Being a college student, I have to always be careful about this on the site Facebook (for those who don't know, it's MySpace for college kids). Since anyone with a.edu email address can sign up, all of my professors, research advisors, and med school admissions reps can see the pictures my friend link to my account of any Friday/Saturday night activities I may participate in. Also, the police on campus all have.edu addresses, and there has been alot of controversy over police officers searching through students facebook pictures (MANY of which show underage drinking/drug use). I just saw an article the other day about a freternity that got shut down for pictures of underage drinking http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/news-arti cle.aspx?storyid=53679. I plan on removing my account this summer when I apply to medical schools, not worth the risk.
It is true that we need more people in the field, but we need people to improve on current techniques, such as the researchers mentioned in the article. We don't just need more people using the same old methods. Currently protein crystallization is almost all trial and error, which obviously isn't most efficient way to do much of anything. I currently work in a crystallography lab myself, and I can tell you from expereince that it is an extremely painful process. While the human genome project was a huge advancement, we still need to know what all of those genes look like as proteins, and we're not even remotely close to solving all the structures.
P.S. for everyone who says that NMR is "better" clearly doesn't know much about the field. While it is useful, it only works on small proteins of fragments of proteins and doesn't give anywhere near the same detail as good x-ray diffraction data.
I find it interesting that despite the Mass. government moving to the OpenDocument format, Microsoft chose my school, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as a "Microsoft IT Showcase School."
I don't know if this has already been said (sorry, i dont have time to read 1500 posts), but people on the anti-evolution side of this debate completely misunderstand what a scientific theory is. In science, a theory is an explaination for some phenomnon. It is not at all the same as the conventional way in which people use it to explain something that is a very tentative explaination. After all, Einstein's theory of gravity is just that, a theory, but no one would doubt the existence of gravity. Despite what you want to believe, there is overwhelming evidence to support evolution which I don't have the time to go into. Also, why is the creationist view so much more realistic? Are we supposed to believe that life has evolved in an ordered and predictable way to favor certian traits over others, or should be believe that this mystical superhuman force just created everything? To me, evolution is much more reasonable than creationism once you know the facts.
I agree, whether we like it or not, the First Amendment gives us a right to speak, not a right to be heard.
Re:11,000 dead civilians in iraq
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Actually I will not be voting for Senator Kerry, and, for the record, do not think that his service was very honorable because it seems he lied or exaggerated the truth many times just to get medals or ribbons. I don't think it is out of line to reply as I did to someone who is condemning every person in the military for joining voluntarily.
Re:11,000 dead civilians in iraq
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Semper WiFi
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· Score: 4, Informative
However, US soldiers who enrolled (i.e. all US soldiers in Iraq), did so willingly...they're hired killers and they're this administration's accomplices in starting this illegal war and invasion of a sovereign country.
Wow, you really are ignorant. Given the choice, most people wouldn't risk their lives overseas just to "see some action." Most of these people are doing it because they have no other choice. It certianly doesn't pay well, especially for the risks involved. Maybe you're somehow not aware of current tuition costs, but I know of alot of people who cannot even afford to go to a state or community college. Going into the military for a few years then having them pay your tuition is a great way to go to college and be able to get a job that is better than being in the military. Consider yourself lucky that you didn't have to take this route and don't condemn other people who have no other options. You can disagree with the war in Iraq, but the troops did not make those political decisions.
Actually appendices were useful for our primitive ancestors and their very different diet. Tens of thousands of years isn't enough time for an organ to go away because it is no longer useful. You could also argue that humans are not really evolving anymore because the key to evolution is differential reproduction, but the most adapted members of our society do not have any reproductive advantage over the most useless anymore.
P.S. I'm not trying to say that the "most adapted" people SHOULD have an advantage, that is a little too Hitler-esque.
No pulse, huh? Being an EMT, if I got called to a scene where this guy was a patient, I would find no pulse and start to defribillate him, then ZAP!, the artifical heart is toasted and the guy is really in trouble. I hope these people wear some kind of ID bracelet or necklace.
If the rogue proteins are found in a "healthy" person, they will definitley get CJD ("Mad Cow disease" in humans) eventually. There is a long incubation period for this disease, upwards of 15 or 20 years. Until enough good protein is converted into rogue protein, and the rogue protein starts to form plaques in the brain, the patient will not show any signs or symptoms of the disease. Then it will start slowly and progress to total dimentia and loss of function.
By the way, if anyone is interested, a very good book that explains this whole thing is called "Deadly Feasts" by Richard Rhodes, highly recommended.
A prion infection is never the result of a viral or bacterial infection. The prion itself is spread directly from animal to animal (and I'm including humans as animals here). Now if you want to ask how the first prion was created, that would be more of a "chicken-or-the-egg" debate.
Actually no one knows what the precursor protein does in the brain. they have genetically engineered mice to lack this protein, and there were absolutley no adverse side effects. But if it's there, it probably does something, stuff usually doesn't stick around through billions of years of evolution if it is useless.
No one has managed to denature them yet using even extremely high amounts of heat. They are also resistant to irradiation, all types of alcohol, and many other methods of destroying most proteins that I forgot.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a college student, I have to always be careful about this on the site Facebook (for those who don't know, it's MySpace for college kids). Since anyone with a .edu email address can sign up, all of my professors, research advisors, and med school admissions reps can see the pictures my friend link to my account of any Friday/Saturday night activities I may participate in. Also, the police on campus all have .edu addresses, and there has been alot of controversy over police officers searching through students facebook pictures (MANY of which show underage drinking/drug use). I just saw an article the other day about a freternity that got shut down for pictures of underage drinking http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/news-arti cle.aspx?storyid=53679. I plan on removing my account this summer when I apply to medical schools, not worth the risk.
It is true that we need more people in the field, but we need people to improve on current techniques, such as the researchers mentioned in the article. We don't just need more people using the same old methods. Currently protein crystallization is almost all trial and error, which obviously isn't most efficient way to do much of anything. I currently work in a crystallography lab myself, and I can tell you from expereince that it is an extremely painful process. While the human genome project was a huge advancement, we still need to know what all of those genes look like as proteins, and we're not even remotely close to solving all the structures.
P.S. for everyone who says that NMR is "better" clearly doesn't know much about the field. While it is useful, it only works on small proteins of fragments of proteins and doesn't give anywhere near the same detail as good x-ray diffraction data.
I find it interesting that despite the Mass. government moving to the OpenDocument format, Microsoft chose my school, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as a "Microsoft IT Showcase School."
I don't know if this has already been said (sorry, i dont have time to read 1500 posts), but people on the anti-evolution side of this debate completely misunderstand what a scientific theory is. In science, a theory is an explaination for some phenomnon. It is not at all the same as the conventional way in which people use it to explain something that is a very tentative explaination. After all, Einstein's theory of gravity is just that, a theory, but no one would doubt the existence of gravity. Despite what you want to believe, there is overwhelming evidence to support evolution which I don't have the time to go into. Also, why is the creationist view so much more realistic? Are we supposed to believe that life has evolved in an ordered and predictable way to favor certian traits over others, or should be believe that this mystical superhuman force just created everything? To me, evolution is much more reasonable than creationism once you know the facts.
I agree, whether we like it or not, the First Amendment gives us a right to speak, not a right to be heard.
Actually I will not be voting for Senator Kerry, and, for the record, do not think that his service was very honorable because it seems he lied or exaggerated the truth many times just to get medals or ribbons. I don't think it is out of line to reply as I did to someone who is condemning every person in the military for joining voluntarily.
However, US soldiers who enrolled (i.e. all US soldiers in Iraq), did so willingly...they're hired killers and they're this administration's accomplices in starting this illegal war and invasion of a sovereign country.
Wow, you really are ignorant. Given the choice, most people wouldn't risk their lives overseas just to "see some action." Most of these people are doing it because they have no other choice. It certianly doesn't pay well, especially for the risks involved. Maybe you're somehow not aware of current tuition costs, but I know of alot of people who cannot even afford to go to a state or community college. Going into the military for a few years then having them pay your tuition is a great way to go to college and be able to get a job that is better than being in the military. Consider yourself lucky that you didn't have to take this route and don't condemn other people who have no other options. You can disagree with the war in Iraq, but the troops did not make those political decisions.
Actually appendices were useful for our primitive ancestors and their very different diet. Tens of thousands of years isn't enough time for an organ to go away because it is no longer useful. You could also argue that humans are not really evolving anymore because the key to evolution is differential reproduction, but the most adapted members of our society do not have any reproductive advantage over the most useless anymore. P.S. I'm not trying to say that the "most adapted" people SHOULD have an advantage, that is a little too Hitler-esque.
No pulse, huh? Being an EMT, if I got called to a scene where this guy was a patient, I would find no pulse and start to defribillate him, then ZAP!, the artifical heart is toasted and the guy is really in trouble. I hope these people wear some kind of ID bracelet or necklace.
If the rogue proteins are found in a "healthy" person, they will definitley get CJD ("Mad Cow disease" in humans) eventually. There is a long incubation period for this disease, upwards of 15 or 20 years. Until enough good protein is converted into rogue protein, and the rogue protein starts to form plaques in the brain, the patient will not show any signs or symptoms of the disease. Then it will start slowly and progress to total dimentia and loss of function. By the way, if anyone is interested, a very good book that explains this whole thing is called "Deadly Feasts" by Richard Rhodes, highly recommended.
A prion infection is never the result of a viral or bacterial infection. The prion itself is spread directly from animal to animal (and I'm including humans as animals here). Now if you want to ask how the first prion was created, that would be more of a "chicken-or-the-egg" debate.
Actually no one knows what the precursor protein does in the brain. they have genetically engineered mice to lack this protein, and there were absolutley no adverse side effects. But if it's there, it probably does something, stuff usually doesn't stick around through billions of years of evolution if it is useless.
No one has managed to denature them yet using even extremely high amounts of heat. They are also resistant to irradiation, all types of alcohol, and many other methods of destroying most proteins that I forgot.
Anyone else notice this line in Google's cache of google.com:
Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.
So Google isn't affiliated with Google anymore?
FYI, I think the problem with the Explorers and Firestones was that the tires were actually overinflated, giving them less contact with the road.