Skye

She's a witch! Burn her!

Medical studies, and medicine in general, shouldn't come with the obligation to use them. Sayonara, so the nun outfit was just a thinly-veiled ploy?

For sickle cell, it's a different allele that codes for a protein that stretches the red blood cells out into a long thin sickle shape when there is low oxygen. Then they clump up and...anemia. Dunno about the native americans, probably complicated again.

Yep. So x=CD. I can't see why x can't have a wide range of values, i.e. 0<x<9. [edited stupid inequalities]

That's really because of the nature of red blood cells. But yeah, races aren't that different. There are differences; some races don't have some alleles.

Thirteen years is a long time. How long do you think there should be to evaluate the coma? My girlfriends boss died late last year, went into a coma after being diagnosed with meningitis. It was only about a month after she was hospitalised that he had the feeding tube removed...seemed a little hasty.

Well, it's complicated and not really well understood There are at least four genes (we don't know exactly) with several alleles at each (we don't know that either) and they might interact (who knows?). It's just hard to say much for sure, and unfortunately it's not very simple.

Skin colour is a bad example because it's complicated and not really well understood. We have the same locations on our genome, but different alleles at those locations. You don't have all the alleles for anyone else, because we are all genetic individuals, cept monozygotic twins.

Get a clock with a circular face and point out the number between 11 and 1.

*looks into crystal ball* Sorry, it appears we won't evolve psychic ablity.

Perhaps because some of the genes 'for' alcoholism are probably also 'for' related behaviours. Alcohol has been around for a while. I was talking to a tutor about human evolution and brought up that Australian aboriginals have larger molars than other peoples. She said they also have larger intestines. These are probably because most other peoples teeth and intestines have become smaller as we have increased the processing of food, cutting it up, grinding it, etc. They don't much, so they still need the teeth and guts. When you think about it alot of these changes are only thousands of years old. Alcohol has been consumed for quite some time, perhaps enough for pretty substantial adaptations to it. Anways I'm off to bed

Oh, well put simply everything is the product of genes interacting with the environment. You wouldn't say, "alcoholism is only caused by genetic factors", or "alcoholism is only caused by social factors." You can say that such and such a gene (or social condition) has a statistically significant effect though. The other bit is that genes are actually very simple in a way. For the most part, the important part here, they just code for different proteins. They don't say "oh build this guy a really big nose", it's all proteins. It's really only by these proteins ability to catalyse specific reactions that there is any interaction with the environment. They can go around catalysing all kinds of things, and it's all these reactions which lead to life. They even convey the messages and catalyse the production of more proteins. The problem is that to do all this cool stuff they need to be really complicated, and this is part of the reason you can't pass on your traits to your children. There's just no way for another protein to 'read' all the proteins and convert it into genes made of DNA.

"does THAT effect us geneticly at all?" No.

Holeum moleum Batman, it's a non-radiating black hole!

Yeah, it's accidents of nature being more successful one. It's essentially impossible to go through gene expression backwards (proteins-->DNA) and even harder to encode a specific development into DNA. And even if organisms could, how would they tell what was advantageous and what wasn't? The most likely changes you would inherit would be cancers, lost limbs, aging etc. Not so good....

There's been a few groups pushing for scientific journals to be more freely available to the public, especially as they pay for much of the research. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was trying to get the big name journals like Nature and Science to allow free online access to articles six months after they were published. While they release some selected articles for free, these journals believe that it's not commercially viable to produce quality journals for free. In response, PLoS decided to produce their own journals, covering the costs with grants and a $1500 fee to the authors of published articles. They have recently released some of their early articles of their first journal 'PLoS Biology' [link]. There are already some other journals that offer free articles at BioMed Central [link], the British Medical Journal [link], the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [link] and BioMedNet [link].

http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa061602a.htm You could try to get your teacher to help you make one, though I don't know if they are allowed.

It's ready for download. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/guide/human/

The Nobel prize winners were announced recently, and not for the first time there has been some controversary involved [link]. Both the prize for Medicine and for Physics were awarded for contributions to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Paul Laterbur, and Peter Mansfield, were awarded the prize for Medicine, while the prize for Physics went to Vitaly Ginsburg, Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett. But a US researcher claims "the Nobel committee is rewriting history" [link]. Raymond Damadian is the founder and director of Fonar Corp., which produces MRI scanners. He owns a patent based on his discovery in 1970 that normal and cancerous tissue could be distinguished using nuclear magnetic resonance. In response to the announcement the prize for Medicine would be awarded to Lauterbur and Mansfield, but not himself, he has had published full page advertisements in the Washington Post and New York Times calling the decision "The Shame That Must Be Righted." The secretary of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinka Intitutet, Hans Jornvall, has pointed out that the decision could not be appealed. The prizes for Chemistry, to Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon for work on cell membrane channels, Literature, to novelist J.M. Coetzee, and Economics, to Robert Engle and Clive Granger, attracted much less attention. The Peace prize, to Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, has received a luke warm response from the Tehrans right wing press, concerned at the implications of the prize [link] but this has been dismissed by the government [link].

Google gave me this Yeah it's for kids But it does say that wind machines have an efficiency, in converting kinetic energy to electrical energy, of 30-40%.

I read in popular science magazine that in some languages the colour blue is often represented by the same word that defines green, or darkness, in several languages. The suggestion was that some cultures haven't had a seperate concept of the colour blue. It is supposedly common amongst tropical people, where blue-yellow colour blindness is also sometimes more prevalent. There was also an experiment outlined which tested the effect of degradation of vision due to UV-B light, as a possible cause. Just seemed to me interesting anyway, and I was wondering if anyone had heard of this sort of 'cultural colour blindness' before.

DarkApostle, lived through doesn't mean verifiable. You can't verify a personal experience with anyone else.

Anything will rise if the air it's in is rising faster than it falls through it.

Intent and duty of care play a role too. You might not have meant to run down the 5 year old. But you should have stopped when you realised you did.

Just because predictable material processes result in thought doesn't make thought itself predictable. Chemistry or whatever, it is a reaction, you don't love someone by force of will.