Congratulations, you just walked into day one of undergrad evolutionary bio. :-) Short answer- genes form interesting clusters in plots of the frequency at which they appear with other genes, with more or less fuzzy edges and you would get no work done in biology if you couldn't occasionally throw a lasso around one of those clusters and assign a name to what you caught. If two species are separated by a reproductive barrier, but if that barrier is related to the biochemical machinery of reproduction rather than being temporal, geographic, or behavioral, at what failure rate do you call it a barrier? What fraction of the offspring do you demand be fertile?
Pre-Darwin, this was a big deal. If a deity was crafting species ex nihilio, the messiness of interbreeding posed some question about what really counted as a "kind." Darwin pointed out in the conclusion of the "Origin of Species," that in light of his (and Wallace's) discoveries, that was kind of a waste of time. Everything was interrelated, so occasionally interbreeding capability between two apparently different organisms was something to expect from time to time.
There's a blog called The Proteineers about attempting rational protein design. Short version is that they're attempting to create simpler and more reliably folding sequences to cut down on the computational load versus an evolved protein, and maybe work backwards from the protein target to the simplest protein that fits the lock.
Good for him, though I am a little jealous. When I was 14, my tossup for a science fair project was between a Farnsworth fusor like he built and a Martian ISRU plant that I ended up building- to excellent effect, mind you, but I have few occasions to fire up the plant for visitors relative to the nice stellate glow of a fusor. I just ended up finding a more fun professor to talk to about my plant, and had better luck finding catalysts than the X-ray power supply everyone uses. Every since then I've kept my eyes peeled for the parts (and the time) to make a fusor- because who doesn't want a neutron source in their garage? Maybe today should be the day to start my own...
Well, no, it's not. It's harder to seal hydrogen envelopes and the gas has a wider combustible mixture ratio, and the flames are problematically near-invisible, but having hydrogen gas cells need be no more dangerous than trucking around a tank of hydrocarbon fuel. Hydrogen combustion delivers a great deal of energy per unit mass but not much per unit volume at atmospheric pressure, meaning any given leaks in an envelope are going to release low levels of energy if ignited, and its buoyancy in air means leaks tend to dissipate more quickly. When Lockheed was exploring hydrogen fueled aircraft in the '50's they ran lots of experiments on the dangers of hydrogen infrastructure. Hydrogen fires caused uniformly less damage than hydrocarbon fires. The vapor space above a tank of gasoline or jet fuel is considerably more dangerous.
During WWI, London was raided by bomber Zeppelins, and they were sufficiently hard to shoot down, even with burning magnesium incendiary rounds, that the British were convinced the hydrogen gas envelopes were surrounded by inert nitrogen bags. It's a fine idea, but it wasn't true. Sending a chunk of burning metal into the anaerobic environment of the inside of a gas bag certainly didn't cause fires, and the gas from previous punctures dispersed too quickly to generally ignite and was too low energy to cause major damage when it did. Eventually the British started dropping bombs on them from above in combination with incendiary strafing. The stuff finally burns if you tear away half the envelope...
The Hindenburg was scrupulously designed to avoid fire. While the hydrogen certainly burned, and may even have been the first substance ignited, the spectacular nature of the fire was mostly a product of having tremendous amounts of surface area, thin materials, and lots of diesel fuel, because, as mentioned, hydrogen fires are not terrible visible. In the end, two-thirds of the passengers lived, an oft-overlooked fact, likely because the burning hydrogen transported heat away from the passenger compartments at the keel. It was an awful accident to be sure, but in a word, shit happens. It was not of an unprecedented scale in terms of casualties then or now. It just so happened to happen in front of the cameras, produced a hell of a show, and just so happened to arrive as airships were on the verge of being marginalized by airplanes, whose development was accelerated by WWII. There's more poetry than engineering lessons in the Hindenburg-especially considering that if you still are eager to implicate the hydrogen cells, they would have been filled with helium had the US not been refusing to sell it (the global supply comes from Texas) to the fascists. Making a really safe hydrogen airship these days wouldn't be too terribly difficult, and various groups have done some work in that vein, seeing as helium is something of a limited resource.
Before I die I hope we reach a point where any mention of hydrogen needn't be accompanied with a mention of the Hindenburg. Yes, it's a shocker, flammable things in containers can burn when said containers are ruptured by burning things. Hydrogen doesn't contribute anything novel to that equation. I've done a demo where we bubbled electrolysis gas through soapy water and lit off the foam in our hands- good noise, no harm done. It's not magically deadly stuff.
About 60 years late to the party on dreaming that one up, friend. :-)
Short answer is breeding. Broiler chickens don't get much in way of movement as it is.
Umm, unmanned mission to Mars are titanically cheaper than Apollo. Titanically. We're getting way more out of NASA than we did in '80- and that's good, because '80 was practically the nadir of American space presence. We had no space station (Skylab was toast, small, and certainly hadn't been inhabited for ten years straight) no manned flights (Apollo was done, as were the applications flights like Apollo/Soyuz, the shuttle was still teething and we certainly couldn't buy Russian flights to take up the slack) no active planetary probes (save for the Voyagers- but compare to three lunar orbiters, two Martian ones, an inbound rover, Cassini, Messenger, New Horizons, Dawn, EPOXI, Juno...) no space telescopes (versus Hubble, Chandra, Kepler, XMM, Solar Dynamics...)- the list goes on. The era of us "getting more" out of NASA- I presume you mean Apollo-esque fun- entailed a decade of spending at levels *triple* those in 1980, in 2007 constant dollars.
All the GAO findings and such have suggested that NASA is actually rather efficient. At the per item level, big science is always expensive- and the estimated discounted return rate on NASA related tech development isn't trivial- it's 33%. Try finding other investments that solid.
Really? I think nearly every conversation I've had or witnessed about life extension expressed concern that it would be trivial- indeed, the default- for access to be privileged. Already lifestyle morbidities that are correlated with poverty- crime, drugs, obesity, etc.,- can reduce the lifespan of a poor person 25 years relative to their affluent neighbor. All that would be necessary would be for immortality to not be a switch, but to represent a continual and expensive effort. Everyone in the book *is* immortal, for certain values of the word- but it's not hard, for me at least, to imagine that if I finally have the money saved up to resleeve Great-Grandma, who I've never met, and well, none of her friends are out of storage and they tore down her childhood home, and I could spend the money on a sleeve for me that'll earn me bank, and she seemed so lost and sad last time we took her out, and her job skills are obsolete, and someone else will be able to set her up really nice in a few years... it's not hard to imagine that people's stored selves might eventually get socked away with no real intention of revival.
I think there's probably a post of mine kicking around this very website wishing someone would adapt Altered Carbon instead of something else or something like that, so I'm naturally intrigued. It has a classical crackle to it, maybe exhausting the one variant on the closed-room mystery that the likes of Doyle or Christie couldn't possibly have imagined yet, and along the way has one of the better anxious unpackings of the self outside of Dick. It could be a hell of a movie.
It could also suck really bad, because the thing is so borderline harrowing with the unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, as it stands in print that it isn't hard to imagine that with a viewpoint placed a little too close to the action that it could turn into one of Those Movies, where the nastiness appeals a bit too much to prurient interests for my tastes.
If five or six different actors of both genders and above-the-credits notoriety can portray Bob Dylan in the same film ("I'm Not There,) I think they can manage a few body switching plots. As for the monologues, the switch from first to third person is weathered in a pretty fair fraction of film adaptations.
More trouble will come of it simply being bleak as all hell in a way that might simply be too oppressive on screen.
I'm always a bit flabbergasted as the people who walk away from reading Dune and somehow didn't grok that all the thoughtful characters and the author himself are clearly intensely wary of Campbellian mythos. A few consider it inevitable, many consider it useful, but no one save the Fedaykin are especially cheered by the messianic machinery.
Oh gracious. I'm familiar with indigenous entheogens and auteur theory both quite well, thank you. Levity, my friend.
I'm merely suggesting that, firstly, Dune and Co., as written, are more "Foundation" than "Dhalgren" and that spice is as much MacGuffin as theme (especially when Paul's visions are lamented as terrible dead ends for another two books and then the industrial replacement of all the uses of spice is undertaken for another two.)
Secondly, I posit that the reason that Dune on film has variously sputtered or failed to impress is largely because directors (Lynch and Jodorowsky) with an affinity for pseudocryptic exercises (which I am uniformly fond of, I should add) attached themselves to said projects primarily because of the opportunities for said exercises offered by the neogothic pomp and the psychedelia and proceeded to throw away the majority of the book that consists of chess played with spies, fanatics, ecosystems, Cretan paradoxes and very long knives, and that their work suffered as a result.
No indictment of prehistorical shamanism, analytical fallacies, or misunderstanding of the adaptation process contained within.
Well yes. I mean, I do this shit for a living. The general ubiquitous confusion is that the far side of the moon is never exposed to sunlight. Ergo...
I mean, sure, it's right there in his son's book that Herbert had three interesting experiences with drugs, and he was writing in 1965. I'm not daft. It's a bit of a running joke that a different drug got invented for each of his books. By and large though, the spice is just good old science fiction mineral unobtainium, ala tylium, quantium-40, naquadah, dilithium, et al., for a universe crafted around a medieval dependence on human talent- it's an equally good (if not superior) stand in for oil (a pivotal resource under the sands of a place populated with tribes that speak an Arabic-spotted language,) water, manna, or anything else anyone has ever used as the core of a hydraulic empire. Across all six books, the amount of time dedicated to someone tripping balls is really very low compared to thinking about the delicate balances of feudalism (touched with those of nuclear deterrence,) classical philosophical ruminations on prophecy, some of the first big displays of ecological consciousness in fiction, and a willful deconstruction of our fondness for heroic arcs (Herbert came out and said that was half the point of the book,) and all of those elements depends on people doing some serious thinking.
If you haven't followed some links, really do some exploring. Jodorowsky had Paul dreaming Arrakis out of orbit, after his death, to shine the light of higher consciousness throughout the galaxy and Emperor Dali, living with his replicant on an all gold planet, holding court while crapping on a toilet throne made from dolphins. He didn't get what the hell the whole thing was about.
Far side you mean- not dark side. The Moon doesn't have a dark side. :-)
I think the trippy hands need to stay the hell away from Dune- which I realize, given Herbert's predilection for experiencing and depicting altered states, may seem foolish. But it's true. Between this (Salvidor Dali?) and David Lynch making it rain and giving the Mentat eyebrows you could hide small villages beneath, there seems to be this compulsion to treat all the wild locales and outsize characters as literal dreamscapes, and it never pans out, because the book itself has a hell of a lot of work to do depicting a culture bulging under the strain of bloated Luddite feudalism and and the predations of a hydraulic economy. It calls for a keen eye for detail and multilayered plotting, not psychedelic antics.
Oof. I know, that he knows, what he's saying-obviously, he's the one in the tank- and he's trying to get it out there, but no, it doesn't make thrust per se. That'd be a thermodynamic violation. What it does is enhance pressure recovery, which decreases net drag.
I mean, it's nasty and hot and not fun to be around. The shorter-half lives of waste from breeder reactors (which include ones that can run on thorium- thorium reactors still run on uranium, just uranium they make themselves) inherently means that it puts out more radiation for less time.
But- and this is half of what makes us tolerate said nastiness- is that it all fits into a nice bucket of metal oxides in a world full of places to dig very secure holes. The default mode of a coal fired power plant is to put undesired nastiness everywhere in quantities of a scale larger than that of nuclear plants by roughly the scale in difference in energy delivered from a chemical vs. a nuclear reactor- planet-scorching CO2, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, fly ash, and even sequestered radioisotopes. Nukes are fundamentally tidy. A nuclear reactor will fundamentally work as a magical black box for twenty to thirty years, taking and and discharging nothing, and at the end of it, you have to make a cave about the volume of the reactor core, pay attention to the flow of groundwater, and lock the door behind you. And that's not too bad.
I think most really giant monsters are unnecessary by definition- because there's no monster big enough you can't imagine shooting it. The scary ones are either smart or hard to hit.
