Yes. With a sabot slug and a rifled barrel or choke, it's possible. Not with smoothbore & birdshot. And definitely not aiming up at a moving target.

thank you

I wondered that myself. There would be great value if the bacteria could be engineered to maintain a limited population so the host would get a baseline supply of insulin. They would probably still require injections to keep well regulated, but it would be less and with reduced consequences if they were unable to do that for a time.

Perhaps it could even be enough to let a type I diabetic manage their blood sugar more like a type II sufferer.

One is modifying bacteria in a lab to produce a vital medication. The other is modifying plants growing out in the open to make them produce pesticides that they swear won't hurt us when we eat them.

there's marine life attached to the wing

i was wondering two things:

1. if not by species, then maybe by subspecies, or some sublte variation within a species, that they could attach an area to where the wing developed the attached creatures

2. if there are variations in isotopes the marine species would absorb differentially by area, if that can be pinpointed to an area. that would probably be very subtle and not helpful. just an idea

I was diagnosed as a Type 1 in 1997. Back then, a 10ml vial (U-100) of Eli Lilly's Humulin R or NPH costs--I'm not making this up-- $17.00. Today, without insurance, the same vial goes for $99. And this is for insulin made from recombinant DNA tech that has been around since the '70's like the article mentions.

The wonders of modern science. Pharmaceutical companies use recombinant DNA tech to make a drug cheaper to make but more expensive for sick people to buy.

Ain't it grand?

The food religion says GMO is bad until one of them happens to need insulin and also happens to be allergic to "natural" cow insulin, then GMO produced humulin (secreted by a genetically modified e. coli bacterium to be chemically similar to human insulin) is a miracle.

And because tomatoes are delicious, we should all go eat a whole bunch of Atropa belladonna.

The GMO religion believes that every GMO is a good GMO. That no genetically modified organism can ever possibly hurt you, so you must not be allowed to know which foods are from GMOs. They've never heard about NewLeaf Potatoes or LibertyLink Rice.

You know the difference between GMO produced humulin and GMO produced food? GMO produced medicines are labeled. You know what else is different about them? The drug manufacturers who use GMOs have done a good job of marketing their products and the makers of Agent Orange have done a lousy job of marketing their products. Maybe if they used some of the money they spend lobbying congress to pass industry-friendly laws to market GMO foods to consumers, they might be able to sell people that genetically modified foods have worthwhile benefits.

I still get a wee bit finicky about the word "MODEM" being thrown about. The is no cable modem nor DSL modem. In both cases the signal remains digital. MODEM is MOdulation and DEModulation. Whilst trivial it still irks me a little tiny bit but not enough to actually comment on it most of the time. That and, well, the options are a bit clunky to type or to say. Still, I prefer to use the word router, I suppose.

Art class was so very very long ago, likely before you were a mote in your father's eye, actually. I never took any of the arts classes in college - I did take creative writing and music classes which served to fill my prerequisites. Anyhow, I may be wrong. Isn't black the presence of all colors and white the absence of any color?

I could see using the RGB to create black but how does one manage to get a true white? It seems (I did not even do more than skim the summary) that there would need to be some filtering involved or multiple lasers.

I dunno... Hippos are the most dangerous large animal on the planet. The mosquito is the most deadly small animal I understand.

However, smart insurance companies will see this as a dangerous erosion of their market, and will probably fight against this...

Actually, isn't this the ideal case for the insurance companies? All they need to know is the software version the car is using to know exactly how it drives.

I didn't make it suitably clear; but the 'complexity' is really more of a historical issue. The fact that you can get power transistors, digital logic, and similar solid-state goodness for peanuts, possibly even less than the carbon brushes or other electromechanical alternatives, is a comparatively recent thing in historical terms.

Now that you can, doing so is pretty compelling for any but the highest-power tasks; but it has not always been the case that you can throw semiconductors at a problem for astonishingly tiny amounts of money. Today it is; but a lot of very clever electromechanical, inductive, and similar tricks were developed during the time that it was not.

Four out of five elderly people given CPR end up dying within days. Many of them with prolonged and intense suffering due to CPR prolonging the inevitable.

We certainly need more thought about end-of-life care, living wills, and do-not-resuscitate orders. But CPR is not the only intervention affected by that.

And in some cases CPR is given when it's not warranted, breaking ribs, collapsing lungs or otherwise causing serious and sometimes fatal damage.

Sometimes, yes, but more rarely than you might think.

If I keel over, please don't resuscitate unless there is at least a 50% chance of long-term success, and less than a 50% chance of causing long-term damage.

Dude, unless you're already in the hospital, whoever sees you go down or trips over your unconscious body does not have your medical history, nor can they predict your course of treatment.

What I find a bit weird about SPARC's near-total obscurity is that(please correct me if I'm wrong on the details; but to the best of my understanding from what I've read) the ISA is available for use on a royalty-free basis, and there are even a few BSD or GPL verilog implementations out there. That's even less encumbered than MIPS(which has some patents that the owners like to wave around on a couple of useful instructions).

My naive expectation would have been that SPARC on such liberal terms would show up a bit more often embedded in various chips that need some sort of CPU to do housekeeping, as the ISA of security and/or nationalism driven 'indigenous technology' efforts, and potentially even as the cheaper-than-ARM option for application processors.

Clearly that hasn't actually happened, and it's mostly ARM in SoCs and application processors(with PPC holding out in certain automotive and networking niches for some reason; and MIPS in router SoCs and the occasional Chinese vanity project); so ARM's license fees must just not sting that much.

Building SPARC parts that go toe to toe with Xeons would obviously be a much more ambitious project(as well as an act of directly fucking with Intel's juciest margins, which they probably won't take very kindly); but I am surprised by the fact that SPARC is so rare among the zillions of devices that have no need for x86 compatibility and are mostly about delivering performance in the gap between beefy microcontrollers and weak desktops for as little money as possible.

The last time we had this conversation, we have had it multiple times, I followed a link that showed there was no GMO in the wild - ever - for human consumption. I do not know if the link was accurate but it was interesting.