zyncod

The attempted murder charge would be in Oklahoma. I don't know about the conspiracy, except that it would be in Florida for Perp A, if at all. But Perp B made a call into Oklahoma, and then showed up in a park in Oklahoma with the intent to kill.

Jim, I would like the reference to those laws about taking property out of state with the intent to defraud.

My hypothetical was that the authorities had you on tape: Other person: "So you want to kill him?" You: "Yes, if he's in Oklahoma, or Florida, or whatever." Very silly, and pretty much the only way you could be prosecuted in Florida.

Right, but if you had conspired to murder somebody regardless of whereabouts, that could be prosecutable. Of course, this is an incredibly silly argument, and is a law school hypothetical.

No, I think they would prosecute for conspiracy, if anything.

I would really like a reference in terms of those laws, because I can't imagine that they would be constitutional.

True. But for this to be legal, then the state would have to restrict the ability of all pregnant women to leave the state. After all, it's not what you do in another state that's illegal in custody law, it's the very fact of leaving the state with the child that's illegal. And I kind of think that that runs afoul of the Constitution, especially the Fifth amendment, given that there is no pressing need to keep pregnant women in the state.

Yahoo story However you feel about Guantanamo Bay (and I think that this is indicative of how many people in Gitmo are being wrongly held), I think that this is an interesting story. Are they terrorists - after all, they were plotting probable terrorist action against a sovereign government, authoritarian as it may be? And two, given that they were admittedly "wrongly imprisoned" for nearly four years, and really have no place to go, should we be foisting them off on other countries (like Germany), or should we trade four years in jail for nothing for citizenship in our country?

Dialysis is a very serious procedure. The patient's life will be shortened far more significantly through the dialysis procedure itself, as well as the heightened risk of infection. Not to mention the stress to the body of rapidly changing blood sugar levels (insulinemia, anyone?). My guess is leptin-based therapy will be far more important in the years to come. Also, getting off your fat ass and getting some exercise.

I'd agree, especially since most primers have a complimentary sequence of only 30-45 bp. If you've got any restriction sites in your overhang, especially multiple restriction sites, that's going to complicate things because of the stemloops you'll have. If I was you, I would do this in steps, say 20 bp at a time. It's annoying, but I've spent months on a single construct before giving up and doing it the slow, incremental way.

I suspect that, as we research further, the advent of a circulatory system (found ~500 mya in acorn worms) will correlate with the advent of an adaptive immune response. I only say this as sponges and plants clearly have no adaptive immune response since they're not actively spreading pathogens throughout their bodies. Incidentally, this 'missing link' is utterly irrelevant in the creation/evolution debate. The absolute, mindbendingly great mass of information is on the side of evolution. A 'fish with legs' is simply an easy way of visualizing the evolutionary pathway. Like putting two pennies together with two pennies and asking whether the concept of 'addition' is a valid way of explaining a subset of the world of mathematics.

Actually, some secondary structures in repetitive regions probably have unconventional base pairs since the base stacking interactions are messed up (I've never actually seen a crystal structure of that, tho). On a side note, Yggdrasil, I can't believe that you have the chair conformation for glucose as your icon/avatar/whatever. I cannot think of anything that I've ever hated more than organic chem.

Just wait until you get to college - you have plenty of years of schooling ahead of you (at least 11 from what it sounds like you want to do). Taking courses and working in labs should give you a better idea of what's involved. I thought that I wanted to work in "genetic engineering" too (y'know, the whole Monsanto thing - without the evil) until I worked in a lab where I had to construct over a hundred plasmids. Genetic engineering is a good tool, but I found out that I don't just want to make tools.

Grrr... They don't actually glow. They're just fluorescent. Hence, not that interesting, since there are many naturally fluorescent aquatic organisms. Like Aqueora victoria.

Hey! 1e-50 is a very small number, but, as I've proven, it's not at all impossible for something with a probability of 1e-50 to happen. Predicting beforehand that something will happen and knowing afterward are two entirely different things. Right now, as life is, you need to have nucleic acids and proteins for replication of nucleic acids. Viral RNA genomes can be reproduced from a single template RNA. However, there are multiple examples of RNA with 'ribozyme' activity; that is, RNA that is capable of carry out chemical reactions (the traditional domain of proteins). DNA shows no such capability. It is possible, though far from proven, that the earliest common ancestor of life was a self-replicating RNA. Crystals were a somewhat specious example since they fulfill all the requirements for life as we understand it now, if viruses are alive. Of course, any definition of life is bound to be flawed in many respects. It depends on which organism you're talking about and whether repair pathways are calculated in that result. That whole rocky planet thing was utter speculation on my part. But the universe does not seem to be over-inundated with life, so it's either the absence of places that can support life or the absence of life itself. Nothing is ever proven in science except for negative results. We can state for sure that something didn't happen but we can't ever state that something did happen. However, the data strongly supports evolution from a single celled organism. Things like the commonality of the genetic code (an essentially arbitrary code shared by all life on this planet). But we can't, and probably never will, have any surety about how life began. Abiogenesis and evolution are entirely separate things.

I really doubt that yeast would be responsive to LPS - what would they have to gain from it? Actually the TLR responsible for LPS recognition also recognizes zymosan.

Yes, I know. I was not being serious. But, think about it this way: If you were using a random number generator to generate 50 digit long strings of numbers and you got: 11111.... (I'm not going to write the full string out because I'm lazy. Lazy and self-important.) then you would probably think that something was up. It's not an impossible result, it's just extremely improbable (1e-50) that something like that would occur. But then you realize that there are many such patterns that would strike you as odd: 12121212..... 123454321.... Fibonacci sequences etc, etc, etc... And then you realize that you're being teleological. The number of 50 digit strings with some kind of pattern actually form a fairly significant minority of the total number of possibilities. Just as there is with life. If you take random recombination of organic molecules as probably existed during prebiotic Earth, there are many, many possibilities of how a self-replicating molecule could come into being. It doesn't have to be DNA with a DNA polymerase made out of amino acids. It could have been a self-replicating RNA (as most scientists think now). It could have been a self-replicating protein. It could have been silicon-based. It could have been a crystal (if viruses are "alive," so are crystals). No scientist has ever stated (post-Francesco Redi) that a fully functional prokaryote burst into being. The actual probability of an organism as complex as, say, E. coli (which is, I'm sure, what the creationists used as their probability calculation model, since they don't seem to be willing to bother with most primary research) spontaneously forming from a prebiotic soup is actually far lower than the 10^-40000. You might as well expect Douglas Adams' whale and petunias to appear in the sky. It's actually quite stupid and ignorant to continue to quote these figures of probability as if they had anything to do with how life formed. The fact is, given how this planet was situated and its chemical makeup, it would be surprising if life (in some form or other) didn't form. Earth is, I'll grant you, not a likely scenario. Planets are not common. Rocky planets are extremely uncommon. Rocky planets with liquid water are vanishingly uncommon. Rocky planets with liquid water and the means of forming complex "organic" molecules are stupendifyingly vanishingly uncommon. But once this scenario occurs, life is almost a foregone conclusion.

I don't know that humans have been in this type of social situation long enough to be sure that there is an evolutionary basis for this idea. Humans are not like dogs - there is no hardwired social strata.

That's wrong. Just in the last five seconds, in your pinky finger, many things have happened that have a probability of less than 10 to the 50th power. Or, here: 032594239802355431028975302548631053150987568032537 What is the probability that I would pick this exact string of numbers to type out? 1e-51. Did I type out this exact string of numbers? Yes. So the above statement is clearly wrong.

Well, you mutate a bunch of organisms (w/EMS, UV, etc.), and grow them up at room temp. Usually, temp-sens mutants are single-celled organisms, so you replate them and grow them at 37C. Whatever dies at that temperature harbors a temp-sens mutation.

Actually, you're talking about a homeobox gene. That doesn't specifically code for a mammalian eye. It simply codes for the further development of optical tissue. Which would make sense from an evolutionary standpoint, but not from a design standpoint.

You have to remember: HIV is not really such a 'deadly' virus. Sure, people succumb in the long term, but there is a long latency period. So you can easily reproduce in between the time when you're infected and the time you die. Moreover, it's not that easily transmissable - only sexual and placental contact (in the normal state of affairs) spread it. So it would take a very long time for humans and HIV to coevolve to a less aggressive relationship. If you want an example of a virus that has coevolved with people, smallpox would be it. Smallpox had a very high mortality rate when it first made its appearance about a millennium ago. But people and the virus coevolved such that it was really not much more than a nuisance (in the evolutionary scheme of things) by the time we eradicated it. The modern position of humanity is unique, however. It's not the lifespan of a human that is going to make it difficult for humans to evolve immunity to viruses; it's the constant contact of a worldwide population. Essentially, we are all one isolated population now. Any especially virulent disease will spread very quickly throughout the whole of the human population. Not everybody will die, but it will wreak havoc on what we consider to be our civilization.

Women that have children are not Stepford wives. What companies need to understand is that the human sphere does not operate entirely separately from the corporate sphere. If they want employees beyond the present generation, women are going to have to carry these future employees to term and carry primary responsibilities for raising them. It's actually incredibly offensive that you call mothers 'Stepford wives.' Given how much of the world's future rests in the wombs of women, I think we can trade a few months of 'vacation time' here and there.

Ok, just to clarify, because the media does not seem to be adequately explaining this. GFP does not make things glow in the dark. It makes them fluorescent - so you need to shine a UV light on them to make them glow. It does make organisms green under regular light (I work with GFP mice and it's very weird to open them up and see that a number of their organs are green). You can make 'glow in the dark' mice by adding the luciferase transgene (from fireflies) and injecting them with luciferin. Unfortunately, the amount of light produced is not visible to the naked eye.

Well, you do have situations where you can have superheated water (like in geysers or black smokers) or supercooled water (I don't know what natural situations you might find this in), where the water is still in the liquid phase.