from paragraph 2 of TFA: "Scientists don't know what the gene does."
No, they know what the gene does, it codes for a protein. They don't know what this protein does.
Then they say that the protein is expressed all over, including the brain, so that means it may be involved in brain function. For all they know it could be a structural protein, which is a better bet if it's expressed outside the brain.
Somehow I doubt that a single gene is responsible for humanity.
I try to be positive when I post, but what kind of morons do they have writing this stuff? And this is Nature magazine? How about some info on what sort of protein it is: Kinase? Carboxylase? Protease? How about some info on the expression levels instead of how many copies there are? There could be 1000 copies in our genome, but if the expression is low, it doesn't matter.
Guess I'll have to RTFP, where P=Paper.
well, that dooms the Phantom console
on
Duke in Trouble?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
What's Phantom going to use now that their star title is floundering?
Yes, there are usefull bacteria we need but they are totally different species. The equivalent of the phage attacking them would be to have a lynx that lives off rabbits deciding to eat deer. Even if it made the switch, it wouldn't be very god at it and wouldn't make much of an effect on the ecosystem. In the end, that strain would die out because it would be less competative than the one that was eating the rabbits.
Phages are _very_ specific and it's a huge thermodynamic deficit for them to switch species.
Short term, or long term. Certainly in the long term our gut bacteria have been in their ecosystem longer and would adapt far better than the phage. Predator-prey relationships always favour the prey. They have to, or the predator would starve to death after over-grazing.
Viruses don't carry out metabolism, they can't reproduce themselves (they rely on the host for that), they don't do any of the stuff that we use to define life.
There is nothing to die off.
Ok, lets give you truth in labelling: your tap water contains a hundred trillion of these phages in every glass, but most are specific for other species. While we're at it, about 4 pounds of your body weight is bacteria. That's about the mass of your brain.
Do you think if we told the public that any given piece of meat has x billion bacteria on it that it would be useful information to them? Plants too, so none of that herbivore crap.
How about this, your food is inspected and is maintained within the strict standards set by those in charge of your health. That is a good label that can go on all your food.
Sodium and fat content are useful so you can set your diet. The food's safety shouldn't even be a question, so putting it on the package is pointless.
Genetic modification has been going on for 10 thousand years by us and a few billion by nature. Unless you're one of those Intelligent Design whacks. If you are, I have one word for you:
This is very cool. I remember the Russians were working on killing bacterial infections in people (Tuberculosis, Leprosy, even Flesh eating disease) with Phages. That was in the 70s. It's about time someone came up with something successful.
By the way these are completely harmless to humans, in fact to all plants and animals. The phage is a very simple virus with a small genome that gets injected into the bacterium and does the standard virus things (hijacks the host's systems to replicate itself a billion times). The cell explodes, releasing billions more phages. These phages have been our tools for a long time in biology, we use them to move genes around, for making libraries of genes, all sorts of neato stuff. There's little we don't know about them, so they're a good candidate for this task. There is no way these can make the leap from infecting bacteria to infecting higher organisms, any more than a plant could suddenly start walking around.
I could think of a few things that are possible, for example if it mutated enough to find our host bacteria a good target then that might cause problems, but again, very doubtful.
For once I try to be one of the gang, and I get modded redundant? I spot a relatively new story with an obvious joke that _Somebody_ was going to jump on and I figure, what the hay, be part of the crowd for once. If not me, then it would have been one of you and don't tell me otherwise.
And for my contribution I get modded down and redundant!
Probably somebody with mod points jealous that I took his precious line.
this whole internet is so unfair!
Now what, grammar nazis?
funny, I just googled "rich user experience" and my first hit was: msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/experience/ And I realized that everything you said applies here. The biggest problem with MS is that their goal is this "rich user experience" whereas with Linux it's about stable platform that others can build tools for, rich or not. I'm not trying to jump on the bash-MS bandwagon, just a mini-epiphiny I had.
I especially like the part where he mentions the Atari ST as his favorite piece of hardware. That says alot. I still have mine too, and it's still my fave. Brings back the good old days of cracking each others' BBSs while tightening your own code up.. A good evolutionary approach to security.
In my books, Atari ST == Street Cred.
send and assemble a mass driver on the surface, use its own mass to push it in one direction (sending the debris in the opposite direction) And the mass would come from your tunneling equipment as you hollow it out for habitation. By the time it's in orbit, it'd be all set up to be habitable.
Hmm, lets take that one step further..
Lets capture it in a very high orbit and use it as the counterweight for our Space Elevator. We should just be getting out technology down pat by that time and, hell, this thing is big enough we could actually use it as a base for all sorts of stuff.. kinda a mini-moon.. with elevator access.
heh, it'd even make the ISS obsolete.
You could use it to capture/send spaceships from/to other sites (Mars...)
First of all, IAAGE, (I'm a genetic engineer)
Whether the article is facetious or not, I think it brings up a valid approach
OK, let me relate this in historical terms: During the space race, the U.S. spent billions trying to put 3 guys on that big vaccuous rock in the sky. In the end, they got all the glory, but more importantly, they got a world of new technologies that benefitted all mankind (and girl-kind too).
This technological bootstrapping would have never happened without this wasteful brute-force approach to the spacerace. Dividing up those billions and investing it in various fields or research would not have provided the same benefits. This is one thing the Americans are very good at is overdoing solutions and reaping the benefits of their work. Compare this with the Russians that go for simplicity, but get no tech trickle-down.
For example, the Americans spend millions to design a pen that will write in zero-g, the Russians use a pencil. The russians have an elegant solution, but the Americans now have a new understanding of chemistry, a new understanding of flow-dynamics, perhaps a new manufacturing process for fine detail, plus detailed experience of zero-G. The Russians have invested nothing and gained nothing in their solution.
To get back to the point at hand, {insert biotech company} have a ready market for something nobody knows much about. If they develop and mature the technologies to create new products faster than their competitors (because you know they'll be competing) then they will have a technology base that will make curing disease trivial. And with the money they can make on this, they can do the disease work for cheap. or better yet, universities, with these new technologies can do the work as open source.
Honestly, I think anything that anything that gets capitalism to develop technology is good. Capitalism excels at developing new technology, and is at its worst when it can't and must feed off itself.
For those of you that don't like to read long comments, let alone RTFA, I think this is a good thing because it promotes the growth of technologies as a whole and thus is good.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of having internet access when you don't have electricity?
from paragraph 2 of TFA:
"Scientists don't know what the gene does."
No, they know what the gene does, it codes for a protein. They don't know what this protein does.
Then they say that the protein is expressed all over, including the brain, so that means it may be involved in brain function.
For all they know it could be a structural protein, which is a better bet if it's expressed outside the brain.
Somehow I doubt that a single gene is responsible for humanity.
I try to be positive when I post, but what kind of morons do they have writing this stuff? And this is Nature magazine? How about some info on what sort of protein it is: Kinase? Carboxylase? Protease? How about some info on the expression levels instead of how many copies there are? There could be 1000 copies in our genome, but if the expression is low, it doesn't matter.
Guess I'll have to RTFP, where P=Paper.
What's Phantom going to use now that their star title is floundering?
That was sort-of my point. When even the luddites can get movies on their keys, the MPAA is doomed.
Notice: I'm not saying that movies are doomed, just the association that tries to stick them in the past.
I did the total tourist thing for a launch a few years back, and I loved it. So not me, but the crowd was great, all 'round wonderful experience.
But the best part was after the launch, when all the glory has gone, realizing that by the time we got back to the car, they were in orbit...
It's the Gators and snakes I'm worried about.
Why do you think the SWAT team carries said MP5s? Gator defense.
I'd rather die of kenetic lead poisoning than a Gator death roll any day.
My boss just looked over my shoulder and said 16 gig! that's two movies!! How much are they?
It's like giving BB guns to kids.. you know they're gonna get themselves in trouble.
Yes, there are usefull bacteria we need but they are totally different species. The equivalent of the phage attacking them would be to have a lynx that lives off rabbits deciding to eat deer. Even if it made the switch, it wouldn't be very god at it and wouldn't make much of an effect on the ecosystem. In the end, that strain would die out because it would be less competative than the one that was eating the rabbits.
Phages are _very_ specific and it's a huge thermodynamic deficit for them to switch species.
Short term, or long term. Certainly in the long term our gut bacteria have been in their ecosystem longer and would adapt far better than the phage. Predator-prey relationships always favour the prey. They have to, or the predator would starve to death after over-grazing.
Good questions, tho.
Viruses don't carry out metabolism, they can't reproduce themselves (they rely on the host for that), they don't do any of the stuff that we use to define life. There is nothing to die off.
Ok, lets give you truth in labelling: your tap water contains a hundred trillion of these phages in every glass, but most are specific for other species. While we're at it, about 4 pounds of your body weight is bacteria. That's about the mass of your brain.
Do you think if we told the public that any given piece of meat has x billion bacteria on it that it would be useful information to them? Plants too, so none of that herbivore crap.
How about this, your food is inspected and is maintained within the strict standards set by those in charge of your health. That is a good label that can go on all your food.
Sodium and fat content are useful so you can set your diet. The food's safety shouldn't even be a question, so putting it on the package is pointless.
Genetic modification has been going on for 10 thousand years by us and a few billion by nature. Unless you're one of those Intelligent Design whacks. If you are, I have one word for you:
Evolve.
see subject.
haha... I kill me.
This is very cool. I remember the Russians were working on killing bacterial infections in people (Tuberculosis, Leprosy, even Flesh eating disease) with Phages. That was in the 70s. It's about time someone came up with something successful.
By the way these are completely harmless to humans, in fact to all plants and animals. The phage is a very simple virus with a small genome that gets injected into the bacterium and does the standard virus things (hijacks the host's systems to replicate itself a billion times). The cell explodes, releasing billions more phages. These phages have been our tools for a long time in biology, we use them to move genes around, for making libraries of genes, all sorts of neato stuff. There's little we don't know about them, so they're a good candidate for this task. There is no way these can make the leap from infecting bacteria to infecting higher organisms, any more than a plant could suddenly start walking around.
I could think of a few things that are possible, for example if it mutated enough to find our host bacteria a good target then that might cause problems, but again, very doubtful.
For once I try to be one of the gang, and I get modded redundant? I spot a relatively new story with an obvious joke that _Somebody_ was going to jump on and I figure, what the hay, be part of the crowd for once. If not me, then it would have been one of you and don't tell me otherwise. And for my contribution I get modded down and redundant! Probably somebody with mod points jealous that I took his precious line. this whole internet is so unfair! Now what, grammar nazis?
I for one welcome our negatively charged spinning overlords
but you'd probably still be shamed by your North American neigbours had we been included in the poll.
<chant>
Ca-Na-Da!!
Ca-Na-Da!!
</chant>
well fr yur inf that key desn't wrk n my keybard, you insensitive cld!
set up a kickass speaker system and turn it up to eleven with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note/.
funny, I just googled "rich user experience" and my first hit was:
msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/experience/
And I realized that everything you said applies here. The biggest problem with MS is that their goal is this "rich user experience" whereas with Linux it's about stable platform that others can build tools for, rich or not.
I'm not trying to jump on the bash-MS bandwagon, just a mini-epiphiny I had.
these are used for accessing the white flag conveniently stowed in the backpack.
You could also just say that land levels are rising in the area they are talking about.
I especially like the part where he mentions the Atari ST as his favorite piece of hardware. That says alot. I still have mine too, and it's still my fave. Brings back the good old days of cracking each others' BBSs while tightening your own code up.. A good evolutionary approach to security.
In my books, Atari ST == Street Cred.
Um.. ya.. I had a response to that but.. I can't seem to..
ok, who wants icecream?
send and assemble a mass driver on the surface, use its own mass to push it in one direction (sending the debris in the opposite direction) And the mass would come from your tunneling equipment as you hollow it out for habitation. By the time it's in orbit, it'd be all set up to be habitable.
Hmm, lets take that one step further.. Lets capture it in a very high orbit and use it as the counterweight for our Space Elevator. We should just be getting out technology down pat by that time and, hell, this thing is big enough we could actually use it as a base for all sorts of stuff.. kinda a mini-moon.. with elevator access. heh, it'd even make the ISS obsolete. You could use it to capture/send spaceships from/to other sites (Mars...)
First of all, IAAGE, (I'm a genetic engineer)
Whether the article is facetious or not, I think it brings up a valid approach
OK, let me relate this in historical terms: During the space race, the U.S. spent billions trying to put 3 guys on that big vaccuous rock in the sky. In the end, they got all the glory, but more importantly, they got a world of new technologies that benefitted all mankind (and girl-kind too).
This technological bootstrapping would have never happened without this wasteful brute-force approach to the spacerace. Dividing up those billions and investing it in various fields or research would not have provided the same benefits. This is one thing the Americans are very good at is overdoing solutions and reaping the benefits of their work. Compare this with the Russians that go for simplicity, but get no tech trickle-down.
For example, the Americans spend millions to design a pen that will write in zero-g, the Russians use a pencil. The russians have an elegant solution, but the Americans now have a new understanding of chemistry, a new understanding of flow-dynamics, perhaps a new manufacturing process for fine detail, plus detailed experience of zero-G. The Russians have invested nothing and gained nothing in their solution.
To get back to the point at hand, {insert biotech company} have a ready market for something nobody knows much about. If they develop and mature the technologies to create new products faster than their competitors (because you know they'll be competing) then they will have a technology base that will make curing disease trivial. And with the money they can make on this, they can do the disease work for cheap. or better yet, universities, with these new technologies can do the work as open source.
Honestly, I think anything that anything that gets capitalism to develop technology is good. Capitalism excels at developing new technology, and is at its worst when it can't and must feed off itself.
For those of you that don't like to read long comments, let alone RTFA, I think this is a good thing because it promotes the growth of technologies as a whole and thus is good.