So the goal of the adenovirus is to introduce the broadly neutralizing antibody into T cell lines. These are the immune cells that are going to be ultimately fighting HIV infection, but they lack the right antibodies. In the normal situation, your body raises antibodies, but they cannot bind to the right spot on the virus envelope. Instead, they bind to a spot that the virus naturally varies, and the virus escapes via mutation (i.e., mutated virus replicates, other virus doesn't). In the new situation, the adenovirus provides an antibody that is better, which binds a spot on Env that the virus needs (so virus with mutation at this spot replicate poorly).
So muscle and heart cells are likely not getting the vector, nor would they be expressing antibodies. Similarly, your body wont continue to raise the antibody if the infection is gone (it will not be ad infinitum).
This is my understanding... perhaps others could add key points.
Sometimes, the trials are conducted with people who are currently on HAART (anti-HIV therapy). Their HAART regimens are ended, and the new regimen is given to them. My understanding is that the HIV-infected community is very very understanding--they know that the only chance for a real solution is to volunteer.
An alternative scenario is to conduct the trial in a high risk population, such as sex workers or people living in sub-Saharan Africa. If you treat enough people, there will be a portion who become HIV-positive during the trial, and you can compare the control/test groups. If the drug is really working well, the study will be halted prematurely because it's unethical not to give the control group the treatment (also an incentive for someone to volunteer themselves when they don't know what they are getting, placebo or test).
I just heard a seminar from the guy who discovered nanotubes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumio_Iijima ), and it's pretty amazing with all the various properties the tubes have. He showed us some, and it was black (and he talked about this). He also mentioned that they would be the future for smartphone touch screens but that Apple was reluctant to use them in the latest iPhone.
Now when his group or some other researchers discover a thin material black enough to block gamma wavelengths, then we'll be talking.
Re:Nassim is one of the brightest thinkers around
on
End Bonuses For Bankers
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· Score: 1, Interesting
From one bookworm to another, there is a lack of fiction (aside from the Bible) on your list! What gives?
I think the more reasonable concern is that crops will yield less over time due to climate change. Combine that with ever-growing population (+ a billion people every dozen years or so) and you have a real problem. Shortages of food lead to riots and further instability of governments that are already shaky. Of course, this wont happen soon but probably in the next 100 years unless some sort of technological breakthrough happens. People probably exaggerate the effects because the smaller effects over time are harder to recognize as being caused by climate change.
It's funny that you think scientists aren't up to answering trends over 100 years. There was a paper that came out in Science yesterday predicting temperatures back 800,000 years ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/347.abstract ). It's the job of scientists to question these narratives, too, but it's also wise to look at all of the data.
Exactly what I was going to post. I am not a programmer, but hanging out in the alt.org nethack put me in touch with a lot of cool programmers. ^^ My 15 ascension streak is still up there I think too.
This is partly true, but with such a long time from birth to adulthood, the parents' survival gives their offspring a much greater chance for survival. Sure there are other people around to care for your 12 kids when you are gone, but if the numbers of cases increased substantially, then this would not be the case. Natural selection would begin to favor those with fewer kids and surviving than more kids and not surviving. You could even test this with a mathematical model if you wanted to (and I bet that it's already in the literature somewhere).
If you look back, originally it started appearing in young gay men (1981 I think). But within 1 year, women were documented with the disease. You can probably blame politicians at the time for making the wrong decisions if you want. There has been a similar reaction from Russian politicians who for a large time ignored the disease there (which is in a way far worse because it's spread to a much higher degree by intravenous drug users, which is the worst form of transmission). And if you compare certain sub-Saharan countries based on the political impetus for controlling the disease, there is a clear drop in new cases for countries that educate the population about condom use. I dont think they by and large think of the disease as a way of getting rid of gays but something that either does not really exist in their population or something religious-related (God's punishment blah blah blah).
What I am wondering about is how this compound would not harm cellular membranes, which contain cholesterol-rich regions (lipid rafts). HIV particles bud from these regions, giving them their particular cholesterol-rich membrane composition. This is a question related to theoretical off-target cytotoxic effects. Then again, RTIs have cytotoxic effects, too.
Not really. It could allow future use of amber suppression in higher eukaryotes, esp those that are models for HIV / SIV study (primates, mice, cats/FIV). That is still far off.
As the article notes, this has been done with all sorts of amino acids in E. coli. In fact, "amber suppression" is a fairly common way to introduce any amino acid you want into your protein. Commonly they are uniquely reactive amino acids for labeling a protein site-specifically for experiments to gain insight into the protein's function. (I'm actually doing this in my lab to look at the function of an HIV protein.)
With E. coli, introducing the extra amino acid doesn't usually confer an advantage because 1) the extra amino acid cannot be synthesized by E. coli, 2) even if you give E. coli the pathway to make that amino acid, proteins wont really need the extra amino acid (there is no selective advantage). This is a much bigger change than just introducing a gene into an organism—it's giving the organism an extra amino acid. 3) Organisms like methanogenic bacteria, which naturally encode an extra amino acid pyrrolysine, have this extra amino acid because their energy source relies upon (i.e., methane fixation, a rather difficult chemical reaction, requiring an electrophile).
So I would argue that this type of technology is rather safe. The organism would have to make a pretty huge leap to actually use the amino acid for a different purpose.
Another type of mistake or error that should be considered is the attempt to program or write code for something at all. I remember watching a lecture about this topic at some point and I cannot find the link anymore. The general message was that no programs are bug-free, and in some circumstances it's unethical to even attempt to program for certain devices because undetected coding errors could end up killing many people. An example would be an automated missile defense system in which someone out there has to write code for the system. Think about the bug testing for a system that fires missiles at other missiles. (Apologies if this is a tad offtopic.)
From personal experience (my Toshiba laptop), I noticed that Ubuntu consumed more power than windows Vista (based on how long the battery would last). I tried to tweak both of them to run on more optimal settings for battery life. I probably did a poorer job tweaking the Ubuntu settings though due to my own lack of experience with the OS. This was running the same basic programs in both OSes (office programs like powerpoint/word and the openoffice equivalents, mozilla/firefox with lots of tabs open)--not particularly taxing on the CPU IMO but a fair measure of what I actually use my laptop for. Important to say again that this was Vista, not 7. So, even my attempts to optimize did not succeed on the part of Ubuntu in what I consider to be a fair assessment from a beginner to moderately skilled user.
I agree the original post. In my case, I switched from a relatively standard Microsoft optical mouse (can't remember the model) to a Logitech G5 (~40$ at the time). The G5 felt better for one, but the sensitivity increase via the program that came with the mouse was a much bigger deal to me. I don't know if the hardware is really all that much better, but the people I played with online (i.e., Quake3) began to ask how I got so much better all of a sudden, too. To be honest, I never really got used to the extra buttons--mouse1, mouse2, and the wheel are all I need. By the way, the G5 also has weights in it to control how heavy the mouse is. (Believe it or not, finding a mouse that is the right weight makes a big difference for me at least.)
So the authors present the results of a new method for looking at all of the sequence data obtained by sequencing environmental samples.
I.e., step 1, get some sea water or some ocean samples, step 2, sequence them all at the same time (so you could have many organisms present), and step 3, use methods (this is mainly what the paper is about) to figure out the genetic information of the organisms present. They are looking only for a few protein cDNA sequences (recA and rpoB and homologs) and small subunit ribosomal RNA. These are found in many organisms and are good standards to pick (esp small subunit rRNA). The organisms you will miss here are the ones that do not have homologous proteins or rRNA (such as viruses).
So they use this method and find that there are some "outliers" that they call Unknown 1 and Unknown 2. They are close in sequence to each other but not to other sequences. This could be an artifact of the method they use (in which case this is nonsense), the least interesting of the possibilities. They could be mixtures of proteins (through recombination), uncharacterized virus sequences, or paralogs of proteins created through ancient gene duplication events. Or, they could be a new branch of life, which is the most interesting of the possibilites. The authors note all of these possibilities, and they say that more data will be needed to figure out what is going on.
So maybe it is underwhelming because it's very speculative... but they could be on to something!
Well, I'm a graduate student, and I own some of Molycorp (MCP). I bought in at 29.20, and look where it is now... it looks like a hell of an investment to me. It's not just the rich who can invest in these things.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does Linux live in a separate world?
There are two types of people: those who fear command lines and those who do not.
So the goal of the adenovirus is to introduce the broadly neutralizing antibody into T cell lines. These are the immune cells that are going to be ultimately fighting HIV infection, but they lack the right antibodies. In the normal situation, your body raises antibodies, but they cannot bind to the right spot on the virus envelope. Instead, they bind to a spot that the virus naturally varies, and the virus escapes via mutation (i.e., mutated virus replicates, other virus doesn't). In the new situation, the adenovirus provides an antibody that is better, which binds a spot on Env that the virus needs (so virus with mutation at this spot replicate poorly).
... perhaps others could add key points.
So muscle and heart cells are likely not getting the vector, nor would they be expressing antibodies. Similarly, your body wont continue to raise the antibody if the infection is gone (it will not be ad infinitum).
This is my understanding
Sometimes, the trials are conducted with people who are currently on HAART (anti-HIV therapy). Their HAART regimens are ended, and the new regimen is given to them. My understanding is that the HIV-infected community is very very understanding--they know that the only chance for a real solution is to volunteer.
An alternative scenario is to conduct the trial in a high risk population, such as sex workers or people living in sub-Saharan Africa. If you treat enough people, there will be a portion who become HIV-positive during the trial, and you can compare the control/test groups. If the drug is really working well, the study will be halted prematurely because it's unethical not to give the control group the treatment (also an incentive for someone to volunteer themselves when they don't know what they are getting, placebo or test).
Well, NPR had the test on. But imagine that if you draw a Venn diagram of "fucking idiots" and "NPR listeners" ... well, you get my point.
I just heard a seminar from the guy who discovered nanotubes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumio_Iijima ), and it's pretty amazing with all the various properties the tubes have. He showed us some, and it was black (and he talked about this). He also mentioned that they would be the future for smartphone touch screens but that Apple was reluctant to use them in the latest iPhone.
Now when his group or some other researchers discover a thin material black enough to block gamma wavelengths, then we'll be talking.
From one bookworm to another, there is a lack of fiction (aside from the Bible) on your list! What gives?
I'm pretty sure Rodney McKay will appear at the point of the rip.
I think the more reasonable concern is that crops will yield less over time due to climate change. Combine that with ever-growing population (+ a billion people every dozen years or so) and you have a real problem. Shortages of food lead to riots and further instability of governments that are already shaky. Of course, this wont happen soon but probably in the next 100 years unless some sort of technological breakthrough happens. People probably exaggerate the effects because the smaller effects over time are harder to recognize as being caused by climate change.
It's funny that you think scientists aren't up to answering trends over 100 years. There was a paper that came out in Science yesterday predicting temperatures back 800,000 years ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/347.abstract ). It's the job of scientists to question these narratives, too, but it's also wise to look at all of the data.
These kinds of protest were very popular before the Great Depression and spawned all kinds of songs against the banking elites (e.g., JP Morgan). NPR had a nice piece discussing the history of anti-Wall Street protest the other day: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/07/141162196/a-look-at-the-history-of-wall-street-protests
Exactly what I was going to post. I am not a programmer, but hanging out in the alt.org nethack put me in touch with a lot of cool programmers. ^^ My 15 ascension streak is still up there I think too.
This is partly true, but with such a long time from birth to adulthood, the parents' survival gives their offspring a much greater chance for survival. Sure there are other people around to care for your 12 kids when you are gone, but if the numbers of cases increased substantially, then this would not be the case. Natural selection would begin to favor those with fewer kids and surviving than more kids and not surviving. You could even test this with a mathematical model if you wanted to (and I bet that it's already in the literature somewhere).
If you look back, originally it started appearing in young gay men (1981 I think). But within 1 year, women were documented with the disease. You can probably blame politicians at the time for making the wrong decisions if you want. There has been a similar reaction from Russian politicians who for a large time ignored the disease there (which is in a way far worse because it's spread to a much higher degree by intravenous drug users, which is the worst form of transmission). And if you compare certain sub-Saharan countries based on the political impetus for controlling the disease, there is a clear drop in new cases for countries that educate the population about condom use. I dont think they by and large think of the disease as a way of getting rid of gays but something that either does not really exist in their population or something religious-related (God's punishment blah blah blah).
What I am wondering about is how this compound would not harm cellular membranes, which contain cholesterol-rich regions (lipid rafts). HIV particles bud from these regions, giving them their particular cholesterol-rich membrane composition. This is a question related to theoretical off-target cytotoxic effects. Then again, RTIs have cytotoxic effects, too.
Wish you the best, you insensitive clod!
I.e., what is the failure rate of star formation? Maybe I'm missing something, but these Y dwarfs seem a lot like Jupiters.
It's the other Goa'uld we should be worried about. And those damn replicators.
Not really. It could allow future use of amber suppression in higher eukaryotes, esp those that are models for HIV / SIV study (primates, mice, cats/FIV). That is still far off.
As the article notes, this has been done with all sorts of amino acids in E. coli. In fact, "amber suppression" is a fairly common way to introduce any amino acid you want into your protein. Commonly they are uniquely reactive amino acids for labeling a protein site-specifically for experiments to gain insight into the protein's function. (I'm actually doing this in my lab to look at the function of an HIV protein.)
With E. coli, introducing the extra amino acid doesn't usually confer an advantage because 1) the extra amino acid cannot be synthesized by E. coli, 2) even if you give E. coli the pathway to make that amino acid, proteins wont really need the extra amino acid (there is no selective advantage). This is a much bigger change than just introducing a gene into an organism—it's giving the organism an extra amino acid. 3) Organisms like methanogenic bacteria, which naturally encode an extra amino acid pyrrolysine, have this extra amino acid because their energy source relies upon (i.e., methane fixation, a rather difficult chemical reaction, requiring an electrophile).
So I would argue that this type of technology is rather safe. The organism would have to make a pretty huge leap to actually use the amino acid for a different purpose.
The guys at Oracle are finally fed up with the constant stream of Java updates.
Another type of mistake or error that should be considered is the attempt to program or write code for something at all. I remember watching a lecture about this topic at some point and I cannot find the link anymore. The general message was that no programs are bug-free, and in some circumstances it's unethical to even attempt to program for certain devices because undetected coding errors could end up killing many people. An example would be an automated missile defense system in which someone out there has to write code for the system. Think about the bug testing for a system that fires missiles at other missiles. (Apologies if this is a tad offtopic.)
From personal experience (my Toshiba laptop), I noticed that Ubuntu consumed more power than windows Vista (based on how long the battery would last). I tried to tweak both of them to run on more optimal settings for battery life. I probably did a poorer job tweaking the Ubuntu settings though due to my own lack of experience with the OS. This was running the same basic programs in both OSes (office programs like powerpoint/word and the openoffice equivalents, mozilla/firefox with lots of tabs open)--not particularly taxing on the CPU IMO but a fair measure of what I actually use my laptop for. Important to say again that this was Vista, not 7. So, even my attempts to optimize did not succeed on the part of Ubuntu in what I consider to be a fair assessment from a beginner to moderately skilled user.
I agree the original post. In my case, I switched from a relatively standard Microsoft optical mouse (can't remember the model) to a Logitech G5 (~40$ at the time). The G5 felt better for one, but the sensitivity increase via the program that came with the mouse was a much bigger deal to me. I don't know if the hardware is really all that much better, but the people I played with online (i.e., Quake3) began to ask how I got so much better all of a sudden, too. To be honest, I never really got used to the extra buttons--mouse1, mouse2, and the wheel are all I need. By the way, the G5 also has weights in it to control how heavy the mouse is. (Believe it or not, finding a mouse that is the right weight makes a big difference for me at least.)
So the authors present the results of a new method for looking at all of the sequence data obtained by sequencing environmental samples.
... but they could be on to something!
I.e., step 1, get some sea water or some ocean samples, step 2, sequence them all at the same time (so you could have many organisms present), and step 3, use methods (this is mainly what the paper is about) to figure out the genetic information of the organisms present. They are looking only for a few protein cDNA sequences (recA and rpoB and homologs) and small subunit ribosomal RNA. These are found in many organisms and are good standards to pick (esp small subunit rRNA). The organisms you will miss here are the ones that do not have homologous proteins or rRNA (such as viruses).
So they use this method and find that there are some "outliers" that they call Unknown 1 and Unknown 2. They are close in sequence to each other but not to other sequences. This could be an artifact of the method they use (in which case this is nonsense), the least interesting of the possibilities. They could be mixtures of proteins (through recombination), uncharacterized virus sequences, or paralogs of proteins created through ancient gene duplication events. Or, they could be a new branch of life, which is the most interesting of the possibilites. The authors note all of these possibilities, and they say that more data will be needed to figure out what is going on.
So maybe it is underwhelming because it's very speculative
In related news, Scientists report that upon entering the cave, their ears were filled with the beginning of "Thus Spake Zarathustra".
Well, I'm a graduate student, and I own some of Molycorp (MCP). I bought in at 29.20, and look where it is now ... it looks like a hell of an investment to me. It's not just the rich who can invest in these things.