it has to hijack a cell's reproduction machinery to do the reproducing for it. In order to hijack the cell, it inserts its own viral DNA (or RNA - depends on the virus) into the cell's genomic DNA, and reprograms the cell to make more viruses.
Often, if the cell doesn't die from the infection, it passes on the viral genes as well when the cell reproduces. Our own human genome has a significant amount of viral DNA in it; most of it has been inactivated, but we still produce some viral proteins in very small amounts (reverse transcriptase for instance). I once heard the estimate that a full 15% of our genome has viral origins, but cannot find any reference to verify this claim at the moment - take it with a large grain of salt.
Now, cells do have several mechanisms that they use to defend against viral attacks. Most notably, restriction endonucleases. These are enzymes that chop up the DNA at certain sites. We use these enzymes all the time in genetics work. If you've seen images of agarose or acrylamide gels with patterns of lines on them, that's usually DNA that's been chopped into pieces by some of these endonucleases, and then separated by size. Restriction endonucleases are commonly found in bacteria, but can also be found in lower eukaryotes like yeasts.
Another method for defending against viral attacks is RNAses (enzymes that chew up RNA). This primarily works against viruses that use RNA as their genetic material. There's also the trick of marking your own genes with methyl groups so that you can tell the difference between it and foreign DNA, (if it's not marked, destroy it). Eukaryotes typically destroy any DNA found in the cytoplasm. So yeah, the cell does have several methods to defend against viral attack.
But I suppose it may spend more energy to defend the sensitive areas such that those areas that are more flexible to mutations are not as well protected; meaning they get hit more.
Once the virus genes have been inserted, removing them is quite difficult. Generally, viruses don't have a specific site that they insert to either, it's typically inserted at random. The reason that our own genes don't get significantly interrupted is that the majority of our genome doesn't code for anything; viruses insert themselves into areas we aren't using anyhow.
It's been known for quite a while that certain sections of the genome mutate faster than others. Areas where the genes are less likely to mutate are typically referred to as 'conserved' regions, and most genome browsers will even indicate which regions they are. The UCSC genome browser is great for checking things like this (http://genome.ucsc.edu/). With that browser, you can look up genes and compare them to the coding sequences in other animals.
For very highly conserved genes such as the homeobox sequences, the degree of conservation is enormous. Nearly everything has the homeobox -or 'hox' sequence, and the sequence itself hasn't changed significantly (in comparison to most other genes). tRNA sequences as well don't change significantly; neither do ribosomal genes. Some stuff you simply can't change without experiencing lethal (or at least highly detrimental) results.
Other regions such as non-coding regions, and introns to a lesser extent, can be mutated significantly without any change to the phenotype of the organism. In fact, this is what a lot of DNA fingerprinting is based on - big variations in sequence lengths and other polymorphisms between individuals. These variations don't occur frequently enough within coding sequences to be of any use in identification. Rather, they check the non-coding areas and other mutational hotspots for differences. Conversely, changes in the protein-coding regions can be used to determine the relatedness between species (say, human and chimp differences, or rat and mouse) on a much longer scale.
Now, having said that, there are always exceptions. Some organisms have entirely novel mutation patterns. The influenza virus (admittedly, not an organism in the traditional sense) mutates almost exclusively in the coding areas of its envelope proteins. Even stranger, only 1 strain of the virus seems to survive every year to propagate the next. (See the 2001 article by Bull and Wichman entitled "Applied Evolution" in the journal 'Annual Review of Ecological Systems".)
Basically, what I'm saying is that the fact that some parts of the genome mutate faster than others is something we already know. This isn't necessarily news. The only way I can think that this would be significant is that lab mice are generally thought to be basically genetically identical. They're normally inbred for about 20 generations (most don't survive past 7) to ensure the homozygosity of the mice. Inbred mice like this are valuable because the way they react is consistent and reproducible (traits that are mainstays of science). If they're mutating faster than we expected, it may have an affect on the reliability of the studies done with these mice.
It's not with the video games but rather in the toy section with the board games and dolls.
Hate to point this out here, but not all wal-marts stock their stores according to the standard motif. There's 2 wal-marts in my town here (State College, PA) and while one of them has it with the knockoffs and board games, the other store stocks it on the rack across the aisle from the Wii games*. There's a clear intention to deceive.
If you buy a cheap LCD game and somehow think you've bought a Wii, then you probably needed to do a little more research before leaving the house.
That would be great as long as you were fluent in the local language. I've known many immigrant families who have been fooled simply because the packaging wasn't in a language they could immediately understand. To further the problem, once these people realize that they've made an error, returning the item is an exercise in frustration. Explaining the reason for the return when the bigoted customer service drone doesn't even try to understand you is an act akin to public humiliation. Stores are more than happy to take your money, but they don't like to give it back.
These types of items are designed with deceit as their purpose; taking advantage of the gullible and those too embarrassed to defend themselves. In a way, it reminds me of the penis pills. It's something you purchase in either wild hope or simple ignorance. Even though it's defective, getting a return is totally unfeasible (no refund from the supplier, and the gatekeeper to recompense requires that you humiliate yourself).
*at leas that's where it was when I was there 2 days ago.
Chuck Palahniuk (same guy who wrote fight club) actually wrote a book (entitled "Lullaby") with this concept behind it.
One of the characters is a real estate agent who intentionally works with houses that are haunted. She sells the house to a couple and collects her relator fees. As the hauntings get worse, the couple contacts her and try to move somewhere else. She tells them that unless they can *prove* that the house is haunted, and that the previous owner knew it was haunted when they sold it, there's no way to get out of the contract without taking a loss. The couple decides to sell the house, and once again she collects her realator fees.
One of her goals is to collect enough of these high turnover rate houses that she can live off of all the fees.
No, but it just might be in charge of Gundam.
Perhaps they're attempting to set a precedent that will allow them to sue virtually everyone (though I'm honestly unsure if the UK law works that way).
Why not use the old RIAA trick and just sue speaker manufacturers for "making available" the copyrighted material? Deeper pockets there anyhow.
It's not just about having media to install from, it's that the windows installer will *only* accept media from a floppy drive. No USB drives (unless your BIOS allows you to map it as a floppy). No CDs. No files from another Hard drive. No networked or internet files.
I assume that Microsoft fixed this in Vista, but years of dealing with it in XP has been a source of sufficient frustration that my next install will likely be Ubuntu.
From TFA:
The compact unit can be used to:
(1) take cell samples,
(2) extract the DNA,
(3) perform polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification to generate copies of the DNA,
(4) perform electrophoresis to measure the spacing between DNA bands (to create the genetic fingerprint), and
(5) perform short tandem repeat (STR) analysis to create a unique genetic profile for the individual,"
As I'm currently a grad student in biotechnology (and am performing similar processes in the lab), I feel compelled to respond to their claims on processing time. Taken step by step;
1: simple enough, although some cells are more suitable to DNA work than others.
2: the main obstacles in extracting DNA are proteins and prokaryotic contamination in the sample. DNA is almost always complexed with proteins like polymerases and histones. These proteins effectively prevent the DNA from migrating through agarose or acrylamide; the resulting electrophoresis bands would be almost meaningless. Prokaryotes are pretty much ubiquitous. The problem is that they carry their own DNA which can confuse results, and they carry endonucleases which chop apart most any DNA they come in contact with; destroying the reliability of the gel electrophoresis. Endonuclease digestion of DNA is standard fare for genetics, and I'm assuming that it's performed here, but the contamination of unknown endonucleases from uncharacterized bacteria causes problems regardless. Time required to separate the DNA from the proteins: 1 hour at best.
3: PCR incubation time depends on the length of the DNA chains being amplified, and the initial size of your sample. 10 minutes would be a best case scenario, and that's with ideally sized DNA fragments (whole-genome DNA is far too large), and a large initial sample (not likely).
4: As mentioned previously, protein contamination can make the electrophoresis results almost unreadable. Furthermore, moving that much DNA through a gel in such a short time requires very high voltages. The banding which results from high voltages is generally very blurred, making the 'fingerprint" unreadable. Moreover, whole-genome DNA doesn't really separate into bands; it makes big long smears, so standard staining practice is useless for diagnostics. The last gel I ran with genomic DNA (corn in this case) required about 45 minutes, and that was a small gel using high voltage.
5: STR analysis is touchy. Basically, you use a radioactive or chemoluminescent probe on both the genomic DNA, and a DNA with known STR lengths and compare how bright the sample is compared to the standard. An accurate reading requires a fairly precise estimate of the amount of DNA in your sample; a measure that usually requires a well-calibrated photospectrometer that also needs time to warm up and be calibrated. To further complicate matters, your DNA is in a gel. Getting the tagged probe into the gel (or getting the sample DNA back out of the gel) so that annealing can occur takes time. A southern blot (process involving the removal of DNA from a gel) is usually allowed to run overnight. After annealing takes place, the extra probe molecules are washed away. If excess stray probe is allowed to sit around, or if the annealing isn't complete in the first place, the measurement becomes unreliable. The minimum time I would think feasible for this step would be an hour. In a lab, the labeling alone is normally a 3 hour process. Accuracy would suffer tremendously as time decreases.
So yeah, in conclusion, their time frame for getting results is obscenely short. Severly truncated time frames produce equally severe errors. I don't personally know any scientist who would vouch for the validity of these results.
I got you beat on that one. Assuming that the punctuation hasn't changed between the copy I have in front of me and the original, the King James version of the Bible beats your poem by about 100 years. According to Wikipedia, the KJV was first published in 1611.
Here's a list of a few places where it occurs:
Matt 6:32
Matt 24:15
Mark 5:13 (this one's a winking smiley)
Mark 15:41
Acts 18:2
Romans 2:15
2 Corinthians 5:7
2 Samuel 14:26
1 Kings 8:39,42
1 Chronicles 5:2
1 Chronicles 6:10
Psalms 7:4
Ecclesiastes 8:16
The smiley is found in many other locations in both the New and the Old Testaments. Truth be told, finding and highlighting the things was one of the only tricks that allowed me to get through the Old Testament. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to stay awake. I've tried searching for them using various Bible search engines, but the string is just too short.
I concede that their presence in the text may be an artifact unique to the edition I have (printed in 1979). However, I can provide scans to verify my claims, (though there still is the big assumption that my text here uses the same punctuation as the original).
According to Fight Club (Authored by Chuck Palahniuk), It is the yardstick of civilization.
Due to the fact that we live in a republic, and the continued existence of the electoral college, your vote has already been sold.
What I mean is that our votes don't directly influence the decisions about who goes into office, or what laws get ratified. In a true democracy, that would be the case. However, we live in a republic where we vote for individuals who theoretically share our interests. In essence, by electing a politician, we grant that politician custody of our voting rights. We let them do the politicking while we go about our daily lives.
Summary: Your vote has already been sold. You gained no monetary profit thereby. And you didn't really have a whole lot of choice on who it was sold to.
Now, I know this rant doesn't answer the question you asked (as I read it anyway). I just saw it as an opportunity to point out how insubstantial our relationship to our governors really is. Go ahead and mod me as flamebait.
Well then, we'll just have to make Methane powered jets!