jimmydasaint

I commend your intellectual honesty. However, is it not considered ethical to care about all life in general that happen to share this planet with us? This category would include anencephalic clones, or any other clones for that matter. I consider it a personal ethical duty to care for most (but not all) creatures and bemoan the damage that we do to the environment for greed or lebensraum. Additionally, IMHO, the way we think about humans in general is also important. If we consider humans to be no more than animals, then there should be no objection to cloning humans or to construct chimeras, or indeed, to make transgenic humans. However, if we consider humans to be something separate from the animal kingdom, and we cannot risk DNA damage and the possible suffering to human foetuses or babies, from poor cloning technique: then the problem is both technical and moral.

SJ, I would be careful to attribute industrial toxins in allergic asthma. I think there are several factors which could contribute to the role of toxins in diseases like asthma. Amongst them are the following: a) age of the subject, b) health of the subject c) type of environmental pollutant d) concentration of environmental pollutant e) type of activity performed by the subject at time of onset of symptoms... I would be interested in understanding why asthma is more common in children from families where the parents smoke. Any ideas folks?

I am a bit pushed for tine, but I will say that I find the results quite mixed, as this article seems to indicate. Science Daily

After doing a bit of reading, I would agree with the hygiene hypothesis. However, the wiki article seems to come up with a long list of problems related to the hypothesis and I would have to re-check some of the articles for credible content. Wiki

This is a puzzle to me. Why is it that gorillas,, who are herbivores, to the best of my meagre knowledge, have well-developed canine teeth? Are they as strong as those of carnivorous animals? If you had found a fossil of a gorilla with forward facing eye sockets and well-developed canine teeth, does that not show a carnivorous past? Any views? canine teeth

As you may have noticed, asthma is on the increase. There appear to be two forms - allergic and non-allergic. Moreover, there are an estimated 150 million people worldwide with asthma. I think the dominant form is allergic asthma. However, what are the causes? Are they genetic, because I doubt that the genetic profile would have changed that much? Or are the changes environmental, or social? Any ideas? Asthma Article

I think SMF has given you a pretty good answer. The transient phenotype expressed by persisters allows escape from antibiotic effects but the exact mechanism seems to be unclear. Link to journal As a speculation, is it possible that: a) the antibiotic targets in the cells (ribosomes, membranes etc...) are inactive so no binding occurs and the antibiotics diffuse out? b) Additionally, is it possible that the dose of the antibiotic and the half life/ persistence of the antibiotic is also important? Refer also to Table 1 in this article.Half Life of Antibiotics

Reading mooeypoo's article about the confirmation bias involved in locating an Australopithecine skeleton, the suggested 'Missing Link' of human ancestry (mooeypoo ) inspired me to think of examples where scientists had cheated to get ahead. Certainly, I had witnesses one or two 'dodgy' goings on as a research scientist over twenty years ago (I quit research 20 years ago) and I wondered how much of an issue it had become. I found two reasonably relevant articles: Nature Article Saudi Journal But I have to admit that everything is not black and white here, and that my idealism as a young man to do the ethically correct thing has now given way to feeling sympathy for those that feel that they can only gain grant funding or achieve a permanent contract through adding to their publication count. Of course, tweaking the data is unethical and deserves disapprobation. How do others feel?

Do you have any papers to refer to, for further information please? That is quite a large claim to make.

Link The immune system has T cells which 'takes out' lymphocytes that would fight the body itself. The T cells are called regulatory T cells. We have found a gene, called Foxp3 which controls how the regulatory T cell develops into a CD4 strain from naive T cells. In humans and mice where this gene is 'knocked out' or faulty, the body's lymphocytes fight against the body itself causing inflammation, or swelling (like what happens in arthritis when the joints swell up). The Foxp3 gene seems to be a transcription factor and helps DNA inside the regulator T cells to effectively become RNA. This makes sense to me. What more would you like to discuss?

With the excellent contributions others have made with the information they presented, I wonder if I may make a speculation. Spontaneous human combustion needs at least alcohol as an accelerant, involves people who regularly consume alcohol (so we don't see horses spontaneously disappear in a puff of smoke and flames) and may involve asphyxiation of the person from smoke inhalation. The 'anaesthetised' state of the person would slow responses to the initial flame anyway. Combined to the 'wick effect' of slow burning body fat, the whole person could be consumed and burnt to cinders. Sorry to bring up an old thread but this is fascinating stuff.

IMHO, the jury still seems to be out about the effects of zinc, although it appears to have a relatively beneficial effect on the immune system. For example: The Lancet However, to provide a more balanced view, it is also possible that in studies where zinc has been of benefit to patients, a confounding factor is that administration of zinc helps to fight zinc deficiency in the first instance: Link to article

IMHO most of you, especially timo, have hit the nail on the head. You have to be able to publish and receive grants as an academic, in order to keep a reasonably high profile in the academic world. However, the further you go in Scientific research, the more you can end up in research of 'pure Science'. In short, there might be no direct useful result to your research except to add to the body of knowledge about an organism. For example, it may not be important to others whether or not a flagellated bacterium moves in a nutrient medium in a clockwise or anti-clockwise motion. However, to the individual researcher, he has fitted another part of the jigsaw puzzle in place, leaving it to others to discover other facets of the big picture. The danger is that the academic loses touch with the real world. This may manifest itself in a loss of ability to enter into social discourse with students or the general public or in personality disorders. We all know stories about nutty professors. One of my favourites is about a Physics professor who wore the same sweater to all his lectures in the winter and, due to the summer heat, cut out oval patches in the armpits to aid air circulation in the summer.

Well Esoteric groups (and I tentatively include Freemasons here) seem to have ESP already tapped. The people I have met claim that you can become telepathic with another person by synchronising your own breathing patterns with theirs. These guys seem to think it is a passe subject: Link

I would be a hypocrite to disagree with you. Both sides should move forward and not with the type of scornful attitude that requires 10 foot high Neon signs to make their point. As soon as you resort to this type of scorn, it creates a psychological barrier in the 'opponent'. I am used to seeing a low key poster effect outside churches in Great Britain and did not realise that the Americans like to broadcast their views in such an OTT manner. I am against any billboarding of religious, or anti-religious sentiment in this way. Why should all of us not try something radical and address other humans in a way that preserves their dignity as well as ours?

I am not taking sides here, but a comment, please. IMHO, Atheists, Theists, Deists, have the right for free speech. It is our basic human right. However, although we have the right to treat each other with disdain, we should not use this right to mock the deeply held beliefs of another person. The erecting of a billboard to advertise religion as a scam is, at best, disdainful and, at worst, an ill-thought out move. The interviewer in the O.P. used a crude, playground, method, to put down Silverman. However, he did have a right to respond to being treated with disdain.

I am thinking about accelerants, for example alcohol, or ubiquitous furniture foam etc... combined with the type of convection currents in the vicinity of the burning corpse. I remember seeing some trash TV, which showed how an elderly gentleman burned to death in his armchair leaving items in his proximity completely untouched, including his radio, which was only a couple of feet away from his body. The reconstruction of his flat showed fierce convection currents which were localised and took the heat upwards in a narrow plume, roughly the diameter of the old man's body, accelerated by the synthetic materials in his armchair. So, the bottom line IMHO is: accelerants (from the surroundings and also the human body) and 'narrow diameter' convection 'plumes'.

I see that you have directly answered the points raised by the OP. Well done. However, I was pointing out something far more fundamental. There is actually a widening divide between rich and poor. You have also answered that by what I may call 'serendipitous consumerism'. In my opinion, the world has become a worst place for the 'have-nots' of this world, and consequentially, the poor have poorer health. One of the reasons is that it is cheaper to buy products for your household which are high in oils and fats and are highly processed so that you can satisfy hunger pangs. I have been poor in the past, and have also had the privilege of teaching children of disadvantaged backgrounds. There is a world of difference between rich and poor that technology cannot address per se. You can read about this here: Link to article or read the original analysis which used net household incomes, wages and educational outcomes, amongst other factors, to compare different socio-economic classes. Academic article If you look at gaps in health, due to many factors, of course, the divide is clear again: Newspaper Article It is quite possible for people to spend their whole lives in a 'middle class bubble', never going to the 'rough' side of town, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the possibility that two thirds of the world are struggling to find a meal to last them for the day, whilst the remaining third are torturing themselves about which i-phone to buy, and losing the pounds they accumulated over Christmas (I include myself, in a shamefaced way, in the latter category). (emphasis is my own) Link to peoplesworld

There are, to my mind, no pre-requisites or definitions of God. I think that was my main point. In an attempt to understand God, humans impose absolute moral qualities on Him. To magnify our human 'qualities' of good, power and knowledge to an infinite level (another arbritary human term) is not enough, in my opinion. IMHO, God is almost incomprehensible. However, we can recognise His act of creation called the Universe by looking at the physical laws (e.g. gravity) that He has set in place, and then considering the invisible law which goes under the term: 'what goes round comes round'. So we all pay for, or gain, from our actions. I think that there is something called 'soul', which I am trying to get my head round by reading Descartes and Augustine. The part about justice is that I cannot imagine a God who is not just. And that there is an Earthly life and a life beyond, where justice is delivered fully. The other qualities are relativistic and human. To my mind justice is a quality where there is no Golden Mean - you either have it or you don't. Good thoughts michel123456. Well said! In my opinion, organised religion and blind faith are the factors holding humans from recognising the true glory of our Lord. The sooner, we lose these unnecessary accessories, the quicker we understand what is meant by true worship.

During my search of a normal website, I clicked to check out some of their podcasts. Within seconds, my AVG antivirus came up with a list of folders that had become infected with a Trojan virus. The first was a Trojan Ramnit-E. What was worse, the AVG antivirus became infected and I had to replace it with Avast antivirus. The second virus seemed to be a rootkit virus and, after loading itself over my Sygate firewall with ease, the computer shut down and restarted. I could not restore the system back to a pre-infection date. I understand that rootkit viruses can 'hide' inside the OS leaving a 'back door' for the hacker to remove. I cannot remove it even after using Sophos anti-rootkit. However, after a scan the Sophos anti rootkit declared that it was inadvisable to delete rootkits installed on the computer. Even MS Windows advised that their anti rootkit software was making operating systems unstable. So am I stuck with a root kit virus which cannot be deleted from my system? Or are there any solutions?

Hoh, Hoh, Hoh, Ha, Ha, Ha, HAH! Improved? The Technology has improved. And the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. The rich stay healthy whilst the poor get the worst standards of healthcare possible, by hard-pressed doctors with quick -fix cures using paracetamol or penicillin IV. If you are rich then rejoice! The world is yours to enjoy!

This article really deserved more discussion. Let's imagine that most UFO craft are UAV's (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) UAV or secret military aircraft, Future aircraft, I find it unlikely that the UAV, or whatever, would be of American origin. Is it possible that one of the 'hostile' countries surrounding Israel wanted a reconnaissance of the nuclear facility?

I am trying to reconcile the human moral quality of infinite good with the presence of evil, or what we perceive as wrong, and elevate it to a 'meta' platform. The comparison I can give is of a child reading the alphabet and learning to string together words in front of a professor of linguistics. We are looking from a relativist platform, glimpsing a part of a portrait, or admiring the brushstrokes, whilst God is looking at the whole picture. I can only think and articulate from a human viewpoint and do so using human moral references. How else can I do it? My logic is not deductive but rather inductive and faulty, I cannot help it. I take your point but using an incorrect statement like 'God is infinitely good' just to make it comprehensible would not even cut the mustard with an eight year old who is exposed to the reality of evil on a daily basis. The statement would have to be replaced with 'God is infinitely just'. And then we have a statement which is comprehensible in the face of the real world that most of us live in. If I am making my point incomprehensible, then I apologise, but I am trying to rationalise the existence of God and evil and also God and His apparent lack of care for His creation. An all-powerful God who is infinitely good cannot possibly watch His creation suffer, yet He apparently allows unspeakable things to happen on Earth, sometimes in His name. If I don't make sense then it is my own stupidity. Wow, as a heretical Methodist, I also feel like a heretic from every religion. From what little I have read of Islam, there is no way that what I have written squares with that faith. An honest view zapatos. I also have my doubts but I also believe that the love that I feel for my family and children, and for other individuals, cannot be explained by temporary imbalances in certain hormones and chemicals in my brain but has a deeper bond than the purely physical. I think that the possibility of a soul which is not merely a 'driver' of the body was a thought expressed by several sages including Augustine and Descartes. Your brain is in a dark and quiet environment. When you see your bus approaching, who is that sees the picture in the brain and interprets it? Who in your brain interprets the sound of footsteps behind you on a dark and foggy night...In short, if the soul exists, it is there for a purpose and, if we accept that there is a soul, we have to find the purpose of its existence. This is where the Scriptures come in with metaphors that transcend the errors and shortcomings that are evidently man-made. This is why I came up with a personal justification of my impressions of God (the Father).

Agreed, by discussing the negative effects of stress (or distress), I can agree to the spectrum of physiological and psychological disorders caused by stress. Now what we need are proper, research-based articles, on the effects of meditation on negative stress and how it improves health. I would be really interested in research on the immune system because it may be pivotal in avoiding some of the worst physiological effects of being (dis)stressed. As a teacher, I am aware of the effects of constant pressure on my fellow professionals (and me, of course). Meditation would be an excellent way to cope with (dis)stress. I have been on a course where we were advised that if we had a difficult class or pupil, we had to take a deep breath and 'see ourselves from outside our bodies' in order to buy time before making an assertive point. IMHO, much negative stress arises from the perception, or fact, not being in control of your own live/job/relationships.

Ah. OK! That is interesting. To clarify, a chill is caused by viral infection (cold or influenza viruses, I presume). What I experience is caused by changes in blood flow in the nasal mucosa. Thanks for the information. Just a follow on question please/ What causes the sneezing and runny nose then? References are welcome.