I think Mabel the Swimming Monkey should be on the list. What SYSADMIN or SYSOP hasn't asked "Did you remember to mount a scratch monkey?" Or, for that matter, had the chance to ask "Can you swim?"
As the owner of two African Grey parrots, I have to give props to Alex's inclusion on the list. The bird developed the use of a "zero-like" concept and abuses grad students. Pepperberg was actually able to document statistically that "Alex is ornery."
Pepperberg is also teaching Alex to surf a parrot Internet and convert visual cues to phonemes which can be assembled by Alex into recognizable words. Pepperberg, always one for rigor, will not say that she is teaching Alex to read.
I think you offer up a good point. Isn't the flipper supposed to be a merged pair of legs embyologically? If so, then why is there a flipper as well? This sounds more like a HOX gene activation that shouldn't have been, or (as you suggest) incomplete twinning.
And, as I point out, photographs are often taken in the non-visible spectrum. Gamma, UV, and IR photos are still called photos. Why not radio waves. It's not a matter of it being "passive," either, as anyone who has used a flash to take a photograph would point out.
Now, a recent "photo," where the position of dark matter was calculated by measuring the gravitational lensing it caused -- I wouldn't try to argue that was a photograph. The photons did not bounce off the material being imaged -- they were rerouted by the gravitation and the position of the gravitational mass inferred from the deflection. The result of the calculation was applied to the image.
I go to sleep for one night, and they change the Standard Model and no one tells me. So what are microwaves, and why aren't they electromagnetic radiation like gamma and UV and IR and radio?
Use a laser to dump the heat. (Reference to Brin's "Sundiver," a great book for anyone who has ever had to take thermo and didn't kill themselves.)
Liquid sodium was used in fast breeder reactors for the coolant systems for a number of years. I understand it was a bit of a headache. I should look up the boiling point of sodium, mercury, and a few others, and see what's closest to the temp on the surface of Venus, but I'm having a crappy day and can't be bothered.
Shame on me.
A photo is an image made with electromagnetic radiation.
I take infrared photos with my camera. Infrared, although not visible to humans, is a form of electromagnetic radiation. If I want to take a photograph of something when there's not enough electromagnetic radiation around, I can use an IR light source. The IR light source sends out electromagnetic waves. Those electromagnetic waves bounce off the objects I'm photographing and come to the camera and I take a picture.
Because of phase interference, there's even distance information in the photograph. Given the depth of field, my photograph contains a lot of distance information.
Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation. So why can't images generated with microwaves be considered photographs as well?
Yeah, I know where you're trying to go. I just don't think it's a meaningful distinction.
The weird thing is, you run BECAUSE of some of those viruses. Humans couldn't reproduce without at least one protein from an HERV. [Insert Microsoft Windows joke here]
Everyone on the planet has 30 copies of Phoenix in their genome. While the copies are mutated, due to the nature of the DNA code, most mutations code for substitute amino acids that will function as well. The individual proteins it codes for are expressed in human cells. At some time, it (or comparable parts from some other HERV) must express itself so that a fully functional virus is made in humans.
Compare that to the hemorrhagic fevers; they do not have a reservoir in humans. You get the virus, either you die or you get rid of it. Once you're over it, you're no longer infective -- although you are danged lucky. The reservoir for these viruses is in some other animal that has adapted to it, or in which it simply doesn't result in the catastrophic viral overload. Every human on the face of the Earth does not have the component parts to the hemorrhagic fevers, waiting to be randomly reassembled, sitting in their genome. If we did, either we'd almost (50-90% strikes me as close enough to "almost") all be dead or these viruses wouldn't be dangerous because we'd have adapted to them.
The two cases are very different. Viral hemorrhagic fevers deserve their rep and deserve to be Biosafety Level 4. Making Phoenix in a Biosafety Level 3 lab with extra precautions was an effort at caution aimed at preventing fear mongering by the public.
Ebright might say it, but does that make it right?
The researchers weren't sure about the infectivity of the virus...they weren't sure it would be infective at all. This is a virus that was beaten by evolution and became a pet:
In addition, the researchers showed that Phoenix could form particles capable of infecting mammalian cells in culture. Infectivity was very low, presumably because host cells have evolved mechanisms to resist uncontrolled virus propagation, as has been repeatedly observed for retroviruses from experimental animals. -- ScienceDaily
Now, taking the components of this retrovirus and mixing them with, say a pig retrovirus that is known to infect human cells (this is called superinfection)...that's a bit scarier. Unfortunately, it's called "pig farming." Last I checked, pig farming was not a Biosafety Level 4 activity. It's these porcine retroviruses that are holding up using genetically engineered pig body parts as human replacement parts for transplant. Still, think of all the people who get pig heart valves each year...
Why haven't we all died from some strange porcine-HERV virus combination? Human retroviruses (HTLV1, HTLV2, HIV1, HIV2) are all Biosafety Level 2. The hallmark of these retroviruses is that they aren't very good at propagating.
By bumping up to Level 3 the virus that is probably recreated naturally every once in a while, and throwing in the disabling trick to permit it to only reproduce once, they took more than sufficiently reasonable precautions.
Biosafety 4 is reserved for viral hemorrhagic fever viruses (Ebola, Marburg, etc.) and stuff like that. If Phoenix were deserving a Biosafety Level 4, humanity would have been long dead and no one would be alive to conduct the experiments. Think of it as the biologist's version of the Anthropic principle.
Actually, being in a P3 lab, there were other safeguards.
In working with fissionables, the usual goal is 3 fault tolerance. In other words, you make three mistakes and they don't combine to create "bad." A P3 lab is, in and of itself, 3 fault tolerant, the damage done to the virus was simply an added, extra layer.
If anything, it was overkill on the safety measures. I can't blame them for that.
I didn't use "virii." Someone else did. I'm not the world's greatest proofreader, but "virii" just sounds obnoxious. It's what most of my biochemistry professors used, and the same can be said for a lot of physicians I've worked with over the years. I just don't happen to like the sound of it, and so I go with the preferred version. If you're going to call someone ignorant, what about the person who accuses the wrong individual? Pulling up grammar in a biology/biochemistry argument is pedantic and ignorant. Colleges make a terrible mistake in not forcing scientists to be better writers. Then again, for a number of years, that's kept me employed, so I don't complain!
Knowing the details of the argument is part of what Slashdot is about. I posted so that others would know about the debate. I may be biased. I can remember back to the furor after the first recombinant DNA experiments, the Asilomar conference, etc. I also remember how darned difficult we've learned all those horror scenarios actually are.
I say "no risk" because, had this virus wanted to make a comeback, it already would have done so. There's 30 copies of the virus in the human DNA. If it could come back, it would have already done so. In fact, it may have. HERVs are viruses that we learned to get along with.
The use of the term "devastating" was with regard to the past tense. In the past, they were devastating. Those individuals which were not wiped out, reproduced. Notice all the all-black felines (panthers, esp.). That's a mutation that caused a bottleneck in their evolution. Felines with all black pigment tended to survive the viral onslaught whereas regular colored ones didn't. The virus that caused the problem is no endogenous to all cats.
HIV, if natural selection were permitted to run its course, would eventually reach the same state. Some populations in Africa are believed to coexist with the virus with no apparent long-term harm. There are a number of mechanisms that evolve that would keep a retrovirus from "running free." The point is, human ancestors developed one for the Phoenix virus.
The question of infectivity was a question as to whether the virus would work at all, not whether it would be super-infective. Given the techniques used, which were fairly crude (all things considered), getting the thing to work at all was amazing. Whether it would even be capable of infecting human cells would be another question entirely. Was a mutation in the attachment point on the cell the virus used what caused the virus to go dormant? Are there genetic mechanisms that prevent the virus from replicating at all? Is the virus cell-specific, incapable of infecting the particular cells presented? Any number of factors would have prevented success. That it worked is fairly amazing. It also indicates that this virus may not be completely dormant -- in which case, they didn't create anything that isn't seen normally.
Biosafety Level 3 was fine for this one; if anything, it was excessive. There are always people who claim every genetic engineering experiment ought to be Biosafety Level 4 -- or not done at all. I'm thinking Rifkin here, obviously.
These were not Dr. Frankensteins. They did their work. I'm impressed, and I'm frightened by the hordes that wish to stop all research because of mythical scenarios that don't even make sense.
Resuscitating this virus presented no danger. Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERVs for short) make up 8% of the human genome.
In this particular case, there were 30 copies of the virus in the genome. They worked backward to create the original virus. The resultant virus was disabled so that, after replicating once in a cell, the daughter viruses could not replicate. So there was no risk.
All of these HERVs are viruses that, throughout human evolution, we and our ancestors have more or less come to terms with. At some point, many of them were probably devastating. But those that caught the virus, survived, and reproduced were able to mitigate the effects of the virus. These are viruses we've reached a "détente" with. They no longer rampage through the population. In fact, some of the proteins they produce are vital to our survival. One of these retroviral proteins permits implantation of the placenta. Without it, we'd all have placentas that don't attach to the uterine lining -- like mice, which as a result, aren't very complex when they have to be born.
Yes, HERVs are related to cancer. This occurs naturally. They act in a transposon-like manner, and they can pop into areas where they either damage mechanisms that prevent cancer or control cell replication. If we don't study these viral remains, we won't learn about them, won't learn what we can safely disable further -- and what we don't dare eliminate from our genome because we are dependent upon it.
These researchers were not Dr. Frankensteins, messing with things man was not meant to know. They were careful, they were deliberate, and theya re beginning the investigation into what could be an incredibly crucial topic in molecular biology.
Remember -- these are viruses that we learned to live with, more or less. By studying them, we can learn to mitigate the damage they still present.
Anoushe Ansari funded the X-Prize. She deserves this, and yet she's paying for it -- again helping to grow the private space industry.
Even more entertaining, she's a lot of people's worst nightmare:
The Muslim extremists are horrified that a woman is accomplishing so much...and not having to walk 10 paces behind the Soyuz on the way to orbit.
The Christian extremists are horrified that a woman is accomplsihing so much...and not having to walk 10 paces behind the Soyuz on the way to orbit.
The Iranians are horrified because it's showing their people what the West and a modern lifestyle can provide.
George Allen is terrified he'll forget and refer to her as "Macaca".
The American loonies -- how long until the paranoid "They shouldn't allow Muslims on the space station" screaming starts?
Slashdot readers are horrified because she's a beautiful, intelligent woman who wouldn't go out with them, if they could even get the courage to ask her out in the first place.
Atmospheres are part of a planet, aren't they? If their atmospheres (or oceans) are covering the center of mass, then it's within the planet/planets.
The more I think about it, the more I think they might well be considered one planet, anyway. Given some time, they certainly will be! A Rocheworld would not be stable long (galactically speaking).
You're right, a Rocheworld would be an extreme case, but that's half the fun of arguing definitions. To a lot of folks, it's sort of a game.
I was thinking more about whether they're two planets, as the point they orbit about is inside one of them!
Planet: A round thing orbiting a star. More precisely, according to the draft definition: "A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet."
Pluton: A planet orbiting beyond Neptune, taking more than 200 Earth years to circle the Sun. So far, it would include Pluto; Pluto's former moon, Charon; and "Xena" (2003 UB313).
Satellite: Anything orbiting a planet, as long as the mutual centre of gravity does not fall outside the planet. Includes several bodies much larger than many planets, such as Jupiter's moon Ganymede (diameter: 5262 kilometres).
Small solar system body: Anything orbiting the Sun that's not a planet or a satellite. Most asteroids and comets would be SSSBs. Currently called minor planets.
Unofficial categories of planet:
Dwarf planet: A planet smaller than Mercury (diameter: 4879 kilometres), which is the smallest uncontested planet. Would include the former asteroid Ceres; Pluto; Charon; and Xena.
Giant planet: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
Classical planet: The four giant planets plus the familiar four rocky, terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
The definition is useful. Yes, it may result in an absurd number of "planets" in the solar system, but that's not the scientists' problem.
That's not to say the definition might not have problems. Using this definition, would ice worlds be more likely to achieve "planet" designation than rock worlds because their components soften and deform at a higher temperature?
The white dwarf in RS Ophiuchi is near this critical limit now, but it will still probably need hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate the final bit of mass, scientists say.
Slashdot Mirror
As the owner of two African Grey parrots, I have to give props to Alex's inclusion on the list. The bird developed the use of a "zero-like" concept and abuses grad students. Pepperberg was actually able to document statistically that "Alex is ornery."
Pepperberg is also teaching Alex to surf a parrot Internet and convert visual cues to phonemes which can be assembled by Alex into recognizable words. Pepperberg, always one for rigor, will not say that she is teaching Alex to read.
Thanks. I only studied human, cat, chicken, frog, and dogfish embryology. I appreciate the clarification.
I think you offer up a good point. Isn't the flipper supposed to be a merged pair of legs embyologically? If so, then why is there a flipper as well? This sounds more like a HOX gene activation that shouldn't have been, or (as you suggest) incomplete twinning.
Now, a recent "photo," where the position of dark matter was calculated by measuring the gravitational lensing it caused -- I wouldn't try to argue that was a photograph. The photons did not bounce off the material being imaged -- they were rerouted by the gravitation and the position of the gravitational mass inferred from the deflection. The result of the calculation was applied to the image.
Not exactly a photograph in that case.
I go to sleep for one night, and they change the Standard Model and no one tells me. So what are microwaves, and why aren't they electromagnetic radiation like gamma and UV and IR and radio?
Use a laser to dump the heat. (Reference to Brin's "Sundiver," a great book for anyone who has ever had to take thermo and didn't kill themselves.) Liquid sodium was used in fast breeder reactors for the coolant systems for a number of years. I understand it was a bit of a headache. I should look up the boiling point of sodium, mercury, and a few others, and see what's closest to the temp on the surface of Venus, but I'm having a crappy day and can't be bothered. Shame on me.
I take infrared photos with my camera. Infrared, although not visible to humans, is a form of electromagnetic radiation. If I want to take a photograph of something when there's not enough electromagnetic radiation around, I can use an IR light source. The IR light source sends out electromagnetic waves. Those electromagnetic waves bounce off the objects I'm photographing and come to the camera and I take a picture.
Because of phase interference, there's even distance information in the photograph. Given the depth of field, my photograph contains a lot of distance information.
Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation. So why can't images generated with microwaves be considered photographs as well?
Yeah, I know where you're trying to go. I just don't think it's a meaningful distinction.
The weird thing is, you run BECAUSE of some of those viruses. Humans couldn't reproduce without at least one protein from an HERV. [Insert Microsoft Windows joke here]
What reason would you give for making this a Biosafety Level 4 experiment, then?
Everyone on the planet has 30 copies of Phoenix in their genome. While the copies are mutated, due to the nature of the DNA code, most mutations code for substitute amino acids that will function as well. The individual proteins it codes for are expressed in human cells. At some time, it (or comparable parts from some other HERV) must express itself so that a fully functional virus is made in humans. Compare that to the hemorrhagic fevers; they do not have a reservoir in humans. You get the virus, either you die or you get rid of it. Once you're over it, you're no longer infective -- although you are danged lucky. The reservoir for these viruses is in some other animal that has adapted to it, or in which it simply doesn't result in the catastrophic viral overload. Every human on the face of the Earth does not have the component parts to the hemorrhagic fevers, waiting to be randomly reassembled, sitting in their genome. If we did, either we'd almost (50-90% strikes me as close enough to "almost") all be dead or these viruses wouldn't be dangerous because we'd have adapted to them. The two cases are very different. Viral hemorrhagic fevers deserve their rep and deserve to be Biosafety Level 4. Making Phoenix in a Biosafety Level 3 lab with extra precautions was an effort at caution aimed at preventing fear mongering by the public.
The researchers weren't sure about the infectivity of the virus...they weren't sure it would be infective at all. This is a virus that was beaten by evolution and became a pet:
Now, taking the components of this retrovirus and mixing them with, say a pig retrovirus that is known to infect human cells (this is called superinfection)...that's a bit scarier. Unfortunately, it's called "pig farming." Last I checked, pig farming was not a Biosafety Level 4 activity. It's these porcine retroviruses that are holding up using genetically engineered pig body parts as human replacement parts for transplant. Still, think of all the people who get pig heart valves each year...
Why haven't we all died from some strange porcine-HERV virus combination? Human retroviruses (HTLV1, HTLV2, HIV1, HIV2) are all Biosafety Level 2. The hallmark of these retroviruses is that they aren't very good at propagating. By bumping up to Level 3 the virus that is probably recreated naturally every once in a while, and throwing in the disabling trick to permit it to only reproduce once, they took more than sufficiently reasonable precautions.
Biosafety 4 is reserved for viral hemorrhagic fever viruses (Ebola, Marburg, etc.) and stuff like that. If Phoenix were deserving a Biosafety Level 4, humanity would have been long dead and no one would be alive to conduct the experiments. Think of it as the biologist's version of the Anthropic principle.
In working with fissionables, the usual goal is 3 fault tolerance. In other words, you make three mistakes and they don't combine to create "bad." A P3 lab is, in and of itself, 3 fault tolerant, the damage done to the virus was simply an added, extra layer.
If anything, it was overkill on the safety measures. I can't blame them for that.
This is Slashdot.
Knowing the details of the argument is part of what Slashdot is about. I posted so that others would know about the debate. I may be biased. I can remember back to the furor after the first recombinant DNA experiments, the Asilomar conference, etc. I also remember how darned difficult we've learned all those horror scenarios actually are.
I say "no risk" because, had this virus wanted to make a comeback, it already would have done so. There's 30 copies of the virus in the human DNA. If it could come back, it would have already done so. In fact, it may have. HERVs are viruses that we learned to get along with.
The use of the term "devastating" was with regard to the past tense. In the past, they were devastating. Those individuals which were not wiped out, reproduced. Notice all the all-black felines (panthers, esp.). That's a mutation that caused a bottleneck in their evolution. Felines with all black pigment tended to survive the viral onslaught whereas regular colored ones didn't. The virus that caused the problem is no endogenous to all cats.
HIV, if natural selection were permitted to run its course, would eventually reach the same state. Some populations in Africa are believed to coexist with the virus with no apparent long-term harm. There are a number of mechanisms that evolve that would keep a retrovirus from "running free." The point is, human ancestors developed one for the Phoenix virus.
The question of infectivity was a question as to whether the virus would work at all, not whether it would be super-infective. Given the techniques used, which were fairly crude (all things considered), getting the thing to work at all was amazing. Whether it would even be capable of infecting human cells would be another question entirely. Was a mutation in the attachment point on the cell the virus used what caused the virus to go dormant? Are there genetic mechanisms that prevent the virus from replicating at all? Is the virus cell-specific, incapable of infecting the particular cells presented? Any number of factors would have prevented success. That it worked is fairly amazing. It also indicates that this virus may not be completely dormant -- in which case, they didn't create anything that isn't seen normally.
Biosafety Level 3 was fine for this one; if anything, it was excessive. There are always people who claim every genetic engineering experiment ought to be Biosafety Level 4 -- or not done at all. I'm thinking Rifkin here, obviously.
These were not Dr. Frankensteins. They did their work. I'm impressed, and I'm frightened by the hordes that wish to stop all research because of mythical scenarios that don't even make sense.
I learned to ignore mathematical nonsense in popular fiction books.
In this particular case, there were 30 copies of the virus in the genome. They worked backward to create the original virus. The resultant virus was disabled so that, after replicating once in a cell, the daughter viruses could not replicate. So there was no risk.
In the human genome, the researchers point out, are the pieces from other viruses. 8% of the human genome codes for HERV proteins or their regulatory subunits. If these pieces are activated, they can reassemble to create a new, working virus. This happens naturally.
All of these HERVs are viruses that, throughout human evolution, we and our ancestors have more or less come to terms with. At some point, many of them were probably devastating. But those that caught the virus, survived, and reproduced were able to mitigate the effects of the virus. These are viruses we've reached a "détente" with. They no longer rampage through the population. In fact, some of the proteins they produce are vital to our survival. One of these retroviral proteins permits implantation of the placenta. Without it, we'd all have placentas that don't attach to the uterine lining -- like mice, which as a result, aren't very complex when they have to be born.
Yes, HERVs are related to cancer. This occurs naturally. They act in a transposon-like manner, and they can pop into areas where they either damage mechanisms that prevent cancer or control cell replication. If we don't study these viral remains, we won't learn about them, won't learn what we can safely disable further -- and what we don't dare eliminate from our genome because we are dependent upon it.
These researchers were not Dr. Frankensteins, messing with things man was not meant to know. They were careful, they were deliberate, and theya re beginning the investigation into what could be an incredibly crucial topic in molecular biology.
Remember -- these are viruses that we learned to live with, more or less. By studying them, we can learn to mitigate the damage they still present.
Even more entertaining, she's a lot of people's worst nightmare:
Godspeed Anoushe Ansari. I hope you have a great time.
Here's the IAU web site draft definitions. Check out the artwork, including one "potato," 203 EL61.
The more I think about it, the more I think they might well be considered one planet, anyway. Given some time, they certainly will be! A Rocheworld would not be stable long (galactically speaking).
You're right, a Rocheworld would be an extreme case, but that's half the fun of arguing definitions. To a lot of folks, it's sort of a game. I was thinking more about whether they're two planets, as the point they orbit about is inside one of them!
That's not to say the definition might not have problems. Using this definition, would ice worlds be more likely to achieve "planet" designation than rock worlds because their components soften and deform at a higher temperature?
So how would this definition handle a Rocheworld, like in the book by that name by Robert L. Forward?
Is this an advertisement for Galactus pulling a tablecloth out from under dark matter dinnerwear on "The Universe Has Talent?"