People are weird

The DNA double helix can under certain conditions accommodate a third strand in its major groove. Researchers in the UK have now presented a complete set of four variant nucleotides that makes it possible to use this phenomenon in gene regulation and mutagenesis.

Natural DNA only forms a triplex if the targeted strand is rich in purines – guanine (G) and adenine (A) – which in addition to the bonds of the Watson–Crick base pairing can form two further hydrogen bonds, and the ‘third strand’ oligonucleotide has the matching sequence of pyrimidines – cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Any Cs or Ts in the target strand of the duplex will only bind very weakly, as they contribute just one hydrogen bond. Moreover, the recognition of G requires the C in the probe strand to be protonated, so triplex formation will only work at low pH.

triplex DNA

To overcome all these problems, the groups of Tom Brown and Keith Fox at the University of Southampton have developed modified building blocks, and have now completed a set of four new nucleotides, each of which will bind to one DNA nucleotide from the major groove of the double helix.¹

They tested the binding of a 19-mer of these designer nucleo-tides to a double helix target sequence in comparison with the corresponding triplex-forming oligonucleotide made from natural DNA bases.

Using fluorescence-monitored thermal melting and DNase I footprinting, the researchers showed that their construct forms stable triplex even at neutral pH.

Tests with mutated versions of the target sequence showed that three of the novel nucleotides are highly selective for their target base pair, while the ‘S’ nucleotide, designed to bind to T, also tolerates C.

In principle, triplex formation has already been demonstrated as a way of inducing mutations in cell cultures and animal experiments.²

The new set of building blocks ‘opens the way to the exploitation of the triplex approach in many areas of biology,’ said Brown.

link.

oh fuck

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.

link

UPDATE: Re: America Steals Russian lake

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.

Similar warming has also been taking place in Alaska: earlier this summer Jon Pelletier of the University of Arizona in Tucson reported a major expansion of lakes on the North Slope fringing the Arctic Ocean.

The findings from western Siberia follow a report two months ago that thousands of lakes in eastern Siberia have disappeared in the last 30 years, also because of climate change (New Scientist, 11 June, p 16). This apparent contradiction arises because the two events represent opposite end of the same process, known as thermokarsk.

In this process, rising air temperatures first create "frost-heave", which turns the flat permafrost into a series of hollows and hummocks known as salsas. Then as the permafrost begins to melt, water collects on the surface, forming ponds that are prevented from draining away by the frozen bog beneath. The ponds coalesce into ever larger lakes until, finally, the last permafrost melts and the lakes drain away underground.

Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.

His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.

An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. "Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released," said the project's chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia.

Link.

North Bay inventor creates 'God Light', cures cancer too!

One scientist interviewed by BayToday.ca said Hurtubise had “rewritten” the laws of physics with the God Light.

William Rieken, a PhD candidate at the Chihara Laboratory, at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), in Osaka, Japan, has co-invented the XB-2, an unmanned aerial vehicle developed for search and rescue missions.

Rieken, a computer scientist with a background in particle physics, was in North Bay Tuesday because he is considering using some Hurtubise-invented materials for the XB-2 and wanted to take back samples for further analyses.

Hurtubise also gave him a demonstration of the God Light.

“I think this is going to revolutionize physics and change the understanding of the concepts of science,” Rieken said.

“What Troy’s doing can’t be done, according to the current theories and models that we have. I know a lot of physicists in Japan who would love to get their hands on this machine.”

An idiot
Hurtubise and the German physicist, who requested anonymity, worked together on the project using a Web cam.

“First he’s got engineers doing schematics, and I said ‘buddy don’t you get it that I am an idiot with electronics,’ so he would show me what to do using the Web cam,” Hurtubise said.

The engineer and the electrician provided the expertise Hurtubise didn’t have, and some of the more specialized parts of the God Light were manufactured at various machine shops in North Bay.

The 26-foot device utilizes 67 high-end optical lenses and five different gases, while producing 80,000 lux of full-spectrum light.

Two of the nine run on pure oxygen, and four produce electromagnetic radiation in a closed chamber, Hurtubise said.

Beyond realistic expectations
When the God Light was completed, the physicist, sensing a possible use for it, put Hurtubise in touch with a Toronto cancer researcher.

Hurtubise said he knew he was onto something after two cancerous lab mice were exposed to the device.

The findings, Hurtubise said, quoting from the researcher’s notes, were “beyond realistic expectations.”

Beyond realistic expectations
One mouse, Specimen C-12, had a stomach tumour, while the other, Specimen H-27, had a brain tumour.

C-12 had been exposed to the God Light for 20 minutes and seven seconds, and H-27 for 18 minutes and 33 seconds.

The researcher, who did not reveal his name, Hurtubise said, then extracted small skin samples from each mouse for analyses.

“C-12 had a 27-per cent reduction in the tumour, the researcher told me,” Hurtubise said, adding the mouse had had prior radiation therapy.

H-27, which had had no prior therapy, Hurtubise said, exhibited a 12-per cent reduction in its tumour.

“And there was no further advancement of cancer to healthy tissue, or adverse side effects detected within a 56-hour observation period,” Hurtubise said, again quoting the researcher.

“Though test results are in their infancy with regards to strict scientific protocol, the preliminary findings are beyond realistic expectations,” the researcher had written.

Full article here.

This is why Bob Geldof sucks balls

The largest concert series in history, Live 8, will only serve to legitimize the further enslavement of Africa, despite its genuinely good intentions.

The purpose of the concerts was, its organizers said, to "demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 to put an end to poverty." But as Sir Bob Geldof, main organizer of Live 8, knows, the purpose of the G8 is to provide Western corporations with profit. They do this by creating and exploiting poverty.

Unfortunately, Live 8 wasn't cheap. It needed funding to happen- corporate funding. To bring Live 8 to the world, Geldof had needed the support of the institutions that cause the poverty he's trying to eradicate.

Corporate donors don't like to fund events that expose what they do, but they do like to make a lot of money. Their purpose is to make profit, and to maximize their profits they need to advertise. Live 8 was an opportunity to reach a million concert-goers and a projected two billion viewers.

They had a dilemma. They could ignore Live 8 and miss out on the billions of potential consumers. They could fund Live 8, expose their own practices, and tell the world that to eliminate poverty we have to eliminate the corporate system, and the profit motive itself. Or they could fund Live 8, but make sure it ignored the whole point. They chose the latter.

They funded Live 8 and brought it to the world, but only because the concerts ignored the cause of poverty - the West's policies.

Many of these policies are created by the G8, which is a group of formerly imperialist nations - the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and Canada - that exists, like the IMF, WTO, and World Bank, to control and exploit the world's poorest people.

These groups and acronyms are simply non-imperialist and humanitarian facades. They're the imperialist institutions of the modern world.

Together, they provide poor nations with loans, much of which goes to Western corporations, for things the poor mostly don't need anyway. The loans are large enough so that these countries will never be able to fully repay them.

Western states give loans to create a permanent debt, which the poor pay back forever. The loans don't help the people, and payment on the debt diverts money, which would otherwise go to meet the country's needs, to the lenders. Debt is one of the main causes of Africa's poverty.

The Western states also provide what they call "aid" to poor nations. This aid also goes to Western corporations, and, like the loans, requires that poor nations abide by trade policies that enrich those corporations.

The G8 leaders require "the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign," although they know that "not all countries will benefit in the short term from reductions in trade barriers." In the "short term" the West will benefit, just as it has in the past and will in the future.

These policies force poor nations to open their markets to foreign competition, but only if the foreign competition will win out. They require a sell-off of state-owned industries at artificially low prices. They give Western corporations access to natural resources and cheap labor, too.

The aid and loans the West gives makes poor states accept policies that they would never accept otherwise. These destroy domestic industries, increase unemployment, and cause a greater dependence on the West for everything, even things necessary for simple survival, like food.

Geldof knows this, but to raise awareness of it, he had to ignore it. You can find it on the website, but the events of Live 8, which were supposed to inform the world and promote "The Long Walk to Justice," had to ignore "justice." They had to ignore the whole point. Live 8 became an "audience builder" for corporations.

Any attempt at eliminating poverty, at achieving justice for the poor, will focus on these facts. The world's poor are not poor by accident, but by design. This should have been the focus of Live 8.

Instead, Live 8 ignored this, as it had to, and will achieve little for the poor. It will make the G8 leaders look like heroes, though.

We'll hear how Live 8 tickled the hearts of the great men of the Group of 8, who will seize the opportunity to eliminate poverty. And then they'll pursue similar policies, to achieve the same ends as usual.

Link.

Is this where science and spirtuality meet?

Many questions are asked about underlying mechanism, such as whether there is an optimal speed or frequency for data collection, or whether the number of bits which are momentarily in play will matter. The short answer is that these and similar questions harbor assumptions that aren't correct. It appears that the domain for most of the effective variables is not physics but psychology, not matter but mind. So counting the events or measuring the speed are not relevant unless the counts and measures are in the non-physical realms we usually leave to poets and musicians.

So, for example, we often disregard the wisdom of the ancients, of other cultures than that of modern Western science, which Ken Wilber calls a monocultural flatland in his "A Brief History of Everything." He shows, for example, that the modern western view is shallow at best, a "flatland" incapable, because of its narrow focus on what can be located and what can be counted, even of asking the questions we know we must be able to ask about consciousness and spirit.

The GCP analyses are based on canonical statistics, and while some argue that this cannot provide "real" evidence, the implications of statistical measures can be profound. Though we don't know how an REGs behavior can be altered by thoughts and emotions or intentions, we know empirically the effects touch upon information theory and imply entropy reduction, and we think that resonance and coherence are good metaphoric descriptors for the necessary conditions. It also appears that the global consciousness effect is more than just casually related to nonlinear dynamical system models.

We find some useful points in models based on David Bohm's notion of active information (which I'll summarize below), and in Brian Josephson's recent article on String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal. One of the most coherent approaches to the evidence demanding extensions of physical models is Rupert Sheldrake's description of Morphic Fields. Abraham Boyarsky argues that any theory of mind is better than none, and uses the language of nonlinear dynamical systems and ergodic theory is to present a theoretical framework for the study of mind.

A number of correspondents suggest interesting perspectives, or make comments that can be stimulating. In this border area it is difficult to know what will turn out to be the most useful ideas, and it is worthwhile to keep an open mind. Philippe Viola offers an interesting approach with a Bioquantum Theory that addresses relevant issues, including linkage to Bohm and to Sheldrake's work. Alan Bondies offers a speculation on Universal Consciousness that touches pertinent questions.

However, most of what can be said is speculative, and not immediately useful for understanding the empirical data. We do not know how a mental state such as an intention or emotion is able to inform the physical system to affect its behavior. In addition, all of the robust measures we have providing evidence for the anomalous effects are statistical in nature, and the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. This means that we typically cannot be sure that the "signature" of an effect in any individual analysis is driven by the hypothesized influence of consciousness. The details written in the data from single instances are more likely to be chance fluctuations than consciousness effects. Only in larger concatenations, gathering the weak signals from many separate events, can we be satisfied that trends and structure represent the hypothesized effect.

After all the caveats, however, we can say that the evidence for an effect of consciousness on REGs is strong. We are driven by that evidence to infer that something like a "consciousness field" exists, and that intentions or emotional states which structure the field are conveyed as information that is absorbed into the distribution of output values of labile physical systems.

The bottom line is that the output distribution of data from the REG differs from what would be expected without the influence of consciousness. Two major questions should be kept in mind to help focus our speculations:

1) What is the physical meaning of the statistically unlikely patterns that appear in our random data?

2) What is the social meaning of the correlation of such patterns with events of importance to humans?

Full text here.

Homepage.

Early Results.

Ebola Swine flu?!

The flu, pigs and ebola; why does this sound so familiar? oh yeah that's why.

Recombinomics Commentary
July 30, 2005

D: "It's alright. We ran tests on those samples and isolated the SZ77++A3231 virus."

I: "What is this SZ77++A3231 virus?"

D: "This is a strain of the Ebola virus."

I: "Would you like to comment about it?"

D: "It's rather impossible to totally explain it."

I: "I can understand so, but why is the term "less-infectious" always affixed to our version of the Ebola virus?"

D: "There are 2 reasons for doing so. First, to reduce panic among the people should it ever leak. And second, the Ebola virus has evolved in China. Re-combination has been detected. Most prominently at the portion which determines its effect on humans (very technical description, I can't describe it. sorry.). Also, abrupt breaks in the sequencing were detected, leading to changes in the incubation period. (Or possibly "changes in the incubation period were detected")

I: "How were these viruses classified then? / Could you elaborate more about the various strains?"

D: "Previously, strains of Ebola in China always had the EBO prefix. Subsequently following information leaks, the classification method was changed. We stopped using the EBO prefix. Instead, coupled with the discovery that the virus had become more virulent and lethal, we re-named the strains according to the placed where they were first discovered. For example, the strain in June became the SZ77++A3231. Sometimes, we don't even use their place of discovery, instead directly naming it the ++A3231."

I: "In that way, the Ebola virus wouldn't even be brought into the picture."

D: "Precisely, viruses such as the Ebola are national secrets."

The above comments by a physician involved in testng samples from patients in the mysterious swine outbreak in Sichuan indicate that one of the agents isolated is a recombinant Ebola virus originally isolated from Shenzen. Prior reports had listed the names and characteristics of various Ebola isolates and EB-SZ-277 was capable of infecting birds. SZ277++A3231 is a recombinant version of SZ-277 isolated from a patient. The discussion indicates China has an active Ebola project and the virus is rapidly evolving via recombination. It was not clear from earlier reports if the agent was isolated and sequenced, but this interview leaves little doubt that both isolation and sequencing of Ebola is quite active. It is unclear if the recombination is related to the region of identity between Ebola and H5N1. Ebola is considered a state secret, so there are no reports of the virus or availability of virus or sequences.

The interview also indicates that the streptococcus suis is not the cause of the illness. It is present in pigs and is merely activated by infectious agents, which include Ebola, plague, and an un-named virus which is considered "dangerous". The emphasis is on the bacteria because it can produce similar symptoms. The symptoms of the patients match pandemic flu of 1918, and H5N1 can produce such symptoms.

The interview, if accurate, would support the role of agents other than the bacteria, in the spread or progression of the illness. Streptococcus Suis does not produce the high case fatality rate, and can be treated with antibiotics, as can plague. The high case fatality rate also supports the involvement of a virus. The proximity to Qinghai Lake keeps H5N1bird flu and migratory birds on the short list of explanations for the rapid spread of the fatal disease that is resistant to antibiotic treatment.

Link.

Full interview here.

01 Aug 2005 06:44:22 GMT

Source: Reuters

Chinese authorities say all those taken ill in Sichuan had slaughtered, handled or ate infected pigs, and stressed that there had not been any human-to-human transmission of the bacteria.

However, China's death toll of some 20 percent so far is particularly worrying as previous mortality rates are not known to have gone over 10 percent.

Many who died in Sichuan died within 24 hours of showing symptoms and many bled under their skin, signs which were not typical of Streptococcus suis infections.

"The situation is extraordinary. The pattern hasn't followed previous outbreaks, there are many human infections and deaths," said infectious disease expert Lo Wing-lok.

"Could there be other factors involved? Has the organism changed? Has it mutated to become more contagious and virulent? Is there co-infection of any other virus or bacteria? These are the questions on our minds."

Full article here.

NYC doing drug trials with orphans... I think I'm going to be sick

Mimi Pascual gave the children drugs every day and every night, on schedule, as the doctors ordered. She shook the children awake and popped the pills into their mouths, or squirted a syringe full of ground pill and water to the back of their throats.

She and the other child-care workers made the rounds: midnight, 3 a.m., 5 a.m. Some kids took the pills by mouth, some through nasal tubes, and some through tubes jutting out of their stomachs. The children didn't like the drugs. They'd wake up vomiting or with bad diarrhea. But Mimi and the workers at Incarnation Children's Center had to follow the regimen, or they'd be fired."The drugs had side effects, everybody knew that," said Mimi. But the workers were told the drugs were saving the children's lives. After a young girl who had just gone on the drugs had a stroke and then quickly died, and another young boy who was put on thalidomide wasted away on a respirator, Mimi stopped believing that the drugs were just saving lives. She believed they were killing the children too.

Mimi Pascual worked at Incarnation Children's Center for eight years over a nearly 10-year period, taking care of the abandoned HIV-positive children of drug-addicted mothers in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood. She started at ICC in 1995, when she was just 17. Mimi was one of two dozen neighborhood women from Washington Heights, Harlem and Inwood Heights who were hired by the Catholic nuns who ran the orphanage for abandoned babies.

...

"In the beginning we were taking care of little abandoned crack babies who had no one, but then it changed. More and more of the kids were there for compliance. They didn't want to take drugs, or their parents didn't want to give them, so they got put in ICC.

"None of us ever blamed the kids for refusing. We all saw them throw up like clockwork after taking the pills, and then the diarrhea that followed.

When the kids were all younger—babies—they couldn't tell us the drugs made them sick. But when they got older they started to tell us, 'I don't want to take this 'cause I can't go to school, I feel worse when I take it.'"

"We all had doubts about what we were doing," Mimi said. "But honestly, we did what we were told."

One of the things Mimi and the other childcare workers noticed was the constantly shifting medicine regime. "Some children got AZT, some didn't. Then it would switch. Then it was a new drug, then it was a drug that we never heard of.

"We figured it out," she said. "These were experimental treatments." Marta, another child-care worker, put it more bluntly, "This is the guinea-pig business," she said.

ICC is administered by Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the Catholic Home Bureau. It was under ICC's first medical director, Dr. Stephen Nicholas, that the orphanage began to receive funds from the National Institutes of Health to use its wards in pharmaceutical clinical trials.

ICC claims to have stopped the trials in 2002, but children from ICC are still seen at major New York hospitals, including Columbia Presbyterian, which all continue to do trials with HIV-positive children.

...

Mimi has a paper from ICC, that she saved from Seon's treatment. "One day I got a sheet from the nurses about a drug they were going to give Seon—it said any woman who was pregnant or who was of child-bearing age should not touch the drug, even with gloves on."

"I couldn't pronounce the name, so I kept the sheet. Thalidomide. That's what they gave him."

Thalidomide was originally marketed as a safe, over-the-counter sedative and analgesic in the 1950s and 1960s throughout Europe. It caused a wave of severe deformities in children of pregnant women who took the drug and was taken off the market. In 1998, the drug company Celgene resurrected Thalidomide, with FDA approval, officially as a leprosy drug, but with intended off-label use for AIDS and cancer patients.

"They pumped Seon with it; he deteriorated fast," Mimi said. "Once day we came in and he was bleeding from every hole in his body—his rectum, his nose, his mouth. He was in such pain. He would scream when he had to go to the bathroom. They put him on a respirator. They induced a coma with drugs so they could put him on a respirator. They told us they did it so he could breathe better." Mimi said, her voice getting a little rough. "I sat with him; he couldn't talk, but he was crying-tearing from his eyes. "He got all dry and scaly; he shriveled up like a snail-and he died."

Full article here.