Deathby

Aye, I agree Mokele most of it is picking at the edges. But the stuff on Antarctica isn't. The amount of sea ice and the amount of snow seem critical to how much Antarctica is warming (and to many that's where global warming will do the most damage).

Hi, I was talking to someone about climate change, and they showed me this quote from the Wall St. journal from a guy named Bjorn Lomborg. I know he's not a scientist, but he makes strong points which my scientific noviceness cannot refute although I assume there are explanations for these things. In particular, I'd like to hear an explanation for his points about Antarctica's snowfall and the sea ice.

Hi, I'm about to choose a degree in university and frankly I'm confused. I've been wanting to do law for a while, but my recent marks mean that I have to get a full-fee paying place in the university that I want. Now money is not a problem for me, but I was wondering if I could instead get a career in science. I've always loved science, and although I think I will like law, I don't know if I will enjoy it for certain. I know a lot of science, or at least I think I do and I've enjoyed going on the forums every now and engaging in the creation/evolution debate and even did a debate in the debate forum on the use of DDT. But my major problem with doing a Bachelor of Science is I dunno what sort of job I can get, and if it will have job security. And the other thing is I have to choose my subjects in a month or so, which will greatly determine what career in science I will take. Well that was a bit of a ramble, but here's my question. So what I'm asking is what career paths are open in science? I'm interested in advanced physics (although I didn't choose physics in high school because I don't particularly enjoy electronics or Newtonian physics), but my major interest lies in biology, mostly on the organism-level, but also in genetics. I want to know what career paths are there, and how many jobs would be available? I'm currently looking through newscientistjobs.com.au but its hard to gain a sense of perspective as to which branches of science offer the most opportunities for someone who is fairly knowledgable.

Sorry I did a search on timecube and time cube... didn't find any results.

And I thought Creationists used bad science and too much name-calling. I would have thought there'd already have been a post on this, considering the age its been around (or so I've been told) but I searched for it and there isn't one. This is not a joke (or at least the website creator doesn't). http://www.timecube.com I found it amusing.

Brilliant I love it

I don't know, but here's a guess. Property 1 evolved first. Plants already need to attract insects to pollinate themselves, not too tricky. A plant evolved with some funky smell (I assume a single gene could produce this so its not too great a co-icidence) and flies were attracted. I believe other plants are pollinated by flies and could have been adapted by the VFT. But I don't know if it evolved from pollinating plants. The second part is most difficult, considering we don't know how it works. I remember reading something recently in New Scientist about high speed cameras capturing it switching from concave to convex (or the other way around) as soon as it felt movement. However, it jsut occured to me that we are assuming the VFT is the first carniverous plant. What about the honeydew (I forget the name) which is just a little bowl of sap which the fly falls into and gets stuck in? That would reasonably solve the top 2 problems. Plants often have sticky, tasty stuff to attract insects, it wouldn't be too difficult to adapt that to catch the insect instead. I don't know about point 3, my knowledge of enzymes is mostly restricted to "they help activation energy" but is it possible that they already had enzymes to squeeze as much nitrogen out of the soil as possible, then simply used those on insects?

Well if therapods evolved from five fingered reptiles, then obviously they would have 5 fingers in embryology, I don't see why there is a reason their ancestors definately wouldn't have it.

I thought the point of Urey Miller was to say that life began underwater. Cause the setup was lightning strikes the clouds, carbon compounds are formed which collect in the little bottle of water down the bottom representing the ocean. So life formed underwater (even according to the Urey Miller experiments). If you mean deep underwater in sulfur vents, I think there was a similar experiment which showed organic chemicals could occur that way too. And another which said they could form in asteroids even at space temperatures from (I think) UV rays.

Your "dinosaur" it seems to me could just as likely have been a mammoth. I seem to recall that Siberian dwarf mammoths survived into historical times and there were pictures of some in some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Unfortunately I don't recall where I read this so I can't verify its authority. Not really being familiar with the Bible, but I think the ancient Greek myths have yet to be disproven. Just because Jove himself hasn't personally come down to seduce our women doesn't mean he didn't once do it. It is of course possible that Mt Olympus does have Gods living there sipping ambrosia and nectar, but they just hide their massive temple from mortal eyes. If humans were there from the beginning, surely the Ancient Egyptians or Greeks would have known more about Creation than us. But what about the Dead Sea scrolls? They contain extra stuff, like Lilith. Adam's first wife etc. Doesn't that count as evidence that Genesis may not be entirely correct?

Ok this is going to sound like a really basic question, but what is an allele? I know the dictionary definition is "the different types of a gene" eg. A,B,O for blood types, but is it also the two halves of a gene? If it isn't, what do you call those two halves? (aka complete this sentence everyone has two ___ for each gene, you get one ___ from your mother and one ___ from your father.

No, that was 17 changes (not %, just alterations in sequence) in a single GENE. And there are millions of genes, you can't just narrow it down to, oh yeah all those groups have the "vertebrate gene" and those groups have the "head gene" because it isn't a single gene, its hundreds of genes, all of which are radically different even between fish and amphibians. It'll be possible to inject DNA into your bacterium (we can already do it- in little snippets), but humans have 21 chromosomes worth of DNA and bacteria only have a single DNA. You're loading them with 2100% more genetic material than they had before- its simply not going to fit, and if it does it will be weighed down by it. Even compressed human DNA (without all the junk DNA) will overload a bacterium, you won't be able to fit millions of species' worth of DNA into a single bacterium.

Come on buddy, that classification stuff is the simplest thing. There are only 5 kingdoms. I'm guessing that you already know its a bacteria, so you know its kingdom. Here's a quick link to get you started. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirochete Research is more complicated than simply putting spirochete into google and hoping for the best.

From what I've been able to figure out, the difference is this. An organism employing enantiostasis does not employ homeostasis for example, in a mangrove the salt changes with the tide. A homeostasis organism would keep the salt the same so no enzymes are affected. An enantiostasis organism allows is salt concentration to change with its environment (hence saving energy) however it also changes something else (such as pH) so that the enzymes which are negatively affected by the salt are positively affected by the pH, so they continue to work. That way the internal environment is not maintained, but a functional state is maintained. Although I am intrigued (and suspicious of the BOS) that you haven't heard of enantiostasis before coquina. I'd thought you fairly knowledgeable in biology generally.

oh and Mokele, just to help your case a little. Scientists have created a nice scissors paper rock game using GM bacteria [i'm fairly certain this is the article: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424765.700]. One bacteria creates a toxin, another bacteria is immune, yet another bacteria has neither toxin nor immunity. Otherwise they are all exactly the same. toxin + immune => immune wins (because the toxin bacteria is wasting energy on producing toxins) toxin + normal =>toxin wins (because normals die) immune + normal => normal wins (because the immunes have an increased metabolic load with no use so they are out-competed) Let's look at that last result and compare it with cyber_indian's scenario. The immunity gene, like your memory stuff, is very useful. However, at this present moment it provides no evolutionary advantage so those without that gene become dominant and eventually take over.