Tubulin is a major structural protein, so manipulating it may allow you to create 'memory structures' whatever they may be. However, my reading of TFA is that it's the logic information held by the kinase by way of the degrees of phosphorylation on the molecule that actually encodes the data.
As you say, very speculative but interesting. I'm sure there are experimental systems with mutations in both the kinase and tubulins - that should offer some experimental avenues to look into this.
This research implies that long term storage is digital and has the ability to be manipulated by logic constructs familiar to at least some of us who work with computers and similar machines. That's an interesting statement. Their hypothesis centers on a protein that works on tubulin (a common structural protein that makes, wait for it, tubes) and that this represents the 'logic framework' for memory storage.
Aside from the 'it's full of tubes' attempt at humor, it's a striking hypothesis and probably wrong but certainly one that would be amenable to experimental manipulation by modifying the kinase or finding that in organisms with 'memory' the kinase is a very preserved structure.
No, my point is that using aspirin to keep you from getting cancer does need a suitably powered high quality study (as opposed to using data generated from another study) because it's not clear if it helps.
Taking aspirin for arthritis is pretty easy - you take it, you're better or you're not in a couple of days on the outside. You can tell if it's going to trash your GI tract in a couple of weeks. So with n=1, you're study is pretty good. Put a couple of thousand people in the study and you can find some less common side effects (always good to know) and get a better picture of how well the drug works.
Taking aspirin for cardiovascular or cancer prevention is a whole different story. Your chances of getting colorectal cancer in the US (without a strong family history) is about 1 in 10000 (number from memory, it may well be wrong). Your risk for cardiovascular disease is a bit more complex but pretty well studied. But even if you're a 60 year old hypertensive smoker it's perhaps 1 in 50. So then you need reasonably powered studies to tease out the benefits and risks.
Current studies seem to indicate that for people at low risk of cardiovascular disease (ie, not diabetic, no previous heart attack or similar) don't benefit from daily low dose aspirin. This runs counter to older studies - but the newer studies are supposedly cleaner and better powered. This is an all to common finding in drug or treatment studies - early studies seem to yield better results that later ones. (cf, hormone replacement in menopausal women, bisphophonate treatment for osteoporosis, HDL cholesterol raising drugs, LDL cholesterol lowering drugs, etc.).
So other studies will be done and the balance may shift a bit over time - or we may discover a previously unknown variable that needs to be accounted for and the cycle will begin anew.
But a reasonable approach to something in medicine where studies are all over the map is that it doesn't make a whole lot of difference in a large population. There may be subpopulations where the treatment is really effective, but until you tease that out, you're just guessing.
In the case of aspirin, assuming that it doesn't give you ulcers and assuming that you don't need urgent trauma surgery, the risks and costs are pretty low. For other drugs, perhaps not so much.
This has been going on for years - low dose aspirin either helps or it doesn't help.
Here's a couple of take home messages - the canonical study would be to see if low dose aspirin helps you live longer (live 'better' would be a much more useful metric, but pretty much impossible to do). IIRC, the studies that looked at that did not find any benefit from aspirin.
Second - all of these aspirin / cancer link studies have been pulled from aspirin and heart disease studies - these were secondary effects and the studies neither designed nor powered to ask whether or not aspirin was useful for cancer prevention. When you do this, you are pretty much at the mercy of people who purport to understand statistics much better than the vast majority of folks. Lies, damned lies and.... statistics.
And finally, when you see reports that a certain drug / treatment / lifestyle does or does not work over a number of various and sundry studies, it means that the value of the treatment / drug / lifestyle isn't all that much. In other words, the effect is just barely over the noise floor.
On top of that there are already pipelines running through most of the Keystone XL planned route. There are a couple of places that should get rerouted, but it seems to me that a new pipeline is a better deal than keeping the old (30+ year old) rust buckets going.
And you're correct about aquifer pollution to a point. A large spill could eventually taint the aquifer for millions of years but with modern pipeline surveying instruments and clean up equipment that should not (famous last words) happen.
Get over it. We can't 'destroy' the world. Even a massive nuclear exchange would only reset the planet's ecosystem on an order of the last 'dino killer' asteroid. Yeah, it would suck to be us (and lots of other species) but the 'world' is going to survive our puny attempts to wipe it out.
Personally, I think the anthropocene is just going to be a puzzling, slightly radioactive stratographic layer in a distant geology book.
'WTF were those assclowns about' will be the byline.
You do realize that MS Word isn't really compatible with MS Word? Docs made in an older version often don't open flawlessly on newer versions - especially if anything 'funny' is going on - like an outline or endnotes or other useful features that one might tempt one to use a full fledged word processor over Notepad. Older versions won't open docx files unless they've been upgraded to do so - manually.
Exactly this. MOST Muslim clerics regard targeting civilians via suicide bombings a sin and against the precepts of Islam. MOST Christian clerics feel the same.
However, all it takes is a few religious nutjobs of whatever stripe to go all batshit about whatever it is they feel like going batshit about and come up with a fatwa or an ex cathedra letter proclaiming the infidel as something that shouldn't be allowed to live in the Glory of God and so is a valid target for your crusade or jihad.
Religions, gotta love 'em. If we are still around in a couple hundred years we may look back and go WTF where these primitives thinking? Or it may end up like A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Basically, this should be a 'hero' project. Like a moon shot. Lets face it, we need to transit off of fossil fuels to a large degree sometime down the line. Not tomorrow. Not next year, but certainly in the next decade or so. Nuclear fission is an option - but as we've seen, not a terribly good one. Solar / wind / hydro / ponies and pixie dust / conservation will also help but we still need a backbone capable of powering modern civilization unless we want to devolve into something less pleasant. And that backbone has to put a lot of gigajoules into the system on a 24/7/365 basis.
So we need to put our money where our collective mouths are and work on something capable of bringing up the entire world to first world standards.
Or fight the war to see who's standing over the oil fields.
The key point is those scientists and engineers were not raised and trained by American society. The cold war drove the education of the handful of born-and-raised American scientists. The cold war is over.
That's why we're starting a new Cold War with China!
Slashdot Mirror
Tubulin is a major structural protein, so manipulating it may allow you to create 'memory structures' whatever they may be. However, my reading of TFA is that it's the logic information held by the kinase by way of the degrees of phosphorylation on the molecule that actually encodes the data.
As you say, very speculative but interesting. I'm sure there are experimental systems with mutations in both the kinase and tubulins - that should offer some experimental avenues to look into this.
This research implies that long term storage is digital and has the ability to be manipulated by logic constructs familiar to at least some of us who work with computers and similar machines. That's an interesting statement. Their hypothesis centers on a protein that works on tubulin (a common structural protein that makes, wait for it, tubes) and that this represents the 'logic framework' for memory storage.
Aside from the 'it's full of tubes' attempt at humor, it's a striking hypothesis and probably wrong but certainly one that would be amenable to experimental manipulation by modifying the kinase or finding that in organisms with 'memory' the kinase is a very preserved structure.
No, my point is that using aspirin to keep you from getting cancer does need a suitably powered high quality study (as opposed to using data generated from another study) because it's not clear if it helps.
Taking aspirin for arthritis is pretty easy - you take it, you're better or you're not in a couple of days on the outside. You can tell if it's going to trash your GI tract in a couple of weeks. So with n=1, you're study is pretty good. Put a couple of thousand people in the study and you can find some less common side effects (always good to know) and get a better picture of how well the drug works.
Taking aspirin for cardiovascular or cancer prevention is a whole different story. Your chances of getting colorectal cancer in the US (without a strong family history) is about 1 in 10000 (number from memory, it may well be wrong). Your risk for cardiovascular disease is a bit more complex but pretty well studied. But even if you're a 60 year old hypertensive smoker it's perhaps 1 in 50. So then you need reasonably powered studies to tease out the benefits and risks.
Current studies seem to indicate that for people at low risk of cardiovascular disease (ie, not diabetic, no previous heart attack or similar) don't benefit from daily low dose aspirin. This runs counter to older studies - but the newer studies are supposedly cleaner and better powered. This is an all to common finding in drug or treatment studies - early studies seem to yield better results that later ones. (cf, hormone replacement in menopausal women, bisphophonate treatment for osteoporosis, HDL cholesterol raising drugs, LDL cholesterol lowering drugs, etc.).
So other studies will be done and the balance may shift a bit over time - or we may discover a previously unknown variable that needs to be accounted for and the cycle will begin anew.
But a reasonable approach to something in medicine where studies are all over the map is that it doesn't make a whole lot of difference in a large population. There may be subpopulations where the treatment is really effective, but until you tease that out, you're just guessing.
In the case of aspirin, assuming that it doesn't give you ulcers and assuming that you don't need urgent trauma surgery, the risks and costs are pretty low. For other drugs, perhaps not so much.
This has been going on for years - low dose aspirin either helps or it doesn't help.
Here's a couple of take home messages - the canonical study would be to see if low dose aspirin helps you live longer (live 'better' would be a much more useful metric, but pretty much impossible to do). IIRC, the studies that looked at that did not find any benefit from aspirin.
Second - all of these aspirin / cancer link studies have been pulled from aspirin and heart disease studies - these were secondary effects and the studies neither designed nor powered to ask whether or not aspirin was useful for cancer prevention. When you do this, you are pretty much at the mercy of people who purport to understand statistics much better than the vast majority of folks. Lies, damned lies and .... statistics.
And finally, when you see reports that a certain drug / treatment / lifestyle does or does not work over a number of various and sundry studies, it means that the value of the treatment / drug / lifestyle isn't all that much. In other words, the effect is just barely over the noise floor.
Don't worry about it, you're gonna die anyway.
On top of that there are already pipelines running through most of the Keystone XL planned route. There are a couple of places that should get rerouted, but it seems to me that a new pipeline is a better deal than keeping the old (30+ year old) rust buckets going.
And you're correct about aquifer pollution to a point. A large spill could eventually taint the aquifer for millions of years but with modern pipeline surveying instruments and clean up equipment that should not (famous last words) happen.
This is precisely what most of the 'theories' show. (Too many citations to bother listing, look it up).
But Fairbanks has been pretty dry. SE Alaska has had a normal (ie, wet) winter.
Just like the computer models have forecast - bigger gradients.
Rest assured that we don't want to see it either.
I loved the 1980's......
Seriously, DESQview rocked. Supposedly Symantec owns it (but apparently doesn't know that, for Symantec, I'd expect no less).
I'll go back to my shuffleboard now.
Careful, dude. You're coming from a state that foisted Sarah (and Todd) Palin on the rest of the world.
You are certainly not taking the moral high ground here.
Get over it. We can't 'destroy' the world. Even a massive nuclear exchange would only reset the planet's ecosystem on an order of the last 'dino killer' asteroid. Yeah, it would suck to be us (and lots of other species) but the 'world' is going to survive our puny attempts to wipe it out.
Personally, I think the anthropocene is just going to be a puzzling, slightly radioactive stratographic layer in a distant geology book.
'WTF were those assclowns about' will be the byline.
You do realize that MS Word isn't really compatible with MS Word? Docs made in an older version often don't open flawlessly on newer versions - especially if anything 'funny' is going on - like an outline or endnotes or other useful features that one might tempt one to use a full fledged word processor over Notepad. Older versions won't open docx files unless they've been upgraded to do so - manually.
Yeah, it's like writing good software was hard or something.
(I'm looking at YOU Slashdot and your unicode hating attempts at AJAX / Web 2 / whateverthehellyouaredoingthatscrewsupeverybrowserontheplanet coding.)
Exactly this. MOST Muslim clerics regard targeting civilians via suicide bombings a sin and against the precepts of Islam. MOST Christian clerics feel the same.
However, all it takes is a few religious nutjobs of whatever stripe to go all batshit about whatever it is they feel like going batshit about and come up with a fatwa or an ex cathedra letter proclaiming the infidel as something that shouldn't be allowed to live in the Glory of God and so is a valid target for your crusade or jihad.
Religions, gotta love 'em. If we are still around in a couple hundred years we may look back and go WTF where these primitives thinking? Or it may end up like A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Been there, done that.
Basically, this should be a 'hero' project. Like a moon shot. Lets face it, we need to transit off of fossil fuels to a large degree sometime down the line. Not tomorrow. Not next year, but certainly in the next decade or so. Nuclear fission is an option - but as we've seen, not a terribly good one. Solar / wind / hydro / ponies and pixie dust / conservation will also help but we still need a backbone capable of powering modern civilization unless we want to devolve into something less pleasant. And that backbone has to put a lot of gigajoules into the system on a 24/7/365 basis.
So we need to put our money where our collective mouths are and work on something capable of bringing up the entire world to first world standards.
Or fight the war to see who's standing over the oil fields.
Seven screws is sealed? You expect wingnuts?
Takes all of ten minutes to replace a battery in a current model MacBook Pro. Woop de do..
I've had a couple of nightmares that were pretty close to Santorum ads.
Oh. Wait.
Come now, even Google isn't completely evil.
Paypal? That would prevent the seller from knowing where you are located, would it not?
Someone hasn't played Jenga, apparently.
Hoping not to disturb your world view overmuch, but there is this interesting concept of reality.
You might try it sometime - it's different enough at any rate.
Actually, except for the color scheme and the fact that the NYC machine isn't named after the Mayor, they look nearly identical.
Couldn't you just use an access point across the street ( and likely in another state) and bypass the whole problem?
The key point is those scientists and engineers were not raised and trained by American society. The cold war drove the education of the handful of born-and-raised American scientists. The cold war is over.
That's why we're starting a new Cold War with China!
War is Peace!
Ignorance is Strength.
"The challenge is having the NZ courts rule there was bad faith when the US is clearly manipulating the entire process."
Not really. As much as slashdotters want to believe there is a shadowy U.S. cabal dictating policy to every other country, it's just not true.
That's right. Vampires don't cast shadows.