Would be interesting to see the changes over the coming weeks.

“Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.”

Does Windows Still Matter? – Business, Power and Deals – Executive Suite blog – NYTimes.com.

Joe Nocera, said it well. The operating system is fast being made irrelevant by the internet. Google leap frogged Microsoft by releasing the chrome browser. The OS is irrelevant or more aptly, Windows is dispensable.

Why doesn’t abstinence-only education deter teens from having sex? Consider this R-rated experiment, led by the behavioral economist Dan Ariely and neuroeconomist George Loewenstein. They began by asking twenty-five male undergraduates at UC-Berkeley a series of provocative sexual questions. The first set of questions concerned their sexual preferences. Could they imagine having sex with a 60 year old woman? What about getting sexually excited by contact with an animal? Did they like getting tied up during sex? The next set of questions dealt with sexual morality. Would the male students slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with them? Would they keep trying to have sex after their date said “no”? The final set of questions was about safe sex. Would the men insist on using a condom? Is it safe to have unprotected sex if you “pull out” before ejaculation?

The Frontal Cortex : Teens and Sex.

The problem is that, nor does the educational programs that advocate safe sex. It is a problem of the “intervention” – namely abstinence education or safe sex education not having the desired effect in the study populace – the message is not getting across. The above study is a reflection of that. Maybe it has something to do with the the methods used.

The traditional way to attenuate a virus is through trial and error — a process of selecting harmless versions. But now, attenuation can be engineered. The idea is to rewrite some of the virus’s genes using “slow” combinations of codons. The virus makes the same proteins it did before, but it makes them so slowly that an infection cannot get going.

In a recent series of experiments investigating whether such engineering actually works in practice, polioviruses with rewritten genes were 1,000 times less efficient than the viruses found in the wild. This successfully rendered the virus harmless while still letting the immune system get a good look at it: mice that had been exposed to the engineered version were immune to wild poliovirus, whereas mice that had not been were not.

Braking the Virus – Olivia Judson – Evolution – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

An interesting concept. Attenuation of bacterial strains to prevent disease and make vaccines have been well known for many years and gave us disease fighting tools such as BCG. The current tuberculosis vaccine is a live vaccine derived from Mycobacterium bovis and attenuated by serial in vitro passaging. All vaccine substrains in use stem from one source, strain Bacille Calmette-Guérin. However, they differ in regions of genomic deletions, antigen expression levels, immunogenicity, and protective efficacy.

BCG vaccine, which is derived from an attenuated strain of the mycobacterium bovis when given to people helped mount an immune response that would help in case the real thing – Mycobacterium tuberculosis came along. 

Tuberculosis is an infectious disease of enormous global importance. It is estimated that about one third of the human population is latently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis with 1.6 million people dying annually from the disease. The currently employed tuberculosis vaccine, Mycobacterium bovis Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) was originally derived from a virulent strain of M. bovis back to 1921, by repeated passages on potato slices soaked in glycerol-ox byle. The primary attenuation is attributed to loss of RD1 locus, which affects a protein secretion pathway. Subsequent propagation of BCG in several laboratories around the world resulted in further in vitro evolution, which is still ongoing. 

It would be interesting to see where the new technique of attenuation, applied to viruses, would take us. Hopefully it would help us mount an adequate response – no pun intended – to the present day scourge, HIV. The HIV virus replicates rapidly and changes a lot in the interim such that the body is unable to adequately mount a response [1]. The immune system is also unable to get a “good look” at the virus as the envelope is hidden by various proteins. Virus attenuation may be able to slow down HIV replication enough to help the body form truly neutralizing antibodies. 

References

1) An HIV vaccine–challenges and prospects.

A fresh take on the browser

Google Chrome

We spend so much time doing our day to day activities on the web, namely, from banking to finding a spouse. The browser is quickly becoming the entry point app to these everyday activities. It traditionally has been and still is Microsoft’s backyard. With Internet Explorer commanding 74% of the browser market, with Firefox at 19% and Safari, at a distant third with 6% marketshare; Google’s Chrome may not have much traction to start off with. Plus Firefox and Safari do get monetary incentives as a result of search boxes in both browsers defaulting to Google search. 

I am not sold as to Google’s track record with software. Only Gmail is successful. The rest of them have languished without much traction. It remains to be seen if ” Chrome” will fare any better.

Some of the technical aspects of the new browser are impressive. It is based on Webkit and open source to boot!

I certainly like “tabs” that do not take up any more of the viewable window space along with the myriad other toolbars and what not. Alas, as a mac user, I will have to wait a while before I use one.

Apple event for next Tuesday, the 9th

Maybe the much vaunted new iPods are coming. Should be interesting!

Pharyngula::A book list for evolutionists.

Is on my bucket list!

For example, the Prius was NOT designed to have good gas mileage. The original thrust of the Prius design within Toyota was to leapfrog ALL current and pending emissions legislation. The increased gas mileage was a freebie. As you pointed out, it also has the best reliability ratings in the Consumer Reports guide.

Engineering? All other cars have transmissions, either manual or automatic, that are mechanical monstrosities. The equivalent unit in the Prius (called the Power Split Device) will fit in the palm or your hand and has only 21 moving parts, with no clutches, belts, torque converters, or any other kind of slip component. All three motors are directly connected to the wheels at all times. Want to back up? No gear changes— just spin the motors in reverse. Simple. Elegant. Reliable.

How about 100,000 miles between brake pads replacement? The Prius only uses its brake pads for panic stops and stopping under 7 miles per hour. All other braking is done electromagnetically, using the regeneration of electricity to both stop the car and charge the batteries. A win/win situation.

Toyotas Prius: The Debate Continues – Pogue’s Posts – Technology – New York Times Blog.

I have been fascinated by the engineering and concept of the Toyota Prius. Appeals very much to my inner tree hugger. Never knew the details above until today!

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Novelties – Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data – NYTimes.com.

Interesting concept.

As an addendum to my previous ” How to create a Quicksilver Web Search Trigger”, I came across this very useful tip in one of the comments. In Quicksilver, enable advanced features; now bring up “Current selection” in the first pane, and ” Search with Google” –  a service of Safari.app in the second pane and save it as a trigger by assigning it a shortcut key. Now one can highlight a piece of text and then search using Google by invoking the shortcut. Cool; thank you “hmelman”