Re:Spotting a natural diamond is possible
on
Diamond Age Coming Soon
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Not qute so. Melt-grown High pressure/high temeperature diamonds can have inclusions (tiny specs of the metal solvent) in them and a microscopic defect from the original seed crystal. Also the fancy yellow kind which Gemesis produces used to be extremely rare, so if you see one like this chances are that it is artificial. Then there is fluorescence (shine under UV) with most of these stones, although not with every one. (And a portion of natural diamonds have fluorescence also). The most reliable test is FT-infrared spedtroscopy, there are characteristic absorbtion bands in these artificial diamonds because of a different nitrogen atom distribution than in naturals.
Plasma-deposited diamonds (Apollo) are typicaly flawless, and they do not grow from a seed. So far, these tend to be small and very flat. If anything, they tend to appear "too perfect" upon inspection.
"Thanks to my American science education, I had never heard of this feat."
Don't be sad. Thanks to my soviet-era communist education, I was convinced in my school years that the Apollo maned missions to Moon are just an expenisve imperialist publicity stunt with no real scientific value.
Yea, like this 'Barnyard masturbator' job. Someone can do it every day - and get paid while doing it - I don't think they should have it in the 'worst job' category.
How many monkeys have to be used by the mice? {monk/mL}. Would it help using a sperm whale instead? Would it help employing *male* mice? (not necesserily white, protestant)
we can learn what happened before 10^-17 seconds a.b.b. and what is realy happening on Planck scale. It is pleasant worrying about problems like these.
Thanx for the link. DDT is a reasonable safe insecticide if not used indiscriminately. Current insecticides, which are mostly organophosphates, cannot be used indiscriminately because they are too toxic. If you use currently field-applied insectides (methylparathion) in your home, you can get pretty sick.
Persistance of DDT is "not a problem, it is the feature". That is what makes it work so well. Similar to the "Agent Orange" herbicide contaminated by dioxines (because US bought a very cheap heavily contaminated stuff from communist Czechs), it is the impurity in technical DDT which is far more dangerous than DDT itself.
DDT is easily manufactured from inexpensive chemical precursors. But this reaction produces besides the desired DDT (the p,p- isomer) about 10% of the other isomer, o,p-DDT. Removing this impurity from the technical stuff was usualy not done, because it is more expensive.
DDT gets slowly dechlorinated in vivo to DDD. The impurity o,p-DDT produces o,p-DDD which is a powerful endocrine disruptor (it knocks out adrenal glands). The toxic effects of o,p-DDT can take years to develop, so the problem of purity of the technical stuff was unrecognized for long time. I think they should re-introduce DDT in purified form, for a moderate use.
Btw. the nano-scare is a fad comparable to the GMO scare. These people writing novels about swarms of micron-sized self-replicating microbes invading bodies and chasing people around like swarms of hornets got the physisc funndamentaly wrong.
Mars is a very windy and cold place. Hard-shell from composite pieces - the kind of they use in Antarctica - seem more appropriate habitat. The weight of shell is not that big - compared to the weight of all the necessery food, air, water and life-support equipment. (They can place inflatable tent inside the shell - to keep the leaks down).
Gold in oceans is very diluted. But low-grade gold ore is a different matter. There are vast amounts of it in Australia, often with gold yields below the cost of extraction. Composting lousy ore with some bacteria sounds like a nice proposal (compared to the current method - macerating it with cyanide solution). Now they need to identify the useful microbes and find out how to speed up the process, 10^6 years is bit slow.
"0354 GMT (10:54 p.m. EST Sat.) Opportunity is currently 8,268 miles from Mars, traveling at 7,758 miles per hour. The craft's speed will continue to increase as the Martian gravity pulls Opportunity to the planet."
Right on target. To be confirmed by bright flash in few minutes.
There is a neuropathologist (whose name I forgot) that studies brains of deceased nuns over two decades now. He has a dela deal with nuns in several abbeys - he could test their cognitive performance in memory tests before they die and access their medical files. And slice their donated brains when they die. (The monastic orders are wonderful for having very commited patients and very controled enviroment for a human study. And wealth of long-time medical histories is available).
The post-mortem findings were very interesting. Almost every very old person at the time of death had some plaques associated with Alzheimer. And many of the heavily plaque-affected patients were obviously very lucid considering their old age. What seemed te make the difference was presence of plaques *together* with multiple microscopic strokes in dementia patients. It seems as if damage from plaques - for brain not affected by strokes - does not by itself necesserily lead to Alzheimer.
Friend saw a Belgian monastery like this. Monks on one side of the highway, brewery on the other. There was a walk-overpass with an conspicuos silvery-shiny insulated hefty pipe tagged along. They proudly explained to him that the pipe on the overpass was their "beer main" to supply the monastery on the other side of the road. There was beer on tap in the hallways in the living qarters. (My friend did not get to see their chappel, but I have my guess...)
That's why you do not put a Real Doll gift under Christmass Tree. That would spoil the fun. You put only a shovel there with instruction where to find it.
I would ask somebody to inflate your doll with helium. Then I would release the beast in some dignified public place with very high celing - like bank or opera house
It is actualy easy and rather cheap to get bulsh#t patents through. I have seen patents covering all possible variation/combination of derivatives of a natural product, which was apparently drafted without going into a trouble of making these analogs and included as a "novel" structure the very same natural products. (Natural products cannot be patented per se, only their non-obvious application or formulation). I have also seen patent preparative procedure that were completely irreproducible and probably fake.
The patents that do not conform patent law can be easily challenged even after they are issued and will not withstand the court scrutiny. The same goes even for patents that are too broad, having all-encompassing claims without sufficient number of clearly described specific examples.
Start-up biotech companies often exaggerate value of their proprietary technology to secure financing. It starts with describing their own technology as "cutting-edge", "state of the art", publishing self-promotional papers in second-tier journals demonstrating their achievements (even though the technology is not quite developed and/or does not work reliably). It includes stealing credit from competing reserch groups (claiming their discoveriies as their own, under different name and not-referencing competitors work). Far-reaching patents belong to the same category of PR-science geared towards investors.
Start-up biotech drug company needs at least 5 years - more often 10 years - before it has something to sell . It can take much longer before it starts turning profit. Even if the value is there, it still needs a lot of convincing the investors to supply huge ammount of money for so long. Burning rate $20M/y is not considered high for a normal-sized biotech company employing around 80 people.
Scientists are people like anybody else, when the job and investment is at stake, they may compromise on their research integrity.
"Just about *every* single drug today has its origins in some marine life (or bacteria/mold)."
This is simply untruth. Natural products and natural-product synthetic analogs are only a minor fraction of modern drugs. (But an important fraction).
Synthesis of natural products gets publicity. Complex molecules are very difficult to make in the lab. The academia groups are doing it for prestige and fun. But if it takes 3 grad students and 3 postdocs to complete a synthesis of a 2 mg of the material within 4 years, its probably a very good chemistry and education, but not a practical drug. Even if the natural compound is promising, you need a practical source of the material, which often means making some poor organism to produce it in insane quantities. They don't like to. They would rather die.
If you are doing drug research on a natural product, you have a head-start because you get right away something potent, often even behaving drug-like (having decent oral absorbtion, etc). But your starting material is likely to be incredibly scarce, rather finicky in terms of stability and as a medicinal chemist you will have probably have very limited choice for making changes in the final molecule. Maybe I am biased because I am lazy.
The camera probe costs as much as a new BMW. But they put a wintergreen flavor on it.
How about an active, powered probe - a suppository working its way up, getting spat out nice & clean? Could be much faster (hey, stop playing with that remote).
It is actualy the oxidation that makes U precipitate as U3O8. Thats why uranite sediments formed only after there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere.
U is not very radioactive, but inhaling the dust and especialy the decay products (radon) can give you lung cancer. And U ingested in soluble form will knock out your kidneys by damaging the glomerulles and also impair the imune system rather quickly, within few days.
I have seen a guy who poured accidentaly a little bit of solution of aceto-uranylate-sodium into his eye in the lab and the effect (swelling, followed by inflamation, etc) was pretty scary. But they saved his eye.
I am not expert, but I believe that uranium tox should be more comparable with uglies like mercury or thalium - I think comparing U toxicity to lead is misleading understatement, and that's why army is doing it.
The door into summer was my absolute favorite. The kind of story where the technicaly oriented guy survives intriques of a his slimy lawyer-buddy, gets two hibernated sleeps and one time travel, and ends up marrying a beautiful girl. Dream on, buddy.
The arctic lizards - they must have some antifreeze proteins which inhibit ice crystal nucleation, the same as arctic fish has, so it can stay overcooled for some time. People would have to be given a massive IV infusion of this stuff before this could be used.
Any outside technical people working with police are preferrable to the police' own experts: for being interested in geting their science right rather than getting their job done and over with -possibly by framing up the suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
Not qute so. Melt-grown High pressure/high temeperature diamonds can have inclusions (tiny specs of the metal solvent) in them and a microscopic defect from the original seed crystal. Also the fancy yellow kind which Gemesis produces used to be extremely rare, so if you see one like this chances are that it is artificial. Then there is fluorescence (shine under UV) with most of these stones, although not with every one. (And a portion of natural diamonds have fluorescence also). The most reliable test is FT-infrared spedtroscopy, there are characteristic absorbtion bands in these artificial diamonds because of a different nitrogen atom distribution than in naturals.
Plasma-deposited diamonds (Apollo) are typicaly flawless, and they do not grow from a seed. So far, these tend to be small and very flat. If anything, they tend to appear "too perfect" upon inspection.
"Thanks to my American science education, I had never heard of this feat."
Don't be sad. Thanks to my soviet-era communist education, I was convinced in my school years that the Apollo maned missions to Moon are just an expenisve imperialist publicity stunt with no real scientific value.
Ja ja, secret German design. (The device was called "Sieg Heil"). Had they succeeded, the weather in UK would be utterly befouled.
Yea, like this 'Barnyard masturbator' job. Someone can do it every day - and get paid while doing it - I don't think they should have it in the 'worst job' category.
How many monkeys have to be used by the mice? {monk/mL}. Would it help using a sperm whale instead? Would it help employing *male* mice? (not necesserily white, protestant)
we can learn what happened before 10^-17 seconds a.b.b. and what is realy happening on Planck scale. It is pleasant worrying about problems like these.
Thanx for the link. DDT is a reasonable safe insecticide if not used indiscriminately. Current insecticides, which are mostly organophosphates, cannot be used indiscriminately because they are too toxic. If you use currently field-applied insectides (methylparathion) in your home, you can get pretty sick.
Persistance of DDT is "not a problem, it is the feature". That is what makes it work so well.
Similar to the "Agent Orange" herbicide contaminated by dioxines (because US bought a very cheap heavily contaminated stuff from communist Czechs), it is the impurity in technical DDT which is far more dangerous than DDT itself.
DDT is easily manufactured from inexpensive chemical precursors. But this reaction produces besides the desired DDT (the p,p- isomer) about 10% of the other isomer, o,p-DDT. Removing this impurity from the technical stuff was usualy not done, because it is more expensive.
DDT gets slowly dechlorinated in vivo to DDD. The impurity o,p-DDT produces o,p-DDD which is a powerful endocrine disruptor (it knocks out adrenal glands). The toxic effects of o,p-DDT can take years to develop, so the problem of purity of the technical stuff was unrecognized for long time. I think they should re-introduce DDT in purified form, for a moderate use.
Btw. the nano-scare is a fad comparable to the GMO scare. These people writing novels about swarms of micron-sized self-replicating microbes invading bodies and chasing people around like swarms of hornets got the physisc funndamentaly wrong.
Mars is a very windy and cold place. Hard-shell from composite pieces - the kind of they use in Antarctica - seem more appropriate habitat. The weight of shell is not that big - compared to the weight of all the necessery food, air, water and life-support equipment. (They can place inflatable tent inside the shell - to keep the leaks down).
Gold in oceans is very diluted. But low-grade gold ore is a different matter. There are vast amounts of it in Australia, often with gold yields below the cost of extraction.
Composting lousy ore with some bacteria sounds like a nice proposal (compared to the current method - macerating it with cyanide solution).
Now they need to identify the useful microbes and find out how to speed up the process, 10^6 years is bit slow.
Skoda jokes:
The difference between Skoda and a Jehova Witness:
You can slam the door on Jehova Witness.
The difference between Skoda and a sheep:
It is less embarassing to be caught in a sheep.
"0354 GMT (10:54 p.m. EST Sat.)
Opportunity is currently 8,268 miles from Mars, traveling at 7,758 miles per hour. The craft's speed will continue to increase as the Martian gravity pulls Opportunity to the planet."
Right on target. To be confirmed by bright flash in few minutes.
Subconcious learning and memory improvement effect: Grades of students markedly improved after they went to bed with their teachers.
'cracked open protons and neutons like subatomic eggs to create a primordial form of matter'
Dumb analogy. Better would be "battered protons and neutrons like subatomic eggs into yolk-eggwhite sludge"
There is a neuropathologist (whose name I forgot) that studies brains of deceased nuns over two decades now. He has a dela deal with nuns in several abbeys - he could test their cognitive performance in memory tests before they die and access their medical files. And slice their donated brains when they die. (The monastic orders are wonderful for having very commited patients and very controled enviroment for a human study. And wealth of long-time medical histories is available).
The post-mortem findings were very interesting. Almost every very old person at the time of death had some plaques associated with Alzheimer. And many of the heavily plaque-affected patients were obviously very lucid considering their old age. What seemed te make the difference was presence of plaques *together* with multiple microscopic strokes in dementia patients. It seems as if damage from plaques - for brain not affected by strokes - does not by itself necesserily lead to Alzheimer.
Friend saw a Belgian monastery like this. Monks on one side of the highway, brewery on the other. There was a walk-overpass with an conspicuos silvery-shiny insulated hefty pipe tagged along. They proudly explained to him that the pipe on the overpass was their "beer main" to supply the monastery on the other side of the road. There was beer on tap in the hallways in the living qarters. (My friend did not get to see their chappel, but I have my guess...)
"But if you found out that you'd had your memory erased, they'd just erase it again!"
There could be unerasable marks of the memory erasing. For example, if they severed the neuronal connection with a dentist drill...
That's why you do not put a Real Doll gift under Christmass Tree. That would spoil the fun. You put only a shovel there with instruction where to find it.
I would ask somebody to inflate your doll with helium. Then I would release the beast in some dignified public place with very high celing - like bank or opera house
It is actualy easy and rather cheap to get bulsh#t patents through. I have seen patents covering all possible variation/combination of derivatives of a natural product, which was apparently drafted without going into a trouble of making these analogs and included as a "novel" structure the very same natural products. (Natural products cannot be patented per se, only their non-obvious application or formulation). I have also seen patent preparative procedure that were completely irreproducible and probably fake.
The patents that do not conform patent law can be easily challenged even after they are issued and will not withstand the court scrutiny. The same goes even for patents that are too broad, having all-encompassing claims without sufficient number of clearly described specific examples.
Start-up biotech companies often exaggerate value of their proprietary technology to secure financing. It starts with describing their own technology as "cutting-edge", "state of the art", publishing self-promotional papers in second-tier journals demonstrating their achievements (even though the technology is not quite developed and/or does not work reliably). It includes stealing credit from competing reserch groups (claiming their discoveriies as their own, under different name and not-referencing competitors work). Far-reaching patents belong to the same category of PR-science geared towards investors.
Start-up biotech drug company needs at least 5 years - more often 10 years - before it has something to sell . It can take much longer before it starts turning profit. Even if the value is there, it still needs a lot of convincing the investors to supply huge ammount of money for so long. Burning rate $20M/y is not considered high for a normal-sized biotech company employing around 80 people.
Scientists are people like anybody else, when the job and investment is at stake, they may compromise on their research integrity.
"Just about *every* single drug today has its origins in some marine life (or bacteria/mold)."
This is simply untruth. Natural products and natural-product synthetic analogs are only a minor fraction of modern drugs. (But an important fraction).
Synthesis of natural products gets publicity. Complex molecules are very difficult to make in the lab. The academia groups are doing it for prestige and fun. But if it takes 3 grad students and 3 postdocs to complete a synthesis of a 2 mg of the material within 4 years, its probably a very good chemistry and education, but not a practical drug. Even if the natural compound is promising, you need a practical source of the material, which often means making some poor organism to produce it in insane quantities. They don't like to. They would rather die.
If you are doing drug research on a natural product, you have a head-start because you get right away something potent, often even behaving drug-like (having decent oral absorbtion, etc). But your starting material is likely to be incredibly scarce, rather finicky in terms of stability and as a medicinal chemist you will have probably have very limited choice for making changes in the final molecule. Maybe I am biased because I am lazy.
The camera probe costs as much as a new BMW. But they put a wintergreen flavor on it.
How about an active, powered probe - a suppository working its way up, getting spat out nice & clean? Could be much faster (hey, stop playing with that remote).
But are they aware of it?
It is actualy the oxidation that makes U precipitate as U3O8. Thats why uranite sediments formed only after there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere.
U is not very radioactive, but inhaling the dust and especialy the decay products (radon) can give you lung cancer. And U ingested in soluble form will knock out your kidneys by damaging the glomerulles and also impair the imune system rather quickly, within few days.
I have seen a guy who poured accidentaly a little bit of solution of aceto-uranylate-sodium into his eye in the lab and the effect (swelling, followed by inflamation, etc) was pretty scary. But they saved his eye.
I am not expert, but I believe that uranium tox should be more comparable with uglies like mercury or thalium - I think comparing U toxicity to lead is misleading understatement, and that's why army is doing it.
The door into summer was my absolute favorite. The kind of story where the technicaly oriented guy survives intriques of a his slimy lawyer-buddy, gets two hibernated sleeps and one time travel, and ends up marrying a beautiful girl. Dream on, buddy.
The arctic lizards - they must have some antifreeze proteins which inhibit ice crystal nucleation, the same as arctic fish has, so it can stay overcooled for some time. People would have to be given a massive IV infusion of this stuff before this could be used.
Any outside technical people working with police are preferrable to the police' own experts: for being interested in geting their science right rather than getting their job done and over with -possibly by framing up the suspect.