Kookas

For an A-Level Biology project, I've been doing a CGI animation of two molecules of glucose bonding to start to form starch. I've assumed that to form the glycosidic bond between the two molecules, a molecule of water is formed, but is that actually correct? I sort of have a feeling it isn't. This is my entry project (I start year 12 tomorrow), so all I know about saccharides is what I can find on the Internet.

http://www.chromodis...hromosomes.aspx It's about halfway down the page. I hope that's what you were looking for

First thing that I thought was that it is a highly-stylised virus. To be honest though, does this really fit here? I don't think there are any creatures with a neon ring in their body

I'd say it varies from case to case depending on variables such as the mother's movement as the baby develops - I doubt there's one single orientation for every fetus.

My interpretation of what Marqq has said is this: 1. If every particle is frozen in position, then your thoughts are frozen and so your conciousness is frozen. However, you would not experience it as you would have no perception of the passage of time and so the time spent frozen would apparently be over in an instant. 2. No, like I said, you wouldn't actually experience it as such. 3. I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you froze someone to absolute zero, then yes, everything is frozen. If you mean freezing the experience so you constantly relive the moment over and over (some kind of torture?), that would not work, see above. 4. Processes and motion themselves are based on the position of particles. And yes, I should imagine that they would indeed retain all their properties. Absolute zero means there is exactly zero energy and so nothing could possibly change unless it gained energy and thus was not at absolute zero.

Natural selection is founded on the simple fact that if something is terrible at doing something, it is likely to fail. You could apply that to organisms and their ability to survive, as you do, and you could apply that to astronomical systems and their ability to maintain stability, as you also do. In fact, you can apply that very basic logic to anything and everything. In that sense, you could say everything that exists evolves. It's partially why a lot of creationists are actually starting to believe in evolution and natural selection. There are large followings of Muslims and Christians who believe in theistic evolution.

Very interesting and thanks for the article. It does seem that we do a lot for people we'll only interact with once in our lives (or even, in some cases, may not interact with at all). I'd question that last line though: It seems to me that everything we do wilfully has a gain of some sort, even if sometimes only an emotional one. I look at it as an incentive that ultimately leads to the preservation of the species. Those who are motivated to be generous without looking ahead are driven by the emotional benefits of their actions in the same way that those who help "only when they can see a gain" are. Makes evolutionary sense, doesn't it? You can't deny that paying the homeless or tipping the waiter makes you feel better about yourself - the emotional drive to try and maintain social relations.

"Consciousness" is something that really intrigues me. You can't really study it scientifically. Along the same lines, how do you prove to someone else that you are conscious? Anyway, to say that consciousness arises from complex cell structures seems a bit off to me and I beg to differ. I'd say it's a lot deeper than that. I'm not talking "spiritual" or any of that, I'm talking a lot more general. Perhaps sentience arises from certain electrical impulses? In which case there would be far more to the world than could ever be reliably studied. I wouldn't attribute any single part of the brain to the creation of sentience. It strikes me as quite possible that certain interactions within every single neuron create "us". The problem is that in order to even get close to answering this question, you have to really delve deep into the realms of what the mind is and how it really works. Neurons create the complex and sophisticated system that is our brain and each one feeds information to another. Our conciousness leads us to believe that we can control what each neuron feeds the other - we work arbitrarily, out of our own free will. In reality, free will is a complicated process of decision-making and comprehension that is, to some extent at least, predictable. The consciousness is, if you will, merely the output of this system, a sort of "collage" of all the inter-neuron communications currently going on in the brain. So from that perspective, consciousness does not arise from one particular neuron, but from the brain as a whole. It seems a bit mumbo-jumboy and baseless, but I think it's as scientific as you can get when it comes to something that can't be observed in anything but yourself - in my opinion, you can't really get beyond speculation. Perhaps I'm wrong, though. Perhaps conciousness only occurs in the parts of the brain that manage thought. Still, you won't be able to investigate anyone but yourself if you want a reliable study. http://www.sciencefo...616#entry619616 In the above article Paul Thagard, of Psychology Today, recommends checking out the websites of the following people for further reading: Antonio Damasio, Los Angeles Stanislas Dehaene, Paris Christof Koch, Pasadena Guilio Tononi, Madison It might seem off-topic, but you can't really answer your question without defining what conciousness is, and to do that you have to look at this type of thing. (By the way, psychology and neuroscience are directly linked. I wouldn't recommend studying one without the other if you want to gain a true understanding of the nature of the mind.)

I'm curious about how life comes into being right down at the atomic scale. Are there certain elements that will bond and create an organic material of their own accord given certain environmental conditions? I would love to know what elements could naturally form something that resembles an organism, protein, or similar. It seems reasonable to assume that all life must have originated from something fairly simple which somehow joined with other molecules to become something more complex. Although I also figure that if we knew, we'd probably be developing our own stem-cells and whatnot by now. I'm only making assumptions, though, and I'm not an expert (I would love "the expert view" on this).

It's a very difficult topic, this, as you can be a child with some very valuable experience, or an adult with nothing much worth talking about. You may have parents from a rich learning background, or parents who didn't even get the opportunity. People often fall back onto obvious attributes (such as age) when they are unable to find a deeper cause for things, and it doesn't always work.

So, you want it to wait for a certain period of time? It can be done using ActionScript and Timers. Try this: import flash.events.TimerEvent; stop(); var sleepTime:Timer = new Timer(5000); sleepTime.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, moveOn); function moveOn(event:TimerEvent) { play(); } EDIT: Sorry, didn't check the post date, didn't realise that threads so old would be on the first page...

It makes sense to me that emotions are influenced (if not controlled completely) by our genes (in which all actions of any organism seem to find their roots). The emotions might simply be the genes' way of getting us to act for its survival. Makes everything seem quite superficial, really (and I suppose it is, if you give it enough thought).