Re: Article] Scientists Take DNA's Temperature

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jim Menegay) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> "Robert Karl Stonjek" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED]>...
> > Scientists Take DNA's Temperature
> > 
> > The temperature most often associated with human life is 98.6 degrees
> > Fahrenheit, that of a healthy person. Now scientists have succeeded in
> > taking a different measurement, one they've dubbed the "heat of life:" the
> > energies involved in DNA replication and synthesis.
>  [snip]
> > The thermal detection system, which is accurate to a millionth of a calorie,
> > determined the amount of heat given off when a base pair was inserted into
> > the DNA strand.
>  [snip]
> > Comment:
> > The latest science?  Then why do they use a scale that was originally the
> > measure of a King's stride (yard) foot (foot) or manliness (inch)??  Why not
> > use the centigrade scale (Celsius) like the rest of the non-monarchical
> > world (or do you Americans still check imperial measures against, say, the
> > latest president's dimensions?)
> > 
> > Kind Regards,
> > Robert Karl Stonjek.
> 
> It is interesting that the number 98.6, which every American school child
> learns, is a direct conversion from the Celsius estimate of 37 degrees that
> was set back in the 19th century by a German researcher.  I suspect that
> Americans probably relied on an Oxbridge trained Englishman to do the
> arithmetic of the conversion - an American would have rounded to 99 degrees
> (and incidentally have come closer to the truth).

No, it would have been closer by truncating to 98 °F.

> Of course, Americans are familiar with some metric scales - notice that the
> heat measurement was in calories.  Perhaps Scientific American should have
> converted that to BTU...  ;-)

Scientific American should indeed have converted it.   Calories are
not part of the modern metric system.  They are not part of the
International System of Units (SI), and they are not part of the
"metric system" as defined in U.S. law.  The proper units are joules.

Note also that they didn't use the metric prefixes, saying "millionth
of a calorie" instead, and they didn't identify which calorie is being
used--I'd say it should be the large calorie most often used in the
medical field, but it might be the small calorie which was common in
physics and chemistry, only 0.001 large calorie.  Is the resolution of
this equipment 4 mJ or is it 4 µJ?

-- 
Gene Nygaard
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Gene_Nygaard/t_jeff.htm
  But if it be thought that, either now, or at any future time, the 
  citizens of the United States may be induced to undertake a thorough
  reformation of their whole system of measures, weights and coins, 
  reducing every branch to the same decimal ratio already established 
  in their coins, and thus bringing the calculation of the principal 
  affairs of life within the arithmetic of every man who can multiply 
  and divide plain numbers, greater changes will be necessary.
             U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, 1790