Here's a research paper that reveals the mechanism for Wolverine's amazing ability to heal and regenerate after deploying his adamantium claws, or after he is wounded by an enemy. It's because he's part amphibian! Or at least produces an amphibian protein. Here's the abstract:
Wolverine, a mutant from the X-men team, possesses super healing abilities. Wolverine’s healing abilities have striking similarities to that seen in axolotl, an amphibian with the capacity to regenerate amputated limbs. In this study we sought to determine the mechanisms by which Wolverine regenerates. Widentified a novel protein, dubbed Howlett, that is nearly identical to the Amblox protein in axolotl which is known to be responsible for the amphibian’s limb regeneration. siRNA knockdown of the howlett and amblox genes demonstrated decreased replication in Wolverine and axolotl, respectively, and Howlett was found in all Wolverine tissues. Using mass spectrometry and x-ray crystallography, we identified an S2 pocket in the Howlett protein that we postulate contributes to the 5.66-fold increased specific activity observed over Amblox in cleaving a large substrate analogue. Our findings show that Howlett is a major contributor to Wolverine’s incredible regeneration capacity, and further investigation of the signaling and regulatory mechanisms associated with this novel protein could provide outstanding advances in the field of regenerative medicine.
There's six pages of "science" in the paper. Link (pdf) -via Boing Boing
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this is only an example, it gets more complicated than that.
I think the only reason it's easier than Arabic is that we like to make words up as we go along.
but for some reason, I almost always know what my russian buddies are talking about. it's weird. i feel like the equivalent of an intelligent dog.
je parle en peu de francais, but it's been a long itme.
That's not different from Portuguese (and perhaps Spanish and other latin languages) at all. To me the worst part of learning Arab would be to learn how to read all over again. And backwards.
keyword: planning.
:S
partially because there is never a need to speak it
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
my favorite latin palindrome ^^^
i haven't taken a latin class in 5 years
@ Kaviani: I'm a native-English speaker and found Japanese to be relatively easy. I've also heard that it is one of the easiest languages to learn for foreign speakers.
Aside from its well-known difficulties (e.g., 3 scripts), Japanese often omits the subject of a sentence, and has different levels of speech depending on one's social status relative to one's interlocutor.
Also, the 6,900+ figure is for languages AND dialetcts.
Nice people but their politics are a little confused.
ps: they make nice beer.
Chinese and Arabic are equally difficult but in different ways. Chinese isn't terribly hard to pick up but it gets a lot harder as you progress.
Arabic is difficult in the beginning but afterward you start to get a feel for things--it's a consistent system unlike English.
It's impossible! By law, all Irish children spend a massive 12 years learning this impossible language and a bare handfull can speak it fluently when they leave school.
What to know some of its'f madness? Ok, in Irish, we add letters called séimhiú and urú http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_initial_mutations . Basically these are added to words to make them easier to say, so if I wanted to say, pen I would say "peann". If I wanted to say my pen, I would say "mo pheann" and if I wanted to say your en it would be "bhur bpeann".
Hard enough yet? Well the letter you put it changes according to personal pronouns and other things, but it also changes according to the first letter of the word. So we had "bpeann" for pen, but what about horse or "capall"? Well in that instance it's still "mo chapall" for my horse, but now it's "bhur gcapall" for their horse.
And if you wonder why some Irish people can't just say yes or no to a question, that's because Irish has no yes and no words! We just use the negative & positive of the verb in question, so if someone askes "An bhfuil sé ag cur baiste? is it raining? you say Sea, or Ni shea (it is or it isn't)
And that's before we get into the weird tenses, the exceptions to the rules (more exceptions than rules to be frank)the regional dialects, the pronunciation, the bonkers spelling, etc etc etc! Still, it's a great language!^_^ Anyway, here's a pretty old irish langauge film - I picked it because it'd give you a fairly accurate version of Irish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxFpWRNhySI
My persian is at a 6th grade level. I've got a thing for languages. I started arabic it was too hard so I started japanese as well which by comparison is really not bad at all!
Can I just add, that grammatical arabic is a beast unlike any other, that I have seen.
The base form of any word has a total of 14 conjugations. Then, there are 14 forms, for each, past, present, future, negative, command... and the list goes on. anything you want to say, has 14 conjugations.
Then to add to it, the rules have variety depending on the letters you use. So the size and scale of the rules exponentially increases! Then, as the article mentions is the passive tone which has a completely different set of rules.
What's worse is that conversationally mispronunciation can completely change the gist of what you want to say. Oh and dialects between countries, are so extreme that they can be incomprehensible.
:-(