I suppose it really is to much to ask that people Read The Fucking Study...
In a nutshell, this study collected drug use data from 3095 drivers involved in crashes and 6190 matched control drivers. THC was detected in 234/3095 crash involved drivers, vs 379/6190 controls. That sample size is plenty. If you think otherwise, please explain why you think the studies' methodology is statistically underpowered.
The biggest caveat is probably that THC testing can be positive even if the drug use was days or weeks ago. I'm not aware of a test that, like BAC, can detect whether someone is high as balls right now. That makes the conclusions a bit weaker, but we can still conclude that people who frequently use marijuana are not riskier drivers than anyone else, and blood THC testing is not a measurement of impairment.
The Surface Pro 3 could be the best tablet I've seen so far to actually substitute for a paper notepad and stack of printed reading material. As a biology graduate student, I can envision several use cases that aren't well served by any other devices:
1) It could be the electronic lab notebook that so many scientists have been waiting for. Even though I use a desktop to write protocols and analyze data, I always end up using paper at the bench. If I write up a protocol, I print a copy so that I can carry it to the bench and scribble notes as I go. Similarly, for small and medium scale data collection, I record the data on a notepad and only later transcribe it to the computer. With OneNote, a good stylus, and a good aspect ratio for portrait, this could conceivably replace the binder full of papers I keep at my lab bench. (Difficulty: is it water and solvent resistant? Can it be covered in plastic without overheating or blocking the touch screen?)
2) This could be the best tablet for reading big stacks of 8.5x11 inch PDFs. It's got the right display size, aspect ratio, pixel density, and again the styles could be pretty handy. A 10" tablet is too small, particularly with a low resolution screen. Fingertips or capacitive styluses are too imprecise for highlighting and note taking. On the other hand, I find reading it tedious to read much on a desktop, even with a good monitor. At 800g, the Surface Pro 3 isn't even that heavy by paper standards: the textbooks I have next to me are 1-3 kg, and I have many stacks of journal articles that weigh more than 1 kg.
3) Finally, it could be a good tablet for the sorts of image manipulation I do. If it's good enough for Gabe at Penny Arcade, it should be more than good enough for my modest needs. I spend a lot of time with Inkscape and Paint.net making figures for presentation and publication. (I even, I am ashamed to admit, use PowerPoint vector graphics more than anyone ever should.) It's never anything fancy, but I bet a good screen and stylus would be faster than doing everything by keyboard and mouse. Plus, I can use all of my usual scientific image processing software, and directly transfer processed images to other programs for further manipulation.
All of these uses are purely as a tablet or desktop replacement. I can't even see much use for the type cover to be honest, I'd rather just use the dock so I can plug in a real keyboard and mouse along with an external monitor.
However, it's way out of my grad-student budget. I'll be waiting for price drops (and other competitors) as I save up enough money. Or perhaps my research advisor has money budgeted for lab computers.
This was my first concern. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
Photosynthesis is pretty lousy in terms of thermodynamic efficiency. About 1% of the light that hits a plant is converted to useful chemical energy. The plant will have to use most of that energy for its metabolic processes. Luciferase itself is a very efficient enzyme, however, so I'll generously assume that 10% of the energy that the plant captures can be turned into useful light. So the overall efficiency can't be much higher than 0.1%. By comparison, solar cells are around 10% efficient, and LEDs 20%, so at first glance the luciferase plant seems to be an order of magnitude less efficient than the solar powered flashlight my in-laws gave me for christmas.
In absolute terms, there is about 100 watts/meter^2 of energy in sunlight. If you've got a one-square-meter window full of the hypothetical plants sitting in sunshine all day, let's say they can absorb 1500 watt-hours, and then convert 1.5 watt-hours into useful light. That'd be comparable to running a 5-watt LED for an hourish, which could be useful if you could turn the luminescence on and off at will. But if the plant is glowing all night and only a portion of the light is emitted in a useful direction, maybe the window-full-of-plants would give off light comparable to the little cluster of LEDs on the front of my computer. So overall I'd say that the idea is not completely impossible, but still totally impractical.
A "four year thesis project" sounds just about right to me. My particular program in biology has an average completion time of 5.5 years, and the national average I believe is 6.5 years. But I don't even have a formal thesis project until I write a proposal for the end of my second year. I spent my first year taking classes and doing research rotations. I'm currently in my second year, I've picked a lab and started to do some productive research, but I still have classes and TA duties, and I spent a lot of time this year learning the techniques that I will need for my thesis. So yeah, I'm aiming for a "four year thesis project".
I'm a little shocked that 10 or 11 years is at all normal. In my experience, anything beyond 7 years is the stuff of horror stories. 10+ years must be in fields where a grad student has to do their research after working as a TA for 30+ hours per week to afford their ramen.
Have you ever actually used a microscope? You can't just put one on an arm and wave it over a patch of dirt and expect to see anything interesting. Microscopes capable of resolving bacteria have a very tiny depth of field, so if you point it at a patch of ground there'd be nothing in focus. You have to take samples, mount them on a slide, stain them (usually), and then place them under a microscope. And on Mars, most potentially interesting microbes will probably be buried. To do that you have to have some fairly sophisticated sample handling mechanisms... which is exactly what this new mass spec instrument doesn't need. Now you just point it at an interesting patch of dirt, zap it with the laser, and suck all of the vaporized ions into the mass spec.
Part of the problem in my experience is that there isn't a single, reliable cloning manual out there that provides start-to-finish logical guidance. Most people do their projects in an ad-hoc sort of way. If I have a particular cloning project, my resources are (in order) my PI, my labmates, the NEB catalog, and whatever I can google up.
You'll probably want a decent background in molecular biology -- equivalent to one or two intermediate college courses, or whatever you can self-learn from the right textbooks. Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of the better textbooks out there. There are some relevant manuals on cloning out there, but mostly they're concerned with the gory details on what biologists do at their bench. One is written by Maniatis. It doesn't really present a unified, logical approach, but is really just a collection of protocols and recipes for accomplishing individual steps, without providing much guidance for a whole project. Still, if you have access to a university library, it's probably in the reference section, and it has a lot of good information covering the basic theory of all sorts of techniques. Another good resource is the New England Biolabs website -- they sell reagents and kits for subcloning, and their technical references are excellent. So good, in fact, that their catalog was passed around one of my undergrad lab classes as a supplemental textbook of sorts.
The big challenge for you is to put all of that crap together -- distilling the accumulated lab superstition and hodge-podge of tools into a flowchart of decisions that outputs useful cloning advice.
Unfortunately, most such attempts are written by biologists with a bit of coding background... and end up being the crappy sorts of projects that I could do myself, if I wanted to put the time in. The better computer scientists making their way into biology are all going into bioinformatics, which involves big sexy problems like analyzing and comparing whole genomes. The routine concerns of everyday biologists haven't attracted the right talent.
TFA states that it's a general problem with soft drinks, and the really serious cases involve patients that drink multiple liters every day.
Not that there's any particular benefit to more reasonable consumption (say, 20 oz/day), even if it won't put you in the hospital.
Cheap and effective heatpipes showed up, and have been adopted by just about everything now. A good heatpipe is comparable to a basic water cooling setup, but it's a hell of a lot more reliable. They're sealed and have no moving parts, making them much better to stick in your laptop.
On the nerd/enthusiast side of things, I gave up my watercooling rig for just this reason. When I built a new computer, I just got an ordinary bigass heatsink, since it would give me 95% of the cooling for much less hassle and money.
I was talking about C. elegans specifically. Certainly, there have been plenty of direct recordings of neurons for decades. These have tended to be of very specific model systems however. With the giant squid axon or other preparations, you can stick tiny electrodes in different parts of the neuron to record exactly what's going on. And there are the nanowire arrays you mention -- though these are a more indirect technique.
These techniques tend to involve either some in vitro preparation, where you have a collection of isolated neurons in a dish (which is occasionally done with C. elegans), or minimally intrusive but limited recordings of a rat or larger animal. At that size, it's possible to stick some recording device in the head of the test subject and still have it behave mostly normally.
The nematodes are far to small for the second approach. You might be able to get some recordings with inserted electrodes, but you'll have to immobilize and nearly eviscerate the poor worm to do so, so you won't be dealing with normal behaviors.
I'm sure you can also teach some other arbitrary neural network to simulate the nematode's behavior, but that's not very biologically relevant.
Well, that's the hope, and a major source of appeal for the humble nematode. Unfortunately, that's still far beyond what we know right now. The physical map of every neuron and their connections has been complete for decades. Still, despite a whole lot of effort, researchers are still working to piece together small functional circuits for the simplest of behaviors. A lot of complexity arises in neural circuits -- one physical circuit can contain several independent functional circuits, depending on the types of inputs.
The best current knowledge of C. elegans neurophysiology involves qualitative descriptions of small circuits, involving a few dozen neurons. Unfortunately, while you can do a lot of good behavioral studies and other experiments, it's impossible to directly record the activity of specific neurons. Also, it turns out that some "neural" functions are actually performed by other cells. For example, one pattern generator in the digestive tract actually resides in intestinal cells instead of neurons -- my lab is working on the genetics involved.
On further review, it seems that the CBC article is total crap, but that the original paper isn't that far off the deep end. I admit that I don't know enough to really follow or critique the research, but it doesn't seem to be the crackpot theory that TFA implies. Nowhere, for example, does that paper say that nerves don't use electricity. In fact, the paper refers to "solitons" as a piezo-electric effect. They are merely proposing a new mechanism on top of previous theories, not trying to completely throw out all neuroscience to date.
To recap: Completely bogus headline, based on a completely bogus bit of popular science reporting, which itself is based on a possibly intriguing (but tentative) bit of original research. Nothing to see here.
How do they explain all of the electrical measurements of nerve cells? We have measured voltages and currents. We know that these are dependent on certain protein channels, and salt concentrations. If impulses are actually the result of "solitons", how can they explain half a century worth of neurobiology? One wild guess, based on a minor inconsistency (if it even exists as they believe) needs a hell of a lot more evidence before they should be taken seriously.
That's very nice, but it seems more of an example of individual courtesy, rather than corporate policy.
With Verizon, for example, I've had some of the best and worst experiences with their customer service. Once, I actually went in to their store to update my phone's firmware and change a few details on my plan. The woman who helped me along was truly amazing... she went out of her way to show me how to save money, while getting even more of what I needed.
On the other hand, after I had maybe sent a whopping dozen text messages within a month, I get some sort of automatic call where a customer service representative tries to convince me to "upgrade" to the $5/month text message plan. Somehow, this is supposed to save me money over my buck twenny worth of text messages. At least, that's what the desperate call center lackey tried to convince me of.
The moral of all this is to try to distinguish between helpful and polite individuals (genuinely decent people, the kind which we need more of in this world) and the asshole corporations that employ these nice people. Your helpful Circuit City employee was probably just trying to honestly help you, while not really following corporate policy. Some higher-up management flunky chose to very deliberately make the online and in-store prices different, so that people would be drawn in by lower prices.
Asshole corporations, despite their best efforts, still manage to employ good people.
Even if you could control all external sources of mutagenesis, a lot of mutation is caused by inherent flaws in cellular processes. DNA replication, even after error correction mechanisms, still makes about 1 mistake per ten billion nucleotides copied -- roughly on the order of one error for every few rounds of cell replication. Additionally, there are plenty of free radicals and other reactive molecules naturally floating around our cells, each capable of causing mutations.
Of course, with current technology the data access time would be ridiculous. Whole genome sequencing, at this time, takes months or years to complete, and it ain't cheap or easy.
Perhaps you could come up with an "addressing" scheme where you access sequence X by adding some transcription factor, and sequencing the resultant transcript. With current technology, this could "only" take a few days to access a small piece of data. Foreseeable technology might reduce this to hours. Even then, a useful data storage scheme using regulatory networks would be an impressive feat of genetic engineering.
Which also happens with incandescents, and in my experience at a significant rate. I probably used to accidentally break more bulbs' filaments than I ever let burn out, and CFLs seem to be physically much sturdier. Sure, on average, nobody will really see the quoted 10,000 hour life span from CFLs, but I'd be stunned if incandescents last anywhere near their quoted 1,500 hour life span (again on average). In any case, the extra cost of a CFL is roughly offset by the increased life span it sees.
Bullshit. CFL bulbs may be 8 times as expensive, but they also last about 8 times as long. So while Walmart will probably see a short term increase in profits from selling the more expensive CFLs, the long term profits over the next few years won't increase much. People won't have to replace bulbs as often as they do with incandescents.
Of course, Walmart is still certainly doing this for financial reasons; this is a great PR move. It will really appeal to people that vaguely want to "do something" about the environment while maintaining their current lifestyle [he says as he queues up a few torrents to run overnight...]. It certainly won't stop or even significantly slow global warming or the coming energy collapse or whatever other doomsday scenarios there are, but every little bit helps.
Musicians are not being given rights to public performance of the scores. There is a difference and it is a difference that matters.
I wonder where the line defining "public performance" sits. Obviously, a student "performing" for their teacher should be considered private performance. But how about a performance given to other members of a studio? Or a recital given in a private residence to friends and family? A studio recital open to other musicians at a large but "private" music school?
Obviously, whenever a performance is advertised and completely open to the public (i.e. anyone could walk off the street and watch), or if anyone is charging, that falls well on the "public performance" side of the line. Where exactly is that line?
Eh. You could just have a lazy IT department, which would rather force people use IE rather than fix some specific bug with some other browser. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, etc.
"According to the new policy, the crew would release an object on a spacewalk by pushing it "behind" the station to speed up the separation between the ISS and the object and to decrease the amount of time it spends in orbit."
So, they're not just gonna randomly toss objects around. Instead they'll toss them into a slightly lower orbit, where atmospheric drag (which DOES exist even at the orbit of the ISS, though it's very slight) will guarantee the objects will eventually spiral in and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind that mitochondrial dna is only a record of maternal descent. So, while the mtDNA record indicates that the human and neandertal maternal lineages diverged, it's entirely probable that some male neandertal lineage could still be surviving today (I'll let you insert the obvious jokes...) Specifically, this gene could have been introduced into the modern human population if a male Neandertal mated with some ancestral human female. Even the article you reference only claims that "little interbreeding occurred between our own species and the Neanderthals"; it did not claim that there wasn't any interbreeding at all. All you need is a single interbreeding event to introduce this gene, and then if the selective advantage of this gene is high enough (as TFA posits), the gene can easily spread through the human population.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind that mitochondrial dna is only a record of maternal descent. So, while the mtDNA record indicates that the human and neandertal maternal lineages diverged, it's entirely possible that some male neandertal lineage could still be surviving today (I'll let you insert the obvious jokes...). Specifically, this gene could have been introduced into the modern human population if a male Neandertal mated with some ancestral human female.
Even the article you reference only claims that "little interbreeding occurred between our own species and the Neanderthals"; it did not claim that there wasn't any interbreeding at all. All you need is a single interbreeding event to introduce this gene, and then if the selective advantage of this gene is high enough (as TFA posits), the gene can easily spread through the human population.
Because of social pressures pushing people to work harder and earn more money. Because very few people can work less than full time and afford to even live. And yes, working long hours at a job you find unpleasent is a bad way to live your life. Being realistic though, if you set aside time to work, eat, and sleep, there are at most eight hours left in a typical day.
The ideal answer in this case is to find something you can do for a living that you can enjoy, or at least tolerate.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it really is to much to ask that people Read The Fucking Study...
In a nutshell, this study collected drug use data from 3095 drivers involved in crashes and 6190 matched control drivers. THC was detected in 234/3095 crash involved drivers, vs 379/6190 controls. That sample size is plenty. If you think otherwise, please explain why you think the studies' methodology is statistically underpowered.
The biggest caveat is probably that THC testing can be positive even if the drug use was days or weeks ago. I'm not aware of a test that, like BAC, can detect whether someone is high as balls right now. That makes the conclusions a bit weaker, but we can still conclude that people who frequently use marijuana are not riskier drivers than anyone else, and blood THC testing is not a measurement of impairment.
Do you have any links to those papers or related articles? I am intrigued, but I won't be searching for "environmental fetishes" on a work computer...
The Surface Pro 3 could be the best tablet I've seen so far to actually substitute for a paper notepad and stack of printed reading material. As a biology graduate student, I can envision several use cases that aren't well served by any other devices:
1) It could be the electronic lab notebook that so many scientists have been waiting for. Even though I use a desktop to write protocols and analyze data, I always end up using paper at the bench. If I write up a protocol, I print a copy so that I can carry it to the bench and scribble notes as I go. Similarly, for small and medium scale data collection, I record the data on a notepad and only later transcribe it to the computer. With OneNote, a good stylus, and a good aspect ratio for portrait, this could conceivably replace the binder full of papers I keep at my lab bench. (Difficulty: is it water and solvent resistant? Can it be covered in plastic without overheating or blocking the touch screen?)
2) This could be the best tablet for reading big stacks of 8.5x11 inch PDFs. It's got the right display size, aspect ratio, pixel density, and again the styles could be pretty handy. A 10" tablet is too small, particularly with a low resolution screen. Fingertips or capacitive styluses are too imprecise for highlighting and note taking. On the other hand, I find reading it tedious to read much on a desktop, even with a good monitor. At 800g, the Surface Pro 3 isn't even that heavy by paper standards: the textbooks I have next to me are 1-3 kg, and I have many stacks of journal articles that weigh more than 1 kg.
3) Finally, it could be a good tablet for the sorts of image manipulation I do. If it's good enough for Gabe at Penny Arcade, it should be more than good enough for my modest needs. I spend a lot of time with Inkscape and Paint.net making figures for presentation and publication. (I even, I am ashamed to admit, use PowerPoint vector graphics more than anyone ever should.) It's never anything fancy, but I bet a good screen and stylus would be faster than doing everything by keyboard and mouse. Plus, I can use all of my usual scientific image processing software, and directly transfer processed images to other programs for further manipulation.
All of these uses are purely as a tablet or desktop replacement. I can't even see much use for the type cover to be honest, I'd rather just use the dock so I can plug in a real keyboard and mouse along with an external monitor.
However, it's way out of my grad-student budget. I'll be waiting for price drops (and other competitors) as I save up enough money. Or perhaps my research advisor has money budgeted for lab computers.
This was my first concern. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
Photosynthesis is pretty lousy in terms of thermodynamic efficiency. About 1% of the light that hits a plant is converted to useful chemical energy. The plant will have to use most of that energy for its metabolic processes. Luciferase itself is a very efficient enzyme, however, so I'll generously assume that 10% of the energy that the plant captures can be turned into useful light. So the overall efficiency can't be much higher than 0.1%. By comparison, solar cells are around 10% efficient, and LEDs 20%, so at first glance the luciferase plant seems to be an order of magnitude less efficient than the solar powered flashlight my in-laws gave me for christmas.
In absolute terms, there is about 100 watts/meter^2 of energy in sunlight. If you've got a one-square-meter window full of the hypothetical plants sitting in sunshine all day, let's say they can absorb 1500 watt-hours, and then convert 1.5 watt-hours into useful light. That'd be comparable to running a 5-watt LED for an hourish, which could be useful if you could turn the luminescence on and off at will. But if the plant is glowing all night and only a portion of the light is emitted in a useful direction, maybe the window-full-of-plants would give off light comparable to the little cluster of LEDs on the front of my computer. So overall I'd say that the idea is not completely impossible, but still totally impractical.
A "four year thesis project" sounds just about right to me. My particular program in biology has an average completion time of 5.5 years, and the national average I believe is 6.5 years. But I don't even have a formal thesis project until I write a proposal for the end of my second year. I spent my first year taking classes and doing research rotations. I'm currently in my second year, I've picked a lab and started to do some productive research, but I still have classes and TA duties, and I spent a lot of time this year learning the techniques that I will need for my thesis. So yeah, I'm aiming for a "four year thesis project".
I'm a little shocked that 10 or 11 years is at all normal. In my experience, anything beyond 7 years is the stuff of horror stories. 10+ years must be in fields where a grad student has to do their research after working as a TA for 30+ hours per week to afford their ramen.
Have you ever actually used a microscope? You can't just put one on an arm and wave it over a patch of dirt and expect to see anything interesting. Microscopes capable of resolving bacteria have a very tiny depth of field, so if you point it at a patch of ground there'd be nothing in focus. You have to take samples, mount them on a slide, stain them (usually), and then place them under a microscope. And on Mars, most potentially interesting microbes will probably be buried. To do that you have to have some fairly sophisticated sample handling mechanisms... which is exactly what this new mass spec instrument doesn't need. Now you just point it at an interesting patch of dirt, zap it with the laser, and suck all of the vaporized ions into the mass spec.
Part of the problem in my experience is that there isn't a single, reliable cloning manual out there that provides start-to-finish logical guidance. Most people do their projects in an ad-hoc sort of way. If I have a particular cloning project, my resources are (in order) my PI, my labmates, the NEB catalog, and whatever I can google up.
You'll probably want a decent background in molecular biology -- equivalent to one or two intermediate college courses, or whatever you can self-learn from the right textbooks. Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of the better textbooks out there. There are some relevant manuals on cloning out there, but mostly they're concerned with the gory details on what biologists do at their bench. One is written by Maniatis. It doesn't really present a unified, logical approach, but is really just a collection of protocols and recipes for accomplishing individual steps, without providing much guidance for a whole project. Still, if you have access to a university library, it's probably in the reference section, and it has a lot of good information covering the basic theory of all sorts of techniques. Another good resource is the New England Biolabs website -- they sell reagents and kits for subcloning, and their technical references are excellent. So good, in fact, that their catalog was passed around one of my undergrad lab classes as a supplemental textbook of sorts.
The big challenge for you is to put all of that crap together -- distilling the accumulated lab superstition and hodge-podge of tools into a flowchart of decisions that outputs useful cloning advice.
Unfortunately, most such attempts are written by biologists with a bit of coding background... and end up being the crappy sorts of projects that I could do myself, if I wanted to put the time in. The better computer scientists making their way into biology are all going into bioinformatics, which involves big sexy problems like analyzing and comparing whole genomes. The routine concerns of everyday biologists haven't attracted the right talent.
TFA states that it's a general problem with soft drinks, and the really serious cases involve patients that drink multiple liters every day. Not that there's any particular benefit to more reasonable consumption (say, 20 oz/day), even if it won't put you in the hospital.
Cheap and effective heatpipes showed up, and have been adopted by just about everything now. A good heatpipe is comparable to a basic water cooling setup, but it's a hell of a lot more reliable. They're sealed and have no moving parts, making them much better to stick in your laptop.
On the nerd/enthusiast side of things, I gave up my watercooling rig for just this reason. When I built a new computer, I just got an ordinary bigass heatsink, since it would give me 95% of the cooling for much less hassle and money.
Here's the link to the article on one continuous page, bypassing the ads and pageload glomming.
I was talking about C. elegans specifically. Certainly, there have been plenty of direct recordings of neurons for decades. These have tended to be of very specific model systems however. With the giant squid axon or other preparations, you can stick tiny electrodes in different parts of the neuron to record exactly what's going on. And there are the nanowire arrays you mention -- though these are a more indirect technique.
These techniques tend to involve either some in vitro preparation, where you have a collection of isolated neurons in a dish (which is occasionally done with C. elegans), or minimally intrusive but limited recordings of a rat or larger animal. At that size, it's possible to stick some recording device in the head of the test subject and still have it behave mostly normally.
The nematodes are far to small for the second approach. You might be able to get some recordings with inserted electrodes, but you'll have to immobilize and nearly eviscerate the poor worm to do so, so you won't be dealing with normal behaviors.
I'm sure you can also teach some other arbitrary neural network to simulate the nematode's behavior, but that's not very biologically relevant.
Well, that's the hope, and a major source of appeal for the humble nematode. Unfortunately, that's still far beyond what we know right now. The physical map of every neuron and their connections has been complete for decades. Still, despite a whole lot of effort, researchers are still working to piece together small functional circuits for the simplest of behaviors. A lot of complexity arises in neural circuits -- one physical circuit can contain several independent functional circuits, depending on the types of inputs.
The best current knowledge of C. elegans neurophysiology involves qualitative descriptions of small circuits, involving a few dozen neurons. Unfortunately, while you can do a lot of good behavioral studies and other experiments, it's impossible to directly record the activity of specific neurons. Also, it turns out that some "neural" functions are actually performed by other cells. For example, one pattern generator in the digestive tract actually resides in intestinal cells instead of neurons -- my lab is working on the genetics involved.
This shit gets complicated, fast.
IAAUCER
I am an (undergrad) C. Elegans researcher
On further review, it seems that the CBC article is total crap, but that the original paper isn't that far off the deep end. I admit that I don't know enough to really follow or critique the research, but it doesn't seem to be the crackpot theory that TFA implies. Nowhere, for example, does that paper say that nerves don't use electricity. In fact, the paper refers to "solitons" as a piezo-electric effect. They are merely proposing a new mechanism on top of previous theories, not trying to completely throw out all neuroscience to date.
To recap: Completely bogus headline, based on a completely bogus bit of popular science reporting, which itself is based on a possibly intriguing (but tentative) bit of original research. Nothing to see here.
How do they explain all of the electrical measurements of nerve cells? We have measured voltages and currents. We know that these are dependent on certain protein channels, and salt concentrations. If impulses are actually the result of "solitons", how can they explain half a century worth of neurobiology? One wild guess, based on a minor inconsistency (if it even exists as they believe) needs a hell of a lot more evidence before they should be taken seriously.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
That's very nice, but it seems more of an example of individual courtesy, rather than corporate policy.
With Verizon, for example, I've had some of the best and worst experiences with their customer service. Once, I actually went in to their store to update my phone's firmware and change a few details on my plan. The woman who helped me along was truly amazing... she went out of her way to show me how to save money, while getting even more of what I needed.
On the other hand, after I had maybe sent a whopping dozen text messages within a month, I get some sort of automatic call where a customer service representative tries to convince me to "upgrade" to the $5/month text message plan. Somehow, this is supposed to save me money over my buck twenny worth of text messages. At least, that's what the desperate call center lackey tried to convince me of.
The moral of all this is to try to distinguish between helpful and polite individuals (genuinely decent people, the kind which we need more of in this world) and the asshole corporations that employ these nice people. Your helpful Circuit City employee was probably just trying to honestly help you, while not really following corporate policy. Some higher-up management flunky chose to very deliberately make the online and in-store prices different, so that people would be drawn in by lower prices.
Asshole corporations, despite their best efforts, still manage to employ good people.
Even if you could control all external sources of mutagenesis, a lot of mutation is caused by inherent flaws in cellular processes. DNA replication, even after error correction mechanisms, still makes about 1 mistake per ten billion nucleotides copied -- roughly on the order of one error for every few rounds of cell replication. Additionally, there are plenty of free radicals and other reactive molecules naturally floating around our cells, each capable of causing mutations. Of course, with current technology the data access time would be ridiculous. Whole genome sequencing, at this time, takes months or years to complete, and it ain't cheap or easy. Perhaps you could come up with an "addressing" scheme where you access sequence X by adding some transcription factor, and sequencing the resultant transcript. With current technology, this could "only" take a few days to access a small piece of data. Foreseeable technology might reduce this to hours. Even then, a useful data storage scheme using regulatory networks would be an impressive feat of genetic engineering.
We still order a pound of wings and a pint of beer (I think you get beat up if you ask for 568mL of beer in a bar).
Well, there's an easy solution to that: drink your beer one liter at a time.
Which also happens with incandescents, and in my experience at a significant rate. I probably used to accidentally break more bulbs' filaments than I ever let burn out, and CFLs seem to be physically much sturdier. Sure, on average, nobody will really see the quoted 10,000 hour life span from CFLs, but I'd be stunned if incandescents last anywhere near their quoted 1,500 hour life span (again on average). In any case, the extra cost of a CFL is roughly offset by the increased life span it sees.
Bullshit. CFL bulbs may be 8 times as expensive, but they also last about 8 times as long. So while Walmart will probably see a short term increase in profits from selling the more expensive CFLs, the long term profits over the next few years won't increase much. People won't have to replace bulbs as often as they do with incandescents.
Of course, Walmart is still certainly doing this for financial reasons; this is a great PR move. It will really appeal to people that vaguely want to "do something" about the environment while maintaining their current lifestyle [he says as he queues up a few torrents to run overnight...]. It certainly won't stop or even significantly slow global warming or the coming energy collapse or whatever other doomsday scenarios there are, but every little bit helps.
Musicians are not being given rights to public performance of the scores. There is a difference and it is a difference that matters.
I wonder where the line defining "public performance" sits. Obviously, a student "performing" for their teacher should be considered private performance. But how about a performance given to other members of a studio? Or a recital given in a private residence to friends and family? A studio recital open to other musicians at a large but "private" music school?
Obviously, whenever a performance is advertised and completely open to the public (i.e. anyone could walk off the street and watch), or if anyone is charging, that falls well on the "public performance" side of the line. Where exactly is that line?
Eh. You could just have a lazy IT department, which would rather force people use IE rather than fix some specific bug with some other browser. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, etc.
From TFA:
"According to the new policy, the crew would release an object on a spacewalk by pushing it "behind" the station to speed up the separation between the ISS and the object and to decrease the amount of time it spends in orbit."
So, they're not just gonna randomly toss objects around. Instead they'll toss them into a slightly lower orbit, where atmospheric drag (which DOES exist even at the orbit of the ISS, though it's very slight) will guarantee the objects will eventually spiral in and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind that mitochondrial dna is only a record of maternal descent. So, while the mtDNA record indicates that the human and neandertal maternal lineages diverged, it's entirely probable that some male neandertal lineage could still be surviving today (I'll let you insert the obvious jokes...) Specifically, this gene could have been introduced into the modern human population if a male Neandertal mated with some ancestral human female. Even the article you reference only claims that "little interbreeding occurred between our own species and the Neanderthals"; it did not claim that there wasn't any interbreeding at all. All you need is a single interbreeding event to introduce this gene, and then if the selective advantage of this gene is high enough (as TFA posits), the gene can easily spread through the human population.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind that mitochondrial dna is only a record of maternal descent. So, while the mtDNA record indicates that the human and neandertal maternal lineages diverged, it's entirely possible that some male neandertal lineage could still be surviving today (I'll let you insert the obvious jokes...). Specifically, this gene could have been introduced into the modern human population if a male Neandertal mated with some ancestral human female.
Even the article you reference only claims that "little interbreeding occurred between our own species and the Neanderthals"; it did not claim that there wasn't any interbreeding at all. All you need is a single interbreeding event to introduce this gene, and then if the selective advantage of this gene is high enough (as TFA posits), the gene can easily spread through the human population.
Because of social pressures pushing people to work harder and earn more money. Because very few people can work less than full time and afford to even live. And yes, working long hours at a job you find unpleasent is a bad way to live your life. Being realistic though, if you set aside time to work, eat, and sleep, there are at most eight hours left in a typical day.
The ideal answer in this case is to find something you can do for a living that you can enjoy, or at least tolerate.