Makes me wonder if this is an organism which has adapted to tolerate the damage from arsenic which would kill us.
This organism, almost certainly not. Most of these extremophiles are miserably slow growers (the doubling time was ~2 days vs 20 minutes for E. coli), so unless there's a niche somewhere in your body that allows the extremophile's adaptations to be a major advantage, it would never gain a foothold in your body as the many strains of bacteria we symbiotically live with will outcompete it for resources.
But as to the more general question of whether any dangerous extremophiles exist out there - this is a recurring topic of speculation (over beer) amongst those that work with pathogenic microbes. Consensus seems to be that it's not impossible that an extremophile such as an archaea, or, in this case, a protobacteria could potentially be an opportunistic pathogen as well, but we haven't found one yet so it's probably not a common occurrence. The organism in this press release is a distant, distant cousin of helicobacter Pylori, an acid-loving bacteria which causes ulcers and is linked with gastric cancer, so it's not insane to think it could happen. Just unlikely.
So I have a bad attitude about a guy who took a shit job and does it to the bare minimum? He could quit if he's so pissed. And honestly, does a janitor have a multitude of people scrubbing the floor for them? Your analogy is weak at best. If he cannot pony up and teach... then leave.
It wasn't an analogy, it was a salary comparison. He could be the worst prof ever, I've never had him so I can't say. But you seriously expect someone teaching a 600 person class to not have teaching assistants? Do you seriously think its his fault the department has no incentive to hire more instructors, or *horrors* force their tenured professors to teach more so that students actually get individualized, quality instruction?
If your beef is that this is a "I'll pretend to teach if you'll pretend to learn" scenario then I agree with you. If you think guys like this, even the really bad ones, however, are somehow the cause and not the symptoms of a broken system, however, then I still disagree.
After looking at this video, I have to add, this guy is a tool. He is EVERYTHING that's wrong with education today. He's a fat lazy ass who feels he's entitled because of his position. Yet he cheats the very students at whom he's pissed. If he felt like he was delivering a good product in his education career he'd NEVER used canned tests. He'd also have fresh material that needed to have a new test created each and every time. Instead uses canned lectures and he's got a bank of assistants to do his bidding while he packs on the pounds and years to get to retirement. Teaching is an easy job for this type of person because they do it once and repeat until they retire. Using the moral high ground is just a way of deflecting the fact that he couldn't even write a good test.
You are aware that he's an instructor, and therefore not tenured, right? And that all he does is teach classes like this one? And that his salary is probably inbetween that of a janitor and a nurse on a good year? Also, that he WRITES management textbooks that are in use in many classes other than his? And probably the test question answer banks as well?
So I'm not sure where your 'tude comes from. Teaching on a contract is a miserable way to live, with 0 prospects for career advancement and constant uncertainty if you'll still have an income next semester even if you've got decades of experience.
There certainly are lazy professors out there that don't give a hoot about education, nor is the system set up to encourage them to change that in anyway, but this is one of the guys that has to pick up the broken pieces of the system. And when you consider that there are many schools that are now charging more for tuition per student per year than the non-tenured instructors actually make doing the instructing (in classes with triple-digit enrollments), you'll see they are being just as screwed by the system as the students are.
Or in this case, "not responsible if your passive-aggressive neighbor decides to clean up your river for you".
Am I the only one noticing that these troops did not seem to have a military objective but were in fact on some sort of conservation mission?
Or maybe this is like when you disagree where your yard boundry is and you "accidentally" mow down your neighbor's rose bushes while tidying up your lawn. . .
If you've ever studied astronomy, then you would know that faint signals need to be acquired for as long as possible in order to get good signal to noise.
I have studied astronomy, and it's abundantly clear you have not. ("Geostationary orbit would let you look all night long"? ROTFLMAO. There is no night in space you moron.)
Well, I'll be sure to let the next planning committee know that future space telescopes should be placed in as low an Earth orbit as possible and not to worry about stars being eclipsed by the earth, and not to worry about where the shadow of the earth with respect to the sun is whatever you decide to call that.
Clearly these are unimportant details best left to scientific experts such as yourself, who are infinitely more eloquent in trying to explain basic science concepts to a lay audience.
ROTFLMAO. You can point away from Earth from *any* altitude - go out in the street and look up, and you're looking away from Earth *right at ground level*.
If you've ever studied astronomy, then you would know that faint signals need to be acquired for as long as possible in order to get good signal to noise. Being in a low Earth orbit where you circle the earth every 90 minutes (and hence nighttime is only 45 minutes) is a logistical tracking and signal/noise nightmare for something that is meant to look at very faint signals from very far away. Geostationary orbit would let you look at the same object all night long, and if you went to a Lagrange point you would never have to worry about the Earth blocking your view.
It is great, however, if you want to keep track of what is changing on the ground every hour and half.
I thought people fly in rockets and visit space stations and the moon because it's cool. I don't care if no scientific progress comes out of it - I like space travel because it's awesome. Similarily, I'm not attracted to science, mathematics or technology for their practical uses, but because it's fun understanding how the world works, being able to calculate things and think up and admire cool (preferably huge) machines.
Maybe if you work for spaceshipone, you can legitimately say that. The US industrial-military complex, however, made rockets and went to the moon because we had to beat those darn Russkies . Once that motivation (and the associated infinite budgets went away), NASA was left holding the bag trying to figure out what types of science could be done with things that were designed in an era of infinite budgets and intimate military support that no-longer existed.
How many scientists did we actually put on the moon? Exactly one, and he was the last one to set foot on it.
Next exhibit - the space shuttle. The amount of useful things it could do were severely gimped because the Air Force wanted a low-orbit heavy lifter, whereas most science payloads were smaller and would have benefited from being in higher orbits (so they can point AWAY from the Earth instead of towards it). And once the air-force decided they were better off using non-manned rockets to deploy their spy satellites, NASA was left high and dry with something they could barely afford to maintain, never afford to replace, but also didn't actually do the things they needed it to do.
As a big supporter of space science and someone whose father has worked at NASA his entire career, I will still maintain that any possibly useful scientific justification for the ISS was gimped from day one once the cold war ended and budgets became ever increasingly small. Early drafts for the station had on-board observatories (imagine how much easier AND cheaper that would have been to fix than doing that mission-impossible stunt to fix the Hubble) as well as an array of labs to test everything from solar propulsion to human physiology in zero G. What we actually ended up with is this giant white elephant that does nothing in particular well, that we are constantly begging other countries to help us run, and the toilets don't even work reliably. And all of that money could have been spent on real space science, like a couple thousand mars rovers or dozens of Hubbles or what have you.
So for me, it's not a question of if we should fund space science even if it's expensive and there's no immediate return. We fund art too, and I would argue it makes society richer for similar reasons. But we can't pretend that cost doesn't matter in an era of forever shrinking federal science budgets, not to mention the gov't has many more pressing problems it needs to worry about. We need science agencies that can be small and nimble, retain the best talent in the field and reliably get the most bang for the scientific buck. Instead we have these bloated, hyper-political agencies that lost their best talent to industry years ago, have 12 layers of middle management fighting tooth and nail about what logo to use in the next press release defending giant, gimpy white elephant projects of limited scientific usefulness that was pitched to congress as a job creation strategy for someone's homestate. This was never a winning formula.
This sounds almost exactly like turnitin.com where when one uploads a paper to it, it searches almost anything it can get ahold of and will list any text in any academic journal that is copied verbatim.
An apt analogy. Imagine the following scenario: you are simultaneously enrolled in a two classes that both require a lengthy essay which constitutes a large portion of your final grade. You find the two assignments to have similar enough parameters and decide to submit the same essay to both teachers without any prior approval for the double-dipping, thus making it appear you have spent more effort than you actually have. You are only "plagarizing yourself", so no harm, right?
Doubtful.
Self-plagarism is unethical if there is an intent to deceive, it has little to do with copyright. Teachers aren't using turnitin to make sure copyright infringers pay royalties, they are trying to find out who is cheating.
if you resubmit your own work, it's not plagiarism.
Let me clarify the issue for those not accustomed to the rules of scientific publishing.
There IS a thing as self-plagarism, and it's not necessarily a minor offense. At it's core, if you submit essentially the same work to multiple venues with the intent to pass each off as an independent body of work when they are not, then there is intent to deceive and that is an ethical breach of conduct. Worst case scenario, the author list and abstract has been changed just enough that it leads others to believe this particular experiment has actually been independently confirmed and duplicated when it has not.
Most journals require that you affirm that the same manuscript is not currently under consideration for publication in another journal and has not already been published in a highly similar form elsewhere (except maybe as a conference abstract). This is different than re-submission, where a manuscript was rejected from one publication and you are now free to send to to another venue. And then there is the copyright issue, that as authors you are not necessarily the sole copyright holder (often the journal has some claim), in which case a duplicate publication is actually a violation of the journal's copyright.
There is also the case where one, comprehensive study is artificially split into smaller, less meaningful sub studies with the intent to pad publication counts (there was an example of a prenatal intervention study where the effects on the mothers and on the infants for the exact same study were published separately without any reference to each other, diminishing the usefulness of the study). This is now not a copyright issue but now a scientific integrity issue, presumably the medical audience of such a study could be harmed by not being told both sets of outcomes for the same study in any sort of obvious way.
The main reason these patents were allowed was to help refund the costs of the research into these genes. By forcing researchers, drug companies, ect. to license the use of the gene, it helped the initial team of researchers/parent company recover the money they sunk into finding the gene.
The implication of this ruling is a loss of profitability via research. Whether this is actually the case or not will be determined by time.
Yes, but you are looking at the wrong end of the drug pipeline. The ultimate goal of said research is for actual therapies and treatments to be invented, which can then enjoy patent protection. Patenting the gene itself creates a highly restrictive environment where only those with agreements with the patent holder can even consider embarking on the (much more costly and difficult) search for a treatment.
There are researchers in the community, BTW, that are now legally barred from working on disease treatments for genes they discovered because they felt it was unreasonable to patent and restrict access to it, only to find out that patent troll biotech companies had read their work and successfully patented the same information and are now suing for compensation. So think about before you generalize on the hypothetical research implications of patentability, this is happening now.
I'm calling BS on the parent post for a multitude of reasons.
First-off, individual post-doc positions are rarely longer than 5 years long unless there is a change in field or extenuating circumstances involved. Most institutions are required to convert to some sort of technical staff position after 5 years or so. And it does not look good on your C.V. to have been a postdoc in one place for 7 years.
Secondly, I think you are confusing tenure expectations with expectations to be hired as junior faculty. Yes, probably half the assistant profs at Harvard do not get tenure, but they typically still have their pick of professorships elsewhere when they leave. Yes, they are expected to publish alot, and raise alot of grant money.
Institutions rarely recruit amongst their own post-docs for faculty positions. Both for the diversity of their research portfolio and because if they did, the former post-doc would be in direct competition with their former advisor, not a good position for anyone to be in.
Lastly, and most significantly, you are implying there is some sort of gross number of papers that Harvard requires for tenure, and that they could care less about the quality or impact of said publications. Please point me one tenured Harvard biology professor that got tenure with a surplus of incremental, archival publications and not a single high profile paper (Science/Nature/PNAS/what have you). In fact, you would probably need a whole string of them to be assured of tenure. Yes, those journals are often more flash than substance, but trying to publish bad or fraudulent science in something that you know half the labs in your field will try to reproduce the next month is a sure way to doom your career quickly.
Perhaps the scientist's cheating is a response to their government's insane minimum requirements for the number of publications a scientist with a government grant must have.
I don't know, though. This is just a hypothesis.
That's actually not too far off the mark. The official salary of any government researcher is, well, well below what someone of equivalent schooling could have gotten in business or IT (as in most countries, only moreso). However, the government is pumping major sums of money at institutions that publish frequently, such that most researchers are paid hefty bonuses on a "per publication" basis by their home institution, usually a smaller amount for chinese-language journals and more for international journals, and a mega-bonus for high-profile journals.
The bottom line is that you can become comfortable middle class by pumping out as many publications in the most obscure international journal that you can break the entry barrier into. You can become very comfortable indeed if you actually start cooking the data and publishing only in journals you doubt will ever fact-check your data (for example, a journal run by your buddy down the hall). And short of the journals getting wise to you, there is virtually no chance of being caught if you are careful - you simply choose your fake results to be just-interesting-enough to be publishable while not notable enough to garner any widespread attention. In all but the highest-tier journals, the peer review is under no obligation to also serve as fraud detection. Peer reviewers are anonymous, unpaid volunteers who are asked to assess if the presented data warrant the arrived-at conclusions, the system simply could not operate if we had to assume every submitted paper could be a carefully planted fake.
In the US, the people who give you your grants work for some large federal agency that would start going over everything you have ever written with a fine-toothed comb at the first whisper of faked data. In China, the grant managers are often employees of the same institution that you work at, so there are all sorts of disincentives to proactively look for fraud.
But just because the system is skewed this way doesn't mean they should be let off the hook by any means. Fake science is so much worse than no-science because it often forces others in the same field to have to expend scarce resources to identify, reproduce, and discredit it. And as the Central Government shifts to aiming for quality over quantity, they will have to pay the price sooner and crack down on massive fraud, or risk exclusion from the very same international scientific communities they hope to impress.
For personal reasons I highly suspect that natural photosynthesis is pretty damn efficient, and I doubt that they’ll ever get anything similar that is 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis. Okay, if you scale it up 10 times larger then you can get 10 times the yield, but 10 times more efficient on the same scale? I don’t think they’ll ever achieve that. But... who knows? Maybe there’s a good reason for natural photosynthesis not to be the most efficient method possible.
Anyway, yes, this could be a key piece of the overall puzzle of getting cheaper, more efficient utilization of solar energy.
Photosynthetic efficiency is actually quite abysmal, typically a fraction of a percent (with sugarcane topping out at single digit percents). If you study the chain of events that occurs in a plant photosystem, it's designed like a Rube Goldberg device with hundreds of moving parts interacting in a myriad of ways. It may be the most efficient solution given the constraints that a plant has to deal with , such as the natural abundance of various nutrients in the soil and air, the evolved bio-synthetic pathways that dictate that whatever you make has to be composed of amino acids and insert into a lipid membrane, etc etc.
This is the reason we eat plants and not vice-versa!! Synthetic attempts to harness photo-energy have no such constraints, for example in this case requiring large amounts of trace elements like Iridium. Research solar cells can be nearly 50% efficient in comparison. But they are terribly expensive to produce, and break down rapidly over time, as opposed to plants that can make more of themselves...
It's actually entirely reasonable that the current biological solution is just trapped in a local minimum and not the global best solution to the answer even given those constraints, something that I personally believe based on the directed evolution lab experiments with plants that I'm familiar with. But you may not be able to get there from here naturally, so to speak, if the path to such a state would require generations of plants to tolerate photosystems with reduced functionality or none at all. If we understood protein folding a lot better than we currently do, it might be possible to overcome such barriers at least in a test-tube setting.
At which point I will happily welcome our new zombie plant overlords.
Press release stories like this should get a special Slashdot category - something like scientific vaporware. While this is potentially an important discovery, none of the information needed to determine if this could ever be an energetically or economically viable way of producing hydrogen is provided.
Agreed. Providing proper context is 100% of the difference between scientific sensationalism and good science journalism.
FYI, the original press MIT press release does include such context information, which TFA conveniently left out.
http://web.mit.edu/press/2010/virus-water
Thomas Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in this work, says, “This is an extremely clever piece of work that addresses one of the most difficult problems in artificial photosynthesis, namely, the nanoscale organization of the components in order to control electron transfer rates.”
He adds: “There is a daunting combination of problems to be solved before this or any other artificial photosynthetic system could actually be useful for energy conversion.” To be cost-competitive with other approaches to solar power, he says, the system would need to be at least 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis, be able to repeat the reaction a billion times, and use less expensive materials. “This is unlikely to happen in the near future,” he says. “Nevertheless, the design idea illustrated in this paper could ultimately help with an important piece of the puzzle.”
I am not a biochemist so I must ask some questions about your particular example with breast cancer genes. I'm lead to believe that 'discovering a breast cancer gene' is extremely difficult.
It was the first time it was done. Since then, the cost for sequencing an entire human genome has fallen to under $10,000, expected to go down to $1,000 within a year or two. Less comprehensive diagnostics are even cheaper than that - think paternity testing expensive, not "you need your own research institution" expensive.
Doesn't the number of sets of DNA one must collect coupled with the accuracy of those collections coupled with the willingness of the volunteers coupled with the number of potential snippets of DNA that could be the gene coupled with all sorts of other complications and permutations make finding such a gene like finding a needle in a haystack? Doesn't that require vast amounts of resources? And then to do it for all sorts of diseases?
This is the key misconception. Finding disease-linked genes and mutations was extremely difficult in the pre-human genome era. The technology is currently getting cheaper and faster to the same tune as CPU power, it's rather a routine type of exercise now. The problem is that, except for the most trivial of cases, simply isolating and sequencing these genes alone brings us very little insight as to the underlying mechanism of the disease.
The gene probably codes for a protein of unknown function, so you have to isolate it and purify it and figure out what it does. It probably interacts with an unknown number of other proteins, often also of unknown function, so you have to figure all of that too, by knocking the gene out of a rat or mouse. The gene probably gets turned on and off or levels inbetween by other genes, so you have to map out all those interactions too. It probably acts different in diseases tissues vs healthy tissues, so you need to study it in cell culture to figure out the difference. And, of course, if you actually want to bind candidate drugs to it, then you might need to figure out the 3-D structure of the protein so you know the shape and size of any achilles heels it might have. But even after all that, you're still probably screwed because often things works very differently in a test tube than in cell culture than in rats than it does in chimpanzees than it does in actual human patients. But you can't test your hypothesis by mucking with the genes of actual humans, apparently that's unethical:-)
My point is you could spend an entire PhD on every one of these little parts and still not understand how they interact to cause a disease. But you CAN study it - that is the advance that having sequenced the gene allows - before that, we were completely in the dark. But it's a starting address, no more and no less.
it means if anyone uses your genes to develop a cure, you get royalties for that patent term.
Sequencing a gene is cheap, like I said, you seem to assume it's prohibitively expensive. Can one patent raw biological information? If you are Monsanto, then you can patent a GMO that you've added a drought resistance gene into. It's a new creation, and you can describe exactly how you did it and exactly what it does. That requires a level of understanding of a gene that is so detailed that it certainly should be patentable. But I submit to you that noone currently understands what most cancer genes actually DO. Can you patent something if you don't understand how it works? Most of the patents in question barely provide any explanation, if at all, about how a gene actually works. The descriptions read like stuff from high-school biology textbooks. They are really that bad, I kid you not.
I scoff at your claims of gene squatting as you have to say what the gene does and pay the huge patent fees to get the patent (so you can't just patent each gene as the breast cancer ge
As unpopular as the above statement is on Slashdot and as flawed as the patent system is, it still fulfills purposes making this at least a two sided issue. Ignoring either side is nothing but folly.
You can revise your statement to read: Hopefully it's a net positive for gene research.
Good thought, especially for more tricky examples like patient-derived cell lines or naturally occurring therapeutic molecules, but in this case such worry is not warranted. Treatments, cures, diagnostics, etc are all still patentable, and they are what the investors were looking to make their money from in the first place.
The central issue at stake was whether the discovery of a gene in and of itself, which is just a snipped of biological information, was patentable, and all the resulting technology that utilized that information would be rendered derivative works. Think about that for a moment, if someone went out and discovered a new type of fish, maybe they'd get to name it but they certainly can't claim to own all future profits made by anyone else catching and selling that fish. More to the point, if someone then discovered that the fish produced a chemical that cured some disease, they original discoverer of the fish would not have the ability to sue and say that was reverse engineering of his patented intellectual property. Discovering a gene is not terribly different - it already existed all over the world long before we had to tools to identify and study it. Discovering is different than inventing, and in the case of genes discovery by itself is a far cry from understanding how it works, much less how to manipulate it to fix a disease.
Also, for context, the only real reason one would want to patent a gene is some sort of exclusivity clause (i.e. I discovered this breast cancer gene so now only I can work on a cure for it) or for patent trolling (now lets sue all the other folks working on breast cancer cures). Both scenarios would effectively destroy the ability for competing companies to work on the same disease, and lead to a massive gene-squatting free for all. IAAB (I am a biochemist), and I honestly can't think of any scenarios where being able to patent a naturally occurring gene would be good for either society as a whole or even just letting the market do what it does best.
Re:It is bad, wrong way to go about it
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Is there anything that the government runs that really functions correctly/efficiently?
Well, the postal service and the IRS are both pretty efficient:-) And, unlike in many other government agencies, the NIH actually does have many of the best and brightest in their field on the federal payroll. But this is the wrong question, isn't it?
The government was never intended to be efficient, nor should that ever it's primary goal. I mean, checks and balances inherently mean lots of duplication of effort, and some amount of inefficiency is inevitable. Even the most die-hard Libertarian would agree that police and military should not be run by private corporations, even if they would cost less, and then after that most people would agree that things like environmental protection and Food/Drug regulation cannot possibly be entrusted to "self-regulation", even if we are unhappy with the way things are currently run.
So the real question is, where is the dividing line between things we would rather have done "efficiently" through a free-market system, vs things that we would rather pay a collective price as a society in terms of efficiency because the stakes are too high?? And why aren't politicians honest that this is the actual thing that is up for debate??
Mod parent up. IAACBP (I am a computational Bio-Physicist) and although I find this paper interesting, why Science Daily chose to feature this particular PNAS paper is not readily apparent to me. Even with its quirks (indeed, the paper was direct submitted by the last author, a PNAS member, and therefore did not undergo the standard peer review process as hinted by the parent) there are many, many other neat findings in PNAS that would have made much more interesting subjects for a sciencedaily article, without having to make over-reaching statements about applicability to curing cancer.
When in search of funding, linking your research to cures for cancer increases your odds of funding approval.
If you RTFJA (journal article) the authors make no claim of applicability to cancer research. That's just a weird tack that a misguided science journalist at Science Daily decided to take with it. Many, many people have been studying water using similar methods for decades.
"So how will this cure cancer ?"
" Um, . . we're simulating the structure of supercritical water and. . "
every water molecule fleetingly interacts with its four nearest neighbors, forming a tetrahedron
So that's why I haven't cured cancer yet- I didn't realized the tetrahedrons in water need to have five points!
The water model consists of 5 points. You could think of it as one for each of the (2) hydrogens, one for the oxygen, and two for the lone pairs that cause water to be V-shaped instead of linear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_model#5-site
After reading TFA, as far as my medically ignorant mind makes out, the study was withdrawn due to ethical issues obtaining the samples for the study, not due to issues with the conclusions drawn.
One of the central issues with these sorts of studies, scientifically, is that there is no actual mechanism proposed by which having a vaccine can lead to autism, hence no specific hypothesis to prove or disprove other than the vaguely described "correlation" between the two. It turns out that Autism is typically diagnosed at the same stage in child development that one is supposed to be immunized, thus leading to an inevitable number of cases where one proceeds the other by a short time span and might appear to have been "causative" at an anectodal level, especially to devastated parents desperate for some sort of autism cure. This is precisely the sort of link that, in absence of a proposed disease mechanism to explain the connection, one can only deduce from rigorous, systematic studies that carefully test the hypothesis that there is some sort of non-random correlation in a large, statistically significant sample of patients.
12 children does not constitute a statistical sample, especially if you already secretly knew most of them already had autism, doubly so in fact you were being paid to represent the kids parents in anti-vaccine litigation (since we have to take the author's word that he didn't cherry pick to produce the observed correlation).
It doesn't help at all that autism is one of the least understood mental disorders, we know comparatively much more about the underlying causes of Huntingtons and Alzheimers, to the point at which I would not be surprised if there are effective treatments within 10 or 15 years. With autism your guess is as good as mine, the community is grasping at straws for a good explanation of what is going on. And we do know that the incidence seems to rising dramatically in recent times, which is an alarming trend to say to least.
It's not that I trust big pharma companies so much, or even that the scientific method is so perfect. It's just Occam's razor, a conspiracy of the scale that is proposed by anti-vaccination types reflects a complete disconnect from the realities of biomedical research. It's a dog-eat-dog world with thousands of competing sources of influences and hundreds of thousands of "players" who more like free agents all trying to make a name for themselves. It's not some monolithic organization like the military that was designed from bottom up to keep secrets from the public.
From someone working in a related field, a car analogy just doesn't cut it, because this is a fantastic story even by modern scientific standards. I would characterize this as more like discovering that the dead sea scrolls actually contain blueprints for a fully functional plasma rifle just as you are being overrun by aliens. And I would totally pay to see that movie.
It's better than that! It's a premature stop codon, which basically means someone inserted a semicolon the middle of a line of previously functional expression (but hey, it still compiles!). And if you can decipher what the comments mean, free trip to Stockholm!
Everyone keeps bandying about the "it used to be 50/50 in the 80's" without thinking hard about the context of that statement. The CS landscape has fundamentally changed many fold since the 1980's. My mother, in fact, was a music major who took some CS classes at the advice of her professors in the early 80's because it was, at the time, viewed as a good fallback skill if teaching music didn't work out. The local state school was still teaching CS using dumb terminals and a mainframe then, punch cards, although quaint, were still alive and well. The job prospects for entry level CS work at the time were based on the fact that companies and banks would always need clerks to maintain their payroll databases or accounting reports or whatnot. Good (but not great) paying part-time work that you could juggle while raising a family, or following your husband's career trajectory, or until you got your big break in your primary profession. That's what many people saw it as. Temp Work.
Bill gates was still working out of a garage, and most programming professionals either worked for large corporations or academia. There were no billionaire software startups, very few people even owned a personal computer and most certainly there was no competition from outsourcing to underpaid southeast asians.
So it's not as if we declined from an era in which 50% of professional software developers or CS PhDs were women. The nature of the field itself changed, and so did the demographics of the people who saw it as the best opportunity to get ahead.
Same here, it's one of my wife's favorite museums and she's also definitely not a geek (she's an environmental educator). The main reason she likes it is that the volunteer docents there have such interesting stories to tell (although they usually have an up-front disclaimer that they can't answer any most questions about events post korean war), also the displays are mostly full of real, historically significant artifacts that you read about. Like the working Enigma machines. Contrast this with the Spy Museum in downtown D.C., which first of all costs $$$, second of all is mostly a collection of mock, reconstructed espionage equipment with glitzy, uninformative displays with a heavy bias towards all things James-Bond. And no docents with actual stories to tell.
One thing that always gave me a chuckle was the large mural of a surveillance satellite that covers one wall, donated by a grateful aerospace contractor. My dad worked for NASA, so I'm used to seeing such things, only at NASA all the instruments are pointed away from Earth and not towards it.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes me wonder if this is an organism which has adapted to tolerate the damage from arsenic which would kill us.
This organism, almost certainly not. Most of these extremophiles are miserably slow growers (the doubling time was ~2 days vs 20 minutes for E. coli), so unless there's a niche somewhere in your body that allows the extremophile's adaptations to be a major advantage, it would never gain a foothold in your body as the many strains of bacteria we symbiotically live with will outcompete it for resources.
But as to the more general question of whether any dangerous extremophiles exist out there - this is a recurring topic of speculation (over beer) amongst those that work with pathogenic microbes. Consensus seems to be that it's not impossible that an extremophile such as an archaea, or, in this case, a protobacteria could potentially be an opportunistic pathogen as well, but we haven't found one yet so it's probably not a common occurrence. The organism in this press release is a distant, distant cousin of helicobacter Pylori, an acid-loving bacteria which causes ulcers and is linked with gastric cancer, so it's not insane to think it could happen. Just unlikely.
So I have a bad attitude about a guy who took a shit job and does it to the bare minimum? He could quit if he's so pissed. And honestly, does a janitor have a multitude of people scrubbing the floor for them? Your analogy is weak at best. If he cannot pony up and teach... then leave.
It wasn't an analogy, it was a salary comparison. He could be the worst prof ever, I've never had him so I can't say. But you seriously expect someone teaching a 600 person class to not have teaching assistants? Do you seriously think its his fault the department has no incentive to hire more instructors, or *horrors* force their tenured professors to teach more so that students actually get individualized, quality instruction?
If your beef is that this is a "I'll pretend to teach if you'll pretend to learn" scenario then I agree with you. If you think guys like this, even the really bad ones, however, are somehow the cause and not the symptoms of a broken system, however, then I still disagree.
After looking at this video, I have to add, this guy is a tool. He is EVERYTHING that's wrong with education today. He's a fat lazy ass who feels he's entitled because of his position. Yet he cheats the very students at whom he's pissed. If he felt like he was delivering a good product in his education career he'd NEVER used canned tests. He'd also have fresh material that needed to have a new test created each and every time. Instead uses canned lectures and he's got a bank of assistants to do his bidding while he packs on the pounds and years to get to retirement. Teaching is an easy job for this type of person because they do it once and repeat until they retire. Using the moral high ground is just a way of deflecting the fact that he couldn't even write a good test.
You are aware that he's an instructor, and therefore not tenured, right? And that all he does is teach classes like this one? And that his salary is probably inbetween that of a janitor and a nurse on a good year? Also, that he WRITES management textbooks that are in use in many classes other than his? And probably the test question answer banks as well?
Take a look at what they pay "instructors" at UCF. Consider that this man has been teaching for 34 years. http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/index.php?action=result&search=central+florida&state=Florida&year=2010&category=&withRanks=1 You could probably earn more teaching grade-school, not to mention you'd have teacher-tenure and a nice pension plan.
So I'm not sure where your 'tude comes from. Teaching on a contract is a miserable way to live, with 0 prospects for career advancement and constant uncertainty if you'll still have an income next semester even if you've got decades of experience.
There certainly are lazy professors out there that don't give a hoot about education, nor is the system set up to encourage them to change that in anyway, but this is one of the guys that has to pick up the broken pieces of the system. And when you consider that there are many schools that are now charging more for tuition per student per year than the non-tenured instructors actually make doing the instructing (in classes with triple-digit enrollments), you'll see they are being just as screwed by the system as the students are.
Am I the only one noticing that these troops did not seem to have a military objective but were in fact on some sort of conservation mission?
Or maybe this is like when you disagree where your yard boundry is and you "accidentally" mow down your neighbor's rose bushes while tidying up your lawn. . .
I have studied astronomy, and it's abundantly clear you have not. ("Geostationary orbit would let you look all night long"? ROTFLMAO. There is no night in space you moron.)
Well, I'll be sure to let the next planning committee know that future space telescopes should be placed in as low an Earth orbit as possible and not to worry about stars being eclipsed by the earth, and not to worry about where the shadow of the earth with respect to the sun is whatever you decide to call that.
Clearly these are unimportant details best left to scientific experts such as yourself, who are infinitely more eloquent in trying to explain basic science concepts to a lay audience.
ROTFLMAO. You can point away from Earth from *any* altitude - go out in the street and look up, and you're looking away from Earth *right at ground level*.
If you've ever studied astronomy, then you would know that faint signals need to be acquired for as long as possible in order to get good signal to noise. Being in a low Earth orbit where you circle the earth every 90 minutes (and hence nighttime is only 45 minutes) is a logistical tracking and signal/noise nightmare for something that is meant to look at very faint signals from very far away. Geostationary orbit would let you look at the same object all night long, and if you went to a Lagrange point you would never have to worry about the Earth blocking your view.
It is great, however, if you want to keep track of what is changing on the ground every hour and half.
I thought people fly in rockets and visit space stations and the moon because it's cool. I don't care if no scientific progress comes out of it - I like space travel because it's awesome. Similarily, I'm not attracted to science, mathematics or technology for their practical uses, but because it's fun understanding how the world works, being able to calculate things and think up and admire cool (preferably huge) machines.
Maybe if you work for spaceshipone, you can legitimately say that. The US industrial-military complex, however, made rockets and went to the moon because we had to beat those darn Russkies . Once that motivation (and the associated infinite budgets went away), NASA was left holding the bag trying to figure out what types of science could be done with things that were designed in an era of infinite budgets and intimate military support that no-longer existed.
How many scientists did we actually put on the moon? Exactly one, and he was the last one to set foot on it.
Next exhibit - the space shuttle. The amount of useful things it could do were severely gimped because the Air Force wanted a low-orbit heavy lifter, whereas most science payloads were smaller and would have benefited from being in higher orbits (so they can point AWAY from the Earth instead of towards it). And once the air-force decided they were better off using non-manned rockets to deploy their spy satellites, NASA was left high and dry with something they could barely afford to maintain, never afford to replace, but also didn't actually do the things they needed it to do.
As a big supporter of space science and someone whose father has worked at NASA his entire career, I will still maintain that any possibly useful scientific justification for the ISS was gimped from day one once the cold war ended and budgets became ever increasingly small. Early drafts for the station had on-board observatories (imagine how much easier AND cheaper that would have been to fix than doing that mission-impossible stunt to fix the Hubble) as well as an array of labs to test everything from solar propulsion to human physiology in zero G. What we actually ended up with is this giant white elephant that does nothing in particular well, that we are constantly begging other countries to help us run, and the toilets don't even work reliably. And all of that money could have been spent on real space science, like a couple thousand mars rovers or dozens of Hubbles or what have you.
So for me, it's not a question of if we should fund space science even if it's expensive and there's no immediate return. We fund art too, and I would argue it makes society richer for similar reasons. But we can't pretend that cost doesn't matter in an era of forever shrinking federal science budgets, not to mention the gov't has many more pressing problems it needs to worry about. We need science agencies that can be small and nimble, retain the best talent in the field and reliably get the most bang for the scientific buck. Instead we have these bloated, hyper-political agencies that lost their best talent to industry years ago, have 12 layers of middle management fighting tooth and nail about what logo to use in the next press release defending giant, gimpy white elephant projects of limited scientific usefulness that was pitched to congress as a job creation strategy for someone's homestate. This was never a winning formula.
This sounds almost exactly like turnitin.com where when one uploads a paper to it, it searches almost anything it can get ahold of and will list any text in any academic journal that is copied verbatim.
An apt analogy. Imagine the following scenario: you are simultaneously enrolled in a two classes that both require a lengthy essay which constitutes a large portion of your final grade. You find the two assignments to have similar enough parameters and decide to submit the same essay to both teachers without any prior approval for the double-dipping, thus making it appear you have spent more effort than you actually have. You are only "plagarizing yourself", so no harm, right?
Doubtful.
Self-plagarism is unethical if there is an intent to deceive, it has little to do with copyright. Teachers aren't using turnitin to make sure copyright infringers pay royalties, they are trying to find out who is cheating.
if you resubmit your own work, it's not plagiarism.
Let me clarify the issue for those not accustomed to the rules of scientific publishing.
There IS a thing as self-plagarism, and it's not necessarily a minor offense. At it's core, if you submit essentially the same work to multiple venues with the intent to pass each off as an independent body of work when they are not, then there is intent to deceive and that is an ethical breach of conduct. Worst case scenario, the author list and abstract has been changed just enough that it leads others to believe this particular experiment has actually been independently confirmed and duplicated when it has not.
Most journals require that you affirm that the same manuscript is not currently under consideration for publication in another journal and has not already been published in a highly similar form elsewhere (except maybe as a conference abstract). This is different than re-submission, where a manuscript was rejected from one publication and you are now free to send to to another venue. And then there is the copyright issue, that as authors you are not necessarily the sole copyright holder (often the journal has some claim), in which case a duplicate publication is actually a violation of the journal's copyright.
There is also the case where one, comprehensive study is artificially split into smaller, less meaningful sub studies with the intent to pad publication counts (there was an example of a prenatal intervention study where the effects on the mothers and on the infants for the exact same study were published separately without any reference to each other, diminishing the usefulness of the study). This is now not a copyright issue but now a scientific integrity issue, presumably the medical audience of such a study could be harmed by not being told both sets of outcomes for the same study in any sort of obvious way.
There is an excellent resource on what constitutes scientific plagarism (including self-plagarism) here: http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/Self%20plagiarism.html
The main reason these patents were allowed was to help refund the costs of the research into these genes. By forcing researchers, drug companies, ect. to license the use of the gene, it helped the initial team of researchers/parent company recover the money they sunk into finding the gene.
The implication of this ruling is a loss of profitability via research. Whether this is actually the case or not will be determined by time.
Yes, but you are looking at the wrong end of the drug pipeline. The ultimate goal of said research is for actual therapies and treatments to be invented, which can then enjoy patent protection. Patenting the gene itself creates a highly restrictive environment where only those with agreements with the patent holder can even consider embarking on the (much more costly and difficult) search for a treatment.
There are researchers in the community, BTW, that are now legally barred from working on disease treatments for genes they discovered because they felt it was unreasonable to patent and restrict access to it, only to find out that patent troll biotech companies had read their work and successfully patented the same information and are now suing for compensation. So think about before you generalize on the hypothetical research implications of patentability, this is happening now.
First-off, individual post-doc positions are rarely longer than 5 years long unless there is a change in field or extenuating circumstances involved. Most institutions are required to convert to some sort of technical staff position after 5 years or so. And it does not look good on your C.V. to have been a postdoc in one place for 7 years.
Secondly, I think you are confusing tenure expectations with expectations to be hired as junior faculty. Yes, probably half the assistant profs at Harvard do not get tenure, but they typically still have their pick of professorships elsewhere when they leave. Yes, they are expected to publish alot, and raise alot of grant money.
Institutions rarely recruit amongst their own post-docs for faculty positions. Both for the diversity of their research portfolio and because if they did, the former post-doc would be in direct competition with their former advisor, not a good position for anyone to be in.
Lastly, and most significantly, you are implying there is some sort of gross number of papers that Harvard requires for tenure, and that they could care less about the quality or impact of said publications. Please point me one tenured Harvard biology professor that got tenure with a surplus of incremental, archival publications and not a single high profile paper (Science/Nature/PNAS/what have you). In fact, you would probably need a whole string of them to be assured of tenure. Yes, those journals are often more flash than substance, but trying to publish bad or fraudulent science in something that you know half the labs in your field will try to reproduce the next month is a sure way to doom your career quickly.
Perhaps the scientist's cheating is a response to their government's insane minimum requirements for the number of publications a scientist with a government grant must have. I don't know, though. This is just a hypothesis.
That's actually not too far off the mark. The official salary of any government researcher is, well, well below what someone of equivalent schooling could have gotten in business or IT (as in most countries, only moreso). However, the government is pumping major sums of money at institutions that publish frequently, such that most researchers are paid hefty bonuses on a "per publication" basis by their home institution, usually a smaller amount for chinese-language journals and more for international journals, and a mega-bonus for high-profile journals.
The bottom line is that you can become comfortable middle class by pumping out as many publications in the most obscure international journal that you can break the entry barrier into. You can become very comfortable indeed if you actually start cooking the data and publishing only in journals you doubt will ever fact-check your data (for example, a journal run by your buddy down the hall). And short of the journals getting wise to you, there is virtually no chance of being caught if you are careful - you simply choose your fake results to be just-interesting-enough to be publishable while not notable enough to garner any widespread attention. In all but the highest-tier journals, the peer review is under no obligation to also serve as fraud detection. Peer reviewers are anonymous, unpaid volunteers who are asked to assess if the presented data warrant the arrived-at conclusions, the system simply could not operate if we had to assume every submitted paper could be a carefully planted fake.
In the US, the people who give you your grants work for some large federal agency that would start going over everything you have ever written with a fine-toothed comb at the first whisper of faked data. In China, the grant managers are often employees of the same institution that you work at, so there are all sorts of disincentives to proactively look for fraud.
But just because the system is skewed this way doesn't mean they should be let off the hook by any means. Fake science is so much worse than no-science because it often forces others in the same field to have to expend scarce resources to identify, reproduce, and discredit it. And as the Central Government shifts to aiming for quality over quantity, they will have to pay the price sooner and crack down on massive fraud, or risk exclusion from the very same international scientific communities they hope to impress.
For personal reasons I highly suspect that natural photosynthesis is pretty damn efficient, and I doubt that they’ll ever get anything similar that is 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis. Okay, if you scale it up 10 times larger then you can get 10 times the yield, but 10 times more efficient on the same scale? I don’t think they’ll ever achieve that. But... who knows? Maybe there’s a good reason for natural photosynthesis not to be the most efficient method possible.
Anyway, yes, this could be a key piece of the overall puzzle of getting cheaper, more efficient utilization of solar energy.
Photosynthetic efficiency is actually quite abysmal, typically a fraction of a percent (with sugarcane topping out at single digit percents). If you study the chain of events that occurs in a plant photosystem, it's designed like a Rube Goldberg device with hundreds of moving parts interacting in a myriad of ways. It may be the most efficient solution given the constraints that a plant has to deal with , such as the natural abundance of various nutrients in the soil and air, the evolved bio-synthetic pathways that dictate that whatever you make has to be composed of amino acids and insert into a lipid membrane, etc etc.
This is the reason we eat plants and not vice-versa!! Synthetic attempts to harness photo-energy have no such constraints, for example in this case requiring large amounts of trace elements like Iridium. Research solar cells can be nearly 50% efficient in comparison. But they are terribly expensive to produce, and break down rapidly over time, as opposed to plants that can make more of themselves. ..
It's actually entirely reasonable that the current biological solution is just trapped in a local minimum and not the global best solution to the answer even given those constraints, something that I personally believe based on the directed evolution lab experiments with plants that I'm familiar with. But you may not be able to get there from here naturally, so to speak, if the path to such a state would require generations of plants to tolerate photosystems with reduced functionality or none at all. If we understood protein folding a lot better than we currently do, it might be possible to overcome such barriers at least in a test-tube setting.
At which point I will happily welcome our new zombie plant overlords.
Press release stories like this should get a special Slashdot category - something like scientific vaporware. While this is potentially an important discovery, none of the information needed to determine if this could ever be an energetically or economically viable way of producing hydrogen is provided.
Agreed. Providing proper context is 100% of the difference between scientific sensationalism and good science journalism. FYI, the original press MIT press release does include such context information, which TFA conveniently left out. http://web.mit.edu/press/2010/virus-water
Thomas Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in this work, says, “This is an extremely clever piece of work that addresses one of the most difficult problems in artificial photosynthesis, namely, the nanoscale organization of the components in order to control electron transfer rates.” He adds: “There is a daunting combination of problems to be solved before this or any other artificial photosynthetic system could actually be useful for energy conversion.” To be cost-competitive with other approaches to solar power, he says, the system would need to be at least 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis, be able to repeat the reaction a billion times, and use less expensive materials. “This is unlikely to happen in the near future,” he says. “Nevertheless, the design idea illustrated in this paper could ultimately help with an important piece of the puzzle.”
I am not a biochemist so I must ask some questions about your particular example with breast cancer genes. I'm lead to believe that 'discovering a breast cancer gene' is extremely difficult.
It was the first time it was done. Since then, the cost for sequencing an entire human genome has fallen to under $10,000, expected to go down to $1,000 within a year or two. Less comprehensive diagnostics are even cheaper than that - think paternity testing expensive, not "you need your own research institution" expensive.
Doesn't the number of sets of DNA one must collect coupled with the accuracy of those collections coupled with the willingness of the volunteers coupled with the number of potential snippets of DNA that could be the gene coupled with all sorts of other complications and permutations make finding such a gene like finding a needle in a haystack? Doesn't that require vast amounts of resources? And then to do it for all sorts of diseases?
This is the key misconception. Finding disease-linked genes and mutations was extremely difficult in the pre-human genome era. The technology is currently getting cheaper and faster to the same tune as CPU power, it's rather a routine type of exercise now. The problem is that, except for the most trivial of cases, simply isolating and sequencing these genes alone brings us very little insight as to the underlying mechanism of the disease.
The gene probably codes for a protein of unknown function, so you have to isolate it and purify it and figure out what it does. It probably interacts with an unknown number of other proteins, often also of unknown function, so you have to figure all of that too, by knocking the gene out of a rat or mouse. The gene probably gets turned on and off or levels inbetween by other genes, so you have to map out all those interactions too. It probably acts different in diseases tissues vs healthy tissues, so you need to study it in cell culture to figure out the difference. And, of course, if you actually want to bind candidate drugs to it, then you might need to figure out the 3-D structure of the protein so you know the shape and size of any achilles heels it might have. But even after all that, you're still probably screwed because often things works very differently in a test tube than in cell culture than in rats than it does in chimpanzees than it does in actual human patients. But you can't test your hypothesis by mucking with the genes of actual humans, apparently that's unethical :-)
My point is you could spend an entire PhD on every one of these little parts and still not understand how they interact to cause a disease. But you CAN study it - that is the advance that having sequenced the gene allows - before that, we were completely in the dark. But it's a starting address, no more and no less.
it means if anyone uses your genes to develop a cure, you get royalties for that patent term.
Sequencing a gene is cheap, like I said, you seem to assume it's prohibitively expensive. Can one patent raw biological information? If you are Monsanto, then you can patent a GMO that you've added a drought resistance gene into. It's a new creation, and you can describe exactly how you did it and exactly what it does. That requires a level of understanding of a gene that is so detailed that it certainly should be patentable. But I submit to you that noone currently understands what most cancer genes actually DO. Can you patent something if you don't understand how it works? Most of the patents in question barely provide any explanation, if at all, about how a gene actually works. The descriptions read like stuff from high-school biology textbooks. They are really that bad, I kid you not.
I scoff at your claims of gene squatting as you have to say what the gene does and pay the huge patent fees to get the patent (so you can't just patent each gene as the breast cancer ge
As unpopular as the above statement is on Slashdot and as flawed as the patent system is, it still fulfills purposes making this at least a two sided issue. Ignoring either side is nothing but folly. You can revise your statement to read: Hopefully it's a net positive for gene research.
Good thought, especially for more tricky examples like patient-derived cell lines or naturally occurring therapeutic molecules, but in this case such worry is not warranted. Treatments, cures, diagnostics, etc are all still patentable, and they are what the investors were looking to make their money from in the first place.
The central issue at stake was whether the discovery of a gene in and of itself, which is just a snipped of biological information, was patentable, and all the resulting technology that utilized that information would be rendered derivative works. Think about that for a moment, if someone went out and discovered a new type of fish, maybe they'd get to name it but they certainly can't claim to own all future profits made by anyone else catching and selling that fish. More to the point, if someone then discovered that the fish produced a chemical that cured some disease, they original discoverer of the fish would not have the ability to sue and say that was reverse engineering of his patented intellectual property. Discovering a gene is not terribly different - it already existed all over the world long before we had to tools to identify and study it. Discovering is different than inventing, and in the case of genes discovery by itself is a far cry from understanding how it works, much less how to manipulate it to fix a disease.
Also, for context, the only real reason one would want to patent a gene is some sort of exclusivity clause (i.e. I discovered this breast cancer gene so now only I can work on a cure for it) or for patent trolling (now lets sue all the other folks working on breast cancer cures). Both scenarios would effectively destroy the ability for competing companies to work on the same disease, and lead to a massive gene-squatting free for all. IAAB (I am a biochemist), and I honestly can't think of any scenarios where being able to patent a naturally occurring gene would be good for either society as a whole or even just letting the market do what it does best.
Is there anything that the government runs that really functions correctly/efficiently?
Well, the postal service and the IRS are both pretty efficient :-) And, unlike in many other government agencies, the NIH actually does have many of the best and brightest in their field on the federal payroll. But this is the wrong question, isn't it?
The government was never intended to be efficient, nor should that ever it's primary goal. I mean, checks and balances inherently mean lots of duplication of effort, and some amount of inefficiency is inevitable. Even the most die-hard Libertarian would agree that police and military should not be run by private corporations, even if they would cost less, and then after that most people would agree that things like environmental protection and Food/Drug regulation cannot possibly be entrusted to "self-regulation", even if we are unhappy with the way things are currently run.
So the real question is, where is the dividing line between things we would rather have done "efficiently" through a free-market system, vs things that we would rather pay a collective price as a society in terms of efficiency because the stakes are too high?? And why aren't politicians honest that this is the actual thing that is up for debate??
Mod parent up. IAACBP (I am a computational Bio-Physicist) and although I find this paper interesting, why Science Daily chose to feature this particular PNAS paper is not readily apparent to me. Even with its quirks (indeed, the paper was direct submitted by the last author, a PNAS member, and therefore did not undergo the standard peer review process as hinted by the parent) there are many, many other neat findings in PNAS that would have made much more interesting subjects for a sciencedaily article, without having to make over-reaching statements about applicability to curing cancer.
When in search of funding, linking your research to cures for cancer increases your odds of funding approval.
If you RTFJA (journal article) the authors make no claim of applicability to cancer research. That's just a weird tack that a misguided science journalist at Science Daily decided to take with it. Many, many people have been studying water using similar methods for decades. "So how will this cure cancer ?"
" Um, . . we're simulating the structure of supercritical water and. . "
"Does cancer have water?"
"Well, yes, but. . ."
"Got it, you're curing cancer! Awesome"
every water molecule fleetingly interacts with its four nearest neighbors, forming a tetrahedron
So that's why I haven't cured cancer yet- I didn't realized the tetrahedrons in water need to have five points!
The water model consists of 5 points. You could think of it as one for each of the (2) hydrogens, one for the oxygen, and two for the lone pairs that cause water to be V-shaped instead of linear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_model#5-site
After reading TFA, as far as my medically ignorant mind makes out, the study was withdrawn due to ethical issues obtaining the samples for the study, not due to issues with the conclusions drawn.
One of the central issues with these sorts of studies, scientifically, is that there is no actual mechanism proposed by which having a vaccine can lead to autism, hence no specific hypothesis to prove or disprove other than the vaguely described "correlation" between the two. It turns out that Autism is typically diagnosed at the same stage in child development that one is supposed to be immunized, thus leading to an inevitable number of cases where one proceeds the other by a short time span and might appear to have been "causative" at an anectodal level, especially to devastated parents desperate for some sort of autism cure. This is precisely the sort of link that, in absence of a proposed disease mechanism to explain the connection, one can only deduce from rigorous, systematic studies that carefully test the hypothesis that there is some sort of non-random correlation in a large, statistically significant sample of patients.
12 children does not constitute a statistical sample, especially if you already secretly knew most of them already had autism, doubly so in fact you were being paid to represent the kids parents in anti-vaccine litigation (since we have to take the author's word that he didn't cherry pick to produce the observed correlation).
It doesn't help at all that autism is one of the least understood mental disorders, we know comparatively much more about the underlying causes of Huntingtons and Alzheimers, to the point at which I would not be surprised if there are effective treatments within 10 or 15 years. With autism your guess is as good as mine, the community is grasping at straws for a good explanation of what is going on. And we do know that the incidence seems to rising dramatically in recent times, which is an alarming trend to say to least.
It's not that I trust big pharma companies so much, or even that the scientific method is so perfect. It's just Occam's razor, a conspiracy of the scale that is proposed by anti-vaccination types reflects a complete disconnect from the realities of biomedical research. It's a dog-eat-dog world with thousands of competing sources of influences and hundreds of thousands of "players" who more like free agents all trying to make a name for themselves. It's not some monolithic organization like the military that was designed from bottom up to keep secrets from the public.
From someone working in a related field, a car analogy just doesn't cut it, because this is a fantastic story even by modern scientific standards. I would characterize this as more like discovering that the dead sea scrolls actually contain blueprints for a fully functional plasma rifle just as you are being overrun by aliens. And I would totally pay to see that movie.
It's better than that! It's a premature stop codon, which basically means someone inserted a semicolon the middle of a line of previously functional expression (but hey, it still compiles!). And if you can decipher what the comments mean, free trip to Stockholm!
Everyone keeps bandying about the "it used to be 50/50 in the 80's" without thinking hard about the context of that statement. The CS landscape has fundamentally changed many fold since the 1980's. My mother, in fact, was a music major who took some CS classes at the advice of her professors in the early 80's because it was, at the time, viewed as a good fallback skill if teaching music didn't work out. The local state school was still teaching CS using dumb terminals and a mainframe then, punch cards, although quaint, were still alive and well. The job prospects for entry level CS work at the time were based on the fact that companies and banks would always need clerks to maintain their payroll databases or accounting reports or whatnot. Good (but not great) paying part-time work that you could juggle while raising a family, or following your husband's career trajectory, or until you got your big break in your primary profession. That's what many people saw it as. Temp Work. Bill gates was still working out of a garage, and most programming professionals either worked for large corporations or academia. There were no billionaire software startups, very few people even owned a personal computer and most certainly there was no competition from outsourcing to underpaid southeast asians. So it's not as if we declined from an era in which 50% of professional software developers or CS PhDs were women. The nature of the field itself changed, and so did the demographics of the people who saw it as the best opportunity to get ahead.
One thing that always gave me a chuckle was the large mural of a surveillance satellite that covers one wall, donated by a grateful aerospace contractor. My dad worked for NASA, so I'm used to seeing such things, only at NASA all the instruments are pointed away from Earth and not towards it.