our clarification doesn't help, because in point of fact, lizard scales are less efficient at storing heat than human skin anyway. Lizard scales form a more efficient protective layer than mammal skin. Lizard scales are actually more resistant to heating than mammal skin.
Either way, lizard skin would be... not what you want to be looking at.
I never mentioned lizard scales, I mentioned the skin of certain lizards and certain lizard cells. And I mentioned on more than one occasion specific properties it could be modified for. I suspect someone who constantly misreads statements and then draws faulty conclusions, well their tremendously acute advice is itself suspect. And very much worth ignoring.
I'm not even sure that it's that; it's more like speculation.
I've been around long enough, and around since the internet started, to recognize the type of personality who scans across the internet looking to interject his/her opinions into everything without any analysis at all of what he is actually saying, or of what anyone else is actually saying. I suspect I can part ways from the enormous acumen of your background and training without fear of much loss of capability on my own part. Or on the part of anyone else, for that matter. So, since you habitually misread what I say, and I have noticed habitually misread what others say, and since because of this you have demonstrated a noted lack of both perception of the actual content being discussed, and a sufficient lack of any contribution other than that of reflexive argument, why don't we just both agree your that your far more often than not comments lack real productive insight. So, as far as I'm concerned, I'm just gonna ignore ya from now on fella. Assuming you are a fella.
Unsurprisingly, becoming easily offended and attempting to couch insulting commentary in semi-polite text gets you booted from the thread. Everyone reading this, please use this as an example of what not to do. ~ PCat
In all fairness, a lot of times reporters do that all on their own. After all, it's a lot more interesting to say "Hints of life found on Titan" than "Expected hydrogen and acetylene levels on Titan not accounted for." Still, the quest for funding is one of the necessary but icky parts of being a scientist. Unfortunately research does not pay for itself, and it's always a competition to get funding.
You're right about the journalistic sensationalism part. Real science doesn't work like Marvel comic science, but that bores a lot of people and it bores a lot of journalist. On the other hand he did name his company as he did, and did suggest he was creating new species and life, whereas he was just modifying an existing one, and I don't blame him for that because yes, he needs funding.
We actually do have intestinal flora that process things we don't digest. Adjusting that flora isn't as simple as injecting new species though. Within the first month or so after birth our immune systems become attuned to the flora in our gut. Afterward, foreign bacteria are treated like any other non-self object, and attacked by the immune system. Unfortunately, a lot of factors go in to what flora we have - method of birth, breast feeding, maternal flora, and local environment being the big ones. Still, the best method for pursuing what you describe would be genetic alterations of gut flora. For example, you could find cellulose-digesting bacteria, take the genes for that mechanism, insert them into gut flora, and hope there's not enough different for the immune system to attack it.
There are a couple of other difficulties involved. The big one is that intestinal flora are generally anaerobic; they don't like oxygen. So figuring out how to easily administer them would be a challenge. Additionally, any sort of antibiotic regimen or other medical treatment that removes gut flora would also destroy the modified bacteria. Therefore, it would need to be reintroduced on occassion. It's hypothesized that bacteria (specifically biofilms) exist in the appendix, where it's protected from such "killing events" and can be rejuvenated from there. It may be possible to introduce the modified bacteria there, however it's only a hypothesis.
You gave me some interesting ideas. About the GI tract, and how the bacteria might develop a symbiotic environment which could then reabsorb the waste of the bacteria as innate and natural material rather than as simply different waste material that needs to be refiltered.
I was driving in the car last night listening to a lecture on specialized or extraordinary cells, and mature stem cells by Young. I was thinking about placental cells and the appendix. About using the lining of the appendix as a stem cell housing for innate stem cells which could then be harvested, or dispersed, as necessary, for treatment of future injuries and invasions.
Of course you would need a whole cluster of proteins and so forth to regulate and command functions, and for the appendix to become a distribution center for undifferentiated mature stem cells that could then be dispersed as needed by the immune system and by the body to repair injury.
Of course there would be a host of problems to overcome first, there always are in science, but you would already have an organ within the body that would, with modification, make a good storage system for extraordinary cell types.
Well, it's my weekend off. So I'm gonna go take in a movie maybe, vad some, and perhaps get in some fishing.
