You might want to cut them some slack. This is a proof-of-concept, er, give-me-more-money demonstration. Of course, most of these sorts of things don't scale, don't work outside the bottle and won't end up commercialized, but it is an interesting way to go about doing things.
In general, I'm leery of using bioreactors as a production tool. They're expensive, cranky of maintenance and tend to smell bad.
Again, the first article is very, very speculative. Basically, they state that 1) Autism exists but we really don't know what it is, but it's some sort of neurodevelopmental disorder. 2) That environmental factors have caused (other) neurodevelopmental disorders so there is a potential model for a similar mechanism in autism 3) Genetics is certainly part of it but Mendelian genetics doesn't really explain the data (as it fails to do for most human diseases with a clear genetic component - the review just completely blows by the newer regulatory mechanisms such as methylation, the various small RNA control dohickies and the other neat stuff coming down the pike).
So since genetics can't explain it and environmental factors have been shown to have a role in brain development it is certainly possible that there is an environmental factor.
That's fine but it's not going to get anybody the Nobel prize. The hard work has yet to be done. The paper was really a preamble for a grant proposal. Nothing wrong with that - its a deserving hypothesis but I'm not overwhelmed with the data.
You would be better off buying lottery tickets for your kids with the money that you're spending. At least there is a chance it could be used for something.
If you really feel the need to do this, use a public registry that uses the cord blood for real research, not a private company that's just hoping you will pay them every month.
I routinely get something over 300 baud at my house (in plain sight of a tower). Calls just might go through. Bringing up a web page on the browser is an exercise in patience and battery capacity. Forget streaming anything except invective language.
I hate AT&T. Keep bragging and I might get to dislike you as well....
Look at all the ecological niches that life has managed to inhabit here. Pretty much everything we've got. The big question is how hospitable does a planet's environment need to start life from pre biotic origins. What chemicals? What environments?
Or, to go out on another branch, if panspermia is a viable hypothesis, what conditions does it need to take hold?
My seat of the pants thought is that it's hard to start up self replicating organisms, but once you do, they will quickly (in geologic time frames) populate a variety of niches. The boundaries of the niches just relate to the physical chemistry of the molecules involved (ie, carbon most likely, pressures and temperatures something like what we have here on earth, etc.).
But, IMHO, that's the Big Question. None of this mamby pamby physics stuff with weird incomprehensible math....
Just takes a while. First, protobacteria, then little bugs that spew out CO2 and methane, then some oxygen, wait a few million years and you have Target and Martha Stewart.
Exactly. If f(little L) (the fraction of star systems that actually go on to develop life at some point) in the Drake equation goes past one, then you linearly increase the chance of intelligent life beyond earth. Doesn't sound all that impressive, but if f(little L) doesn't go past one, then it means we're alone. Period. Somebody made some big mistake way back when and we're the end result of it. Meaning we'd best behave. OTOH, if life pops up most everywhere that planet chemistry allows for the appropriate conditions and time, maybe we're just a garden variety ecosystem and if we blast ourselves back to plankton, no big deal. Somebody else will take up the slack and colonize the Galaxy.
So finding life, anything, even Elvis, somewhere off the planet is a Very Big Deal.
(Maybe the Aliens can help upgrade Slashcode. Stupid incompetent earthling programmers.....)
Here at Slashdot, we take our comments seriously. At the very least, you are expected to keep a couple of dozen brain cells functioning if you intend to post. Proper spelling and grammar are optional, but highly recommended.
Also, what level of paranoia are we talking? State or industry secrets? Personal paranoia?
Exactly this.
Are you worried about some random app stealing your contacts? Easy - don't install random apps. Are you worried about somebody tracking you with your GPS / wifi trangulation / whatever? Easy - get a dumbphone. Turn it off most time. Or get a radio. Are you worried about the NSA picking up on your conversations with your co conspirators in an effort to blow up Wall Street? A bit harder. Get a one time pad. Get rid of that FBI informant in your cell (yes, that one).
Perhaps, but bioinfomatics is an up and coming field. The big, big problem is the inherent variability of biologic systems and our rather primitive understanding of same. The other problem is we're shotgunning science - we spend an enormous amount of money to study human biology (poorly, in general) whilst we should really be spending money on the back end - bugs and worms and the like that we might be able to understand better.
There are good reasons for this, of course, and 'science' doesn't really care. If we spend the next 100 years running around in the wrong direction, then figure it all out, well, that's science. Nobody said we had to understand life, the Universe and everything in our lifetimes.
20K is what we were quoted to superinsulate our 1970's era house. And I make enough money to pay for it, it's just the ROI didn't make sense with wood heat.
And yes, there certainly are cheaper ways to save some money for individual households - these should be more widely encouraged. As fuel prices rise, I rather suspect they will be.
But you are still faced with the problem that you cannot economically conserve your way to a better future. You have to come up with bulk power generation facilities that are rather expensive. And unless you change the economics of the situation, say by making insulation credits quite a bit more generous, it's going to be hard to get the vast majority of the 99% to retrofit significantly. And even harder to get the 99% to actually save significant energy.
And, in the US, as usual, we appear to be Doing It Wrong. What I see are state and federal rebates for energy efficient windows / doors. Little things that don't help much but are cheap enough for people to purchase. If you seal up your windows in a drafty house, you've done very little - however the rebates are predicated on completely imagined savings that would only happen if you put a new, superinsulated window in a new superinsulated house. It's band aid therapy and as is always the case, bandaids don't prevent patients from bleeding to death. Even if they're shiny high tech bandaids.
Remember, this is likely to be the 'long recession' - maybe going on for decades or the foreseeable future, whichever comes first. Not all that many folks have the money to invest in something that might save them money over a decade. The US government, of course, has the money, but it's more interested in blowing things up and / or protecting the.01%.
Same problem in SE Alaska (which looks suspiciously like Norway). Lots of hydro potential but it's rather expensive to build out. Problem with steep sided gorges is that it's hard to build damns on them, they tend to happen in the middle of nowhere and transmission lines over rugged terrain ain't cheap either.
Now, when diesel is $10 / gallon everyone will be whistling a different tune, but here and now it's hard to get the money to go out an put these projects together.
Yes you're getting somewhere. You're getting broke. Sure you have a 30 degree temp differential to work with. That'll be $30K US dollars to put in a heat pump whose payout time is 10 years. If it doesn't break. Sure you can superinsulate - for maybe $20000 a house. Got that much spare change? Thought not.
Lots of energy floating around. Just not lots of cheap energy.
It may be simple, but it's not cheap. I live in SE Alaska, 100+ inches of rain per year. Steep fjord like valleys (actually they are fjords). So long as nothing is screwing up, we get 100% of our electricity from hydro. We have two generators, an 18 MW and a 10 MW system. Generators are several million dollars a pop. We have a plan to increase dam height to generate another 10 MW - at close to $100 million in costs (some if which will be used to replace 50 year old equipment).
That's a lot of money.
Cheaper than diesel, in the long run but requiring a large up front payment. Small cities / towns can't afford this sort of thing without significant state and federal money. We can't even bond out that kind of money because the tax base isn't there.
And this is in a pretty good case scenario. Not best case - construction costs are high because it's remote and the geography and geology works against you, but that's life....
No, replacing oil with plant based fuel DOES NOT make sense. It doesn't scale. It wastes water. It's only useful in certain edge case environments. Just like small scale hydro.
You are seeing fossil fuels become scarce. You are seeing a marked decrease in environmental interest. Look at China and India. Yes, they're both attempting to reign in coal based pollution. No, they are not doing a very good job of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Pics or it didn't happen.
And no, the three boobed prostitute in 'Total Recall' does not count.
You might want to cut them some slack. This is a proof-of-concept, er, give-me-more-money demonstration. Of course, most of these sorts of things don't scale, don't work outside the bottle and won't end up commercialized, but it is an interesting way to go about doing things.
In general, I'm leery of using bioreactors as a production tool. They're expensive, cranky of maintenance and tend to smell bad.
But you've got to start somewhere.
Again, the first article is very, very speculative. Basically, they state that 1) Autism exists but we really don't know what it is, but it's some sort of neurodevelopmental disorder. 2) That environmental factors have caused (other) neurodevelopmental disorders so there is a potential model for a similar mechanism in autism 3) Genetics is certainly part of it but Mendelian genetics doesn't really explain the data (as it fails to do for most human diseases with a clear genetic component - the review just completely blows by the newer regulatory mechanisms such as methylation, the various small RNA control dohickies and the other neat stuff coming down the pike).
So since genetics can't explain it and environmental factors have been shown to have a role in brain development it is certainly possible that there is an environmental factor.
That's fine but it's not going to get anybody the Nobel prize. The hard work has yet to be done. The paper was really a preamble for a grant proposal. Nothing wrong with that - its a deserving hypothesis but I'm not overwhelmed with the data.
You would be better off buying lottery tickets for your kids with the money that you're spending. At least there is a chance it could be used for something.
If you really feel the need to do this, use a public registry that uses the cord blood for real research, not a private company that's just hoping you will pay them every month.
If their were 'truth in advertising' required for the signal strength meter, most of the AT&T network would be stuck at "1200 baud".
I routinely get something over 300 baud at my house (in plain sight of a tower). Calls just might go through. Bringing up a web page on the browser is an exercise in patience and battery capacity. Forget streaming anything except invective language.
I hate AT&T. Keep bragging and I might get to dislike you as well....
Crap. You're right. Never posit mathematical stuff before adequate caffeine levels have been reached. Even if it's fifth grade math.
Should have said 'approaches one'.
Sigh.
So, it's not all progress then.
Well, I hadn't even gotten to Newt Gingrich, so the term 'progress' is certainly relative.
Look at all the ecological niches that life has managed to inhabit here. Pretty much everything we've got. The big question is how hospitable does a planet's environment need to start life from pre biotic origins. What chemicals? What environments?
Or, to go out on another branch, if panspermia is a viable hypothesis, what conditions does it need to take hold?
My seat of the pants thought is that it's hard to start up self replicating organisms, but once you do, they will quickly (in geologic time frames) populate a variety of niches. The boundaries of the niches just relate to the physical chemistry of the molecules involved (ie, carbon most likely, pressures and temperatures something like what we have here on earth, etc.).
But, IMHO, that's the Big Question. None of this mamby pamby physics stuff with weird incomprehensible math....
Careful. Don't go there.
Remember all the nightmares after 'Alien'.
With no kind of atmosphere?
Just takes a while. First, protobacteria, then little bugs that spew out CO2 and methane, then some oxygen, wait a few million years and you have Target and Martha Stewart.
Exactly. If f(little L) (the fraction of star systems that actually go on to develop life at some point) in the Drake equation goes past one, then you linearly increase the chance of intelligent life beyond earth. Doesn't sound all that impressive, but if f(little L) doesn't go past one, then it means we're alone. Period. Somebody made some big mistake way back when and we're the end result of it. Meaning we'd best behave. OTOH, if life pops up most everywhere that planet chemistry allows for the appropriate conditions and time, maybe we're just a garden variety ecosystem and if we blast ourselves back to plankton, no big deal. Somebody else will take up the slack and colonize the Galaxy.
So finding life, anything, even Elvis, somewhere off the planet is a Very Big Deal.
(Maybe the Aliens can help upgrade Slashcode. Stupid incompetent earthling programmers.....)
Here at Slashdot, we take our comments seriously. At the very least, you are expected to keep a couple of dozen brain cells functioning if you intend to post. Proper spelling and grammar are optional, but highly recommended.
Slow down on the bong hits next time.
We've always been at war with China. Err, Russia, Err, Drugs.
Hell, we're always at war with somebody! Even if it's just cancer.
USA! USA! USA!
Also, what level of paranoia are we talking? State or industry secrets? Personal paranoia?
Exactly this.
Are you worried about some random app stealing your contacts? Easy - don't install random apps.
Are you worried about somebody tracking you with your GPS / wifi trangulation / whatever? Easy - get a dumbphone. Turn it off most time. Or get a radio.
Are you worried about the NSA picking up on your conversations with your co conspirators in an effort to blow up Wall Street? A bit harder. Get a one time pad. Get rid of that FBI informant in your cell (yes, that one).
This isn't hard, folks.
What? Use your brain?
That's crazy talk!
Certainly. Would you want a building made out of windows, or one made out of hamburgers?
Come on, this is easy!
Perhaps, but bioinfomatics is an up and coming field. The big, big problem is the inherent variability of biologic systems and our rather primitive understanding of same. The other problem is we're shotgunning science - we spend an enormous amount of money to study human biology (poorly, in general) whilst we should really be spending money on the back end - bugs and worms and the like that we might be able to understand better.
There are good reasons for this, of course, and 'science' doesn't really care. If we spend the next 100 years running around in the wrong direction, then figure it all out, well, that's science. Nobody said we had to understand life, the Universe and everything in our lifetimes.
20K is what we were quoted to superinsulate our 1970's era house. And I make enough money to pay for it, it's just the ROI didn't make sense with wood heat.
And yes, there certainly are cheaper ways to save some money for individual households - these should be more widely encouraged. As fuel prices rise, I rather suspect they will be.
But you are still faced with the problem that you cannot economically conserve your way to a better future. You have to come up with bulk power generation facilities that are rather expensive. And unless you change the economics of the situation, say by making insulation credits quite a bit more generous, it's going to be hard to get the vast majority of the 99% to retrofit significantly. And even harder to get the 99% to actually save significant energy.
And, in the US, as usual, we appear to be Doing It Wrong. What I see are state and federal rebates for energy efficient windows / doors. Little things that don't help much but are cheap enough for people to purchase. If you seal up your windows in a drafty house, you've done very little - however the rebates are predicated on completely imagined savings that would only happen if you put a new, superinsulated window in a new superinsulated house. It's band aid therapy and as is always the case, bandaids don't prevent patients from bleeding to death. Even if they're shiny high tech bandaids.
Remember, this is likely to be the 'long recession' - maybe going on for decades or the foreseeable future, whichever comes first. Not all that many folks have the money to invest in something that might save them money over a decade. The US government, of course, has the money, but it's more interested in blowing things up and / or protecting the .01%.
Behave. This is Slashdot. Don't say 'excel' - say 'data in CSV or other open format".
Same problem in SE Alaska (which looks suspiciously like Norway). Lots of hydro potential but it's rather expensive to build out. Problem with steep sided gorges is that it's hard to build damns on them, they tend to happen in the middle of nowhere and transmission lines over rugged terrain ain't cheap either.
Now, when diesel is $10 / gallon everyone will be whistling a different tune, but here and now it's hard to get the money to go out an put these projects together.
Yes you're getting somewhere. You're getting broke. Sure you have a 30 degree temp differential to work with. That'll be $30K US dollars to put in a heat pump whose payout time is 10 years. If it doesn't break. Sure you can superinsulate - for maybe $20000 a house. Got that much spare change? Thought not.
Lots of energy floating around. Just not lots of cheap energy.
It may be simple, but it's not cheap. I live in SE Alaska, 100+ inches of rain per year. Steep fjord like valleys (actually they are fjords). So long as nothing is screwing up, we get 100% of our electricity from hydro. We have two generators, an 18 MW and a 10 MW system. Generators are several million dollars a pop. We have a plan to increase dam height to generate another 10 MW - at close to $100 million in costs (some if which will be used to replace 50 year old equipment).
That's a lot of money.
Cheaper than diesel, in the long run but requiring a large up front payment. Small cities / towns can't afford this sort of thing without significant state and federal money. We can't even bond out that kind of money because the tax base isn't there.
And this is in a pretty good case scenario. Not best case - construction costs are high because it's remote and the geography and geology works against you, but that's life....
No, replacing oil with plant based fuel DOES NOT make sense. It doesn't scale. It wastes water. It's only useful in certain edge case environments. Just like small scale hydro.
You are seeing fossil fuels become scarce. You are seeing a marked decrease in environmental interest. Look at China and India. Yes, they're both attempting to reign in coal based pollution. No, they are not doing a very good job of it.