Obi-wan in the original trilogy: "The Emperor knew that if Vader were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him."
Why? Because force sensitivity is heritable, and passed down to children from parents. This was not a new notion that Lucas suddenly introduced in the new movies.
When I was at UC Berkeley, their bioengineering/mechanical engineering shared computer lab was all Sun. My senior year, they were all magically replaced with Dells running Red Hat. It actually made life a lot easier, because it's much easier to find obscure bioinformatics software with Linux ports.
Right now, most university's aren't sure what 'Bioengineering' actually is. Is is device design? Genetic manipulation? Bioinformatics? Mathematical modeling? In truth, it's all those things...but what do they all have in common that warrants being under a single major? My degree is in Bioengineering (from Berkeley) and the program there is a mess. You basically take a hodge podge of courses from other departments, with no real theme to tie it together. The job market makes this approach even worse. Companies know the skillset of your basic, off the shelf chemical engineer. Same with EE/CS. But what skills can you assume a BioE has? MIT was probably just waiting until it had answers to some of these questions...something Berkeley would have been well served to do, rather than rush in and create a department with no real purpose.
I doubt we'll ever see an iPhone. The Economist did an analysis of this from Apple's perspective a while back. Market research indicated that people who use an iPod tend to immerse themselves in the music, and are almost never observed to be switching between their iPod and a cellular phone. According to the article, Apple concluded that adding cell phone or PDA functionality would therefore just be a distraction for users.
I think it's unlikely that the recombinant adenovirus they created is attracked by the overproduction of telomerase. I read both the article and their lab's page....they are very vague as to exactly how they target the virus specifically to cancerous cells. There are lots of ways to artificially kill cell in vivo, but cancer cells are almost always impossible to distinguish from the untransformed type. After reading the patent itself, they apparently placed the ADP (adenovirus death protein...the 'smart bomb') under the control of telomerase regulatory elements. Thus, any cell constituitively expressing telomerase (i.e. cancer cells) will be lysed by this virus. A couple concerns spring to mind: 1) how to eliminate the virus after treatment? Just because it's not lysing non-cancerous cells doesn't mean it can't infect them. 2) cells susceptible to adenoviruses. Adenoviruses enter through mucus membranes in the lungs, etc. and initially infect the epithelial layers. I think you might have trouble targeting these recombinant viruses to, say, brain or other kinds of cancer located in remote regions.
If you'd studied evolutionary biology at all (or even just read any phylogenomics), you'd know that nature is actually very inefficient. I've also worked in molecular biology and bioinformatics (at Berkeley) enough to realize that stuff evolves to be "just good enough," and no better. Computer science has always been driven by completing tasks as efficiently as possible. It's romantic to dream of biological computers someday running in reaction tubes, but giving up real efficiencies in the silicon world for fanciful efficiencies in the biologic is like trying to run backwards as fast as you can.
When I took intro EE at Berkeley last year, the mathematical lecture portion was coupled with the hands-on lab part. We actually got to build rudimentary robots (CalBots) at the end. The experience was a good one, and I think other universities should adopt this sort of merger between the practical and the esoteric.
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The figures in that document have the little cat version of clippy enabled...
Unfortunately, no money from Prop. 71 has been spent yet due to a lawsuit filed by groups opposed to stem cell research.
Integrate.
A cooperative of independents? Now I've seen everything...
Obi-wan in the original trilogy: "The Emperor knew that if Vader were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him." Why? Because force sensitivity is heritable, and passed down to children from parents. This was not a new notion that Lucas suddenly introduced in the new movies.
When I was at UC Berkeley, their bioengineering/mechanical engineering shared computer lab was all Sun. My senior year, they were all magically replaced with Dells running Red Hat. It actually made life a lot easier, because it's much easier to find obscure bioinformatics software with Linux ports.
Right now, most university's aren't sure what 'Bioengineering' actually is. Is is device design? Genetic manipulation? Bioinformatics? Mathematical modeling? In truth, it's all those things...but what do they all have in common that warrants being under a single major? My degree is in Bioengineering (from Berkeley) and the program there is a mess. You basically take a hodge podge of courses from other departments, with no real theme to tie it together. The job market makes this approach even worse. Companies know the skillset of your basic, off the shelf chemical engineer. Same with EE/CS. But what skills can you assume a BioE has? MIT was probably just waiting until it had answers to some of these questions...something Berkeley would have been well served to do, rather than rush in and create a department with no real purpose.
I doubt we'll ever see an iPhone. The Economist did an analysis of this from Apple's perspective a while back. Market research indicated that people who use an iPod tend to immerse themselves in the music, and are almost never observed to be switching between their iPod and a cellular phone. According to the article, Apple concluded that adding cell phone or PDA functionality would therefore just be a distraction for users.
I think it's unlikely that the recombinant adenovirus they created is attracked by the overproduction of telomerase. I read both the article and their lab's page....they are very vague as to exactly how they target the virus specifically to cancerous cells. There are lots of ways to artificially kill cell in vivo, but cancer cells are almost always impossible to distinguish from the untransformed type. After reading the patent itself, they apparently placed the ADP (adenovirus death protein...the 'smart bomb') under the control of telomerase regulatory elements. Thus, any cell constituitively expressing telomerase (i.e. cancer cells) will be lysed by this virus. A couple concerns spring to mind: 1) how to eliminate the virus after treatment? Just because it's not lysing non-cancerous cells doesn't mean it can't infect them. 2) cells susceptible to adenoviruses. Adenoviruses enter through mucus membranes in the lungs, etc. and initially infect the epithelial layers. I think you might have trouble targeting these recombinant viruses to, say, brain or other kinds of cancer located in remote regions.
If you'd studied evolutionary biology at all (or even just read any phylogenomics), you'd know that nature is actually very inefficient. I've also worked in molecular biology and bioinformatics (at Berkeley) enough to realize that stuff evolves to be "just good enough," and no better.
Computer science has always been driven by completing tasks as efficiently as possible. It's romantic to dream of biological computers someday running in reaction tubes, but giving up real efficiencies in the silicon world for fanciful efficiencies in the biologic is like trying to run backwards as fast as you can.
When I took intro EE at Berkeley last year, the mathematical lecture portion was coupled with the hands-on lab part. We actually got to build rudimentary robots (CalBots) at the end. The experience was a good one, and I think other universities should adopt this sort of merger between the practical and the esoteric.
I recommend Gravity's Rainbow...tough, but it'll knock you down.