zyncod

Motivations aside (for now), is terrorism valid? I am defining terrorism as the murder of innocents in the cause of furtherance of a political goal. I would also like to point out that the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden, and Hamburg in WWII, and to a lesser extent Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as the political message was more direct here), were orchestrated in the hopes of demoralizing the German and Japanese citizenry to the extent that the citizens would support a radical shift in the policies of their governments (i.e, surrender). Since all of these campaigns resulted in the slaughter of, for the vast majority, innocents, I fail to see the difference in tactics between these campaigns and 9/11. At least 9/11 resulted in the deaths (aside from public safety personnel) of those who willingly chose, however tacitly, to further the cause of their home governments; that is, the dominant rule of the US version of the "free market economy." Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo resulted in the deaths of, again for the vast majority, women and children that had the choice of either complying with the edicts of their government or dying. To be honest, given the choice of means (not motives), I would choose Al Qaeda over the US government.

We use ammonium chloride with Tris base as the buffer. It works just as well as the commercial sol'ns and is a thousand times cheaper. p.s. - Rakuenso, RBC lysis is used to remove red blood cells from cell suspensions as they interfere with flow cytometric analysis and tissue culture.

It's helping CEOs. They took a big hit after the internet bubble burst, when they went from being paid 500x the average worker's salary to only 350x the average workers salary. But thanks to globalization, tax rebates, and the Republican Revolution, we hope that one day that number might hit 1000x. Or 1000000x! There's no theoretical limit - what with global warming and myriad other looming ecological, disease, and famine disasters, the "average" person might one day be as poor as the Chinese workers are now.

Yes - the visual cortex is an amazing thing. What colors you see are dependent not only on the color of the object you are looking at, but the surrounding colors, the speed that the object is moving relative to its surroundings, and the direction of the motion of the object. Neuroscientists have figured out that the higher order processing centers of the visual cortex (the columns) are actually performing Fourier transforms on the data coming from the lower order centers.

Has it really? As a scientist, I would have to disagree with that statement. All that science has ever done is provide a systematic way of looking at the world, for better or worse. "Science" didn't create the polio vaccine (good) or nuclear weapons (bad) - people did.

I was not being serious at all. Injecting yourself with LPS would be incredibly stupid, but at least it would work. And though it is true that LPS is pyrogenic and toxic, it is still used in vaccines among other adjuvants to prime the TLRs for an immune response to whatever bacterial/viral antigen you are injecting. My point was simply that the immune system is so old in terms of evolution that you probably could not "enhance" your response without serious side effects. Since the immune response predates the animal/plant split, "boosting" your immune system by eating a random herb would be like boosting DNA polymerase activity by eating a herb. And even if you did manage to "boost" your immune system, you would wind up with serious side effects, as in the case of LPS. And all of this to prevent getting the flu or a cold? If you're that worried about getting sick, wash your hands a few times a day, get the flu vaccine, eat a balanced diet, and get plenty of sleep.

No, monoclonal antibodies are still in use for some diseases. Like all other treatments, they weren't as useful as people said they were going to be, but they are still of some use. Why use a monoclonal in place of telomerase inhibitors? No reason. Of course, neither of these is actually going to work, as they are fairly simple ideas and would have been tried a decade ago.

Well, it would be a pretty crappy way to protect the planet from an extinction event like a meteor since most scientists agree that humans are responsible for the sixth major extinction event (the Holocene). It's not as big as the others yet, but give us time.

How do you know that didn't already happen in this universe prior to the Big Bang or another one (contradicting all known laws of physics aside)? Note to all creationists or those wearing the lambskin of ID: the improbable does not equal the impossible. And I did give you an example of something complex spontaneously coming into existence. And yet you are still talking. Thankfully, nobody really cares.

Cancers don't actually need to pick up mutations in genes themselves to overexpress telomerase. In fact, the most likely mechanism for overexpression of most genes is mutation of upstream regulatory sequences. And you know where you want to go to grad school in your first year? I've gotta say, I'm a little envious - I'm two months away from my grad school deadlines and I've got no idea. I will be applying to UCSF tho - Cali is where its at. God, Manhattan is really pissing me off lately.

I once saw clouds that spelled out the word "ASS". Not perfect penmanship, but still... Now, either God was being profane again or random winds and condensation patterns led to an English word being spelled out in the sky. And that was just on one corner of this particular planet in this particular solar system in this particular galaxy in this particular local group of galaxies in this particular supercluster of galaxies in this particular universe in my admittedly short lifetime. I would find it odd that, in the infinite reaches of space, there is not a working watch out there that nobody made. Of course, nobody's probably around to find it either. The only reason that we're around to find life is that we're alive. So stop asking loaded questions.

Actually, neither "taking yourself off the grid" by growing your own food nor refusing to pay taxes in response to government policies rises to the level of Hume's analogy. The situation in these terms is closer to Locke's implicit contract. You're not being asked to sacrifice your life, only creature comforts and freedom. Thoreau managed to protest the Mexican War by not paying taxes - he went to jail for it. Do you really imagine that we'd be in Iraq right now if we'd managed to coordinate a million people to refuse to pay their income tax? But nobody really cares enough (including me) - they're more interested in shocking the "sheep" by walking around in a pink blowup phallus at the RNC protests. So my inability to sacrifice in any way that really matters as regarding the Iraq war I feel actually makes me more responsible for the 100,000 deaths than the Republicans, since I knew better. My whole point here is that nobody holds the key to morality; the Bible didn't say many things that were very useful but "Let he who is without sin..." I find a meaningful statement. It's very dangerous when otherwise rational people start to deride others for faulty morality without examining their own- a problem that I have with many of my AR friends - but from your later posts, IMM, I don't think you really have that problem. We'll just continue to disagree on the absolute value of sentience, but that's not something I have a problem with.

It's not a bad idea. You could create a mouse anti-telomerase: human Fc fusion antibody to a telomerase peptide and it could attack cells that are presenting telomerase fragments on MHCI. And attacking telomerase-expressing cells is not really that much of a problem - even with the inhibitors, telomerase is expressed at a low level except in stem cells (and cancers). The stem cells can be easily replaced by saving cd34+ cells from peripheral blood before beginning this procedure. However, this would require years of time and tens of thousands of dollars, so I don't really think it's appropriate for a high school science project. Good idea though.

Please, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, nobody respond to this. There is nothing that will be said here that hasn't been said a thousand times before (proof positive: he's still using Piltdown man even after his last thread). Additionally, he's posting something that he knows will be inflammatory and rightly belongs on an ICR website or something to a community that's 99% "Darwinists." I just hate to think of the time that will be wasted - but hey, at least he got the category right this time.

Hypocritical I am about many things, but smug and pompous I hope that I am not. Having said that, I probably could not have worded that last post less tactfully. Saying that objecting to human farming while allowing animal research to proceed is, by your own admission IMM, an ideologically consistent viewpoint as it takes into consideration the sentience and lifestyle diversity of the research subject. That's really the only point that I wanted to make. So you can stop reading now and I hope that we've resolved this fairly amicably. But I'm going to continue unbidden. This is not a "stump the vegan" point that I'm trying to make here. I find it admirable that you've committed yourself to reducing animal suffering, and I support it until the point at which you call for a blanket abolition of animal research. For your ability to live in civilization, even in the circumstances most committed to reducing suffering, at least 6000 mammals will die throughout your life. Knowing this and continuing to live in civilization is an implicit endorsement of these deaths - they are no longer unintentional. Given that a 6000:1 ratio is, apparently, acceptable, calling all animal research "wrong" because it results in the death of sentient animals is not ideologically consistent. You can, however, impugn the morality of the researchers based on the premise that being caged in "shoeboxes" or subjected to the stresses of some types of experimentation vastly decreases the quality of life for these animals. Additionally, campaigning to end animal research now seems incredibly silly. It's equivalent to saying in the 1850s that, not only should we end slavery, but we should have a black President. Now, slavery is wrong, and should be ended, but given that so many black people are suffering in slavery, it seems a pointless, token gesture to be campaigning for a black President then. Similarly, eating meat is wrong because there is literally no benefit to humanity, and factory farming should be ended. Ending animal research at this point would, however, be a pointless gesture since these animals are for the most part treated as humanely as possible, since these animals are for the most part fairly low on the sentience scale, since these animals form such a vanishingly small percentage of total exploited animals, and since there are tangible benefits to humanity as a result of their deaths. The fact that so many AR activists make ending animal research such a cornerstone of their philosophy leads me to one of two possibilities: 1. There's a kind of post-eugenics resistance to the thought of "experimentation" on sentient beings of any kind. 2. AR activists also make being a morally superior pain in the ass a cornerstone of their beliefs. And you're right. I don't really care about reducing animal suffering all that much. Still and all, I'm probably one of your greatest allies in the field that I work in - my experiments still turn my stomach sometimes, I really try as hard as I can to treat my mice humanely, and I do find the mice incredibly cute at times (if you pet them for a while, they'll kind of 'purr'). I'm a vegetarian for the primary reason of environmentalism - the corollary being that the pointless suffering meat animals endure should be ended. I don't think we should experiment at all on primates, cats, dogs, and pigs we should try not to, and all other animals are pretty much acceptable as long as suffering is kept to a minimum. This is all based upon "gut" morality, and is not ideologically or logically consistent (you don't want me to get into my logical system of morality). The difference is that I'm not trying to convert anybody.

Cancer is evolution - within your body. There's a number of safeguards that any cell must outevolve to become cancerous - like contact inhibition. All any drugs or nanobots are going to do is increase the number of safeguards that a cell must outevolve - from six to seven, or eight, or one hundred. At some point, the cancer is going to outevolve these safeguards. Cancer is not curable the way a disease from a pathogen is curable because your cells are the "pathogen" - albeit quiescent for the vast majority.

It sounds like a slime mold - my old roomate had one in an aquarium. They're very weird - plants/algae that can move around.

Well, the thing is with cancers is that they're your own cells, so you can't really attack them head-on without killing yourself too. And, yes, every cancer researcher will tell you that there will never ever be a cure for cancer. You can't stop evolution.

Hark at you! You do understand that even a vegan, organic diet leads to the death of many small mammals every year (field mice, etc) through threshers and combines. We'll take the conservative estimate that 100 mammals die every year because of you, your diet, your lifestyle, etc. Would you still want to go on living the way you do if 100 people died every year for your lifestyle? Many people have given up their lives for strangers, and I know of no vegans that have moved out into the woods and grown their own food so they can stop this wholesale slaughter of mammals, let alone given up their lives for a mouse. And I'm not even going into the thousands upon thousands of lesser vertebrates and invertebrates you cause to die each year. So spare us the self-righteous rhetoric about your "consistent morality." You do not apply it evenly - you hold human life to a higher standard than other life, or you wouldn't even be posting on this forum due to the number of animal lives you are ending by using electricity distributed by high-tension lines. I'm a vegetarian; I like to see animals' lives and quality of life preserved whenever possible, but I do not pretend to equate human life with animal life. And you shouldn't pretend that you do either.

Well, the birds do say the "meme" (God, how I hate to use that word, even in quotation marks), but it's not Mullerian mimicry. Nobody is mistaking the birds for humans- it's just a behavior that is propagated because humans think it's cute. Like getting dogs to sit for treats. And it's not symbiosis unless having a bird that says things gets you laid more often.

I'm not sure what you mean. Endonucleases don't replicate.

Ahh, nobody remembers much chem beyond molarity and simple reaction equations. And for orgo, the only useful thing is the ability to understand the relationship between name and structure. But here's a test - next time you see your doctor, ask if they remember what a Grignard reagent is - a pretty basic organic chemistry thing - I guarantee they won't. Chemistry is a bitch and it's boring; the only stuff that the doctors need to know is the biology.

The larger beads isolate smaller biomolecules and the smaller beads larger biomolecules. If you're just doing a PCR clean, I don't think it makes much difference.

Well, if that's all you need, how about a robot dinosaur? It would be many orders of magnitude easier to "build" and would be just as accurate.

The only way that inbreeding increases the rate of evolution for a specific population is to increase the chances of another bottleneck. It reduces genetic variability, as Mokele has said, and in the event of a drastic change in the population's environment, inbreeding makes it more likely that a large percentage of the population would die. For example, if an emerging disease makes contact with an inbred population, the genetic homogeneity will likely increase the number of individuals that die, causing a bottleneck. Inbreeding, like large meteors hitting the planet, can increase the rate of evolution, but it is in no sense beneficial for the extant organisms.