Santalum

Well as they said in the doco, most medical researchers are still wedded to antibiotics. But the way things are headed they will probably be dragged kicking and screaming to bacteriophages because in all lilelihood a new class of antiobitocs will probably not be found before superbugs become a major cause of premature death.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/phages-the-virus-that-cures/ Very interesting doco. From my university days I am well aware of bacteriophages, but this documentary details serious US efforts to develop bacteriophages into high standard and practical treatments for bacterial infections in the face of inexorable rise of antibiotic resistance. There will be one limitation however that will be very difficult to overcome. And that is bacteriophages cannot be injected into the blood stream as they are soon destroyed by our own immune response. Hence they are likely to be limited to gastrointestinal, respiratory, wound and topical applications.

We have seen from Egypt and Syria etc what is inevitably happens if the majority do not get an acceptible cut of the wealth - political instability leading to revolution and over throw of those that seek to hog all the wealth and diempower the masses.

Another way of stating the fact.

For that matter jam generally does not spoil either, and they do not contain any preservatives. Jam and honey do not spoil probably for similar reasons that salted meat does not spoil, i.e. through an osmotic environment that is hostile to most microbes. Although honey may well also contain anti-microbial agents - it is sometimes used as an antimicrobial 'ointment' for persistent bed sores and ulcers etc.

All this speculation about random individual colour perception is rather nonsensical. We all have the same types of rods and cones in our our retinas, although the number and distribution of each might vary, and we all share virtually the same neural pathway structures in our brains. This means, in all likelihood, our percpetion of 'red' etc is innate and not a learned behaviour. With the exception of those with colour blindness of course.

Yeah, we have substituted that problem with wide spread alcohol fueled violence, particularly among young males, increased road trauma, foetal alcohol syndrome and partially brain damaged adults due them having continuously binged on alcohol while adolescents, etc, etc, etc. Perhaps all these drugs should be legalised but governments run a supply monopoly, being illegal for anyone else to supply them, to keep the prices relatively high so that affordability is limited along with consumption. A potentially win, win formula. An excelent source of revenue for governments, full control over supply and demand but unprofitable for criminals. The trick would be in getting the balance right. If prices are too high you will make illegal supply profitable again. If they are too low then consumption will increase too much. Then again if criminal did start supplying then the government could drop the price of the legal supply until they are out of business and then raise the price again to reduce consumption..............

Unless our theories about the structure and nature of the atom is fundamentally wrong (unlikely) then the periodic table of today will be identical to the periodic table of 500 years from now. All the places in the periodic table, atomic number 1 to 96 that correspond to naturally occuring stable elements, are filled and all the possible elements have been discovered. There can be no new ones other than artificial elements created in nuclear reactors and that can only exist for fractions of a second before they spontaneously fall apart beyond atomic number 96. Or is it 95......what ever.

Fine legalise it and eliminate much of the crime associated with it. But in Australia people should be drug tested for it and paid less youth allowances etc and an increased medicare levi if they are users. I.E. In order to compensate society for their reduced productivity and increased long term health care costs that result from smoking it. Same principal as tobacco smokers and heavy drinkers etc.

It would be far easier to drain the fluid out of an old car battery - that is H2SO4

http://www.gmat.unsw...fs/navpaths.pdf Found this website explaining rhumb lines, geodesics and gnomic projections etc. What I have been describing is a rhumb line or an small circle arc formed by the intersection of plane and the earth's surface, that does not include the centre of the earth. I can see from their diagram that it is clearly not going to be the shortest distance between two points on the earth's surface. Where as if you tilt that plane until it includes the earth's centre then you have shortened the distance, albeit slightly, between the two points. The penny is starting to drop DrRocket. In fact what I have been assuming is an arc of the circumference of the earth is in fact an arc of the circumference of what would be a smaller earth..........the distance on the earth's surface between two points at a given latitude. This amounts to a tighter curve and when you project that onto the surface of the earth it ends up being a slightly longer distance. Am I correct DrRocket? Also has a perfect decription of the difference between geodesics (ellipsoids and ellipses) and arc (circles and spheres) The 19th century term 'the antipodes' suddenly becomes meaningful to me.

Yes apparently I don't. I am struggling to comprehend what you mean. But now you have me absolutely intrigued even though I have never had any particular interest in maths. I don't suppose there is a website as good as your book that I could read? Anyone?

I think I have to agree with China and Russia on this.........up to a point. It is not as one sided as the western media is making it out to be. There is an armed revolt going on Syria. What if all the muslims in America or Australia got together and demanded that the Gillard or Obama governments resign and hold fresh elections, and backed up their demands with armed attacks on police, institutions and the army? Would we not react with live rounds proportionate to the attacks mounted by such hypothetical muslim insurgents in our own countries? What is going on in Syria is clearly not isolated Timothy James McVeigh type attacks on the state. It is much more widespread than that and the distinction between criminal, protestor and civillian is far more blurred. The good old USA has gotten it wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq on numerous occasions, particularly with the killing of the Reuter's reporters in the famour Wikileaks video. I am not so sure that the USA and the west are in a position to lecture Syria with a holier than thou attittude.

If you take a given latitude on the earth's surface and draw tangents all the way along that latitude line then they would all converge some where above the north or south pole and form a cone. If you take a given longnitude on the earth's surface and draw tangents along it then none of them will be parellel. So I don't understand how you can have parallel tangents........or have I some how misunderstood what you meant by this? Can you direct me to some sort of diagram that will enable me to visualise what you mean by this? Here is another site that describes a geodesic as a great arc: http://gregegan.cust...warzschild.html As I understand from this the distinction between a great arc and an arc is that an arc is a curved line segment with tangential line segments along its length but a great arc is a curved line segment within a curved surface which has multiple tangential planes along its length. <BR><BR> If you draw lines from two points on the earth's surface and the center of the earth then the line joining those two points on the earth's surface is an arc of a ccircular slice of the earth. So surely in 2D curved surfaces the distinction between an arc and a geodesic is some what blurred. <BR><BR>I obviously can't picture this sort of scenario in 4D spacetime so, without learning the mathematics, I will just have to take your word for it that there is a clear distinction between an arc and a geodesic in that case.

Can I take it that, on a 2D curved surface a geodesic = an arc but that this does not hold for higher dimensional curves? I suppose it should be obvious that an arc is specific to a 2D curved surace but that a geodesic is more generalised and covers higher dimensions. Perhaps Wikipedia should explicitly state this if it is the case because it currently appears that geodesic = arc may be assumed by some readers.

Are you kidding???? The backward pointing joint is a bird's ankle, not its knee. The 'lower leg' is in fact the bird's foot and is equivalent to the tarsal bones of our feet - a bird walks on its toes. The knee and thigh of an emu, and most birds, is out of sight beneath its feathers. If you squat down and raise your heels off the ground then you will understand how it is for the emu above. If you had a good knowledge of evolution and the fossil record and understood that: 1) We, mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles are descended from a common fish ancestor. 2) Whose direct descendant may be the Coelacanth that has its bony struts at the base of its fins) and that was inherited by birds etc. 3) And that evolution has modified this anatomically identical bone structure to form a wide variety of limbs we see in the animal kingdom today and throughout the fossil record. Surely you would then realise that any notion of a limb structure that is totally opposite this inherrited anatomy, i.e. a backward pointing knee, is just plain silly and that there must be some other more plausible explanation for the odd shape of an emu's leg.

A geodesic is an arc according to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic And the shortest distance between two points in 4D spacetime could be a wormhole........equivalent to boring through the earth from one point on the surface to another. Correct?

At the Bundoora Children Farm in Victoria Australia, a tour guide informed my daughter's grade 2 class that an emu had a backwards pointing knee. Have science education standards sunk so low that people cannot even get rudimentary scientific facts right??????

Purple bacteria use green and yellow wavelengths and reflect the blue and red wavelengths. It is undoubtedly a case of there being a very limited number of suitable light absorbing molecular arrangements that are also suitable for photosynthesis in biological systems. So if you like light absorbing molecules suitable for photosynthesis are quantised due to the biochemical restraints of biological systems. Evolution has come up with a red and blue absorbing/green reflecting one, a green and yellow absorbing/ red and blue reflecting one and a few others used by other type of autotrophic organisms. Presumeably it is far more difficult for evolution to succesfully couple the myriad of other light absorbing molecules in nature to the ATP generation machinery within cells.

Life experience has taught me that, if you REALLY want to learn any particular thing, then you will with seemingly little effort. You will indeed be more than happy to hold a book on the subject for more than 30 minutes, hungry for more knowledge. Your above comments suggest to me that perhaps your heart may not be entirely in your medical degree. Direct experience tells me that if your heart is not totally in it then you are unlikely to excel at the particular career or remain it over the longer term. Lack or loss of enthusiasm leads to career stagnation.

If that is how you interpret it then so be it! If there are enough failed adults making bad choices and harming wider society in the process then screw their individual rights to make those bad choices! As with badly behaving children, they ought do what they are told not what they want to do. Either tax junk food are make the obese (and smokers) pay a premium for health services that seeks to correct the damage caused by their poor choices, perhaps with weight loss and lifestyle modification services excluded. In Australia it ould be relatively easy where your medicare levi could be variable and subject to an annual medical check up. Smokers and the obese etc would pay an increased levi to compensate for the increased drain on the public health system they cause. Nothing like hitting the hip pocket in modifying behaviour.

Churchill also said that the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter. The recent global financial crisis is a pretty good indication that most economic experts are largey punching while blind folded.

So in short it is the constant shifting of electrons to and from excited states in the metal that causes electrical resistance to a current. Both due to collisions between transitioning electrons and electrons forming the electrical current or from electrons being lost from the current due to them entering an excited state etc. Is that roughly the story in very simplistic terms?

I would imagine the behaviour among apes would be similar to that between humans in that there is a whole spectrum of reasons why they engage in the behaviour, including sexual attraction to the same sex.

Personally I don't think the human race is coordinated or cooperative enough to form a real global brain - to many individuals, groups and countries doing their own thing that is not all that often in the interests of the global collective. Neurones, for example, do not consume all the glucose available to them at the expense of their neighbours as humans so often do. The global population probably more resembles an assemblage of competing malignant tumours than it does a cooperative global brain......at least at present.