LucidDreamer

My requirements for evolution were chosen so there would be no argument over whether that degree of change actually constituted a new species. To answer radical edward, I did not pick the amount of difference between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man because its anyone’s guess as to whether Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man could produce viable offspring and I don’t believe we have the genetic code from them. "6,000 years? Check your dates pls." Ok, I did. Recent evidence shows the most ancient writings to be from around 3100-3300 BC. Doesn't seem like enough to quibble about and I really don’t disagree with the rest of your post. Yes the frequency of alleles has shifted some in human history. But will this fluctuation actually bring about the creation of a new species in time. If you took a man from 40,000 years ago and dressed him up in a suit and put him on wallstreet, noone would look twice.

90% of an augument is in the definitions. I'm afraid this argument will go nowhere because evolution is such a broad term. Lets start with a definition then restate the question. Lets define evolution as the change of a species to the extent that they are no longer able to procreate with the original and with a DNA change of 1%(about the same amount of difference in DNA between humans and chimpanzees). If there was no genetic engineering and no separation into isolated groups for long periods of time would man evolve into a new species in 2 million years according to this definition. Lets also pretend that his civilization grows and experiences no major disasters with no major depletions of population.

I would agree with yourdadonapogos that we have physically evolved very little in the course of human history. But human history spans no more than about 6,000 years, which is a very short time compared to the eons that life has been evolving on earth. I would also argue that although man has not physically evolved much in the last 6000 years he has in fact evolved more than any other organism in the history of earth in that time. Before man and civilization the only way a species could pass the information that it had accumulated for millions of years about how to survive was through its genes. Since language was developed and writing was invented the amount of information that is passed down through the human species has become almost unfathomable. We are no longer constrained as other organisms are to the information in the genes. We are no longer restricted to one form of existence that takes millions of years to remake. Our existence is no longer dependent upon the whims of nature. We fly higher than any bird, dive deeper than any marine animal, and run faster than any land animal. The burden of evolution has been taken off the shoulders of natural selection and placed on the beams of libraries and the infrastructure of the Internet. With a huge and ever increasing population with limitless combinations of alleles and modern medicine to ensure that most combinations survive there will be little natural physical evolution that is not orchestrated by our own hands.

That's a cool video. The f is frequency of the waves formed, which is the amount of waves that you generate per time. The a is the acceleration that the machine uses to create the waves. g is the acceleration of gravity which is 32 ft/s, so 25 g would be an acceleration equal to 25 times gravity. Acceleration is the increase in the amount of speed per time. Yes the cornstarch is being shaken. Yes those machines look like they might do the trick but don't go buy one on my advice. Maybe there is another way you could create the waves without having to buy one of those machines. The only way I can think of right now is to borrow a paint shaker and try to modify it for your use. But I have no idea if that would work. Maybe someone else has some more info on this experiment or maybe they could suggest another way to create the waves without buying a machine.

With the addition of the T to the begining of the sequence you have created a frameshift mutation. This is usually very distructive and usually results in a very abmormal protein because all of the codons after the insertion/deletion are incorrect.(unless the alteration just happens to code for the same amino acid). I did not check to see how many of the codons changed to another amino acid but the amount changed is the key to how much damage is done. On the second part you have created another frameshift mutation by deleting the 10th base. However a frameshift mutation only effects the codons after the insertion/deletion so since the DNA sequence you are looking at is only 5 aminos long and the deletion only affects the 5th codon the effect is not as bad as if it occurred earlier in the sequence. Just how much this insertion effects the function of the sequence depends on many factors. Sometimes by changing one amino acid in a protein sequence you get no change at all and sometimes it totally changes it. It depends on where it is and the function of that amino for the peptide. In this case you have changed from glycine, a polar amino acid, to Aspartic acid, an acidic amino acid. I don't know offhand what this would do but it could be a significant change.

I recommend "Thinking Physics" by Lewis Carroll Epstein because it’s a totally new approach to learning physics. The book is comprised entirely of illustrated problems that are explained in a way that you really begin to understand the "why" of physics. Its not a hard read at all but some of the problems will even stump a physicist.

A really good vaccine would have a very slim chance of infecting the patient because it would have no virulent viruses and yet still be effective. So I couldn't vote until I knew more about the vaccine.

The trick is that your mind can pick up the meaning of the words faster than you can sound them out. Allot of people simply read as fast as they can talk, just taking in one word at a time. But given a little practice you can learn to read much faster than that by training your mind to look for key words and ignore all the filler. My method involves moving my middle 3 fingers across the book underneath the sentence im reading. I usually move it twice for each line and then go on to the line underneath it. One of the key principles here is to keep your fingers moving at a steady pace and force your mind to keep up. Since your taking in the lines in just two glances you will have to learn to relax your eyes a little and focus on a cluster of like 6 words instead of just one. This method should allow you to read about 2-3 times faster with the same level of comprehension. The reason for this is that your mind is totally consumed with its task and will not wander off. However, If you go any faster you will probably sacrifice comprehension for speed. If you are moving faster than like 5 times the rate at which you can speak it becomes skimming or photoreading which has its uses as well. Speed-Reading is only useful in certain situations. If you are reading a paperback book with easy to medium level difficulty it can be quite useful. It's not really possible to speed read a difficult subject like biochemistry and learn anything. Also, while your speed reading you don't really have time to think about the material, its simply an exercise in fact finding. With a little practice you will find yourself reading much faster with good comprehension and you will also learn when it’s useful to use it.

It’s called biomimicry and its really cool. I'm not sure a biologist would be the best candidate for a robot team. I think a good team might consist of a bioengineer, a biophysicist, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a robot engineer (if there is such a thing), and me. I don't really have any qualifications, but I really want to build a robot.

I took a forensic psychology course and the textbook had a section on hypnosis and memory. A group of psychologist gathered all of the research and came up with the conclusion that hypnosis did not help to recall lost memories. I agree with glider as well. If you study in the traditional way by speaking it, studying vocabulary, and watching Russian movies you will not have to learn from scratch, your past experience will greatly increase your ability to pick it up. I read a book once where the researchers claimed they could increase the rate of learning a foreign language by like 300%. They played Baroque music with a certain rhythm that produced strong alpha waves and then read foreign vocabulary words to that rhythm. The name of the book is "Superlearning."

I think that at some point if we headed out into space we would be unable to measure earth's magnetic field with current instrumentation.

I think tycho is right and that magnetic fields created by electromagnetic forces is like all other forces and it has infinite reach. But like gravity, the effects of a magnetic field become smaller and smaller as you get farther away until its pretty much inconsequential.

I think you and your friends need to invest or build a high-quality security system to protect all the sheds or find somewhere else to store your stuff. Having to replace stuff + sheds all the time sounds like a lot of wasted time and money. Good luck on whatever you decide to do though.

Ok, i have been thinking about this since last night, I didn't want to look it up because I wanted to figure it out myself. I believe I have the answer. To really understand this you must visualize it. If you were at the North Pole and you set a pendulum in motion by pulling back on it as you walked towards the South Pole you would create a motion along an axis from the North Pole to the South Pole (a vertical path). If you drew a line underneath you representing the pendulum path you would be able to detect any change in its pattern. As the day grew later you would notice that the line that the pendulum traced was moving and was no longer tracing the same line but was actually changing. At six hours you would notice that the pendulum was tracing a pattern perpendicular to its original path, at 12 hours it would be vertical, 18 hours perpendicular and at 24 its pattern would be vertical again and would have done a 360 in one day. Basically, since the earth is spinning but the pendulum is not attached to the earth except by a string that does not force it to rotate it, the world spins underneath the pendulum. If you set up the pendulum experiment at the equator and set its motion vertical from the north pole to the south pole the and traced its pattern over the day or even a year the pattern would never change. The earth would be spinning underneath it traveling north to south while the earth is moving east to west. What about if you set up a pendulum somewhere in between the North Pole and the equator. Let’s set up our experiment just 50 miles south of the North Pole. This time it would rotate like it did at the North Pole but it would take just a little bit longer than a day. As you get farther from the north or south poles and approach the equator the amount of time it takes to change its motion 360 would increase until you reach the equator and it would no longer change. Now, the reason for this. The pendulum swings because of the force of gravity. The force of gravity of the earth is centered in the center of the earth. The earth spins along an axis going from the North Pole to the south. When the pendulum is set in motion at the equator the motion of the pendulum going from north to south and the axis of the earth spinning are exactly perpendicular. But if you move the pendulum say half way in between the North Pole and the equator they are no longer perpendicular. Think of it like this. If I take a globe or and ball and drove a spike through it from the north to the south pole and I had another spike with the restriction that it could only be held perpendicular to the spike and then decided to drive it through the spot where I set up the pendulum it would not go through the center of the globe. Since I set the pendulum halfway in-between the north pole and the equator and I can only drive my second shaft through the globe perpendicular to the north and south pole it would be driven into the globe on the upper hemisphere half way to the pole. But the pendulum is not attracted to the depth of the earth directly below it 1/4 of the way up the world. It’s attracted to the center of the earth 1/2 way between both poles. So the plane that is created when you drove the spike in perpendicular to the poles and the plane created if you went directly to the center of the earth are not the same and they create an angle between them. As the earth spins this angle causes the pendulum to spin around in its path. You can really see this if you take a large ball. Put a dot the top and bottom for the poles and draw a line halfway around to create the equator. Place the pen halfway between the equator and the North Pole. If you hold the pen perpendicular to the poles and spin the ball along the north and south axis you will draw a circle halfway between the North Pole and the equator. But if you hold the pen towards the center of the ball and spin it along the north and South Pole you will create a spiral and you will understand the twisting motion that causes a pendulum to change its path. Sorry about the length of this thread.

1) you could test the memories of people at different ages for both verbal and visual memory 2)you could test the effects of different kinds of music on peoples memories or other kinds of mental activities. 3)you could test whether peoples memories are affected by smells, lound repeating annoying sounds, or affter they just eat certain kinds of foods. 4)you could get a female friends and a male friend to ask strangers for help and see if there is a difference in the amount of people that help them 5)you could get friends of differnt ethnic backgrounds to ask for help or try to get assitance at stores and see if there is a difference 6)You could test how suggestable people's memory is by having two people try to remember something that you set up, but one of them is a friend that insist that it happened in a way that is wrong. Then test if this affects the others memory. 7)Test whether left handed people really are more creative than right handed 8)give football fans questionares that test how happy or depressd they are in relation to wherther thier team has won recently and see if and how much it changes. 9) You could research the backgrounds of football players and find if their is somekind of correlation between being a professional football player and their parents education, profession, how big the family is, whether anone else is an athlete, etc. 10) you could tell a stranger you have an important quetion to ask them then say hold on and walk around the corner or in a room and have a friend come out wearing the same cloths and see if they notice. I could go on and on, does any of this help?

A creature with so little density that it floats in air and thus is capable of swimming would have allot more problems than just being fragile. It could not have proteins for structure or enzymatic reactions nor could it have fats or carbohydrates to store energy. I propose a different type of creature that could move through the air like it was swimming. A creature with a large bubble like cavity that it fills with a gas that is lighter than air, such as hydrogen. It could make more hydrogen inside the cavity or release it to move up and down. Instead of wings it could have flippers to move it around. It would resemble something like a bloated puffer fish.

One of my favorite sites has some stuff about physics, astronomy, and lots of other cool things. http://www.howstuffworks.com

Here's one for remembering the classifications of organisms: Kings Play Cards On Fairly Good Silk Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species

Yes. Here is an article with several new species created with genetic engineering. http://members.tripod.com/c_rader0/gemod.htm

I doubt they really need to anymore as they have become domesticated but it takes a long time to change genetic programming. The original reason that cats sleep so much was to conserve energy. They were fast and efficient hunters that use lots of energy in a short burst of activity and then recouped by sleeping and napping. Now they are just lazy.

This research didn't involve genetic engineering but its pretty cool anyway: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/205477.stm

The answer to the part about mixing kingdoms is yes. We have been splicing different pieces of DNA into bacteria for years. For instance, one of the best methods of producing human insulin is to harvest genetically altered bacteria.

If you are interested in lucid dreaming I recommend reading "Lucid dreaming" by Stephen LaBarge (maybe Laberge).

What does a2 stand for and are there any other guidelines?

Depends on what your definition of strongest. Diamonds get that reputation because they are at the top of the hardness scale, which has to do with the strength of chemical bonds. Hardness is determined by doing a scratching test, basically seeing what will scratch what. Diamonds score a 10 on their ability to scratch other minerals and not be scratched themselves. Diamonds on the other hand can easily be destroyed by smashing them while some metal alloys can be pounded on all day and they will only loose thier shape a little.