I mean, Toyota has this system where the car parks itself (http://www.hiptechblog.com/2006/02/25/toyotas-parallel-parking-assist/). So tell me, how does this Nissan toy improve over that?
If these guys need laser interferometry to understand why the acetic acid test works, I am not sure whether they should be the ones to decide how to use this really cool new toy. The test works because squamous cell carcinoma of the cervix behaves a bit like skin - it no longer acts as a non-keratinizing mucous squamous epithelium but will form proteins that are normally present in skin. Application of acetic acid (try it on your own skin if you don't believe this:)) will denature these and cause white discoloration. Duh.Other acids will work, too, but tend to be a tad too corrosive to use on a cervix.
A mistake that patients and other laypeople commonly make is to think that their search is just as good as the doctor's. It isn't. An untrained individual (patient, curious person, whoever) using Internet resources to gather information about their real or perceived diagnosis usually ends up barking up the wrong tree. I see it all the time in my patients. I warn them about it and still they make this mistake. I deal with rare diseases, the 20% that are usually diagnosed wrong. Trust me, Google by itself or any other internet resource doesn't do you any good if you don't know EXACTLY what the key symptoms are. And selecting those is not something an amateur can do. So you can go on and tell me about how you corrected your doctor and beat the medical establishment and crap like that, but at least for the kind of disorder discussed here (IPEX and family) you as an amateur would not arrive at that diagnosis. And oh, Google is not the best resource for medical type searches. Try Pubmed, or OMIM, or if you're really serious (IPEX is an X-linked disorder caused by FOXP3 mutations) use the London Dysmorphology Database (LDDB). Amateurs should NOT, I repeat NOT, try to diagnose their own diseases. They simply lack the background to judge their own symptoms.
Look up the recent publications about alcohol dehydrogenases. What you now mention is a good example of convergent evolution, where the needs of function impose structure. The argument you use to counter my reply in effect proves my point. If you are a believer in intelligent design, please admit to it. But do not bother us here with its flawed arguments. For further discussion everybody is better off reading the judge's dissection of intelligent design in the recent Kansas ruling.
It would if the genes were exactly identical. But they are not. They have evolution written all over their sequences, with the essential parts being preserved so they keep the important structures. Sorry, but this observation if anything is proof for evolution rather than for design. If you like I can show you some sequence alignments, for example between human and fly Eya/PAX6 (= Eyes absent) and other species in between that show quite astonishingly how these species are related. That's the beauty of all of this - it demonstrates how all forms of life are interconnected.
It just implies that sharks and us, remotely related as we are, use a common toolkit to specify seemingly different kinds of things, such as electroreceptors and neural crest cells in humans. The former may be neural crest derived. So are many receptors in our skin. It does not mean that we are descended from sharks in any way. We are related, as all life is. Nature abounds with examples where very remotely related genera will use very similar genes to specify tissues with similar functions but very dissimilar compositions. The same gene that specifies eyes in the fruit fly for instance specifies eyes in us humans. Yet our eyes are not like those of a fly at all. The gene says "Make an eye here". The same will apply to electroreceptors in sharks and neural crest derivatives in humans. One of the genes might say "migrate here and make this receptor", regardless of the identity of the receptor. A gene is a tool, like a hammer. It is not the blueprint.
Another example of researchers drumming up their findings. Altered methylation patterns of tumor suppressor gene promotor sequences is nothing new. Neither is the finding of a gene whose product can act to suppress tumor growth. There are many of those.Posting this on slashdot is somewhat overdone. DNA methylation is an exciting target for chemotherapy, that will doutblessly benefit cancer patients in the near future. But it is too early to cry victory.
propaganda when you see it? The government outlet makes a big deal of what is essentially a small research setup. How's that comparable to ITER? Yeah, "superior Chinese technology can make this 10 times cheaper than primitive Western technology". Utter crap. I can't believe this made it to slashdot.
is what I am. A long standing spinal injury is characterized by severe gliosis, ie the formation of neural scar tissue. This effectively blocks the path for new nerves to grow. This alone makes it hard to believe for me. Furthermore, the rapidity of the recovery is implausible. Nerve cells will grow at a speed of about 1 mm per year. Hence a recovery of lost feeling (thin fibers) within the time span indicated is unlikely. Then there is the issue of homing and differentiation - umbilical cord stem cells will typicall find their way to the bone marrow, not the the spinal cord or other neural tissues.
Finally, the fact that this alleged breakthrough has been published in a very minor journal is quite telling IMHO. I do not believe this, unless I see more convincing proof. I'm willing to wait, this is only a first press publication after all, but don't hold up your hopes too high on this one.
Well, the symantec description wasn't very useful to me. But if I read it right, the virus tries to infect/bin. But iirc it will have to be run with root privileges in order to be able to infect/bin. Dunno about you guys, but I never ever unpacked firefox builds into my home directory when running as root. Basic security. So, if I understand this correctly, it only infects/bin when you've been sloppy. Not much of a threat, is it?
Before we all jump to the obvious conclusion that implanting chips will interfere with civic rights (which it can), it is worthwhile to consider that such implants can be useful. As a medical doctor I encounter patients everey day, who have no clear recollection of their medical history or the medication that they use. In the recent I've prescribed medication that was potentially dangerous because of interference with another drug that the patient was taking but forgot to tell me about when asked. If the pharmacist hadn't noticed there might have been a serious problem. The same applies to genetic conditions that affect medical care. These are often too complicated for the average patient to understand or report correctly. Adverse drug reactions, idem. An electronic patient file can solve these problems but one does not always have access to those. So, there are definitely opportunities here to improve medical care and ease the administrative burden for doctors. I would like to have this technology. As for the privacy issues - if you use a credit card to pay your way through life, you have already given up a lot of your privacy. Same goes for any other process that involves the registration of personal data (such as buying a car). Thorny issue, though.
Again, you fail to read this properly. I do not believe for one second that a compound that has not passed beyond the letter+digit naming stage has been used in 40 patients, in the sense of systemic administration. There's no way that you can get away with this from an ethics point of view now that we have HAART. I believe it when they give actual details. Perhaps it was a phase I toxicity study. That is NOT a trial! As said in my other post, they may as well have taken material from 40 patients and tried it on that. The present message is just hype, hype, hype.
Well, I read it. If you do read it well you will see that they have not done a clinical trial. They state that it works "in patients". That means that they may as well have taken blood from these people and worked with the cells from it. Sorry, not convincing. The definition of a "clinical trial" is rather more stringent. Both of these "news" items are overenthusiastic overhyped press releases meant to help raise funds. I know as I've made such releases myself (the last one was when we found a gene involved in a rare hair disorder, we released it to the press as a "baldness gene" I spent a day in various radio studios after that).
Slashdot must be a little starved for news these days. I didn't even bother to read the HIV paper. There are so many compounds that can block entry of HIV into its target cells that one new one is not exactly a breakthrough. Ditto for the bromelaine - there are many many compounds that will kill cancer in vitro. How everything will work in the actual patient, that's something else entirely. Please wake me up when some realistic coverage of modern drug research is posted.
It's not too difficult, conceptually. The star's mass is a function of its brightness. So, you already know the mass of the star. The orbiting planet causes the star to wobble a bit. The more massive the planet, the more the star wobbles. Weight is not the same as mass, by the way. Weight is what you get when you place a mass in a gravitational field.
More info on this: http://ethel.as.arizona.edu/~collins/astro/subject s/srchplanet5.html
Because that's what you are if you think there's going to be a test for geekiness. While Asperger's syndrome is a circumscribed and very possibly monogenic entity, what we currently group under "autism spectrum" definitely is not. Geekiness, defined as possibly socially awkward or not interested in acquiring social skills because there are better things to do such as writing papers on General Relativity is not a single gene thing. It's polygenic and I seriously doubt whether, even if we find the genetic variations that go into building smart brains, there will ever be a test that determines whether someone will be smart. At most we'll be able to test for potential, and that's something else entirely. Oh, and Bill will not have Asperger syndrome. People with that disease are generally mentally retarded or have one hypertrophied talent (idiots savants). And Bill, for all his merits, is not retarded.
If you do not tick the "open safe files" check box in the prefs. Which you should left unchecked if you're not entirely stupid, as there is no way to tell whether any file is actually "safe". Good Internet Practice, as I like to call it.
It works by virtue of the fact that your motor cortex plans ahead. So, even while you have not yet consciously taken the decision to speak yet, your motor cortex has already set up the appropriate commands and sent them out to the nerves involved. This translates to an increased firing rate in these nerves, which is not enough to move the muscles but will be sufficient to register on sufficiently sensitive equipment. In fact (other discussion entirely, but fascinating nonetheless) most of our "voluntary" decisions appear to be made before we become aware of them. So much for free will:)
But nothing more. I agree with other posters. Now, if you could get some kind of force feedback that would tell you if one molecule can dock to the other in a particular orientation, or whether a, say, DNA molecule will accept a transcription factor and bend in the right direction, or.... - that would make a really useful tool for research. As it is now, this is a nice way of helping students to visualize the spatial properties of complex molecules. Useful, but hardly revolutionary in any sense.
Sorry, magnetic field are incapable of causing cancer. What causes cancer are relatively gross changes to the genetic material that lead to hyperactivity or inactivity of genes that are crucial for normal cell cycling. Some scientists believe that you actually need chromosomal rearrangements for cancer to occur (meaning malignancy, ie an invasive and metastatizing process). Indeed, most malignancies show these rearrangements. I can assure you that magnetic fields are not capable of causing this kind of damage. They cannot even cause point mutations. Obviously, ionizing radiation can, but AFAIK you don't get that from a CRT. People complaining about hypersensitivity to magnetic fields are like those suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome - they suffer from something, but the cause is entirely imaginary, fueled by magical thinking. CRT's do not make you ill. You get a headache from squinting or sitting slumped in your seat, at most.
Now we can really measure how many angels can fit together on a pinhead!
More seriously, this technology opens up interesting possibilities for high-througput easy mutation screening. Base substitutions (mutations) in a given stretch of DNA will obviously alter its weight. In this way you can easily (well, relatively speaking) detect the presence of a mutation, after which you can select the stretch of DNA that the mutation is in for sequence analysis. It'd be an interesting application for us geneticists.
Nice idea, that with the egg, but it will not work. Looks like most organisms require so-called maternal effect genes (Fruit flies do, nematodes do, and if they do, we usually do, too) for proper initial embryonic development. While these genes are usually highly conserved, I doubt whether the Ostrich/Monitor/Your_fav_reptile will have the proper set of maternal effect genes that have enough T-Rex sequence in them left to actually properly satisfy fore and aft (to begin with). And then there's a whole bunch of even more esoteric genetic reasons why this will not work. Don't get me started. If you do, I'll ramble on for several pages.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, Toyota has this system where the car parks itself (http://www.hiptechblog.com/2006/02/25/toyotas-parallel-parking-assist/). So tell me, how does this Nissan toy improve over that?
If these guys need laser interferometry to understand why the acetic acid test works, I am not sure whether they should be the ones to decide how to use this really cool new toy. The test works because squamous cell carcinoma of the cervix behaves a bit like skin - it no longer acts as a non-keratinizing mucous squamous epithelium but will form proteins that are normally present in skin. Application of acetic acid (try it on your own skin if you don't believe this :)) will denature these and cause white discoloration. Duh.Other acids will work, too, but tend to be a tad too corrosive to use on a cervix.
A mistake that patients and other laypeople commonly make is to think that their search is just as good as the doctor's. It isn't. An untrained individual (patient, curious person, whoever) using Internet resources to gather information about their real or perceived diagnosis usually ends up barking up the wrong tree. I see it all the time in my patients. I warn them about it and still they make this mistake. I deal with rare diseases, the 20% that are usually diagnosed wrong. Trust me, Google by itself or any other internet resource doesn't do you any good if you don't know EXACTLY what the key symptoms are. And selecting those is not something an amateur can do. So you can go on and tell me about how you corrected your doctor and beat the medical establishment and crap like that, but at least for the kind of disorder discussed here (IPEX and family) you as an amateur would not arrive at that diagnosis. And oh, Google is not the best resource for medical type searches. Try Pubmed, or OMIM, or if you're really serious (IPEX is an X-linked disorder caused by FOXP3 mutations) use the London Dysmorphology Database (LDDB). Amateurs should NOT, I repeat NOT, try to diagnose their own diseases. They simply lack the background to judge their own symptoms.
but doesn't Cupertino deserve a sarcast for this?
Look up the recent publications about alcohol dehydrogenases. What you now mention is a good example of convergent evolution, where the needs of function impose structure. The argument you use to counter my reply in effect proves my point. If you are a believer in intelligent design, please admit to it. But do not bother us here with its flawed arguments. For further discussion everybody is better off reading the judge's dissection of intelligent design in the recent Kansas ruling.
It would if the genes were exactly identical. But they are not. They have evolution written all over their sequences, with the essential parts being preserved so they keep the important structures. Sorry, but this observation if anything is proof for evolution rather than for design. If you like I can show you some sequence alignments, for example between human and fly Eya/PAX6 (= Eyes absent) and other species in between that show quite astonishingly how these species are related. That's the beauty of all of this - it demonstrates how all forms of life are interconnected.
It just implies that sharks and us, remotely related as we are, use a common toolkit to specify seemingly different kinds of things, such as electroreceptors and neural crest cells in humans. The former may be neural crest derived. So are many receptors in our skin. It does not mean that we are descended from sharks in any way. We are related, as all life is. Nature abounds with examples where very remotely related genera will use very similar genes to specify tissues with similar functions but very dissimilar compositions. The same gene that specifies eyes in the fruit fly for instance specifies eyes in us humans. Yet our eyes are not like those of a fly at all. The gene says "Make an eye here". The same will apply to electroreceptors in sharks and neural crest derivatives in humans. One of the genes might say "migrate here and make this receptor", regardless of the identity of the receptor. A gene is a tool, like a hammer. It is not the blueprint.
Another example of researchers drumming up their findings. Altered methylation patterns of tumor suppressor gene promotor sequences is nothing new. Neither is the finding of a gene whose product can act to suppress tumor growth. There are many of those.Posting this on slashdot is somewhat overdone. DNA methylation is an exciting target for chemotherapy, that will doutblessly benefit cancer patients in the near future. But it is too early to cry victory.
propaganda when you see it? The government outlet makes a big deal of what is essentially a small research setup. How's that comparable to ITER? Yeah, "superior Chinese technology can make this 10 times cheaper than primitive Western technology". Utter crap. I can't believe this made it to slashdot.
is what I am. A long standing spinal injury is characterized by severe gliosis, ie the formation of neural scar tissue. This effectively blocks the path for new nerves to grow. This alone makes it hard to believe for me. Furthermore, the rapidity of the recovery is implausible. Nerve cells will grow at a speed of about 1 mm per year. Hence a recovery of lost feeling (thin fibers) within the time span indicated is unlikely. Then there is the issue of homing and differentiation - umbilical cord stem cells will typicall find their way to the bone marrow, not the the spinal cord or other neural tissues. Finally, the fact that this alleged breakthrough has been published in a very minor journal is quite telling IMHO. I do not believe this, unless I see more convincing proof. I'm willing to wait, this is only a first press publication after all, but don't hold up your hopes too high on this one.
Well, the symantec description wasn't very useful to me. But if I read it right, the virus tries to infect /bin. But iirc it will have to be run with root privileges in order to be able to infect /bin. Dunno about you guys, but I never ever unpacked firefox builds into my home directory when running as root. Basic security. So, if I understand this correctly, it only infects /bin when you've been sloppy. Not much of a threat, is it?
Before we all jump to the obvious conclusion that implanting chips will interfere with civic rights (which it can), it is worthwhile to consider that such implants can be useful. As a medical doctor I encounter patients everey day, who have no clear recollection of their medical history or the medication that they use. In the recent I've prescribed medication that was potentially dangerous because of interference with another drug that the patient was taking but forgot to tell me about when asked. If the pharmacist hadn't noticed there might have been a serious problem. The same applies to genetic conditions that affect medical care. These are often too complicated for the average patient to understand or report correctly. Adverse drug reactions, idem. An electronic patient file can solve these problems but one does not always have access to those. So, there are definitely opportunities here to improve medical care and ease the administrative burden for doctors. I would like to have this technology. As for the privacy issues - if you use a credit card to pay your way through life, you have already given up a lot of your privacy. Same goes for any other process that involves the registration of personal data (such as buying a car). Thorny issue, though.
Again, you fail to read this properly. I do not believe for one second that a compound that has not passed beyond the letter+digit naming stage has been used in 40 patients, in the sense of systemic administration. There's no way that you can get away with this from an ethics point of view now that we have HAART. I believe it when they give actual details. Perhaps it was a phase I toxicity study. That is NOT a trial! As said in my other post, they may as well have taken material from 40 patients and tried it on that. The present message is just hype, hype, hype.
Well, I read it. If you do read it well you will see that they have not done a clinical trial. They state that it works "in patients". That means that they may as well have taken blood from these people and worked with the cells from it. Sorry, not convincing. The definition of a "clinical trial" is rather more stringent. Both of these "news" items are overenthusiastic overhyped press releases meant to help raise funds. I know as I've made such releases myself (the last one was when we found a gene involved in a rare hair disorder, we released it to the press as a "baldness gene" I spent a day in various radio studios after that).
Slashdot must be a little starved for news these days. I didn't even bother to read the HIV paper. There are so many compounds that can block entry of HIV into its target cells that one new one is not exactly a breakthrough. Ditto for the bromelaine - there are many many compounds that will kill cancer in vitro. How everything will work in the actual patient, that's something else entirely. Please wake me up when some realistic coverage of modern drug research is posted.
It's not too difficult, conceptually. The star's mass is a function of its brightness. So, you already know the mass of the star. The orbiting planet causes the star to wobble a bit. The more massive the planet, the more the star wobbles. Weight is not the same as mass, by the way. Weight is what you get when you place a mass in a gravitational field. More info on this: http://ethel.as.arizona.edu/~collins/astro/subject s/srchplanet5.html
If you read the actual blog, it doesn't really contain any information or opinion or whatever. One of the comments on the blog provides more useful information - for older and more informative papers go here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/security/2004/08/0 3/symbiot.html and
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/security/2004/03/10/sy mbiot.html
Because that's what you are if you think there's going to be a test for geekiness. While Asperger's syndrome is a circumscribed and very possibly monogenic entity, what we currently group under "autism spectrum" definitely is not. Geekiness, defined as possibly socially awkward or not interested in acquiring social skills because there are better things to do such as writing papers on General Relativity is not a single gene thing. It's polygenic and I seriously doubt whether, even if we find the genetic variations that go into building smart brains, there will ever be a test that determines whether someone will be smart. At most we'll be able to test for potential, and that's something else entirely. Oh, and Bill will not have Asperger syndrome. People with that disease are generally mentally retarded or have one hypertrophied talent (idiots savants). And Bill, for all his merits, is not retarded.
If you do not tick the "open safe files" check box in the prefs. Which you should left unchecked if you're not entirely stupid, as there is no way to tell whether any file is actually "safe". Good Internet Practice, as I like to call it.
It works by virtue of the fact that your motor cortex plans ahead. So, even while you have not yet consciously taken the decision to speak yet, your motor cortex has already set up the appropriate commands and sent them out to the nerves involved. This translates to an increased firing rate in these nerves, which is not enough to move the muscles but will be sufficient to register on sufficiently sensitive equipment. In fact (other discussion entirely, but fascinating nonetheless) most of our "voluntary" decisions appear to be made before we become aware of them. So much for free will :)
But nothing more. I agree with other posters. Now, if you could get some kind of force feedback that would tell you if one molecule can dock to the other in a particular orientation, or whether a, say, DNA molecule will accept a transcription factor and bend in the right direction, or.... - that would make a really useful tool for research. As it is now, this is a nice way of helping students to visualize the spatial properties of complex molecules. Useful, but hardly revolutionary in any sense.
Sorry, magnetic field are incapable of causing cancer. What causes cancer are relatively gross changes to the genetic material that lead to hyperactivity or inactivity of genes that are crucial for normal cell cycling. Some scientists believe that you actually need chromosomal rearrangements for cancer to occur (meaning malignancy, ie an invasive and metastatizing process). Indeed, most malignancies show these rearrangements. I can assure you that magnetic fields are not capable of causing this kind of damage. They cannot even cause point mutations. Obviously, ionizing radiation can, but AFAIK you don't get that from a CRT. People complaining about hypersensitivity to magnetic fields are like those suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome - they suffer from something, but the cause is entirely imaginary, fueled by magical thinking. CRT's do not make you ill. You get a headache from squinting or sitting slumped in your seat, at most.
Now we can really measure how many angels can fit together on a pinhead! More seriously, this technology opens up interesting possibilities for high-througput easy mutation screening. Base substitutions (mutations) in a given stretch of DNA will obviously alter its weight. In this way you can easily (well, relatively speaking) detect the presence of a mutation, after which you can select the stretch of DNA that the mutation is in for sequence analysis. It'd be an interesting application for us geneticists.
Cancelled already.... Citing ethical concerns etcetera. One wonders whether the comments on /. would have anything to do with it :)
Nice idea, that with the egg, but it will not work. Looks like most organisms require so-called maternal effect genes (Fruit flies do, nematodes do, and if they do, we usually do, too) for proper initial embryonic development. While these genes are usually highly conserved, I doubt whether the Ostrich/Monitor/Your_fav_reptile will have the proper set of maternal effect genes that have enough T-Rex sequence in them left to actually properly satisfy fore and aft (to begin with). And then there's a whole bunch of even more esoteric genetic reasons why this will not work. Don't get me started. If you do, I'll ramble on for several pages.