Atheist Apologist: My Favorite Atheism Quotes

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Here is a collection of my favorite quotes about atheism and religion. They're in no particular order:"I would challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. Now, you can think of an uncountable number of questions that run the other way, where we once had a religious answer and now the authority of religion has been battered and nullified by science, and by moral progress, and by secular progress generally. And I think thats not an accident." -- Sam Harris

"Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?" -- Robert G. Ingersoll

"If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you." -- Unknown

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?" -- Annie Dillard, 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'

"Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions." -- Frater Ravus

"'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'" -- Douglas Adams

"A man without religon is like a fish without a bicycle" -- Unknown

"Without God, life is everything." -- Rev. Ron

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." -- Robert M. Pirsig

"Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion." -- Superintendent Chalmers, The Simpsons

"Deaths in the Bible. God - 2,270,365 not including the victims of Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc because no specific numbers were given. Satan - 10" -- Unknown

"The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on." -- Frank Zappa

"The Christian god makes man human, then burns him when he acts like one." -- HSM

"Blasphemy is a victimless crime" -- Anonymous

"Why would some all powerful being create creatures capable of reason and then demand that they act in a manner contrary to their creation?" -- Josh Charles

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." -- Richard Dawkins

"Do I think Im going to paradise? Of course not; I wouldnt go if I was asked. I dont want to live in some fucking celestial North Korea, for one thing, where all I get to do is praise the Dear Leader from dawn till dusk. I dont want this; it would be hell for me." -- Christopher Hitchens

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? -- Epicurus

"It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living." - Sinclair Lewis

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -- Stephen Henry Roberts

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal

"Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence." -- Anonymous

"If God wants us to do a thing he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him." -- Samuel Butler

"I cannot believe in a God who has neither humor nor common sense." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"Question: How do you know you're God?Answer: Simple. When I pray to him, I find I'm talking to myself." -- Peter O'Toole

"Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?" -- James Madison

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life -- except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?" -- Christopher Hitchens

"If this is your God, he's not very impressive. He has so many psychological problems; he's so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He's a pretty poor excuse for a Supreme Being." -- Gene Roddenberry

"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nation, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have." -- James Baldwin

"I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

"The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all of his perfection, creating imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell." -- Armand Salacrou

"It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument -- their intellect -- which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously." -- Galen Strawson

"The Way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason." -- Benjamin Franklin

"Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question." -- Johannes Kepler

"None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them." -- Ernest Renan

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses." -- Sigmund Freud

"Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs." -- Sam Harris

"If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?" -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" -- Douglas Adams

"Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?" -- Epicurus

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned." -- Anonymous

"You believe in a book which has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd, and primitive stories; and you say that I am the one who is mentally ill?" -- Dan Barker

"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God." -- Thomas Paine

"As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times and bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book." -- Thomas Paine

"One's convictions should be proportional to one's evidence." -- Sam Harris

"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish." -- Anonymous

"A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets." -- Arthur C. Clarke

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer." -- Anonymous

"Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established." -- Ludwig Feuerbach

"I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this." -- Robert G. Ingersoll

Is your favorite quote missing from here? E-mail it to atheistapologist@gmail.com and I'll add it!

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Atheist Apologist: My Favorite Atheism Quotes

Gambling | Britannica.com

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Gambling, the betting or staking of something of value, with consciousness of risk and hope of gain, on the outcome of a game, a contest, or an uncertain event whose result may be determined by chance or accident or have an unexpected result by reason of the bettors miscalculation.

The outcomes of gambling games may be determined by chance alone, as in the purely random activity of a tossed pair of dice or of the ball on a roulette wheel, or by physical skill, training, or prowess in athletic contests, or by a combination of strategy and chance. The rules by which gambling games are played sometimes serve to confuse the relationship between the components of the game, which depend on skill and chance, so that some players may be able to manipulate the game to serve their own interests. Thus, knowledge of the game is useful for playing poker or betting on horse racing but is of very little use for purchasing lottery tickets or playing slot machines.

A gambler may participate in the game itself while betting on its outcome (card games, craps), or he may be prevented from any active participation in an event in which he has a stake (professional athletics, lotteries). Some games are dull or nearly meaningless without the accompanying betting activity and are rarely played unless wagering occurs (coin tossing, poker, dice games, lotteries). In other games betting is not intrinsically part of the game, and the association is merely conventional and not necessary to the performance of the game itself (horse racing, football pools). Commercial establishments such as casinos and racetracks may organize gambling when a portion of the money wagered by patrons can be easily acquired by participation as a favoured party in the game, by rental of space, or by withdrawing a portion of the betting pool. Some activities of very large scale (horse racing, lotteries) usually require commercial and professional organizations to present and maintain them efficiently.

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sports: Gambling and sports

One of the most popular forms of gambling is wagering on sports, which taps into the passion of sports fans. A bet placed on a race or a game allows fans to prove their knowledge of a sport or to show their

A rough estimate of the amount of money legally wagered annually in the world is about $10 trillion (illegal gambling may exceed even this figure). In terms of total turnover, lotteries are the leading form of gambling worldwide. State-licensed or state-operated lotteries expanded rapidly in Europe and the United States during the late 20th century and are widely distributed throughout most of the world. Organized football (soccer) pools can be found in nearly all European countries, several South American countries, Australia, and a few African and Asian countries. Most of these countries also offer either state-organized or state-licensed wagering on other sporting events.

Betting on horse racing is a leading form of gambling in English-speaking countries and in France. It also exists in many other countries. Wherever horse racing is popular, it has usually become a major business, with its own newspapers and other periodicals, extensive statistical services, self-styled experts who sell advice on how to bet, and sophisticated communication networks that furnish information to betting centres, bookmakers and their employees, and workers involved with the care and breeding of horses. The same is true, to a smaller extent, of dog racing. The emergence of satellite broadcasting technology has led to the creation of so-called off-track betting facilities, in which bettors watch live telecasts at locations away from the racetrack.

Casinos or gambling houses have existed at least since the 17th century. In the 20th century they became commonplace and assumed almost a uniform character throughout the world. In Europe and South America they are permitted at many or most holiday resorts but not always in cities. In the United States casinos were for many years legal only in Nevada and New Jersey and, by special license, in Puerto Rico, but most other states now allow casino gambling, and betting facilities operate clandestinely throughout the country, often through corruption of political authorities. Roulette is one of the principal gambling games in casinos throughout France and Monaco and is popular throughout the world. Craps is the principal dice game at most American casinos. Slot and video poker machines are a mainstay of casinos in the United States and Europe and also are found in thousands of private clubs, restaurants, and other establishments; they are also common in Australia. Among the card games played at casinos, baccarat, in its popular form chemin de fer, has remained a principal gambling game in Great Britain and in the continental casinos most often patronized by the English at Deauville, Biarritz, and the Riviera resorts. Faro, at one time the principal gambling game in the United States, has become obsolete. Blackjack is the principal card game in American casinos. The French card game trente et quarante (or rouge et noir) is played at Monte-Carlo and a few other continental casinos. Many other games may also be found in some casinosfor example, sic bo, fan-tan, and pai-gow poker in Asia and local games such as boule, banca francesa, and kalooki in Europe.

At the start of the 21st century, poker exploded in popularity, principally through the high visibility of poker tournaments broadcast on television and the proliferation of Internet playing venues. Another growing form of Internet gambling is the so-called betting exchangesInternet Web sites on which players make wagers with one another, with the Web site taking a small cut of each wager in exchange for organizing and handling the transaction.

In a wide sense of the word, stock markets may also be considered a form of gambling, albeit one in which skill and knowledge on the part of the bettors play a considerable part. This also goes for insurance; paying the premium on ones life insurance is, in effect, a bet that one will die within a specified time. If one wins (dies), the win is paid out to ones relatives, and if one loses (survives the specified time), the wager (premium) is kept by the insurance company, which acts as a bookmaker and sets the odds (payout ratios) according to actuarial data. These two forms of gambling are considered beneficial to society, the former acquiring venture capital and the latter spreading statistical risks.

Events or outcomes that are equally probable have an equal chance of occurring in each instance. In games of pure chance, each instance is a completely independent one; that is, each play has the same probability as each of the others of producing a given outcome. Probability statements apply in practice to a long series of events but not to individual ones. The law of large numbers is an expression of the fact that the ratios predicted by probability statements are increasingly accurate as the number of events increases, but the absolute number of outcomes of a particular type departs from expectation with increasing frequency as the number of repetitions increases. It is the ratios that are accurately predictable, not the individual events or precise totals.

The probability of a favourable outcome among all possibilities can be expressed: probability (p) equals the total number of favourable outcomes (f) divided by the total number of possibilities (t), or p = f/t. But this holds only in situations governed by chance alone. In a game of tossing two dice, for example, the total number of possible outcomes is 36 (each of six sides of one die combined with each of six sides of the other), and the number of ways to make, say, a seven is six (made by throwing 1 and 6, 2 and 5, 3 and 4, 4 and 3, 5 and 2, or 6 and 1); therefore, the probability of throwing a seven is 6/36, or 1/6.

In most gambling games it is customary to express the idea of probability in terms of odds against winning. This is simply the ratio of the unfavourable possibilities to the favourable ones. Because the probability of throwing a seven is 1/6, on average one throw in six would be favourable and five would not; the odds against throwing a seven are therefore 5 to 1. The probability of getting heads in a toss of a coin is 1/2; the odds are 1 to 1, called even. Care must be used in interpreting the phrase on average, which applies most accurately to a large number of cases and is not useful in individual instances. A common gamblers fallacy, called the doctrine of the maturity of the chances (or the Monte-Carlo fallacy), falsely assumes that each play in a game of chance is dependent on the others and that a series of outcomes of one sort should be balanced in the short run by the other possibilities. A number of systems have been invented by gamblers largely on the basis of this fallacy; casino operators are happy to encourage the use of such systems and to exploit any gamblers neglect of the strict rules of probability and independent plays. An interesting example of a game where each play is dependent on previous plays, however, is blackjack, where cards already dealt from the dealing shoe affect the composition of the remaining cards; for example, if all of the aces (worth 1 or 11 points) have been dealt, it is no longer possible to achieve a natural (a 21 with two cards). This fact forms the basis for some systems where it is possible to overcome the house advantage.

In some games an advantage may go to the dealer, the banker (the individual who collects and redistributes the stakes), or some other participant. Therefore, not all players have equal chances to win or equal payoffs. This inequality may be corrected by rotating the players among the positions in the game. Commercial gambling operators, however, usually make their profits by regularly occupying an advantaged position as the dealer, or they may charge money for the opportunity to play or subtract a proportion of money from the wagers on each play. In the dice game of crapswhich is among the major casino games offering the gambler the most favourable oddsthe casino returns to winners from 3/5 of 1 percent to 27 percent less than the fair odds, depending on the type of bet made. Depending on the bet, the house advantage (vigorish) for roulette in American casinos varies from about 5.26 to 7.89 percent, and in European casinos it varies from 1.35 to 2.7 percent. The house must always win in the long run. Some casinos also add rules that enhance their profits, especially rules that limit the amounts that may be staked under certain circumstances.

Many gambling games include elements of physical skill or strategy as well as of chance. The game of poker, like most other card games, is a mixture of chance and strategy that also involves a considerable amount of psychology. Betting on horse racing or athletic contests involves the assessment of a contestants physical capacity and the use of other evaluative skills. In order to ensure that chance is allowed to play a major role in determining the outcomes of such games, weights, handicaps, or other correctives may be introduced in certain cases to give the contestants approximately equal opportunities to win, and adjustments may be made in the payoffs so that the probabilities of success and the magnitudes of the payoffs are put in inverse proportion to each other. Pari-mutuel pools in horse-race betting, for example, reflect the chances of various horses to win as anticipated by the players. The individual payoffs are large for those bettors whose winning horses are backed by relatively few bettors and small if the winners are backed by a relatively large proportion of the bettors; the more popular the choice, the lower the individual payoff. The same holds true for betting with bookmakers on athletic contests (illegal in most of the United States but legal in England). Bookmakers ordinarily accept bets on the outcome of what is regarded as an uneven match by requiring the side more likely to win to score more than a simple majority of points; this procedure is known as setting a point spread. In a game of American or Canadian football, for example, the more highly regarded team would have to win by, say, more than 10 points to yield an even payoff to its backers.

Unhappily, these procedures for maintaining the influence of chance can be interfered with; cheating is possible and reasonably easy in most gambling games. Much of the stigma attached to gambling has resulted from the dishonesty of some of its promoters and players, and a large proportion of modern gambling legislation is written to control cheating. More laws have been oriented to efforts by governments to derive tax revenues from gambling than to control cheating, however.

Gambling is one of mankinds oldest activities, as evidenced by writings and equipment found in tombs and other places. It was regulated, which as a rule meant severely curtailed, in the laws of ancient China and Rome as well as in the Jewish Talmud and by Islam and Buddhism, and in ancient Egypt inveterate gamblers could be sentenced to forced labour in the quarries. The origin of gambling is considered to be divinatory: by casting marked sticks and other objects and interpreting the outcome, man sought knowledge of the future and the intentions of the gods. From this it was a very short step to betting on the outcome of the throws. The Bible contains many references to the casting of lots to divide property. One well-known instance is the casting of lots by Roman guards (which in all likelihood meant that they threw knucklebones) for the garment of Jesus during the Crucifixion. This is mentioned in all four of the Gospels and has been used for centuries as a warning example by antigambling crusaders. However, in ancient times casting lots was not considered to be gambling in the modern sense but instead was connected with inevitable destiny, or fate. Anthropologists have also pointed to the fact that gambling is more prevalent in societies where there is a widespread belief in gods and spirits whose benevolence may be sought. The casting of lots, not infrequently dice, has been used in many cultures to dispense justice and point out criminals at trialsin Sweden as late as 1803. The Greek word for justice, dike, comes from a word that means to throw, in the sense of throwing dice.

European history is riddled with edicts, decrees, and encyclicals banning and condemning gambling, which indirectly testify to its popularity in all strata of society. Organized gambling on a larger scale and sanctioned by governments and other authorities in order to raise money began in the 15th century with lotteriesand centuries earlier in China with keno. With the advent of legal gambling houses in the 17th century, mathematicians began to take a serious interest in games with randomizing equipment (such as dice and cards), out of which grew the field of probability theory.

Apart from forerunners in ancient Rome and Greece, organized sanctioned sports betting dates back to the late 18th century. About that time there began a gradual, albeit irregular, shift in the official attitude toward gambling, from considering it a sin to considering it a vice and a human weakness and, finally, to seeing it as a mostly harmless and even entertaining activity. Additionally, the Internet has made many forms of gambling accessible on an unheard-of scale. By the beginning of the 21st century, approximately four out of five people in Western nations gambled at least occasionally. The swelling number of gamblers in the 20th century highlighted the personal and social problem of pathological gambling, in which individuals are unable to control or limit their gambling. During the 1980s and 90s, pathological gambling was recognized by medical authorities in several countries as a cognitive disorder that afflicts slightly more than 1 percent of the population, and various treatment and therapy programs were developed to deal with the problem.

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Gambling | Britannica.com

KNOPPIX 7.7.1 – Linux Live System

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Donate to WikipediaInstead of a call on our own behalf, we would like to encourage you to donate to the Wikipedia Project this year. Wikipedia is the largest free collection of knowledge, serving the public good, composed completely in an open and cooperative approach, indispensable as a reference for teaching and learning. Without access to Wikipedias collected information and conceptual ideas, projects like Knoppix would be infeasible.KNOPPIX 7.7.1 Public ReleaseContents

Complete software list: -> DVD (~4000 software packages, over 11GB uncompressed, cloop-compressed to 4.3GB).

A.D.R.I.A.N.E. (Audio Desktop Reference Implementation And Networking Environment) is a talking menu system, which is supposed to make work and internet access easier for computer beginners, even if they have no sight contact to the computers monitor. A graphical environment with also talking programs and arbitrary magnification using compiz, is another option.

The current public beta release of KNOPPIX 7.7.1 DVD is available in different variants for download at the KNOPPIX-Mirrors.

Caution: Because the DVD image is larger than 4GB, it cannot be stored on a FAT32 partition! -> Use NTFS or a linux file system.

For burning a CD or DVD, only one single .iso file matching your language and version choice, is sufficient.

Additionally, several independent vendors offer readily burned and verified CDs, DVDs and USB-memorysticks saent out via postal service.

Since there are so many different media capacities, there is no readymade image for booting off memorystick available for download. But it is easy to create a bootable USB-stick or flashcard from a running KNOPPIX system, as described in the next section.

In order to create a bootable USB-medium (memory flashdisk, SD-card, digital camera with USB connector, cellphone with microSD, ...), the program flash-knoppix can be started from a running KNOPPIX system. This program installs all needed KNOPPIX files onto the FAT-formatted flashdisk, and creates a boot record for it. If desired, the target medium can be partitioned and fornatted, or left in its inistal state, so that existing files stay intact. The KNOPPIX Live System starts and runs about factor 5 faster from USB flash disk than from CD or DVD!

After having copied the system to flash, using the persistent KNOPPIX image (overlay feature) or an additional Linux partition, it is possible to also store files permanently in live mode. That way, personal settings and additionally installed programs survive a reboot.

The flash-knoppix script since Knoppix 7.4.0 supports on-the-fly conversion of a DVD ISO image for direct flashing of a USB pendrive or disk. By using this, the intermediate step of burning a DVD and booting from it, can be skipped. For burning a CD or DVD, only one single .iso file matching your language and version choice, is sufficient.For using this feature, just add the name of the .iso file as commandline parameter to flash-knoppix like this:flash-knoppix KNOPPIX_V7.7.1DVD-2016-10-22-EN.iso

Overview of the most important functions. A complete description and listing of shortcuts can be found in the configurations of sbl, orca and compiz.

Boot options like "adriane" can easily be preset by changing syslinux.cfg after having copied the CD to a bootable memorystick using "flash-knoppix":

DEFAULT auto

to:

DEFAULT adriane

for automatically starting ADRIANE on boot. This is already default in all ADRIANE iso files.

Knopper.Net is not responsible for the content of external web pages

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KNOPPIX 7.7.1 - Linux Live System

Jacobs Email – IT – Teamwork at Jacobs University

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Included Services

"Jacobs Email" includes:

In the following, the word "mailbox" relates to the sum of these features, which are bundled into the user's "mailbox".

Every JACOBS university member with an active CampusNet account and a "@jacobs-university.de" email address has access to JACOBS Email.

Account Information

Access to the mailbox, including email, calendar, contacts, etc. is with the CampusNet username and password, also known as JACOBS user account.

Please note that the email address is different from the username. The email address has a dot in it, the username doesn't.

Please check with the CampusNet team to deal with lost passwords.

There is world-wide web access via:

Vacation messages can be set either within Outlook connected to Exchange, or by using the web interface.

It is possible to set an interval for the message, so can be used way before being away.

As Jacobs Email is accessible world-wide, vacation messages can also be set while off campus.

The recommended access way is to use an English-language version of Microsoft Outlook as an email client, but any other client will work.

AutoDiscover is available, making manual configuration usually unnecessary.

If you are logged in to a JACOBS computer while starting Outlook the first time, it automatically sets up email based on your JACOBS login without any manual configuration requirement.

To manually configure an Exchange connection, which is the recommended connection type,use

Exchange Server

exchange.jacobs-university.de

This connection type is sometimes called EWS.

To manually configure any other applicable email client, use the following information:

IMAP4 & IMAP4S

exchange.jacobs-university.de

POP3 & POP3S

exchange.jacobs-university.de

SMTP

exchange.jacobs-university.de

For security reasons, only the secure variants should be used,i.e. SSL for incoming and TLS for outgoing emails.For convenience, the unsecured protocols are still accepted, but strongly discouraged.

If manually configuring Outlook access to Exchange, XMLRPC over HTTPS is the recommend setting. Please refrain from using MAPI access, which is deprecated.

The system requires authentication using TLS before sending!

Depending on the client used, not all features are available.

Tip: the JACOBS user name has NO dot in it! If you are unsure regarding user name vs. email address, please see JACOBS user namefor details.

It is possible to grant access to mailbox information to other JACOBS domain users.

By default, only the user has access to his/her mailbox, though the free/busy information, without further details, is available to any other JACOBS domain user.

Access to information can be shared within the JACOBS domain community by standard Windows domain access permission mechanisms.

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Jacobs Email - IT - Teamwork at Jacobs University

Seychelles Travel – Best time to visit

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As the Seychelles islands are blessed with a year-long warm, tropical climate, its always a good time to visit, although different times of year may be better suited to your particular interests.

Two opposing trade winds generally govern the weather pattern: the north-westerly trades blow from October to March when wind speeds average from 8 to 12 knots; and the brisker south-easterly trades blow from May to September with winds of between 10 to 20 knots, bringing the cooler and windier conditions ideal for sailing.

The periods of calm between the trades produce fairly warm and wind-free conditions throughout April and also in October. Conditions for swimming, snorkelling and especially diving are superb during April/May and October/November when the water temperature sometimes reaches 29C and visibility is often 30 metres plus.

The SUBIOS Underwater Festival, showcases Seychelles extraordinary underwater world through a series of film shows, talks and competitions, while the 'Festival Kreol' (a week-long celebration of Creole heritage and traditions) is held in October each year.

The Seychelles Sailing Cup, an international sailing event, is held in January and the International Fishing Competition in November. Further local fishing competitions are held throughout the year.

The table below summarises the best times to visit Seychelles for different types of activities.

Activity

Period

Bird-watching

April (breeding season), May - September (nesting of Sooty Terns) October (migration)

Diving

March May / September - November

Fishing

October - April

Hiking/Walks & Trails

May - September

Sailing

Year-round

Snorkelling

Year-round

Surfing/Windsurfing

May - September

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Seychelles Travel - Best time to visit

Crypto Prices Fall; Ireland Toughens Law on Money Laundering

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Cryptocurrency prices fell on Friday in Asia, with XRP and Litecoin falling more than 3%, as Ireland greenlit tougher laws on money laundering, which includes restrictions on the use of digital currencies.

Bitcoin dropped 1.95% to $3,774.9 and Ethereum lost 2.86% to $147.4 at 12:30 AM ET (05:30 GMT).

XRP fell 3.32% to $0.35471 on the Poloniex exchange, while Litecoin slid 3.61% to $31.438.

The Irish cabinet approved the Criminal Justice Bill 2019 that aims to combat money laundering. The proposed law would restrict the use of virtual currencies for terrorist financing and limiting the use of pre-paid cards and improves safeguards for financial transactions to and from high-risk third countries, according to the Irish Times.

This bill came after the European Commissions fifth anti-money laundering directive entered into force in July last year. The measures include limiting the use of anonymous payments via pre-paid cards, which will see virtual currency exchange platforms come under the anti-money laundering rules.

EU member states are expected to implement the new rules into their legislation in January 2020.

Elsewhere, after New York State announced a task force to study cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology earlier in the week, and South Africa has also established a regulatory working group to investigate digital tokens and blockchain concepts, local media BusinessDay reported.

It is anticipated that, following broad industry comment and participation, the crypto assets regulatory working group will be ready to release a final research paper on the subject during the course of 2019, South Africas Finance Minister Tito Mboweni was quoted as saying.

Mboweni said that income tax rules apply to digital currencies.

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Crypto Prices Fall; Ireland Toughens Law on Money Laundering

CMA warns against new coin offering – mediamaxnetwork.co.ke

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Zachary Ochuodho@zachuodho

Capital Markets Authority (CMA) has cautioned the public against participating in any coin offering or trading in any coin exchange offered by Wiseman Talent Ventures.

Chief Executive Officer, Paul Muthaura, said the firm is raising money from the public through issuance of digital token coins and further provides a platform for the trading of the said coins on its coin exchange.

It is important for the public to know that the nature and features of the capital raising and coins trading promoted by Wiseman Talent Ventures have not been approved by the authority, he said.

Muthaura (pictured) said Wiseman Talent Ventures, raising money through http://www.kenicoinexchange.com, is luring investors by promising to give returns of 10 per cent monthly on the initial investment in coins which were issued at Sh100 at the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and are now purportedly being marketed as trading at Sh2,000 at its Coin Exchange.

Muthaura said the Kencoin value being marketed as exponentially rising since its initial offering poses substantive information asymmetry, liquidity and fraud risks.

The Authority is investigating the operations of Wiseman Talent Ventures. We have noted discrepancies in the information provided on the firms website and the information provided to the authority during interviews of Wiseman Talent Ventures leadership in relation to the total number of Kencoin sold and the total funds raised, he added.

Global trends

Global trends in unregulated digital currencies demonstrate that the cryptoasset market is uncertain and has experienced accelerated boom and bust cycles which may expose investors to substantial losses.

By comparison in December 2017, the price of Bitcoin was $19,783 (Sh2,020,833.45) and it has since fallen to $3,810 (Sh389,191.50), Litecoin was $366 (Sh37,386.90) a coin and has since come down to $30 (Sh3,064.50).

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CMA warns against new coin offering - mediamaxnetwork.co.ke

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What is Cloning – Genetics

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Many people first heard of cloning when Dolly the Sheep showed up on the scene in 1997. Artificial cloning technologies have been around for much longer than Dolly, though.

There are two ways to make an exact genetic copy of an organism in a lab: artificial embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Artificial embryo twinning is a relatively low-tech way to make clones. As the name suggests, this technique mimics the natural process that creates identical twins.

In nature, twins form very early in development when the embryo splits in two. Twinning happens in the first days after egg and sperm join, while the embryo is made of just a small number of unspecialized cells. Each half of the embryo continues dividing on its own, ultimately developing into separate, complete individuals. Since they developed from the same fertilized egg, the resulting individuals are genetically identical.

Artificial embryo twinning uses the same approach, but it is carried out in a Petri dish instead of inside the mother. A very early embryo is separated into individual cells, which are allowed to divide and develop for a short time in the Petri dish. The embryos are then placed into a surrogate mother, where they finish developing. Again, since all the embryos came from the same fertilized egg, they are genetically identical.

Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), also called nuclear transfer, uses a different approach than artificial embryo twinning, but it produces the same result: an exact genetic copy, or clone, of an individual. This was the method used to create Dolly the Sheep.

What does SCNT mean? Let's take it apart:

Somatic cell: A somatic cell is any cell in the body other than sperm and egg, the two types of reproductive cells. Reproductive cells are also called germ cells. In mammals, every somatic cell has two complete sets of chromosomes, whereas the germ cells have only one complete set.

Nuclear: The nucleus is a compartment that holds the cell's DNA. The DNA is divided into packages called chromosomes, and it contains all the information needed to form an organism. It's small differences in our DNA that make each of us unique.

Transfer: Moving an object from one place to another. To make Dolly, researchers isolated a somatic cell from an adult female sheep. Next they removed the nucleus and all of its DNA from an egg cell. Then they transferred the nucleus from the somatic cell to the egg cell. After a couple of chemical tweaks, the egg cell, with its new nucleus, was behaving just like a freshly fertilized egg. It developed into an embryo, which was implanted into a surrogate mother and carried to term. (The transfer step is most often done using an electrical current to fuse the membranes of the egg and the somatic cell.)

The lamb, Dolly, was an exact genetic replica of the adult female sheep that donated the somatic cell. She was the first-ever mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell.

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What is Cloning - Genetics

Food fortification – Wikipedia

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Food fortification or enrichment is the process of adding micronutrients (essential trace elements and vitamins) to food. Sometimes it's a purely commercial choice to provide extra nutrients in a food, while other times it is a public health policy which aims to reduce the number of people with dietary deficiencies within a population. Staple foods of a region can lack particular nutrients due to the soil of the region or from inherent inadequacy of a normal diet. Addition of micronutrients to staples and condiments can prevent large-scale deficiency diseases in these cases.[1]

As defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), fortification refers to "the practice of deliberately increasing the content of an essential micronutrient, ie. vitamins and minerals (including trace elements) in a food irrespective of whether the nutrients were originally in the food before processing or not, so as to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply and to provide a public health benefit with minimal risk to health", whereas enrichment is defined as "synonymous with fortification and refers to the addition of micronutrients to a food which are lost during processing".[2]

Food fortification was identified as the second strategy of four by the WHO and FAO to begin decreasing the incidence of nutrient deficiencies at the global level.[2] As outlined by the FAO, the most common fortified foods are cereals (and cereal based products), milk (and milk products), fats and oils, accessory food items, tea and other beverages, and infant formulas.[3] Undernutrition and nutrient deficiency is estimated globally to cause between 3 and 5 million deaths per year.[1]

Main methods of food fortification:

The WHO and FAO, among many other nationally recognized organizations, have recognized that there are over 2 billion people worldwide who suffer from a variety of micronutrient deficiencies. In 1992, 159 countries pledged at the FAO/WHO International Conference on Nutrition to make efforts to help combat these issues of micronutrient deficiencies, highlighting the importance of decreasing the number of those with iodine, vitamin A, and iron deficiencies.[2] A significant statistic that led to these efforts was the discovery that approximately 1 in 3 people worldwide were at risk for either an iodine, vitamin A, or iron deficiency.[5] Although it is recognized that food fortification alone will not combat this deficiency, it is a step towards reducing the prevalence of these deficiencies and their associated health conditions.[6]

In Canada, the Food and Drug Regulations have outlined specific criterion which justifies food fortification:

There are also several advantages to approaching nutrient deficiencies among populations via food fortification as opposed to other methods. These may include, but are not limited to: treating a population without specific dietary interventions therefore not requiring a change in dietary patterns, continuous delivery of the nutrient, does not require individual compliance, and potential to maintain nutrient stores more efficiently if consumed on a regular basis.[4]

Several organizations such as the WHO, FAO, Health Canada, and Nestl Research acknowledge that there are limitations to food fortification. Within the discussion of nutrient deficiencies the topic of nutrient toxicities can also be immediately questioned. Fortification of nutrients in foods may deliver toxic amounts of nutrients to an individual and also cause its associated side effects. As seen with the case of excessive fluoride intakes below, the result can be irreversible staining to the teeth. Although this may be a minor toxic effect to health, there are several that are more severe.[8]

The WHO states that limitations to food fortification may include: human rights issues indicating that consumers have the right to choose if they want fortified products or not, the potential for insufficient demand of the fortified product, increased production costs leading to increased retail costs, the potential that the fortified products will still not be a solution to nutrient deficiencies amongst low income populations who may not be able to afford the new product, and children who may not be able to consume adequate amounts thereof.[2]

Food safety worries led to legislation in Denmark in 2004 restricting foods fortified with extra vitamins or minerals. Products banned include: Rice Crispies, Shreddies, Horlicks, Ovaltine and Marmite.[9]

One factor that limits the benefits of food fortification is that isolated nutrients added back into a processed food that has had many of its nutrients removed, does not always result in the added nutrients being as bioavailable as they would be in the original, whole food. An example is skim milk that has had the fat removed, and then had vitamin A and vitamin D added back. Vitamins A and D are both fat-soluble and non-water-soluble, so a person consuming skim milk in the absence of fats may not be able to absorb as much of these vitamins as one would be able to absorb from drinking whole milk. On the other hand, the nutrient added as a fortificant may have a higher bioavailability than from foods, which is the case with folic acid used to increase folate intakes.[10]

Phytochemicals such as phytic acid in cereal grains can also impact nutrient absorption, limiting the bioavailability of intrinsic and additional nutrients, and reducing the effectiveness of fortification programs.

Ecological studies have shown that increased B vitamin fortification is correlated with the prevalence of obesity and diabetes.[11] Daily consumption of iron per capita in the United States has dramatically surged since World War II and nearly doubled over the past century due to increases in iron fortification and increased consumption of meat.[12] Existing evidence suggests that excess iron intake may play a role in the development of obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.[13]

Fortification of foods with folic acid has been mandated in many countries solely to improve the folate status of pregnant women to prevent neural tube defectsa birth defect which affected 0.5% (1 out of 200) US births before fortification began.[14][15] However, when fortification is introduced, several hundred thousand people are exposed to an increased intake of folic acid for each neural tube defect pregnancy that is prevented.[16] In humans, increased folic acid intake leads to elevated blood concentrations of naturally occurring folates and of unmetabolized folic acid. High blood concentrations of folic acid may decrease natural killer cell cytotoxicity, and high folate status may reduce the response to drugs used to treat malaria, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and cancer.[16] A combination of high folate levels and low vitamin B-12 status may be associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment and anemia in the elderly and, in pregnant women, with an increased risk of insulin resistance and obesity in their children.[16] Folate has a dual effect on cancer, protecting against cancer initiation but facilitating progression and growth of preneoplastic cells and subclinical cancers.[16] Furthermore, intake of folic acid from fortification have turned out to be significantly greater than originally modeled in pre mandate predictions.[17] Therefore, a high folic acid intake due to fortification may be harmful for more people than the policy is designed to help.[15][16][18][19]

There is a concern that micronutrients are legally defined in such a way that does not distinguish between different forms, and that fortified foods often have nutrients in a balance that would not occur naturally. For example, in the U.S., food is fortified with folic acid, which is one of the many naturally-occurring forms of folate, and which only contributes a minor amount to the folates occurring in natural foods.[20] In many cases, such as with folate, it is an open question of whether or not there are any benefits or risks to consuming folic acid in this form.

In many cases, the micronutrients added to foods in fortification are synthetic.

In some cases, certain forms of micronutrients can be actively toxic in a sufficiently high dose, even if other forms are safe at the same or much higher doses. There are examples of such toxicity in both synthetic and naturally-occurring forms of vitamins. Retinol, the active form of Vitamin A, is toxic in a much lower dose than other forms, such as beta carotene. Menadione, a phased-out synthetic form of Vitamin K, is also known to be toxic.

There are several main groups of food supplements like:

Many foods and beverages worldwide have been fortified, whether a voluntary action by the product developers or by law. Although some may view these additions as strategic marketing schemes to sell their product, there is a lot of work that must go into a product before simply fortifying it. In order to fortify a product, it must first be proven that the addition of this vitamin or mineral is beneficial to health, safe, and an effective method of delivery. The addition must also abide by all food and labeling regulations and support nutritional rationale. From a food developer's point of view, they also need to consider the costs associated with this new product and whether or not there will be a market to support the change.[21]

Examples of foods and beverages that have been fortified and shown to have positive health effects:

"Iodine deficiency disorder (IDD) is the single greatest cause of preventable mental retardation. Severe deficiencies cause cretinism, stillbirth and miscarriage. But even mild deficiency can significantly affect the learning ability of populations. [] Today over 1 billion people in the world suffer from iodine deficiency, and 38 million babies born every year are not protected from brain damage due to IDD."Kul Gautam, Deputy Executive Director, UNICEF, October 2007[22]

Iodised salt has been used in the United States since before World War II. It was discovered in 1821 that goiters could be treated by the use of iodized salts. However, it was not until 1916 that the use of iodized salts could be tested in a research trial as a preventative measure against goiters. By 1924, it became readily available in the US.[23] Currently in Canada and the US, the RDA for iodine is as low as 90g/day for children (48 years) and as high as 290g/day for breast-feeding mothers.

Diseases that are associated with an iodine deficiency include: mental retardation, hypothyroidism, and goiter. There is also a risk of various other growth and developmental abnormalities.

Folic acid (also known as folate) functions in reducing blood homocysteine levels, forming red blood cells, proper growth and division of cells, and preventing neural tube defects (NTDs).[24] In many industrialized countries, the addition of folic acid to flour has prevented a significant number of NTDs in infants. Two common types of NTDs, spina bifida and anencephaly, affect approximately 2500-3000 infants born in the US annually. Research trials have shown the ability to reduce the incidence of NTDs by supplementing pregnant mothers with folic acid by 72%.[25]

The RDA for folic acid ranges from as low as 150g/day for children aged 13 years old, to 400g/day for males and females over the age of 19, and 600g/day during pregnancy.[26] Diseases associated with folic acid deficiency include: megaloblastic or macrocytic anemia, cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and NTDs in infants.

Niacin has been added to bread in the USA since 1938 (when voluntary addition started), a programme which substantially reduced the incidence of pellagra.[27] As early as 1755, pellagra was recognized by doctors as being a niacin deficiency disease. Although not officially receiving its name of pellagra until 1771.[28] Pellagra was seen amongst poor families who used corn as their main dietary staple. Although corn itself does contain niacin, it is not a bioavailable form unless it undergoes nixtamalization (treatment with alkali, traditional in Native American cultures) and therefore was not contributing to the overall intake of niacin.

The RDA for niacin is 2mg NE(niacin equivalents)/day (AI) for infants aged 06 months, 16mg NE/day for males, and 14mg NE/day for females who are over the age of 19.

Diseases associated with niacin deficiency include: Pellagra which consisted of signs and symptoms called the 3D's-"Dermatitis, dementia, and diarrhea. Others may include vascular or gastrointestinal diseases.[28] Common diseases which present a high frequency of niacin deficiency: alcoholism, anorexia nervosa, HIV infection, gastrectomy, malabsorptive disorders, certain cancers and their associated treatments.[28]

Since Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, it cannot be added to a wide variety of foods. Foods that it is commonly added to are margarine, vegetable oils and dairy products.[29] During the late 1800s, after the discovery of curing conditions of scurvy and beriberi had occurred, researchers were aiming to see if the disease, later known as rickets, could also be cured by food. Their results showed that sunlight exposure and cod liver oil were the cure. It was not until the 1930s that vitamin D was actually linked to curing rickets.[30] This discovery led to the fortification of common foods such as milk, margarine, and breakfast cereals. This took the astonishing statistics of approximately 8090% of children showing varying degrees of bone deformations due to vitamin D deficiency to being a very rare condition.[31]

The current RDA for infants aged 06 months is 10g (400 International Units (IU))/day and for adults over 19 years of age it is 15g (600 IU)/day.

Diseases associated with a vitamin D deficiency include rickets, osteoporosis, and certain types of cancer (breast, prostate, colon and ovaries). It has also been associated with increased risks for fractures, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune and infectious diseases, asthma and other wheezing disorders, myocardial infarction, hypertension, congestive heart failure, and peripheral vascular disease.[31]

Although fluoride is not considered an essential mineral, it is useful in prevention of tooth decay and maintaining adequate dental health.[32][33] In the mid-1900s it was discovered that towns with a high level of fluoride in their water supply was causing the residents' teeth to have both brown spotting and a strange resistance to dental caries. This led to the fortification of water supplies with fluoride in safe amounts (or reduction of naturally-occurring levels) to retain the properties of resistance to dental caries but avoid the staining cause by fluorosis (a condition caused by excessive fluoride intake).[34]The tolerable upper intake level (UL) set for fluoride ranges from 0.7mg/day for infants aged 06 months and 10mg/day for adults over the age of 19.

Conditions commonly associated with fluoride deficiency are dental caries and osteoporosis.

Some other examples of fortified foods:

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Food fortification - Wikipedia

Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence – Future of Life …

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Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline:Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind. And as many havelost count of how many similar articles theyveseen.Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because theyve become conscious and/or evil.On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers dontworry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, androbots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car?Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, its irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AIdoes, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isnt malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans dont generally hate ants, but were more intelligent than they are so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and theres an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines cant have goals.Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target.If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose.If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldnt exclaim: Im not worried, because machines cant have goals!

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids,because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isnt with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines cant control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, its possible that we might also cede control.

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Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence - Future of Life ...

A.I. Artificial Intelligence – Wikipedia

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A.I. Artificial Intelligence, also known as A.I., is a 2001 American science fiction drama film directed by Steven Spielberg. The screenplay by Spielberg and screen story by Ian Watson were based on the 1969 short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss. The film was produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg and Bonnie Curtis. It stars Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson and William Hurt. Set in a futuristic post-climate change society, A.I. tells the story of David (Osment), a childlike android uniquely programmed with the ability to love.

Development of A.I. originally began with producer-director Stanley Kubrick, after he acquired the rights to Aldiss' story in the early 1970s. Kubrick hired a series of writers until the mid-1990s, including Brian Aldiss, Bob Shaw, Ian Watson, and Sara Maitland. The film languished in protracted development for years, partly because Kubrick felt computer-generated imagery was not advanced enough to create the David character, who he believed no child actor would convincingly portray. In 1995, Kubrick handed A.I. to Spielberg, but the film did not gain momentum until Kubrick's death in 1999. Spielberg remained close to Watson's film treatment for the screenplay.

The film divided critics, with the overall balance being positive, and grossed approximately $235 million. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards at the 74th Academy Awards, for Best Visual Effects and Best Original Score (by John Williams).

In a 2016 BBC poll of 177 critics around the world, Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence was voted the eighty-third greatest film since 2000.[3] A.I. is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick.

In the late 22nd century, rising sea levels from global warming have wiped out coastal cities such as Amsterdam, Venice, and New York and drastically reduced the world's population. A new type of robots called Mecha, advanced humanoids capable of thought and emotion, have been created.

David, a Mecha that resembles a human child and is programmed to display love for his owners, is given to Henry Swinton and his wife Monica, whose son Martin, after contracting a rare disease, has been placed in suspended animation and not expected to recover. Monica feels uneasy with David, but eventually warms to him and activates his imprinting protocol, causing him to have an enduring childlike love for her. David is befriended by Teddy, a robotic teddy bear that belonged to Martin.

Martin is cured of his disease and brought home. As he recovers, he grows jealous of David. He tricks David into entering the parents's bedroom at night and cutting off a lock of Monica's hair. This upsets the parents, particularly Henry, who fears David intended to injure them. At a pool party, one of Martin's friends pokes David with a knife, activating David's self-protection programming. David grabs Martin and they fall into the pool. Martin is saved from drowning, but Henry persuades Monica to return David to his creators for destruction. Instead, she abandons David and Teddy in the forest. She warns David to avoid all humans, and tells him to find other unregistered Mecha who can protect him.

David is captured for an anti-Mecha "Flesh Fair", where obsolete, unlicensed Mecha are destroyed before cheering crowds. David is placed on a platform with Gigolo Joe, a male prostitute Mecha who is on the run after being framed for murder. Before the pair can be destroyed with acid, the crowd, thinking David is a real boy, begins booing and throwing things at the show's emcee. In the chaos, David and Joe escape. Since Joe survived thanks to David, he agrees to help him find Blue Fairy, whom David remembers from The Adventures of Pinocchio, and believes can turn him into a real boy, allowing Monica to love him and take him home.

Joe and David make their way to the decadent resort town of Rouge City, where "Dr. Know", a holographic answer engine, directs them to the top of Rockefeller Center in the flooded ruins of Manhattan. There, David meets a copy of himself and destroys it. He then meets Professor Hobby, his creator, who tells David he was built in the image of the professor's dead son David. The engineers are thrilled by his ability to have a will without being programmed. He reveals they have been monitoring him to see how he progresses and altered Dr. Know to guide him to Manhattan, back to the lab he was created in. David finds more copies of him, as well as female versions called Darlene, that have been made there.

Disheartened, David lets himself fall from a ledge of the building. He is rescued by Joe, flying an amphibicopter he has stolen from the police who were pursuing him. David tells Joe he saw the Blue Fairy underwater, and wants to go down to meet her. Joe is captured by the authorities, who snare him with an electromagnet. Before he is pulled up, he activates the amphibicopter's dive function for David, telling him to remember him for he declares "I am, I was." David and Teddy dive to see the Fairy, which turns out to be a statue at the now-sunken Coney Island. The two become trapped when the Wonder Wheel falls on their vehicle. David repeatedly asks the Fairy to turn him into a real boy. Eventually the ocean freezes and David's power source is depleted.

Two thousand years later, humans are extinct, and Manhattan is buried under glacial ice. The Mecha have evolved into an advanced silicon-based form called Specialists. They find David and Teddy, and discover they are original Mecha who knew living humans, making them special. The Specialists revive David and Teddy. David walks to the frozen Fairy statue, which collapses when he touches it. The Mecha use David's memories to reconstruct the Swinton home. David asks the Specialists if they can make him human, but they cannot. However, he insists they recreate Monica from DNA from the lock of her hair, which Teddy has kept. The Mecha warn David that the clone can live for only a day, and that the process cannot be repeated. David spends the next day with Monica and Teddy. Before she drifts off to sleep, Monica tells David she has always loved him. Teddy climbs onto the bed and watches the two lie peacefully together.

Kubrick began development on an adaptation of "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" in the late 1970s, hiring the story's author, Brian Aldiss, to write a film treatment. In 1985, Kubrick asked Steven Spielberg to direct the film, with Kubrick producing.[6] Warner Bros. agreed to co-finance A.I. and cover distribution duties.[7] The film labored in development hell, and Aldiss was fired by Kubrick over creative differences in 1989.[8] Bob Shaw briefly served as writer, leaving after six weeks due to Kubrick's demanding work schedule, and Ian Watson was hired as the new writer in March 1990. Aldiss later remarked, "Not only did the bastard fire me, he hired my enemy [Watson] instead." Kubrick handed Watson The Adventures of Pinocchio for inspiration, calling A.I. "a picaresque robot version of Pinocchio".[7][9]

Three weeks later, Watson gave Kubrick his first story treatment, and concluded his work on A.I. in May 1991 with another treatment of 90 pages. Gigolo Joe was originally conceived as a G.I. Mecha, but Watson suggested changing him to a male prostitute. Kubrick joked, "I guess we lost the kiddie market."[7] Meanwhile, Kubrick dropped A.I. to work on a film adaptation of Wartime Lies, feeling computer animation was not advanced enough to create the David character. However, after the release of Spielberg's Jurassic Park, with its innovative computer-generated imagery, it was announced in November 1993 that production of A.I. would begin in 1994.[10] Dennis Muren and Ned Gorman, who worked on Jurassic Park, became visual effects supervisors,[8] but Kubrick was displeased with their previsualization, and with the expense of hiring Industrial Light & Magic.[11]

"Stanley [Kubrick] showed Steven [Spielberg] 650 drawings which he had, and the script and the story, everything. Stanley said, 'Look, why don't you direct it and I'll produce it.' Steven was almost in shock."

Producer Jan Harlan, on Spielberg's first meeting with Kubrick about A.I.[12]

In early 1994, the film was in pre-production with Christopher "Fangorn" Baker as concept artist, and Sara Maitland assisting on the story, which gave it "a feminist fairy-tale focus".[7] Maitland said that Kubrick never referred to the film as A.I., but as Pinocchio.[11] Chris Cunningham became the new visual effects supervisor. Some of his unproduced work for A.I. can be seen on the DVD, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham.[13] Aside from considering computer animation, Kubrick also had Joseph Mazzello do a screen test for the lead role.[11] Cunningham helped assemble a series of "little robot-type humans" for the David character. "We tried to construct a little boy with a movable rubber face to see whether we could make it look appealing," producer Jan Harlan reflected. "But it was a total failure, it looked awful." Hans Moravec was brought in as a technical consultant.[11]Meanwhile, Kubrick and Harlan thought A.I. would be closer to Steven Spielberg's sensibilities as director.[14][15] Kubrick handed the position to Spielberg in 1995, but Spielberg chose to direct other projects, and convinced Kubrick to remain as director.[12][16] The film was put on hold due to Kubrick's commitment to Eyes Wide Shut (1999).[17] After the filmmaker's death in March 1999, Harlan and Christiane Kubrick approached Spielberg to take over the director's position.[18][19] By November 1999, Spielberg was writing the screenplay based on Watson's 90-page story treatment. It was his first solo screenplay credit since Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).[20] Spielberg remained close to Watson's treatment, but removed various sex scenes with Gigolo Joe. Pre-production was briefly halted during February 2000, because Spielberg pondered directing other projects, which were Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Minority Report and Memoirs of a Geisha.[17][21] The following month Spielberg announced that A.I. would be his next project, with Minority Report as a follow-up.[22] When he decided to fast track A.I., Spielberg brought Chris Baker back as concept artist.[16]

The original start date was July 10, 2000,[15] but filming was delayed until August.[23] Aside from a couple of weeks shooting on location in Oxbow Regional Park in Oregon, A.I. was shot entirely using sound stages at Warner Bros. Studios and the Spruce Goose Dome in Long Beach, California.[24]The Swinton house was constructed on Stage 16, while Stage 20 was used for Rouge City and other sets.[25][26] Spielberg copied Kubrick's obsessively secretive approach to filmmaking by refusing to give the complete script to cast and crew, banning press from the set, and making actors sign confidentiality agreements. Social robotics expert Cynthia Breazeal served as technical consultant during production.[15][27] Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law applied prosthetic makeup daily in an attempt to look shinier and robotic.[4] Costume designer Bob Ringwood (Batman, Troy) studied pedestrians on the Las Vegas Strip for his influence on the Rouge City extras.[28] Spielberg found post-production on A.I. difficult because he was simultaneously preparing to shoot Minority Report.[29]

The film's soundtrack was released by Warner Sunset Records in 2001. The original score was composed and conducted by John Williams and featured singers Lara Fabian on two songs and Josh Groban on one. The film's score also had a limited release as an official "For your consideration Academy Promo", as well as a complete score issue by La-La Land Records in 2015.[30] The band Ministry appears in the film playing the song "What About Us?" (but the song does not appear on the official soundtrack album).

Warner Bros. used an alternate reality game titled The Beast to promote the film. Over forty websites were created by Atomic Pictures in New York City (kept online at Cloudmakers.org) including the website for Cybertronics Corp. There were to be a series of video games for the Xbox video game console that followed the storyline of The Beast, but they went undeveloped. To avoid audiences mistaking A.I. for a family film, no action figures were created, although Hasbro released a talking Teddy following the film's release in June 2001.[15]

A.I. had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2001.[31]

A.I. Artificial Intelligence was released on VHS and DVD by Warner Home Video on March 5, 2002 in both a standard full-screen release with no bonus features, and as a 2-Disc Special Edition featuring the film in its original 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen format as well as an eight-part documentary detailing the film's development, production, music and visual effects. The bonus features also included interviews with Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Steven Spielberg and John Williams, two teaser trailers for the film's original theatrical release and an extensive photo gallery featuring production sills and Stanley Kubrick's original storyboards.[32]

The film was released on Blu-ray Disc on April 5, 2011 by Paramount Home Media Distribution for the U.S. and by Warner Home Video for international markets. This release featured the film a newly restored high-definition print and incorporated all the bonus features previously included on the 2-Disc Special Edition DVD.[33]

The film opened in 3,242 theaters in the United States on June 29, 2001, earning $29,352,630 during its opening weekend. A.I went on to gross $78.62 million in US totals as well as $157.31 million in foreign countries, coming to a worldwide total of $235.93 million.[34]

Based on 192 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 73% of critics gave the film positive notices with a score of 6.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A curious, not always seamless, amalgamation of Kubrick's chilly bleakness and Spielberg's warm-hearted optimism. A.I. is, in a word, fascinating."[35] By comparison, Metacritic collected an average score of 65, based on 32 reviews, which is considered favorable.[36]

Producer Jan Harlan stated that Kubrick "would have applauded" the final film, while Kubrick's widow Christiane also enjoyed A.I.[37] Brian Aldiss admired the film as well: "I thought what an inventive, intriguing, ingenious, involving film this was. There are flaws in it and I suppose I might have a personal quibble but it's so long since I wrote it." Of the film's ending, he wondered how it might have been had Kubrick directed the film: "That is one of the 'ifs' of film historyat least the ending indicates Spielberg adding some sugar to Kubrick's wine. The actual ending is overly sympathetic and moreover rather overtly engineered by a plot device that does not really bear credence. But it's a brilliant piece of film and of course it's a phenomenon because it contains the energies and talents of two brilliant filmmakers."[38] Richard Corliss heavily praised Spielberg's direction, as well as the cast and visual effects.[39] Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, saying that it was "wonderful and maddening."[40] Leonard Maltin, on the other hand, gives the film two stars out of four in his Movie Guide, writing: "[The] intriguing story draws us in, thanks in part to Osment's exceptional performance, but takes several wrong turns; ultimately, it just doesn't work. Spielberg rewrote the adaptation Stanley Kubrick commissioned of the Brian Aldiss short story 'Super Toys Last All Summer Long'; [the] result is a curious and uncomfortable hybrid of Kubrick and Spielberg sensibilities." However, he calls John Williams' music score "striking". Jonathan Rosenbaum compared A.I. to Solaris (1972), and praised both "Kubrick for proposing that Spielberg direct the project and Spielberg for doing his utmost to respect Kubrick's intentions while making it a profoundly personal work."[41] Film critic Armond White, of the New York Press, praised the film noting that "each part of David's journey through carnal and sexual universes into the final eschatological devastation becomes as profoundly philosophical and contemplative as anything by cinema's most thoughtful, speculative artists Borzage, Ozu, Demy, Tarkovsky."[42] Filmmaker Billy Wilder hailed A.I. as "the most underrated film of the past few years."[43] When British filmmaker Ken Russell saw the film, he wept during the ending.[44]

Mick LaSalle gave a largely negative review. "A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg." Dubbing it Spielberg's "first boring movie", LaSalle also believed the robots at the end of the film were aliens, and compared Gigolo Joe to the "useless" Jar Jar Binks, yet praised Robin Williams for his portrayal of a futuristic Albert Einstein.[45][not in citation given] Peter Travers gave a mixed review, concluding "Spielberg cannot live up to Kubrick's darker side of the future." But he still put the film on his top ten list that year for best movies.[46] David Denby in The New Yorker criticized A.I. for not adhering closely to his concept of the Pinocchio character. Spielberg responded to some of the criticisms of the film, stating that many of the "so called sentimental" elements of A.I., including the ending, were in fact Kubrick's and the darker elements were his own.[47] However, Sara Maitland, who worked on the project with Kubrick in the 1990s, claimed that one of the reasons Kubrick never started production on A.I. was because he had a hard time making the ending work.[48] James Berardinelli found the film "consistently involving, with moments of near-brilliance, but far from a masterpiece. In fact, as the long-awaited 'collaboration' of Kubrick and Spielberg, it ranks as something of a disappointment." Of the film's highly debated finale, he claimed, "There is no doubt that the concluding 30 minutes are all Spielberg; the outstanding question is where Kubrick's vision left off and Spielberg's began."[49]

Screenwriter Ian Watson has speculated, "Worldwide, A.I. was very successful (and the 4th highest earner of the year) but it didn't do quite so well in America, because the film, so I'm told, was too poetical and intellectual in general for American tastes. Plus, quite a few critics in America misunderstood the film, thinking for instance that the Giacometti-style beings in the final 20 minutes were aliens (whereas they were robots of the future who had evolved themselves from the robots in the earlier part of the film) and also thinking that the final 20 minutes were a sentimental addition by Spielberg, whereas those scenes were exactly what I wrote for Stanley and exactly what he wanted, filmed faithfully by Spielberg."[50]

In 2002, Spielberg told film critic Joe Leydon that "People pretend to think they know Stanley Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don't know either of us". "And what's really funny about that is, all the parts of A.I. that people assume were Stanley's were mine. And all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley's. The teddy bear was Stanley's. The whole last 20 minutes of the movie was completely Stanley's. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film all the stuff in the house was word for word, from Stanley's screenplay. This was Stanley's vision." "Eighty percent of the critics got it all mixed up. But I could see why. Because, obviously, I've done a lot of movies where people have cried and have been sentimental. And I've been accused of sentimentalizing hard-core material. But in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of A.I., not me. I'm the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That's why he wanted me to make the movie in the first place. He said, 'This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own.'"[51]

Upon rewatching the film many years after its release, BBC film critic Mark Kermode apologized to Spielberg in an interview in January 2013 for "getting it wrong" on the film when he first viewed it in 2001. He now believes the film to be Spielberg's "enduring masterpiece".[52]

Visual effects supervisors Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Michael Lantieri and Scott Farrar were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, while John Williams was nominated for Best Original Music Score.[53] Steven Spielberg, Jude Law and Williams received nominations at the 59th Golden Globe Awards.[54] A.I. was successful at the Saturn Awards, winning five awards, including Best Science Fiction Film along with Best Writing for Spielberg and Best Performance by a Younger Actor for Osment.[55]

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Artificial Intelligence: The Pros, Cons, and What to Really Fear

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For the last several years, Russia has been steadily improving its ground combat robots. Just last year,Kalashnikov, the maker of the famous AK-47 rifle,announced it would builda range of products based on neural networks, including a fully automated combat module that promises to identify and shoot at targets.

According to Bendett,Russia delivered a white paperto the UN saying that from Moscow's perspective,it would be inadmissible to leave UASwithout anyhuman oversight. In other words, Russia always wants a human in the loop and to be the one to push the final button to fire that weapon.

Worth noting: "A lot of these are still kind of far-out applications," Bendett said.

The same can be said for China's more military-focused applications of AI, largely in surveillance and UAV operations for the PLA,said Elsa Kania, Technology Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Speaking beside Bendett at the Genius Machines event in March, Kania said China's military applications appear to beat a a fairly nascent stage in its development.

That is to say: There'snothing to fear about lethal AI applications yet unless you're an alleged terrorist in the Middle East. For the rest of us, we have our Siris, Alexas, Cortanas and more, helping us shop, search, listen to music,and tag friends in images on social media.

Until the robot uprising comes, let us hope there will always be clips ofthe swearing Atlas Robot from Boston Dynamics available online whenever we need a laugh. It may be better to laugh before these robots start helping each other through doorwaysentirely independent of humans. (Too late.)

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Choosing to be Childfree to Live a More Sustainable Lifestyle

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guest post by: Emily of Conservation Folks

Buying a house, having a successful career, and raising children are all part of the classic American dream. While it may sound idyllic, its not always an option in todays world. We currently have a growing population of more than 7.4 billion people and counting on a planet that can only sustain a maximum of 10 to 11 billion souls. How can living a childfree life contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle?

According to science, you dont have to live entirely childfree to have a sustainable lifestyle just have one fewer child.Its been calculated that having one fewer child could help to reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions by more than 58 tons per year. For comparison, getting rid of your car only reduces emissions by about 2.4 tons per year, and upgrading your light bulbs from incandescent to CFL or LED reduces your emissions by less than 1/10 of a ton.

The key here, in addition to reducing carbon emissions, is to help stabilize the population. While the planet could potentially support a population of around 11 billion, it will not be able to do so well. What is the ideal stable population? Expert opinions vary but many do agree that having fewer children is key. Ideally, the number of children per couple should be 2.1 or fewer. The best way to ensure our planet and resources are able to support the human race is to take steps toward stabilizing our population, but how?

Many modern families have already chosen to limit their family size to one or two children, but for every family that only has one or two kids, there is one that has chosen to shun contraceptive and have as many children as they can carry, i.e. the Duggar family of 19 Kids and Counting. Implementing childbearing laws legally limiting couples to 2 children has been tried before in China, specifically, though there are other areas that have implemented similar laws/policies. Unfortunately, in some areas, it has lead to a stagnating birth rate that hasnt produced enough children to take the place of adults and elderly workers who are reaching the age of retirement.

Having one less child or choosing to have only two children, is one way to be more sustainable. However, to have a large impact on the world, it will have to be implemented on a global scale.

Having a childfree life isnt just good for the environment it can be good for you as well. First, you will have more freedom. Ive always wanted to travel the world without children, I can pick up and go anytime my career and finances will allow. I dont have to worry about finding someone to watch the kids or go through the hassle of bringing them with me to a foreign country. While kids can definitely benefit from this kind of experience, there are tons of things that are simply out of reach if youre traveling with children in tow. Second, youll have more money. The average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is roughly $300,000. Break that down per year and it comes out to somewhere around $17,000. Think of all you could do each year with $17,000 extra.The possibilities are endless. Now, Im not saying that all these things arent possible after youve had children, but having extra money certainly makes them easier.

Finally, you also have the option to add children to your life in the future either biologically or by fostering or adopting. According to the Childrens Bureau, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, there is an average of 500,000 children in the foster care system at any given time. Having fewer children or choosing to live childfree is a totally personal choice but it is one that can have many benefits.

More about Emily:Emily is a sustainability blogger who is passionate about living an eco-friendly lifestyle. You can check out more of her work on her blog, Conservation Folks.

How do you think being childfree helps the environment? Comment below!

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World Travel Awards

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Worlds finest travel brands revealed at World Travel Awards Grand Final 2018 in Lisbon

The finest travel brands in the world have been unveiled at a star-studded gala ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal. The elite of the travel industry gathered for the World Travel Awards Grand Final Gala Ceremony 2018 at the historic Ptio da Gal to find out who amongst them had been crowned the finest in the world.

The finest travel brands in Africa and the Indian Ocean have been unveiled at a star-studded gala ceremony in Durban, South Africa. The elite of the travel industry assembled for the World Travel Awards Africa & Indian Ocean Gala Ceremony 2018 at the Durban International Convention Centre to find out who amongst them would be crowned best of the best.

The finest travel brands in the Caribbean and North America have been unveiled at a star-studded gala ceremony in Jamaica. The whos who of the travel industry gathered for the World Travel Awards Caribbean & North America Gala Ceremony 2018 at Sandals Montego Bay to find out who amongst them would be crowned best of the best.

The finest travel brands in South and Central America have been unveiled at the World Travel Awards Latin America Ceremony 2018 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Hundreds of the leading figures of South and Central's travel and tourism industries attended the red-carpet ceremony, which was staged at Guayaquil's historic Palacio de Cristal.

Asia and Australasia's finest travel brands have been unveiled at World Travel Awards Asia & Australasia Gala Ceremony 2018 in Hong Kong. Hundreds of the leading figures from Asia and Australasia's travel and tourism industries attended the red-carpet ceremony, which was staged at the newly-refurbished InterContinental Grand Stanford Hong Kong.

Madeira has been revealed as the host for the World Travel Awards (WTA) Europe Gala Ceremony 2019. The Portuguese destination, which has taken the title of Europes Leading Island Destination for the past five years, will use the event to boost its profile on the international stage.

Europe's finest travel brands have been unveiled at World Travel Awards Europe Gala Ceremony 2018 in Athens, Greece. Hundreds of the leading figures of Europe's travel and tourism industry attended the ceremony, which was staged at the historic Zappeion Megaron Hall.

Ras al Khaimah has welcomed the World Travel Awards Middle East Gala Ceremony for the first time, with the best of regional hospitality recognised at the event.

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Singularity | Singularity Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

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For the event, see Singularity (event).

Game Cover

Singularity is a video game developed by Raven Software and published by Activision. It was released for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Singularity is Raven Software's second title based on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, the first being X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The title was announced at Activision's E3 2008 press conference.

Singularity follows Nathaniel Renko through a variety of missions that must be completed to progress the story line. The Game-play is similar to Call of Duty and Bioshock type games. Renko starts off with nothing and is lead by James Devlin through a tutorial type mission. Renko can interact with a variety of items. Some are useful, e.g., Chests, notes, and recorders. Some are not, e.g., Telephones and typewriters. Eventually Renko finds weapons but can only carry two at any given time since there is no actual inventory. Finding the Sniper Rifle is the first interaction with time manipulation. While using the scope, time can be slowed. Head shots are instant kills for humans only. Mutated enemies take more to kill. It is possible to sever limbs, even torsos, without killing them, depending on the weapon used. Certain weapons can actually split enemies in half. E-99 tech is scattered throughout Katorga-12 and can be collected to buy Weapons, Upgrades , and Ammunition. Once found, the Time Manipulation Device or TMD is used for a variety of things and becomes a permanent part of Renkos equipment.

Other useful items found.

The plot revolves around a mysterious island known only as "Katorga-12" where Russian experiments involving "E99" (Element 99, which appears to be an equivalent to the actual element Einsteinium, which has no special properties like those referenced in the game), took place during the height of the Cold War era. Sometime during 1950, a terrible catastrophe known as the "Singularity" occurred on the island. The player controls Nate Renko, an elite Special Forces soldier who is sent to investigate bizarre radiation emissions coming from the island, only to crash land there. After regaining consciousness, Nate finds the TMD (Time Manipulation Device) and discovers that the island is constantly shifting between the time periods of 1950 and 2010. Renko's goal is to find his co-pilot, escape the island and eventually prevent the Singularity from occurring. Besides having to deal with hostile Russian forces in both time periods, the player must also deal with hideously mutated flora, fauna and former residents of the island, some of which have developed time manipulation powers of their own.

During the '50s, at the very start of the Cold War, it seemed that the Americans would always be the dominating power, thanks to their knowledge of the atomic energy. So, the USSR leader Joseph Stalin ordered his scientific staff to begin experimenting in that field. Then on a small island near Kamchatka, named Katorga-12, the scientists found the mysterious "Element 99" or E-99 for short, which, despite its inherent instability, was an incredible power source. The studies continued until 1955, when the island was all but destroyed by a mysterious incident. The government erased Katorga-12 from the maps and hid every piece of news about E-99.

In 2010, a sudden electromagnetic surge from Katorga-12 damages an American spy satellite. A military black ops team is sent on the presumably uninhabited island, but a second surge causes their helicopter to crash. Captain Nathaniel Renko, one of the two survivors, enters the abandoned scientific complex; he's then exposed to a strange energy wave, only to find himself in 1955.

While in 1955, Renko saves a man from a deadly fall, carrying him out of the burning complex. On his way from the building, a man shouts at Renko to stop and let him die, before he is crushed by debris. This scene turns out to later have a big effect on the game. A group of survivors refers to the man as "Demichev", just before Renko is abruptly returned to the year 2010. Renko discovers that the island has somewhat changed and encounters strange and violent creatures. He is forced to fight through a school and regroups with Devlin, the second survivor. Both soldiers are captured by Russian troopers. The Russian commander starts to ask them for a "TMD"; when Devlin declares that their actions are not legal, the Russian shoots him in the head.

Renko is saved by a woman named Kathryn. It is revealed that she works for an organization called MIR-12. MIR-12 revealed that two scientists helped study E-99. They were Viktor Barisov and Nikolai Demichev. Barisov was claimed dead due to a accident in a lab so only Demichev was left to work on the new found element. Barisov had created a machine called the Time Manipulation Device or the TMD. It was also revealed that MIR-12 discovered a journal saying that only one can save time and that person was Renko. Kathryn tells Renko to find the TMD and use it to go back in time and save Barisov. Renko succeeds and returns back to 2010 with Barisov.

Barisov and Renko plans to fix history by reversing the singularity with an E-99 bomb at an earlier time before the accident transformed most of the residents into mutants. Renko used the TMD to raise a ship called The Pearl for it had a E-99 bomb in its cargo bay. Renko recovers the bomb and returns to Barisov, who informs him that Kathryn was shot and killed while providing a distraction.

The bomb was missing its most important element (the E-99 core), so Renko has to carry it to the Cooker: the giant structure where in the past isotopes of E-99 were created. The 2010 Cooker is destroyed, so Renko had to travel to an earlier time to charge the bomb. Renko charged the bomb in 1955, overloading the Cooker systems: he returns to 2010 seconds before the Cooker exploded. He and Barisov fought into the heart of Katorga-12. Renko traveled back in time and destroyed the facility with the fully charged E-99 bomb. It is implied that this explosion triggered the destruction of the Singularity and mutated the island's population.

When Renko returned to 2010, he finds the facility still the same as if nothing happened. He finds Demichev holding Barisov hostage behind him. Demichev revealed that he rebuilt the facility after the bomb was detonated (presumably at another location). Renko shoots Demichev with a nonlethal shot, freeing Barisov in the process. Barisov figured out what was wrong, believing that the facility wasn't the problem. The real problem was Demichev. When Renko saved Demichev at the beginning of the game, he rewrote history. Demichev also revealed that while Renko was saving him from the fire, another Renko was there trying to prevent himself from saving Demichev's life. This was the man who yelled at Renko to let Demichev die before being crushed by debris. Demichev gave an offer to grant Renko unlimited power if he gives him the TMD. Barisov protests and tells Renko to go back in time using the Singularity to power the TMD, and kill himself to turn history back to normal. The player is left with a choice resulting in 3 endings:

A post-credit scene shows Kathryn emerging in 1955 from the Pearl wreckage. Mortally injured and quickly losing blood, she uses the confusion amongst the station's personnel during Demichev's seizure of power to seclude herself in one of the station's offices and write out the messages that are found in the MIR-12 journal, messages that had set in motion her original meeting with Renko in 2010.

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Genetics – Wikipedia

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This article is about the general scientific term. For the scientific journal, see Genetics (journal).

Science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms

Genetics is a branch of biology concerned with the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.[1][2][3]

Gregor Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian friar, discovered genetics in the late 19th-century. Mendel studied "trait inheritance", patterns in the way traits are handed down from parents to offspring. He observed that organisms (pea plants) inherit traits by way of discrete "units of inheritance". This term, still used today, is a somewhat ambiguous definition of what is referred to as a gene.

Trait inheritance and molecular inheritance mechanisms of genes are still primary principles of genetics in the 21st century, but modern genetics has expanded beyond inheritance to studying the function and behavior of genes. Gene structure and function, variation, and distribution are studied within the context of the cell, the organism (e.g. dominance), and within the context of a population. Genetics has given rise to a number of subfields, including epigenetics and population genetics. Organisms studied within the broad field span the domains of life (archaea, bacteria, and eukarya).

Genetic processes work in combination with an organism's environment and experiences to influence development and behavior, often referred to as nature versus nurture. The intracellular or extracellular environment of a cell or organism may switch gene transcription on or off. A classic example is two seeds of genetically identical corn, one placed in a temperate climate and one in an arid climate. While the average height of the two corn stalks may be genetically determined to be equal, the one in the arid climate only grows to half the height of the one in the temperate climate due to lack of water and nutrients in its environment.

The word genetics stems from the ancient Greek genetikos meaning "genitive"/"generative", which in turn derives from genesis meaning "origin".[4][5][6]

The observation that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding.[7] The modern science of genetics, seeking to understand this process, began with the work of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century.[8]

Prior to Mendel, Imre Festetics, a Hungarian noble, who lived in Kszeg before Mendel, was the first who used the word "genetics." He described several rules of genetic inheritance in his work The genetic law of the Nature (Die genetische Gestze der Natur, 1819). His second law is the same as what Mendel published. In his third law, he developed the basic principles of mutation (he can be considered a forerunner of Hugo de Vries).[9]

Other theories of inheritance preceded Mendel's work. A popular theory during the 19th century, and implied by Charles Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species, was blending inheritance: the idea that individuals inherit a smooth blend of traits from their parents.[10] Mendel's work provided examples where traits were definitely not blended after hybridization, showing that traits are produced by combinations of distinct genes rather than a continuous blend. Blending of traits in the progeny is now explained by the action of multiple genes with quantitative effects. Another theory that had some support at that time was the inheritance of acquired characteristics: the belief that individuals inherit traits strengthened by their parents. This theory (commonly associated with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) is now known to be wrongthe experiences of individuals do not affect the genes they pass to their children,[11] although evidence in the field of epigenetics has revived some aspects of Lamarck's theory.[12] Other theories included the pangenesis of Charles Darwin (which had both acquired and inherited aspects) and Francis Galton's reformulation of pangenesis as both particulate and inherited.[13]

Modern genetics started with Mendel's studies of the nature of inheritance in plants. In his paper "Versuche ber Pflanzenhybriden" ("Experiments on Plant Hybridization"), presented in 1865 to the Naturforschender Verein (Society for Research in Nature) in Brnn, Mendel traced the inheritance patterns of certain traits in pea plants and described them mathematically.[14] Although this pattern of inheritance could only be observed for a few traits, Mendel's work suggested that heredity was particulate, not acquired, and that the inheritance patterns of many traits could be explained through simple rules and ratios.

The importance of Mendel's work did not gain wide understanding until 1900, after his death, when Hugo de Vries and other scientists rediscovered his research. William Bateson, a proponent of Mendel's work, coined the word genetics in 1905[15][16] (the adjective genetic, derived from the Greek word genesis, "origin", predates the noun and was first used in a biological sense in 1860[17]). Bateson both acted as a mentor and was aided significantly by the work of female scientists from Newnham College at Cambridge, specifically the work of Becky Saunders, Nora Darwin Barlow, and Muriel Wheldale Onslow.[18] Bateson popularized the usage of the word genetics to describe the study of inheritance in his inaugural address to the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization in London in 1906.[19]

After the rediscovery of Mendel's work, scientists tried to determine which molecules in the cell were responsible for inheritance. In 1911, Thomas Hunt Morgan argued that genes are on chromosomes, based on observations of a sex-linked white eye mutation in fruit flies.[20] In 1913, his student Alfred Sturtevant used the phenomenon of genetic linkage to show that genes are arranged linearly on the chromosome.[21]

Although genes were known to exist on chromosomes, chromosomes are composed of both protein and DNA, and scientists did not know which of the two is responsible for inheritance. In 1928, Frederick Griffith discovered the phenomenon of transformation (see Griffith's experiment): dead bacteria could transfer genetic material to "transform" other still-living bacteria. Sixteen years later, in 1944, the AveryMacLeodMcCarty experiment identified DNA as the molecule responsible for transformation.[22] The role of the nucleus as the repository of genetic information in eukaryotes had been established by Hmmerling in 1943 in his work on the single celled alga Acetabularia.[23] The HersheyChase experiment in 1952 confirmed that DNA (rather than protein) is the genetic material of the viruses that infect bacteria, providing further evidence that DNA is the molecule responsible for inheritance.[24]

James Watson and Francis Crick determined the structure of DNA in 1953, using the X-ray crystallography work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins that indicated DNA has a helical structure (i.e., shaped like a corkscrew).[25][26] Their double-helix model had two strands of DNA with the nucleotides pointing inward, each matching a complementary nucleotide on the other strand to form what look like rungs on a twisted ladder.[27] This structure showed that genetic information exists in the sequence of nucleotides on each strand of DNA. The structure also suggested a simple method for replication: if the strands are separated, new partner strands can be reconstructed for each based on the sequence of the old strand. This property is what gives DNA its semi-conservative nature where one strand of new DNA is from an original parent strand.[28]

Although the structure of DNA showed how inheritance works, it was still not known how DNA influences the behavior of cells. In the following years, scientists tried to understand how DNA controls the process of protein production.[29] It was discovered that the cell uses DNA as a template to create matching messenger RNA, molecules with nucleotides very similar to DNA. The nucleotide sequence of a messenger RNA is used to create an amino acid sequence in protein; this translation between nucleotide sequences and amino acid sequences is known as the genetic code.[30]

With the newfound molecular understanding of inheritance came an explosion of research.[31] A notable theory arose from Tomoko Ohta in 1973 with her amendment to the neutral theory of molecular evolution through publishing the nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution. In this theory, Ohta stressed the importance of natural selection and the environment to the rate at which genetic evolution occurs.[32] One important development was chain-termination DNA sequencing in 1977 by Frederick Sanger. This technology allows scientists to read the nucleotide sequence of a DNA molecule.[33] In 1983, Kary Banks Mullis developed the polymerase chain reaction, providing a quick way to isolate and amplify a specific section of DNA from a mixture.[34] The efforts of the Human Genome Project, Department of Energy, NIH, and parallel private efforts by Celera Genomics led to the sequencing of the human genome in 2003.[35][36]

At its most fundamental level, inheritance in organisms occurs by passing discrete heritable units, called genes, from parents to offspring.[37] This property was first observed by Gregor Mendel, who studied the segregation of heritable traits in pea plants.[14][38] In his experiments studying the trait for flower color, Mendel observed that the flowers of each pea plant were either purple or whitebut never an intermediate between the two colors. These different, discrete versions of the same gene are called alleles.

In the case of the pea, which is a diploid species, each individual plant has two copies of each gene, one copy inherited from each parent.[39] Many species, including humans, have this pattern of inheritance. Diploid organisms with two copies of the same allele of a given gene are called homozygous at that gene locus, while organisms with two different alleles of a given gene are called heterozygous.

The set of alleles for a given organism is called its genotype, while the observable traits of the organism are called its phenotype. When organisms are heterozygous at a gene, often one allele is called dominant as its qualities dominate the phenotype of the organism, while the other allele is called recessive as its qualities recede and are not observed. Some alleles do not have complete dominance and instead have incomplete dominance by expressing an intermediate phenotype, or codominance by expressing both alleles at once.[40]

When a pair of organisms reproduce sexually, their offspring randomly inherit one of the two alleles from each parent. These observations of discrete inheritance and the segregation of alleles are collectively known as Mendel's first law or the Law of Segregation.

Geneticists use diagrams and symbols to describe inheritance. A gene is represented by one or a few letters. Often a "+" symbol is used to mark the usual, non-mutant allele for a gene.[41]

In fertilization and breeding experiments (and especially when discussing Mendel's laws) the parents are referred to as the "P" generation and the offspring as the "F1" (first filial) generation. When the F1 offspring mate with each other, the offspring are called the "F2" (second filial) generation. One of the common diagrams used to predict the result of cross-breeding is the Punnett square.

When studying human genetic diseases, geneticists often use pedigree charts to represent the inheritance of traits.[42] These charts map the inheritance of a trait in a family tree.

Organisms have thousands of genes, and in sexually reproducing organisms these genes generally assort independently of each other. This means that the inheritance of an allele for yellow or green pea color is unrelated to the inheritance of alleles for white or purple flowers. This phenomenon, known as "Mendel's second law" or the "law of independent assortment," means that the alleles of different genes get shuffled between parents to form offspring with many different combinations. (Some genes do not assort independently, demonstrating genetic linkage, a topic discussed later in this article.)

Often different genes can interact in a way that influences the same trait. In the Blue-eyed Mary (Omphalodes verna), for example, there exists a gene with alleles that determine the color of flowers: blue or magenta. Another gene, however, controls whether the flowers have color at all or are white. When a plant has two copies of this white allele, its flowers are whiteregardless of whether the first gene has blue or magenta alleles. This interaction between genes is called epistasis, with the second gene epistatic to the first.[43]

Many traits are not discrete features (e.g. purple or white flowers) but are instead continuous features (e.g. human height and skin color). These complex traits are products of many genes.[44] The influence of these genes is mediated, to varying degrees, by the environment an organism has experienced. The degree to which an organism's genes contribute to a complex trait is called heritability.[45] Measurement of the heritability of a trait is relativein a more variable environment, the environment has a bigger influence on the total variation of the trait. For example, human height is a trait with complex causes. It has a heritability of 89% in the United States. In Nigeria, however, where people experience a more variable access to good nutrition and health care, height has a heritability of only 62%.[46]

The molecular basis for genes is deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA is composed of a chain of nucleotides, of which there are four types: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). Genetic information exists in the sequence of these nucleotides, and genes exist as stretches of sequence along the DNA chain.[47] Viruses are the only exception to this rulesometimes viruses use the very similar molecule RNA instead of DNA as their genetic material.[48] Viruses cannot reproduce without a host and are unaffected by many genetic processes, so tend not to be considered living organisms.

DNA normally exists as a double-stranded molecule, coiled into the shape of a double helix. Each nucleotide in DNA preferentially pairs with its partner nucleotide on the opposite strand: A pairs with T, and C pairs with G. Thus, in its two-stranded form, each strand effectively contains all necessary information, redundant with its partner strand. This structure of DNA is the physical basis for inheritance: DNA replication duplicates the genetic information by splitting the strands and using each strand as a template for synthesis of a new partner strand.[49]

Genes are arranged linearly along long chains of DNA base-pair sequences. In bacteria, each cell usually contains a single circular genophore, while eukaryotic organisms (such as plants and animals) have their DNA arranged in multiple linear chromosomes. These DNA strands are often extremely long; the largest human chromosome, for example, is about 247 million base pairs in length.[50] The DNA of a chromosome is associated with structural proteins that organize, compact, and control access to the DNA, forming a material called chromatin; in eukaryotes, chromatin is usually composed of nucleosomes, segments of DNA wound around cores of histone proteins.[51] The full set of hereditary material in an organism (usually the combined DNA sequences of all chromosomes) is called the genome.

While haploid organisms have only one copy of each chromosome, most animals and many plants are diploid, containing two of each chromosome and thus two copies of every gene.[39] The two alleles for a gene are located on identical loci of the two homologous chromosomes, each allele inherited from a different parent.

Many species have so-called sex chromosomes that determine the gender of each organism.[52] In humans and many other animals, the Y chromosome contains the gene that triggers the development of the specifically male characteristics. In evolution, this chromosome has lost most of its content and also most of its genes, while the X chromosome is similar to the other chromosomes and contains many genes. The X and Y chromosomes form a strongly heterogeneous pair.

When cells divide, their full genome is copied and each daughter cell inherits one copy. This process, called mitosis, is the simplest form of reproduction and is the basis for asexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction can also occur in multicellular organisms, producing offspring that inherit their genome from a single parent. Offspring that are genetically identical to their parents are called clones.

Eukaryotic organisms often use sexual reproduction to generate offspring that contain a mixture of genetic material inherited from two different parents. The process of sexual reproduction alternates between forms that contain single copies of the genome (haploid) and double copies (diploid).[39] Haploid cells fuse and combine genetic material to create a diploid cell with paired chromosomes. Diploid organisms form haploids by dividing, without replicating their DNA, to create daughter cells that randomly inherit one of each pair of chromosomes. Most animals and many plants are diploid for most of their lifespan, with the haploid form reduced to single cell gametes such as sperm or eggs.

Although they do not use the haploid/diploid method of sexual reproduction, bacteria have many methods of acquiring new genetic information. Some bacteria can undergo conjugation, transferring a small circular piece of DNA to another bacterium.[53] Bacteria can also take up raw DNA fragments found in the environment and integrate them into their genomes, a phenomenon known as transformation.[54] These processes result in horizontal gene transfer, transmitting fragments of genetic information between organisms that would be otherwise unrelated.

The diploid nature of chromosomes allows for genes on different chromosomes to assort independently or be separated from their homologous pair during sexual reproduction wherein haploid gametes are formed. In this way new combinations of genes can occur in the offspring of a mating pair. Genes on the same chromosome would theoretically never recombine. However, they do, via the cellular process of chromosomal crossover. During crossover, chromosomes exchange stretches of DNA, effectively shuffling the gene alleles between the chromosomes.[55] This process of chromosomal crossover generally occurs during meiosis, a series of cell divisions that creates haploid cells.

The first cytological demonstration of crossing over was performed by Harriet Creighton and Barbara McClintock in 1931. Their research and experiments on corn provided cytological evidence for the genetic theory that linked genes on paired chromosomes do in fact exchange places from one homolog to the other.[56]

The probability of chromosomal crossover occurring between two given points on the chromosome is related to the distance between the points. For an arbitrarily long distance, the probability of crossover is high enough that the inheritance of the genes is effectively uncorrelated.[57] For genes that are closer together, however, the lower probability of crossover means that the genes demonstrate genetic linkage; alleles for the two genes tend to be inherited together. The amounts of linkage between a series of genes can be combined to form a linear linkage map that roughly describes the arrangement of the genes along the chromosome.[58]

Genes generally express their functional effect through the production of proteins, which are complex molecules responsible for most functions in the cell. Proteins are made up of one or more polypeptide chains, each of which is composed of a sequence of amino acids, and the DNA sequence of a gene (through an RNA intermediate) is used to produce a specific amino acid sequence. This process begins with the production of an RNA molecule with a sequence matching the gene's DNA sequence, a process called transcription.

This messenger RNA molecule is then used to produce a corresponding amino acid sequence through a process called translation. Each group of three nucleotides in the sequence, called a codon, corresponds either to one of the twenty possible amino acids in a protein or an instruction to end the amino acid sequence; this correspondence is called the genetic code.[59] The flow of information is unidirectional: information is transferred from nucleotide sequences into the amino acid sequence of proteins, but it never transfers from protein back into the sequence of DNAa phenomenon Francis Crick called the central dogma of molecular biology.[60]

The specific sequence of amino acids results in a unique three-dimensional structure for that protein, and the three-dimensional structures of proteins are related to their functions.[61][62] Some are simple structural molecules, like the fibers formed by the protein collagen. Proteins can bind to other proteins and simple molecules, sometimes acting as enzymes by facilitating chemical reactions within the bound molecules (without changing the structure of the protein itself). Protein structure is dynamic; the protein hemoglobin bends into slightly different forms as it facilitates the capture, transport, and release of oxygen molecules within mammalian blood.

A single nucleotide difference within DNA can cause a change in the amino acid sequence of a protein. Because protein structures are the result of their amino acid sequences, some changes can dramatically change the properties of a protein by destabilizing the structure or changing the surface of the protein in a way that changes its interaction with other proteins and molecules. For example, sickle-cell anemia is a human genetic disease that results from a single base difference within the coding region for the -globin section of hemoglobin, causing a single amino acid change that changes hemoglobin's physical properties.[63] Sickle-cell versions of hemoglobin stick to themselves, stacking to form fibers that distort the shape of red blood cells carrying the protein. These sickle-shaped cells no longer flow smoothly through blood vessels, having a tendency to clog or degrade, causing the medical problems associated with this disease.

Some DNA sequences are transcribed into RNA but are not translated into protein productssuch RNA molecules are called non-coding RNA. In some cases, these products fold into structures which are involved in critical cell functions (e.g. ribosomal RNA and transfer RNA). RNA can also have regulatory effects through hybridization interactions with other RNA molecules (e.g. microRNA).

Although genes contain all the information an organism uses to function, the environment plays an important role in determining the ultimate phenotypes an organism displays. The phrase "nature and nurture" refers to this complementary relationship. The phenotype of an organism depends on the interaction of genes and the environment. An interesting example is the coat coloration of the Siamese cat. In this case, the body temperature of the cat plays the role of the environment. The cat's genes code for dark hair, thus the hair-producing cells in the cat make cellular proteins resulting in dark hair. But these dark hair-producing proteins are sensitive to temperature (i.e. have a mutation causing temperature-sensitivity) and denature in higher-temperature environments, failing to produce dark-hair pigment in areas where the cat has a higher body temperature. In a low-temperature environment, however, the protein's structure is stable and produces dark-hair pigment normally. The protein remains functional in areas of skin that are coldersuch as its legs, ears, tail and faceso the cat has dark-hair at its extremities.[64]

Environment plays a major role in effects of the human genetic disease phenylketonuria.[65] The mutation that causes phenylketonuria disrupts the ability of the body to break down the amino acid phenylalanine, causing a toxic build-up of an intermediate molecule that, in turn, causes severe symptoms of progressive intellectual disability and seizures. However, if someone with the phenylketonuria mutation follows a strict diet that avoids this amino acid, they remain normal and healthy.

A common method for determining how genes and environment ("nature and nurture") contribute to a phenotype involves studying identical and fraternal twins, or other siblings of multiple births.[66] Identical siblings are genetically the same since they come from the same zygote. Meanwhile, fraternal twins are as genetically different from one another as normal siblings. By comparing how often a certain disorder occurs in a pair of identical twins to how often it occurs in a pair of fraternal twins, scientists can determine whether that disorder is caused by genetic or postnatal environmental factors. One famous example involved the study of the Genain quadruplets, who were identical quadruplets all diagnosed with schizophrenia.[67]However, such tests cannot separate genetic factors from environmental factors affecting fetal development.

The genome of a given organism contains thousands of genes, but not all these genes need to be active at any given moment. A gene is expressed when it is being transcribed into mRNA and there exist many cellular methods of controlling the expression of genes such that proteins are produced only when needed by the cell. Transcription factors are regulatory proteins that bind to DNA, either promoting or inhibiting the transcription of a gene.[68] Within the genome of Escherichia coli bacteria, for example, there exists a series of genes necessary for the synthesis of the amino acid tryptophan. However, when tryptophan is already available to the cell, these genes for tryptophan synthesis are no longer needed. The presence of tryptophan directly affects the activity of the genestryptophan molecules bind to the tryptophan repressor (a transcription factor), changing the repressor's structure such that the repressor binds to the genes. The tryptophan repressor blocks the transcription and expression of the genes, thereby creating negative feedback regulation of the tryptophan synthesis process.[69]

Differences in gene expression are especially clear within multicellular organisms, where cells all contain the same genome but have very different structures and behaviors due to the expression of different sets of genes. All the cells in a multicellular organism derive from a single cell, differentiating into variant cell types in response to external and intercellular signals and gradually establishing different patterns of gene expression to create different behaviors. As no single gene is responsible for the development of structures within multicellular organisms, these patterns arise from the complex interactions between many cells.

Within eukaryotes, there exist structural features of chromatin that influence the transcription of genes, often in the form of modifications to DNA and chromatin that are stably inherited by daughter cells.[70] These features are called "epigenetic" because they exist "on top" of the DNA sequence and retain inheritance from one cell generation to the next. Because of epigenetic features, different cell types grown within the same medium can retain very different properties. Although epigenetic features are generally dynamic over the course of development, some, like the phenomenon of paramutation, have multigenerational inheritance and exist as rare exceptions to the general rule of DNA as the basis for inheritance.[71]

During the process of DNA replication, errors occasionally occur in the polymerization of the second strand. These errors, called mutations, can affect the phenotype of an organism, especially if they occur within the protein coding sequence of a gene. Error rates are usually very low1 error in every 10100million basesdue to the "proofreading" ability of DNA polymerases.[72][73] Processes that increase the rate of changes in DNA are called mutagenic: mutagenic chemicals promote errors in DNA replication, often by interfering with the structure of base-pairing, while UV radiation induces mutations by causing damage to the DNA structure.[74] Chemical damage to DNA occurs naturally as well and cells use DNA repair mechanisms to repair mismatches and breaks. The repair does not, however, always restore the original sequence.

In organisms that use chromosomal crossover to exchange DNA and recombine genes, errors in alignment during meiosis can also cause mutations.[75] Errors in crossover are especially likely when similar sequences cause partner chromosomes to adopt a mistaken alignment; this makes some regions in genomes more prone to mutating in this way. These errors create large structural changes in DNA sequence duplications, inversions, deletions of entire regions or the accidental exchange of whole parts of sequences between different chromosomes (chromosomal translocation).

Mutations alter an organism's genotype and occasionally this causes different phenotypes to appear. Most mutations have little effect on an organism's phenotype, health, or reproductive fitness.[76] Mutations that do have an effect are usually detrimental, but occasionally some can be beneficial.[77] Studies in the fly Drosophila melanogaster suggest that if a mutation changes a protein produced by a gene, about 70 percent of these mutations will be harmful with the remainder being either neutral or weakly beneficial.[78]

Population genetics studies the distribution of genetic differences within populations and how these distributions change over time.[79] Changes in the frequency of an allele in a population are mainly influenced by natural selection, where a given allele provides a selective or reproductive advantage to the organism,[80] as well as other factors such as mutation, genetic drift, genetic hitchhiking,[81] artificial selection and migration.[82]

Over many generations, the genomes of organisms can change significantly, resulting in evolution. In the process called adaptation, selection for beneficial mutations can cause a species to evolve into forms better able to survive in their environment.[83] New species are formed through the process of speciation, often caused by geographical separations that prevent populations from exchanging genes with each other.[84]

By comparing the homology between different species' genomes, it is possible to calculate the evolutionary distance between them and when they may have diverged. Genetic comparisons are generally considered a more accurate method of characterizing the relatedness between species than the comparison of phenotypic characteristics. The evolutionary distances between species can be used to form evolutionary trees; these trees represent the common descent and divergence of species over time, although they do not show the transfer of genetic material between unrelated species (known as horizontal gene transfer and most common in bacteria).[85]

Although geneticists originally studied inheritance in a wide range of organisms, researchers began to specialize in studying the genetics of a particular subset of organisms. The fact that significant research already existed for a given organism would encourage new researchers to choose it for further study, and so eventually a few model organisms became the basis for most genetics research.[86] Common research topics in model organism genetics include the study of gene regulation and the involvement of genes in development and cancer.

Organisms were chosen, in part, for convenienceshort generation times and easy genetic manipulation made some organisms popular genetics research tools. Widely used model organisms include the gut bacterium Escherichia coli, the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), and the common house mouse (Mus musculus).

Medical genetics seeks to understand how genetic variation relates to human health and disease.[87] When searching for an unknown gene that may be involved in a disease, researchers commonly use genetic linkage and genetic pedigree charts to find the location on the genome associated with the disease. At the population level, researchers take advantage of Mendelian randomization to look for locations in the genome that are associated with diseases, a method especially useful for multigenic traits not clearly defined by a single gene.[88] Once a candidate gene is found, further research is often done on the corresponding (or homologous) genes of model organisms. In addition to studying genetic diseases, the increased availability of genotyping methods has led to the field of pharmacogenetics: the study of how genotype can affect drug responses.[89]

Individuals differ in their inherited tendency to develop cancer,[90] and cancer is a genetic disease.[91] The process of cancer development in the body is a combination of events. Mutations occasionally occur within cells in the body as they divide. Although these mutations will not be inherited by any offspring, they can affect the behavior of cells, sometimes causing them to grow and divide more frequently. There are biological mechanisms that attempt to stop this process; signals are given to inappropriately dividing cells that should trigger cell death, but sometimes additional mutations occur that cause cells to ignore these messages. An internal process of natural selection occurs within the body and eventually mutations accumulate within cells to promote their own growth, creating a cancerous tumor that grows and invades various tissues of the body.

Normally, a cell divides only in response to signals called growth factors and stops growing once in contact with surrounding cells and in response to growth-inhibitory signals. It usually then divides a limited number of times and dies, staying within the epithelium where it is unable to migrate to other organs. To become a cancer cell, a cell has to accumulate mutations in a number of genes (three to seven). A cancer cell can divide without growth factor and ignores inhibitory signals. Also, it is immortal and can grow indefinitely, even after it makes contact with neighboring cells. It may escape from the epithelium and ultimately from the primary tumor. Then, the escaped cell can cross the endothelium of a blood vessel and get transported by the bloodstream to colonize a new organ, forming deadly metastasis. Although there are some genetic predispositions in a small fraction of cancers, the major fraction is due to a set of new genetic mutations that originally appear and accumulate in one or a small number of cells that will divide to form the tumor and are not transmitted to the progeny (somatic mutations). The most frequent mutations are a loss of function of p53 protein, a tumor suppressor, or in the p53 pathway, and gain of function mutations in the Ras proteins, or in other oncogenes.

DNA can be manipulated in the laboratory. Restriction enzymes are commonly used enzymes that cut DNA at specific sequences, producing predictable fragments of DNA.[92] DNA fragments can be visualized through use of gel electrophoresis, which separates fragments according to their length.

The use of ligation enzymes allows DNA fragments to be connected. By binding ("ligating") fragments of DNA together from different sources, researchers can create recombinant DNA, the DNA often associated with genetically modified organisms. Recombinant DNA is commonly used in the context of plasmids: short circular DNA molecules with a few genes on them. In the process known as molecular cloning, researchers can amplify the DNA fragments by inserting plasmids into bacteria and then culturing them on plates of agar (to isolate clones of bacteria cells "cloning" can also refer to the various means of creating cloned ("clonal") organisms).

DNA can also be amplified using a procedure called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).[93] By using specific short sequences of DNA, PCR can isolate and exponentially amplify a targeted region of DNA. Because it can amplify from extremely small amounts of DNA, PCR is also often used to detect the presence of specific DNA sequences.

DNA sequencing, one of the most fundamental technologies developed to study genetics, allows researchers to determine the sequence of nucleotides in DNA fragments. The technique of chain-termination sequencing, developed in 1977 by a team led by Frederick Sanger, is still routinely used to sequence DNA fragments.[94] Using this technology, researchers have been able to study the molecular sequences associated with many human diseases.

As sequencing has become less expensive, researchers have sequenced the genomes of many organisms using a process called genome assembly, which utilizes computational tools to stitch together sequences from many different fragments.[95] These technologies were used to sequence the human genome in the Human Genome Project completed in 2003.[35] New high-throughput sequencing technologies are dramatically lowering the cost of DNA sequencing, with many researchers hoping to bring the cost of resequencing a human genome down to a thousand dollars.[96]

Next-generation sequencing (or high-throughput sequencing) came about due to the ever-increasing demand for low-cost sequencing. These sequencing technologies allow the production of potentially millions of sequences concurrently.[97][98] The large amount of sequence data available has created the field of genomics, research that uses computational tools to search for and analyze patterns in the full genomes of organisms. Genomics can also be considered a subfield of bioinformatics, which uses computational approaches to analyze large sets of biological data. A common problem to these fields of research is how to manage and share data that deals with human subject and personally identifiable information. See also genomics data sharing.

On 19 March 2015, a group of leading biologists urged a worldwide ban on clinical use of methods, particularly the use of CRISPR and zinc finger, to edit the human genome in a way that can be inherited.[99][100][101][102] In April 2015, Chinese researchers reported results of basic research to edit the DNA of non-viable human embryos using CRISPR.[103][104]

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Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever CRISPR

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Designer babies, the end of diseases, genetically modified humans that never age. Outrageous things that used to be science fiction are suddenly becoming reality. The only thing we know for sure is that things will change irreversibly.

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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:

The best book we read about the topic: GMO Sapiens

https://goo.gl/NxFmk8

(affiliate link, we get a cut if buy the book!)

Good Overview by Wired:http://bit.ly/1DuM4zq

timeline of computer development:http://bit.ly/1VtiJ0N

Selective breeding: http://bit.ly/29GaPVS

DNA:http://bit.ly/1rQs8Yk

Radiation research:http://bit.ly/2ad6wT1

inserting DNA snippets into organisms:http://bit.ly/2apyqbj

First genetically modified animal:http://bit.ly/2abkfYO

First GM patent:http://bit.ly/2a5cCox

chemicals produced by GMOs:http://bit.ly/29UvTbhhttp://bit.ly/2abeHwUhttp://bit.ly/2a86sBy

Flavr Savr Tomato:http://bit.ly/29YPVwN

First Human Engineering:http://bit.ly/29ZTfsf

glowing fish:http://bit.ly/29UwuJU

CRISPR:http://go.nature.com/24Nhykm

HIV cut from cells and rats with CRISPR:http://go.nature.com/1RwR1xIhttp://ti.me/1TlADSi

first human CRISPR trials fighting cancer:http://go.nature.com/28PW40r

first human CRISPR trial approved by Chinese for August 2016:http://go.nature.com/29RYNnK

genetic diseases:http://go.nature.com/2a8f7ny

pregnancies with Down Syndrome terminated:http://bit.ly/2acVyvg( 1999 European study)

CRISPR and aging:http://bit.ly/2a3NYAVhttp://bit.ly/SuomTyhttp://go.nature.com/29WpDj1http://ti.me/1R7Vus9

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Genetic Engineering: What is Genetic Engineering?

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Written by Patrick Dixon

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - BioTech, MedTech, Gene Therapy and Stem Cells

Video on Genetic Engineering

Genetic engineering is the alteration of genetic code by artificial means, and is therefore different from traditional selective breeding.

Huge number of other resources on this site about Genetic engineering.

Genetic engineering examples include taking the gene that programs poison in the tail of a scorpion, and combining it with a cabbage. These genetically modified cabbages kill caterpillers because they have learned to grow scorpion poison (insecticide) in their sap.

Genetic engineering also includes insertion of human genes into sheep so that they secrete alpha-1 antitrypsin in their milk - a useful substance in treating some cases of lung disease.

Genetic engineering has created a chicken with four legs and no wings.

Genetic engineering has created a goat with spider genes that creates "silk" in its milk.

Genetic engineering works because there is one language of life: human genes work in bacteria, monkey genes work in mice and earthworms. Tree genes work in bananas and frog genes work in rice. There is no limit in theory to the potential of genetic engineering.

Genetic engineering has given us the power to alter the very basis of life on earth.

Genetic engineering has been said to be no different than ancient breeding methods but this is untrue. For a start, breeding or cross-breeding, or in-breeding (for example to make pedigree dogs) all work by using the same species. In contrast genetic engineering allows us to combine fish, mouse, human and insect genes in the same person or animal.

Genetic engineering therefore has few limits - except our imagination, and our moral or ethical code.

Genetic engineering makes the whole digital revolution look nothing. Digital technology changes what we do. Genetic engineering has the power to change who we are.

Human cloning is a type of genetic engineering, but is not the same as true genetic manipulation. In human cloning, the aim is to duplicate the genes of an existing person so that an identical set is inside a human egg. The result is intended to be a cloned twin, perhaps of a dead child. Genetic engineering in its fullest form would result in the child produced having unique genes - as a result of laboratory interference, and therefore the child will not be an identikit twin.

Genetic engineering could create crops that grow in desert heat, or without fertiliser. Genetic engineering could make bananas or other fruit which contain vaccines or other medical products.

Genetic engineering is helped by the fact that it only costs $1000 to analyse someone's genetic code (sequencing of genome) - down from $800m in 2001.

Genetic engineering is aided by techniques such as Crispr which allow scientists to swop genes between humans or between animals and humans or between animals, in a very precise and controlled way.

Genetic engineering will alter the basis of life on earth - permanently - unless controlled. This could happen if - say - mutant viruses, or bacteria, or fish or reptiles are released into the general environment.

READ FREE BOOK on Genetic Engineering - by Patrick Dixon, author of 16 books and creator of this website - read now: Chapters 1 and 2 explain basics in way which is easy to understand.

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Spain Shuts Down 26 Unprofitable Coal Mines

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Come January 1, all unprofitable coal mines in the European Union will be shut down. In Spain, that means 26 new closures.

No More Handouts

Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production by the first day of 2019, the date on which all public funds for the mines will come to an end. In Spain, that means that 26 coal mines are about to close up shop, according to Reuters.

This move away from coal is a refreshing bit of bluntness — letting the failed remnants of a fossil fuel industry fade away — compared to how the federal government in the U.S. is grasping at anything to keep coal alive. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact the coal closures will have in the ongoing effort to curb climate change.

Always a Bigger Fish

The deadline was set back in 2010 as the EU sought to move away from fossil fuel dependence, according to Telesur. The EU wanted to end public aid to coal mines sooner, but groups from Germany — which shuttered its last coal mine earlier this month — and Spain are responsible for extending the deadline all the way to the end of 2018.

Spain has already decreased the portion of its electricity generated by coal down to about 14 percent, according to United Press International. And 90 percent of the coal burned in Spain is imported from Russia and Colombia anyway.

Still, the deal that Spain struck with the EU dictates that nine of the 15 coal-burning plants in Spain must close by 2020, according to Telesur. That on its own is huge news for the transition to cleaner power, and marks a clear sign that major world powers are taking their responsibility to help prevent our impending climate change catastrophe seriously.

Think Ahead

Once again in stark contrast to the U.S., where coal miners in Appalachia face a weak job market with few prospects, Spain’s socialist government — largely supported by coal mining communities — made a deal with mining union in October to ensure that displaced workers will be taken care of, according to Reuters.

About 60 percent of the people who worked in closing mines are expected to take advantage of an early retirement offer, while others have access to the 250 million euros that the government is making available to help launch new businesses or repurpose the land around the coal mines.

The headline of this story has been updated.

READ MORE: Spanish coal miners work last shifts before mines shuttered [Reuters]

More on coal: More Than 40 Percent of the World’s Coal Plants Lose Money

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Spain Shuts Down 26 Unprofitable Coal Mines