No Cipro is very common. It is routinely perscribed for "traveler's diahrrea" for tourists visting Africa. However, a lot depends on dosage. A lot also depends on doubling up with Vancomycin and the fact that your body might be completely shot immunologically from the fact that you just had an amputation due to drug resistant infection.
...who works in a department that deals with the real scariest bacteria I can say that this list is decent, but far from the real scary bugs. The meth resistant staff was a great choice, but aspergillis?!? You generally do not die from it unless you are seriously immuncomprimised. If it was that deadly then all of New Orleans would be stone dead right now.
If you want to talk about truly deady bacterial pathogens you must include baccilus anthracis and yersinia pestis. These are two of the most deadly "select agents." They can only be worked with in Biosafety Level 3 labs. This means that you have a Tyvek suit, huge HEPA filtration respirator. The whole BL3 lab has to be under negative pressure and you need biometric and keycode identification for anyone going in. Not to mention a background check and you have to work in pairs.
A common way to asses the lethality of a pathogen is to give it an "ID-50" or infectious dose that will kill 50% of those infected (also known as LD50 or lethal dose 50%). So pathogens with high ID50's are not so bad and the lower you go the more virulent/infective it is. Yersia pestis which causes pneumonic plague (you might know this as Black Death which killed ~20% of the Earth's population once). The ID50 for pnuemonic plague is 1. This means if you get on bacterium in your lungs you are dead, 100% of the time. You simply do not survive. It is a bit less pathogenic in beubonic form (skin infection). The worst part is that once you show symptoms it is almost always too late, there is 100% lethality. It is more deadly than ebola and the only reason people don't get it all the time is modern sanitation. The people that work with this bug in BL3 labs have to go to the hospital and get cipro if they run a fever of 104F and even then it is life threatening. It is one hell of a bio weapon because you are already dead by the time you express symptoms and by the time you start getting scared you have probably already infected a lot of other people. Not including Yersinia in "The Most Dangerous Bacteria" was probably a bit of an oversight.
As an American I find my relation to the Middle East almost exclusively filtered through the lens of "spreading Democracy." I am also a Religious Studies major so I find myself fascinated by Muslim theocracies and their relation to modern technology. Increased access to the Internet and availability of technology must be an enormous influence for modernization and liberalization in otherwise oppressive countries. However, you see countries like Iran becoming more technologically saavy even while they promote a culture that could be considered archaic. As someone who could shed some light on the interplay. Do you see technology and information access to be more a force for positive change or more of a force for finding new ways to oppress at least in the context of the Middle East?
USC-ISI is actually working on something that could be much more incredible than this. Their project (still in research phase) is known as SuperBots. They want to be able to build large self-configurable robots that can adapt to any terrain. They have videos available. These guys are currently being looked into by the LEAG (lunar exploration analysis group) of NASA's JPL (here is some commentary by an actual JPL engineer who went to the last LEAG conference). It is basically a nerd wet dream to imagine these things on a 10x scale powered by small nuclear engines stomping all over Mars and the Moon doing experiments, exploration, and generally being awesome.
I am pretty sure that Linux is really the only option for something like this for several reasons: -OS X would simply look too damn sleek and sexy for military use -Windows
*Blue Screen of Death (not helpful in tactical situations)
*As mentioned before, Clippy would probably be a liability in the field
*Do you really want something like Sasser to cripple the military?
*In a battlefield situation is one Tuesday a month enough? -The proprietary Diebold voting machine system
*hahahahhahahahahaha -Arm this thing with some serious firepower and "rm -rf" means something -Arm this thing and alias pWn="sudo rm -rf/var/enemy/combatants/" -BeOS just flashes the things headlights
I have been the victim of "heat stroke" at least once. I set out for a hike at Navajo National Monument that was deemed a "strenuous dayhike". At the time I was engaged heavily in wilderness trips in the desert conditions of NM, AZ, CO, and UT. On this trip we ednded up running out of water (that we were promised we would be able to refill by rangers) and getting seriously bonked by dehydration. This is the one and only time I have ever hallucinated. On the 8 mile return trip we started to get loopy at about mile 6. I fell into a very "sharp" bush at about mile 7 or 7.5 and did not feel any pain at all despite the fact that this bush almost left me with permanent scars. This was also very problematic because the "falling into bushes" occured VERY close to the edge of the canyon itself, but we (at the time) did not seem to care about nearly falling over the 300-500ft drop. These problems were reflected in the behavior of the entire group (I was not the only one to experience a lack of pain/conern). Lack of hydration left us with an impaired sense of judgement and an impaired ability to sense pain/danger.
I have also been trained as a Wilderness First Responder and can tell you that at least "extremely thirsty" people have such an incredibly deranged world view that definitions of "pain" get thrown right out the window.
..are areas that I have worked in, at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC. I am not really that enthusiastic about this find. There are an enourmous amount of "cancer supressing genes" but very few yield useful clinical results. This seems to be a case of over-hyping (which occurs all the time) of a scientific find.
Well I am glad that the Boston Globe, pinnacle of science that it is has deemed antibiotics to be a dead field. I would say that this cannot be more wrong. Not only are antibacterials being actively sought I have first hand knowledge of this fact. Private industry and the government have poured millions into finding vaccinations, antimicrobials, and many other biological elements of disease resistance. Your statement is wrong at best and intentionally misleading at worst. The most hilarious part is that the US is by FAR the leading country in this tpye of research. This is why everyone and their mother in the fields of immunology, microbiology, and biotechnology, wants a PhD from a US institution. This is why my boss gets at least 20 emails a week from people outside the US wanting to join our lab, despite the fact that it is very small.
I could not agree more. When my family had the money to move into a new house the first thing they did was relegate me to the smallest "bedroom" and take the bedroom that would otherwise have been mine and convert it into a computer room/library. It took me a while (I was young... forgive me) to understand the importance of this room. Now I can say that I have learned almost as much about my parents by seeing what books they chose to enshrined than I have by simply talking to them.
When I did enter college I found myself much more literarily versed than MANY of my peers despite the fact that I was a biochemitry major. This was almost certainly due to the fact that my parents encouraged me to read and discover on my own and gave me a base of operations by which to do so, as well as PLENTY of other resources including a library card and almost weekly trips to the library. These trips I am almost convinced were more for my mother's enjoyment than mine (she is a bookworm if I have ever met one) but the effect definitely was transferred.
I am not really surprised that soil bacteria are incredibly hardy. Remember that Bacillus anthracis (or Anthrax) is a bacterium that is endemic to soil. It is an incredibly hardy bacterium that can last as a spore in the right conditions for years (literally decades). Bacteria that live in the soil live in a hostile environment, to which they will develop methods of immunity. If a bacteria can live in soil, which is a hostile environment then one might guess that the same bacteria could handle the relatively "easy-to-live-in" human body. It is also interesting to note that many of our antibiotics are derivied from organisms that fight off bacterial infection. These same organims are prevalent in the soil. I am not sure what the big surprise is here?
And they will find something to complain about no matter what. Perhaps by leaving a few typos on the site, I am making their day a little easier! Leave them some low hanging fruit I guess.
This is why I have always been of the opinion that someone should just make a site that all blog or forum style sites can link to where it is just an infinite flame war. The moderators of the site could sort of "chum the waters" by posting as random nicknames articles that are heavily biased and filled with tons of spelling/grammar errors. Then/. can just add a "banished to the infinite flame war" moderation.
...contrary to the popular "deal with" or "confront" psychology of dealing with tragedy the most helpful mindset is actually to accept and move on. It is actually well documented that in dealing with disaster/death/tragedy it is best to acknowledge that it happened and the accept it and move on. This is well detailed in the book The Road To Malpsychia. Perhaps this pill will truly help. If you choose to take it you can save yourself years of trauma. While it sounds sinister, it may prove to be better than years of dysfuntions or worse suicidal depression etc. Who knows? I am willing to see how this pans out, although I am skeptical this will ever be handed out with rescue blankets by the government. Perhaps as an alternative perscription from a liscences psychiatrist, but not as a mass amnesiac.
It will provide an array of multimedia tools for identifying and indexing images, sound and text. Quaero will also reportedly include a powerful translating tool which will be able to 'understand' audio as well as text. The developers plan to make Quaero available on all platforms, including PCs, mobile devices and digital TVs.
and while we are dreaming... the EU will be offering a pony to every little girl and boy and a Christmas turkey to all families (except ones of North African heritage and anyone who has used the term "Nazi" in the last 20 year)
I think that the only way to solve this is to let MLB own the rights to the statistics. But every conceivable use of these statistics will be considered "fair use."
Ok I am going to assume you have been asleep for the last 2 years. Timberlake hasn't been cool in any crowd for a while. Yes you can say U2 is an ancient organization. That doesn't give Timberlake a popularity stamp. Even the poppest lamest MTV whores aren't going for Timberlake. He is dead on arrival... if you haven't been keeping up.
Well you have elucidated one of the cetral faults of all law enforcement. Timothy McVeigh was "caught" because he didn't keep enough operational security!? The man was completely successful in achieving his twisted goal. If you are willing to kill yourself for your worthless cause then there is not much that anyone can do... even if they "catch you."
We have "caught" many of the hijackers from 9/11 but they still achieved their goal. Say we find 1,000 people that buy books about jihad against the US... will we stop them from bombing a pizza parlor? The truth is that people who want to kill and don't cherish their life will get it done despite any kind of Amazon data mining. If this was such a powerful tool then how come we haven't had more success using it? Suicide bombers probably don't take a break and order a few books about killing the american satan and make a list of "books on how to make jihad against the Great Satan (the United States)."
...that I know freely subscribe to Amazon.com wish lists. They are like "lets overthrow the government that wants to jail us" but they are also all over "Lets let everyone know how we feel about corparations and the government by making wish lists that not only incriminate us but play into the hands of the very corporate droogs we hate... makes sense right." Anyone thinking they will get useful information about truly dangerous groups from Google Maps or Amazon Wish Lists needs to take a breather and sit down for a minute.
How does the univeristy want to come out. OF COURSE the university can impose sanctions on this student as they please. That is not the question. The question is how does Marquette want to be known to the rest of the nation. They can rake this guy over the coals for what essentially amounts to name calling, but is that in their best interest?
I highly doubt it. Did his comments make him a worse dentist? Has he somehow slighted the university in an irreparable way? Probably not. At this point make him apologize for being a pain in the ass but leave it at that. If you can't take criticism then what does that say about your institutional self confidence? Why does he have to do community service? Has he somehow created a karmic debt for expressing his opinion that requires compulsory community service? I would think that the university wanted students that thought for themselves, but if this one must toe the party line then let it be. Let Marquette shoulder the responsibility of being the institution that crushed one of its own because they couldn't handle a little anonymous criticism. That is the truly pathetic part.
This is an interesting analogy but in this case it is not necessarily that useful. The problem is that if a completely original and synthetic organism is made on a DNA level it means nothing unless it can be "compiled" into a new organism. The problem arises because raw DNA even with exact translation means nothing. There is an entire process of post translational modification that occurs to proteins. One single DNA sequence can produce more than one protein based on the activity of the rest of cellular machinery. There is also an ENORMOUS amount of regulation that occurs before RNA is even made into protein. This regulation is completely dependent on the native cellular machinery.
The point I am making is this: The output of the DNA genome is protein, BUT the output of one sequence of DNA can be wildly different depending on the cellular machinery. The same DNA sequence in humans can produce different proteins in bacteria (in some but not all cases). So if you are truly "synthesizing life" but are still dependent on existing cellular machinery (in this case E. coli) are you really synthesizing life? It is more something to think about than a truly practical consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
No Cipro is very common. It is routinely perscribed for "traveler's diahrrea" for tourists visting Africa. However, a lot depends on dosage. A lot also depends on doubling up with Vancomycin and the fact that your body might be completely shot immunologically from the fact that you just had an amputation due to drug resistant infection.
If you want to talk about truly deady bacterial pathogens you must include baccilus anthracis and yersinia pestis. These are two of the most deadly "select agents." They can only be worked with in Biosafety Level 3 labs. This means that you have a Tyvek suit, huge HEPA filtration respirator. The whole BL3 lab has to be under negative pressure and you need biometric and keycode identification for anyone going in. Not to mention a background check and you have to work in pairs.
A common way to asses the lethality of a pathogen is to give it an "ID-50" or infectious dose that will kill 50% of those infected (also known as LD50 or lethal dose 50%). So pathogens with high ID50's are not so bad and the lower you go the more virulent/infective it is. Yersia pestis which causes pneumonic plague (you might know this as Black Death which killed ~20% of the Earth's population once). The ID50 for pnuemonic plague is 1. This means if you get on bacterium in your lungs you are dead, 100% of the time. You simply do not survive. It is a bit less pathogenic in beubonic form (skin infection). The worst part is that once you show symptoms it is almost always too late, there is 100% lethality. It is more deadly than ebola and the only reason people don't get it all the time is modern sanitation. The people that work with this bug in BL3 labs have to go to the hospital and get cipro if they run a fever of 104F and even then it is life threatening. It is one hell of a bio weapon because you are already dead by the time you express symptoms and by the time you start getting scared you have probably already infected a lot of other people. Not including Yersinia in "The Most Dangerous Bacteria" was probably a bit of an oversight.
As an American I find my relation to the Middle East almost exclusively filtered through the lens of "spreading Democracy." I am also a Religious Studies major so I find myself fascinated by Muslim theocracies and their relation to modern technology. Increased access to the Internet and availability of technology must be an enormous influence for modernization and liberalization in otherwise oppressive countries. However, you see countries like Iran becoming more technologically saavy even while they promote a culture that could be considered archaic. As someone who could shed some light on the interplay. Do you see technology and information access to be more a force for positive change or more of a force for finding new ways to oppress at least in the context of the Middle East?
It's a bit early yet isn't it? Is this just setup for a really good one on 4/1?
USC-ISI is actually working on something that could be much more incredible than this. Their project (still in research phase) is known as SuperBots. They want to be able to build large self-configurable robots that can adapt to any terrain. They have videos available. These guys are currently being looked into by the LEAG (lunar exploration analysis group) of NASA's JPL (here is some commentary by an actual JPL engineer who went to the last LEAG conference). It is basically a nerd wet dream to imagine these things on a 10x scale powered by small nuclear engines stomping all over Mars and the Moon doing experiments, exploration, and generally being awesome.
I am pretty sure that Linux is really the only option for something like this for several reasons: /var/enemy/combatants/"
-OS X would simply look too damn sleek and sexy for military use
-Windows
*Blue Screen of Death (not helpful in tactical situations)
*As mentioned before, Clippy would probably be a liability in the field
*Do you really want something like Sasser to cripple the military?
*In a battlefield situation is one Tuesday a month enough?
-The proprietary Diebold voting machine system
*hahahahhahahahahaha
-Arm this thing with some serious firepower and "rm -rf" means something
-Arm this thing and alias pWn="sudo rm -rf
-BeOS just flashes the things headlights
just a little anecdote
I have also been trained as a Wilderness First Responder and can tell you that at least "extremely thirsty" people have such an incredibly deranged world view that definitions of "pain" get thrown right out the window.
Or better yet... every single eyeball so the real pirates (patches and peglegs) don't get away with two sea captains watching for the price of one.
Or this is "The Directors Cut"
..are areas that I have worked in, at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC. I am not really that enthusiastic about this find. There are an enourmous amount of "cancer supressing genes" but very few yield useful clinical results. This seems to be a case of over-hyping (which occurs all the time) of a scientific find.
Well I am glad that the Boston Globe, pinnacle of science that it is has deemed antibiotics to be a dead field. I would say that this cannot be more wrong. Not only are antibacterials being actively sought I have first hand knowledge of this fact. Private industry and the government have poured millions into finding vaccinations, antimicrobials, and many other biological elements of disease resistance. Your statement is wrong at best and intentionally misleading at worst. The most hilarious part is that the US is by FAR the leading country in this tpye of research. This is why everyone and their mother in the fields of immunology, microbiology, and biotechnology, wants a PhD from a US institution. This is why my boss gets at least 20 emails a week from people outside the US wanting to join our lab, despite the fact that it is very small.
I could not agree more. When my family had the money to move into a new house the first thing they did was relegate me to the smallest "bedroom" and take the bedroom that would otherwise have been mine and convert it into a computer room/library. It took me a while (I was young... forgive me) to understand the importance of this room. Now I can say that I have learned almost as much about my parents by seeing what books they chose to enshrined than I have by simply talking to them. When I did enter college I found myself much more literarily versed than MANY of my peers despite the fact that I was a biochemitry major. This was almost certainly due to the fact that my parents encouraged me to read and discover on my own and gave me a base of operations by which to do so, as well as PLENTY of other resources including a library card and almost weekly trips to the library. These trips I am almost convinced were more for my mother's enjoyment than mine (she is a bookworm if I have ever met one) but the effect definitely was transferred.
I am not really surprised that soil bacteria are incredibly hardy. Remember that Bacillus anthracis (or Anthrax) is a bacterium that is endemic to soil. It is an incredibly hardy bacterium that can last as a spore in the right conditions for years (literally decades). Bacteria that live in the soil live in a hostile environment, to which they will develop methods of immunity. If a bacteria can live in soil, which is a hostile environment then one might guess that the same bacteria could handle the relatively "easy-to-live-in" human body. It is also interesting to note that many of our antibiotics are derivied from organisms that fight off bacterial infection. These same organims are prevalent in the soil. I am not sure what the big surprise is here?
This is why I have always been of the opinion that someone should just make a site that all blog or forum style sites can link to where it is just an infinite flame war. The moderators of the site could sort of "chum the waters" by posting as random nicknames articles that are heavily biased and filled with tons of spelling/grammar errors. Then /. can just add a "banished to the infinite flame war" moderation.
...contrary to the popular "deal with" or "confront" psychology of dealing with tragedy the most helpful mindset is actually to accept and move on. It is actually well documented that in dealing with disaster/death/tragedy it is best to acknowledge that it happened and the accept it and move on. This is well detailed in the book The Road To Malpsychia. Perhaps this pill will truly help. If you choose to take it you can save yourself years of trauma. While it sounds sinister, it may prove to be better than years of dysfuntions or worse suicidal depression etc. Who knows? I am willing to see how this pans out, although I am skeptical this will ever be handed out with rescue blankets by the government. Perhaps as an alternative perscription from a liscences psychiatrist, but not as a mass amnesiac.
It will provide an array of multimedia tools for identifying and indexing images, sound and text. Quaero will also reportedly include a powerful translating tool which will be able to 'understand' audio as well as text. The developers plan to make Quaero available on all platforms, including PCs, mobile devices and digital TVs. and while we are dreaming... the EU will be offering a pony to every little girl and boy and a Christmas turkey to all families (except ones of North African heritage and anyone who has used the term "Nazi" in the last 20 year)
I think that the only way to solve this is to let MLB own the rights to the statistics. But every conceivable use of these statistics will be considered "fair use."
HA! P2P sharing come social vigilanteism. I love it.
Ok I am going to assume you have been asleep for the last 2 years. Timberlake hasn't been cool in any crowd for a while. Yes you can say U2 is an ancient organization. That doesn't give Timberlake a popularity stamp. Even the poppest lamest MTV whores aren't going for Timberlake. He is dead on arrival... if you haven't been keeping up.
We have "caught" many of the hijackers from 9/11 but they still achieved their goal. Say we find 1,000 people that buy books about jihad against the US... will we stop them from bombing a pizza parlor? The truth is that people who want to kill and don't cherish their life will get it done despite any kind of Amazon data mining. If this was such a powerful tool then how come we haven't had more success using it? Suicide bombers probably don't take a break and order a few books about killing the american satan and make a list of "books on how to make jihad against the Great Satan (the United States)."
...that I know freely subscribe to Amazon.com wish lists. They are like "lets overthrow the government that wants to jail us" but they are also all over "Lets let everyone know how we feel about corparations and the government by making wish lists that not only incriminate us but play into the hands of the very corporate droogs we hate... makes sense right." Anyone thinking they will get useful information about truly dangerous groups from Google Maps or Amazon Wish Lists needs to take a breather and sit down for a minute.
I highly doubt it. Did his comments make him a worse dentist? Has he somehow slighted the university in an irreparable way? Probably not. At this point make him apologize for being a pain in the ass but leave it at that. If you can't take criticism then what does that say about your institutional self confidence? Why does he have to do community service? Has he somehow created a karmic debt for expressing his opinion that requires compulsory community service? I would think that the university wanted students that thought for themselves, but if this one must toe the party line then let it be. Let Marquette shoulder the responsibility of being the institution that crushed one of its own because they couldn't handle a little anonymous criticism. That is the truly pathetic part.
Only one of these choices actually makes music. Coincidentally only one of these companies has a successful online music store.
The point I am making is this: The output of the DNA genome is protein, BUT the output of one sequence of DNA can be wildly different depending on the cellular machinery. The same DNA sequence in humans can produce different proteins in bacteria (in some but not all cases). So if you are truly "synthesizing life" but are still dependent on existing cellular machinery (in this case E. coli) are you really synthesizing life? It is more something to think about than a truly practical consideration.