trishgannon

Comment Threads

• heteromeles commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Um, yeah. I sure wouldn't invest in that company. Weird statements on that page include: "Provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix nitrogen." --no nitrogen fixing plant, or nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium, has nitrogen fixation in every single cell. The reaction does require a general absence of oxygen, and that requires special mechanisms to keep oxygen out. It's really, really hard to pair that with chloroplasts, which generate oxygen within a cell. "Is non-GM"--Yeah, so how are they getting nitrogen fixation into plant cells again? Or maybe they are being accurate. Here's my guess: sugar cane has long...
• Trottelreiner commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Please note that even if this works, they are using a system where we know something about the proteins involved and their biochemistry, not just some sequences. If we didn't know there was something like nitrogen fixation, deducing it from those might be somewhat, err, complicated. But if you know an easy way to get from sequences to protein structure, err, I guess there might be some people interested[1]. And if you try to "cheat" and express nitrogenases in plants, they still won't do much with oxygen present. To make myself somewhat clear, I didn't say nitrogen fixation was an...
• heteromeles commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Got to love room temperature, water soluble, sustainable organic nanotechnology. Simple it ain't....
• Zorro commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Coming back to molecular modeling, there was a time they said the only atom the Schrödinger equations etc. were solved for was the hydrogen one, no idea if that's still true, but AFAIK molecular modelling solutions still contain a hefty amount of heuristics. As for molecular modeling of proteins as a special case, you might cheat somewhat with comparing to proteins whose structure is already solved, but then, finding a way of doing accurate multiple sequence without heuristics that is not NP-complete is an interesting subproblem, but let's not go there... The Schrödinger equation only has a practical analytical solution...
• burain.asurin commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Robert Asprin wrote a series called Time Scout which featured a female protagonist Margo Smith. http://www.goodreads.com/series/40856-time-scout These scouts go ahead and explore the time portals before they are opened up for Tourism. Margo wants to become the first ever Female Time Scout. SPOILER ALERT Asprin pulled no punches with the first book, and she ends up getting captured and raped at one point....