If Arsenic replaces phosphorus and the rest is carbon based it is still very likely for it to be related to the rest of the life forms on Earth.
In my view the most significant implication of this is that it can be the base of huge branch of the biotech industry - genetically enginieered bugs that make nasty stuff like biofuels or are used to detoxify industrial waste. The advantage is that it will not grow outside the very limited environment that provides the necessary arsenic. So if you accidentally spill the toxic tank the bug is not going to propagate and contaminate the rest of the world.
If it uses arsenic instead of phosphorus, it can't infect you. Where is the poor bug supposed to get nutrients if it accidentally ends your arsenic deprived flesh?
Hmmm, nice theory. Let's see how the facts support it. On one hand we have Ireland, that has low tax rate, which has given the incetive for the people to produce. You would expect it to be rich and prosperous society, but somehow it is on the verge of bankrupcy and the only way out that they have is a bailout that is going to be paid for mostly by Germany and France. Now, Germany and France are as you so eloquently put it "...societies with gigantic tax rates and so called 'social obligations...'" that "have produced entirely unsustainable parasitic governments of enormous size that are strangling the host economy.", yet somehow they are the "productive societies" and Ireland is the "third world country" in the example that we are discussing. Do you see why I am tempted to call your argument " bulshit, bulshit".
How is this news? RNA editing has been known for so long that it is already in the textbooks.
From the article: The most common of the 12 different types of misspellings was when an A in the DNA was changed to G in the RNA. That change accounted for about a third of the misspellings.
This is a textbook example of RNA editing by adenosine deaminase. It will convert the Adenosine bases ('A') to Inosine ('I'). When they try to sequence the RNA the first step is to make a DNA copy. During the process the positions that contain 'I' are copied mostly as 'G'. This is because 'I' can pair with any base, but prefers 'C'. So in the first strand you will get 'C' paired with 'I'. When you build the second strand these 'C' positions will direct incorporation of 'G'.
You are missing an important part of the story. The fire department was actually on site, dozing his paying neighbor’s fence with water to protect him from the fire. The conclusion of the story:
Taxes are good, because they protect idiots like this one from themselves.
In fairness the firemen did act silly and are now open to lawsuits. Instead of acting like the local extortion crew they should have helped the man and then sent him a bill with handsome fee for their service.
Chances are that this paper is not going to pass peer review. A brief read paper shows that they don't even attempt to validate the model with real data (too lazy for real research I guess). Their model is also overly simplistic to the point of stacking the deck towards proving that peer review is bad. The reviewer role is simplified to an accept/reject decision, which has nothing to do with reality. They completely eliminate the revision step in the peer review process, where authors address either through new experiments or through argument the comments of the reviewers. If you look at the 'characters', what they call a 'rational' reviewer looks more like a 'bastard' reviewer. They completely ignore the possibility that a reviewer can make suggestions that improve the paper.
I have several publications that were significantly improved through the peer review process. When I review papers my goal is not to shoot down the work, rather I try find ways to improve it. Of course there are 'bad' reviewers, who think that reviewing a paper is shredding it to pieces. These are actually easy to spot, because they rarely suggest anything useful and are often ignored by the journal editors. Speaking of which, journal editors are yet another part of the peer review process that is missing from their model
I'm mostly kidding, but isn't there some decent way to weasel around this?
Yes, there is - leave US for some place where laws are written by a somewhat more rational way, compared to frivolous interpretation of a 2000 year old set of texts. Singapore apparently is one such place.
I know you are making a joke here, but somebody should mod you up as 'Insightful'. Having incompatible fittings at the ends is the easiest and safest solution. Color coding as somebody else suggested is harder - you need to prove to FDA that the color is safe and does not leach from the plastic, and it isn't as safe - people are dumb they will connect the red tube to the blue outlet if they can.
This looks like high frequency traders have moved on from just gaming the market and now are trying for flood each other with bogus data hoping to trigger a bug in the competition's software or simply overwhelm it.
Yes it is. Based on my experience in US and EU (including some of the East European countries that score high on the list), US is an expensive dump as far as internet access goes. The reason: there is competition and free enterprise out there unlike US. If you go in one of these eastern europe countries you get to choose from DSL, WiMAX, Cable and even ethernet cable strung from the local 'mom & pop' garage operation.
Modern biomedical research is pushed at a very rapid pace due to grant/publication deadlines and goals. This is all great, but it leaves a huge gap - there is little place in modern labs for projects that require patience and long terms to complete. Here is one example where hobbyist can make a dent and with luck some money. Breed mice. Feed them high fat diet (aka McDonalds) and select for animals with life span that is either longer or shorter than the average. The goal is to create too lines of animals - one that tolerates high caloric intake and one that does not. If you are lucky and get these lines, I know of couple of companies and thousands of researches that would love to be friends with you. The reason is that the follow up research, once you have the animals is trivial, rapid and very rewarding. Besides, your mice will be a nice model for testing obesity drugs. The key here is patience and consistency. My guesstimate is that it will take you somewhere between 8 and 15 years to complete the breeding. This is enormous commitment. You can't place the work on hold hen going on vacation (you can but technically it is outside the hobbyist realm) and you have to take care of the animals pretty much on a daily basis (mice stink).
My guess is that he is an a setup that I have seen on multiple places around the country - a research or university hospital. The network layouts were designed out at time when there where no data protection laws and little electronic patient records. As a result over the years machines that host the patient records now end up on the same network that hosts machines used for research, including everybody's personal laptop. Now the new and very appropriate data protection laws come into effect and the managment and IT staff have three choices:
1. Spend tons of money on complete overhaul that will separate the patient records and the machines that process them from the rest of the network. This includes putting interfaces that would allow aggregate anonymized data to be accessed from the outside for population, epidemiological and other types of research.
2. Encrypt everything that ever touches the network.
3. Shut down the hospital or the research
Which option would you choose?
At the places where I have been very few of the postdoc and grad students have a computer that is purchased by the employer. Even if they do they still need to bring their personal laptop for various reasons directly connected to their work or study. I am currently doing research at a place like that and the security measures although not as draconian as in the article, are interfering seriously with my work. I never touch anything even remotely related to patients, but I need to exchange large chunks of data with colleagues around the world, have remote access to the local network, etc. Based on my experience I would advise the poster to calm down, and not lash out at the poor IT staff that has to deploy all this, while dealing with the anger of everybody around. You need to talk to people that are higher at the pay scale, define well the problem that you are facing and work with them to solve it.
We already know that expensive placebo can bring pain relief. Now we can completely eliminate the pill, save all the expenses related to drug development testing and production. All we need to do is charge people more for nothing and they will feel better. Isn't this a perfect business plan.
Oh, really! And this is based on your experience with the UK health care system I assume and not on a Slashdot non-story about a problem that has been fixed a year ago (yes I read the original article)?
Let me assure, that the crap that has been put on US TV about the european health care systems has nothing to do with reality. I have been covered under the German system (a mix of state and private insurance), my wife has been under the UK system and I we friends in France, Belgium and Spain. Nobody on the other side of the Atlantic has to deal with the crap an average US citizen faces when going to a doctor. The only place that I had good experience in the US is kaiser permanente, which is non-for-profit, owns its doctors and in essence operates as a single payer system
Not being USA citizen you probably were never exposed to reasons like the bill being ungodly, unamerican, taking away your freedom and putting you in front of a government run death panel.
The problem is not exactly 'cost/availability'. It is more like 'greed/stupidity'. Such system exist and functions perfectly well in Europe, even in the somewhat more backward eastern parts. It is free or the costs are negligible for the typical consumer. All you need to do is know the IBAN of the other account and you can safely, quickly and cheaply transfer money. And this is not something that just happen. It has been in place for decades.
In the US banks want to charge you for any absurd thing that comes to their mind. As a results we are stuck with an incredibly slow, inefficient and insecure way to transfer money (writing numbers on paper). There is no way that check processing is cheaper that wire transfer. Here are two examples of how absurd wire transfers in the US can be:
1. I have accounts in banks A (checking) and B (brokerage). If I go to bank A and tell them to transfer money to bank B, they will charge me $15. If I go to bank B and tell them to transfer the money _from_ bank A it is free.
2. I want to transfer money to Europe. My bank will charge me $35 and send the money. The bank on the other side will withhold their own fee (because the US bank is not part of the IBAN system) and put the rest in the account. While I know the US bank fee there is no way to know the fee on the other side, even my bank claims there is know way the can find this out. As a result putting exact sum of money into a bank account which should be the simplest thing to do is absolutely impossible.
I second this. p21 is what you call a 'tumor suppressor' gene. Without p21 it is significantly easier to get cancer. It would matter less to mice, because of their short lifespan and different DNA damage repair strategy (fix aggressively active genes, don't care much about the rest). For humans with life span ten times longer compared to mice, this is real deal breaker. These mice also appear to have some sort of autoimmune disease.
Don't count on this. I am sure somebody in China keeps on cranking thousands of those as we speak. They already have gone through the trouble of making molds for the fake fan and CPU. Why stop now when with all this publicity there will be a market for the fakes as collectibles?
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature. The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
That's exactly what came to my mind when I read it. We can make very sophisticated kill switches including ones that are coupled to positive selective pressure, so the evolution away from it is strongly inhibited. But even in this case my money would be on the "randomness of evolution', as they put it, taking care of it in the long term. Oh, and as we are talking about bacteria with 20 minutes generation time, long term is really not that long.
Jazzing up beginners chemistry classes (biology and physics too) with computers strikes me as an attempt replace real teaching with simulations. Besides there is no reason to teach them bad science skills (Excell) in science class. As you noted science is not accounting. Guess in which field being creative is good and where it is bad.
My advice would be:
1. Make damn sure all of your students can balance chemistry equations and can move from moles to grams to liquid volumes with ease.
2. Get their hand wet. Do as many experiments as you can. You can do things like analytical inorganic chemistry reactions (color change, precipitate formation) to identify ions in solution, titrations to measure concentrations, reactions that illustrate properties of some organic molecules like using glucose to reduce silver ions and turn the glass tube into a shiny mirror.
Slashdot Mirror
If Arsenic replaces phosphorus and the rest is carbon based it is still very likely for it to be related to the rest of the life forms on Earth. In my view the most significant implication of this is that it can be the base of huge branch of the biotech industry - genetically enginieered bugs that make nasty stuff like biofuels or are used to detoxify industrial waste. The advantage is that it will not grow outside the very limited environment that provides the necessary arsenic. So if you accidentally spill the toxic tank the bug is not going to propagate and contaminate the rest of the world.
If it uses arsenic instead of phosphorus, it can't infect you. Where is the poor bug supposed to get nutrients if it accidentally ends your arsenic deprived flesh?
Hmmm, nice theory. Let's see how the facts support it. On one hand we have Ireland, that has low tax rate, which has given the incetive for the people to produce. You would expect it to be rich and prosperous society, but somehow it is on the verge of bankrupcy and the only way out that they have is a bailout that is going to be paid for mostly by Germany and France. Now, Germany and France are as you so eloquently put it "...societies with gigantic tax rates and so called 'social obligations...'" that "have produced entirely unsustainable parasitic governments of enormous size that are strangling the host economy.", yet somehow they are the "productive societies" and Ireland is the "third world country" in the example that we are discussing. Do you see why I am tempted to call your argument " bulshit, bulshit".
From the article: The most common of the 12 different types of misspellings was when an A in the DNA was changed to G in the RNA. That change accounted for about a third of the misspellings.
This is a textbook example of RNA editing by adenosine deaminase. It will convert the Adenosine bases ('A') to Inosine ('I'). When they try to sequence the RNA the first step is to make a DNA copy. During the process the positions that contain 'I' are copied mostly as 'G'. This is because 'I' can pair with any base, but prefers 'C'. So in the first strand you will get 'C' paired with 'I'. When you build the second strand these 'C' positions will direct incorporation of 'G'.
Mystery solved
You are missing an important part of the story. The fire department was actually on site, dozing his paying neighbor’s fence with water to protect him from the fire. The conclusion of the story: Taxes are good, because they protect idiots like this one from themselves. In fairness the firemen did act silly and are now open to lawsuits. Instead of acting like the local extortion crew they should have helped the man and then sent him a bill with handsome fee for their service.
Honey, that's how things have always been and it ain't changing anytime soon.
I have several publications that were significantly improved through the peer review process. When I review papers my goal is not to shoot down the work, rather I try find ways to improve it. Of course there are 'bad' reviewers, who think that reviewing a paper is shredding it to pieces. These are actually easy to spot, because they rarely suggest anything useful and are often ignored by the journal editors. Speaking of which, journal editors are yet another part of the peer review process that is missing from their model
Here is the eBay reasoning:
1. Buy Skype
2. ???
3. Profit!
I'm mostly kidding, but isn't there some decent way to weasel around this?
Yes, there is - leave US for some place where laws are written by a somewhat more rational way, compared to frivolous interpretation of a 2000 year old set of texts. Singapore apparently is one such place.
I know you are making a joke here, but somebody should mod you up as 'Insightful'. Having incompatible fittings at the ends is the easiest and safest solution. Color coding as somebody else suggested is harder - you need to prove to FDA that the color is safe and does not leach from the plastic, and it isn't as safe - people are dumb they will connect the red tube to the blue outlet if they can.
This looks like high frequency traders have moved on from just gaming the market and now are trying for flood each other with bogus data hoping to trigger a bug in the competition's software or simply overwhelm it.
'The more bandwidth that you make available, the faster it will be consumed,' said Craig Moffett, analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York.
Is this dude proposing that limiting the bandwith to will make it last longer?
Yes it is. Based on my experience in US and EU (including some of the East European countries that score high on the list), US is an expensive dump as far as internet access goes. The reason: there is competition and free enterprise out there unlike US. If you go in one of these eastern europe countries you get to choose from DSL, WiMAX, Cable and even ethernet cable strung from the local 'mom & pop' garage operation.
Modern biomedical research is pushed at a very rapid pace due to grant/publication deadlines and goals. This is all great, but it leaves a huge gap - there is little place in modern labs for projects that require patience and long terms to complete. Here is one example where hobbyist can make a dent and with luck some money. Breed mice. Feed them high fat diet (aka McDonalds) and select for animals with life span that is either longer or shorter than the average. The goal is to create too lines of animals - one that tolerates high caloric intake and one that does not. If you are lucky and get these lines, I know of couple of companies and thousands of researches that would love to be friends with you. The reason is that the follow up research, once you have the animals is trivial, rapid and very rewarding. Besides, your mice will be a nice model for testing obesity drugs. The key here is patience and consistency. My guesstimate is that it will take you somewhere between 8 and 15 years to complete the breeding. This is enormous commitment. You can't place the work on hold hen going on vacation (you can but technically it is outside the hobbyist realm) and you have to take care of the animals pretty much on a daily basis (mice stink).
My guess is that he is an a setup that I have seen on multiple places around the country - a research or university hospital. The network layouts were designed out at time when there where no data protection laws and little electronic patient records. As a result over the years machines that host the patient records now end up on the same network that hosts machines used for research, including everybody's personal laptop. Now the new and very appropriate data protection laws come into effect and the managment and IT staff have three choices:
1. Spend tons of money on complete overhaul that will separate the patient records and the machines that process them from the rest of the network. This includes putting interfaces that would allow aggregate anonymized data to be accessed from the outside for population, epidemiological and other types of research.
2. Encrypt everything that ever touches the network.
3. Shut down the hospital or the research
Which option would you choose?
At the places where I have been very few of the postdoc and grad students have a computer that is purchased by the employer. Even if they do they still need to bring their personal laptop for various reasons directly connected to their work or study. I am currently doing research at a place like that and the security measures although not as draconian as in the article, are interfering seriously with my work. I never touch anything even remotely related to patients, but I need to exchange large chunks of data with colleagues around the world, have remote access to the local network, etc. Based on my experience I would advise the poster to calm down, and not lash out at the poor IT staff that has to deploy all this, while dealing with the anger of everybody around. You need to talk to people that are higher at the pay scale, define well the problem that you are facing and work with them to solve it.
We already know that expensive placebo can bring pain relief. Now we can completely eliminate the pill, save all the expenses related to drug development testing and production. All we need to do is charge people more for nothing and they will feel better. Isn't this a perfect business plan.
Oh, really! And this is based on your experience with the UK health care system I assume and not on a Slashdot non-story about a problem that has been fixed a year ago (yes I read the original article)?
Let me assure, that the crap that has been put on US TV about the european health care systems has nothing to do with reality. I have been covered under the German system (a mix of state and private insurance), my wife has been under the UK system and I we friends in France, Belgium and Spain. Nobody on the other side of the Atlantic has to deal with the crap an average US citizen faces when going to a doctor. The only place that I had good experience in the US is kaiser permanente, which is non-for-profit, owns its doctors and in essence operates as a single payer system
Not being USA citizen you probably were never exposed to reasons like the bill being ungodly, unamerican, taking away your freedom and putting you in front of a government run death panel.
The problem is not exactly 'cost/availability'. It is more like 'greed/stupidity'. Such system exist and functions perfectly well in Europe, even in the somewhat more backward eastern parts. It is free or the costs are negligible for the typical consumer. All you need to do is know the IBAN of the other account and you can safely, quickly and cheaply transfer money. And this is not something that just happen. It has been in place for decades.
In the US banks want to charge you for any absurd thing that comes to their mind. As a results we are stuck with an incredibly slow, inefficient and insecure way to transfer money (writing numbers on paper). There is no way that check processing is cheaper that wire transfer. Here are two examples of how absurd wire transfers in the US can be:
1. I have accounts in banks A (checking) and B (brokerage). If I go to bank A and tell them to transfer money to bank B, they will charge me $15. If I go to bank B and tell them to transfer the money _from_ bank A it is free.
2. I want to transfer money to Europe. My bank will charge me $35 and send the money. The bank on the other side will withhold their own fee (because the US bank is not part of the IBAN system) and put the rest in the account. While I know the US bank fee there is no way to know the fee on the other side, even my bank claims there is know way the can find this out. As a result putting exact sum of money into a bank account which should be the simplest thing to do is absolutely impossible.
I second this. p21 is what you call a 'tumor suppressor' gene. Without p21 it is significantly easier to get cancer. It would matter less to mice, because of their short lifespan and different DNA damage repair strategy (fix aggressively active genes, don't care much about the rest). For humans with life span ten times longer compared to mice, this is real deal breaker. These mice also appear to have some sort of autoimmune disease.
No, No, No! Making fakes of the fakes, will only make the original fakes even more valuable.
Don't count on this. I am sure somebody in China keeps on cranking thousands of those as we speak. They already have gone through the trouble of making molds for the fake fan and CPU. Why stop now when with all this publicity there will be a market for the fakes as collectibles?
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature. The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
That's exactly what came to my mind when I read it. We can make very sophisticated kill switches including ones that are coupled to positive selective pressure, so the evolution away from it is strongly inhibited. But even in this case my money would be on the "randomness of evolution', as they put it, taking care of it in the long term. Oh, and as we are talking about bacteria with 20 minutes generation time, long term is really not that long.
Jazzing up beginners chemistry classes (biology and physics too) with computers strikes me as an attempt replace real teaching with simulations. Besides there is no reason to teach them bad science skills (Excell) in science class. As you noted science is not accounting. Guess in which field being creative is good and where it is bad.
My advice would be:
1. Make damn sure all of your students can balance chemistry equations and can move from moles to grams to liquid volumes with ease.
2. Get their hand wet. Do as many experiments as you can. You can do things like analytical inorganic chemistry reactions (color change, precipitate formation) to identify ions in solution, titrations to measure concentrations, reactions that illustrate properties of some organic molecules like using glucose to reduce silver ions and turn the glass tube into a shiny mirror.
You vastly underestimate them. In addition to their US and Australian projects they are also not building one in Namibia .
The Namibian project is more ambitious as it will be used also to grow food in the hot and windy conditions under their greenhouse.