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erik-g

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There are a lot of comments about smoking more to make up for reduced nicotine levels, but this is a little bit misguided. Keep in mind the time it takes to consume nicotine. If you have a 5-minute smoke break at work you can't hang out for 15 minutes to smoke 3 because each cigarette is less potent. I'm sure there's a better term for it, but smoking isn't a zero sum game, you don't always have the option of increasing the quantity to make up for reduced concentration, if for no other reason than time and financial constraints.

That's fair, but when I shop I don't buy food with just one meal in mind. Sure, at home maybe I'll have a bit less onion one day then I would prefer because I used half of it the night before, but storing excess in the fridge and buying with leftovers in mind or multi-use items (bulk bag of carrots) means I have very little excess food waste. Certainly excess food waste is far, far less than packaging material from these companies.

You don't _have_ to shop on Amazon. But I feel like being a cognizant consumer is your own responsibility. By that I mean I don't have to cross-reference with 8 other sites, I feel like the prices are fair, and as best I can tell I have avoided buying cheap knockoff items. I hear this complaint a lot (here, especially) but have yet to see much evidence of that.

So, if we assume that the dinosaur has 1 billion base pairs in its genome (huge assumption, see my other comment), it has degraded over 110 million years with a half life of 512 years, there is functionally 0 base pairs left[1] in each dna helix. Even statics can't help much there! I'm wide open to the possibility that I am incredibly wrong in any one of these assumptions however

[1] http://www.calculator.net/half-life-calculator.html?type=1&n...

How would you know where to align the sequences? I am not an evolutionary biologist so maybe one of those people have a "yes, actually!", but consider modern descendants of dinosaurs have 1 billion base pairs and 20,000-23,000 genes[1], and the fact that we have many many living versions of those fowl to experiment with. Trying to realign chopped up bits of dna with who know how much completely missing, and minimal opportunities to experiment or direct information as to how any particular sequence functions, I can't see any way to extract useful data from highly degraded dna.

More information of degraded dna handling techniques, albeit in the forensics field and aimed toward people, but interesting to me nonetheless [2]

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7018/full/nature0...

[2] http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...