fafalone

I don't have access to the full article, and CNN didn't say anything... but I'd imagine this will add at least a couple billion years to the estimate.

CNN is reporting on an article in the July 10th Edition of Astrophysical Journal letters that quasar APM 08279+5255 has an iron content far greater than it should, implying the age of the universe to be older than previously suspected, given that this quasar is 13.5 billion light years away. Click read more to discuss this article. Click here for the Astrophysics Forum Click here for the Cosmology forum.

The most primitive biochemical pathways of the most ancient organisms require water for energy production. Water has an extremely small dissociation constant, which makes it very stable. Most organic molecules do not even react with water; and if they did, then you couldn't define water as our "life blood." The first organisms on this planet did not develop in the presence of oxygen; as oxygen is corrosive. Organisms tolerant of oxygen developed later. The way in which we are "modifying" our environment is not conducive to our form of life. We're constantly adding toxins. We have not moved on to other planets yet. Venus is too close to the sun to support carbon based life. Period. The scale at which Earth's orbit is deteriorating is not even close to the same time frame as we're making the planet unlivable. In fact, the sun will probably burn out before our orbit takes us out of its habitable zone. The DNA of some things is only a few kbp, while ours is many mbps. DNA structure of the former couldn't produce near as many combinations, including fractal patterns. There has been no evidence of anything reading DNA actual structure and not just nucleotides. Most DNA is leftovers, such as the sequence for gills. It's not an advantage to leave it out, so it stays. Furthermore, some viruses don't even have DNA, just RNA. And also, then why would there be any interspecific variance between DNA? It would be more logical to just have a different recognition set for introns, which is how which DNA is expressed has been proven to operate. Can you support your position using evidence and not just philosophy? What evidence is there life predated water?

Who's to say your soul wouldn't re-enter your body?

It's been done. Not on humans yet, but some species of frogs have been cryogenically frozen and then brought back; with seemingly the same personality and everything else. It might take 100 years or more to get to humans, but eventually I think we'll get there, though the initial cost of revival will be alot higher than the cost of freezing.

Akio Mori, a professor in Nihon University's College of Humanities and Sciences, conducted a study which claims prolonged use of video games causes less beta wave activity in the prefrontal region of the brain, the region which is responsible for emotion and creativity. The study links this decrease in activity to loss of concentration, having a short temper, and decline in social skills. Personally, I'd say it was the monitor radiation rather than the content of the games themselves responsible for this, if this study is even peer reviewed and found to be valid, which I doubt. Click read more to discuss this article. Click here for the Neuroscience forum.

They already proved neutrinos have mass. There are 3 flavors of neutrinos, e- neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. A observed propert called neutrino oscillation involves neutrinos changing flavor in a vacuum. In order for this to happen, it must have mass. Another proof came from measurement of the decay of a tritium nucleus (2). Furthermore, Klapdor-Kleingrothaus et al. (1) recently demonstrated that the lepton number is not conserved in the neutrinoless double-b-decay reaction 76Ge->76Se + 2e1 (76 is superscript), which violates lepton conservation by 2 units. Not only does this show they have mass, but that all 3 flavors have almost the same mass. Their measurements say the mass of any kind of neutrino is ~2x10^-9 GeV c1 2. (1) Klapdor-Kleingrothaus, H. V., Dietz, A., Harney, H. L. & Krivosheina, I. V. Mod. Phys. Lett. A 16, 2409–2420 (2001) (2) Bonn, J. et al. (MAINZ collaboration) Nucl. Phys. Proc. Suppl. 91, 273–279 (2001). --------- ps- blike, if you read the nature articles you sent me, you would have already known of these experiments

In an upcoming issue of Science, Froehlich et al. open the door to a new understand of how light works in the body. From the abstract in Science Express:

Who created the ones who created us? Keep asking that question, and somewhere along the line you'll get to 'god', and when you reach that, is it not more logical to assume it was the 'god' entity that created us, and not other life forms? Any advanced life form has a hell of alot more than 223 genes. Adam and Eve is creationist nonsense, try looking at the fossil record, genetic evidence, comparative anatomy, and any of the other dozens of reasons. Any belief that life was created exactly as it is now is NOT logical.

It is hard to talk about the geometry of a black hole because you essentially cannot rely on Euclidean geometry to explain the relationship of space and time. Mass warps space time, and a black hole has an extremely large mass. Only very strange particles are believed to escape black holes.

The major issues I see with this are as follows: 1) Water was present before life. 2) Modifying the environment for a better DNA sequence to be expressed- this sounds like a mechanism of action for Darwinian Evolution rather than a contradiction of it. 3) It is contended that humans have stopped evolving; and with current social trends it's my opinion we're heading backwards in evolution. With the basic drive towards survival, why would a single organism have its parts doing this? 4) Not all DNA contains all of life; especially the very small size of some plastids. I'd like to read more on this topic, as I too feel there is more to life than just all of its parts. Could you recomend any good books or sites on this subject? Thanks, fafalone

Yeah. Had to for my physics class. Great book.

Read a book called "The Physics of Star Trek." Has a great section about teleportation.

Depends on the theory. Farthest galaxy we've seen so far is 14 billion light years away. There could be more, certainly if a galaxy is that far away and we saw it already formed, the universe is at least a couple billion older. And of course the latest theory says the universe is trillions of years old.

An article in Nature Science Update talks about the recent finding of a pattern in ant cemeteries with the activator-inhibitor mechanism. It has long been established certain occurences in nature following Turing patterns, mathematical equations that accurately describe the structure of seemingly random events. The ants use of this in the patterns of burying their dead is the first example of such a pattern in higher organisms. Click read more to discuss this article. Click here for the Biology forum.

I think basic safety like this should be common sense to both the student and the teacher. Honors students not seeing where something would be going? I think it's more their fault than the teachers. Laws governing high-school laboratories are overly strict already; fortunately I had a teacher who allowed us to bend the rules, so we could make methanol rockets in class. Of course our rules were whacked out... we had to wear goggles, but no gloves were available for working with burning things or handling acids/bases. Accidents are going to happen whether there's a law or not. The only way to prevent accidents like this is to make a law against using a combustable liquid, which is overly opressive. Of course, if the teacher is unaware of the dangers of using amateur combustion engines, well that's just sad.

It's possible, but long way off. In order to see any decent amount of time into the past, the telescope would have to be far outside our solar system, as I believe light can't take more than a few hours to travel to the edge from Earth. Seeing detail from this range would require imaging ability we simply are not capable of. Looking into the distant past would require a telescope to have imaging technology millennia ahead of what we've got now, and to be practicle it would need to be extremely far away, on the order of several KPcs (kiloparsecs, 1 parsec=3.24light years). So, it's possible, but not plausible. At least not anytime within the next few thousand years.

Storks.

Any layer for the API that Microsoft makes is inherently going to be buggy, overly large, and more confusing than the original API.

Dr. Cox from Scrubs is my hero for a doctor

Yeah, the detector is sensitive enough to observe a single fusion pore opening.

I don't care for "working up" to something, so I just started with Win32 C++ programming.

welcome

Nanotechweb has an article describing a nanofabricated amperometrical detector that Cornell researchers are using to explore the process by which chemicals such as neurotransmitters are excreted from cells. The original paper appears in Nanotechnology, June 2002 Click read more to discuss this article. Click here for the Biochemistry/Molecular Biology forum.

Wake Forest Univeristy researchers have a press release detailing an ion channel in the thalamus that increases in activity with moderate alcohol consumption, and is deactivated by higher amounts. This apparently explains why alcohol lets you sleep better at night, but disrupts sleep in the early morning. Click read more to discuss this article. Click here for the Neuroscience forum.