ensign_beedrill

I read an article, that can detect animal life-forms for up to 100 meters away. It picks up on the energy pulses aniamls hearts put out every time they beat, and also display their locations in relation to your on a small screen. Additionally, after about 30 seconds, it can tell you what the animal is. Or, in some cases that several species are very similar, the most likely species. This technology is strictly military right now, but is supposed to be available to the public (hopefully) within the next 5 years.

 

The two should be combined.

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That's interesting, and it would be neat if there is some way to combine them. And by the way, I like your Gir. ^-^

I just recently saw the episode "Badda-Bing Badda-Bang," and I enjoyed it very much. It was really fun to watch.

I was wondering if anyone had the song from the end where Vic and Sisko are singing together. It's called "Best is Yet to Come." I've had this song in my head ever since. So, if anyone has or knows where I can get this particular version of the song, I'd appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.

Oi, and I'm definitely going to have to get "This One's from the Heart." I feel giddy...

This is from The Dallas Morning News.

The code of the wild

 

Merger of DNA technique, barcodes has potential for instant specimen ID

 

 

05:41 PM CDT on Sunday, October 10, 2004

 

 

By RACHEL EHRENBERG / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

 

 

 

You're camping in the woods when you realize you pitched the tent on what might be a nice, soft patch of poison ivy. The mushrooms your spouse picked look suspiciously poisonous. And you think that trout your daughter pulled from the stream is a protected species.

 

Don't panic. Get out your handy-dandy DNA barcoder. In the future, such a contraption may let you identify everything from salmon in the stream to slime mold in the basement, filling you in on the organism's natural history to boot.

 

A DNA barcoder would also make research a lot easier for people such as tropical ecologist Dan Janzen. "I read a lot of sci-fi in high school," he says. "And a recurrent theme is, the spaceship lands and the person comes out and sticks a gadget into something and the gadget tells them animal or mineral or plant, friendly or not friendly."

 

"I didn't see it coming as quickly as it got here, but it's been in my mind my whole life," says Dr. Janzen, who's made a career of getting a handle on the diversity of the tropics.

 

That gadget will be one of the payoffs of efforts to catalog the world's flora and fauna using a short sequence of DNA, or "DNA barcode." Two new studies demonstrate the usefulness of the project – the Barcode of Life Initiative – which was launched in 2003 by a number of major natural history museums and herbaria. The consortium promises the ultimate field guide, one that would allow rapid identification of and information about any of the world's estimated 10 million species.

 

The project is as ambitious as its potential applications are broad. Ultimately, a DNA barcoder could allow quick identification of disease-causing organisms (for example, that tick embedded in your leg is not carrying Lyme), protected species or invasive critters that threaten farmlands and forests. It could also help answer many of the questions that keep biologists up at night, such as which animals live where, and who is eating whom.

 

A goal of the barcoding project is to have a reference chunk of DNA from the same part of the same gene for all creatures, a sort of Dewey Decimal System for the library of life.

 

However, not just any gene will do. The arrangement of letters in the DNA code changes over evolutionary time – with some genes this happens very slowly and their DNA sequences look very much the same in closely related species. These genes are good for asking questions about the deeper branches in the tree of life.

 

But to get at questions about the tips of the evolutionary shrubbery, scientists must look at genes that are changing quickly.

 

One such gene in the animal kingdom is cytochrome c oxidase I, or COI. This gene changes quickly enough that its code reveals recent evolutionary events, allowing researchers to distinguish species from very close relatives.

 

"We had anticipated that there might be more complications than there are," says Paul Hebert of the University of Guelph in Ontario. "But the startling observation is, from whales ... to butterflies or birds, these organisms appear to all obey roughly the same sorts of rules in terms of the patterns of genetic variation."

 

This genetic variation helps scientists draw the line on what to call a species. Traditionally, experts sort species by looking at a number of traits – what the organisms look like, how they behave – and more recently, how their DNA varies. This genetic information can also unmask look-alike species: organisms that might look and act the same, but aren't breeding and are actually separate species. Revealing these cryptic critters is another promise of DNA barcoding, says Dr. Hebert.

 

Dr. Hebert, Dr. Janzen and their colleagues put this power to the test recently with a neotropical skipper butterfly, Astraptes fulgerator . The little lepidopteron has long been regarded as a single species that lives in a variety of habitats from the southwestern United States to Argentina. But when more than 2,500 wild caterpillars of the skipper were closely examined, they hinted at hidden species.

 

Caterpillars of butterflies are usually loyal to their handful of food plants, yet the skipper caterpillars were caught chowing on a huge range of plants. "If this had been a moth I wouldn't have been so startled and annoyed by this long list, but no butterfly on earth eats 57 plants," says Dr. Janzen.

 

When the researchers sorted the adult butterflies by their caterpillar food plants, a pattern emerged: subtle differences in wing color, size and shape also fell into similar food plant categories, suggesting the skipper was a complex of six or seven species. Then the skipper's DNA barcode revealed that there were 10 species of butterfly, the researchers reported in a recent issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Dr. Janzen says the butterfly work illustrates where DNA barcoding would really shine: the tropics. There are so many species there, and there's so little known about them. Scientists may see a plant or animal only in one part of its life cycle – a caterpillar on a plant, say, or a tree that isn't in flower – so barcoding could allow a quick ID in the field, facilitating all kinds of investigations.

 

Cautions, potential

Barcoding will be an important tool in temperate areas as well, but here scientists may have to tread a little more carefully, writes evolutionary biologist Craig Moritz in a commentary on a study published recently in Public Library of Science Biology.

 

Working mainly from museum specimens, a team of scientists led by Dr. Hebert surveyed the COI gene of 260 North American birds. The barcodes revealed four more hidden species: genetic variants within the sandpiper, meadowlark, marsh wren and warbling vireo. But many North American birds are migratory – come fall, they get out of Dodge and head to the tropics. By sampling only temperate birds, the scientists may have missed their closest relatives, and therefore have a skewed version of the group's genetic variation.

 

As long as its limitations are recognized, the barcoding project has great potential, says Dr. Moritz, of UC-Berkeley, who calls the effort "a big challenge, and a very exciting one." Researchers need to be wary of other things that can complicate the genetic picture, such as hybridization, the mating of two different species. The COI gene is found in the mitochondria, the factories that make energy for cells. Mitochondrial DNA is usually passed on to offspring only by mothers, so it represents one snapshot of genetic variation. And it may not be the right gene to look at for all of life; in plants for example, a gene from the chloroplasts, the light-harvesting factories, might be a better candidate.

 

Not a replacement

Some researchers worry that barcoding is intended to do away with the traditional ways of sorting species, replacing them with "DNA taxonomy." But proponents of the project say this concern is misguided.

 

"Our effort is built upon the idea of bringing in as much information as possible. It is a total evidence approach," says Dr. Hebert.

 

As with the bird and butterfly work, the preliminary thrust of the barcoding project will be sampling from museum specimens and getting the DNA library together. Technology isn't a limiting factor – there are plenty of facilities that could do all of the lab work in about a year, says Dr. Hebert. Coordinating efforts and gathering funds is the crucial part right now.

 

Eventually the creatures' genetic code will be linked to an "encyclopedia of life," so that, gadget in hand, someone could retrieve not just a name, but also information on the animal's range, food and habitat preferences, and conservation status. This is the real importance of the barcoding project, says Dr. Janzen: It democratizes access to information about life on Earth.

 

"Right now it's like asking someone who can't read to save books," says Dr. Janzen. But barcoding "could transform the way that humans see the wild world. ... And maybe that will get more humans willing to work to save a fraction of that wild world."

 

Rachel Ehrenberg is a freelance writer in Michigan.

 

So... are we going to be able to scan for life forms... just like on Star Trek? Are tricorders on the way? It's an interesting idea... for sure.

I read this in The Dallas Morning News and I thought it might be of interest to some of you. Especially TheUnicornHunter, because I've seen you talk about this topic before. Surprisingly, the author gets through this article without ever cracking a Vulcan joke. Amazing.

Emotions may be more useful than you think

 

SCIENCE

 

05:08 PM CDT on Sunday, September 12, 2004

 

By TOM SIEGFRIED / The Dallas Morning News

 

"Emotional intelligence" might sound like an oxymoron, but ignoring emotions is rarely very smart. And suppressing emotions might even turn you into an actual moron.

 

Well, maybe it's not always that bad. But blocking emotional thoughts does seem to diminish thinking ability, studies show. Concealing your feelings apparently requires mental resources that reduce your ability to remember, communicate and reason.

 

"Typically, people conceal feelings to foster the illusion that they are cool, calm and collected," writes psychologist Jane Richards of the University of Texas at Austin. "There is mounting evidence, however, that these emotion-regulatory efforts may have unintended cognitive consequences."

 

Scientists have long realized that emotions play an important role in making intelligent choices. Nobel economics laureate Herbert Simon once warned that human reasoning is always influenced by emotions, so that ignoring them when studying how people make decisions is bound to lead to a misguided notion of rationality. But that left open the question of how emotions exerted their effects.

 

"Until quite recently ... it was almost taken for granted that if emotions play any part in reasoning, it would be to put sand into the rational choice machinery," write Roberta Muramatsu, of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Yaniv Hanoch, of the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

But in fact, they point out in a new paper to be published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, researchers now know that emotions are essential for making quick and smart judgments. Emotions help focus attention on the most urgent environmental cues and shortcut lengthy reasoning procedures in situations where hesitation is hazardous.

 

And not only can having emotions make you smart, it seems, but suppressing emotions can make you dumb.

 

In one study, participants were shown disturbing slides of injured men, with voiceovers describing each man's name, job and type of injury. Some of the participants were told to refrain from showing any signs of emotion while viewing the slides. Others were given no such emotional prohibition.

 

When tested to see how well they remembered the spoken information, participants suppressing emotion scored much lower than the others.

 

Similar studies show the same effect, regardless of whether the suppressed emotions are unpleasant or pleasant. In conversations between relationship partners, for instance, people hiding feelings remembered less of the discussion than their expressive partners.

 

Other experiments show that people suppressing their feelings don't communicate very well – speaking less, speaking more slowly and not responding to the statements of others. And people suppressing emotions were not given high marks on the rapport scale by their partners.

 

Even reasoning ability seems to suffer when people block their emotional thoughts. Participants in one experiment first viewed an upsetting film while suppressing their feelings, then played a word game (making words from scrambled letters). Suppressors performed poorly.

 

Apparently, suppressing feelings depletes the brain's mental capacity, Dr. Richards suggests in a review published in last month's issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.

 

Alternate strategies for keeping your cool might be less taxing, though, some research indicates. In advance of a potentially emotional experience (say, a job interview), you might "reappraise" its significance (you don't really care if you get the job, perhaps) so that strong emotions are less likely to arise. That way you won't have to exert effort to suppress them and you'll retain your reasoning and communication skills.

 

All this may seem like nothing to get emotional about, yet there are some possibly serious consequences when expressing emotions makes you dumb. Jurors, for instance, are not supposed to be emotionally demonstrative while listening to testimony. Perhaps that explains some otherwise inexplicable acquittals of certain high-profile murder suspects. Or what about students who tell themselves to remain calm while taking a test? They might be unintentionally degrading their ability to get good grades.

 

So far, though, the research is not conclusive enough to warrant emotional outbursts as a way to improve memory. Other emotion-suppression strategies might not be so damaging. Some people mask one emotion by displaying another, for instance – such as laughing when they really want to cry. And it's possible to combine that strategy with others, such as suppressing all thought about a subject likely to evoke emotions, rather than just suppressing the emotions once they occur.

 

Ultimately, researchers must also be able to discern the differences between their artificial experiments and real-world situations. Expressing emotion certainly isn't always a good way to get you high marks for rapport – ask basketball officials who have conversed with Bobby Knight.

 

Still, research into such issues isn't trivial. Controlling emotions without diminishing intelligence is a worthwhile goal, and psychological research, as Dr. Richards notes, is an important part of clarifying what it actually means to be "emotionally intelligent."

 

Thoughts? Discussion? Vulcans seem to be very intelligent. Have they found something that we've missed? Can they use more of their brains and therefore suppress emotions while paying attention to other things? Is it a result of hundreds of years of practice and philosophy and development?

Y35, 1 5p34k l337, 4nd 1 l0v3 ///3g470ky0. 1'v3 4l\\\4'/5 7h0ugh7 7h47 7h3 80|2g 5h0uld 5p34k 1n l337. 17'5 4///u51ng 70 533 4|| 0f 7h3 d1ff3r3n7 f0|2///5 of l337 j00 9u'/5 u53. 1 u53 4 |4z'/ f0|2///, b3c4u53 1'/// |4z'/. 4nd |23///3///83|2. l337 = 3v0|u710n.

Beedrill, if that's true then i guess the USA had no reason to fight the british in the late 1700's

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I have to disagree, as that was the fight that was foremost on my mind when I was writing that. The colonists were feeling inferior to the "folks back home." What with the "no taxation without representation" and the like. The whole gist of the thing was that they weren't getting treated equally... they weren't being treated fairly... they were being treated like they were inferior. Even though England was they land they had come from, they were being treated like inferiors. And that's why they fought the British. If the British had treated the colonists like equals, America might still belong to Britain.

And mj, your points were smack on. Great analyzing!

I think it all has to do with the mentality a race has. I mean, let's narrow it down a bit. If you met some people who are much smarter than you and much stronger than you, would you feel inferior to them? I probably would. Would they feel superior to you? I think it's safe to say yes. Now if we apply this to an entire race, if right now in 2004, Humans met a race of aliens with faster-than-light space ships, universal translators, food replicators, transporters and the like. A race of people who make our highest and most advanced levels of science theories and mathematics seem like child's play, would we feel inferior to them? I think so. No matter if they've been around a couple thousand years longer than we have, I think we'd still feel inferior. Because that's the way we think, and that's the way we judge.

Don't older siblings feel superior to their younger siblings, just because they've been around longer? Don't they like to tease their little brothers and sisters? "I can read and you can't." "You can't do that math problem? That's easy!" "I can't believe how many words you can't spell." And maybe the little siblings feel a bit inferior at times.

It all has to do with what's in your head and the way you judge things. When the European explorers came to the new world, they declared themselves superior to the natives. Even though a lot of them were very scientifically advanced. Even though they knew the land a lot better, and if it weren't for them, the Europeans might not have had such an easy time surviving in the new world. How about Hitler and his "superior" race? It's all a matter of perspective and how you view yourself relative to another.

Humans think superior means better, faster, stronger, more. Faster computers, faster cars, better service, faster service, bigger houses, more space, more stuff, more money. So by our own judgment, we would be the ones who would deem us inferior to another race. And by their own judgment, they would be the ones to deem us the inferior race. It all has to do with the mentality. You have to believe you're superior and have someone believe they're inferior to you to be superior. And whether it's right or not, that's how it happens.

And that's how revolts come about. When people are fed up with feeling inferior, they fight back.

Well, here we go. The moment has arrived. This round's mystery character is...

*dramatic music*

No problem

 

It's what I'm progr- uh, I can't get enough of these. Too fun, plus the pictures are awsome! You're a great artist.

249960[/snapback]

Thanks. ^-^

Oh, thanks so much! I had hoped someone here would know. ^-^ Thanks again!

Well, I'm back. But it's kind of late. I think I'll give everyone one more day. I'll post the answer tomorrow. It'll probably be up in the afternoon.

and for some reason keep coming back

*raises hand for some reason*

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^-^ Thanks for always coming back. You certainly make it interesting.

You're right that star does look bad, I never looked at it before.    I'd change it 'cept it's been so long since I did I don't remember how.  (<blush so hot the house sets a-fire.  )

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^-^ Hehe... it is easy to overlook those little stars, isn't it? Especially when they're yours. I do it all the time. Umm, to change, I think you go into "my controls" and then to "edit profile," and there'll be a drop down box at the end of the edit fields to choose your mood.

 

This is the place for explianing why you have chosen your current Mood Star (you may re-post when-ever you change it)

 

Mine is Examinate because that's pretty much all I do. 

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Hmmm, I did a double take because your star looked kinda' angry and puffed up. You're actually set to exanimate, which means spiritless or disheartened. Maybe you could find a mood like curious or something. Unless you really meant to be exanimate, in which case I'm wrong and you can forget everything I just said.

I chose good because... I feel... good. Yeah.

Who was the actor who played the MACO Richards? He's been in about seven episodes. For a description, picture, and listing of appearances go to this page. I know of someone who wants to know, so if you know or could find out, that person would appreciate it.

As for why I made the changes, Invision has been refining their 2.0 version of the board for about 6 months and it has been in my plan ever since I first tried 2.0 that we would upgrade as soon as they had a stable version that would take all of our custom modifications (like spoilers). All of the Mods can attest to the fact that I've been anxious to get this version running, I've installed 2 or 3 test boards so we could play with it and get used to the functions before we officially upgraded lol.

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Well, I'm glad you finally got to upgrade like you wanted to. Oh, and I've noticed the black area is back under the message now. That's nice. ^-^ Thanks for all the work you've done for this site. It's a place that keeps me coming back.

Yeah, I've had a few people tell me that. I'm actually in the process of making another skin that removes ths stars from the areas that they normally aren't in.

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Very cool.

I just noticed that the quote buttons are at the bottoms of the posts now. I think they used to be at the tops. Or maybe I'm just playing tricks on myself. I also like how the quote text shows up in the message text box, now. And the little "snapback" buttons in the quotes are cool! It's the little things that make me happy. ^-^

So... what moved you to make these changes?

The multi-quotage thing is awesome! I've been wanting to be able to do that for a long time. And I like the new quote boxes... they look very neat.

One thing I don't like is all of the stars everywhere. They used to be in the background, but now they're under all of the words and inside all of the boxes. They're somewhat distracting when I'm trying to read. I liked the solid black under the message and the stars in the very background better.

But other than that, I like the new look. ^-^

Goodness, she looks so realistic! That's totally awesome! Great work! She is very pretty. Very nice work.

Welcome, one and all, to the fifth round of this crazy game that has no name. Everyone's welcome to play, whether you've played in previous rounds and for some reason keep coming back, or whether you're new to this and stumbled in here by some unfortunate mistake. I'm your host and before you start to play, let me lay down the rules.

I'll post a line drawing of a Star Trek character. You make a post to guess who it is. And after an undisclosed amount of time, I'll put and end to the guessing by posting a color picture of the original drawing and revealing the mystery person. I will award fake points to anyone who has guessed correctly within the allotted time. Easy, eh?

If you guess more than one person, you will not receive any points, even if one of the guesses is correct. The character will not be any previously played character: Riker, Spock, Picard, and Kirk are already out of the game.

I'm going on another vacation. They're so fun, I can't seem to get away from them. I'll get back sometime on Thursday. So I'll probably post the answer on either Thursday or Friday, depending on the direction the wind is blowing and the phase of the moon. And now... I leave you to guess.

I like the hair.

Thanks. I've been experimenting with new ways to do hair.

For free web hosting...

I used to use Angelfire, but that has just gotten so out of hand with all of the pop-ups and now some sidebar search thing that comes up. It's just annoying.

Here are some that I've never actually used, but I've heard of. You can check them out and see which you like. Bravenet offers free web hosting as well as a lot of free web site tools. There is also Zero Catch. You're right, Yahoo does offer it... it's called GeoCities, but I don't really like the ads on those, either... they sometimes cover up the content and they can get annoying.

I hope this helps.

Sea trooper, why yes, it has been a week. I just got back today. Boy, there's some variety here! Well, let's lift the curtains. This round's mystery character is...

Click for Spoiler:

James Kirk!

Mrs.Picard receives five fake points. (total five points)

Congratulations! I'm glad you liked my Picard drawing. I'll try to put up some more sketches in the fan art gallery. ^-^

Thanks, everyone, for participating, it was fun looking at all of your guesses. This one was a harder one, I think. I said that at the beginning. I can see he might look a little like Wes. Please come back and play again next round! I'll put it up soon.

As always, any criticism/comments is/are welcome!

Oh, and I noticed this was moved to the games forum. So I'll post all future rounds there. Look for them in games!

Welcome to round four of this little guessing game I have going on here. The last two rounds weren't too bad, but this one might be a little more challenging.

If you haven't played before, it's quite simple. I'll post a line art drawing of a Star Trek character and you make a post to guess who it is. After an unspecified length of time, I'll post the answer and a color picture of the original. If you guess right, you get these awesome fakey points!

But you can only guess one person. Guessing more than one person, even if one of the people is the right one, automatically disqualifies you for getting any points.

And that's it for the rules. Let's see... I'm terrible at drawing people with arms crossed, but I do it anyway. I mean... the picture called for it.

I'll be gone for a week, so I'll post the answer when I get back from my little vacation. Let the games begin!

The Eugenics Wars and World War III were entirely separate. I was reading some Star Trek article a while ago and it said that people mistakenly believe The Eugenics Wars and World War III to be the same. I forget where it was, I read so many Star Trek things that I forget which ones are which! I'd point you to it, if I remembered. But if you want some sort of reconciliation (because we obviously did not have full-scale open warfare... we would have noticed) you can read The Eugenics Wars by Greg Cox.

I've read Volume One and it was really good. It tells about the conception of the super humans and follows Khan as he grows up with a special focus on Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln (and of course, Isis). Remember them from "Assignment: Earth?" Cox does a wonderful job of bringing in all sorts of old Trek lore and characters and mixing together actual historical facts with his own fictional twists to really make this whole thing totally believable. I haven't read Volume Two, yet. Sadly, my local library does not carry it. But I am sure that it is every bit as compelling and outstanding as the first book. From what I've read of summaries, the Wars were conducted covertly, so we wouldn't have had much of a clue as to what was going on.

But it's an awesome story and I recommend you read it. It will really help you to believe that these wars really did happen.

And the guessing is closed. Thanks to everyone who played this time around. And now for the revealing. This round's character is:

Click for Spoiler:

Picard!

Sorry if his head kinda' blinds you when you look at it. ^-^ I've got nothing against bald people or Picard. I just kinda' thought it was funny. And now for points!

Jack_Bauer receives 5 fake points. (total 5 points)

WEAREBORG4102 receives 5 fake points. (total 5 points)

Tal Shiar 8472 receives 5 fake points. (total 5 points)

T'pol_1 receives 5 fake points. (total 5 points)

v_seven receives 5 fake points. (total 5 points)

Q stole my bike receives 5 fake points. (total 10 points)

TrekkieMage receives 5 fake points. (total 10 points)

DixonHill1989 receives 5 fake points. (total 5 points)

And now for some new fun things I just thought up. I'm just full of them, aren't I? ¬.¬

Honorable mentions are for people who guessed more than one person but one of their guesses included the actual character.

Unadopted Angelic receives an honorable mention.

Mike_Hines01 receives an honorable mention.

Laughs are for things that just make me laugh.

sea trooper receives a laugh for changing from The Doctor to Worf quite spontaneously. (total 5 points)

Congratulations!

So, there you have it. I should have another up soon. This one might not be as easy as the last ones. Thanks again, everyone, for participating, and I hope to see you next round.

Hmmm... I'll just change the polarity on this here...