SMF

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WMD-45R8FXC-3N&_user=10&_coverDate=08%2F07%2F1995&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=gateway&_origin=gateway&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1733174327&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=621cb599dcdd80bc9d50e6c627d538a9&searchtype=a No full text available that I could find. A shame. SM

See- http://jn.nutrition.org/content/130/5/1512S.short (free download of full article available) No evidence for effectiveness. SM

TonyMcC. My statement expressed my concerned about a teacher who claims that only half of what they taught was true. Because scientific knowledge is always progressing, I mean "true" here to consist of what is known, not some absolute truth. The simplifications of complicated information that I have seen good teachers make are not falsehoods, they are clarifications designed for the educational level of the learner. I always tried to inform the students from time to time of my simplifications with a short bit of the very complicated material backing up what I said, or by suggesting that the last few minutes of lecture could easily provide enough material for a whole course. SM

I can"t find any University of Chicago cryptozoology team. If you are talking about Roy Mackal, he is an old Loch Ness Monster chaser who is retired from the University of Chicago. Could you please clarify this issue. SM

In my opinion, any college lecturer who hasn't planned the necessary simplifications to teach complicated information, and done so based on knowledge of the content, is not doing their job. SM

This is just south of the Sahara, but it seems very relevant- http://portal.iri.columbia.edu/~alesall/pubslist/gloplacha2008final.pdf SM

I can support what Insane_alien said. My son was very blond, but by the time he was in high school it had turned brown. SM

The lung is one of the places where it is synthesized and released.

I think this bit should go into the Other Sciences, Cool Facts thread. SM

Iceveela: You are not willing to defend your cat-lion statement, or to discuss any science at all. Your statement says it all- As you say, everything you have posted here is pointless, so I am wondering why you are here at all. I think that it is pointless for me to respond to pointless comments, and will not respond to you further. I advise others to do the same. SM

Iceveela. You said that "no one disagrees that the house-cat descended from the lion" and I contested this. If you want to talk science, please support your assertion. This is the way that science discussion proceeds when there is a disagreement. Now it is your turn and sitting back and yawning shows that you are not serious. SM

This living dinosaur bit reminds me of Bigfoot, area 51, and the Bermuda triangle. Lots of good eyewitness accounts there as well. SM

Here are some points to consider/discuss: Solar and wind power generate the most energy right in the window of peak demand, and thus can pick up much of the load above baseline and make a big dent in fossil generation. It will also make conversion to electric transportation more feasible. Doing this now will ultimately save money and allow time to work out base load solutions. Photovoltaic solar and wind are well suited to more distributed generation and thus minimize how abrupt the necessary change to a smart grid will have to occur during initial stages of the switchover. This also makes it well suited for very poor nations because it is so much less expensive overall for them in particular. Dry hot rock geothermal is apparently being ignored as a reliable, clean, and renewable (at human scale) base load power source. In some limited locations hot brine is also a good clean possibility if ecological concerns are respected. Pebble bed is probably not the best choice for generation 4 nuclear. I think there are 7 different designs and several of them are touted to be safe, fail safe, not producers of weapons grade fuel, and can run on all the waste from the old plants that has been stored perhaps, ultimately, just for this purpose. I would like to hear a very critical comparison of generation 4 reactors. If we have to have nuclear as part of the mix, and I am not entirely convinced of this, we should pick one or more generation 4 designs and perfect them in pilot plants. Next cookie cutter designs should be perfected prior to actually building production plants because this greatly decreases the chance of design flaws, reduces building costs, makes sloppy workmanship harder to cover up, and reduces ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs. It is obvious to me that there is going to have to be a mix of energy sources to make up for the loss of all the precious fossil fuels that we are bent on just burning up. We should get at this changeover before the fossil fuels get too expensive. SM

A computer that replicates itself in order to provide inexpensive computers isn't possible. This is because such a device is just cutting out human labor in the construction but not all of the energy and materials costs. When biological computers are engineered that grow from a genome, use sunlight for energy, use any old biomass for raw material, and replace rare metals and plastics with fats and proteins, then replication might be made inexpensive. SM

Fanghur. SDS does its job by binding to hydrophobic elements of both lipids and integral proteins, and separating them into little soluble micelles. Most peripheral proteins are associated with the hydrophilic portion of integral proteins and could remain attached after detergent treatment depending on the nature of the association.SM

Peripheral proteins are removed first with high or low ionic strength or extreme pH solutions that disrupt their ionic bonds with the membrane. SM

Marat. It would be nearly impossible for a large dino to have survived without discovery. One of the small bird-like ones would be the most likely, but very unlikely in its original form. You don't understand how a massive extinction event might leave a small population of survivors? It did, and they evolved to take over a very profitable ecological niche. SM

Marat and Random: Existing dinosaurs are the birds. One surviving ancient dinosaur species is very unlikely, but in any case would not have any affect on any mass extinction hypothesis. No ancient dinosaur has popped out of a wild bird, there are just too many genetic differences. Crocodiles and alligators (also caimens) did not evolve from dinosaurs. Instead crocodilians are parallel to the dinosaurs. Elephants did not evolve from mammoths. Mammals did evolve from cold blooded reptiles via the synapsids. Fish were the precursors to all land vertebrates. SM Edited to remove apparent disparity between statements 1 and 3. There have been experiments that cause chicken genes for tooth development to be expressed in ovo, but none to demonstrate chicken lips yet.

Marat, do you have a scientific reference for your blond hair/sexual selection statement. I have never heard this. SM

Jet engines will run on vegetable oils (biofuel), but corn should probably be the last choice for this. SM

RobotTemplar, you can always come back here when you are the expert. More about Google Scholar- I have found that trying several searches with different key words often brings up more information. Watch for the "PDF" at the right of each result item because this usually indicates a full text article, and sometimes "HTML" in this position does as well. When the article you want is behind a paywall click "All (some number) Versions", bottom right on each search result item, because there may be one that isn't restricted. Failing that I have sometimes found a full text article or a good description by pasting its whole title into a regular Google search. For example, the article may be up in a preprint form on the web page of one of the authors or the paper is in a book of collected papers and the bookseller allows you to read excerpts. Obviously a good way to follow up on a topic is to use the cited references in an article to see what has been done before that is closely related to an article, but notice "Cited by" (some number) lower left by each search result item. This provides newer research that is citing the one you are looking at and expands your search to a relatively restricted group of papers. Also the "Related articles" and the "Advanced Scholar Search" links are also useful. SM

RobotTemplar, I am glad to have helped. Because you are a serious student I would like to caution you that one of the biggest challenges of teaching science is to simplify complex information without distorting it too much. For example, further study will reveal to you that there are several axon tracts in the spinal cord that carry information other than simple touch and motor control and that both sensory and motor information are processed within relay stations and parallel systems, not just in the cortex. The nervous system she is not so simple. SM

Iceveela, when evaluating what others say regarding scientific topics I have learned to be biased against someone who tells me a "fact" that I know to be wrong, and to completely ignore anyone who presents a "fact" that is very wrong. You say (I have bolded the first factual statement in your first bulleted point): Your first statement is extravagantly incorrect and this indicates that you have little knowledge regarding the evolutionary process. SM

Stefan-CoA, you are asking for old memories about an area outside of my expertise. What I recall is that the reason for the different strains is that except for certain qualified labs the NIH did not make any fully competent virus available for research, and there were pieces that had been removed from each genome. The Ph.D. student reassembled a genome that allowed him to do his study. I believe that the viral protein he was studying had something to do with virulence. SM

How about the exhaust, there should be a little thrust from this.