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Arctodus23



Posts: 322
Joined: Mar. 2013

(Permalink) Posted: Feb. 20 2014,09:51   

I find this article particularly interesting:

http://www.plosone.org/article....A4F81AE

<sarcasm>Looks like the ants had no problem during Noah's Flood.</sarcasm>

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"At our churchs funerals, we sing gospel songs (out loud) to God." -- FL

"So the center of the earth being hotter than the surface is a "gross
violation of the second law of thermodynamics??" -- Ted Holden

   
Quack



Posts: 1961
Joined: May 2007

(Permalink) Posted: Mar. 08 2014,04:03   

Copied from nature: Detecting software errors via genetic algorithms.

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Rocks have no biology.
              Robert Byers.

  
sparc



Posts: 2089
Joined: April 2007

(Permalink) Posted: Mar. 08 2014,06:13   

Quote (Quack @ Mar. 08 2014,04:03)
Copied from nature: Detecting software errors via genetic algorithms.

Don't tell KF if you don't want another war on weasels.

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"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."

- William Dembski -

   
Quack



Posts: 1961
Joined: May 2007

(Permalink) Posted: Mar. 08 2014,10:23   

Quote (sparc @ Mar. 08 2014,06:13)
 
Quote (Quack @ Mar. 08 2014,04:03)
Copied from nature: Detecting software errors via genetic algorithms.

Don't tell KF if you don't want another war on weasels.

Hihi, that's why I posted it here.

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Rocks have no biology.
              Robert Byers.

  
REC



Posts: 638
Joined: Sep. 2006

(Permalink) Posted: April 18 2014,21:43   

http://arstechnica.com/science....tic-one

Undergrads...
Quote
built up an entire chromosome in yeast, eventually replacing the yeast's normal copy. ... the team made radical changes to the DNA normally found in yeast, deleting most of the sequences that might be considered non-essential. Despite the elimination of 15 percent of the chromosome, the synthetic version worked fine, and the resulting yeast were difficult to distinguish from their normal peers.


Sing along now....every base is sacred....every base is great...if a base is wasted...god gets quite irate

  
REC



Posts: 638
Joined: Sep. 2006

(Permalink) Posted: April 18 2014,21:47   

forgot the article link:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126....1249252

Edited by REC on April 18 2014,21:57

  
Quack



Posts: 1961
Joined: May 2007

(Permalink) Posted: April 19 2014,02:38   

Quote (REC @ April 18 2014,21:43)
http://arstechnica.com/science....tic-one

Undergrads...  
Quote
built up an entire chromosome in yeast, eventually replacing the yeast's normal copy. ... the team made radical changes to the DNA normally found in yeast, deleting most of the sequences that might be considered non-essential. Despite the elimination of 15 percent of the chromosome, the synthetic version worked fine, and the resulting yeast were difficult to distinguish from their normal peers.


Sing along now....every base is sacred....every base is great...if a base is wasted...god gets quite irate

All together now: That can't be true that can't be true that can't be true... ENCODE!!!

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Rocks have no biology.
              Robert Byers.

  
sledgehammer



Posts: 533
Joined: Sep. 2008

(Permalink) Posted: April 26 2014,00:34   

Extra-cellular, Fe-catalyzed metabolic pathways in "early ocean solutions" (Markus Ralser, University of Cambridge)
New Scientist, 25Apr2014
"People have said that these pathways look so complex they couldn't form by environmental chemistry alone," says Markus Ralser at the University of Cambridge who supervised the research....The pathways they detected were glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway ... In all, 29 metabolism-like chemical reactions were spotted, seemingly catalysed by iron and other metals that would have been found in early ocean sediments. ...Detecting the metabolite ribose 5-phosphate is particularly noteworthy, Ralser says. This is because it is a precursor to RNA..."

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The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny is alleviated by their lack of consistency. -A. Einstein (H/T, JAD)
If evolution is true, you could not know that it's true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. ?Think about that. -K. Hovind

  
Quack



Posts: 1961
Joined: May 2007

(Permalink) Posted: May 01 2014,07:26   

Predators predict longevity of birds.

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Rocks have no biology.
              Robert Byers.

  
dvunkannon



Posts: 1377
Joined: June 2008

(Permalink) Posted: May 06 2014,13:49   

http://news.psu.edu/story....aterial

Yawn, just another technology designed with the use of a plain vanilla GA. You know, the stuff that doesn't work.

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Im referring to evolution, not changes in allele frequencies. - Cornelius Hunter
Im not an evolutionist, Im a change in allele frequentist! - Nakashima

  
OgreMkV



Posts: 3668
Joined: Oct. 2009

(Permalink) Posted: May 06 2014,14:16   

Quote (dvunkannon @ May 06 2014,13:49)
http://news.psu.edu/story......aterial

Yawn, just another technology designed with the use of a plain vanilla GA. You know, the stuff that doesn't work.

"Absorbs up to 90% of IR..."

I wonder if that could be used in thermocouples...

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Ignored by those who can't provide evidence for their claims.

http://skepticink.com/smilodo....retreat

   
midwifetoad



Posts: 4003
Joined: Mar. 2008

(Permalink) Posted: May 06 2014,14:46   

Or solar panels. It would be interesting to be able to absorb the most effective bandwidth and reflect heat.

I'm not sure that even makes sense, but heat is a problem.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news....r-cells

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Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

  
Henry J



Posts: 5787
Joined: Mar. 2005

(Permalink) Posted: May 06 2014,22:18   

Quote (midwifetoad @ May 06 2014,13:46)
I'm not sure that even makes sense, but heat is a problem.

At least until somebody invents cold fusion that actually works! :D

Henry

  
Wesley R. Elsberry



Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002

(Permalink) Posted: June 12 2014,09:45   

The warp drive people make some awesome CGI renderings.

Does anyone know if they've made and detected even a microscopic warp bubble?

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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

    
OgreMkV



Posts: 3668
Joined: Oct. 2009

(Permalink) Posted: June 12 2014,13:17   

Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ June 12 2014,09:45)
The warp drive people make some awesome CGI renderings.

Does anyone know if they've made and detected even a microscopic warp bubble?

I thought I heard of a guy who was trying to find them. I can't find it now though. Ah, the internet, like trying to find individual molecules of urea in a pool.

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Ignored by those who can't provide evidence for their claims.

http://skepticink.com/smilodo....retreat

   
Wesley R. Elsberry



Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002

(Permalink) Posted: June 18 2014,07:14   

The Smithsonian gets it wrong about NOC the whale.

Quote

Four years after Noc launched into his talking spree, he just as abruptly stopped, reverting in 1999 to “Beluga” for the rest of his days in captivity. In the early 1990s, with the end of the cold war and cutbacks in defense spending, the Marine Mammal Program was greatly downsized. By then only three belugas remained in the Point Loma enclosure, Muk Tuk, Noc and Ruby. Lyl had succumbed to pneumonia only two years into his training. Chr died of a lung infection in 1984. Churchill died in 1987 of pneumonia. In April 1997, Ruby was transferred to SeaWorld, though she remains the property of the U.S. Navy.

Muk Tuk and Noc, however, were retained for a new operation, dubbed Deep Hear. It was developed to test the potential effects on marine mammals of a new type of low-frequency active sonar (LFAS), which has since been cited by more than 100 scientists as the cause of massive whale strandings. The noise often induces entire pods to surface so rapidly in an attempt to escape it, they die of a condition to which scientists had assumed whales to be immune: the bends. In 2001, Muk Tuk joined Ruby behind the glass at Wild Arctic. She died of a lung infection in 2007.


My response to a comment that picked up the article author's confused chronology and misinformation about Deep Hear and ran with it follows:

Quote

There's no mystery about why NOC "stopped talking" in 1999: he died that year. I don't know why the author tried to create mystery around this; the basic information is even seen in Wikipedia.

And I'm not sure why the reporter goes on about low-frequency sonar and whales, when the recognized problem is actually with mid-frequency sonars. The historical record on adverse effects of mid-frequency sonar on beaked whales is clear.

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr....ans.pdf

I'm also not sure why the reporter got so much wrong about the Deep Hear study. Here's a link to the freely available text of the paper reporting its methods and results:

http://jeb.biologists.org/content....29.long

If you look in the methods, you will find that the sounds presented to the whales were a trainer's projected "bridge" stimulus and 0.5 second pure tones produced by a function generator (look for "Wavetek 275" in the report). There wasn't any use of a naval sonar system in the experiment, low-frequency or otherwise. How much effort would it have taken to look at the actual source materials and accurately relay them to readers? The methods of Deep Hear in studying hearing are all standard psychophysics techniques that you yourself might experience in your next trip to your audiologist, except that you won't be asked to dive to do them.

The field season dates are not included in the paper, but Deep Hear data collection was conducted in 1994 and 1995. I participated in the 1995 field season and the analytical workup that followed. The confusion engendered by the article over chronology is certainly regrettable. The Deep Hear study had non-mysterious results, too: the hearing of whales remains just as sensitive at depth, and thus policy on noise mitigation cannot rely on the notion that mammalian hearing sensitivity decreases with depth. That was known to be true for humans and chinchillas, but Deep Hear demonstrated that it was not true for white whales, and thus unlikely to be true for the rest of the cetacea. This is in many ways an inconvenient result for both commercial and military interests, and yet there was no interference in our ability to publish these findings.



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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

    
fnxtr



Posts: 3504
Joined: June 2006

(Permalink) Posted: June 18 2014,09:56   

Would all whale species react similarly to the same frequencies?

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"[A] book said there were 5 trillion witnesses. Who am I supposed to believe, 5 trillion witnesses or you? That shit's, like, ironclad. " -- stevestory

"Wow, you must be retarded. I said that CO2 does not trap heat. If it did then it would not cool down at night."  Joe G

  
Wesley R. Elsberry



Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002

(Permalink) Posted: June 18 2014,11:33   

Quote (fnxtr @ June 18 2014,09:56)
Would all whale species react similarly to the same frequencies?

No. And the evidence shows a skewed vulnerability of beaked whales to mid-frequency sonar. Certainly there are some instances of mass strandings of other species that correlate with naval exercises that could have used mid-frequency sonar, but the clearest, most often repeated pattern of morbidity and mortality involves diving beaked whales meeting a naval exercise with mid-frequency sonar in play.

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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

    
Timothy McDougald



Posts: 1036
Joined: Dec. 2006

(Permalink) Posted: June 19 2014,15:38   

Yikes! First it was birds, now it's fish. Good thing they don't eat humans...yet

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Church burning ebola boy

FTK: I Didn't answer your questions because it beats the hell out of me.

PaV: I suppose for me to be pried away from what I do to focus long and hard on that particular problem would take, quite honestly, hundreds of thousands of dollars to begin to pique my interest.

   
Alan Fox



Posts: 1556
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(Permalink) Posted: June 19 2014,16:17   

Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ June 18 2014,06:33)
 
Quote (fnxtr @ June 18 2014,09:56)
Would all whale species react similarly to the same frequencies?

the clearest, most often repeated pattern of morbidity and mortality involves diving beaked whales meeting a naval exercise with mid-frequency sonar in play.

Hi Wesley

Sorry if this is a daft question, but how does the sonar affect the whales?  Is it the result of disorientation or is there direct physical damage?

  
Wesley R. Elsberry



Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002

(Permalink) Posted: June 19 2014,16:51   

Interesting. I know from the pond scum skimming that I have a bunch of hunting spiders out on the surface of the pond.

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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

    
k.e..



Posts: 5432
Joined: May 2007

(Permalink) Posted: June 20 2014,09:21   

Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ June 20 2014,00:51)
Interesting. I know from the pond scum skimming that I have a bunch of hunting spiders out on the surface of the pond.

Duck hunters?

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"I get a strong breeze from my monitor every time k.e. puts on his clown DaveTard suit" dogdidit
"ID is deader than Lenny Flanks granmaws dildo batteries" Erasmus
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KevinB



Posts: 525
Joined: April 2013

(Permalink) Posted: June 20 2014,10:40   

Quote (k.e.. @ June 20 2014,09:21)
Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ June 20 2014,00:51)
Interesting. I know from the pond scum skimming that I have a bunch of hunting spiders out on the surface of the pond.

Duck hunters?

Wabbits?

Or perhaps Cornelius Hunters, whinging that the British Education Secretary has publish standards precluding the teaching of creationism as "science" in any school being paid for by public money.

Corned Beef

  
midwifetoad



Posts: 4003
Joined: Mar. 2008

(Permalink) Posted: June 20 2014,14:20   

Enquiring minds want to know: do they eat watermelon?

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Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

  
Wesley R. Elsberry



Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002

(Permalink) Posted: June 20 2014,15:56   

There are sometimes ducks on the pond, and other times not. Maybe the spiders are getting them.

I've never seen a watermelon in the pond, though. Maybe the spiders eat them, too, just too quickly to see.







Or not.

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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

    
Wesley R. Elsberry



Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002

(Permalink) Posted: June 24 2014,09:29   

A blog post on the Smithsonian Magazine article about NOC the whale.

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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

    
Richardthughes



Posts: 11178
Joined: Jan. 2006

(Permalink) Posted: July 10 2014,23:50   

BIG VIRUS

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta....t-virus

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"You magnificent bastard! " : Louis
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REC



Posts: 638
Joined: Sep. 2006

(Permalink) Posted: Aug. 12 2014,20:55   

Add this to the junk files (along with the synthetic de-junked yeast chromosome):

It's a virtually "junk DNA"-less insect:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms....11.html

Open Access

"Although it has a similar number of genes as other Diptera, the midge genome has very low repeat density and a reduction in intron length. ... The few transposable elements present are mainly ancient, inactive retroelements."

  
Henry J



Posts: 5787
Joined: Mar. 2005

(Permalink) Posted: Aug. 13 2014,09:50   

Compact genome of the Antarctic midge is likely an adaptation to an extreme environment
I wonder if in that environment, some of the components of DNA molecules are rarer than they are in more hospitable places.

  
The whole truth



Posts: 1554
Joined: Jan. 2012

(Permalink) Posted: Aug. 15 2014,03:30   

An interesting new article about protein folding:

"If proteins evolved to search for funnel-like sequences, the signature of this evolution will be seen projected on the sequences that we observe," Onuchic said. The close match between the sequence data and energetic structure analyses clearly show such a signature, he said, "and the importance of that is enormous."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/release....152.htm

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Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. - Jesus in Matthew 10:34

But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me. -Jesus in Luke 19:27

   
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