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I note, however, that she said nothing about those widows that got up onstage with GWB at the 2004 Republican Convention. Perhaps it's only exploiting widowhood if you're a liberal.

Scicop, I think you meant Toll-like receptors, since I assume that he's not interested in drosophilid immunity. I really think that they should put old editions of textbooks online for free (in this case, the first or second edition of Janeway), because it is actually really difficult to get basic information online. Completely off-topic, I'm actually kind of interested in what you do for the NYPD, given your apparent background.

Yeah, I agree with Alice. You pretty much have an infinite number of small research topics that haven't been done before. However, for Intel, they require a mentor working on something related to that topic. Since not many faculty members are willing to spend time on high school students, I advise you to try to find a mentor working on something you're interested in and work out your project from there. If you had a good idea in mind, I'd advise you to jump for it, and fit the mentor around that, but you seem fairly noncommital at the moment.

Except that cancer is essentially unstoppable. And far more money is spent on cancer research than AIDS research. At the last immunology and pathogenesis retreat I went on, fully 50% of the projects involved cancer while only a few involved HIV.

If you look here: http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/states.htm, you can see how the money is distributed. It seems fairly well distributed, given where I would think terrorists would be most likely to strike. My only surprises were that Newark/Jersey City is getting $33M while Las Vegas is only getting $7M. And New York is still getting $40M more than any other city in the US. And yes, they're probably throwing money at the Statue of Liberty, but the most money is going toward the subway system and probably the bridges/tunnels too since: 1. These are the easiest, softest targets. 2. Attacking either one would have a devastating impact on the economy of NY. Simultaneously hitting four or five bridges would absolutely cripple Manhattan. I doubt that it would ever come back. It's just irritating that they're dropping the amount of DHS money since this is definitely going to make subway fares go up, and almost definitely they're going to stick it to commuters (the unlimited ride Metrocards vs the pay-per-rides for the out of towners). To go completely off-topic, I think that they should be socking it to those who commute by car, say at least a $15 toll to get in. I work by one of the exit ramps on the FDR Drive and 90% of the cars coming off only have one person in there.

This is fantastic. The crux of the matter is that subway fares are going to go up yet again.

Yeah, I mean, you're from Long-geyeland . You're the step above Westchester, which was the step above across the bridge from Westchester (where I'm from).

Actually, the simplest way is to go out to your yard and find naturally growing hallucinogens. For example, jimson weed, which is omnipresent on the East coast. Notice that I am not endorsing this as jimson weed is highly toxic. As somebody who has tried a few (highly illegal - GutZ, I doubt the authorities are all that interested in your acid usage) hallucinogens, it's an experience you can basically live without. It's interesting, but not worth repeating.

I don't know why people think that intelligence only has one aspect: abstract reasoning. If you look at a bat brain, the amount of area devoted to hearing is amazing. Their brains can do Fourier transforms on incoming sound to figure out how fast whatever object their chirp bounced off of is moving (useful as insects tend to fly fast). Humans can't even tell if the side of a barn is there by yelling at it, much less how fast it is moving. And I'm sure that pumas have brains that are overdeveloped in respect to humans as far as the physics of moving objects.

Well, HLA matching is critically important for stem cell transplants since the stem cells are essentially going to remake all of the circulating immune cells in your body. If the MHCs are different in the transplanted cells than the host tissue cells, you're going to possibly develop autoreactive T and B cells (donor or host), leading to either GVHD or graft rejection. That's why stem cell recipients are usually immunosuppressed, since the donor stem cells will almost certainly not be a perfect match. I think that HLA-DR encompasses HLA-DRA and HLA-DRB.

I'm sorry, but this is all kind of funny. Prom is a "tradition," now? If so, I've gotta say that the prom that I went to 6 years ago had many things that would be much more offensive to the 'decent folks' than a man in a dress. As for me, high school students that would spend over $1000 on a dance (and there were many of those) I consider far more offensive than frilly clothes on a man. Stretch Hummers are in keeping with the 'tradition' but a formal dress is not?

Oh my God, Mokele. We've missed the beard. And the snakes.

It might work, except that you'd have to flood the body with the liposomes constantly - like for the rest of the patient's life. Also, the liposomes wouldn't have access to the lymphatics or lymphatic organs (eg, spleen, lymph nodes) - so infection would continue to occur there. Also, macrophages, monocytes, and dendritic cells love to eat little membrane-bound things, so the half-life of the liposomes wouldn't be very long.

I think that the question that has not been asked here is: why did it never happen before? I mean, we have had myriad terrorist groups operating around the globe since the 60s, and yet we never had a foreign terrorist action on American soil prior to 9/11 (yes, there were airplane hijackings - but those stopped abruptly with higher airline security measures). Europe, on the other hand, has been the victim of terrorist actions for a long time, and continues to be a target. Since this is "scienceforums.net," I feel that it is necessary to point out that the non-recurrence of a completely unique event cannot be attributed to anything. At all. And, since the NSA's actions are repugnant to a large percentage of Americans, I feel that the onus is on them to prove that their actions are beneficial.

A number of organisms never move, and all heterotrophs to some extent can't reproduce on their own. If you want a simple, Earth-centric definition, then say that life requires nucleic acids. I consider viruses clearly alive, but prions are not.

Well, that would imply that your organism has been sequenced. If not, your GSPs from another organism are almost guaranteed not to work. It's worth a try, but I think you might also want to try the southern approach, as a positive result would guarantee that you could eventually isolate your gene.

Seriously. The MWs for these "enzymes" are about the easiest thing ever to find as they are the molecular weight standards that are sold by about a hundred companies. ie, see Sigma, Promega, Invitrogen, etc, etc. I'm guessing that you understood almost nothing about the experiment that you did. Prove me wrong and tell me why the SDS causes the proteins to migrate.

I don't understand how you plan on building a contig if you're not going to screen libraries to some extent. Also, once you have GSPs, why would you do RACE? Are you interested in the regulatory regions? If I was doing this, the first thing that I would try - after BLASTing, of course - would be a Southern for homology (which, assuming a positive result, would be followed by library screening, followed by further Southerns to isolate the region in the cosmid/plasmid/etc, followed by sequencing and computer analysis). Edit: Sorry. Given that I don't know what you mean by 'contig' in this context, it is entirely possible that your GSPs do not fully encompass the gene of interest. In which case RACE would be entirely appropriate. It would really help if you indicated what type of gene in which organism you are looking for.

Yay!!!

I agree. Most Americans (67% by a 1996 Washington Post poll) can't even name their representative in Congress. Do we really need to entice more people that are probably less aware of the issues of the day to vote? In fact, I think it should be more difficult to vote, not less difficult - but I can't think of a way of doing so that wouldn't discriminate against some group or other. The whole butterfly ballot thing in 2000 really made me worry about who is voting in America (admittedly, it was the first election I was allowed to vote in). I mean, if the earth swallowed up Bush tomorrow, the only tears I would cry would be crocodile ones. But if my ideological compatriots can't follow an arrow to a button, then they shouldn't be electing the President anyway.

Like Pangloss said, I'm not calling you a racist. The use of the soccer game as a piece of anecdotal evidence, however, does have racist connotations in that you're giving the Mexican flag a significance that other flags would not have. If a group of Irish immigrants got together a kid's soccer team and they were all speaking Gaelic (I know, I know, not many Irish people speak Gaelic anymore), I doubt that you would read very much into it. In a racially-charged debate (and you cannot argue that the immigration issue is not this), you have to be careful using anecdotal evidence. For example, I was hit by a group of black motorcyclists while skating two weeks ago, and one of them ran over my hand. They didn't even stop afterward. But for me to use this as any sort of evidence of criminality among black people in general would be racist, as it would be silly for me to indict white people if a group of white motorcyclists hit me (I don't, however, have any scruples about castigating people riding around on one of those stupid crotch-rockets that hit me). I don't think you're a racist Jim, I'm just saying you have to be careful about how you use your evidence. As far as the Confederate flag goes, I think that people that display it are being ignorant and hurtful, but I don't reflexively think that they are separatists (which was the original point of the flag), nor do I think that they have any great love for slavery. My point here is that the Mexican flag has no more connotations for anti-Americanism than the Swedish flag does, whereas the Confederate flag does have these connotations. And yet most people displaying the Confederate flag are simply proclaiming a love for their heritage, however misguided the symbol they chose might be. I will admit that I don't have any real evidence that most illegal immigrants want to become Americans. But the fact is, illegal immigration is increasing rapidly, meaning that more people are coming to our country than are leaving. Which implies that most illegal immigrants like it here, and, were amnesty for citizenship offered, I have no doubt that a large majority would jump at the opportunity. And, by the way, I do agree that illegal immigration is a serious problem. We simply cannot handle the social services needs of millions upon millions of indigent people, who, unfair as it might be, were not lucky enough to be born in this country. I don't make much money, but I don't feel that it's my obligation to invite the homeless people in my neighborhood to share my bed for the night simply because they're worse off than I am. As a side note on this whole situation: my neighborhood is overwhelmingly Dominican. A few months after I moved in, I went to this restaurant in the neighborhood called "China Star," which, I assumed, sold Chinese food. It actually sold burritos. So the restaurant was basically Chinese people selling Mexican food to Dominicans.

What about people who wear Confederate flags? The whole ideology behind the Confederate flag was the primacy of the South as its own nation. To continue to harp on a team that was really simply paying tribute to their heritage does in fact make you look racist, considering the many, many events in this country that involve carrying around non-US flags. See: St. Patrick's day parades, Puerto Rican day parades, etc, etc, etc. You know, the illegal immigrant community in New York is enORmous. And New York is quite far away from Mexico. So that kind of demonstrates a desire to become American. Actually, if the illegal immigrants were planning on going home, I don't think that anybody would be all that bothered. The fact is that almost all of these people want to become Americans. And for the love of God, please don't capitalize "country" - America is a place, not a deity.

Well, there's all kinds of tests that the USDA does, and I would be suprised if a test for fecal coliform bacteria wasn't one of them. Beef, in this country, for the most part is safe. That being said, one of the nice things about being a vegetarian is that you almost never have to worry about your food making you sick. I mean, yes, there's the occasional thing like salmonella on Mexican strawberries. But it's very unlikely that you're going to get food poisoning. That's not the best reason to be a vegetarian, but it is one of them.

Speaking as one with long experience with abrasions, no, they won't be gone by June 5. But when I abrade myself, it's usually so bad that they don't stop weeping for three days. So I'd say it won't be disfiguring, at least, in two weeks.

It does make you seem kind of stupid, though, as the carpet continues sticking to the ground, especially if you base your entire moral system on that carpet.