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Whoops sorry, I had accidentally put the same URL in both links. I have now updated the first link to the correct article. Try it again. Both of those articles are qualitative and have plenty of references, they should absolutely satisfy your lecturer's requirements. Yes I am happy to continue in chat, but it will have to be tomorrow evening (between GMT 6 and 10) as I have some work of my own to do this evening. Of course, you'll have to write your own essay, but I am happy to show you some general research methods and get you started. Here is another paper which suggests current safety precautions are not sufficient: Goodman et al. (2008) Allergenicity assessment of genetically modified crops - what makes sense? And here is a very recent review (still in press) which gives the results of individual safety trials: Domingo & Bordonaba (2011) A literature review on the safety assessment of genetically modified plants My name is Blahah by the way, Meson is a user rank!

what materials do you have available to make it from?

The second link works fine for me, what happens when you click it? Are you sure it has to be a whole journal dedicated to a particular stance on the issue, or just a journal article? You won't find any reputable journal which only publishes papers taking one side of a discussion. Books are a bit easier to find taking one side of an argument, but then you need to be able to get hold of the books. If you can choose one topic I can help you research it, it's a bit vague to look at 6 different ones. I suggest either GM food safety, or human cloning, as it will be easier to find people taking sides on those things.

I tried what you wanted to do, the sphere within a sphere, in Sketchup and it was fairly straightforward. You might also try Archimedes Geo3D or Geup 3D which are both designed for drawing simple geometric 3D.

The restrictions on GM plants depend on the country. In the UK, you have to have a license from DEFRA to be able to engineer or grow GM plants, and they aren't allowed to be grown outside controlled conditions. There have been some field trials, but they were sabotaged by Greenpeace. To my knowledge, there should be no GM plants outside of labs in the UK. In the US/China/Brazil though there are GM plants all over the place (in agriculture), and increasingly in other parts of the world. Controlling reproduction is one possible method of preventing gene flow from GM to wild species. Possibilities include preventing pollen production genetically, or only using species which don't produce pollen. There are many plant species which won't flower except in certain conditions, so another option is to keep them in controlled climates so they don't flower. That's a bit risky though, prone to error. I'd go with engineering non-pollen producing plants. The major problem at the moment with that technology is that the reaction time is so slow. Dogs and electronic sensors react immediately, but the plants take hours to suppress chlorophyll expression and then a few more hours before they actually change colour. By that time the bombs will have been detonated. If they can get the reaction times down to seconds, then it will be a viable proposition.

Have you tried Google Sketchup? It's very simple and free, and the basic mode does nice line drawings in 3D/ I can't actually remember if it does spheres, but I'm pretty sure it will. edit: Sketchup does do spheres, and it's particularly good for the radius measurements you mentioned.

Do you have any idea what sort of project you want to do? Do you have access to a lab where you can work? $500 will be great funding for materials as long as you have access to basic lab facilities and even better if they already have some form of cryo storage. Do you want to work with plants, animals, bacteria?

Are you at school or university? Do you have access to online journals? I'll get you started on the GM debate... Here is one paper generally concluding that the safety testing methods for GM foods are adequate: Kuiper et al. (2001) Assessment of the food safety issues related to genetically modified foods Here is one which claims they are fundamentally flawed: Schubert (2002) A Different Perspective on GM Food I'll post more tomorrow, it's getting a bit late tonight.

So if we denote: pure yellow as Y green as y round as R wrinkled as r And you have a pure yellow round: YYRR and a pure green wrinkled: yyrr So the gametes of the pure yellow round will be: YR YR YR YR And the green wrinkled gametes: yr yr yr yr Then we do the punnet square (only need to do a small one since they are all the same!): You can see all F1 offspring will have YyRr. But if you then do a dihybrid cross of two F1 offspring, they will each have gametes: YR Yr yR yr Then the punnet square looks like: So you can see the F2 generation has a ratio of 9:3:3:1 (I coloured the phenotypes to make it easier to count) Does that make it clear? So from those results (and lots more) Mendel was able to work out the laws of inheritance. Actually, it has been shown that Mendel probably guessed the laws quite early on in his experiments, and then made up the data to support his guesses! It would have been extremely unlikely that he would get the ratios so perfectly in his results with a few thousand plants. Not very scientific (but still, science is grateful to him). If you want to read about it in more detail, this page describes it clearly.

No there are only 6 possible genotypes: DDBb, DdBb, DDbb, Ddbb, ddBb, ddbb If you draw the punnet square you can count the different genotypes: Remember that DdBb and DdbB are the same genotype, and it's easier to always write the dominant first so you don't accidentally count them as separate. Does that make sense?

Yes that's correct, although you don't write each ratio as x:8. If you want to write the fractions you could write dark hair blue eyes 3/8 dark hair brown eyes 3/8 blonde hair blues eyes 1/8 blonde hair brown eyes 1/8 The ratio is 3:3:1:1 (or 6:6:2:2 before you reduced it) When you write the ratio make sure you also write what it's the ratio of, e.g. dark,blue : dark,brown : blonde,blue : blonde,brown 3:3:1:1

Yes, you have got the genotypes and gametes correct. No explanation needed, seems like you already understand it

Just my initial thought, but wouldn't your eyes have to be quite far apart for light to hit them a significant time apart? I mean, for there to be a second difference between when they saw things, your face would have to be 299,792,458 metres wide. Obviously the time difference between the eyes could be smaller, but it would still be a huge distance. Also, wouldn't that then cause you to have déjá vu every time you saw something which required you to turn your head? I think I've only had it about 10 times in my life.

Right, the space in between objects is (and has been) expanding, so that's one reason why it takes so long for the light to reach us. And surely the something we can see of the big bang is in the form of the cosmic background radiation? (I could be wrong, only just coming to grips with this stuff myself)

I think I could easily get on board (no pun intended) with this sea living idea. I like living surrounded by technology, I can see it being appealing in that way, and being always at the seaside. But how would we get reliable broadband? No internet would be a real dealbreaker.

OK, so (by a modern speces definition) the first male of our evolutionary history who could mate with a modern female to produce viable offspring. Yeah, that guy wasn't called Adam.

Why must there have been a first man? The development of our species was a very gradual evolution - it would only be by setting an arbitrary point in our evolution that we'd have a first.

Perhaps you're on the wrong forum, did you think this was stormfront.org? It's SCIENCEforums. That means when you make claims, you need to back them up with evidence. I hope you get moderated, or preferably banned - your opinions are not founded on evidence and you're making up facts to support your racist opinion. Examples: 'certain parts of the world have been leaders forever' - no, nobody has been a leader 'forever' and no part of the world has been dominant for more than a few hundred years. Power changes; between countries, between continents, between races. 500 years ago the Ming dynasty was dominant. In AD 400 the Gupta empire (in India) was the dominant empire in the world. America has been dominant for less than 100 years, and is on the way out. It has nothing to do with the intelligence of the general populace. 'Egypt would be broke if it were not a relic' - what does that even mean? Egypt was also once a dominant empire (further disproving your previous spurious claim). The causes of the prosperity of the modern nation are far more complex than you could ever hope to quantify. 'And most of the middle east would still live in dung huts' - actually modern civilisation originated in the middle east. Organised civilisation was born in the fertile crescent, also known as 'The Cradle of Civilisation'. 'the right to vote was the result of women rights not the cause of it' - no, it wasn't. The right to vote was a result in most countries of suffrage. It was a movement which started in the UK and spread worldwide, and it was about women demanding rights which they did not previously have. Mods?

No, the baby boom (assuming you are talking about the post WWII boom in the USA) was a boom, i.e. it started with an increase then decreased. Before the world wars, US birth rates were already in massive decline. Worldwide, women being given the vote is associated with a decrease in birthrate (except where religion gets in the way, e.g. Irish Catholic). Historically it is followed by an increase in the number of women joining the workforce, and making the decision to not spend their lives mothering bucketloads of children. That is one of many, many possible explanations. One which is highly unlikely. Far more likely reasons why Africa hasn't achieved food security are: frequent natural disasters rampant disease (malaria, AIDS, various insect-borne fevers) wars resulting from arbitrary borders drawn up by colonial powers and poorly executed transitions to independence terrible economic policies, corruption, etc. All of those factors contribute to the inability of the continent as a whole (except Egypt and South Africa) to set up and maintain effective agricultural policies and structures. Why would you opt to just say that a whole continent of people are stupid?

Wow, that's pretty extreme stuff there. Implants to prevent people with low IQ from procreating? This thread is marching towards another data point for Godwin's Law. Ever since 'we gave women the right to vote' (were you somehow involved?), the rate of population increase has been decreasing. So you are certainly wrong that it has 'been going this way' ever since that day. And 'the thinking is I can not feed my first kid so let's have 3 more'... really? You're stating that every African mother has no power to make basic logical inferences? High numbers of children per woman is associated with areas of high infant mortality and low life expectancy. I don't presume to know what every African mother is thinking, but I imagine it's more along the lines of "I want at least one child to survive to adulthood" and "We don't have any method of dealing with unwanted pregnancy".

Voltman, even if the guy existed in the first place and was buried in Iraq, finding any remnants of his bones would be like searching for, well, a tiny bone in a massive desert. However long ago Adam supposedly lived, it was long enough that his bones could have disintegrated long ago.

lemur has already pointed out the major problems with this position. It is, of course, your choice to make that decision to only have two children. Actually, I currently plan to have certainly no more than two children, if any, for that reason. But there are very many possible ways in which current population limits can be lifted. Asserting your judgement about how many children to have based on the current population limits is not valid - there is no certainty about the carrying capacity of the planet (see the other thread). And it is never just to force others into your way of thinking when it's not based on certain evidence.

Why wouldn't that be possible? It's fairly straighforward to move to China to work, although if you actually expect to have your western standard of living you'll have to get a much better job than you would have here (UK/USA). Quite a few of my cohort from school have moved to china permanently for management positions in finance. I don't think many Chinese cities are abundantly multi-ethnic at the moment though, based only on what I've heard from people visiting.

It's impossible to estimate a human carrying capacity for the Earth, except to say that it is certainly going to be less than some extremely high upper bound (say, 100 billion). Our current state of technology and resource use is not sustainable, but I think it unlikely that the solution to that will be rapid population decrease. The solutions will more likely be technological and social. It's absurd to say that we should estimate the maximum population in a world where there is no need for technological solutions to our waste problems - we haven't lived in a world like that for hundreds of years. The maximum population depends on the sustainability of current resources. Once we kick this stupid habit we have of consuming fossil fuels, we'll be much more sustainable and will therefore be able to maintain a higher population in the long term. Energy, food and water pressures will always be the major ones until we physically take up all the space. There are technological solutions to all these things - if we come up with good enough sustainable means of energy production (these may or may not have already been invented) then the other problems are almost solved - food can be grown indoors, in towers or racks, and water can be desalinated or treated in an energy consuming way. I sincerely hope that our future doesn't involve farming large animals for food, that's a serious waste of resources. I think the future of food is in metabolic/genetic engineering of plants and production of synthetic foods by engineering microorganisms in culture (like Quorn). I wouldn't like to guess about the future of energy prouction, I think that's still very much an open question. Social solutions to population limits could include decreased population increase due to more stable developed nations emerging, and large habitations organising into more efficient networks. Cities and towns which have built up gradually throughout history are extremely inefficient, and people living dispersed through the countryside is even more inefficient due to the enormous costs associated with distributing resources and travelling between nodes in the network. There is quite simple one way to most efficiently organise such a network, and I hope future, well designed habitations will be built in that way. We're kind of getting there with current approaches to sustainable development and town planning, but it really will take new towns being built to achieve major increases in efficiency. Other social change could include consumer pressure to reduce packaging and supply chain waste, which is a huge source of both physical waste and energy inefficiency at the moment; and greater social pressure to become vegetarian, which would decrease our land usage for animal production and animal feed production. Physical building materials might also be a limiting factor, but I think that's so far off in the future, and technologically created new materials are already available, that it won't be limiting for long. @lemur: in an ecological footprint assessment, the footprint associated with production is assigned to the consumer.