danielmorozoff

The whole discussion brings to mind George Orwell.

'Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'

I believe US democracy is founded on similar notions, and underscores the necessity of this dialogue. Thank you HN for supporting this open forum.

It would seem very hard as the main mechanism of action for these nano particles is electrostatic pore formations- confirmed by their mechanistic studies.

This would require evolution of the outer membrane (OM), quite a big change for a bacteria to evolve. That said it's very surprising there are so few off target effects.

Whenever i see nano particles used to combat disease, I am always interested in the off target controls. Since they are using physical mechanism to disrupt membrane stability (in the case of bacteria), controlling targeting is very difficult and requires vastly different membrane properties on the surface of bacteria vs regular cells. Issues usually involve lodging of nano particles in the liver or kidneys/ lysis and cytotoxicity . Here they looked at haemolytic and necrotic activities in cells and assessed whether the mice survived- most are short term, and aggregation of nano particles is not uncommon to cause large obvious pathology, it just takes time.

I looked up the core molecule 'PAMAM' or Poly(amidoamine) and it seems to show relatively low cytoxicity, but recent studies seem to shed some more light:

'More recently, a series of studies by Mukherjee et al.[13][14][15] have shed some light on the mechanism of PAMAM cytotoxicity, providing evidence that the dendrimers break free of their encapsulating membrane (endosome) after being absorbed by the cell, causing harm to the cell's mitochondria and eventually leading to cell death. Further elucidation of the mechanism of PAMAM cytotoxicity would help resolve the dispute as to precisely how toxic the dendrimers are.'

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(amidoamine)#Toxicity

This is a fantastic writeup. this quote really struck me and seems very apt to today:

'Glushkov’s story is also a stirring reminder to the investor classes and other agents of technological change that astonishing genius, far-seeing foresight and political acumen are not enough to change the world. Supporting institutions often make all the difference. '

This is horrible...

Not exactly true. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/301/5630/213.long

Furthermore, this man worked on bio-defense stuff-- very likely a large majority of his work is not published for security reasons, as well as in startups.

There are plenty of people working in science, that don't make their career goals to publish in prestigious journals.

Real discoveries are rarely made at the pace required for securing tenure-track positions in academia.

I wouldn't dismiss this work that quickly. The idea is sound and came out of the MIT Lincoln Lab and has been worked on for many years. If it's still around, it probably does something

https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html

The Wright Brothers were just 2 guys in North Carolina...

Also a write up by the NYTM: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/science/maximum-life-span-...

For those interested in the Soviet / Ukranian scientist who was part of the discovery and for whom the transition(BKT) is also named- Vadim Berezinskii

He passed away in 1980, here's his obituary: http://ufn.ru/ufn81/ufn81_3/Russian/r813k.pdf

Wasn't the reason to drop the bombs was to check Soviet expansion. Notably in destroyed Europe where the red army had amassed a huge force and the 1.5million manchurian offensive which was about to invade Japan on land , which it did August 9th 1945 right before the Japanese surrender

In this vein, Some very interesting work is being done by the church group at Harvard to encode cells to withstand all viral infections at the genetic level.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101657-synthetic-super...

Could you please provide a link?

This is like claiming Amazon is building rockets better than spacex. Ones rockets go up and down , the others actually put things in orbit. Not the same, though they both use rockets.

Comparing apples to oranges.

Here is the resolution calculation for aircraft radar (with respective example of signature - aka image )

http://www.radartutorial.eu/01.basics/Range%20Resolution.en....

For angular resolution: http://www.radartutorial.eu/01.basics/Angular%20Resolution.e...

Totally agreed. I have long been trying to figure out how an incoming graduate student may assess the quality of a professor beyond his academic publications and asking people who work with him. I have come to the conclusion that the best predictor is reputation amongst peers. I may be wrong here, but from what I have seen it usually is the most accurate. The issue is that there is no review site for professors outside of their teaching inside of classrooms. Would be very helpful in selecting mentors, imo.

Maybe even a matching market, much like medical residency in the US.

As you said 'good professor'. It seems prestigious != good these days, even though prestigious does bring in money and can simplify a number of problems. From what I have seen in STEM at 'top' research institutions the true delineating factor is the professor/group you work in, money/grants is a second and project is 3rd.

Terrible loss- he was a great scientist. Gave one of the greatest talk I ever heard.

This is fantastic. I am so glad someone built this.

Wasn't this what wifi slam worked on at Stanford?

Cool project. A chat bot plugin to handle intro convos and scheduling with the brokers would be great :)

Though the schism happened long before the Lykovs, the communist party led a strong campaign to destroy christian organizations in the early 20s-40s (right around the time the lykovs left).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign_(...

Here is another example of a community of old believers in Alaska (1968) with an article in the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/a-17th-c...

If anyone is interested, the Lykovs were part of a group of 'Old Believers' (староверы) a sect of the Russian orthodox church. The primary reason many people who shared their faith fled major cities was because of Communist religious purges (an attempt to solve the problem of 'Religion is the opium of the people')

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers

Could you explain diffuse please? Relativistically, space-time deformation causes both galactic formation and lensing. Collections of stars millions of light years apart(dense locally but not on an average), acting together on light passing near the conglomerate will lens.

So what do you mean by diffuse and could you point me to some source I can read up on this?

There is quite of bit of research activity going into making mosquitoes that act as vectors infertile, by introducing genes into populations: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n1/full/nbt.3439.html

Could you speak a bit more to the idea of gravitational lensing as a proxy to show no regular matter but rather dark matter. If dark matter accounts for the missing 'mass' holding galaxies together, wouldn't you expect it to cause lensing of light?

I would argue some of the most difficult problems in ml is data prep/ preprocessing.

Nature write up: http://www.nature.com/news/brain-s-chemical-signals-seen-in-...

And paper without paywall from kleinfelds lab: http://physics.ucsd.edu/neurophysics/publications/nmeth.3151...

Here's the link to the paper: http://physics.ucsd.edu/neurophysics/publications/nmeth.3151...

Link to PRL preprint in the article Or here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01527