Some bacteria replicate every 20 minutes. That's 72 opportunities a day for them to catch onto at least the beginnings of a method to bypass an antibiotic. And mutations are to increasing environmental survivability as brute force cracking is to opening a file with 2056-bit XYZ+ encryption. It'll work eventually, but 99.99999% of the time (literally) you and your entire family tree are long dead before anything significant happens.
You are underestimating the mutation rate of bacteria, as vertical inheritance is not the only mechanism for mutations. Look up Horizontal (or Lateral) Gene Transfer. Living cells can acquire genes from other cells. In bacteria, it was measured at one successful transfer per generation (in E. Coli). Genes can be acquired from environment, through plasmids, injected by viruses, recombined with other bacteria (a.k.a. bacterial sex), etc. Transfer doesn't have to be from the same species (whatever definition of species you use). Transfers can be cross-species, cross-phyla or even cross-domain. A useful trait like resistance will spread very very quickly.
The problem with antibiotics is that they a very strong selection pressure on bacteria: they kill them. And a stressed cell will have enhanced mutagenesis (look up stress-induced mutagenesis). No living being likes to be killesd, so we all have mechanisms to adapt to that situation. When you have anitbiotics, not only the bad bacteria can develop resistance. Also the harmless bacteria can develop resistance, and then transfer it to bad ones.
An alternative is not to kill bacteria, but to trick bad bacteria into expressing their pathogenicity (a very energetically demanding process) when their numbers are very small, so the other harmless bacteria can outnumber them to irrelevance. A way to do this is called Quorum Sensing Spoofing (hijacking of inter-bacterial communication), which is in very early research stages.
notice how he used the word "accusations" instead of anything that would imply the necessity of evidence.
In older times, the role of punishing people due to accusations (without need for evidence) was carried out by the Inquisition.
Nobody expects the Canuck Inquisition!
Well, of course, as any of my students would immediately ask "what about lamarckian evolution?" (an alternative explanation for the process of evolution, largely rejected or falsified by observations)
...and then you start looking at microbes, which show evolution patterns that can be described as Lamarckian (e.g. antibiotic resistance gathered through horizontal gene transfer, phenotypic switching (a.k.a. phase variation) in biofilms).
Take a look at Prefuse. I haven't used it myself (I considered it for a project), but it may have the right mix of a good Java API and flexibility/customizability that you're looking for. As a bonus, it's BSD licensed. YMMV. Good luck.
I don't know what country are you looking at, but if you're trying to call, say, Chile, T-Mobile is 10 times more expensive than Skype or other VoIP offerings, according to the links you posted. And for $10 a month you can get up to 10,000 minutes to many countries in Skype.
Being a grad student at Illinois I can tell you something. You really don't know about the University's accounting system. It can literally index every atom in campus (not that they need to). That's why 640 won't be enough:)
Also, the supercomputer will require the construction of a new power plant. Seriously.
Just FYI, one of the technicians working in this experiment used to work in a nuclear submarine, I presume taking care of the cooling of a reactor. I don't know what kind of reactors they use in the Navy, but Dr. Lathrop told me that this guy knows how to handle liquid sodium.
(Disclaimer: I'm in a collaboration with Lathrop's lab, though in another experiment.)
On average, a disk drive can last as long as the MTBF number. What are the chances that you have an average drive? They are slim. Each component in the drive, every resistor, every capacitor, every part has an MTBF. They also have tolerance values: that is to say they are manufactured to a value with a given tolerance of accuracy. Each tolerance has to be calculated as one component out of tolerance could cause failure of complete sections of the drive itself. When you start calculating that kind of thing it becomes similar to an exercise in calculating safety on the space shuttle... damned complex in nature. Read up on some "Reliability Theory." It's not that complex, and it can give simple and meaningful results, even on complex systems. BTW, I'd love to get a hold of hard disk data and run it through some math. It'll probably be very obvious why they were withholding the data in the first place.
To say that "they change to become resistant" is misleading, because you are suggesting a single bacteria changes within the span of it's own life cycle to become resistant. Organisms (specially bacteria and archaea) DO have the capability of changing their own genome. You might want to learn a bit of something called "Horizontal/Lateral Gene Transfer." You might want to understand the role of plasmids, transposons, conjugation, transfection, homologous vs non-homologous recombination, hell, even the role of viruses in HGT. I gave you enough keywords, now google them or even look in wikipedia.
HGT is a known mechanism. Pure mutation cannot explain how microbes became drug-resistant in such a short amount of time, neither how different bacterial "species" are able to acquire the same resistance genes.
PS: Just to dwell a bit into the micro vs macro pseudo-dichotomy... Part of the confusion I think arises because the definition of species as a set of phenotypic characters is misleading. And rather useless in the microbial world. That's why genotypic characterization has become so powerful. It gives a whole lot more information, even about the role of non-genetic, 'junk' DNA.
Insight Broadband in Champaign Prepare for the worst. Insight gave the major portion of its coverage area to Comcast (I don't really know the status of the agreement before this, but I'm certain that Comcast was involved with Insight all the time). The actual name change should happen next year. I think you can read about it in the Daily Illini, News Gazette (I don't have the links at hand, sorry).
When my mother passed away in January, I had to fly internationally to go to her funeral. You don't know how much shi^H^H^H screening I had to put up with just for paying at the counter, besides myself being emotionally distressed.
72 hrs is just, well... no need to repeat what most/.ers are saying now.
Was it the movie Mission to Mars that featured something like a DNA sequence transmitted through music? If so, would that count as some sort of prior art?
You don't get a say until you start paying taxes.... So what can we do as non-immigrant, non-permanent, legal, F1 visa-holding, tax-paying residents of the US? That is, besides voting with my wallet (which is not useful in this case)?
And with CDs so easy to rip and resell, used CD stores are little more than rent-to-steal shops these days. Don't forget that some public libraries have big CD and DVD collections. Or as you may call them, borrow-to-steal shops.
I know MayaVi, it's a very cool package, but I wasn't been able to run it before. I should try again.
Also, speaking of cool VTK stuff, there is VisIt (http://www.llnl.gov/visit/). Seems very cool, and it's BSD-licensed (can they do that? they redistribute Qt with it...)
Slashdot Mirror
Some bacteria replicate every 20 minutes. That's 72 opportunities a day for them to catch onto at least the beginnings of a method to bypass an antibiotic. And mutations are to increasing environmental survivability as brute force cracking is to opening a file with 2056-bit XYZ+ encryption. It'll work eventually, but 99.99999% of the time (literally) you and your entire family tree are long dead before anything significant happens.
You are underestimating the mutation rate of bacteria, as vertical inheritance is not the only mechanism for mutations. Look up Horizontal (or Lateral) Gene Transfer. Living cells can acquire genes from other cells. In bacteria, it was measured at one successful transfer per generation (in E. Coli). Genes can be acquired from environment, through plasmids, injected by viruses, recombined with other bacteria (a.k.a. bacterial sex), etc. Transfer doesn't have to be from the same species (whatever definition of species you use). Transfers can be cross-species, cross-phyla or even cross-domain. A useful trait like resistance will spread very very quickly.
The problem with antibiotics is that they a very strong selection pressure on bacteria: they kill them. And a stressed cell will have enhanced mutagenesis (look up stress-induced mutagenesis). No living being likes to be killesd, so we all have mechanisms to adapt to that situation. When you have anitbiotics, not only the bad bacteria can develop resistance. Also the harmless bacteria can develop resistance, and then transfer it to bad ones.
An alternative is not to kill bacteria, but to trick bad bacteria into expressing their pathogenicity (a very energetically demanding process) when their numbers are very small, so the other harmless bacteria can outnumber them to irrelevance. A way to do this is called Quorum Sensing Spoofing (hijacking of inter-bacterial communication), which is in very early research stages.
Dismissing non-believers as heretics/trolls makes you an ideologue and renders the platform unattractive to regular users.
yet, for some reason, Apple has succeeded despite its users.
You might be aware of the current answer: CSS web fonts... now available in the current breed of beta/alpha browsers.
notice how he used the word "accusations" instead of anything that would imply the necessity of evidence.
In older times, the role of punishing people due to accusations (without need for evidence) was carried out by the Inquisition. Nobody expects the Canuck Inquisition!
Well, of course, as any of my students would immediately ask "what about lamarckian evolution?" (an alternative explanation for the process of evolution, largely rejected or falsified by observations)
...and then you start looking at microbes, which show evolution patterns that can be described as Lamarckian (e.g. antibiotic resistance gathered through horizontal gene transfer, phenotypic switching (a.k.a. phase variation) in biofilms).
Take a look at Prefuse. I haven't used it myself (I considered it for a project), but it may have the right mix of a good Java API and flexibility/customizability that you're looking for. As a bonus, it's BSD licensed. YMMV. Good luck.
No, that's the beauty of it. When global warming comes, they'll all cook to death!
There, I fixed it for you.
I don't know what country are you looking at, but if you're trying to call, say, Chile, T-Mobile is 10 times more expensive than Skype or other VoIP offerings, according to the links you posted. And for $10 a month you can get up to 10,000 minutes to many countries in Skype.
fark.com has this type of banning implemented, and thoroughly abused by moderators, since a while ago...
Being a grad student at Illinois I can tell you something. You really don't know about the University's accounting system. It can literally index every atom in campus (not that they need to). That's why 640 won't be enough :)
Also, the supercomputer will require the construction of a new power plant. Seriously.
Just FYI, one of the technicians working in this experiment used to work in a nuclear submarine, I presume taking care of the cooling of a reactor. I don't know what kind of reactors they use in the Navy, but Dr. Lathrop told me that this guy knows how to handle liquid sodium. (Disclaimer: I'm in a collaboration with Lathrop's lab, though in another experiment.)
Dan Lathrop works at the University of Maryland... probably you already have other reasons to stay out of thar region of the US.
HGT is a known mechanism. Pure mutation cannot explain how microbes became drug-resistant in such a short amount of time, neither how different bacterial "species" are able to acquire the same resistance genes.
PS: Just to dwell a bit into the micro vs macro pseudo-dichotomy... Part of the confusion I think arises because the definition of species as a set of phenotypic characters is misleading. And rather useless in the microbial world. That's why genotypic characterization has become so powerful. It gives a whole lot more information, even about the role of non-genetic, 'junk' DNA.
ten-dot-oh will be comtastic from now on
When my mother passed away in January, I had to fly internationally to go to her funeral. You don't know how much shi^H^H^H screening I had to put up with just for paying at the counter, besides myself being emotionally distressed.
/.ers are saying now.
72 hrs is just, well... no need to repeat what most
Here you have another one from them:
Patent number: 6354479
Filing date: Feb 25, 2000
Issue date: Mar 12, 2002
Inventors: Steven Frederick Reiber, Mary Louise Reiber
Was it the movie Mission to Mars that featured something like a DNA sequence transmitted through music? If so, would that count as some sort of prior art?
Or as you may call them, borrow-to-steal shops.
I know MayaVi, it's a very cool package, but I wasn't been able to run it before. I should try again.
Also, speaking of cool VTK stuff, there is VisIt (http://www.llnl.gov/visit/). Seems very cool, and it's BSD-licensed (can they do that? they redistribute Qt with it...)
Quick question... after reading their PR stuff I still wonder:
/Yes, I run it in Linux
Does it still use those ugly, outdated widgets in the front-end?
Good point... Lately I've been using software based on the VTK library, and I must say, it's beautiful, it makes Mathematica look very outdated.
Though my biggest complaint is the front end, as always (reading through the site it seems they still use those outdated widgets...)