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.

I tried reading through that and I never quite understood your point cyber-indian. Is this what you are trying to say? "In order to survive after the Earth is destroyed, we must send bacteria to another world. These bacteria must be able to create a new biosphere as well as evolve as we want them to so our present biosphere is recreated." If so, then you may be correct. If you can find a way of making it worthwhile for those memory bacteria not to shed their excess DNA then you may have a point. Having excess DNA will cause extra metabolic load even if the DNA does nothing because it has to be replicated. However, there are key proteins which do not change much. For example cytochrome c has had very few changes in it. There are 17 differences between us and yeast (I think, don't quote me on that). That is because it is a critical protein and a single change will cause the mutated organism to die. If you can find some way of making your memory DNA so critical that is cannot be changed then yes, you have a way of doing it. However that said you still haven't figured out how you are going to turn the genetic coding for millions of species into millions of species. Just having the coding for those species won't make it reality. It would be an incredibly complex task to recreate the entire history of the Earth at a microscopic level right up to the level of the biosphere so those genes will show up in the same order they appear in modern day animals. It's ridiculous. Unless of course you are saying that we just want to use the bacteria to store the information until we get there after they've terraformed the place. but why bother, we have computers to remember that. Computers which are guaranteed not to mutate randomly. If you could just summarise your theory in a few sentences then we could debate it more logically.

Think of it this way. Simplistically evolution is: bacteria=> lots of crazy ocean stuff=> fish(first vertebrates)=>amphibians=>reptiles-birds/mammals=> Homo sapiens, supreme masters of the world. But bacteria are very well adapted to their environments and can survive where nothing else can. Things go backwards such as whales and penguins going back into the water. I even heard that some 'bacteria' were found that were actually eukarotes becoming prokaryotes again (eukaryotes=multi-celled, prokaryotes=single). Although there does seem to be a general progression towards complexity, I think we have to realise that we only notice the complex stuff because its bigger. There are tens of billions of species of bacteria, billions of insects, millions of vertebrates, tens of hominids.

Well I've heard enough creationist crap to throw out a few examples (rather than the generic Bible=good, scientists=Satan in his evil guise) 1. Whilst it has been proven that natural selection does occur, there is no proof this leads to speciation in the long run. (aka natural selection is a short term tweaking thing, rather than a slow upgrading process) 2. Convergent evolution is just an excuse and a cover-up. They know we're right (rofl). Satan guides their voices. 3. Scientists still have yet to find how life began. (I'm not entirely sure how that disproves evolution). Yes I know about the Urey-Miller experiments, but we still don't know how those carbon compounds began replicating. 4. Non-reducible complexity. In other words, structures which cannot be made simpler. The classic example (though disproved vehemently and frequently) is the human eye. How can something so complex have evolved in a series of little jumps. [i believe someone made a computer program modelling evolution that started from an eyespot in microorganisms to become a reasonable facimile of a human eye.] 5. There is a lot of dodgy evolutionist evidence. I did some research on hycotherium a while back and there is so much creationist crap about it, claiming that the line of descent which hellbender referred to is spread all over the world and is actually in the wrong chronological order. That's some of the best evidence for creationism IMO. There's a lot of other stuff, such as dinosaur and human footprints, trees sticking through several layers of strata (trying to disprove the basic tenets of geology), disproving carbon dating (no proof that C decays at the same exponential rate) etc. Most of that is wrong though and easily disproven.

I'm a biology student and in our syllabus we have to know what enantiostasis is. It defines enantiostasis as the maintenance of metabolic and physiological functions in response to variations in the environment. My question is, is this a new term invented entirely by the Board of Studies (New South Wales' (in Australia) education thingo). I looked it up on the internet and the only sites I can find are all related to our HSC (NSW's SATs). I'm getting suspicious. Has anyone heard of enantiostasis? I can barely even find a rational definition of it, every website has the same definition (damned plagiarism). Here's the board of studies explanation of its syllabus. http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabus_hsc/pdf_doc/science_sup.pdf, it's a fair way down, so just ctrl+f and type enantiostasis.

I had thought the whole blondes being dumb thing was part of "All men are created equal". Blondes = beautiful, so they must be bad in other ways, so they are smart. Smart=ugly, beautiful=dumb. So all of you blondes who have been praising your own intelligence had better not look in a mirror any time soon (j/k) But the whole concept of blondes being ravishing beauties is a relatively new thing, a century or so ago, it was brunettes and "dark-haired beauties" who were considered to be sinful and tempestuous (because of gypsies in part) whereas blondes were more like matrons and housewives. A mild shift in societal thought methinks.

Ok here's how it works. For every gene, there are two halves. eg. AA. When a normal cell turns into a sperm or egg cell, it doubles so it has AAAA, then splits into four cells, and each of those has an A. But if there can be different forms of genes called alleles Eg. A and a. If a father has genotype Aa, then when he produced those 4 sperm cells, there will be 2 sperms with A and 2 with a, but its totally random which one is passed on to the child. If a is a "crap" gene (not techical term) then if a child recieves it will die because of natural selection and that is how bad genes are weeded out. For the most part genes will not be weeded out during the reproduction process itself (that is once 2 mates have been selected). So I don't really see how you could use that to create a robot's coding. I assume you wanted to find out how you could get rid of erroneous coding using reproduction as a model.

Quantum physics says they move about randomly. Unless you want an uninteresting ball, that's the best representation we can have because it does show the atoms in their shells (sort of) as well as their constant movement.

If he used gravity to catch her, it wouldn't matter would it? It's a classic sci-fi idea. Using gravity to accelerate means that acceleration is even over all parts of the body, so in effect there is no g-force even when accelerating at maaassive speeds. my favourite movie is Armageddon (in general). But it has so many flaws that it is the most picked-upon sci-fi film in terms of scientific inaccuracy. I mean the nuke blowing up the asteroid (would just reform), the fire in space (fire in space?! surely not) and a whole lot of others. But then again it wasn't really a particularly serious film was it? I mean sending a lot of rednecks into space...

It seems from the phrasing of the original statement "O is the blood type of around about 47% of caucasians." that husmusen meant 47% had oo as their genotype. I don't know about this specifically, but think about the Norwegeins who are mostly blue eyed, yellow haired, both of which are recessive. Recessive genes aren't necessarily rarer, its just because of the inherent strength of type o In other words I don't know either. A quick bit of research shows (wikipedia isn't a real source I know, but its good enough) So I'm guessing from that information that type O is better immunised against various diseases because they have more antibodies (even if it is only against 2 different types)

I understand that its been proved that simple locality and causality does not apply to quantum physics, but is there some (known) reason why the heisenburg uncertainty principle works? I know that if we try to measure one property, other properties become less precise, but why does that happen? I read something about it having to do with the Shroedinger wave function, but I couldn't really make head or tail of it.