Virus Power

Viruses are made up of just two main parts. A protein coat and DNA core. The protein coat is designed to match it's target cell in a complementary manner and thus fuse with it, injecting the DNA core to the cell it is infecting.

Create a protein coat that matches and targets your cell of interest and what you have are viruses that are launched like guided missiles hitting only the cells you want it to.

The DNA core tells the infected cell what to do. It takes over command as the first few things it codes for, it does so at the expense of the cell. Beyond that .. it just doesn't matter if the host sustains its own cellular machinary.

Lets say, i target, by modifying the protein coat, only adipose tissue. I ask the virus to install information for excess insulin production... with a bit of gene regulation, we have a one dose lifetime treatment for obese diabetic patients. 

This virus will slowly feed on the fat, releasing insulin in a regulated manner to control blood sugar levels.








On the other hand, target the myocytes or the muscles and convert cellular matter into neurotoxins. 


At the battlefield, an infection would lead soldiers immobile and crying in agony and pain just hours after the infection.

Questioning Evolution

I recently read this article and being a biologist, I couldn't just let it go. Here is the article and what i think about questioning evolution.



"

 In the Nature article announcing his latest findings, Jun-Yuan Chen and his colleagues reported dryly that the ancient fish "will add to the debate on the evolutionary transition from invertebrate to vertebrate.


 But the new fossils have become nothing less than a challenge to the theory of evolution in the hands of Chen, a professor at the Nanjing Institute of Paleontology and Geology. Chen argued that the emergence of such a sophisticated creature at so early a date shows that modern life forms burst on the scene suddenly, rather than through any gradual process.


 According to Chen, the conventional forces of evolution can't account for the speed, the breadth, and one-time nature of "the Cambrian explosion," a geologic moment more than 500 million years ago when virtually all the major animal groups first appear in the fossil record.


 Rather than Charles Darwin's familiar notion of survival of the fittest, Chen said he believes scientists should focus on the possibility that a unique harmony between forms of life allowed complex organisms to emerge. If all we have to depend upon is chance and competition, the conventional forces of evolution, Chen said, "then complex, highly evolved life, such as the human, has no reason to appear."


 The debate over Haikouella casts Western scientists in the unlikely role of defending themselves against charges of ideological blindness from scientists in Communist China. Chinese officials argue that the theory of evolution is so politically charged in the West that researchers are reluctant to admit shortcomings for fear of giving comfort to those who believe in a biblical creation.


 "Evolution is facing an extremely harsh challenge," declared the Communist Party's Guang Ming Daily last December in describing the fossils in southern China. "In the beginning, Darwinian evolution was as scientific theory.... In fact, evolution eventually changed into a religion."


 Taunts from the Communist Party wouldn't carry much sting, however, if some Western scientists weren't also concerned about weaknesses in so-called neo-Darwinism, the dominant view of evolution over the last 50 years.


 "Neo-Darwinism is dead," said Eric Davidson, a geneticist and textbook writer at the California Institute of Technology. He joined a recent gathering of 60 scientists from around the world near Chengjiang, where Chen had found his first impressions of Haikouella five years ago.


 But most Westerners at Chen's conference came to praise Darwin, not to bury him. The idea that neo-Darwinism is missing something fundamental about evolution is as scandalous to Americans as it is basic to the Chinese.


 Despite their misgivings about Chen's "harmony" proposal - a mysterious mix of scientific caution, Chinese philosophy, and a decidedly non-Western lack of concern for Darwinian orthodoxy Western scientists have no choice but to go to China to learn about the emergence of animal body plans, including that of humans.


 Virtually all of today's living phyla  or major animal groups make their first impressions in the geologic period known as the Cambrian. And Chengjiang, in the southern province of Yunnan, contains the oldest and best preserved Cambrian fossils in the world. Jun-Yuan Chen has coauthored half of all the papers on the Chengjiang fauna.


 Chen's discovery of the earliest creature with a primitive nervous system, called a chordate, is, for him, but one more piece in a puzzle that looks less and less like the conventional picture of evolution through natural selection.


 For Western paleontologists, Haikouella looks like a breakthrough for understanding the origin of the human lineage. "It proves that the direct ancestor of mankind already existed in the time of the Cambrian explosion," said German paleontologist Michael Steiner.


 "Sort of instinctively, I felt I should go and pay homage to this animal," said another scientist at the conference, Nicholas Holland, an authority on primitive chordates at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. "It's the earliest known chordate ancestor. This is going to be page one, two, three and four of vertebrate texts."


 Chen enjoys seeing his fossils get the attention. But to him, the big story is not that he has discovered our earliest traceable ancestor but that the Cambrian explosion of new body plans is proving to be real, not an illusion produced by an incomplete fossil record.


 Because new animal groups did not continue to appear after the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, he believes that a unique kind of evolution was going on in Cambrian seas. And, because his years of examining rocks from before the Cambrian period has not turned up viable ancestors for the Cambrian animal groups, he concludes that their evolution must have happened quickly, within a mere 2 or 3 million years.


 According to Chen, the two main forces of evolution espoused by neo-Darwinism, natural selection ("survival of the littest") and random genetic mutation, cannot account for the sudden emergence of so many new genetic forms.


 "Harmony can be a driving force [of evolution], too," Chen proposed at the Chengjiang conference.


 As if to underscore the abruptness of Haikouella's place in the million years old. Darwin wrote that, if his theory is true, then the world must have been swarming with the ancestors of the Cambrian critters during long ages before them. He expected future generations to find them.


 Today, paleontologists still.lack viable ancestors for the Cambrian's 40 or more animal phyla. Most researchers explain this by assuming that Precambrian animals were simply too small or too soft to leave a fossil record, or that conditions were unfavorable to fossilization.


 But, for the last three years, Chen's discoveries at Precambrian fossil sites with Taiwanese biologist Chia-Wei Li have magnified this mystery. While sifting though the debris of a phosphate mining site, Chen and Li eventually discovered the earliest clear fossils of multicellular animals. They found sponges and tiny sponge embryos by the thousands  but nothing resembling the fish-like Haikouella or forerunners of other Cambrian creatures, such as trilobites.


 When word of the discovery got out, Chen and Li suddenly found themselves in the international spotlight. But when the hoopla was over and their discovery established, they wondered what evolutionary problems they had actually solved.


 In fact, the pair had failed to find any recognizable body plans showing steps along the way toward the complex Cambrian animais, with their legs, antennae, eyes and other features.


 What they had actually proved was that phosphate is fully capable of preserving whatever animals may have lived there in Precambrian times. Because they found sponges and sponge embryos in abundance, researchers are no longer so confident that Precambrian animals were too soft or too small to be preserved.


 "I think this is a major mystery in paleontology," Chen said. "Before the Cambrian, we should see a number of steps - differentiation of cells, differentiation of tissue, of dorsal and ventral, right and left But we don't have strong evidence for any of these."


 Taiwanese biologist Li was also direct: "No evolution theory can explain these kinds of phenomena."


 In Chen's view, his evidence supports a history of life that runs opposite to the standard evolutionary tree diagrams, a progression he calls top-down evolution.


 In the most published diagram in the history of evolutionary biology, Darwin illustrated what became the standard view of how new taxa, or animal categories, evolve. Beginning with small variations, evolving animals diverge farther from the original ancestor, eventually becoming new species, then new genera, new families, and the divergence continues until the highest taxa are reached, which are separated from one another by the greatest differences.


 But the fossil record shows that story is not true, according to Chen. The differences appear dramatically in the early days, instead of coming at the top. Chen suggested that biologists need to seek new mechanisms to explain these evolutionary leaps.


 Wherever the first chordates came from, Nicholas Holland of Scripps agreed that science should now take seriously the possibility that evolution can occur in relatively quick jumps.


 That still leaves a great divide between Chen, Li and the Chinese media on one side and the mainstream Western view, in which scientists are reluctant to admit that the Cambrian explosion poses a difficult challenge.


 But conferences such as the one in Chengjiang may be changing some views. One of the symposium organizers, paleontologist David Bottjer of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said he disagrees with the idea of rapid evolution, but he conceded, "The Cambrian Explosion is going to tell us something different about evolution, in the sense that it's not the same story that we have always been taught."                         "




There has been a mistake. In this article, i find them repeatedly questioning evolution as a process and they are arguing about darwinism and a gradual (most generally accepted form of) evolution.


Fossil records still prove that animals did evolve from being simple to more complex. Isn't that how you start teaching children about evolution?


I agree that evolution may have happened way too fast to accept. But isn't it more accurate to say that we do not fully understand evolution than to say that it just didn't exist?


The main arguments to evolution have been

Thermodynamics, The Cambrian Bloom argument, Formation of the Eye, Evolution of parasites, Simultaneous evolution of Both genders in a species, Magical appearance of the bat or monkeys  etc.


I can argue both sides of evolution pretty well but what i believe is..

All of this is proof of how we don't understand evolution well. What caused the cambrian bloom, the magical appearances, the organs? these are the questions we must be asking, not question basic theories that could be true. Maybe we should be teaching evolution as its principle skeletal form and not go too much into it's details

Linux Distros

After months and months of searching and researching, downloading and trying out at least 20 iso and distros here is a small conclusion. There is still a lot to discover out there.

1. Best distro for programmers - Gentoo
2. Best distro for networking and security - Red hat and Fedora
3. Best distro for old obsolete computers - Puppy linux
4. Best distro for educational and kids 2 yrs and above - Quimo
5. Best distro for gaming - Supreme Supergamer
6. Best distro for hacking - Backtrack
7. Best distro for Rescue - Trinity
8. Best distro for cloud computing - Peppermint Ice
9. Best live distro - Knoppix
10.Smallest distro - Tiny Core Linux

Ubuntu is the best for a normal user... be it on a desktop, laptop, notebook, mac. Everything.





Also......have you ever wondered what KDE and Gnome are?
Linux is actually like dos, right.. you type commands (which people don't really like).. so there have been a few programs that do that work for you and give you a window to work gui in. KDE and Gnome are the most popular of the lot.

KDE and Gnome users hate each other.. and here is why.
KDE writers believe in having the power to tweak their graphical interface to the maximum. KDE thus has a lot of complex options to make everything look better..

Gnome writers believe in simplicity. Though the power to tweak still exists, it's less versatile. Gnome is for beginners and people who do not wish to be lost in the hassle.

I've just given my opinion on the most controversial topics, am sure i will get a lot of comments on which people think is better, I would love to hear them all and try out what others have to offer. Also if you find other distros that are out there to focus on some task as mentioned above please do let me know.

My seminar with G Subramanium

I attended a seminar by renowned Astrophysicist G Subramanium, his topic was the history of our universe

First off it talked about how space was being warped and stuff, which i just don't understand, cause if you uniformly stretched space, i doubt the effects of physics like the red shift would exist. It has to be relatively stretched for such effects to play a role, as in the distance between galaxies must expand faster than distance that makes up the stars, the galaxies expanding ( this is an argument with rudimentary physics that i will not go into)

Second problem was when the physicists claimed that the universe followed Euclidean geometry and thus must be flat. Otherwise we geometry as a triangle having more than 180 degrees for an angle as if you were drawing it on a ball. WELL OBVIOUSLY IT WILL LOOK FLAT IF YOU ARE LOOKING THROUGH THE UNIVERSE rather than drawing lines on the surface of the universe.

Thus the next issue: I understood the point till baryonic matter, energy, dark matter,even but when it hit dark energy.. whoa... wait. The basic assumption that the universe is Euclidean and thus must have a certain energy density ( density of energy + mass (including dark mass) converted to energy by e=mc^2 formula) which is that of 5 protons (converted back into baryonic matter as units) per cubic meter. The universe has only 1 proton per cubic meter. OKAY.. lets create something to fix the formula.. dark energy!..

Hey man, maybe i don't understand the basic argument about euclidean geometry but lets take another perceptive alright...  Now dark energy is supposed to be why the universe is expanding. This is the driving force behind it's expansion right?? okay..on a previously missed note, one of the astonishing discoveries in our universe's history is that all galaxies are infinitely accelerating further and further away from the center of the big bang.  Okay so what happens when a galaxy approaches speed of light. [When any object approaches speed of light, further energy is compensated by the addition of mass, right?] My guess is that.. it may gather dark energy, converting it to mass, maybe dark matter.. then maybe dark matter turns into baryonic matter like protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, positrons, mesons... etc.

Dark Energy cannot be converted into anything, this is the energy possessed by vacuum. This energy always remains energy.
As for the question i asked about the approaching speed of light..... He gave me some shit about doppler effect which sounded pretty confusing. ( the problem with me, unlike most people is.... I just don't switch off when bullshit if poured onto me... you may think that i'll go all blitz like a tv without signal and then accept the conclusion... i tried... i couldn't switch off) his conclusion was.. that since space itself was expanding the velocity of light just cannot be achieved.

I processed that as much as i could, and realized either he was trying to confuse me or he's got his basic math wrong. I think what he said was that since space too is expanding, to reach speed of light, you need to attain certain distance by time.. and that distance is ever expanding, thus the speed remains lower.

Now if distance or space was expanding, for Doppler effect results as discovered would not exist, subsequently if the speed was 'found' to be accelerating infinity then even if space expands, a certain amount of space just has to be covered, irrespective of how much that space has expanded.




Maybe I am wrong, maybe i didn't understand something, please go ahead and comment, help me understand it a bit better.