Steph

McGill is fun... free beer for more than a week at the start of the school year.

this is a scientific proof that squirrels are from outer space... really, I just wanted to post this... and this gave me an opportunity

how is man different from other life? especially when we share 50% of our genome with some plants. if man is from outer space, so are all (or most) other lifeforms (which is a possibility).

well... in this regard, we are also smarter. the example would be something like. Imagine a father that decides to kill all of his family but because his son is physically stronger and keeps him in check, can't follow with his plan. Or a father who has the same idea but nothing to keep him in check, and then realizes that what he is doing is wrong. The only reason the other animals are not destroying the earth is because they are kept in check. An example is the one of the mooses in Prince-Edward Island. They first came to island in the 1700s I think. now they are the largest population of mooses in the world and are literally grazing the island flat. why because they have no predators there except the small human population. one thing for humans. we have come to realize that we must protect the Earth, although we haven't taken the next step yet.

really? birds first started by gliding too. Whales breathe air but seem to be able to survive for extended periods of time without it. Some fish have lungs. so you can have it two ways. Gliding won't necessary evolve to flight, but its halfway there. you don't need land animals for powered flight to appear. about intelligence. what does the 1 in 400 million mean? is in years? planets? years per planet? At any rate, I doubt its accurate but, I also doubt intelligence is such a rare event that there would be only one species per galaxy. the thing is, it seems that brain has followed more or less a straigt line towards complexity. What I mean by that is that if you take a point in time and check the species with the most complex brain, its higher than a point before (more or less... extinctions kind of mess that up). life also seems to have appeared quickly after Earth has been formed. Sooo, it is safe to say that the probability of the appearance of life on a suitable planet would be close to 1 (give or take a few orders of magnitude). out of this, it also seems that the appearance of intelligence would be close to one (again, give or take a few orders of magnitude). Just to clarify... whether its 1/10 or 1/1000 odds its close enough to one at this point because of the sheer size of the universe.

Why do you need land animals for flight to exist? There are gliding fish and flying out of the sea is a rather effective way to escape a sea-going predator. It gives an advantage even if food is nonexistent above water. Flight could have happened earlier. and so could have intelligence. and saying dinosaurs were dumb is a pretty, well, dumb statement. From the evidence we have, the dinosaurs were the equivalent of land mammals today (barring primates) in the range of their intelligence. While larger animals had smaller brain to body ratio, the smaller ones and the nocturnal species had more developped brain cavities. For some reason, people keep thinking of the slow and stupid sauropods that they were showing in shows in the last century. really, a good example of just how varied the ecosystem was is the BBC documentary "Walking with Dinosaurs" which is still accurate enough for this purpose. now, with this said. dinosaurs were nowhere near as brain-intensive as the humans are today. but asking why didn't smart dinosaurs evolve after 165 MY isn't a very significant question. the same could be said for mammals since they appeared in the cretaceous and until 3 MY ago, they didn't have any human-like species. The thing is that intelligence is probably unlikely to appear (through evolution) in the timeframe of a 100 MY.

You should get tested... for sure. but...unless i misread, you had ONE sinus infection, 5 months after unprotected sex, 5 years ago. Usually AIDS would takemore than 5 months to show any kind of symptoms. Also, should you get AIDS, you wouldn't have had one infection in 5 years (if this is the only disease you had in that time... its pretty impressive!). I doubt that infection had anything to do with HIV. however, that doesn't mean that you do not have the virus. you really should get tested after you've had unprotected sex with any promiscuous person (or anyone that you don't know well for that matter)

haha... that was actually really funny. just a question (serious one). what was the tortoise that was killed off by humans? and where was it located? or if you have more info...

Yea... you're right... I stand corrected.

it doesn't depend that much on the species. be realistic. of course thermophiles will survive in higher temperatures, but how many termophiles can you find in your kitchen? I don't have a precise answer to your question but autoclaves running at 121 oC and high pressure get rid of most bacteria, including most Bacillus and Clostridium species (of course there are exceptions). About the salt thing, I can't say i've tried that, but it should be like human cells, albeit at higher concentrations. however, salt is much more abundant on earth than 121oC areas, so you'd have more species evolved to survive in water with high salt concentration. I also know a lot of bacteria can survive in temperatures up to 55oC (melting temp of agar). about cold temps, I have no idea. I would think freezing temp (or a little below that) would damage most cells. I know some species evolved to counter that though. Sorry I can't be more precise... but I think you could find tables in the internet as to how high a temp a specific species of bacteria will survive.

or... what about this : or the extreme case : (this is actually argyria, but... I guess it would qualify. these aren't children though... i think)

no. all species do not even have the same numbers of base pairs. deletion... the physical removal of a base or base pair... its pretty straightforward. not true. The transcriptional machinery is different in prokes. where you have large amounts of junk DNA that needs to be edited out in eukes, prokes have genes nearly as is in their genome. no we don't. we know the broad lines, but not the details. if we knew the details, we'd live in a very happy world. even with prokaryotes, we are far from knowing everything. no How? Just putting some things straight.

... Is it just me, or this looks like a heart attack machine?

thanks for the info. It still doesn't say why' date=' but is consistent with the data I have found. however, this is not representative of the worldwide population... Very nice way to explain T cell action. I'm just nitpicking here but you made a mistake in the above sentence. HIV proteins bind to the receptors on the T-cells, not by mimicking them, but by being similar to a protein that usually binds to them. otherwise, its a pretty cool way to describe T cells. I'll use it next time i have to explain things to children (if you let me)!

saying god guides the process is irrelevent... if god is infinite, then god is chaos then... for most people, saying god did something doesn't add mysticism to anything... its just means its random.

why would they be more at risk? what factor in their lives would make them more at risk? The only thing I can think of is that bisexual men can spread the disease both ways while bisexual women are less at risk to do so. However, all that says, is that men are at a higher risk of getting the disease (which is not true)

WTF!! This is extremely disturbing to me... you have any sources? as for modifying genes... uhm, i guess it'd be possible, but 2% amounts to a rather large amount of genes (i always forget the number... 600?)