Science Forums: CharonY - Viewing Profile - Science Forums

HIV, maybe. Vaccines may become a reality (even if they do not offer perfect protection), and currently the progression of the resulting disease is relatively well controlled.
Universal virus cure is very hypothetical at this point. It works in culture (afaik) but it is a big difference to have real clinical value.

Schizophrenia: not a chance. We do not even have established a foundation of what it comprises of. Cancer has similar issues. Also, as they are not not diseases caused by an identifiable external agent (usually) but most likely due to normal bodily functions plus confounding factors, a remedy does appear highly unlikely. It is not that that we can simply remove something foreign from the body (such as a virus or bacterium) and suddenly turn healthy.

Regarding genomics, there are gazillions of bioinformatical approaches used to investigate genomes. However, the real stumbling block is less the bioinformatics tools, but the biological knowledge on which they are built on. Or knowledge on some very basic aspects are lacking. Or rather, our total knowledge, while impressive, is still but a drop in the ocean of biological complexity. Biofinromatics can e.g. help us search or predict patterns, but they do not tell us what the biological consequences of these patterns might be.

The problem with controlling stuff via EEG is that it is still relatively crude. Details such as words are not possible to decipher from the information you can currently got. But something like movement or facial expression can be read out and used to translate into a simple control interface, such as mouse movements, for examples.
One of the examples is this here My link and OCZ had also a relatively cheap version.

In short, they made a metagenome project and among the sequences they found gene homologs that looked very distinct from available sequences. The big question is whether this is due to the fact that these differences are due to low relatedness to known organisms, or whether it just means that we have not explored sufficient genomes yet. The dark matter alludes to the assumption that (if they really are a distinct domain) these organisms are unknown until now. One possible source are giant viruses and they were some studies that alluded that they belong to a very old lineage (which includes the paper mentioned in the OP as well as another from a French group under Raoult late 2010). However, subsequent studies (Williams et al 2011, also in Plos One) using different evolutionary models indicate that there is really little evidence hinting at a fourth domain based on these viruses.

My personal take is also on the conservative side and I do not think that the experimental evidence is currently strong enough.

the asinine cretin, on 22 May 2012 - 01:53 AM, said:

That is historically correct, however, note that it is not a mechanism per se, but used to describe events at a given level. Events that span several gene pools as e.g. the split of species can be referred to as macroevolution. Or the investigation of divergence in different species.
However it is not quite correct to say that macroevolution leads to speciation. The molecular mechanisms are essentially the same for macro and microevolution, just the viewpoint (and timescale) of investigation is different.

A macro lens would be really useful for that.