Skye

I think the problem with protists is that if you start diviving them up, you end up with at least a half dozen different groups. And I'm not sure anybody really wants to give slime molds the same status systematically as animals. But that's also the problem with the three domains organisation, and people seem to be accepting that. I think it's interesting how the family tree is still being sketched out, even the major branches. The choanoflagellates are similar to choanocytes of sponges, I think it is all the choanoflagellates. They both have a collar dealy (choano=collar) and flagella inside. But I'm not sure if they are similar aside from that. I found the link below, but it's only one gene. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VRT-43F87N0-R&_coverDate=06/26/2001&_alid=289081454&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=6243&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=71f3acee230259f425177763a6078803#toc2 A problem is that the choanocyte is a differentiated somatic cell of sponges, it's not the germ cell. It would make alot more sense if choanoflagellates resembled the germ cells, then the differentiated cells could have come after.

Fungi is one of the five kingdoms. Animals, plants, fungi, protists and monera. Let's say I said to you Dak, I want you, on behalf of humanity, to reorganise protista. So let's say we have three domains; bacteria, archaea and eukarya. Then within eukarya you have something like this, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/eukaryotasy.html That's a little speculative I think, maybe choanoflagellates are closely related to animals, I'm not sure. But anyways let's assume it's something like that. How would you organise the protists?

I've heard people say this before. Modern systematics would make it seem so, as the Kingdom is not monophyletic and green algae would be better off grouped with plants than protists in any case. The botanists probably claim them anyway. So should people stop using it, and should it no longer be taught in classes or textbooks?

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/53272

Well they're protozoans, but malaria would interesting, as they breed within RBCs. And hepatocytes, but well maybe that would be taking it too far. Then instead of antibiotics you could use a G&T

Not really. The difference with the current war is that NATO hasn't tried to impose authority from outside, but rather they have backed one side (the Northern Alliance). The Afghans haven't put their differences aside, and the warlords of the Northern Alliance have appeared pretty happy to ally themselves with NATO to oust the Taliban. Things could change of course, but at the moment it looks different to the Soviet war.

Faced with parasitic flies that are attracted to the calls, silent variants of black field crickets in Hawaii have been reported to have emerged and become quite successful. This has apparently occurred over about 5 years, pretty quick to me, but then I'm not a cricket. The problem for the stealth crickets is that now the female crickets can't hear them. So the stealth crickets huddle about the remaining chirpy crickets and steal their mates. Cricket ingenuity seems to know no bounds. I think it will be interesting to see how the proportion of chirpy and stealth cricket in the population changes over time. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/921/2

In a rah rah article on military deployments here there was an interesting quote by the defence chief. http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/special-forces-may-face-total-recall/2006/09/27/1159337222421.html This sounds fairly reasonable, there still seems to be a fair number Taliban members and they are cashed up with opium money, so it will probably take a while. It'll be interesting to see if NATO can keep supplying forces for ten years, especially to the south.

I think the difference is that if you come to SFN and hit 'New Posts' you won't have a large proportion being religious discussion. That will allow science-minded members to focus on the science, and particularly it will allow science mods to focus on science threads. There are only so many hours in the day.

Women are such strange creatures, they seem to either reject you so completely that they won't talk to you or fall for you so deeply they can't speak to you. And then they complain you don't listen to them.

There's supposedly a policy of containment of China with the US State Dept. This includes supporting Japan being more outgoing in its foreign policy. When she last visted Oz Condi Rice denied that this. But other people within the Department, like Bob Zoelick, have put forth alternate ideas, so there's obviously a rough policy there that they are creating alternatives to. After WWII some convicted war criminals were released and took up jobs in the government. So there's a sense within the countries that were occupied during WWII that Japan has never really taken its conduct during the war seriously. The shrine vists have played into that in being apparent contradictory to Japan's apologies for war crimes. China and others have protested, but Koizumi has been unwilling to back down to pressure. There's a feeling that Abe might be able to to avoid this if he doesn't set a precedent like Koizumi did. Other than that though, there's the strange relationship Japanese nationalists have with the US that confuses things. On the one hand the US is the main force pushing Japan to take a greater role in the world, and to take a looser interpretation of the pacifist constitution. On the other the US still occupies Japan, and with an apparent agreement to base a nuclear carrier in Japan, this will continue for some time into the future. So there's a sense of Japan being drawn into US foreign policy, something alot of governments around the world have had to deal with since 9/11.

What makes this forum more than half-arsed (I'd say we're a good three-quarter arsed) is that there are people here who have some idea about this science lark. What a theology site will need to do is to attract the same sorts of people, who have the knowledge and hard-headedness to belt discussions into shape. I'm not sure how to do that, but I think that you should try to attract those sort of people. Promises of a blissful afterlife seem to be in vogue.

I imagine the lattice is not completely formed, so there are sheets of crystal that are sliding over each other like graphite.

An issue with alot of these things is maintaining the intellectual property rights of the system. An example is that the UK is developing a suite of weapons for the Eurofighter Typhoon. France already has some weapons that could be used, but the UK wants to be able to sell the Typhoon without France being able to block the sale of the weapons, which would hobble the plane. A big export market for armoured vehicles are the Arab states. Egypt even assembles Abrams tanks from kits. How would Israel (or the Arabs) feel about Israeli weapons on their vehicles? Might be an issue too.

There are already naval versions, most corvettes and frigates, and larger vessels, are fitted with them. They are larger guns though since they're dealing with missiles. Germany is also developing an RPG counter measure for their tanks.

Cotton wadding is very common. You should be able to get it at a supermarket as cotton balls.

Bi-partisan that is Looking at the Queensland election this weekend, the interesting thing about Australian politics has been two trends over the last few years. One is that at the federal level the right wing parties have been becoming increasing dominant. They have been in power for ten years and now control both houses of parliament. The other is that at the state (and territory) level the left wing parties have been becoming increasing dominant. Every state and territory government is left wing. What this means is that people are voting for different parties at different elections. People presumably see through the rhetoric and are voting for what they feel is the best party. That has to be a good thing right?

Yeah that's right. Chemical reactions often release energy as heat, and since heat energy can't converted to other forms of energy by organisms it is lost. So energy is constantly being bled off as heat. The energy that flows from one organism to another is energy 'stored' in chemical bonds. This starts with photosynthesis, with light energy being captured and then transfered and stored by binding smaller molecules together into sugars. Sugars can be broken down again, and these reactions are coupled to the production of molecules like ATP, and then the ATP is broken down and this reaction coupled to many reactions in the cell. Animals can eat plants and absorb the sugars, and then break them down to produce ATP for themselves. In this way they are absorbing the energy that the plant absorbed from sun light.

MHC Class I proteins are found on nearly all cells. Fragments of foreign proteins within the cell are bound to the MHC protein and presented on the surface of the cell. This marks the cell for phagocytes to eat it. MHC I is mainly used to fight viral attacks, which occur inside the cell. MHC Class II proteins are only found on antigen presenting cells. These cells bind foreign protein found outside the cell, take it in and fragment it, then present the fragments on the MHC protein. T cells bind to the MHC and protein fragment, and can then trigger an immune response. MHC II is mainly used to fight bacterial attacks, which occur outside the cell.

The rough pattern is that the maximum valency for each element (some do have multiple valencies) is at a highest: -Firstly in the middle columns -Secondly in the lower rows

The problem is that declaring victory isn't action. Maybe he has more concrete plans for what declaring victory would mean regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. It's difficult judge without that. I don't think it'd be wise to pull out from either country though.

I don't like attributing responisibility to either person, since it's not as though either of them decided to allow it to happen. I think it took the attack to make it feasible for the changes to happen to domestic policy to make another attack more difficult. If people are going to blame Clinton for anything it should be for pulling out of Somalia, which was an actual decision. Since then there's been a civil war and a month ago an Islamist group has took control of the capital.

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060904/full/060904-11.html A paper in Science has reported that a woman in a vegetative state has apparently responded to people asking her to think of doing certain tasks, like playing tennis. After being asked to do so fMRI scans showed brain activity in the same regions as in controls. Owen A. M., et al. (2006) Science, 313. 1402

I did some in the past, mostly muay Thai and kickboxing. I got annoyed with it because I trained for a boxing fight, and I got sick, and a kickboxing fight, and it fell through. So my training faded out after that, although there was a brief grappling revival.

It would depend entirely on whether the new state was allied to the US. If so, then things wouldn't change much. If not, then there'd be a war. Actually there'd be a serious war in the creation of such a state, most likely. TheUS went to all that trouble just to get Iraq on side, imagine the fireworks for the new Palestine. The US support (in terms of arms sales) every state in the region I can think of, aside from Syria. That's not by accident, Israel was used to show the superiority of US kit over Soviet.