Genecks

Same way a post I make in /b goes away quite quickly: Darwinism. I'm not saying what I'm talking about is better than what everyone else is talking about. But I can assure people that most topics, such as human abortion, have been covered for a very long time. Many aspects of religion have been talked about before.

Definitely. There is surely a paradox here. I'm attempting to make the best of a bad situation, which can actually be a good situation for particular scientists who don't feel like shelling out cash to gather resources. All three, really, but in relation to invasive species as the title indicates. As I've not really seen too many arguments in this realm, I think I will move onto a more serious discussion by providing more discussion. I wanted to see what serious replies would come before I poison the river: I don't want my arguments nor line of thinking to really alter the thinking of others who may have their own opinions on the matter. Anyone who wants to provide a view before reading the rest of this post might want to stop reading it and come back to it at a later time. Some people rather have people who start conversations and discussions present an argument so that they have something to argue again. I attempt to start a discussion with some questions. It's Socratic, sure. -- I think my question was quite specific and succinct. If you want me to break it down further for you, I can. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Do you want to discuss if there are situations where ethics can be thrown aside? If a species is invasive, despite being a vertebral or an invertebrate, should a researcher be allow to throw aside ethics? I believe that as long as the research does not directly affect surrounding organisms (in a sense by tampering with the ecosystem that was already there), then a scientist should be allowed to do the research. For example, I have interests in crayfish, behavior, and their learning. In Scotland, there is a currently a problem with sight crayfish, and people have been suggested to kill crayfish on sight: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/south_of_scotland/7564004.stm I believe I should be in full ethical right to do research on the crayfish without ethical intervention. I believe this for a few reasons: (1) The government has classified the animal as an invasive species (2) people want them gone (3) me taking them capture as part of an experiment (in such a way) helps decrease the population of the invasive species (4) the governments have taken action to remove the invasive species. In a sense, I am helping the government, the people, and help restore the ecosystem by taking away the organisms. In the case where I do not attempt to make a species specific super-virus or species-general virus (nor attempt to do any immunological and microbiological research that would lead to a possible release of a biological pathogen into the world's environments), I believe that the majority of research I do on the organism (say a sight crayfish) would be ethical. Furthermore, I also believe it would be ethical to create a research program with other researchers. Do you want to discuss if ethics can be thrown aside in the specific case of the Australian rabbits? As with the Australian rabbits, I see that many of the above premises also apply. In America, people often need approval to work with vertebrates. However, in the case of Australian rabbits, there is such an ample supply of them, capturing them and doing research with them would help decrease the population. I say that this is ethical and should be freely allowed on another point: The governments and other agencies have been finding ways to kill the rabbits. The only difference is that the methods of death have involved usage of a virus (which can be used to kill an infected rabbit within about 2-3 days) and guns to shoot the rabbits. A scientific experiment may require more time, thus causing the animal to undergo pain over a period of months rather than a swift death. Then again, there may be times where an experiment does not seem to go forward too fast, and the researcher decides to terminate the rabbit: Say they are investigating the involuntary nervous system and have the rabbit surgerically cut open and everything: It is decided that bringing back the rabbit would make it a neurological zombie (or something similar). Or do you want to discuss what would ethically be the best way to deal with the Australian rabbits? Again, another thing that can be related to the title of the thread. However, as I propose, legislation on dealing with invasive species should be liberal, because people generally want them gone. However, too much liberty in working with pathogenic materials causes issues, as shown in one of my premises.

You would be surprised that I've never really bashed religion around here or belittled a variety of spiritual, metaphysical ideas around SFN. Personally, I think religious discussions help develop a sense of morality in people. It can also generate greater argumentative skills in individuals. But if you want to make a thread like that. Go for it. I find what you just said to be a personal attack and rude. This isn't what I'm really getting at, though. I've been a member a long time here, and I've seen the ethics/religion subboards taken down before. It appears that they are often taken away when things get off track and irrelevant. And if it gets like that again, I suspect the board would be taken down again. I believe I was actually one of the first people to argue for a religion board, but this was way back in 2006/2007 or so. I was saddened that the ethics board went down, because it's great to talk about ethics in relation to science, especially on this board because we have plenty of actual scientists to discuss science AND ethics.

Talk about the engineering of mechanical pencils. I find that the Twist-Erase by Pentel is the best ever made. However, it could use a better clip for clipping onto one's shirt pocket.

I've talked to a lot of people throughout the years who have had acne. Many people speculated in the past few decades that it was "sugar." The cause of acne: Sugar. So many people thought that was silly and unsupported. However, I could tell it was an easy correlate whenever I would be carb cutting, then eat a lot of sugary foods a day later.... Two days after eating the sugary foods, I'd get some kind of acne. As it took long enough to discover H. pylori in relation to stomach ulcers, I'm definitely skeptical of medical experts who don't actively do microbiological research: I think they're absolute freaking twits. It's all about developing a hypothesis, so I'll throw out an idea: Maybe somehow the intestinal bacteria are depositing biochemicals into the skin that makes the facial skin an excellent media for bacterial growth. Sounds impractical due to how digestion and blood filtering works, but it could be a possibility. Anywhere, here is some stuff I found on Wikipedia: I could only see such statements as feasible in relation to a Freudian or metaphorical interpretation. Otherwise, no, more than likely wrong unless you've got some evidence going into further examination of the intestinal tract and remaining fecal matter that has yet to be released is the cause of infection.

Write things out while looking at your arm, hands, etc.. and imagine all the parts. Write things out... Sometimes the trick to studying for an aspect of an exam/quiz is to actually use rote memorization.

If you're really into this stuff, you may be interested in taking up a profession in bioengineering and reading more about materials science.

Well, I think if I were a sophisticated alien (let's say I'm from Earth, I've blown up Earth Lobo-style, I'm immortal, and I'm too lazy to look for intelligent life elsewhere), I'll just bounce a signal off someone, see if they pick up on it, and attempt to analyze it. The trick is having some kind of information bounce back to me, thus knowing they've intercepted it. Of course, it would take some time to receive the bounce, right? Well, perhaps the equipment I develop sends out a signal generated my some high-tech stuff that only people who've developed particular technologies and mastered particular realms of physics can analyze. With this in mind, a signal will only be bounced back once other life have mastered those technologies and realms of knowledge. And from there, I'm notified that there is someone of equal intelligence as me in the Universe. From there, I attempt to go visit them. Or perhaps I'll have my technology down a few steps so they don't try to visit me, pull a fast one on me, and attempt to take over my space fortress with gadgets and realms of knowledge they have yet to master yet can obtain via brute force. I think there are few things that would entice aliens to visit Earth and start crap: 1) We actually build a time machine Perhaps performing experiments in the mastering of the technology would be a signal for those who've already mastered it to come visit us: Thus making an intergalactic time travel war. 2) We master immortality Maybe they wouldn't care. Maybe they would. 3) We somehow generate this crazy idea that there is indeed life out in space and have an amazing bloodlust to destroy all life beyond Earth (perhaps the Aliens are psychic and will pop up just to destroy us). An old UFO people theories is the interplay between Egyptians and UFO people. But if we go back to Egyptian thinking, many were crazy and believed they developed time travel and immortality... And the Mayans did something similar. Perhaps UFO people did show up, destroy them, notice there really .. wasn't... anything special, and zipped away. Surely, the whole astronaut image in one of the pyramids bothers me to this day.

We may be able to find homological similarities, but it is questionable how far those homological similarities will go. Combine that fact with how the central nervous system (CNS) of a worm is different from a human's, and you must understand that involuntary AND voluntary control of particular systems, such as heart rate and breathing, may not be so easily understood with a model organism, such as C. elegans. For instance, I was lying down last night thinking about pacemaker potentials, nerve development in the heart, and whether or not worms can be a good enough model system to examine how hearts develop and mesh with a nervous system. I think they are a good model for study (as I even understood as a child when I would always cut up worms to watch them live on their remaining hearts -- earthworms have five), but I still think it won't get the complete picture.

Yes, security flaws. You're probably better off inducing those security flaws into bacteria. There's a variety of ways to attempt that. As you attempt to bring in more security flaws, you increase the probability of destroying more of those bacteria. Maybe figuring out how streptococcus conducts gene therapy on itself, putting that aspect into other bacteria, and then bring forward greater security flaws would give a larger ability to destroy the bacteria (B. anthracis in this case). If the genotyping of the various bacteria were known, perhaps using various biochemicals would easily take care of the bacteria. It seems like a method of exhaustion tactic might work well. But then again, for the 9/11 attacks, I believe they used steam pressurized formaldehyde (or some chemical) on government building walls. It took a while to clean the stuff up. Remember: B. anthracis can develop spores. So, if B. anthracis is in a spore form, the virus is not going to easily enter (if enter at all).

In a lot of ways, mice and rats are invasive. For some odd reason, we still have ethics committees about those guys. Should we have strict ethics about doing biological research with invasive species? What about bunnies? Should there be ethics involved with bunnies? I'm talking about Australian bunnies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia Australia is supposedly filled with a lot of these bunnies. Let alone, people have attempted to generate viruses in the past to get rid of the bunnies: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11553459 Personally, I think creation of the viruses was seriously unethical. Secondly, why destroy a useful resource when you can do so many things with it? For instance, perhaps a more ethical and considerable thing, people ate the Australian rabbits during the great depression. They generated a market around it. That's understandable. But then people generated a virus with the questionable intent of releasing it into the population without permission. Now that this has happened, surely people will be wary about eating the rabbits, as was done in the Great Depression and wartime. We have seem the ethical and the unethical. Nonetheless, as they are an invasive species, it gives a person opportunity to use them as a mammalian model to conduct biological experiments with, such as doing experiments on anatomy and physiology: And I'm not referring to immunology, as previous experiment with them in that regard have provided themselves as unethical.

I'm tired of looking at the ethics of particular things, such as religion and marriage. Is there someway we could notify users to make things more science related? I mean, I would more than likely be cool with a religion thread that talked about transhumanism and if it's ethical for people to persuade others to transhumanism (and then the person made some argument about sociobiology and whether or not transhumanism serves a functional use in a person's life).... But people aren't really going on that level. The board is polluted and getting out of control again. How about "religion and so on -- in relation to science/medicine"?

I'm looking over synthesizing alcohols with grignard reagents. I'm going batty trying to figure out where the positive charge is on MgBr+. Is it on the Br? The Mg? Is it localized all over, as in [H3O]+? Thus being [MgBr]+? Also, what is the name of the MgBr+? ChemSketch didn't seem to help in this department.

After taking a quick look at the article, I'd say there is definitely more ground to say synaptic plasticity is affected. I'd need more time to dissect the article. However, it seems as though it was implied that there was some cell viability and that a positive feedback loop was being created so that particular cells with applied TGF-II were sticking around. *reads a little harder once more*

I went to a talk about it yesterday (where a bunch of us scientists, multiple professors and students, were sitting around and someone presented it). It seemed pretty cool. It came out last month, though. A critical role for IGF-II in memory consolidation and enhancement http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7331/full/nature09667.html From what I gather, injections of TGF-II help create a positive feedback loop that allows particular cells, those of which are involved in the retention and recall of memory, stay alive and generate even more TGF-II for themselves so they stick around. I could see some Flowers for Algernon (link) stuff being possible with this. Furthermore, the more interesting aspect, is that I doubt there would be a decrease in cell stability as would be found in the fictitious Flowers for Algernon book. The cells find a way to stabilize themselves. Questionable if a person could eventually develop a tolerance, as the chemical is extracellular and binds to receptors. Many drugs can pass through the cell or somehow interact with the phospholipid bilayer to affect what is inside of the cell. But this binds to a receptor outside of the cell. As it is independent of the cell machinery, TGF-II could help discover more aspects of what's inside the cell (neuron) via manipulation/application of TGF-II and seeing what new things form in neurons. Perhaps some correlations can be found with worms or invertebrates that have expansive nervous systems (ganglia) that reach into somatic regions.

According to the study, for both sexes, higher education leads to a higher rate of suicide. You may want to take a look at the methods. suli%2E2009%2E39%2E5%2E463.pdf

The point here is that I asked for help, and I did do research. After doing enough research and not getting enough information, I asked for help. I decided all of it was becoming some serious B.S. when I looked into the terminology and concepts I was going to present and looked around on the web for others who have presented the information. Funny enough, they had only presented the terms and concepts in a very brief way. And they didn't even really explain the concepts or terms enough to be adequately understood. And this was from the main flag university, too. It's similar to how the article discusses it. You can't really make out too much about what CF and the FM is unless you're in the know about those. It just mentions that bats use FM and CF, but doesn't go too much further than that. It wasn't any better than just parroting something. I could have easily parroted the article and walked away. After seeing that happen, I thought to myself, "Alright, this is getting ridiculous. I've looked over and over for information, and am definitely not getting what I need. Time to ask for help." I had asked for those materials well enough ahead in time, of which he failed to adequately present. Furthermore, there was no research for him to really do, as he already had any data or relevant research materials gathered. There is a difference between collecting data and already having the data. He already had the data yet acted ignorant to its existence. There are few reasons for a person doing that. The fact that he actively helped the other students by (and if you're claiming it's him doing the research, then we can argue that) doing the research for them by telling them what they need. To help them and not me? Well, that's discrimination. I think this might really be a personal situation. The professor broke protocol last semester with a situation. Let a girl sign up for a class who was a brand new transfer: They're not suppose to. I got the A grade and she got a C. Maybe he thinks I deserve punishment or something for her getting a C and me getting an A. It was a team project, and maybe he thinks I'm responsible for her failure rather than him breaking protocol. It's not the first time I saw discrimination from them, as they put more emphasis on helping their grad students than anyone else accomplishing goals.

Based on scientific society's understanding of the brain and physics, we do not have evidence for telekinesis. However, you could attempt to trivialize the matter by saying volitions of the body are acts of telekinesis, but I'm not too sure how many people will agree with your paradigm. I think if it were to exist, then you'd surely have some crazy, almost impossible level of physics and interplay with physical surroundings. I mean, at the subatomic level, you'd have to find some way to use your neurons to change other quantum/physical aspects of your surrounding. I think if this were discovered, then people would either attempt to define the physical and cellular biology involved or find a new realm of physics and/or cellular biology. You're always going to get some hardcore physicalist wanting to define everything via physical law. At best, it could attempt to elude everyone and NEVER be understood: But then that person would be independent of physics, right? Definitely supernatural. And, as I often push forward to other scientists (and I annoy them with this), I say that James Randi is a psychic killer. And what I mean by this is that if someone with the skills did come forward, they'd end up on a table as a specimen (or perhaps someone would try to kill the psychic).

The professor picked an article, the one I attached a few posts back. And I do not believe the information was coincidental at all. No way, because we're talking about owls now. Last week was bats. The guys who are presenting this week are talking about owls. Funny enough, he seemed to have tell them that there are reading materials on the website I previously mentioned that will help them accomplish their speech. *grumble*

In a lot of ways, I didn't understand some of the diagrams from the article. I didn't understand doppler shift, despite how much I read into it. I also didn't understand many aspects of the cortical maps. There was actually something on a website that the professor put up, which he put up late. I kept asking him to put up the resources. It was like a nice 15 page discussion that basically broke down what what a lot of the terms, concepts, and physical aspects (such as doppler shift, and what it means for a bat to have a constant frequency vs. FM call) of the study were talking about. When I got the information/resource, I had wished I had it a week earlier. The professor is not very busy. He might be busy with his 6+ year Ph.D student who is trying to wrap up her dissertation, but other than that, he wasn't too busy. The student can handle herself... maybe. My supervisor was basically telling her elementary stuff she should already know in order to do an isolation experiment with a neuron. I hope that Ph.D student isn't that dense... And seeing as the information was available (I wasn't able to easily get access until a little after he assigned me my speech), he should have known it was there. Total neglect and ignorance from this guy. I was pissed. Lesson learned: If someone is late giving you resources, be late giving them resources back. He allowed me to have a week's worth of extension on my speech, but I didn't take it, because I believed I had enough ability to tackle the issue. The only thing I was missing, however, was critical information that he neglected to give when I probed him for it. I should have taken a speech assignment to do at a later time and told him to screw himself.

The speech is over. It didn't go so well. But I suspect that is primarily due to the professor not replying to my emails and being ignorant (literally). There was definitely another crucial part of information the professor did not get to me, which would have answered the brunt of my questions, thus saving me a lot of time. I couldn't tell if he was being arrogant, testing me, or straight-up ignorant as to learning materials and course design. I hate this school and these professors, I really do. @ ajb For ajb, since you are in power of your own material and what you choose to say, I would suggest you only show as much data as you are willing to get grilled on. Only show what you're willing to talk about.

Hello, Neco Vir. I do not know if you continue to read this or will come back to this. However, if someday you are to come back to this thread, I would like to suggest that you look into the research conducted by Dr. Richard E. Lee and colleagues at the Miami University in Ohio. Here is a list of publications: http://www.units.muohio.edu/cryolab/publications/index.htm After I observed these things for a little bit, I came to understand that there is definitely a complex biochemistry and cytological realm that is involved with freezing an organism and bringing it back. An ethological understanding of various biological and chemical workings may lead to better understanding an applicability to the human condition. There would be a need to discover and use model organisms as model systems to explore homologous (or pretty similar) systems in Homo sapiens. I think this would lead to an eventual link to finding an adequate way to "freeze" and revive people. I currently hypothesize that if a vertebral organism could be successfully frozen and brought back, there would be severe damage the dendritic spines that maintain memory and cognition. As such, upon revival of the organism, it may amnesia and lack a sense of self. However, as shown with Rana sylvatica, it finds a way to regain some behaviors, such as mating behavior. So, it could be said that mating and feeding behavior, instinctual aspects, find a way to re-emerge after a cryogenic hiberation. There would definitely need to be more research into this, for which I surely lack the funds and time. I do suspect someone will eventually pick this up, though. I have emailed Dr. Richard E. Lee Jr. about this issues, and he suggested I attempt to decide whether or not I think there are serious cognitive impairments after a state of cryogenic inducement after reading some articles he gave me. After briefly reading the articles, I decided that I think the realms of instinctual behavior and cognition are intertwined yet independent. Much more so in higher lifeforms, such as primates. I guess a person may want to find a species of organism that shows cognition along with social behavior and find a variety of experiments to examine and compare and contrast cognition vs. instinctual behavior (and perhaps vs. social behavior/cognition). This could but give the hope to keep such mappings together during freezing and revival. The fact that frogs regain some behaviors after freezing means that there are aspects to neuronal systems that firmly establish behavior and memories. And there is some kind of biochemical soup that locks connections together so that when the animal in unfrozen, it can again continue to conduct the behaviors. Long-term potentiation helps establish connections. But somehow, it's as if LTP is put on hold while the connection is still there. There isn't transmission, but it can be brought back online. "On-hold potentiation" if you will. I'm particularly interested if it's some kind of epigenetic factor, genetic, or simply cytoplasmic issue that allows these neuronal connections to be locked in place so that they can continue activity after revival.

So, I was given the article "Cortical Computational Maps Control Auditory Perception" 1991 Riquimaroux, Gaioni, Suga by a professor and asked to discuss the article and present it for about 10 to 15 minutes. 2875092.pdf I'm suppose to present the information within. My guess is that I'm basically putting the paper into dialogue format. I guess it's kind of like a journal club... sure. There are about 20 of us in the room. There was suppose to be 12, but there is 20, because of some admin. screw up. I'm not giving a talk on it to further my own research agendas. The audience would be 400-level (4th year) undergraduate students (peers and the two professors who lead the class). In my guess, some would be seniors and others would be 5th year undergraduate seniors. I'm not aware of any graduate students being around. I don't believe we are competing for a grade. If anything, people are competing for time slots to present papers. I was assigned to be the first person to give a speech. And yes, I will be graded.

How should I present a talk on an article? How do many scientists, biologists, experimenters present their research? I have to give a talk about echolocation in mustache bats. These mice that flap around. Anyway, it's a serious article, and I'm not too sure how to go about a talk. I mean, I've given talks on research I've done before. And I'd have to say I have my own particular style that I like. Then again, I've never received much audience feedback. I suspect if I consider what I'm doing, maybe some people wouldn't like it. But I try to make things seem a little interesting and interactive, as I like to use hand gestures and whatnot as I give a speech. I like to do the following: 1) Introduction 2) Methods and materials 3) Results 4) Discussion Yes, there is the simple fact this layout is similar to a research article. And I like presenting a speech this way, because it's like reading aloud the article to the audience... but in a more summarized, rhetorical fashion. And that's what I tend to aim for. I attempt to introduce the audience and have them understand what my goals and experiment were about. I don't know if this is a bad way to present research as an orator. I like it. Any ideas? Comments? Etc?

To the OP: I don't think much creativity will be found until graduate school. Personally, right now, I could think of a variety of neuroscience projects that I could work on if I had an army of researchers and enough funds. I've been particularly interested in the anatomical and physiological rebuilding of the nervous system of Rana sylvatica after cryogenic hibernation. I asked a researcher who works on cryogenics about this. He emailed saying he wasn't sure about anyone working on the rebuilding of the involuntary nervous system. I find I was able to develop this idea after learning enough material. This came about from reading, learning, and spending time learning the basics. If I didn't keep learning more and more material, I wouldn't be able to know the basics to understand the parts of things I want to study and investigate. Furthermore I wouldn't know if what I wanted to investigate is particularly cutting edge. A person needs a foundation in order to build upon. I believe there is eventually a level where a person develops creative, unique ideas. Because I some knowledge of neuroethology, I know that there is also some bug species I could investigate instead. I could also, if I could figure it out, perhaps investigate tardigrades and the nervous system under severely cold conditions. To hypervalent: I agree with many of your points, hypervalent_iodine. I'm not bitter about lab work. I am bitter about many things, but in particular I dislike being mislead, jacked around, and having my time wasted. I felt like a lot of that occurred while I was first looking for research. I try to balance my pessimism and optimism these days. I agree that it's difficult to find ways to get people to start up on a project and start doing things for themselves. There are many increases in technological advancement to help with this issue, and these advances, I believe, greatly help. Get a group set-up with Skype, webcam technology, email, etc... and you can have people digitally supervising the work of others. Many professionals are dumbfounded when using such technologies and may even be skeptical of such technologies and their efficiency. I don't blame them, as I at times am skeptical of the effiency of particular web collaborations. I've worked on web collaborations since I was about 14. The first one was a video game design collaboration with people from different parts of the U.S.. This wasn't a school project. It was just something a bunch of us gamers did in order to make a cool server with gameplay and awesome maps. This was maybe in year 2000. I guess you could see people as a security concern if you want. That just needs more control needs to be implemented. It's not simple. Not many people know how to use particular types of equipment. But I often wonder if a person did make a really great recorded tutorial, then it would be easier to not have to supervise people. I often question if there is a way to get around hands-on training. I think extremely effective communication is required. But surely, that means a longer video to watch or more interactive flash programs to make... or something like that.... As a funny point, though, I still see Ph.D students, graduate students, and research assistants failing to prevent chemical contamination or biological contamination when working with particular supplies. Even though people get training, sometimes they forget even the most essential things. I have yet to figure out if that's because many universities are competition-based and so emphasis on particular topics are easily dismissed because people are always rushing to get things done and get a good grade. Me: "So, why did you take the pipette and suck up the solution from the batch rather than pouring the batch into a clean beaker?" I see that wayyyyy too many times.