Liquid Crystal Phases of DNA, Beginning of Life? 150
An anonymous reader writes "A team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Milan has discovered some unexpected forms of liquid crystals of ultrashort DNA molecules immersed in water, providing a new scenario for a key step in the emergence of life on Earth.
CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark said the team found that surprisingly short segments of DNA, life's molecular carrier of genetic information, could assemble into several distinct liquid crystal phases that "self-orient" parallel to one another and stack into columns when placed in a water solution. Life is widely believed to have emerged as segments of DNA- or RNA-like molecules in a prebiotic "soup" solution of ancient organic molecules.
Life? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Life? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Life? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those Rabbis, Greeks and monks were very smart people - they also had to deal with politics and ignorance however and sometimes the best way to deal with that is to dumb it down to a lowest common denominator. "That's right, God made that happen. Don't go to war over it... it was a miracle. Now give us money so we can keep teaching your kids how to read/write and count to ten."
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not intelligent enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm personally of the opinion that nothing science concludes will ever be able to prove or disprove the existence of (a) God(s), so I'm not sure why this discussion keeps coming up. Yeah, science never "proves", only "shows to be likely", whatever. The point is that you either believe in God or you don't. There's no scientifically veritable "correct" answer that can ever be had until some day in the future when it's too late to do anything about it anyway. You're either worm food or in your final eternal resting place... wherever that may be.
Honestly, the religion bashing is completely pointless and is getting really, really old hat.
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Talking about a war of religion is an understatement of the Crusades (but nice for people trying to push ideologies), a mixture of many different factors, and which represent part of the medieval mentality (a strange, complex one, but not certainly the one of a "D
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You hypocrite! Have you ever been punished for your bad actions? How many lies you have told so far in your life, or stuff you have "appropriated" that wasn't yours? How about the other eight commandments? Notice they are called commandments not optional choices. How many times have you broken traffic laws and not been punished. Ever wonder what kind of a world it would be if EVERYBODY got punished instantly, EVERY time we broke some law? Because w
Re:not intelligent enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
It keeps coming up because religious ideologues keep insisting that science is wrong because it contradicts their beliefs. And they want to base public policy and education on those beliefs. The beliefs themselves are a personal matter, of course, and they've got every right to believe that Rapture is imminent or that life was created in its current form 6000 years ago; the conflict occurs when they try to base things like environmental management or what's taught in high-school science classes on it.
Honestly, the religion bashing is completely pointless and is getting really, really old hat.
The science bashing isn't pointless at all -- it's a means of gaining political power -- but it's definitely old hat, which doesn't keep fanatics from doing it. Scientists who bash religion, e.g. Dawkins, do so out of disgust with religion's continual insistence on trying to replace knowledge with ignorance, and the consequences thereof.
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Religion by itself is not a curse, nor a tainting mark. I do science and I am religious. Is there something wrong in that?
Re:not intelligent enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
[shrug] I haven't seen that; I have seen a lot of religious believers being hypersensitive and interpreting fanatic-bashing as religion-bashing generally. E.g., when someone attempts to jump in on a discussion of the origins of DNA in the early terrestrial environment with, "That can't be true because Genesis says
I do science and I am religious. Is there something wrong in that?
Of course not. Motivation is irrelevant when science is done right. You can study a problem because you have a personal interest in solving it, because you want to unravel the mysteries of God's creation, because someone is paying you a whole lot of money to do so, or just out of simple curiosity -- all of these motivations can produce good science, and will no doubt continue to do so. But it's important to acknowledge that some motivations are more likely to lead to bias than others; and it is absurd to deny that religion has introduced considerable bias into the study of the origins of life.
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And every hypersensitive religionist who will find every excuse to make personal attacks based on out-of-context snippets of
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I know at least three religion-hating atheists who're not on the Internet. Which implies that you're a pathetic god-squaddie who doesn't realise that you're even more outnumbered and wrong than you already think you are.
Perhaps I should try to persuade them to get onto the internet, but they have so much fun taking the piss out of god-squaddies as they go in and out of the few remaining churches in town.
Depends ... (Score:1)
If you are a deist ala Einstein and Thomas Jefferson then fine.
Somewhere in between? Then it depends on where exactly.
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However, religion bashing has come to a point where even admitting of being religious is a cause of ridicule or arrogance.
Gee I wonder why? Oh that's right, it's because most often "your religion" has some pretty nasty things to say about the rest of us. Such as suffering in eternal agony unless we reciprocate the love of your god or prophet. When was the last anti-Buddhist rant you've heard or read? Ever? Stop trying to pass off being spiritual as having an organized set of beliefs that you must adhere to and coerce others to adhere to as well. I consider myself a very spiritual person but I'm still an atheist and an agnosti
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Absolutely not.
Well.. I have grown away from religion (Catholicism) because of linguists, historians, and anthropologists... scientists.
When I hear the reports of an archaeology dig about how the Bible wasn't quite true, I lose some faith.
When I see the reports and academic writings indicating how a different peoples history doesn't coincide with the Bible, I lose faith.
When I witness
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Unlike other variants of Christians, Catholicism does not really promote a literal interpr
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Can you give an example of that and not just somebody's opinion or interpretation of the data?
(.....What do you believe when at least 25% of your faith is proved false by science and alternate histories and anthropological studies?.....)
Are you taking about actual scientific facts and data, the raw data that is, or someone's interpretation of that data? Both scientists and religionists tend to interpret data thr
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I have no issue whatsoever with people who keep their religion to themselves or who behave in ways that I would expect, i.e. modest, kind and forgiving. I know people who are like that and I have no troubles with them.
Instead, we are confronted almost daily with "proud Christians" who are so intensely narrowminded that they cannot even comprehend that we do not secretly believe in God and by ext
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Pride in a religion is nothing wrong unless you start killing people in its name. And yet, it would be the person's fault, or fault of the people who indoctrinate... but not of religion itself.
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The difference is that with religion, it's actual adults with power and money pushing flawed logic with energy and fanaticism. It is difficult to remain modest while those who assault logic on every level shout the loudest.
It complicates matters that those who
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Pride in a religion is nothing wrong unless you start killing people in its name.
I mostly agree with your formulation, though I'll extend it a little bit (and I think you'll agree with it): Pride in a religion is OK as long as you don't hurt people due to it.
This do, though, increase the scope quite a bit, as it means people can't use religion as a basis for a kind of action that end up hurting people, even when the damage is non-intentional. With that constraint, I feel religion as OK, and a solace and inspiration for people (even though I am an atheist myself.)
Eivind.
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Try to at least read the thing without cultural bias...
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There is no one "modern implementation" of Christianity.
No, but there is modern culture and a way for religion to be implemented within that culture. Christianity is certainly "compatible" with being consumption-oriented. I don't believe it was so at its core. Maybe you have a perspective on that.
All
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Nothing at all. They ask and try to answer different questions that have puzzled the minds of man since the dawn of history.
Science attempts to answer "how" questions. Religion is tries to answer "why" questions. Neither has cornered the market answering "when" things happened or when they might happen.
All information comes to us either by first hand experience or by communication from some witness. Nobody can PROVE if a witness is
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I studied for many years on a catholic school. We had our religion classes. We had our masses. And we would have hour biology classes. The teacher, btw, was a priest. He would even say "science is the tool god gave us to understand his creation". I find that a very enlightened way to look at things.
A scientist who is also religious is something very natural for me.
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I was with you until you said "wrong". Too often I see religious ideologues insisting that science is the only rational basis for a worldview, because other worldviews contradict their beliefs. Religious zealots, regardless of flavor, tend to be distressingly similar when arguing their points of view.
Grow some brains (Score:1)
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If you were as wise as you indirectly claim, then you would realise that there are so many more questions about everything than answers.
Not so amazingly, science cannot explain many things. For example, look at the Fermi Paradox. For another, investigate why quantum mechanics does what it does. Whatever we dig into, we open more questions and unexplainable phenomena.
The wisest I know are agnostic and are open to interesting interpretation. And they certainly don't religion-bas
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Then I would call you ignorant.
You can call a well educated man ignorant if you'd like, that's fine, but you'll look like a fool in the process.
If you were as wise as you indirectly claim, then you would realise that there are so many more questions about everything than answers.
What the hell does this have to do with the conversation?
Not so amazingly, science cannot explain many things.
Correction, science hasn't as of YET explained everything.
Whatever we dig into, we open more questions and unexplainable phenomena.
To use the word "unexplainable" makes you the ignorant one.
The wisest I know are agnostic and are open to interesting interpretation.
You must not know very many wise people, then, because agnosticism means you believe something to be unknown or unknowable. You must still be either theist or atheist. Agnosticism has to do with knowledge, theism/atheism
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What you are really doing is elevating your logic and common sense into the position of God. Do you know everything that could be known? Is there any human that does? If not, you cannot know there is no God any more than a religious person can know that there is. They don't have all knowledge either. Both can only BELIEVE. Who are you to say that your belief is truer or better than someone else's? Are you God or something? Does your belief give
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Evidence is never proof. Any jury has to BELIEVE evidence and witnesses presented on either side. They cannot KNOW. You also have to believe the evidence for or against God, you also cannot know. You have elevated your deluded, limited logic above all other evidence that has been or ever could be presented and made up your feeble mind. I'd hate to have you on a jury, because you are severely biased by what your perverted logic has concocted in your little h
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Scientists creating life from inanimate matter in the lab has absolutely nothing to say about whether god exists, but it pretty much blows out of the water the idea that creating life is the exclusive province of the divine.
Not exclusively divine (Score:2)
Science can't prove or disprove there's a god or gods, but it can turn up an awful lot of evidence that a particular idea of what a god is like is unlikely to be correct.
Scientists creating life from inanimate matter in the lab has absolutely nothing to say about whether god exists, but it pretty much blows out of the water the idea that creating life is the exclusive province of the divine.
[italics mine]
Actually, *scientists* creating life from inanimate matter in the lab is an example of intelligent design (in this case the designer being the scientists). Historically, many proponents of Judaism and Christianity have proposed intermediates in their interpretation of creation (e.g. angels). A major point of just about all flavors of Jewish and Christian theology is that God prefers to use human (and sometimes angelic) agents as opposed to directly working miracles.
For that matter, we
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Certainly all religions, or even all adherents of particular religions wouldn't find scientists creating life a threat. There are some though, and they seem to be particularly vocal about the origins and basic mechanics of life creating being off limits to humans.
So when the first scientist creates life that gives us three options (by my in-the-moment count): 1) there's nothing divine about creating life, 2) those scientists are the hand of God at work or 3) humanity
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So when the first scientist creates life that gives us three options (by my in-the-moment count): 1) there's nothing divine about creating life, 2) those scientists are the hand of God at work or 3) humanity has elevated itself to the point where it possesses at least some divine powers.
Humanity has always been considered to already possess some divine powers by Jews and Christians (and other religions for different concepts of "god"). "Ye are gods." "We are made in the image of God." Classically, literary and mathematical works were pointed to as examples of "sub-creation". Humans creating self-consistent worlds that exist apart from their creator. In the computer age, we create dynamic virtual worlds as a matter of course, and people these virtual worlds with self-replicating agent
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God of the gap (Score:2)
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The question whether the answers contradict the observations themselves or someone's interpretations of the observations. When scientists "measure" the age of rocks, for example, they use radioactive decay as their clock. The assume (believe) that this clock is both accurate and CONSTANT over the time period in question. This assumption is never questioned and on the surface seems to make sense. However, t
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This assumption is never questioned and on the surface seems to make sense. However, there is no way to PROVE that this radioactivity clock, upon which the immense ages theorized, are based, is in fact invariant over the large spans of time.
That is not true. Every time radio-isotope dating is done, it matches the constant constant decay rate assumption. What we don't have is any evidence that would cause this assumption to be questioned. Do you have any?
One very good piece of evidence that the deca
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Whenever distance and time are equated, there again is an assumption (belief) made. It is assumed that whatever is moving, light in this case, travels at a constant rate. So all that was really done was to shift assumptions. There is NO known law of physics that mandates that the speed of light be constant. We KNOW, by experiment, that the speed of light is greatly affected by the medium it traverses. Space itself is not an empty nothin
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Your skepticism is completely unwarranted; do you think that your brain is in a vat? The sensation of your body is just an assumption. Ooohh...
There is NO known law of physics that mandates that the speed of light be constant.
Yes there is: General Relativity
There is evidence that the speed of light must have been 300 million times faster than today, shortly after the "big bang".
There is no such evidence.
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The ideas you question, the constancy of radioa
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Answer me that and I'll get down on my knees and worship him. The bigger one that is... Our god would obviously just be a little godling in comparison... I like to think of him as a Mini-Me god.
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That means your questions includes assumptions that makes them wrong. Please learn more about the issues, and you will get better questions. The process of educating you about these areas is longer than I can do in a single, simple post - I'll just say that there are a ton of information out there that will make you get better questions :) It is also very much fun to learn.
Eivind.
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Clay (Score:2)
However, such experiences have given me the ability to spot arguments waiting to be made. A lot of the research into abiogenesis actually involves clay. It turns out to be a fantastic material for early abiotic evolving molecules. There's a shoe here just waiting to be dropped. Genesis says that God made man out of clay... abiogenesis su
neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:neat for our children overlords! (Score:1)
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How Did the DNA Strands Form? (Score:1)
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I'm sure the likelihood is a factor of time. While I could use the 1000 monkeys analogy, I prefer Steven Wright: "Anywhere is walking distance if you have the time."
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Indeed, time is the magic that turns rocks, never mind frogs, into princes. No maiden kisses required, just enough time. Boy, what a fairy tale masquerading as science!
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Sor far, nobody has ventured a probability figure based on observation. I take it that nobody knows since the random formation of DNA/RNA strands has never been observed. However, it should be possible for a bio-chemist to figure out the likelihood of the right molecules getting together in some primordial soup. What if the probability is zero? Has anybody here thou
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2) They can decompose into simpler chemicals.
3) Each of the decomposition reactions are reversible.
Therefore the probability of simpler chemicals coming together and forming nucleic acids is not zero.
Of course, that *is* like saying that since your room is clean, it can become messy, and that each of the actions that caused it to become messy are reversible, therefore your room could spontaneously clean itself... But see my post below about how those odds can be cut down.
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If there was some prebiotic mechanism for pumping out sugars and nucleotides, then the chances of 6-base strands forming go up a lot. Oro demonstrat
Media is nice, just not all that important (Score:1)
please see:
A. Graham Cairns-Smith of Glasgow
Genetic takeover and the mineral origins of life
Cambridge University Press 1982
LoC cat # 81-17070
ISBN 0 521 23312 7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith [wikipedia.org]
Media is nice, just not all that important - unless you are it.
Was it you that had the good day, or was
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Media is nice, just not all that important
Do you really think so? Maybe you should ask those dictators who use government-controlled media streams to send out their propoganda if they think media is important. Maybe you should look up the relationship between the prevalency of free press in a country and its government's human rights violations. Media, and to a greater extent free press, is INTEGRAL for any democrati
God of the Gaps (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can't draw an existent from an absolute-never-existance. Science must submit to logic in the end, else science falls apart since:
Definition Logic:
1. A method of human thought that involves thinking in a linear, step-by-step manner about how a problem can be solved. Log
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The problem with establishing a series of steps is that the first step has to be put somewhere. Nobody KNOWS where that first step needs to go. We can believe where it might have been, but once you start to believe, who is to say one belief is more true than any other?
The Bible tells us the first step began with God because God is the eternally self existent One. Modern science cannot really place the first
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Most of quantum physics is pretty 'absurd' and much of relativity seems so as well, but they're holding up pretty good so far.
The real problem is trying to fathom what happened before time or what's outside of outside. Both nonsense questions, but if the universe (everything and all of time) has a finite duration prior to now those are the questions being asked.
Mycroft
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Because if the Universe created itself, without a cause, then the law of cause and effect has been violated. AFAIK every effect has a cause. We may not alway know the cause, but it is nevertheless there. There is plenty of objective evidence that the universe did not always exist, but had a beginning. The cosmic background radiation is one of these evidences. Science, among other things is the methodical study of causes and effects. It is at the heart of the scientific method.
Qua
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To those who insist 'GOD' had to have made the universe or it couldn't exist I ask simply then who/what made 'GOD'. This kind of reasoning leads to 'turtle all the way down'
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The Bible tells us the first step began with God because God is the eternally self existent One. Modern science cannot really place the first step. Logic tells us the Universe either created itself, which is absurd, or it was caused by a cause outside of itself or it always existed.
Of course, the natural response to that would be that if 'God' can be eternally self existant, why can't the universe? It can't have taken an act of will for god to come into existance because before existance there's no will. And if it didn't take an act of will, then what works for god works for the universe.
So if a god can exist, we don't need it to explain the universe. Which kind of makes the question of its existance moot.
The writers of the Bible claim they were personally told by God, that He is that one who made everything from nothing. This does fit within the framework of logic.
It also fits within the framework of dementia - I mean no offense, but if you'
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Because we have measured, observed evidence that the universe had a beginning. This beginning requires a cause. We have no scientific evidence for the cause, that is God. All science can tell us that there was a beginning and that like everything else has a cause. Therefore, by faith only we can attribute the cause to whatever someone tells us. We then have to decide the credibility of that someone. If you don't think that Moses an
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You are a classic case of God of the Gaps. Your gap is before the inflationary period of the Big Bang, and you're shoving God in there. That it isn't knowable now (and there are current theories being worked on to fill in this gap fyi) doesn't mean it always will be, and doesn't give you the right to claim it's unknowable.
Sadly, I didn't get back to this topic so no one will probably read this. B
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Yeah, those secular societies are the most backward in the world!
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Eivind.
oblig Dannett ref (Score:2)
noodley appendage (Score:1)
One of the great mysteries of science (Score:1)
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That is not enough. DNA is only a carrier of code, akin to a computer memory or disk. The information on a disk and the structure and material of the disk itself are entirely separate. The chemistry of ink on paper tells you nothing about the musical score or other material written thereon.
Nobody has ever demonstrated the creation of *any* code or language by anything other than a mind. DNA carries the language of life as authored
putting ? on story titles? (Score:2)
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-- bjorn
Sample might be corrupt (Score:2)
Not excited yet (Score:2, Insightful)
Given such a membrane and some short DNA polymers, we also need to translate this random "information" into something meaningful. The current mechanism is: DNA -> RNA -> PROTEIN. This requires RNA polymerase or, at least, some ribosom
Star Trek Crystal (Score:2)
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I'm curious. Do you ever, you know, actually read your own posts? Unpunctuated, case-mangled, non-sequitor-ish loony ramblings have the very subtle effect of, you know, making you look like a simpering, witless, theo-clown. Just sayin'. Other than that, have a great weekend!
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On reflection, I think you're right. That degree of wack-a-doo sophistry takes work. Hard, hard work. Because even for someone with a low IQ, it's a major project to lie that baldly about how you see the world, or (much harder!) actually suspend reason long enough to actually convince yourself that's how it really is.
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Actually, it's pretty easy. Unfortunately.
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I wish...
One Word. (Score:2)
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