LucidDreamer

I think that perhaps you should describe what you have in mind in a little more detail. I'm not exactly sure what you mean when you say "Creative Zen Portable Media center."

One last thought: Sexual libido is intertwined with culture norms. A culture dictates to an individual how he or she should feel about sex. Culture is as much a part of a persons libido as hormones. Maybe its pointless to ask which sex has a greater libido without the effects of culture when culture is an essential part of libido.

The problem here is separating the cultural influences from the physical influences, a classic nurture vs. nature problem. The other problem is making sense of the vast amount of research done on this subject, where the results of one study often contradicts another. The solution to this problem is the same solution that is always used to solve this problem. A relatively unbiased expert or panel of experts will examine all of the research as a whole to make sense of it. Cultural influences can be factored out by examining research from several different kinds of cultures and many studies are examined to determine the source of contradictions. From these studies, the truth often becomes very clear. If you really wanted to know the truth you would look for these multiple-research studies instead of relying on the results from a single researcher. Researchers’ opinions will almost always support their findings and some researchers set out to prove their opinions with their research. In addition, some people pretend to be experts without bias examining the evidence, but they are really fanatical advocates trying to push an agenda.

I don't think that the amount of oil resources affects population too much. In fact, its the very poor that use less oil and who often don't even have automobiles who are having more children and having the greatest effect on population. I have an oddball suggestion for population control. Make laws that restrict the age that woman can have children. Restrict the age that a woman can give birth to over 40 for the first generation, 42 for the second generation, 44 for the third generation, and so on. That way you decrease the population while simultaneously increasing the lifespan and health of the population. Of course, you would have to start screening for Down Syndrome and other maternal-age-related disorders and some woman would be incapable of having children at so late an age.

I don't know how complete it is, but here is a long list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distinct_cell_types_in_the_adult_human_body

This may be a bit off topic for this thread, but I would like to mention the importance of approaching the problem from the other direction. Instead of just concentrating on creating energy alternatives to meet our incredible energy demands, we should also be considering methods to decrease the energy consumption. The world is not in an energy crisis; it’s in an oil crises caused by some amazingly wasteful transportation systems. The United States could cut it's oil use to 1/4 its current consumption levels by simply improving public transportation and switching to hybrid and fuel-efficient cars. In addition to this, we could make tiny changes to the car's carburetors and add a certain percentage of ethanol to our gas to further reduce our oil consumption. I think if we are really going to solve our energy/oil problem we will need to reduce consumption in addition to developing safe and environmentally-friendly alternatives.

Perhaps we can curb man's violent and myopic nature with a bit of genetic engineering and some social reconstruction. Besides, there are still billions of us to destroy before we go completely extinct.

Doesn't selection act on even "higher" levels? Wouldn't dinosaurs dying out because they all had similar physical characteristics be an example?

I can't speak for every cancer researcher, but I believe there will be a "cure" for cancer. Our chemotherapies become more efficient and less toxic every year. We will continue to become more knowledgeable about alternative therapies. New kinds of biotherapies will be invented. We will continue to become more knowledgeable about the viruses that cause cancer. There will be a point in time when we will be able to remove oncogenes and other genes that predispose people to cancer from the gene pool. With billions of people on the earth we will discover genes/alleles in people that have remarkable properties to fight off cancer that we can increase in frequency of through selection or recombination. Most of the treatments that we consider cures are not 100% successful, so I believe that we will reach a state when we will have cancer so well under control that we might consider it cured by the same standards.

I use to believe that the main purpose of dreams was to reorganize memories from the day, but I have been paying attention to my dreams lately and I have found that some of my dreams have nothing at all to do with anything that I did that day. I am starting to believe that dreams might have another purpose. I think that dreams may be a way for the brain to recalibrate itself and reestablish an equilibrium of neurotransmitters. The stimuli of the dreams are just a form of standard to guide the process. To answer your question, during dreams the brain shuts down parts of itself in order to facilitate its maintenance. Perhaps one the parts that it shuts down is important for recognizing events that are extraordinary or out of place. This is important for sleep because those types of images would likely trigger an alarm state that would wake us. Of course, you could be right when you say that this is caused by the release or regulation of a specific neurotransmitter or chemical. I'm not sure what I think of your idea about our brains purposely hiding the truth from us. What would be its reason for doing this? Of course, our brain fools us all the time though. It takes upside down images and makes us think they are right side up, it makes us believe that we are an individual unit when we are really a colony of cells, etc.

I think that the possibilities that other forms of genetic material exist are very good. RNA acts as a form of genetic storage for viruses, as well as single stranded DNA. It's entirely possible that some other form of genetic material could work equally as well or better than DNA and RNA. I think the fact that all life on earth uses DNA is more do to chance, common decent, and fixation than it being the best option.

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Has anyone thought to check the urine to see if there is a change in urea or creatine?

Fe(s) --> Fe2+(aq) + 2e- 4e- + 4H+(aq) + O2(aq) --> 2H2O(l) 2H+(aq) + 2e- --> H2(g) Fe2+(aq) + 2OH-(aq) --> Fe(OH)2(s) 4Fe2+(aq) + 4H+(aq) + O2(aq) --> 4Fe3+(aq) + 2H2O(l) Fe3+(aq) + 3OH-(aq) --> Fe(OH)3(s) Fe(OH)3(s) --> Fe2O3.H2O (not balanced) So the water is needed to facilitate the loss of electrons in the first step and provide the hydroxide ions.

How about using hydrogen peroxide to oxidize the Iodide?

"IGFBP-3, a sensitive marker of physical training and overtraining. Elloumi M, El Elj N, Zaouali M, Maso F, Filaire E, Tabka Z, Lac G. Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Performance Motrice, Universite Blaise Pascal, Bat Biologie B, Les Cezeaux, 63177 Aubiere Cedex, France. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the response of the somatotrope axis (insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), insulin-like growth factor binding protein-3 (IGFBP-3)) to intense exercise in relation to tiredness. METHODS: The study involved 11 rugby players who completed a questionnaire intended to evaluate fitness or, conversely, overtraining and who agreed to plasma samples being taken before and after an international rugby match. RESULTS: The main finding of our study is that we observed strong negative correlations between IGF-1 (r = 0.652) and IGFBP-3 (r = 0.824) levels and the overtraining state estimated using the French Society of Sport Medicine questionnaire. In particular, there was a fall (of up to 25%) in IGFBP-3 levels after the match in the more fatigued subjects compared to an increase (of up to 40%) in fit subjects. CONCLUSIONS: A fall in IGFBP-3 in response to an intense bout of exercise may represent an index of tiredness in highly trained sportsmen, as indicated by the scores obtained from the overtraining questionnaire." Link For future reference, in case you didn't already know, just go to the site listed below and do a search as you would do a google search to find relevant research. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

In my memory, I am going to make a challenge about medical research on animals in the debate section of the forum, if you are interested.

You're a smart girl.

I can think of a few reasons why a plant might retain the poison: 1) To spread out: If the plant looses the poison then it is tied to locations near it's poisonous pal and can't spread out to new locations because the animals in the new location haven't been trained to avoid it. 2) Constant reinforcement: Animals don't have writing and only some have basic societies so their memories don't pass from generation to generation unless some kind of instinct is formed (I know their are exceptions.) So if one plant looses it's poison then animals will soon learn that some of those kinds of plants are not poisonous and begin to start eating them 3) Plant differences: One plant may be similar to another but there are usually differences. If one plant looses its poison then a smart animal may learn to distinguish it from its poisonious friend. 4) Mutual disadvantage: Since the non-poisonous plant will be tied to locations near it's poisonous pal it will only decrease the fitness of the poisonous plant and therefore decrease it's own fitness. If animals learn that it's sometimes ok to eat plants that look like it and the poisonous form, they will eat more of both the non-poisonous form and the poisonous form. The decreasing amount of poisonous plants that it is mimicing will only decrease it's own fitness. However, if it stays poisonous it will only improve the fitness of both itself and its partner. 5) Synergistic effect: It could be that the combined effect of having two similar looking plants with poison is greater than just adding their individual advantages together and therefore it makes loosing the poison very disadvantageous 6) Inappropriatly allocated resources: If a plant developes a strong self-defense mechanism against animals, such as poison, then protecting itself from animals is very important in its location and it is a judicious use of resources compared to using its resources for something else, such as growing faster. Freeing up resources may not be as useful as it seems if the plant is unable to allocate resources in the same fashion. After it looses the poison it may be unable to efficiently take advantage of the extra resources and it may not have enough time to evolve another equally useful attribute. 7) Resistance to poison: If you create a situation where an animal can eat the non-poisonous plant and not get sick but sometimes eat the poisonous plant and become somewhat sick you may evenually end up with a situation where the animal developes a resistance to the to the poison.

http://www.usfca.edu/westciv/Mesochro.html I wouldn't call thousands of years overnight.

The author fails to mention that studies have been done on identical twins raised in different families. This would factor out the effect of environmental factors, which was the whole point of the study. I'm not sure if these are the studies that he is referring to because he does not mention his sources. I can't find a source on this website for the studies so I cannot confirm it. The author has already misrepresented research so I might as well assume that he just did it again. I wouldn't trust a Christian organization to faithfully represent research about homosexuality and I certainly wouldn't trust their conclusions drawn from the research.

The statement from the Christian organization and your statement are different. They were correct in saying that study indicates that there is more than just a genetic component, but you are incorrect in saying that "homosexuality is not caused by genetics" The fact that 52% of the twins were gay when his identical twin was gay, when it is far more likely in our culture to be strait, indicates that there is a genetic component. Furthermore, according to your source, the amount of fraternal twins that are gay when their twin was gay was only 22%. So the more genetics you have in common the more likely you are to share sexual preference Girls Gone Wild tries to turn woman into lesbians for the night and nobody seems to mind. I fail to see the logic that homosexuality is unnatural because homosexuals try to turn straight people into homosexuals. Gay animals try to mount heterosexual animals and nobody starts screaming that it's unnatural. I have been around homosexuals several times and had no fear of turning into a homosexual.

Organisms carry an enormous arsenal of inactive genes and residual DNA. I think some of the mutations that we find that have resulted in beneficial phenotypic changes occur when a gene that was once active and beneficial millions of years ago for an ancestor with a different niche becomes active again and provides a new advantage now that the organism has again changed environments. In your example of a reptile that develops skin between its fingers, it could be that the reptile already had genes that coded for webbed fingers from its amphibian ancestors but these genes were turned off because webbed fingers are not an advantage to a land animal. However, this animal may have already become small, light, and have taken to spending it's time in the trees. So when the gene for coding for webbed fingers became active again through a mutation, this individual was not at a disadvantage like its land-scurrying ancestors would have been. In fact, this creature had an advantage with its webbed fingers because it could leap farther distances between trees when it was escaping predators or seeking new sources of prey. This mutation, which has reactivated an old gene that has now become advantageous again in a new environment, spreads throughout the population until its prevalence is almost complete. Here is another mutation scenario that would produce a strong advantage from a single mutation. Let’s say that the webbed finger gene only causes a certain amount of skin between the fingers, but does not fully cover the area between the fingers. Lets then imagine a crossing over mutation that results in two copies of this gene in a single chromosome that is separated to a gamete and becomes part of an individual’s genome. This creature now has two copies of the webbed finger gene that causes fully webbed fingers and this mutation quickly spreads to the whole population because of its advantages. As a final scenario, I offer a mutation that occurs in a developmental gene that regulates bone growth. This gene produces a protein that acts as a hormone that induces bone growth for the early stages of the developing animal. When this animal's ancestors were on the ground he needed dense bones to sustain all of the activity of tumbling around on the ground. So this gene was regulated to produce 50 copies of the protein per milliliter of blood to induce the correct density of bone. However, since the animal now leaps from tree to tree he would benefit greatly from having lighter bones. Now when a mutation occurs that causes greater regulation of that gene that produces a protein that regulates bone growth and results in only 30 copies of the protein per milliliter of blood it spreads throughout the population because lighter bones have now become an advantage. The point of all that was to show that small mutations in developmental genes can cause great and sometimes beneficial changes in the phenotype of an animal, animals keep large warehouses of old genes and DNA that can be reactivated for future use, animals often have several copies of genes that can be increased or decreased to need, animals have a variety of steps during development and regulation that are subject to mutations and can cause a range in protein amounts and phenotypic changes, and that variations caused by these mutations already exist within populations and are constantly acted on by natural selection and can work together simultaneously to create a synergistic effect causing an adaptation to a new environment. Evolution does not have to create from scratch and it rarely does.