mattbimbo

i once read that meteors carry organic matter and that this has been analyzed for the chirality of its amino acids as evidence of life. i seem to recall it was in this book where i read this.

in another article by the same author as above, there is a dicussion of the rapid demise of Neanderthals in southern Africa. i will also add this [1] Stringer, C. Modern human origins: progress and prospects. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 357, 563?579 (2002) [12] Conard, N., Grootes, P. M. & Smith, F. H. Unexpectedly recent dates for human remains from Vogelherd. Nature 430, 198?201 (2004)

i am still looking for academics who consider polymorphisms of the m1cr gene as evidence of Neanderthal-Caucasoid interbreeding. so far no success, however i did find a recent article published in last Feb's nature. from radiocarbon dating, the authors estimate that the spread of homo sapiens which much greater, and that the overlap with Neanderthals was less, than previous reckoning.

i thought sex was all about pleasure, giving and recieving, does it really have a genetic purpose too?

i remember reading this article last year. it explains part of the situation in the UK, including the removal of anonymity of sperm donors, which has lead to a massive shortfall in sperm donors. it seems men are willing to give sperm, but not their names.

by i am assuming you mean the selling of genetically advanced plants and not the seeds themselves, or is there something more sinister we should know about?

at present, i would say the mapping of the human genome has contributed more to the 'advancement' of medical ethics than to medicine. by using the word 'advancement' i am being a little sarcastic, but maybe you understand what i am getting at? the good thing about your project is the wealth of resources you have, including a recent paper in nature. perhaps the biggest challenge you will have is to keep to the subject of the human genome. utilising the information of the human genome for future medical advancement will require major advances in other areas of research, the most obvious being stem cell research.

does anyone know if there is an equal probability of left and right-handed double helical nebulae?

interesting choice. i assume you are looking more to the future, than to the present.

i totally fukced up the 2nd year of my degree reading about 'prebiotic evolution'. my only excuse is that my lectures were boring. the more i read on the subject, the more i realised the limitations of theory of any kind. prebiotic evolution is a total mind melt, i have every sympathy for SUNSPOT and where his thoughts may now take him.

as far as i know, no one has explained in any prebiotic evolution theory the emergence of chirality. am i mistaken? there is also the problem of evolving a system which can replicate accurately, or distinguish between enantiomers, etc, without having a very advanced system to begin with. as argued by AG Cairns-Smith, it is not the 'organicity' of the molecules which is important, rather the machinery which uses them. what is important is that the machinery is preserved over time, if it is not preserved there is no basis for evolution. does anyone dispute this? but at the moment i am more curious about the source of ATP in SUNSPOTs thought experiment.

Padren posted this picture on the news forum yesterday of a double helical nebula - orignally published in nature last week. does anyone know what its chirality is?

even if someone has been very clever with photoshop, this has to be number one in my favourite outer-space images; i now desire a poster of it. bit of a shame in the paper the authors don't mention the chirality of the helical nebula. anyone willing to guess?

stanley miller and harold urey in 1953 did the experiment YT is talking about, NASA are still repeating these expts, presumably trying to improve the flavour of 'prebiotic soups' by lowering its 90% tar content.

if you can access CELL papers, a colleague in my lab remembered this recent paper with lambda protein and misaligned DNA: http://www.cell.com/content/article/abstract?uid=PIIS0092867405013243

what about mismatch repair? a beautiful system, first studied in ecoli, where it was also demonstrated how the repair of mismatches was determined by the parental strand in a newly replicated DNA molecule - thereby preseverving DNA integrity. a number of crystal structures of mismatch enzymes complexed with duplexes that contain mismatches. crystal structures of enzymes with DNA published very well 10-15 years ago.

i have a number of friends who will be interested in this. i wonder if the report actually showed any negative effects of chiropractice, especially for back problems. many of the manipulations chiropracters perform can be quite aggressive.

the comic or the film V for Vendetta might interest you? most experts expect there to be an avian flu epidemic. governments in europe are stockpiling drugs that can help, vaccines are being synthesised, etc, strategies for isolating infected individuals and limiting spread of the disease are in place. i expect the US has something similar to this. as regards your questions on the synthesis of the virus in the lab, this is absolutely necessary if one wants to both develop and test vaccines. as for the science methods being used by a misanthrope (i much prefer this M word to the T word), well let's be clear that it is not technically difficult; there are generally available books on the methods involved. two days ago, ecoli posted a news thread on a virus that may cause obesity, in one of the references (far removed from the publication standards of nature or science) i found for this thread the authors describe how they made titres of live virus.

i read the paper i referenced above. no immunological characterisation was made and 'no brain damage was observed' in the chickens.

there is an alternative, study business and learn languages, became an entrepreneur and let others do the genetic engineering. scientists with genetic engineering skills are in excess. i have worked in China, and i can assure you more are on the way. i think the most important talent you will need is to spot a financial opportunity in the biotech industry and get their first.

yep Peon. one of the authors Ian Jackson, a scot i presume, possibly a ginger haired one too, is big in the field of M1CR, his homepage is http://www.hgu.mrc.ac.uk/Research/Jackson/Molecular_dissection.html this page should help you understand how M1CR functions. i am not sure which academics have taken the above paper and used it for evidence of N-C hybrids...but it appears in a number of non-academics internet sites have, including: http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/000309.html http://p221.ezboard.com/fbalkanhistoryfrm19.showMessage?topicID=3.topic i am wondering who has reinterpreted this data and turned it into evidence for N-C hybrids.

here is the paper by RL Atkinson with the animal research: Whigham LD, Israel BA, Atkinson RL. Adipogenic potential of multiple human adenoviruses in vivo and in vitro in animals. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol. 2006 Jan;290(1):R190-4. Epub 2005 Sep 15. PMID: 16166204 or http://ajpregu.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/290/1/R190 does anyone else recall the early days of gene therapy? adenovirus vectors where the most popular choice. unfortunately, the extremely high doses of adenovirus-gene molecules needed to ensure sufficient transformation produced dangerous if not lethal immune responses. i am going to read this paper closely to see if there is any indication that the animals became ill.

swansont is right. TIR always appears in text books under refraction. maybe swansont will approve of this - when light is incident on a surface both reflection and refraction take place, however in the case of TIR, no refraction is observed, hence the name TIR.

as i understand the article, 20% out of a sample of 2000 austrailians, showed the presence of the ad-36 virus, but the austrailian author, NG Martin, disputes any correlation of the presence of the virus with body mass index. i am always wary of research that hasn't been published. some film trailers are much better than the actual film. i would be interested to understand how the ad-36 virus can have such wide tropism, infecting chickens, mice, marmosets and humans. this would make it an extraordinarily successful virus. i would also like to see some immunology showing the presence and character of the immune response to ad-36. 95% of the population test positive for herpes simplex virus, but fortunately cold sores, gential sores or herpes encaphalitis, are not so common. just because the presence of the virus can be detected, does not mean there is an active infection.

Harding RM, Healy E, Ray AJ, Ellis NS, Flanagan N, Todd C, Dixon C, Sajantila A, Jackson IJ, Birch-Machin MA, Rees JL. Evidence for variable selective pressures at MC1R. Am J Hum Genet. 2000 Apr;66(4):1351-61. Epub 2000 Mar 24. PMID: 10733465 http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=10733465 or http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v66n4/991391/991391.html