mattbimbo

at night, and any other time we are not eating and low on glucose, is when the liver converts fats and proteins to glucose for our brains. neil9327, if you are looking into what is behind the burning of fat, i suggest you should look up papers on cachexia. reading literature on tumour-induced cachexia is when i started to understand metabolism in depth, but there are other factors that can cause cachexia.

again, this is invented. you may understand what you mean but i don't. your criticism for a pathogenic cause has many very good points! many of which are better than mine. i also liked your explosion scenario. but viruses can rewrite genetic code. look up viral oncogenes for instance. and the nervous system does harbour viruses, including fetal nervous systems. look up herpesvirus fetus for instance. mr d,you seem fairly convinced that sexual orientation is determined at birth - is this so? the strongest quote of yours that sticks in my mind is according to this you are implying sexuality undergoes mendelian inheritance, but you don't seem to like this because you follow with so am i right are you ultimately saying homosexuality is the result of genetic damage, not necessarily paternal or maternal, just (everyday?) damage that occurs with a natural frequency of 10%. this is unlikely!

hey, you may get some ideas from this thread which discusses the possibility of homo neanderthalis and sapiens interbreeding.

of course i could be wrong. maybe this is an original idea that could be important. i mean to develop faster/efficient dialysis machines could contribute a great deal to health care rather than sloth care.

Me too. are you aware of the side-effects of long-term dialysis? do you appreciate how expensive it is? putting all this aside, fatty-acids circulate the bloodstream as large protein-lipid complexes, as a molecular species they are one of the largest in our blood streams, and since rates of dialysis are inversely proportional to molecular size you are talking days of fractional dialysis to selectively remove LDL, never mind VHDL. (well maybe not months if you have a blood flow rate many fold higher than normal.) correction to above quote: carbohydrates in the blood stream are either burnt up, or if there is excess then they are converted to fats in lipocytes, then due to hormones the lipocytes release the fats into the blood stream. the absorption of fats is equally complex.

there is also a wikipedia link for the pathogenic theory of homosexuality.. by the way, mr d your numbers should be expressed correctly and the idea of primary and secondary is totally invented. and if one is going to talk probabilities, i'd like to see some numbers, ranging between 0 and 1. if anyone wants some recent references on the genetic basis of sexual orientation, this paper is a good starting point. as a paper it shows how from a small sample (456 individuals from 146 families with two or more gay brothers) that straight-forward statistics do not give clear results.

mr d, there may be a genetic basis, but what about a viral/immunological basis? others have had this idea for a number of conditions, including homosexuality.

i believe CO2 sensing by mosquitoes and their like, including frogs, involves specialized neurons. yes it would. maybe you have found a career for yourself? and it is possible to make transgenic mosquitoes now.

perhaps oxocarboxylic acids. again oxocarboxylic acids. interestingly after dinner, mosquitoes lose their sense of smell. and now i have an idea why my mother gets bit the most - alcohol intake stimulates mosquitoes to bite. since starting this thread, i am wondering what is the distance-dependency of their attraction to CO2, heat or sweat. and their attraction to light, is this a moonlight thing?

i read the article. Although neither of the authors are dedicated immunologists they consider adaptive immunity to be a prime proof of their system biology hypotheses. But many of their ideas are in fact borrowed, from L Pauling who laid the initial ideas of antigen space to N Jerne who proposed the idiotype network; Both of whom won Nobel Prizes. In fact they reference themselves a little too much for my liking. But most of all to my disliking is that they don't include any reference to research which shows that the adaptive immune system is constantly sensing self - and creating tolerizing immune responses to itself. Your attempt to discuss the genetic side of adaptive immunity was good but the reality is much more deep. The hyperrecombination of antibody and TCR genes is mediated by specific enzymes, the RAG recombinases which may exist in sea urchins but certainly existed in sharks 400-450 million years ago, which recognise specific targets; Nothing 'sloppy' at all. It has to be a highly controlled process, a non-specific recombinase would destroy genetic integrity. I'd recommend having a read of the mechanisms of hyperrecombination, they are very impressive. I like the term 'conserved variability' , it might be one for the future. And thanks for replying, but I am most interested in what ideas people have for the evolutionary events which led to AI. For instance, the reason I'd like to know of cartiliginous fish had their offspring via intrauterine mechanisms, might explain the need for tolerance as a factor in promoting the development of AI. Think of it, sperm as a potential pathogen.

you are so wrong, I don't know where to begin. I could start by telling you that without fat stores we wouldn't last the night.

you are right that it is the genes, DNA or RNA, which are injected. but i believe the injection systems of which you are think are mostly, if not entirely, confined to bacteriophages. many eukaryotic viruses, enter cells through receptor-mediated endocytosis, where they are tranpsorted to intracellular compartments, where the viruses uncoat themselves to release their genetic material, etc. eukaryotic cells are more complicated than bacteria. so simply injecting genes into the cytoplasm of eukaryotes would not stimulate their replication because the enzymes don't exist for it. in prokaryotes this is of course difference, where polymerases exist in the cytoplasm.

Interesting question and I am curious as to what people will write. My feeling is that it is a big world out there; My understanding will always be incomplete. Also it is not a very good strategy to reinvent the wheel too much; If there are people with experience, use it as best you can. Or if you have experience, share it as bet you can but don't give up your day job.

i thought i'd go fishing for any ideas that people may have regarding the evolution of adaptive immunity. for those who don't know what adaptive immunity is, it is the part of the immune system that is involved with pathogen processing and specific recognition. within our lifetime, our immune systems undergo evolution, of course its capacity to do so does ultimately influence our final evolution. from a thread last week, i raised the point that the first appearance of molecules which are central to the adaptive immune response date back 400-450 million years ago/the Devonshire period in sharks/cartilaginous fish. in this same thread, another writer pointed out that acorn worms might precede the sharks. why an adaptive immune system first appears in sharks is considered to be a result of increased predation and absorbance of pathogens. (can anyone tell me if internal reproduction begins with the sharks too? because this could be a driving force for the evolution of adaptive immunity too.) why acorn worms may (still waiting for sequencing of its genome) have an adaptive immune system is because they evolved the first circulatory system which would disperse pathogens within an organism. but a recent article published in PNAS suggests sea urchins may be first. any ideas anyone?

viruses do not have a cell surface! you probably mean the lipid envelope of the virion/capsid! but not all viruses have lipid envelopes. not all viruses are injected. HIV for instance. in fact i don't know of one viruses that infects mammals which are injected into cells.

not such a simple question. i asked a surgeon about people recovering from anaesthesia whether they recovered more quickly if they underwent surgery in the morning compared to night. she said 'yes, perhaps, not sure. i guess it depends on the amount of adrenalin and other stress hormones on the go'. anyway i am sure you could do experiments with mice quite easily.

great post, but where in the picture is the cloud?

here is a weblog refuting Bob Carter - comment 4 by Scott Church is well written.

i remember telling my mum about this paper regarding how female mosquitoes sense sweat, because she is always the one in our family to get most bitten, and she always and correctly reckoned it was a sweat thing.

vestigial organ in german is 'verkümmert organ'. the author of link that i found before is referenced on this german site. reading through this link took me to another site which mentions a german anatomist, R Wiedersheim, who in 1885 or 1895 identified 100 vestigial organs. my guess is that the source you are looking for is The Structure of Man, by R. Wiedersheim, translated by H. and M. Bernard and edited by GB Howes (London 1895).

i might as well tell you all the funniest penis story i know. a friend, who studied theoretical physicis at cambirdge, hadn't had much success with ladies. after his degree to make ends meet he worked as a locum nurse, mostly changing beds and pisspots. one day he was working with a nurse who asked him three questions which he can't remember but his answers were enough to make her ask him to visit her the coming Friday night. he goes to her place, its just her and a little dog who needs a shit. she asks him to take the dog out, which he does even though it is freezing outside. when he returns to her house, drinks are waiting. all the signs were there, he knew this was going to be the night that he would lose his virginity. they joke and drink. his conciousness is beginning to flicker as she takes him upstairs to her room. he lies on the bed. the next morning he wakes. his head is sore. he is naked apart from his underwear. she had already left for work. he dresses and leaves. arriving at work he goes for a shower and as he takes off his shirt he notices bite marks on his neck and torso. he takes off his underwear and there are bite marks and a tear in his foreskin. he goes to the doctor who tells him he has to have a circumcision the next day. after the operation he gets an infection. the result of which is that in two weeks he has a spiralling growth of skin about 3cm long at the end of his penis. he has to have another operation. he does not know if he lost his virginity that night.

some cultures took ritual self-sacrifice as far as castration for men and mastectomies for women to make themselves look more like angels (fictionalized in this book). then you have the Great Papas, the chinese emporers' eunuch servants. i know the Great Papas were highly revered, and their self-sacrifice was important for their families. but what about the future? for how long will priests promote circumcision and pull the foreksin over our eye?

what prose!

on my lunchbreak, i visited the British Library. digging around a little, revealed to me how much the 1880s and 1890s was an intense period for darwinist v creationist literature. this leads me to think, the source of the '180 vestigial organs' may be a little biased (but i haven't read it so i don't know). anyway it is an old-source and is probably best ignored. so X eugene X, maybe it was a trick question?

right you are, and the adaptive immune system is 450 years old.