The hard part is finding what that "thing" is and being able to integrate it into your life in a beneficial way.

"Just starve all people out by destroying all agriculture lands in one big go, planet will heal itself. Not that there will be anybody to care."

I suspect the planet may have reached that point already, but then we get into the sticky matter of population control. A topic that from experience gets ugly pretty quickly.

Personally I think we're all screwed and CO2 is only single link in a chain of serious issues. Environmental contamination with heavy metals, particulate matter, plastics etc etc are things that have begun to bite humans on the backside.

Interesting stats that you present, thanks for sorting through all that :-) I do wonder though, going back to the original thoughts on heat absorption and carbon sequestration, how feasible would it be to negate the current global CO2 emissions by planting trees, bushes, vines etc wherever possible?

Have we gone too far? My cynical side says yes, but part of me wishes for a solution that is relatively straight forward (nature's pretty good at providing solutions to problems). I remember reading an article about an invention that sequestered CO2 from the atmosphere, I thought, WTF why not plant trees? Sequester the carbon, use the wood for things other than burning, then plant more trees. Is such approach even feasible? Or am I just living in a fantasy world?

As you can tell, this is not my area of expertise. Once again thanks for taking time to give me something to think about. Cheers :-)

Fair call :-) I have no room either, I get a non-profit to plant a few trees on reclaimed land for me every year. Surely governments can afford some seedlings to plant in place of deforested areas to absorb carbon etc. If they could coordinate to plant 10 trees per human per year, surely it would help somewhere along the line.

http://newsroom.melbourne.edu/...

I was going to say that a well-setup 2U hybrid CPU/GPU server would be capable of more than 8 TFLOPS (double precision). lol

Just reading the opening paragraph of that story made me think back to sound of my Dad typing away on one of those keyboards.
That sound is so distinct. I can remember using one myself and distinctly remember the long key travel. Nostalgic.

...wait, wait, wait hear me out.

I work in a BSL2+ lab where obviously I can't take my phone out and answer calls etc. But what I've always wanted is a notification band that is relatively low profile, that I can wear on the inside of my wrist. I just need it to let me know who is calling and scroll SMS messages so that I can tell if it is an emergency that needs to be addressed immediately. It takes a bit of time to de-gown and decontaminate before leaving the lab to deal with missed calls and I tend to waste a bit of time during the day replying to calls and SMS messages that were just not that urgent. It's only a matter of time before it'll be possible to get a 5-day working week out of the battery life and hopefully the construction will handle decontamination with mild disinfectants. I'm very close to giving the Galaxy Gear Fit a try as it seems to be close what I'm looking for, but I'm not so sure about battery life. It doesn't seem to be getting good reviews either. I'll be getting something eventually, but I think it's going to take a little longer for manufacturers to iron out the kinks. Cheers.

There is a significant body of literature attempting to associate the onset of type 1 diabetes with infection by members of the species B enteroviruses, specifically CVB's (Coxsackieviruses B1 to B6) , if you search pubmed you will find hundreds of manuscripts. The problem has been nailing down a definitive causal relationship, from my understanding it is thought that there may be an element of molecular mimicry involved in the disease (or something similar). Essentially the virus infects the host and damages specific parts of the pancreas, the host's immune system mounts a response to the insult, but in the process creates antibodies that target the hosts own islet cells, resulting in the autoimmune disease that is type 1 diabetes. The problem of definitively implicating CVB's for type 1 diabetes is similar in some ways to that of other enterovirus infections like Polio. Basically there are other host mediated issues at play but with Polio you are able to detect the virus around the time of infection, with diabetes the disease presents after the infection has been cleared, complicating matters. To this day we still don't understand why only about 1% of people infected with Polio will develop paralysis, whilst the majority of people ~95% will show no significant signs of illness. Host factors are really important and not fully understood, there may even be a role for certain bacteria in the gut assisting the infection!
As a side note there has been some recent rumblings about the possibility of viral infections triggering transient type 2 diabetes, I can't link to any papers at the moment (too busy at work) but if anyone is interested I can have a dig around later.
Hopefully the vaccine is able to account for the amount of drift in the enterovirus genome that occurs at up to ~1% per annum, a similar problem exists with the new enterovirus 71 vaccine, an emerging bug similar in presentation to Polio.

"It was all that Dan Marino's fault, everyone knows that. If he had held the Surface, laces out, like he was supposed to, Ray would never have missed that kick. Dan Marino should die of gonorrhea and rot in hell. Would you like a cookie, son?"

...That way you could cover your peripheral vision. Imagine being in a darkened VR room with "something else" somewhere in the building and you keep seeing movement out the corner of your eye. I remember playing Doom 3 for the first time in a pitch black room with the surround sound cranked,it was the first game that made my arm hairs stand on end, VR would be awesome. I'd love to explore my 3D atomic virus models with this as well, it would make measuring and observing subtle changes so much easier. Awesome work guys, bring it on.

Hey thanks "ratbag" for your kind words. The work that Barnes et al. are doing is so important for researchers like us. It opens the door for us to answer questions in a manner that even 5 years ago was considered "ambitious" to say the least. I am very lucky to be in a position where I have access to resources that allow me to explore new ways of answering some very old questions about how viruses behave, with the added bonus that we may hopefully be able to contribute to making the world just a little bit better. Fingers-crossed.

"jkflying" I started off by working in electronics engineering when I left school, funnily enough I was running a company with some friends designing and building robotics systems, mainly focusing in animatronics. I wanted to start using my robotics background to work in the development of prosthetic limbs, but ended up changing the focus of my undergrad from anatomy and physiology to pathology, specifically microbiology with a lot of biochemistry thrown in. My post-grad was in computational biology. I actually started doing the simulation work after playing around with the tutorials on the VMD/NAMD website at the University of Illinois. I would recommend doing them, it's great nerdy fun and it gets you thinking about the different ways that you apply the techniques.

Have a great day:)

Agreed, at this point we are looking at virus dynamics in response to drug binding events and gross alterations in conformational structure in response to significant changes in temperature and ionic content. So for these simulations, the longer the better. I dream of a day when we can model complex host cell interactions and hopefully I will a grey bearded old man still full of enthusiasm when these sort of simulations are considered "run of the mill". Your work helps to keep me excited about the future of HPC and how it can benefit not only my research, but humanity's understanding of the world as a whole. Cheers.

I'd be interested in seeing if this system could run our full Poliovirus simulations (consisting of around 3.5 million atoms). I've run our simulations on the BlueGene/Q at VLSCI using 32,768 cores (65,536 threads) and have been getting a very respectable 11.2 nanoseconds per day of simulation data using NAMD. Some data on our full virus simulations can be found here... (VIDRL supercomputer simulation page). Hey Lank, maybe you can help me figure out a way to crack the millisecond mark for our full-virus sims??? Great work and cheers from down under :-)

Yoda it was...