Ah, found it here . It turns out the ref is from Kurzweil (shudder) and is for price per computation, not exactly Moore's law but a similar conceit and arguably a better metric.
Unfortunately, you won't be able to get much useful dynamic protein folding info from this setup. For one, protein molecules are too low mass to be visualized except at very low resolutions. Also, being in a hard vacuum, proteins are either dry or encased in ice when in a TEM, making study of their motions moot.
As for graphene memory deviating from Moore's law, keep in mind that conventional fabbing is rapidly approaching the 35 nm scale. Also, graphene fabrication is still a long way from commercialization. If it does become practical, it will probably do so at about the point Moore's law predicts we'll hit those scales. You can actually trace Moore's law backwards (albeit, somewhat messily) to about 1900 or so through discrete transistors, vacuum tubes and mechanical relays. For some reason, the law applies even with radical changes in the underlying tech - kind of spooky.
TEM is generally poor at visualizing individual atoms. At the electron energies used, most matter is fairly transparent. It's like trying to view glass beads in a light microscope. Very heavy atoms such as uranium can be seen individually in special circumstances in a TEM. For the most part the images you see are the result of many, many layers of atoms lining up and causing diffraction effects in the beam.
As exciting as this sounds, it's probably not going to lead to a pancea for cancer in humans. We've cured cancer in mice several times over since the 70s. The problem is that mice are a short-lived species that has very little innate resistance to cancer. After all evolution is not going to have an organism waste lots of energy repairing DNA damage and having pools of immune cells constantly checking for mutant cells if the organism is just going to get eaten by a cat in an average of a few months after birth.
By contrast, humans are a very long-lived animal species. Our bodies already have a large number of cancer-prevention mechanisms that simply aren't present in mice. Take for example telomeres. The telomere ends of chromosomes shorten with each cell replication other than gamete formation. All your cells have what is known as the 'Hayflick limit' where the telomeres get too short, the chromosomes become unstable and the cell dies. Although this mechanism is probably one of the contributors to human aging, it also does a very good job of eliminating many tumors. Most of your tumors hit the Hayflick limit and simply die off before they can present a threat to you. Virtually all human cancers either mutate so as to find a way to reactivate the telomerase that re-lengthens the telomeres or manages to find a way to preserve their telomere ends through chromosomal recombination. Mouse cells, by way of contrast, have huge telomeres which never get short enough to act as this sort of cancer-prevention mechanism.
As a result human tumors are much 'tougher' than mouse tumors. The average mouse tumor wouldn't stand a chance in a human. Any tumor that manages to thrive in a human has had to jump a host of hurdles and checkpoints that no mouse tumor does in order to simply survive.
The problem is that many of these cancer cures in mice already exist in humans naturally. Some of these cures (such as this one, most likely) are simply reactivation of vestigial anti-cancer systems in the mice that have atrophied for the above-mentioned reasons. Others are cancer treatments that attack weaknesses in mouse tumors that are simply irrelevant in human ones. I suspect that this super mouse is simply being more human with regards to cancer and that the end result is that we'll rediscover something our bodies already do.
Ah, someone was good enough to post a link to the actual Science article and it is Belcher's work. Unfortunately, my Science subscription ran out last night (no really!) so I can't read the durn thing. Doh!
Looks like they're mixing gold and CoO here. Unfortunately the abstract doesn't really explain how that's being done. It sounds as if they're seeding CoO growth directly on the phage (some materials can use M13 as a growth seed for crystal formation) and are then attaching gold nanoparticles to gold binding peptides as described in my post above.
If anyone who has access to the whole article can comment, that'd be much appreciated.
Um, they're making wires, not battery cells with the phage. The phage have exactly 0 volts of EMF and do not use any EMF to enter a cell. There's an intrinsic electrostatic charge on the phage that helps to attach to a cell but that is not EMF. That's like saying the intrinsic +1 charge on a sodium atom makes it a battery.
Any yes, electron microscopists have been plating metal on biological samples for many years but its a completely different thing going on here. Traditional metal coating involves evaporating gold over the entire sample including virus, substrate and everything else. (or drying uranyl acetate onto the sample or chemically attaching osmium tetraoxide(eek!) onto the sample) There is no fine control over where the metal goes, its final structure or even how thick it is in a given region.
This work involved genetically engineering M13 to bind to cobalt oxide nanoparticles in solution so that you have control over the particle size and its spatial organization in the finished product.
Ah, I used to work on this sort of stuff. Although TFA is very information poor, I'm guessing that this research was done by Angela Belcher's group. She and a few other folks (including my former prof) have been working with proteins that bind to specific organic surfaces for several years now. She's been at the lead of this particular field for quite a while now. It's a very interesting and promising field of research.
Here's some background for the interested:
M13 is a filamentous bacteriophage. It infect E. coli bacteria and creates a latent infection where the E. coli ends up pumping out hundreds of new M13. Unlike most bacteriophage, the infection is not lethal to the host. The M13 phage itself is thread-like in structure. At the core is the a circular, single-stranded DNA genome arranged in a linear shape. (imagine grabbing a rubber band at both ends and stretching it out so that it's a very elongated and narrow oval) There are 5 types of coat proteins that then coat and protect this DNA. Here's a link to a decent site about M13: http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~mgonzalez/Micro5 21/Lambda/M13.html
One, G8P, is present in thousands of copies and coats the DNA in a spiral fashion. A pipe cleaner is a fairly good representation of what the phage looks like. At the ends, the other 4 types of proteins form end caps. On the end that infects bacteria, a protein known as G3P is present in 5 copies and mediates the atachment of the virus and its incorporation into the bacterium for infection. G3P is important because it's fairly exposed at the end of the virus. Also, experimentation over the years has found a 'permissive' region in G3P. A permissive region of the protein structure that is tolerant to the addition of new amino acid sequences that do not badly disrupt the normal protein function. Therefore, one can genetically engineer M13 to put a small chunk of new protein into this site and the virus is still capable of infecting bacteria and replicating. The inserted bit of protein is also known to be exposed at the end of the virus.
M13 is available in commercially generated libraries where tens of millions of randonly generated DNA sequences have been inserted into M13. These 'libraries' are then infected into bacteria and amplified. The resulting phage are then sold to researchers who want to find pecific protein sequences that bind to certain targets. Mostly, these targets are biological in nature. For example - to try and find peptide-based drugs that bind to and inactivate a particular cellular receptor. Here is a link to a commonly used commercial library (I used to use it and I know Belcher's group did too) http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE8120. asp The link also has lots of pretty pictures and the like about how phage display screening works in more detail that I've got below.
Essentially, what you do is take a substrate of interest, in this case, cobalt oxide and mix it with a sample of the library. You use incubation conditions where regular M13 doesn't stick to the CoO. If any of the library phage stick you know it is probably because those particular phage have a protein insert which binds specifically to CoO. You do a few rounds of binding and washing to get the strongest binders and then sequence the cobalt oxide binding proteins you've recovered.
You can churn out hundreds of sequences this way and start building up a library of proteins very specific to a particular inorganic substrate. You can, for example, create proteins that bind to only platinum versus gold and palladium, cupric oxide versus cuprous oxide, etc. There is even evidence that you can discriminate various sizes of nanoparticles and bind to particular crystalline faces of materials this way. I even heard a rumor a few years back of being able to distinguish p and n-doped
HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE CENTAURI CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO TRANSFER THE SUM OF #47,500,000.00 (FORTY SEVEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND GEESAK COMMONWEALTH GOLTONS) INTO YOUR ACCOUNTS. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM AN OVER-INVOICED CONTRACT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR ABOUT FIVE YEARS (5) AGO BY A INTERSTELLAR CONTRACTOR. THIS ACTION WAS HOWEVER INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE FUND HAS BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF CENTAURI APEX BANK...
Opposed to what, a sterile, buisness-suited present where food production is controlled by large corporations who are more concerned about the bottom line than the welfare of either the customers or the animals used to make the food?
Decentralized 'meat' production where there's no suffering involved, the risk of dangerous bacterial contamination from slaughterhouse processing is gone, the consumer has moer direct control over what antibiotics and hormones, if any, go into their meat is such an Orwellian idea.
Since when did it become required in/. that every submitter comment try and pass off a technological innovation as being Orwellian/reckless/sinister with some sort of boneheaded Luddite comment?
It's been a while so my memory is a bit fuzzy so I'm paraphrasing: Back in High School, programming on Borland Turbo Pascal (6.0?), I noticed the following gem in the help file description of the sound generation function. In addition to the ususal function parameters, etc, there was an odd little anecdote about how the resonant frequency of a chicken head is about 3 Hertz and how one time a factory that generated this frequency at high volume ended killing all of the chickens in a neighboring chicken farm. It them went on to say that the resonant frequency of a human skull was about 1 Hz but that the PC speaker probably couldn't generate that frequency very well.
The issue of Science a few weeks back had a bg article devoted to the dog genome completion. They also reported results from initial studies that showed the relationships between various dog breeds. It turns out (as suspected) that dogs were domesticated in Asia as asian breeds are the most different from other domesticated breeds and most similar to wolves. They did an evolutionary tree for the rest of the dog breeds but the cladistics are still being worked out so most of the other breeds are still in a bit of limbo. They expect to work out the relationships of those breeds over time.
This study was significant because it was the first to be able to unambiguously identify dog DNA by breed reliably. Previous attempts using smaller numbers of SNPs tended to be very innacurate.
The biggest result of the dog genome is for human medicine. Geneticists have been pushing for dog genomes (they're already working on a second dog breed genome) for years. Purebreed dogs are a geneticists dream. Each breed has distintive features as well as characteristic diseases such as arthritis, nerve degeneration and cardiovascular disease. Purebreed dogs are also basically giant inbred families with meticulous documentation about their lineage. Having dog genomes actually has a great deal of potential to revolutionize human medicine as a result.
Actually, the vast majority of gemone sequences are in the public domain in whole or part. Even many of the proprietary genomes ended up being made availabe to the public after a year or two.
Open source is not a new idea for the academic sciences - they've been operating on that principle for a couple hundred years now.
While I am strongly in favor of keeping Hubble operational because of its UV and visible capabilites, the James Webb IR telescope is hardly an inferior scope. It's got much improved optics, a better location and more sensitive detectors.
The problem, though is that there is very little research that is being done or can be done on the ISS. Currently, about 5% of the astronaut time is devoted to science. Take a look at the ISS science web page (you'll have to dig, it's buried - I think NASA is embarassed to show it) sometime, it's pathetic. One of the 'science' experiments is having the astronauts take digital camera pictures of the Earth through the windows, I kid you not.
The NSF did a study of the ISS a few years back and concluded that the station was utterly useless for science. Most of the things NASA claimed ISS would do can be done better on the ground and the rest were impossible because of the limitations in the station design. Since then, the ISS science capability has decreased even more.
Long duration human studies are nice but we already have lots of data from Mir for that. While newer studies are nice, it hadly seems worth the exorbitant price tag required to get that data.
While the risk of the Pu RTGs breaking open if Cassini had hit the Earth on those slingshot maneuvers was non-zero, the risk to human health was non-existant. The stupid - 'toxic enough to kill every human on Earth' line was complete BS.
For one, it's know that at least 3 RTGs have burned up on reentry, one US and two USSR. We didn't all die.
Second, while Plutonium is toxic, it's not that bad - caffeine has a lower fatal dose than Plutonium.
Ignoring the whole false-color picture stuff in your comment which has already been sufficiently jumped-on, I'd like to note that this isn't such a bad idea. Your ears are one of your most sensitive sense organs, especially for noticing small discrepancies. I remember reading an article at least 10 years ago that described a company that had converted the readout for their durg teating machines from a graphical to an auditory readout. The overall accuracy of the people monitoring the machines to catch drug-positive samples went way up for the auditory readout.
Did anyone else notice the due date for proposals? It's 6 weeks from now! Does that strike anyone else as being a bit.. hurried? The way things in aerospace usually go, it takes companies 6 weeks just to pick out what kind of slick, glossy folder they want to put the proposal in.
So is NASA trying to follow the Scaled Composites lead of minimizing paperwork (unlikely, IMO, it's NASA after all) or do they know somethng about the urgency of getting this mission done that we don't?
I don't have any exact figures on hand right now but the solar power situation is much better these days. Amortized solar power is down to about 3 times the grid costs in most places.
Furthermore, many large US cities now require their power utilities to buy power back from renewable energy users. Basically, that means that you tie your solar cells into the power grid and sell power to the power company during the day and buy it back at night. This eliminates the need for batteries since the power grid is your battery.
Once the need for batteries is gone, the price of the solar cells is the biggest holdback. Several companies are now working on nanoparticle or polymer solar cell technologies that are supposed to drop cell costs by a factor of 5-10. Once this happens, solar becomes a very attractive power source. It also helps out the utilities as it reduces the need for more power plants and also decentralizes power generation, lowering the load on the power grid.
It's now possible for a house in the Southern half of the US to have fairly normal power useage (using compact fluorescents, power saving appliances, etc) and have minimal actual net power usage or even a negative net power usage. I saw a rundown of a user built solar setup in CA recently that the user estimates will break even in about 12 years.
Given that I live in Seattle, land of gray skies and not so stellar solar power kickback incentives, solar still isn't economic but if the solar cell cost comes down another factor of 3, it will be worth it. If it comes down a factor of 5, you can bet that most people will be flocking to it as it will save them money in the fairly short term. My guess is that if the time to break-even drops under 5 years, most people will spring for solar.
Solar will probably never satisfy our power needs but it can definately help substantially.
And the total waste helium production from worldwide fusion is going to be a few pounds of helium a year vs the hundreds of millions of cubic feet a year we're now using up. Yeah, a lot of heavy thought indeed...
Actually, the many worlds theory doesn't really say that the universe splits every time there is a quantum decision - that's a very common misinterpretation of the theory, though.
Instead, what happens is that (using Shroedinger's cat as an example) , the atom in the box is a superposition of a decayed and non-decayed quantum state. The cat, having it's life associated with said waveform become a superposition of live and dead. When you open the box, the photons (exhibiting superimposed quantum states) are read by your eyes and reported to your brain which then also splits into a superposition of states, one seeing a live cat, the other seeing a dead cat. Each quantum state of your mind then basically sees either a live or dead cat. You think that you are seeing either a live or dead cat and then assume that the cat's quantum state must have collapsed into one of those states when you looked at it.
The many worlds theory simply states that this is an illusion, you yourself have been split into multiple states and each state coexists without the knowledge of the other states and interprets the world as if waveforms collapse. Instead, the reality is that every possible quantum event not only does happen but happens simultaneously and in the same place. We just can't 'see' it.
The many worlds theory assumes that the waveforms never collapse which is basically the most faithful interpretation of the underlying equations. Any theory that talks about waveform collapse is basically tacking on extra baggage to try to explain this 'collapse' that the many worlds theory simply does away with.
Personally, I think the many worlds theory is by far the most elegant and likely explanation, all of the other versions look a lot like epicycles to me. OTOH, the many worlds hypothesis is fundamentally impossible to prove or disprove since no experiment can demonstrate that multiple quantum states coexist. (at least to my knowledge) However, lack of provability or predictive power probably says more about inherent limitations on experimental science than the validity of this theory.
Incidentally, if you examine cosmology with the many worlds interpretation, you can start applying thermodynamics laws to the universe since pretyty much every possible set of events is going on simultaneously - including events that would mimic a Big Bang.
True, but until there's a law that prevents you from sending your E-mails in an encrypted format, nothing is going to stop you from keeping busybodies out of your stuff.
I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments but I question whether they are truly applicable with regard to GMail. Regardless of how Google ends up treating your personal information, unencrypted e-mail is an inherently unsafe method of communication. If I were concerned about the jackboots looking into my personal beliefs, I'd just as soon talk about those beliefs on GMail, Hotmail or any other service just about as soon as I would walk around WWII Germany wearing a sandwich board with a Star of David on it.
I personally have no problem with the potential privacy abuses put onto GMail - all told, they are in the same order of magnitude that we had on the E-mail systems we've been using all along. What needs to be done instead is to educate people that unencrypted e-mail of any variety is no different than a public conversation. If political conditions change so as to make your life dangerous, it should be fairly evident. Ladyzhenski, Bonhoeffer and Hampton all knew that they were walking a fine line. Even Shepard was walking a fine line - it had nothing to do with being gay, it was, instead, the inherent danger and (let's be perfectly honest here) poor judgement in going home from a bar with a couple of guys he didn't even know.
Most people with common sense are going to see the writing on the wall long before the hammer comes down. Those with some smarts are going to start being a little more circumspect about how they run their lives. For example, I'm pretty sure that Bonhoeffer was being careful (although apparently not careful enough) about his Hitler assasination plans. Of course, there's nothing that one can do to take back your past life as poor Ladyzhenski found out but that's just the luck of the draw. Even if you don't trust any of your personal details to GMail, there's going to be plenty of corroborating evidence from family, neigbors, etc to find you guilty of just about anything.
Suggesting, as you seem to be doing, to the grandparent that one should always live with the assumption that some trivial aspect of your life will result in tragedy is no way to live. There's plenty of aspects of myself that could later be used against me - being half Asian, a scientist, an atheist, etc. I'm certainly not going to try and hide these facts from the world to the extent that I'm not going to talk about them, e-mail about them, etc. Yeah, it could land me in trouble someday but if I choose to live in self-imposed fear my entire life, I've done a better job than all of the Stalins, Hitlers, Hoovers, Ashcrofts and other petty tyrants could have done to me put together.
Life is inherently risky with a mortality rate of 100%. Living life properly is an act balancing out those things that constitute unnecessary and/or exceedingly large risks. GMail is not one of those things, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, found it here . It turns out the ref is from Kurzweil (shudder) and is for price per computation, not exactly Moore's law but a similar conceit and arguably a better metric.
Unfortunately, you won't be able to get much useful dynamic protein folding info from this setup. For one, protein molecules are too low mass to be visualized except at very low resolutions. Also, being in a hard vacuum, proteins are either dry or encased in ice when in a TEM, making study of their motions moot.
As for graphene memory deviating from Moore's law, keep in mind that conventional fabbing is rapidly approaching the 35 nm scale. Also, graphene fabrication is still a long way from commercialization. If it does become practical, it will probably do so at about the point Moore's law predicts we'll hit those scales. You can actually trace Moore's law backwards (albeit, somewhat messily) to about 1900 or so through discrete transistors, vacuum tubes and mechanical relays. For some reason, the law applies even with radical changes in the underlying tech - kind of spooky.
TEM is generally poor at visualizing individual atoms. At the electron energies used, most matter is fairly transparent. It's like trying to view glass beads in a light microscope. Very heavy atoms such as uranium can be seen individually in special circumstances in a TEM. For the most part the images you see are the result of many, many layers of atoms lining up and causing diffraction effects in the beam.
As exciting as this sounds, it's probably not going to lead to a pancea for cancer in humans. We've cured cancer in mice several times over since the 70s. The problem is that mice are a short-lived species that has very little innate resistance to cancer. After all evolution is not going to have an organism waste lots of energy repairing DNA damage and having pools of immune cells constantly checking for mutant cells if the organism is just going to get eaten by a cat in an average of a few months after birth.
By contrast, humans are a very long-lived animal species. Our bodies already have a large number of cancer-prevention mechanisms that simply aren't present in mice. Take for example telomeres. The telomere ends of chromosomes shorten with each cell replication other than gamete formation. All your cells have what is known as the 'Hayflick limit' where the telomeres get too short, the chromosomes become unstable and the cell dies. Although this mechanism is probably one of the contributors to human aging, it also does a very good job of eliminating many tumors. Most of your tumors hit the Hayflick limit and simply die off before they can present a threat to you. Virtually all human cancers either mutate so as to find a way to reactivate the telomerase that re-lengthens the telomeres or manages to find a way to preserve their telomere ends through chromosomal recombination. Mouse cells, by way of contrast, have huge telomeres which never get short enough to act as this sort of cancer-prevention mechanism.
As a result human tumors are much 'tougher' than mouse tumors. The average mouse tumor wouldn't stand a chance in a human. Any tumor that manages to thrive in a human has had to jump a host of hurdles and checkpoints that no mouse tumor does in order to simply survive.
The problem is that many of these cancer cures in mice already exist in humans naturally. Some of these cures (such as this one, most likely) are simply reactivation of vestigial anti-cancer systems in the mice that have atrophied for the above-mentioned reasons. Others are cancer treatments that attack weaknesses in mouse tumors that are simply irrelevant in human ones. I suspect that this super mouse is simply being more human with regards to cancer and that the end result is that we'll rediscover something our bodies already do.
Ah, someone was good enough to post a link to the actual Science article and it is Belcher's work. Unfortunately, my Science subscription ran out last night (no really!) so I can't read the durn thing. Doh!
Looks like they're mixing gold and CoO here. Unfortunately the abstract doesn't really explain how that's being done. It sounds as if they're seeding CoO growth directly on the phage (some materials can use M13 as a growth seed for crystal formation) and are then attaching gold nanoparticles to gold binding peptides as described in my post above.
If anyone who has access to the whole article can comment, that'd be much appreciated.
Um, they're making wires, not battery cells with the phage. The phage have exactly 0 volts of EMF and do not use any EMF to enter a cell. There's an intrinsic electrostatic charge on the phage that helps to attach to a cell but that is not EMF. That's like saying the intrinsic +1 charge on a sodium atom makes it a battery.
Any yes, electron microscopists have been plating metal on biological samples for many years but its a completely different thing going on here. Traditional metal coating involves evaporating gold over the entire sample including virus, substrate and everything else. (or drying uranyl acetate onto the sample or chemically attaching osmium tetraoxide(eek!) onto the sample) There is no fine control over where the metal goes, its final structure or even how thick it is in a given region.
This work involved genetically engineering M13 to bind to cobalt oxide nanoparticles in solution so that you have control over the particle size and its spatial organization in the finished product.
Ah, I used to work on this sort of stuff. Although TFA is very information poor, I'm guessing that this research was done by Angela Belcher's group. She and a few other folks (including my former prof) have been working with proteins that bind to specific organic surfaces for several years now. She's been at the lead of this particular field for quite a while now. It's a very interesting and promising field of research.
Here's some background for the interested:
M13 is a filamentous bacteriophage. It infect E. coli bacteria and creates a latent infection where the E. coli ends up pumping out hundreds of new M13. Unlike most bacteriophage, the infection is not lethal to the host. The M13 phage itself is thread-like in structure. At the core is the a circular, single-stranded DNA genome arranged in a linear shape. (imagine grabbing a rubber band at both ends and stretching it out so that it's a very elongated and narrow oval) There are 5 types of coat proteins that then coat and protect this DNA. Here's a link to a decent site about M13: http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~mgonzalez/Micro5 21/Lambda/M13.html
One, G8P, is present in thousands of copies and coats the DNA in a spiral fashion. A pipe cleaner is a fairly good representation of what the phage looks like. At the ends, the other 4 types of proteins form end caps. On the end that infects bacteria, a protein known as G3P is present in 5 copies and mediates the atachment of the virus and its incorporation into the bacterium for infection. G3P is important because it's fairly exposed at the end of the virus. Also, experimentation over the years has found a 'permissive' region in G3P. A permissive region of the protein structure that is tolerant to the addition of new amino acid sequences that do not badly disrupt the normal protein function. Therefore, one can genetically engineer M13 to put a small chunk of new protein into this site and the virus is still capable of infecting bacteria and replicating. The inserted bit of protein is also known to be exposed at the end of the virus.
M13 is available in commercially generated libraries where tens of millions of randonly generated DNA sequences have been inserted into M13. These 'libraries' are then infected into bacteria and amplified. The resulting phage are then sold to researchers who want to find pecific protein sequences that bind to certain targets. Mostly, these targets are biological in nature. For example - to try and find peptide-based drugs that bind to and inactivate a particular cellular receptor. Here is a link to a commonly used commercial library (I used to use it and I know Belcher's group did too) http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE8120. asp The link also has lots of pretty pictures and the like about how phage display screening works in more detail that I've got below.
Essentially, what you do is take a substrate of interest, in this case, cobalt oxide and mix it with a sample of the library. You use incubation conditions where regular M13 doesn't stick to the CoO. If any of the library phage stick you know it is probably because those particular phage have a protein insert which binds specifically to CoO. You do a few rounds of binding and washing to get the strongest binders and then sequence the cobalt oxide binding proteins you've recovered.
You can churn out hundreds of sequences this way and start building up a library of proteins very specific to a particular inorganic substrate. You can, for example, create proteins that bind to only platinum versus gold and palladium, cupric oxide versus cuprous oxide, etc. There is even evidence that you can discriminate various sizes of nanoparticles and bind to particular crystalline faces of materials this way. I even heard a rumor a few years back of being able to distinguish p and n-doped
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Opposed to what, a sterile, buisness-suited present where food production is controlled by large corporations who are more concerned about the bottom line than the welfare of either the customers or the animals used to make the food?
/. that every submitter comment try and pass off a technological innovation as being Orwellian/reckless/sinister with some sort of boneheaded Luddite comment?
Decentralized 'meat' production where there's no suffering involved, the risk of dangerous bacterial contamination from slaughterhouse processing is gone, the consumer has moer direct control over what antibiotics and hormones, if any, go into their meat is such an Orwellian idea.
Since when did it become required in
It's been a while so my memory is a bit fuzzy so I'm paraphrasing:
Back in High School, programming on Borland Turbo Pascal (6.0?), I noticed the following gem in the help file description of the sound generation function. In addition to the ususal function parameters, etc, there was an odd little anecdote about how the resonant frequency of a chicken head is about 3 Hertz and how one time a factory that generated this frequency at high volume ended killing all of the chickens in a neighboring chicken farm. It them went on to say that the resonant frequency of a human skull was about 1 Hz but that the PC speaker probably couldn't generate that frequency very well.
WTF!?!
Scientific progress goes BOINC?
The issue of Science a few weeks back had a bg article devoted to the dog genome completion. They also reported results from initial studies that showed the relationships between various dog breeds. It turns out (as suspected) that dogs were domesticated in Asia as asian breeds are the most different from other domesticated breeds and most similar to wolves. They did an evolutionary tree for the rest of the dog breeds but the cladistics are still being worked out so most of the other breeds are still in a bit of limbo. They expect to work out the relationships of those breeds over time.
This study was significant because it was the first to be able to unambiguously identify dog DNA by breed reliably. Previous attempts using smaller numbers of SNPs tended to be very innacurate.
The biggest result of the dog genome is for human medicine. Geneticists have been pushing for dog genomes (they're already working on a second dog breed genome) for years. Purebreed dogs are a geneticists dream. Each breed has distintive features as well as characteristic diseases such as arthritis, nerve degeneration and cardiovascular disease. Purebreed dogs are also basically giant inbred families with meticulous documentation about their lineage. Having dog genomes actually has a great deal of potential to revolutionize human medicine as a result.
Actually, the vast majority of gemone sequences are in the public domain in whole or part. Even many of the proprietary genomes ended up being made availabe to the public after a year or two.
Open source is not a new idea for the academic sciences - they've been operating on that principle for a couple hundred years now.
While I am strongly in favor of keeping Hubble operational because of its UV and visible capabilites, the James Webb IR telescope is hardly an inferior scope. It's got much improved optics, a better location and more sensitive detectors.
The problem, though is that there is very little research that is being done or can be done on the ISS. Currently, about 5% of the astronaut time is devoted to science. Take a look at the ISS science web page (you'll have to dig, it's buried - I think NASA is embarassed to show it) sometime, it's pathetic. One of the 'science' experiments is having the astronauts take digital camera pictures of the Earth through the windows, I kid you not.
The NSF did a study of the ISS a few years back and concluded that the station was utterly useless for science. Most of the things NASA claimed ISS would do can be done better on the ground and the rest were impossible because of the limitations in the station design. Since then, the ISS science capability has decreased even more.
Long duration human studies are nice but we already have lots of data from Mir for that. While newer studies are nice, it hadly seems worth the exorbitant price tag required to get that data.
And FOXBAT isn't a wacky name?!
While the risk of the Pu RTGs breaking open if Cassini had hit the Earth on those slingshot maneuvers was non-zero, the risk to human health was non-existant. The stupid - 'toxic enough to kill every human on Earth' line was complete BS.
For one, it's know that at least 3 RTGs have burned up on reentry, one US and two USSR. We didn't all die.
Second, while Plutonium is toxic, it's not that bad - caffeine has a lower fatal dose than Plutonium.
Hey, what J. Michael Straczynski does in the privacy of his own home is fine but I really don't need to be updated on things like his ere....
OH.
Whoops, I parsed Trek as Tent, my bad.
Ignoring the whole false-color picture stuff in your comment which has already been sufficiently jumped-on, I'd like to note that this isn't such a bad idea. Your ears are one of your most sensitive sense organs, especially for noticing small discrepancies. I remember reading an article at least 10 years ago that described a company that had converted the readout for their durg teating machines from a graphical to an auditory readout. The overall accuracy of the people monitoring the machines to catch drug-positive samples went way up for the auditory readout.
Did anyone else notice the due date for proposals? It's 6 weeks from now! Does that strike anyone else as being a bit.. hurried? The way things in aerospace usually go, it takes companies 6 weeks just to pick out what kind of slick, glossy folder they want to put the proposal in.
So is NASA trying to follow the Scaled Composites lead of minimizing paperwork (unlikely, IMO, it's NASA after all) or do they know somethng about the urgency of getting this mission done that we don't?
I don't have any exact figures on hand right now but the solar power situation is much better these days. Amortized solar power is down to about 3 times the grid costs in most places.
Furthermore, many large US cities now require their power utilities to buy power back from renewable energy users. Basically, that means that you tie your solar cells into the power grid and sell power to the power company during the day and buy it back at night. This eliminates the need for batteries since the power grid is your battery.
Once the need for batteries is gone, the price of the solar cells is the biggest holdback. Several companies are now working on nanoparticle or polymer solar cell technologies that are supposed to drop cell costs by a factor of 5-10. Once this happens, solar becomes a very attractive power source. It also helps out the utilities as it reduces the need for more power plants and also decentralizes power generation, lowering the load on the power grid.
It's now possible for a house in the Southern half of the US to have fairly normal power useage (using compact fluorescents, power saving appliances, etc) and have minimal actual net power usage or even a negative net power usage. I saw a rundown of a user built solar setup in CA recently that the user estimates will break even in about 12 years.
Given that I live in Seattle, land of gray skies and not so stellar solar power kickback incentives, solar still isn't economic but if the solar cell cost comes down another factor of 3, it will be worth it. If it comes down a factor of 5, you can bet that most people will be flocking to it as it will save them money in the fairly short term. My guess is that if the time to break-even drops under 5 years, most people will spring for solar.
Solar will probably never satisfy our power needs but it can definately help substantially.
And the total waste helium production from worldwide fusion is going to be a few pounds of helium a year vs the hundreds of millions of cubic feet a year we're now using up. Yeah, a lot of heavy thought indeed...
Actually, the many worlds theory doesn't really say that the universe splits every time there is a quantum decision - that's a very common misinterpretation of the theory, though.
Instead, what happens is that (using Shroedinger's cat as an example) , the atom in the box is a superposition of a decayed and non-decayed quantum state. The cat, having it's life associated with said waveform become a superposition of live and dead. When you open the box, the photons (exhibiting superimposed quantum states) are read by your eyes and reported to your brain which then also splits into a superposition of states, one seeing a live cat, the other seeing a dead cat. Each quantum state of your mind then basically sees either a live or dead cat. You think that you are seeing either a live or dead cat and then assume that the cat's quantum state must have collapsed into one of those states when you looked at it.
The many worlds theory simply states that this is an illusion, you yourself have been split into multiple states and each state coexists without the knowledge of the other states and interprets the world as if waveforms collapse. Instead, the reality is that every possible quantum event not only does happen but happens simultaneously and in the same place. We just can't 'see' it.
The many worlds theory assumes that the waveforms never collapse which is basically the most faithful interpretation of the underlying equations. Any theory that talks about waveform collapse is basically tacking on extra baggage to try to explain this 'collapse' that the many worlds theory simply does away with.
Personally, I think the many worlds theory is by far the most elegant and likely explanation, all of the other versions look a lot like epicycles to me. OTOH, the many worlds hypothesis is fundamentally impossible to prove or disprove since no experiment can demonstrate that multiple quantum states coexist. (at least to my knowledge) However, lack of provability or predictive power probably says more about inherent limitations on experimental science than the validity of this theory.
Incidentally, if you examine cosmology with the many worlds interpretation, you can start applying thermodynamics laws to the universe since pretyty much every possible set of events is going on simultaneously - including events that would mimic a Big Bang.
True, but until there's a law that prevents you from sending your E-mails in an encrypted format, nothing is going to stop you from keeping busybodies out of your stuff.
I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments but I question whether they are truly applicable with regard to GMail. Regardless of how Google ends up treating your personal information, unencrypted e-mail is an inherently unsafe method of communication. If I were concerned about the jackboots looking into my personal beliefs, I'd just as soon talk about those beliefs on GMail, Hotmail or any other service just about as soon as I would walk around WWII Germany wearing a sandwich board with a Star of David on it.
I personally have no problem with the potential privacy abuses put onto GMail - all told, they are in the same order of magnitude that we had on the E-mail systems we've been using all along. What needs to be done instead is to educate people that unencrypted e-mail of any variety is no different than a public conversation. If political conditions change so as to make your life dangerous, it should be fairly evident. Ladyzhenski, Bonhoeffer and Hampton all knew that they were walking a fine line. Even Shepard was walking a fine line - it had nothing to do with being gay, it was, instead, the inherent danger and (let's be perfectly honest here) poor judgement in going home from a bar with a couple of guys he didn't even know.
Most people with common sense are going to see the writing on the wall long before the hammer comes down. Those with some smarts are going to start being a little more circumspect about how they run their lives. For example, I'm pretty sure that Bonhoeffer was being careful (although apparently not careful enough) about his Hitler assasination plans. Of course, there's nothing that one can do to take back your past life as poor Ladyzhenski found out but that's just the luck of the draw. Even if you don't trust any of your personal details to GMail, there's going to be plenty of corroborating evidence from family, neigbors, etc to find you guilty of just about anything.
Suggesting, as you seem to be doing, to the grandparent that one should always live with the assumption that some trivial aspect of your life will result in tragedy is no way to live. There's plenty of aspects of myself that could later be used against me - being half Asian, a scientist, an atheist, etc. I'm certainly not going to try and hide these facts from the world to the extent that I'm not going to talk about them, e-mail about them, etc. Yeah, it could land me in trouble someday but if I choose to live in self-imposed fear my entire life, I've done a better job than all of the Stalins, Hitlers, Hoovers, Ashcrofts and other petty tyrants could have done to me put together.
Life is inherently risky with a mortality rate of 100%. Living life properly is an act balancing out those things that constitute unnecessary and/or exceedingly large risks. GMail is not one of those things, IMO.