Dr Jim Salinger, NIWA, Dynamin

The Dismissal of Dr Jim Salinger ... cont

Notes from Radio NZ Media watch 3May09:
Peter Griffith manager of Science Media Centre recently set up by the Royal Society is puzzled " NIWAknown to encourage the communication of science" ??

Adelia Helit (?) of media watch spoke:
radionzm
AH spoke to some senior scientists (no names) at several CRIs . Some said this sort of restriction on speech was "rife within CRIs"
Some found it "demeaning" to have to ask management permission to speak to media.
AH said as a journalist she would want to know what had been run past management
The old DSIR had a commitment to "Public Good" which may now conflict with commercial interests in the CRI's
AH said she didnt think the sacking was connected with the politics of Climate Change (but how do we know?)
Jack Heineman (Univ of Canterbury) said in a letter to the ChCH "Press" ... scientists have an 'obligation' to communicate their expertise.
Former Chief Govt Statistician Len Cook said the dismissal "looks like bad management"
Helen Hughes, first Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment: "dismayed" at the sacking... Salinger was made a Companion of the Royal Society for his ability to communicate.
Can we get Queen ElizII to throw Mr Morgan, and Sue Suckling into the Tower?
the above notes subject to future transcript rnz will probably post
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glossary
NIWA National institute of Water & Atmosphere
CRI Crown Research Institute
DSIR Dept of Scientific and Industrial Research .. replaced by CRIs in the 1990s

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ptaka

Banksterism is not capitalism
What is the mafia don of the banksters, Barack Obama, actually doing? Here, we must focus on his actions not his smooth rhetoric that has beguiled his followers. First, he is not practicing capitalism or socialism, but a variant of feudal extra-economic extraction, leveraging fear mongering to redistribute the social output through taxation among his bankster vassals.

This means the direct economic actors, the banksters and industrialists, have nonmarket access to the means of their reproduction--i.e., the state--and this is why the U.S., is only a quasi-capitalist system. The state as the repository of organized violence in turn uses its vast resources to squeeze (i.e., economic surplus), extra-economically from the populace through both manufactured terror and taxes. The banksters in turn supply credit manufactured out of thin air to supplement the populace's inadequate income to stimulate their consumption.

ptaka always good for a rightous rant

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How did Princess Sparkle Pony miss these? Do I detect a pro-Michelle O anti Condi bias?
Michelle O's $540 sneakers
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Short short skirts are in, I forget what that says about the economy
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HIV needs dynamin
After it binds to cell-surface receptors, Melikyan's team has found, HIV is engulfed by membranous sacks called endosomes, in a process called endocytosis. The endosomes then sequester the virus away from the cell's cytoplasm for as long as 30 minutes to an hour. Then, the virus's outer coat fuses with the endosomal membrane, allowing the virus to dump its genetic material into the cytoplasm.

"The main discovery is this unexpected strong preference for endosomal fusion, which wasn't really appreciated," Milikyan says.
....
When the team blocked an enzyme called dynamin, which is involved in endocytosis, it stopped HIV infecting cells.
nature
How come this took 27 years to discover? Dynamin is a sort of cage or scaffold on the inside of the membrane, which seems to self-construct and enable the membrane to invaginate against the 'surface tension' of the membrane. I guess its involved in digestion, scavanging of dead cells, maybe in the liver? Immune cells? Neurotransmitter re-uptake??? what would be the effect of a body-wide Dynamin inhibitor?

Swine flu; made in USA, LHC restart

Swine flu: made in the USA

Q: What do you know about this swine flu virus?

R.D.: We know it’s quite similar to viruses that were circulating in the United States and are still circulating in the United States and that are self-limiting, and they usually only are found in Midwestern states where there is swine farming. There’s only one well-documented case where the infection spread from one human to another. What we know is that it is not common that there is sustained transmission in people.

....
Q: Have you completely sequenced this virus?

R.D.: Yes, 2 weeks ago. Very soon after we received specimens from California and Texas. Hemagglutinin, neuraminidase, and matrix, the three genes that have the most public health interest, were sequenced, and then the whole genome was completed.

Q: How large is the genome?

R.D.: It’s 14 kilobases.

Q: It’s only a little larger than HIV. You could sequence it in hours.

R.D.: Yes. It’s tiny.

sciencemag
How hard is it to set up a sequencing lab for 14kBases?

Actually you just need primers, then you use a PCR machine which is the size of a breadmaker. The whole setup is cheap

In general, you need to generate primers to segments of the virus that are unique. It is easy enough to identify these segments using proprietary software to compare sequences. Then you synthesize nucleotide sequences that correspond to these segments. These are called primers, which you use to amplify genetic material from the pathogen if it is present in the test sample.
On Saturday, Marcus Panning at the University of Freiburg identified which primers were needed (while I went to a wedding!). Olfert Landt of the Berlin company TIB Molbiol made the primers physically on Sunday. This part was critical — it is not so easy to get primers physically made to short order, especially over a weekend. I was lucky to have such a good contact in Olfert, again thanks to our work together in the SARS days.
By Monday morning we had everything in place

Christian Drosten
nature

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LHC Restart
100 inverse picobarns of collisions by spring 2010,
discovermagazine
I'm relaxed about the whole Black Hole thing. I believe Hawking and Penrose, those tiny fellas wont eat Switzerland.
Also Theres a few E20 eV protons coming in from outer space every year. (E20 = 10²⁰)
Thats like an 85kph tennis ball

In the Rest Frame of an E19 eV protons, the 3K cosmic background is seen as E8eV and they interact, so we see less,
Somehow at E20 eV the protons dont get bothered, and they come in with "Centre of Mass Frame" energy of hundreds of times more than LHC
I dont know how E20 is only 'hundreds' of times 10TeV , but thats relativity for you
.
Nature 458, 847-851 (16 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07948
The dawn of the particle astronomy era in ultra-high-energy cosmic rays
auger

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I find out that this gadget, in Argentina, 1600 Cherenkov detectors 3000 km², is the only big array still running
The E20 protons smash high in the sky,make a conical cascade, 16km² at the ground


Nobody knows how they get so fast.
A graph suggests
a hundred kilometers of neutron star mass might do the acceleration..

I have to physically bike to the National Library to read Nature - its not free electronically... ugh

360.org Hostages

350 (ppm)
5:16 pm short quake (3084351/G), my predominant reaction is 'bring it on' - guess that makes me a misanthropist
8:00 pm just back from a 350 (ppm) climate meeting. Bill McKibben spoke. I'm sure he 's right, but will folks willingly give up that oil use? 47 MJoule/kg is just too rich. I got in a mention of Dr Jim Salinger, Bill had evidently heard of the sacking, and seemed as perplexed as anyone. Raef Chapman was there, hes a senior environment honcho at Victoria University Wgtn, so I buttonholed him (we were briefly in an an advanced maths class together a couple of ages ago) So I told him to support Salinger.

Anyone can join 350.0rg.nz
Anyone can protest to NIWA about them sacking a Nobel prize winner for appearing on a TV show about glaciers (Yes they are melting - except for 2. Oddly I visited Franz Josef in 1986 and the signs about said it was retreating, which it evidently had done by a long walk, for decades. Seems it was right about then going into growth...)

Dr. Mapp in parliament has sheeted the blame (for the sacking, not the growing) onto: "The chief executive of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Mr Morgan, and the chair of the board, Sue Suckling,"
NIWAs flack catcher seems to be Ms Hollis.
I suggest you leave a message of dismay on her cell phone 0272552500
her email is m.hollis@niwa.co.nz

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Hostages

"AI investigated tens of cases where the Israeli army used Palestinians, children as well as adults, as 'human shields' during military operations in towns and refugee camps throughout the Occupied Territories. Palestinians were forced to walk in front of Israeli soldiers who, at times, fired their weapons while shielding themselves behind the civilians. As well (they) were made to enter houses ahead of Israeli soldiers to check for explosives or gunmen hiding inside

OK, I promised I would never criticise zionists again. After my Vista vanished after mysterious update ( Java: now that Larry E. has bought Sun: do Java updates trash ZE critics PCs? Is Bill G. OK with that? ) But I cant resist, this is a new method of warfare: move only behind local hostages. This eliminates boobytraps, actually it eliminates defence. Sadly, now the zionists have blazed a moral trail beneath SS depths, resistance henceforth involves sacrificing however many of your people the zionists have shackled to the front of their war machines.
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