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Couch Potato Gene Identified In Fruit Flies
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Oct 25, 2008 02:06 PM
from the or-extract-it-straight-from-me dept.
from the or-extract-it-straight-from-me dept.
Pickens writes "University of Pennsylvania biologists have discovered a mutation in fruit flies aptly named the 'couch potato' gene that allows them to simply chill out — entering a mild state of quasi-hibernation known as diapause, when winter arrives. 'It's not like they're bears sleeping in a cave,' says Paul Schmidt. 'They just look like they're a little bit more sluggish.' The couch potato gene, first discovered in the early 1990s, got its nickname because flies with mutations in the gene became really sluggish and behaved abnormally. Little is known about the underlying evolutionary genetic architecture, but in diapause, the slacking off is far less severe. The flies' bodily functions slow down, and they are better able to tolerate stress. The fruit fly gene may have implications for human health, as it can help biologists study the function of the nervous system and diseases such as epilepsy, refuting a recent statement by a political candidate that fruit fly research has 'little or nothing to do with the public good.'"
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This is why we are $10T in debt (Score:2, Insightful)
It might be fashionable to make fun of Palin on Slashdot, where people pretend to be constitutional purists and libertarians. But this type of thinking, "don't cut my program" is why America is $10T in debt, not counting the 79 million baby boomers about to retire and demand their Social Security and Medicare.
The question isn't whether government programs are well intentioned
Re:This is why we are $10T in debt (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:This is why we are $10T in debt (Score:5, Insightful)
But this type of thinking, "don't cut my program" is why America is $10T in debt
Uhh... no. America is $10T in debt because:
a) People demand their programs stay, while simultaneously refusing tax hikes to actually pay for them.
b) Prosecuting a war the country can't afford, then *cutting taxes* in the meantime.
c) Allowing the financial industry to run off a cliff, forcing the government to take action to prevent a complete economic meltdown.
Is pork a problem? Yup. But as Obama has pointed out *many* times, earmarks, where much of this pork comes from, account for a truly *miniscule* sum compared to the broader budget, which is dominated by military expenditures and various entitlement programs. Unfortunately, Americans are, apparently, unwilling to actually *pay* for those military expenditures and entitlement programs, and so you get mind-bogglingly large debt.
Incidentally, on a side note, here in my country, Canada, we have universal healthcare, universal education, university tuition that's actually affordable, old age security benefits, and a welfare system. And we're running a *surplus*. Just a little food for thought.
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Great... so the U.S. will soon become another Canada - universal free everything, and good at nothing.
Such as regulating banks?
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Great... so the U.S. will soon become another Canada - universal free everything, and good at nothing.
Such as regulating banks?
No, no. Such as educating our children! No, wait... umm, such as providing decent health care to all!! No, no, that's not right either... hmmm, such as winning the war on terrorism!! No, wait, we suck at that too; maybe I meant the war on drugs!! Crap, we lost that one too... Oh I know this .... oh yeah -- exporting crappy caricatures of ourselves on television!!! Hah! America rules!! (the US-America that is). Take that, great white north!!
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Great... so the U.S. will soon become another Canada - universal free everything, and good at nothing.
If you take your finger out of your ass and use it to pick up a book you might learn about all the things Canada is good at. Ignorance is curable, after all.
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Canada pays next to nothing for military because they know the US has their back. That goes a long way for social programs.
Uhh... you *are* aware that, prior to the Bush administration, the US was also running a surplus, while still managing to pay for their military?
Sorry, bud... it's a nice looking excuse, but it's only that. An excuse.
Oh, and in case you're curious, not only does Canada pay less, per capita, in total money for our healthcare program, we actually spend *less government money per capita*.
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Above you can see an example of a early 21st century Homo Americanensis thinking. The species died out shortly after due to brain starvation.
One of the characteristics about this failed species was their egocentric orientation and allergy towards the common good. It eventually led to isolationism and the world turning towards more lucrative areas and the species faded avay quickly... Now if you will follow me into the next exhibition hall..
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There's a difference between the "common good" and helping people out, and having other people demand it of you, though; a lot of the left doesn't seem to understand that.
A problem of society in general is that people aren't giving enough and use their money to buy petty things, it's true. But I'm very uncomfortable with others telling me what I "owe" them.
Truthfully, no one is really against the common good, except maybe the true antisocial person, which is probably more apathetic to it than evil, and are
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Every year passing by, with some form of natural disaster, the society is sinking deeper into the abyss because nobody feel it is a common interest and good for the country to pool money together and rebuild these areas. Today
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Some people are really confused. Social security and the various welfare benefits are much more about running a stable, sociable, low stress society. For example universal health means, that we people are suffering, and parent worry about a child serious illness or injury, they do not also have to worry about how they are going to pay for it.
The underlying principles of effective social welfare nets are two fold, firstly there is the basic philosophical principle of society via declared ownership of all
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True, the objectives are more subtle: killng all the brown people who are unwilling to accept US elites' rule. Otherwise known as "Standard Imperial Procedure". Nuking Iraq is incompatible with the doctrine of Pax Americana whereby the (mostly) US-centred economic feudal nobility gets to rule and own pretty much everything, including the natural resources of places like Iraq. All pretences of any other purpose
5T$ and growing from republican policies. (Score:5, Insightful)
"It might be fashionable to make fun of Palin on Slashdot, where people pretend to be constitutional purists and libertarians. But this type of thinking, "don't cut my program" is why America is $10T in debt, not counting the 79 million baby boomers about to retire and demand their Social Security and Medicare."
When Bush took over the debt was 5 Trillion and was shrinking under budget surpluses.
Large unsustainable tax cuts with a trillion dollar war of choice are the main culprits in the current 10 Trillion Debt level. Your grand children will suffer mainly from the Bush legacy. Not fruit file research.
Parent
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Your grand children will suffer mainly from the Bush legacy. Not fruit file research.
Yes but fruit file research will suffer for other reasons; mostly because it's very difficult to get all those oddly shaped fruits into manila folders.
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I may or may not agree, depending on the instance; but I fully support people debating the merits of various projects, either in the broad sense of "what are the principles that guide what we do and do not pay for and how?" or in the narrow "is this particular project worth it or not?" sense. What I find objectionable, tho
FRANCE (Score:2)
I like how she's careful to include that obviously rehearsed "Paris, France" barb. First of all there's still this negative attitude toward France for trying to warn us against a disastrous war. Second there's this implicit mockery of the fact that we're investigating an invasive species from the Mediterranean at a research facility in liberal FRANCE instead of one in the Good Old USA where the flies can escape to infest surrounding areas.
I'm really going to miss this lady.
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Even if someone has the opinion that spending on the sciences should be cut, it's not an excuse to be a redneck-pandering idiot and mock t
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Proving my point (Score:2)
This is exactly my point. It's only a million here, a million there. Somehow, we get to $3 Trillion. 60 percent of which is spent on entitlements ($1.8T). As grandparent poster, my point is that this kind of thinking, "it's only XX million," and "not my program" is how we get there.
You see, when spending other peoples' money, "it's only XX million" doesn't
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Which is paid for out of taxes that come out of every paycheck.
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yeah, but we've been raiding their retirements for years now because they had a surplus *then*. If those idiots in congress hadn't raided social security, it could still be a self-sustaining program, as it was intended.
Re:This is why we are $10T in debt (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why your complaints are directed at libertarians (or liberals/phony libertarians? Your signature is confusing me!) All the libertarians--ALL OF THEM--scoff at the excuses you gave. Some libertarians are unfortunately the Social Darwinist type, as well, and think the homeless should "just get jobs" and don't understand the roots of homelessness. Many libertarians I know are also a bit dogmatic on issues such as free will and don't want to admit that people are machines and simply put some people just don't function as well as others and may need psychological help to fix whatever is contributing to their homelessness.
Not all libertarians are like that--libertarianism is, at its core, a political philosophy, like socialism or anarchism or similar, and generally it's rather consistent although I think many libertarians are rather dogmatic, almost utopian (although they are not true utopians and don't think of themselves as utopian) in nature towards how things will turn out. Quite strange, as they are often bent on economics and talk about (rightly, I feel) subjective value and things are often a system of tradeoffs.
All ideology aside, fruit fly research, like most scientific research, is valuable no matter where the funding comes from. No, I'm not making any argument on where it should come from, or that the ends justify the means. But many people do not have a great understanding of science, particularly evolution and comparative biology, and want these programs cut because their intuition tells them search on cow farts or fruit flies is useless and provides little help to humans. Not that there isn't useless research, but you often have to understand the field on some level to understand why the research is important and its implications.
This leads me back to Americans and science. Americans don't understand science. Just ask Joe Schmoe to explain evolution, you'll get a lot of stuttering and probably some mixed-up talk of fish growing legs or something. Which is quite sad, because all they really need is the basics of natural selection and individual variation to explain how evolution works. The fact that people don't understand evolution is exactly why things like fruit fly research is mocked, by the way--they don't understand that despite being vastly different creatures, there are often many things that can be extrapolated from vastly different species to humans or other creatures, despite hearing stories about fish being genetically engineered to glow in the dark from firefly genes, or such!
The true libertarians, not the Bill Maher type or the "South Park" type, are against all government funding based on the belief that democracy is inherently immoral and unjustified and, from that, taxes are generally tantamount to stealing, because libertarianism is based NOT on "the greater good" but on the individual being the base unit of morality and that no amount of social consensus justifies infringing on the individual's right to autonomy; they generally reject the utilitarian arguments (although, in my experience, tend to employ them when they feel the arguments are in their favor and tend to deny the existence of any downsides of a libertarian system) in favor of "natural rights" either in its original sense or as a personal/ethical/political code. Libertarianism does not mean "generally Republican on economic issues, generally liberal on social issues" although the term is starting to evolve more into that direction and judging by Bob Barr's Libertarian nomination, it appears the Libertarian Party has gone that route as well.
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I assure you what the USA spent in one year in the Iraq war surpasses by an order of magnitude the budget of all sorts of research projects around the world, combined, in the same time period.
How much was the Iraq spending again? 200 billion per month?
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War critics, stop being illogical (Score:3, Informative)
1) Compared to the chief role of the US government today - redistribution of wealth [csmonitor.com] - The Iraq War is a mere drop in the bucket;
2) Compared to other wars, this one is rather cheap [freerepublic.com], and we are spending about 38% on the military today compared to what we did in 1960;
3) The war won't last forever. Government
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i'm sure if you look at the budget figures even with a [i]cursory[/i] glance you will notice that [b]defense[/b] spending, and interest payments on current debt constitute an enormous bulk of USA's debt (well over 50%!). that doesn't even include the MASSIVE $700B bailout package to wallstreet; a number that dwarfs even the defense budget!
[i]Table S-2[/i] has your basic budget figures
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right nex to the sentence you picked, "The fruit fly gene may have implications for human health, as it can help biologists study the function of the nervous system and diseases such as epilepsy", so it's not a complete waste. maybe we should just stop invading random countries and there'll be enough money to pay off our debts and a bit cash in hand to invent anti-gravity
Just because something may have implications for human health in a few areas, doesn't mean it will, or that hose implications will be magical disease cures. Of course a researcher will make every attempt to advocate some sort of use for his expensive research, but there seems to be no evidence that this is plausible. It's not like knowing what a piece of DNA does means we can just fix it in all humans.
As already said, funding everything is sort of a bad idea. We have to make cuts where we can, and this prog
Re:This is why we are $10T in debt (Score:5, Informative)
As already said, funding everything is sort of a bad idea. We have to make cuts where we can, and this program honestly looks like it holds little promise without other major scientific advances. Until human gene modification becomes plausible, there's no point in sinking our imaginary dollars into fruit fly programs.
So you're saying it might be time to change the way we decide who gets scientific funding, that the "Guess a number between one and ten" method we have, where if you guess the right number, your scientific proposal gets funded, might be a BAD system? Maybe we should start thinking about funding only the most important, worthwhile studies? Whoa man...
Waitafuckingminute, THAT'S ALREADY WHAT WE DO! There's this organization, called the National Institute of Health, that hands out a lot of grant money for biomedical research. Scientists spend a lot of their time filling out grant applications in the vain attempt to get them to fund their research, it's very competitive, a LOT of good studies don't get funding.
The ones that do are chosen by panels of other scientists and experts (though any scientist who has had a grant rejected will tell you, they're not perfect). They have a deeper understanding of what the benefits of research projects are than Sarah Palin, although that wouldn't be a high bar to clear. Yet they chose to fund fruit fly projects.
Hmm... a panel of biomedical experts think fruit fly research isn't a waste. Maybe they are crazy or corrupt, or maybe you don't really know as much about it as you think you do.
You can't jump right to the end in science, there is a lot of preliminary data you need to know usually before you can get a cure for X disease. For instance, with syphilis we had to first realize what bacteria were, realize it was a bacteria, realize that penicillin could kill bacteria, THEN we were able to cure it. You could have dumped all the money in the world into finding a cure for syphilis before we knew anything about that. You may have gotten lucky, but it's unlikely.
Similar with human diseases, knowing the genetics involved is ABSOLUTELY essential knowledge, even if we can't directly cure the genes yet.
Cancer treatments have improved greatly because of genetic work often done in flies. We can identify genes involved, then find out what they're doing in human cancers, then make treatments based on that.
One current hot prospect in cancer research is knocking out members of the kinesin family, a protein that moves along the cytoskeleton and is involved in cell division. Cell division goes haywire in cancer, if we could affect only one time of kinesin, it would stop cancer pretty well.
Know how we discovered kinesin? By studying squids and fruit flies.
To sum up: unless you're out there reading whole grant applications, don't say a study is worthless or scientists are lying about the outcomes of their research, because you really have no earthly idea and are maligning people who DO know what they are talking about.
(PS. don't quote me on the squids, I could be mistaken on that)
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indeed, where does it say that you can take my money and use it to invade other countries not in self defense? I agree that social programs at the federal level are unconstitutional owing to the tenth amendment however, it is equally wrong to use tax money in the manner the military is now using it. the military after all under an interventionalist policy has expanded to the point where it is the single largest section of the federal government. it m
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Well, then, lets just get rid of public schools, social security, medicare, etc. The whole point of the *government* spending money on such things is that it provides for the common good. Without government intervention, we'd still be stuck with private schools for the rich only.
I would really much rather not have such a huge military budget than cut programs designed to promote the common good.
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1. the government spends about 60-70% of all that money paying for a "defense" budget, wallstreet bailouts, and interest on the debt it has accumulated.
2. the government cuts "defense" funding to 30% and puts the same cash to work in programs that put bette
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Sweet (Score:4, Funny)
I'm one step closer to getting my disability check when they identify the gene for humans. It's not laziness, it's a disease.
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"I'm one step closer to getting my disability check when they identify the gene for humans. It's not laziness, it's a disease."
A disease with a nice ring to it. "I'm Diapausic!"
Combine this with Asperger's and I have a medical excuse for being a lazy asshole.
I don't believe it (Score:2)
How amny ridiculous genes do we have already? And now the couch potato gene. It's just dumbing down results of research too much so the public can understand it. Please stop this nonsense.
Of course (Score:3, Funny)
That scientific paper the politician had in his hands had "couch", "potato", "fruit", "fly" and "diapause" in it.
Try publishing a paper with the words "penis", "growth", "stamina", "huge", "could beat an animal to death with it in the forest" and see how fast you get bipartisan funding.
More Obama Facts (Score:4, Funny)
Did you know that...
Barack Obama's education was paid for by Saudi Arabian oil princes?
Barack Obama plans to enslave all of the hard-working, white Americans as part of black reparations?
Barack Obama paid $200,000 to the German Nazi organization UMLAUT to drive up attendance to his Berlin rally?
Michelle Obama retains her youthful look by bathing in the blood of infants?
Both Obamas are trained in the art of voodoo witchcraft?
Obama's supporters have engaged in a campaign of violence to terrorize God-fearing McCain supporters, including an underground vault where they torture and kill McCain campaign volunteers?
Obama's third-grade essay claimed that his personal heroes included Stalin, Mao, and Caligula?
The More You Know.
Parent
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What a lovely straw man you have constructed.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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You beat me to it..... and were funnier about it too. WEll done.
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Oh, excuse me, her brain. I was speaking metaphorically anyway.
I love these recent studies about the genetic and personality differences between Rs and Ds. Of course, there are some nature~nurture, urban~rural, and educated~uneducated arguments too, but the brain has duality built into it, and some people think more emotionally, and some people think more rationally. We all do both, all the time, but some people are more one-sided than others. Mutants. Strongly opinionated.
Did you see Linus talk about git?
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