Mokele

Mr Skeptic - my quote tag didn't work - I was referring to the OP's studies.

I'm actually wary of efforts to prosecute. While accountability is nice, I'm afraid that dragging this into the spotlight will divert attention and effort from actually getting productive stuff done like fixing healthcare and the economy. These sorts of investigations seem to have a way of becoming all-consuming shitstorms, IME.

The studies quoted have serious problems with sample size, and no statistics. Sure, the numbers *look* different, but are those differences statistically significant? To what p value? And what about statistical power? Tables of means and percentages are nice, but without statistical tests, they're meaningless.

But turning CO2 into fuel won't substantially change the concentration in the air, since it'll immediately get burned off again when the fuel is used.

Actually, no - the number of muscle cells remains constant, but they get larger.

One thing to consider is that the 'extra time' HS takes could be considered useful. I know that much of my most useful knowledge came from reading and researching outside of class during HS and my first few years of college, though this may be less applicable if you wind up in a field that doesn't rely on taxon-specific knowledge the way organismal biology does.

So, if less people suffer than will be saved, it's OK? By this logic, it's OK to extract information from someone by tying them to a chair and bringing their 8-year-old daughter in, then skinning her alive in front of him until he speaks? After all, that's just two lives, versus dozens, hundreds, or thousands. Would you be OK with that?

I love the way you trivialize and dismiss pscyhological pain, as if it doesn't matter. The truth is that death, for all its finality, usually represents a short period of suffering, followed by none at all. Torture and other psychological trauma leaves lasting, permanent psychological damage that can leave a person in daily suffering for the rest of their life. Are you familiar with the sort of damage PTSD can inflict on a person's life? Guess what the most common and mildest consequence of torture is? PTSD.

The 'ticking time bomb' scenario is actually useful, but for different reasons - ask yourself what's justifiable to extract that information. Waterboarding the unsub? Waterboarding his family, including children? Rape? Killing his kids in front of him? I know these all seem excessive, but it illustrates a point, namely that nobody actually believes 'by any means necessary' unless they're a raging sociopath and sadist. We, and every other society, have limits to what we are willing to do in that situation, and those limits vary between societies and between individuals. So, amid all the definitions and quibbling over various techniques, the real issue is coming to a collective conclusion about what we, as a society, deem to be the boundary. How far is too far for us, as a nation?

scrappy has been suspended for thread-hijacking, trolling, and flaming.

There are no references because it's silly. Blood type does not affect *anything* beyond who you can get transfusions and organs from. Can you even suggest a mechanism which would allow it to affect the mind? No, there's no possible way.

Apparently, it increases protein synthesis (faster repair and growth). As for increasing it, the best thing I can suggest is to stay healthy & sleep well - testosterone is also an immuno-suppressant, and if you're sick or stressed, your body will naturally drop testosterone production in order to allow your immune system to function better.

Nah, try This instead. As bad as it would be for the cat, you must admit it would be funny to tell the neighbors that your plant *ate* the cat.

You have. You just don't know it. The main problem with cat crap is a nasty little protist called Toxoplasma gondii, which, once it gets into you, migrates throughout your body and forms cycsts. The immune system reacts, and it hides in the cyst and eats the antibodies - cunning little thing. In healthy adult humans, there are no symptoms, as the disease is *supposed* to infect mice, which serve only as the indeterminate host (the one where it doesn't reproduce). But if your immune system is compromised, it can become lethal. That's why pregnant women aren't supposed to clean the cat litter - the parasite can cross the placenta and kill the fetus. You're fine now, but if you ever need an organ transplant or chemotherapy, you're in deep, deep shit, because the drugs to deal with this thing are beyond nasty. I should also note it's capable of mind control. Yes, that's right. In mice, the normal host, it secretes chemicals that alter the mouse's fear response, and make it attracted to the scent of cats. It then gets eaten, the parasites mature and breed in the cat's gut, and the eggs are passed with the feces. There is strongly suggestive evidence that, while we're immune to serious effects simply due to our large body mass, infection with this parasite alters your personality in subtle ways. There is also evidence it may trigger latent schizophrenia, increase the chance of traffic accidents due to cognitive deficit, and alter sex ratio of births. Congratulations, you have a mind-controlling parasite. But don't feel bad - 10% of the US population is similarly infected. In France and Brazil, the rate is over 80%.

Honestly, infractions are pretty rare, IME, and are heavily punished by the authorities if discovered. Lab animal use is regulated by over half a dozen groups, governmental and non-governmental, and even minor infractions can cost the lab $10,000 per day until the situation is rectified. Major infractions can result in a faculty member and/or student losing the ability to work with animals ever, which is basically the end of their scientific career.

I don't think anyone really doubts that we're biased towards our own species, but it's not really a good argument against it, since all morality is nothing but ancient behavioral protocols from our origins as a troop primate. And as you note yourself, it's still necessary, and we have no alternative. Plus, IME, we deal with the speciesism issue pretty well - primates are rarely experimented on, and great apes almost never, in part due to their known intelligence, and when they are, it's because the benefits are so enormous that they swamp everything else. For work with smaller impacts, we use much stupider animals, such as mice.

You can always get

Honestly, I've never had this problem - part of the benefit of having a greyhound who's eaten cats is that people take the whole "keep the cat out of my yard" thing pretty seriously. Cats may be quick, but it's hard to beat a 40mph top speed (with cheetah-level acceleration). IMHO, the best option would be a water gun, possibly loaded with lemon juice or something else that smells noxious but is harmless. Part of the trick is to make sure the cat fears the yard, not you, so you can't just wait in plain view. Crack a window and just read for a while nearby, squirting the cat every chance you get. The important thing is to give it no obvious clues about whether or not you're watching, so it can never tell if it's "safe". In the meantime, keep dropping the cat feces off at your neighbor's place until *they* learn.

Is there any actual data supporting this claims, or just the usual speculation and rumor?

Think of a landscape with many hills, and an organism is at a given point in the landscape. NS will ensure that the organism will always move uphill, but only at the local level - if there's another hill nearby that's taller, but the organism would have to pass through a valley to get there, NS won't let it happen. So NS has a 'direction' in that it will always move uphill, but doesn't have a 'direction' in the sense that it has no mechanism to cross valleys or the pick one hill over another. Of course, things are not always so simple - developmental effects can make certain paths unavailable or easier, for instance. But overall, at the very broad, macroevolutionary level, there's no overall pattern or direction.

Care to rephrase that in a way that *doesn't* sound like you're calling gay relationships inferior?

They both have the same name - "marriage". What more is needed? Is there a compelling reason that they should be separated?

D isn't right - think about what happens to a diabetic when blood sugar rises too much, and why a drug that can inhibit glucagon would help. E - think about how insulin & glucagon work, and the difficulties of dealing with even natural fluctuations in blood sugar if you can't naturally make insulin. You want to maintain blood sugar within a narrow range. F - What's the molecular structure of the drug (see the initial problem statement)? What happens to that sort of structure in the stomach? I would note, however, that while they can become quite tame, A) expect to pay more than $1000 for a hatchling and more importantly, B) They are venomous. Technically they haven't killed anyone yet, but two prominent herpetologists have died from bites of animals which they didn't treat medically because "it's never killed anyone before". Plus, with *any* envenomation, there is always a risk of an allergic reaction, which can lead to anaphylactic shock and kill you far faster than the venom.

Function - neurotransmitters only affect the cell directly across the synapse, only serve to depolarize the membrane, and are quickly taken up again to be recycled. Hormones spread throughout the body, have a greater diversity of effects (none electrical), and aren't recycled as easily.

No, actually, it doesn't. If children were the crtierion for "marriage", infertile, childfree, and old couples could not be married. If all of those are granted exceptions, to his rule, why not same-sex couples. It's an idiotic stance that's been thoroughly discredited many, many times, here and elsewhere.