Yeah, this problem really sank in with us when we realize it was faster to download the data onto 2TB external drives and ship it to collaborators rather than transmit it over the internet (even with Aspera). Seemed so bizarre to be surrounded by all this high tech equipment and yet we're putting stamps on our data so we can give it to the mailman.
Pathogenity requires extensive adaptive mechanisms from a microbe, otherwise it isn't able to live in an organism with an immune system. Microbes that cause human illnesses have through countless generations developed traits that enable them to grip molecules on human cells, thrive in tissues, and resist the immune cells' attempts to destroy them.
I don't know if I really agree with that. Some of the more dangerous pathogens are those that have recently jumped from other species and have had little time to evolve into coexistence with their new host. SIV infections are symptomless in their natural host, but deadly in related primate species (including HIV in humans). Same thing with herpesviruses, relatively minor symptoms in their natural host, but often deadly when they make a zoonotic jump (herpes B amd AlHV are good examples). Plus 120,000 years ago is not very long at all on an evolutionary time scale and it could have easily been exposed to other primates/mammals (even humans) at that time. In fact the age of it really only guarantees that a human host would have zero protective immunity against it, so it would be like smallpox blowing through native American populations.
Does Vista do everything openBSD does? I don't seem to remember anything in the release notes about Vista shipping with a SSH or Web server. Hell does windows even ship with an SSH client yet?
Christ, you think that private corporations are any better? There have been so many data breach/loss incidents lately that they don't even make the news anymore.
I question whether that is really true. I've seen a few articles that would lead me to believe that the US isn't alone. In fact, I saw a recent survey in the UK where about about half of people interviewed felt that alternatives to evolution should be taught in the classroom (including 30% of teachers):
We had our proximity card access system completely shit the bed on the 31st. Don't know if it was a leap year issue or if it was just coincidence, but it caused widespread outages and was a major PITA.
Yes. Actually if you read the report, towards the end they conclude that the main cause of death was a failure to place their seat backs and tray tables in the upright position.
Limiting access to any virus or bacteria that's in the environment is rather hard.
Depends on the pathogen. Things like smallpox, sars, or ebola are not going to be easy to come by, while something like influenza and the information to recreate Spanish flu would be. But that was kind of what I was getting at in my last point. Someone could easily start cloning things into common pathogens, which is not a good idea unless you are doing it in controlled conditions (like a BSL3 lab), but in practice there is no way you can effectively regulate that.
Virtually all academic researchers are required to have approval of a recombinant DNA research advisory committee before they do any kind of work like this. There certainly is a real possibility of someone creating something dangerous, such as a recombinant pathogen which is the very reason why we have those oversight committees in the first place. For example, the article mentions creating tattoos using florescent squid genes, which is vague but I'm assuming the only way that would work would be to make a recombinant virus expressing a GFP-like gene. So you really don't that it might be a bad idea to have people injecting infectious agents into themselves that they brewed up in their garage?
I'm all for regulating this, but realistically there is no way to prevent people from making recombinant human pathogens in their garage while still allowing legitimate educational activities like making GFP-expressing e.coli. So frankly, regulation is pointless beyond what already is in place, such as limiting access to pathogens.
Shenanigans. I was just curious about your animals as a reservoir host, so I check the first few that came to mind. Measles, mumps rubella, and polio are all caused by human-specific pathogens that don't have any other natural hosts.
Flagship demo projects like this often get exceedingly big discounts from the vendors.
Yeah, remember Virginia Tech's crazy Mac cluster that had a a slew of Power G5s that they ran for what seemed like less than a year and replaced with XServes? IIRC, Apple gave them an even swap for the brand new XServes.
Nevermind they were just talking about transcription factor binding sites. None of this is new stuff.
No, you were right. The ENCODE group published a paper last year claiming that virtually all of the genome is transcribed (ENCODE Project Consortium in Nature, 2007). While it's an interesting observation that is probably true, the question is what does that really mean? Unlike translation which is a deterministic process (e.g. the codon AAA will always code for the amino acid lysine), transcription is a relatively sloppy probabilistic process where the DNA signals to start and stop don't always work properly, so you end up with things like aborted and run-off transcripts. However, the cell has control measures in place to degrade abnormal protein and RNA transcripts. So if you take a snapshot of the cell at a particular moment, you'll find all of these artifacts that are destined for the genetic dustbin and will never be translated into proteins. Add onto that, that these are relatively rare events, so if you find 1 of these long run-off transcripts in a sea of 50,000 normal ones, does that really matter?
They do have a benefit in that they are believed to occasionally aid in the creation on the elements that control gene expression (promoter and enhancer elements) upstream of genes. So keeping them present does serve an evolutionarily beneficial purpose. However making the claim they *all* of the transposons and repetitive elements in the genome have a purpose is extending that to a point where it is a false statement.
I hope that's a joke. The formation of Al Qaeda didn't occur until August 1988, at the very end of the Soviet invasion. It wasn't a CIA database name, it was short for Al Qaeda al-Askariya (the military base). It wasn't directly funded by the CIA either. The CIA gave money, which was matched by the Saudi's to the Pakistani ISI who then channeled it to the various Mujaheddin groups (of which bin Ladin was not one). He had most of his own funding from his families money and from Saudi donors. The fact that he was an Arab made him an outsider to the other Mujaheddin leaders.
No, you are exactly right. His paper was really only intended for the field of population genetics and genetic epidemiology (his fields), where people have been using the standard p0.05 statistical cutoff as their metric for whether a given analysis is significant. So if you have 20 research groups analyze the same question (like is a mutation in gene X responsible for disease Y), according to that methodology by definition 1 of the 20 researchers will find a statistically significant result simply due to chance alone.
This is old news and journals stopped accepting papers that *only* had that statistical analysis about 3-5 years ago. Almost without exception, they now require you to show some kind of biological verification (show mutant protein X actually is defective and has reduced activity) OR you can do a replication in a completely independent sample, which is unlikely (again 1/20) to be significant by chance.
Unfortunately people have misinterpreted his paper and are applying his point to other fields like chemistry, astrophysics, or even areas of biology where it doesn't apply.
I would agree with that. Once I actually began to try and understand the basic premise of what each of the chemical reactions *actually* did, I went from pulling C-'s on my exams to A-'s. Rote memorization is a great way to fail O-chem.
Why would they not? It's a fairly simplistic solution to a mutual problem. Many organisms tend to have similar reactions to other basic stimuli, e.g. heat, cold, wet, dry, etc.
That was my first thought as well. I thought this was the rationale for why mosses tend to grow on the northern side of a tree. Makes more sense than a theory suggesting mosses and cows can sense geomagnetic fields.
MythBusters did a thing on this and couldn't get any noticeable changes in any of the navigation equipment. Their conclusion was that most of the equipment was too well shielded. Maybe on a small private plane that might be different.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this problem really sank in with us when we realize it was faster to download the data onto 2TB external drives and ship it to collaborators rather than transmit it over the internet (even with Aspera). Seemed so bizarre to be surrounded by all this high tech equipment and yet we're putting stamps on our data so we can give it to the mailman.
Sure we do. Write the manual in C instead of English.
I don't know if I really agree with that. Some of the more dangerous pathogens are those that have recently jumped from other species and have had little time to evolve into coexistence with their new host. SIV infections are symptomless in their natural host, but deadly in related primate species (including HIV in humans). Same thing with herpesviruses, relatively minor symptoms in their natural host, but often deadly when they make a zoonotic jump (herpes B amd AlHV are good examples). Plus 120,000 years ago is not very long at all on an evolutionary time scale and it could have easily been exposed to other primates/mammals (even humans) at that time. In fact the age of it really only guarantees that a human host would have zero protective immunity against it, so it would be like smallpox blowing through native American populations.
Does Vista do everything openBSD does? I don't seem to remember anything in the release notes about Vista shipping with a SSH or Web server. Hell does windows even ship with an SSH client yet?
Christ, you think that private corporations are any better? There have been so many data breach/loss incidents lately that they don't even make the news anymore.
rm -rf juryduty
Yes, yes, but what is it if I look inside the box?
I question whether that is really true. I've seen a few articles that would lead me to believe that the US isn't alone. In fact, I saw a recent survey in the UK where about about half of people interviewed felt that alternatives to evolution should be taught in the classroom (including 30% of teachers):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/nov/07/creationism-intelligent-design-religion
We had our proximity card access system completely shit the bed on the 31st. Don't know if it was a leap year issue or if it was just coincidence, but it caused widespread outages and was a major PITA.
Yes. Actually if you read the report, towards the end they conclude that the main cause of death was a failure to place their seat backs and tray tables in the upright position.
Limiting access to any virus or bacteria that's in the environment is rather hard.
Depends on the pathogen. Things like smallpox, sars, or ebola are not going to be easy to come by, while something like influenza and the information to recreate Spanish flu would be. But that was kind of what I was getting at in my last point. Someone could easily start cloning things into common pathogens, which is not a good idea unless you are doing it in controlled conditions (like a BSL3 lab), but in practice there is no way you can effectively regulate that.
Virtually all academic researchers are required to have approval of a recombinant DNA research advisory committee before they do any kind of work like this. There certainly is a real possibility of someone creating something dangerous, such as a recombinant pathogen which is the very reason why we have those oversight committees in the first place. For example, the article mentions creating tattoos using florescent squid genes, which is vague but I'm assuming the only way that would work would be to make a recombinant virus expressing a GFP-like gene. So you really don't that it might be a bad idea to have people injecting infectious agents into themselves that they brewed up in their garage?
I'm all for regulating this, but realistically there is no way to prevent people from making recombinant human pathogens in their garage while still allowing legitimate educational activities like making GFP-expressing e.coli. So frankly, regulation is pointless beyond what already is in place, such as limiting access to pathogens.
Shenanigans. I was just curious about your animals as a reservoir host, so I check the first few that came to mind. Measles, mumps rubella, and polio are all caused by human-specific pathogens that don't have any other natural hosts.
Probably not, because those fuckers are always at Red Lobster wearing mixed fabric clothing.
Yeah, remember Virginia Tech's crazy Mac cluster that had a a slew of Power G5s that they ran for what seemed like less than a year and replaced with XServes? IIRC, Apple gave them an even swap for the brand new XServes.
Nevermind they were just talking about transcription factor binding sites. None of this is new stuff.
No, you were right. The ENCODE group published a paper last year claiming that virtually all of the genome is transcribed (ENCODE Project Consortium in Nature, 2007). While it's an interesting observation that is probably true, the question is what does that really mean? Unlike translation which is a deterministic process (e.g. the codon AAA will always code for the amino acid lysine), transcription is a relatively sloppy probabilistic process where the DNA signals to start and stop don't always work properly, so you end up with things like aborted and run-off transcripts. However, the cell has control measures in place to degrade abnormal protein and RNA transcripts. So if you take a snapshot of the cell at a particular moment, you'll find all of these artifacts that are destined for the genetic dustbin and will never be translated into proteins. Add onto that, that these are relatively rare events, so if you find 1 of these long run-off transcripts in a sea of 50,000 normal ones, does that really matter?
They do have a benefit in that they are believed to occasionally aid in the creation on the elements that control gene expression (promoter and enhancer elements) upstream of genes. So keeping them present does serve an evolutionarily beneficial purpose. However making the claim they *all* of the transposons and repetitive elements in the genome have a purpose is extending that to a point where it is a false statement.
I hope that's a joke. The formation of Al Qaeda didn't occur until August 1988, at the very end of the Soviet invasion. It wasn't a CIA database name, it was short for Al Qaeda al-Askariya (the military base). It wasn't directly funded by the CIA either. The CIA gave money, which was matched by the Saudi's to the Pakistani ISI who then channeled it to the various Mujaheddin groups (of which bin Ladin was not one). He had most of his own funding from his families money and from Saudi donors. The fact that he was an Arab made him an outsider to the other Mujaheddin leaders.
No, you are exactly right. His paper was really only intended for the field of population genetics and genetic epidemiology (his fields), where people have been using the standard p0.05 statistical cutoff as their metric for whether a given analysis is significant. So if you have 20 research groups analyze the same question (like is a mutation in gene X responsible for disease Y), according to that methodology by definition 1 of the 20 researchers will find a statistically significant result simply due to chance alone. This is old news and journals stopped accepting papers that *only* had that statistical analysis about 3-5 years ago. Almost without exception, they now require you to show some kind of biological verification (show mutant protein X actually is defective and has reduced activity) OR you can do a replication in a completely independent sample, which is unlikely (again 1/20) to be significant by chance. Unfortunately people have misinterpreted his paper and are applying his point to other fields like chemistry, astrophysics, or even areas of biology where it doesn't apply.
You don't think that massive recall of melamine-spiked pet food that killed all those dogs in 2007 might have been a tip off?
I would agree with that. Once I actually began to try and understand the basic premise of what each of the chemical reactions *actually* did, I went from pulling C-'s on my exams to A-'s. Rote memorization is a great way to fail O-chem.
"I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission,"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5010764.stm
Why would they not? It's a fairly simplistic solution to a mutual problem. Many organisms tend to have similar reactions to other basic stimuli, e.g. heat, cold, wet, dry, etc.
That was my first thought as well. I thought this was the rationale for why mosses tend to grow on the northern side of a tree. Makes more sense than a theory suggesting mosses and cows can sense geomagnetic fields.
MythBusters did a thing on this and couldn't get any noticeable changes in any of the navigation equipment. Their conclusion was that most of the equipment was too well shielded. Maybe on a small private plane that might be different.
http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_49_cellphones_on_plane.html