I just heard a seminar from the guy who discovered nanotubes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumio_Iijima ), and it's pretty amazing with all the various properties the tubes have. He showed us some, and it was black (and he talked about this). He also mentioned that they would be the future for smartphone touch screens but that Apple was reluctant to use them in the latest iPhone.

Now when his group or some other researchers discover a thin material black enough to block gamma wavelengths, then we'll be talking.

From one bookworm to another, there is a lack of fiction (aside from the Bible) on your list! What gives?

I'm pretty sure Rodney McKay will appear at the point of the rip.

I think the more reasonable concern is that crops will yield less over time due to climate change. Combine that with ever-growing population (+ a billion people every dozen years or so) and you have a real problem. Shortages of food lead to riots and further instability of governments that are already shaky. Of course, this wont happen soon but probably in the next 100 years unless some sort of technological breakthrough happens. People probably exaggerate the effects because the smaller effects over time are harder to recognize as being caused by climate change.

It's funny that you think scientists aren't up to answering trends over 100 years. There was a paper that came out in Science yesterday predicting temperatures back 800,000 years ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/347.abstract ). It's the job of scientists to question these narratives, too, but it's also wise to look at all of the data.

These kinds of protest were very popular before the Great Depression and spawned all kinds of songs against the banking elites (e.g., JP Morgan). NPR had a nice piece discussing the history of anti-Wall Street protest the other day: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/07/141162196/a-look-at-the-history-of-wall-street-protests

Exactly what I was going to post. I am not a programmer, but hanging out in the alt.org nethack put me in touch with a lot of cool programmers. ^^ My 15 ascension streak is still up there I think too.

This is partly true, but with such a long time from birth to adulthood, the parents' survival gives their offspring a much greater chance for survival. Sure there are other people around to care for your 12 kids when you are gone, but if the numbers of cases increased substantially, then this would not be the case. Natural selection would begin to favor those with fewer kids and surviving than more kids and not surviving. You could even test this with a mathematical model if you wanted to (and I bet that it's already in the literature somewhere).

If you look back, originally it started appearing in young gay men (1981 I think). But within 1 year, women were documented with the disease. You can probably blame politicians at the time for making the wrong decisions if you want. There has been a similar reaction from Russian politicians who for a large time ignored the disease there (which is in a way far worse because it's spread to a much higher degree by intravenous drug users, which is the worst form of transmission). And if you compare certain sub-Saharan countries based on the political impetus for controlling the disease, there is a clear drop in new cases for countries that educate the population about condom use. I dont think they by and large think of the disease as a way of getting rid of gays but something that either does not really exist in their population or something religious-related (God's punishment blah blah blah).

What I am wondering about is how this compound would not harm cellular membranes, which contain cholesterol-rich regions (lipid rafts). HIV particles bud from these regions, giving them their particular cholesterol-rich membrane composition. This is a question related to theoretical off-target cytotoxic effects. Then again, RTIs have cytotoxic effects, too.

Wish you the best, you insensitive clod!

I.e., what is the failure rate of star formation? Maybe I'm missing something, but these Y dwarfs seem a lot like Jupiters.

It's the other Goa'uld we should be worried about. And those damn replicators.

The HTML in slashdot posts? (ducks and covers)

Not really. It could allow future use of amber suppression in higher eukaryotes, esp those that are models for HIV / SIV study (primates, mice, cats/FIV). That is still far off.

As the article notes, this has been done with all sorts of amino acids in E. coli. In fact, "amber suppression" is a fairly common way to introduce any amino acid you want into your protein. Commonly they are uniquely reactive amino acids for labeling a protein site-specifically for experiments to gain insight into the protein's function. (I'm actually doing this in my lab to look at the function of an HIV protein.)

With E. coli, introducing the extra amino acid doesn't usually confer an advantage because 1) the extra amino acid cannot be synthesized by E. coli, 2) even if you give E. coli the pathway to make that amino acid, proteins wont really need the extra amino acid (there is no selective advantage). This is a much bigger change than just introducing a gene into an organism—it's giving the organism an extra amino acid. 3) Organisms like methanogenic bacteria, which naturally encode an extra amino acid pyrrolysine, have this extra amino acid because their energy source relies upon (i.e., methane fixation, a rather difficult chemical reaction, requiring an electrophile).

So I would argue that this type of technology is rather safe. The organism would have to make a pretty huge leap to actually use the amino acid for a different purpose.