Marital status: Single
Worth: $US21 billion, seventh richest person in the world, says Forbes Magazine, 2005
A clear case of too many LAN parties...
Re:Unlikely, but exciting if they pull it off
on
Writing Genetic Code
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, they teach it wrong, then. Bacterial 'sex' involves the transfer of extrachromosomal loops of DNA called plasmids, via a sex pillus also coded by a plasmid. Plasmids can carry, amongst other things, a casette of genes for antibiotic resistance, which is one of the reasons why resistance can spread so rapidly. It has little or nothing to do with near death experiences, and no 'offspring' is created; it's just a transfer of genes.
They seem to be tacitly admitting that if it wasn't her who downloaded the music, it was one of her kids. Given that downloading is illegal, the question then becomes whether she is responsible for their behaviour online. I guess she could hand over the 19-year-old to the tender mercies of the law...
This comment is far from insightful; in fact, the basic premise is nonsense. There is no such thing as a "gene for prematurity". Babies are born prematurely for a host of different reasons, and have different degree of health problems arising from prematurity, ranging from none at all to huge handicaps. And even if there was such a gene, as others have mentioned, eugenics has already led to enormous amounts of cruelty and destruction, even in the good old US of A.
I would wager a proponent of punctuated equilibrium would say that evolutions necessarily happens in 100 years.
Even to proponents of punctuated equilibrium, "geologically instantaneous" is not 100 years. Gould and Eldredge, who came up with the concept, say "for small populations speciating away from a central mass in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, will translate in almost every geological circumstance as a punctuation on a bedding plane, not gradual change" Original paper here In world beset by global warming, the bears are not going to have time to evolve floaties.
Well, bonobos spring immediately to mind. Close relatives of ours, they have sex not just for pleasure, but to facilitate *every single* aspect of social...dare I say...intercourse. And lots of species show occasional homosexual behaviour, which can't possible have primarily reproductive purpose. The necrophiliac homosexual mallard duck which was the subject of an IgNobel prize is a fairly extreme case in point.
Actually, it the kids had Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease. The problem was that the engineered gene is inserted via a viral vector, and what seems to have happened is that the virus inserted into the promoter area of a gene which, when over-active, leads to cancer. There is lots of research underway on ways to prevent this, now that we know what the problem is, and the prosects are good. It should be possible to do this sort of engineering safely in the not-too-distant future.
Sex is absolutely not just about reproduction. It's perfectly possible to produce offspring without orgasm, and lots of species do. Pleasure in sex appears to function to promote closeness between partners, making that hypothetical long term marriage that much more likely. There's even a hypothesis that female orgasm is a by-product of the fact that men need orgasms to convince them to stick around and look after their mates, but I remain unconvinced. More research is required, and by God, I'm the woman to do it...
It may be because, unlike math or physics or chemistry... there's really nothing to "discover". There's lots to invent and improve, sure... but there's no real ingrained "laws of computers" that are woven into the natural fabric of the universe. There's no Plank's Constant or equation balancing or Realtivity. There's nothing that's tangibly abstract (???) that's just THERE to explore, discover and derrive.
On the contrary, there's a whole theory of computation that is far from fully understood. Godel's incompleteness theorem, Turing machines, the Halting problem, computational complexity (as opposed to trendy modern SFI-style complexity), issues surrounding self-replicating automata...some of the greatest minds in science, never mind computer science, have spent serious time on understanding what is computation and what are its abilities and limits. I'm sure there's room for one or two new thinkers.
Of course RNA can code for more than DNA does: RNA editing, where the RNA sequence itself is modified after transcription; differential intron splicing, where different bits are cut out of the pre-mRNA to form different forms of mRNA. Then there's post-translational modifications to the proteins themselves...
A single gene can produce dozens of different proteins (there's one expression in brain tissue which produces around 900 different proteins, but I don;t recall its name) many of which can be completely different from each other. Not to mention functional RNAs themselves. The human proteome probably contains hundreds of thousands of proteins. So yes, it all comes from DNA, but RNA is more than just an intermediary.
If you think about current library practices, nobody makes more money if 100 people borrow a book then if 2 people do. Sure, you have to return a physical book before someone else can borrow it, but nobody benefits financially. So why the need to limit borrowings of electronic media? The library buys one copy and pays for it...after that it doesn't matter who read it, in house or out.
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Worth: $US21 billion, seventh richest person in the world, says Forbes Magazine, 2005
A clear case of too many LAN parties...
Well, they teach it wrong, then. Bacterial 'sex' involves the transfer of extrachromosomal loops of DNA called plasmids, via a sex pillus also coded by a plasmid. Plasmids can carry, amongst other things, a casette of genes for antibiotic resistance, which is one of the reasons why resistance can spread so rapidly. It has little or nothing to do with near death experiences, and no 'offspring' is created; it's just a transfer of genes.
They seem to be tacitly admitting that if it wasn't her who downloaded the music, it was one of her kids. Given that downloading is illegal, the question then becomes whether she is responsible for their behaviour online. I guess she could hand over the 19-year-old to the tender mercies of the law...
This comment is far from insightful; in fact, the basic premise is nonsense. There is no such thing as a "gene for prematurity". Babies are born prematurely for a host of different reasons, and have different degree of health problems arising from prematurity, ranging from none at all to huge handicaps. And even if there was such a gene, as others have mentioned, eugenics has already led to enormous amounts of cruelty and destruction, even in the good old US of A.
Even to proponents of punctuated equilibrium, "geologically instantaneous" is not 100 years. Gould and Eldredge, who came up with the concept, say "for small populations speciating away from a central mass in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, will translate in almost every geological circumstance as a punctuation on a bedding plane, not gradual change" Original paper here In world beset by global warming, the bears are not going to have time to evolve floaties.
I don't know...I'm not going to believe it until I see the article in Wikipedia...
Well, bonobos spring immediately to mind. Close relatives of ours, they have sex not just for pleasure, but to facilitate *every single* aspect of social...dare I say...intercourse. And lots of species show occasional homosexual behaviour, which can't possible have primarily reproductive purpose. The necrophiliac homosexual mallard duck which was the subject of an IgNobel prize is a fairly extreme case in point.
Actually, it the kids had Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease. The problem was that the engineered gene is inserted via a viral vector, and what seems to have happened is that the virus inserted into the promoter area of a gene which, when over-active, leads to cancer. There is lots of research underway on ways to prevent this, now that we know what the problem is, and the prosects are good. It should be possible to do this sort of engineering safely in the not-too-distant future.
Sex is absolutely not just about reproduction. It's perfectly possible to produce offspring without orgasm, and lots of species do. Pleasure in sex appears to function to promote closeness between partners, making that hypothetical long term marriage that much more likely. There's even a hypothesis that female orgasm is a by-product of the fact that men need orgasms to convince them to stick around and look after their mates, but I remain unconvinced. More research is required, and by God, I'm the woman to do it...
"Those guys" have already been all over the world's most prestigious journal with their "scientific" article.
On the contrary, there's a whole theory of computation that is far from fully understood. Godel's incompleteness theorem, Turing machines, the Halting problem, computational complexity (as opposed to trendy modern SFI-style complexity), issues surrounding self-replicating automata...some of the greatest minds in science, never mind computer science, have spent serious time on understanding what is computation and what are its abilities and limits. I'm sure there's room for one or two new thinkers.
Of course RNA can code for more than DNA does: RNA editing, where the RNA sequence itself is modified after transcription; differential intron splicing, where different bits are cut out of the pre-mRNA to form different forms of mRNA. Then there's post-translational modifications to the proteins themselves... A single gene can produce dozens of different proteins (there's one expression in brain tissue which produces around 900 different proteins, but I don;t recall its name) many of which can be completely different from each other. Not to mention functional RNAs themselves. The human proteome probably contains hundreds of thousands of proteins. So yes, it all comes from DNA, but RNA is more than just an intermediary.
If you think about current library practices, nobody makes more money if 100 people borrow a book then if 2 people do. Sure, you have to return a physical book before someone else can borrow it, but nobody benefits financially. So why the need to limit borrowings of electronic media? The library buys one copy and pays for it...after that it doesn't matter who read it, in house or out.
Oh, come on! Benny Hill was an icon of the times. Not to mention Kenny Everett...(did he make it to the States?)