greg1917

Eugenics and eliminating genetic diseases ae different things and if you're seriously advocating eugenics you rank no higher than racists and nazis who started eugenics in the 30's. So you think parents should have have the right to choose their childs hair colour, eye colour, how inteligent he'll be, how sporty he'll be, make him more attractive than he would be, control his sex, that isnt a normal child thats a made to order kit-child. Ignorance is opening to the door to something that could lead to a reduction in the variation of the human gene pool, eliminate individuality and fulfilll Hitlers wish of a master race free of 'impurities' as he called it. Parents have the right to choose how you dress but are you seriously saying they also have the right to control you, shape you before your born and effectively make a child that will fulfill some ambition of theirs? Tell me one reason why scientists should be allowed to clone humans. What purpose would it serve? Stem cell research is important and should continue but the full cloning of a human is pointless, dangerous, serves no purpose other than a scientific exercise and is irresponsible. You're creating hundreds of ebryos in the knowledge most will die, and besides cloning is very dangerous at the moment seeing as many cloned animals die early of birth abnormalities, arent born at all, live with defects or nevere make it past the embryo stage in the first place. Research can and should continue but you seem intent on advocating a ridiculous waste of biologists time - are you secretly a Raelian who thinks we all came from aliens on a the happy love planet and our glorious leader will take us away to paradise, providing we pay him a ridiculous amount for his collection of wives and spedboats?

What? Invitro at least involves the genetic material of two people, not making a copy of someone. And how can you support bringing life into this world in the just so they'll be used as organ doners or just to replace someone? Why should people feel free to create life to satisfy their own ends, your saying thats not selfish? This open the door to eugenics, which is something that should be banned outright. Prants should not have the option to choose childs characterisitcs - obviously things like genetic diseases can be detected and action taken but eugenics is a different and sinister ballpark. And what facts? Cloning people doesnt fill any need in society and its cruel to create life for the sake of it, before you call someone ignorant try imagining a world where profiteering biologists create slaves or children created not out of love but as a piece of flesh, as spare organs. Thats a horrible reality I dont support and so far I havent seen many pros for cloning in the first place.

Identical twins maybe effective clones but thats a totally different situation, you'd be creating people who would live with the stigma of not being natural, only having a single parent and at the core of things, created because of some biologists desire to get his name in the paper. Why should humans feel they have the right to bring life into this world for a scientific exercise? Thats immoral and a faceless misapplication of science. The people pushing this are a combination of rich nutters who want to clone their dead pets and grieving parents who want to clone their late child, situations like that. Obviously peoples views on will vary but you also have to consider how the legalities of this would work. Are the clones parents the parents of the original person? What if problems like premature aging cant be overcome and are inherently associated with clones? Dolly the sheep having arthritis may not just be another problem of clones, that might be a characteristic about cloning itself you cant change. Not proven but just a thought.

Also on a lighter note, why does toast fall butter side down? Is it just fate wanting you to ruin your carpet or is there an aerodynamic reason, or is it the weight distribution?

Humans cannot yet fully explain how life emerged on this planet. Evolution is still a theory because of several missing stages in the evolutionary process. One thing that chemists find interesting about the emergence of life is the chirality problem. In biology, almost all amino acids used in human DNA are in the L-form. the reason for this is because chiral compounds can form two chemically identicle compounds which are either left or right handed. If a single r amino acid is used in a dna chain, the chain cannot be built farther because the molecule will jut out at the wrong angle. the same goes for proteins, which almost always occur in the r-form in the human body. All living things have evolved ways of differentiating between enantiomers (optical isomers), as it is impossible for them to be separated in nature. the chances of 100 amino acids all being n the l-form is close to 10e-30, and thats for a non-functioning simplisitc dna chain. You can imagine the chances of a high number of complex, different amino acids all being in the right form are impossibly minute. So the question is, how did life start when its near impossible to have a solution of an optically pure chiral compound? they just dont separate. A racemic mixture is very difficult to separate with an intelligent observer, in nature its inconceivable for it to happen on its own. Evolution hasnt answered this problem yet.

what? Im specifically asking about optical isomers like carvone and most amino acids, why should a hydrogen or a hydroxyl group plus maybe an ethyl group and an amino group all around a carbon rotate light, while a different arrangement of the same groups around the same carbon atom has the opposite rotation? When naming optical isomers you go round groups by mass to say which is R and L, so surely it will be due to different electron densities in different groups which would exlpain why the electrical vector was rotated in the orietation of whatever that enantiomers chiral orientation is - the (+) enantiomer of one compund could only occupy certain orientations in space so its spread of electron rich or electron defficient areas could occupy the same limited orientations. Again the same being true for the (-) enantiomer but obviously a different set of orientations. If its not electron dense areas of chrial compunds what is it because there is very little else that could affect the electrical vector of a light wave to my knowledge. I presume ionic fields in dichroic crystals do similar things to the electrical vector but these are two different types of substances, carvone is not remotely crystalline.

I did read what you said and while it mentions crystals and refraction, I was specifically looking for some kind of explanation for light plane rotation in optical isomers like D and L carvone, or butan-2-ol. I cant find the answer to this anywhere and no one has come forward with any sort of explanation. Do non chiral compounds rotate plane polarized light in both directions? Ive never had a problem with organic chemistry before but textbooks dont seem to want to say why this happens, only that it does.

So no-one knows why optical isomers rotate plane polarized light? I still cant find an answer to this anywhere, a friend at uni said hed ask his lab super but he hasnt got back to me yet.

Pretty hard to give you an answer, seeing as that would occur inside the event horizon of a black hole. Since nothing can be detected inside this sphere around the singularity, then its impossible to determine what happens at all due to quantum physics now being dominant, so unless you can get yourself inside it (again difficult cos you'd be pulled apart) then we'll never know. would space be compressed to any reasonable degree in the region just outside the event horizon?

What figures are you going on when you say the sun emits less energy pound for pound than a human? these figures are rounded but the sun converts around 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen into 695,000,000 tons of helium per second, the remaining 5,000,000 being converted into gamma rays - this works out at 386 billion billion megawatts (3.86e33 ergs) which in turn works out at 3.51e23 ergs per pound assuming there are 2,200 pounds in a ton. Now if a human of weight say, 180 pounds, was to emit the same figure of 3.51e23 ergs per pound he would have to be emitting a whopping 6.31 e25 joules of energy every second. what is it you mean by the human body emitting and producing energy? the exothermic reactions in cells produce enough enough energy for vital body functions but respiration in itself isnt particluarly powerful.

I thought that maybe all molecules do this, like when you shine plane polarized light through say, methane, maybe each molecule rotates the plane as well. But due to methane not being chiral there would be a totally random spread of the molecules in every possible orientation in space hence no net light plane rotation. I should stress that this is only me guessing and still doesnt come any where nearer to actually explaining what property it is of a certain arrangement of atoms that can have any effect on the plane of polarized light.

Right, this has been annoying me lately. In every chemistry textbook or website that covers optical isomerism, you'll find the same thing. A little paragraph explaining chirality, usually acoompanied by an explanation using hands, mirror images but not superimposable etc. The other section you'll see is how you can tell one enantiomer from another; by shining plane polarized light through them. One enantiomer rotates the plane through a certain angle, the other enantiomer through the same angle but in the opposite direction. This is all fair enough, but what I cant find anywhere is WHY? What is it about a certain arrangment of atoms that can rotate the plane of polarized light? I can understand dichroic crystals because they at least have an arrangement of ions, so in that situation the electric field would have an effect on the electric oscillation of light waves hence the polarization. But why would say, d-butan-2-ol have any effect on the orientation of oscillation of light waves and l-butan-2-ol the same but in the opposite direction? What character of the molecule does this? Any help would be much appreciated.