Etacude

I am not an expert in evolutionary biology, but I have a question regarding live reproduction that relates to evolution (I think). It is known that people of different races, no matter how remote their locality from each other or no matter how different their ways of life and culture may be, when they mate they will produce human offsprings who themselves able to produce more humans when they grow older. Okay, the reason for that is simple, is because they are all humans. Equally speaking, dogs of any pedigree can mate and reproduce dogs, but you don't see mating of dogs and cats to produce a 'dog-cat' animal. However, on extremely rare cases two different animals can be mixed to produce a new animal, such as mule, which is a hybrid of a donkey and a horse. But then a mule does not (or probably extremely rare) mate with another mule to produce a baby mule. Now going back to humans, if we were originated from certain ape-man species (sorry, do not know the scientific name), does it mean that we have to be originated only from one, particular (or unique) species of ape-man? If that is the case, is there any theory to consider that when this particular species dispersed to other places throughout the world and eventually evolved into modern humans independently, how would it possible these modern humans (us) can then come together again to produce 'reproducible offsprings'?

Phi for All, I totally agree with you. By not teaching a child to face the real world would be even more damaging when they grow older, mentally they may not even mature. I just wondering why the authorities keep suggesting or implementing crazy ideas that majority of us don't even agree to? Is it becuase they have more senses than us, or they just simply out of touch with reality?

This is true, sometimes it does not need science to solve everything. Interestingly, overpopulation seems to play in the hands of conspiracy theorists. For instance: Secret meetings in UN to solve overpopulation, in scientific ways, to decimate (certain group) of populations. For instance, AIDS is the work of human, not from green monkey, Spanish flu pandemic, perverted vaccination programs, etc. Okay, I am not saying these are facts. But it makes me wondering if there are people out there, presumably conjuring up these stories, if they ever get into governmental level, what would they do to the world?

Berfore Millenium, people said world will end in 1999, 2000 or near to that. After Millenium, now people said the world will end in 2012. And, obviously, the doom-date need to associate with certain major event to make it credible - Planet X (used to predict to cause some kind of catastrophy in 2004), Millenium bug, communism, fallen comets etc. Curiously, a small group of people always make a lot of money out of it. When the date passed, it is either revised it or just let it swollowed up in tons of information garbage and bocome a background noise. If they truely believe the world would indeed end in certain date, why would they want to grab the worldly possession for? For the past, major event usually occurred out of the blue - the 9/11 incidence, London bombing, S.E.A. Tsunami, etc. I guess no one predict that. If global-wide catastrophy do come, it can happen anytime from now to God knows when. Yes, it may perhaps happen in one normal, sunny working day, or even at night while we all asleep, including the doomsayer.

I aggree. But when I was young, Spectrum BASIC was the first computer language that I learnt, then eventually migrated to GW-BASIC, Commodore BAISC and just touched on FORTH and LOGO. Then as I grow older, I need to learn Fortran, because I need to make use of the supecomputer parallelism features, of which Fortran is well-established. It is not the most elegant language I suppose, especially the Fortran-77. For purposes of intensive mathematical calculations, Java or any cross-platform and web languages are pathetic. For single processor application, I will go for C or C++. By the way, is anyone still using FORTH? What is it use for nowadays?

I wonder does he ever get sued in the court, for mis-selling for instance?

Unlike first protein crystal structure which took 30 years to resolve, nowadays there computers abound to help resolve these structures. One difficult part is to prepare protein crystals, they may take weeks to crystallise. Another approach to do protein strucutral determination is to do computational modelling and molecular simulations. Basically, the experimentallist prepared and resolved a complex protein structure. You then use this as a basis to run a simulation to investigate the structural behaviour down to individual atoms. Doing this sort of simulations often require supercomputers. Hence, you have chance to access state-of-the-art computers and at the same time carry out many structural analysis which frequently not accessible experimentally.

woelen, you are right! I did not read BenSon carefully, I thought it was >90% conc sulfuric.

You can make hydrogen chloride by adding, drop-wise, conc. sulfuric acid into sodium chloride. Note that the gas gives a pungent smell and is poisonous. Best is to pass the hydrogen chloride gas into water to give hydrochloric acid.

I believe every science subject has its own interesting and usefulness aspects of it. Otherwise, it will not exist in the first place, will it? Physics, the study of energy interactions, seems to be most fundamental aspect, but does not translate, in an apparent way, to our everyday life (Consider cosmology, high energy particle physics - do they have anything to do with your everyday life?) Chemistry - the study of electron interactions - seems to to relate most to our everyday life, but have a string of bad publicity - chemical pollution, not to mention recent scare on WMD. Biology - the study of living organisms - seems to confine almost entirely on planet Earth, albeit an important one. How about engineering?

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. W. Churchill When you are content to be yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you. Lao-Tzu

Biophysics - It means employ physicists to do the job of biology - Okay a joke (partly). There are certain biologial processes such as protein foilding, protein aggregation and protein structural change occur via coorperative molecular packing and interactions within the complex biological molecule that do not involve in any chemical reaction, and thus not in the realm of biochemistry. Biophycisicts sometimes require to have the knowledge of mathematical concept and theoretical modelling and only some knowledge of biology in order to carry out studies on topic as mentioned above. Quite common they also use some intrumentations where results obtain are not as straight forward and need some mathematical analysis skill - such as X-ray crystallography, neutron scattering, protein NMR etc.

Yes, particle physics is one of the few scientific community that produce and analyse a huge amount of computer data, if not the most. They are the ones that first to figure ways to transfer large chunk of data across different geographical location, of which the technology subsequently streamed down for consumer use. So, perhaps expect another Internet revolution.

If I remember correctly, I once come across a documentary film or article about some scientists who do not believe in evolution theory. They are not (or perhaps all) religious individuals, but just dissaprove the logic of evolution from certain scientific perspective.

Well, whatever chemicals that smell good or bad, I notice that some of the chemicals listed are highly poisonous. I do not recommend smelling it on purpose. For instance, fluorine smells horrible - but don't even dare to try it! How about arsine - some say smell like rotten garlic - but DON'T ever try it! Such gaseous chemical in the quantity of ppm is enough to prove fatal!!

Does any one has any personal experiences that eating organic food gives noticeable health benefits/improvements over conventional agrochemical-saturated, mass-farming food?

Perhaps one of the most disgusting class of chemicals is mercaptan - sulphur-based organic molecules. Most of them smell rotten of every sort of food imaginable. For example, methanethiol (or methyl mercaptan) smells like a rotten vegetable. One of the most pleasant smell class of chemicals would be esters - these give fruity smells. In fact, ripe fruits that give characteristic sweet smells are due to the presence of esters. __________________ http://www.etacude.com Education in Science

In sub-particle realm, I think the word 'small' is a bit misleading. Top quarke is heavy, about 35000 times heavier than up and down quark and probably as heavy as gold. But this does not mean its size is bigger than a gold atom !? Electron is small and consider point-like too. __________________ http://www.etacude.com Education in science

You may also get a tiny amount of americium (Am) from smoke alarm - make sure you extract from an old, discarded one! Also, some agricultural store may sell copper sulphate. ________________ http://www.etacude.com

I remember in my secondary school I have made this stuff. I added small amount of conc sulphuric acid to potassium permangante crystal to make a paste. Use a glass rod and collect some of the stuff at one end of the rod. Then gently transfer over to the wick of a spirit burner that prefilled with ethanol. The moment the paste touched the wick the flame just automatically lights up! Luckily I never experienced any explosion though. _________________ http://www.etacude.com