Slashdot Mirror

... so how do your comments square with the following?

From Chemical and Engineering news -

Reagan’s economic programs, so controversial then and now, generally supported federal science programs... As Reagan’s term went on, however, the rising federal deficits and lower revenues that were the result of a recession took their toll on R&D budgets. Soon, agencies such as the Energy Department, the National Bureau of Standards, and even the National Institutes of Health were looking at budget cuts.

Further, from "The Revolution that Killed Society", we read...

The Regan Revolution went much further than to just corrupt previously publicly owned companies: they mandated that every service that had begun with ownership by the public needed to be privatized; because only the private corporate-world could make money with things like public services, that up until then had been "a drain" on the public purse. 'Privatization would bring an economic windfall from the drudgery and incompetence of publicly owned services. The justification by the Regan Revolution was that Everything Must Earn a Profit, or it should be terminated: The entire idea of society providing anything for its citizens was heresy to any True-Capitalist.

The result was 'The Revolution That Killed Society'. Everything from the buses and the trains, to electricity, natural gas and heating oil, public hospitals, and public health: indeed everything except possibly firefighters and police have been privatized: and now even those two "services" are experimenting with the idea of privatization as well.

The size of government actually increased under Reagan. This has to stand in stark contrast with his stated goals of downsizing government. From the Reagan Budget, we learn that "People around the country seem to understand what no one in Washington will admit: The budget is out of control. The growth of government is out of control...

Lastly, I take no position on Right vs Left in American politics, except to note that neither party works for We the People. Both parties work hard for the monied class. Hence my belief that America has a one party system. It's called the Business Party and it has two factions that conveniently distract America's citizens by providing great theater as they fight amongst themselves. "Liberals" in the US look better than "Conservatives" only in that they don't say stupid things quite as often as the Rabid Right. Neither faction has any idea how to govern for We the People.

To start, the US de-funded scientific research. It had to, in part, because Ronald Raygun privatized many government functions.

Nice theory, but doesn't agree with reality...

Political correctness has no place in science, and neither does 'dumbing down'.

Neither does rampant misogyny.

It's interesting that you point all the fault of the paper at one "brainless female," when the paper had 11 authors, 7 of which were male, including her post-doctoral adviser, Dr. Ronald Oremland, who is a noted expert on the metabolization of toxic elements. Dr. Wolfe-Simon was the lead author on the paper, but it could not (or at least should not) have gone forward with those 10 other names without each of them approving. And if any of them were so much smarter and better than someone "only employed for reasons of political correctness, then why did all of them sign onto the "rebuttal" paper in response to criticisms of the original paper? Why does only she get the blame for this and none of them, and where do you get the notion that all of these people worked under her (much less were forced to do so for political reasons)?

One would also suspect, given her list of published papers on biochemistry, that she knows a wee bit more about chemistry than some AC blowhard on Slashdot, despite having been very wrong about GFAJ-1. The ability of arsenic to substitute imperfectly for phosphorus is in fact the very reason it's toxic. It's not impossible that there would be some biological use for arsenic, though it seems highly unlikely given the relative abundance of the two elements and the havoc that arsenic causes because of its similarity. The follow-up research in the wake of this is proving fascinating. At the very least, she's kicked off a whole new interest in arsenic biochemistry.

So, while you pat yourself on the back on your true "scientific understanding," it's clear that you haven't done ANY real research on this subject matter and are just relying on snap judgments -- not surprising considering the sheer hatred you seem to be able to call up for an entire gender. Speaking of which...

It turns out that the liquid state of carbon is mostly an unknown due to the temperatures and pressures required, but there's been a recent consensus that it acts very differently at "low" and high pressures. Computer simulations and experiments have suggested that under high pressures, carbon orders itself into an irregular but still recognizably diamond-like structure with four neighbors for each atom. In fact, high pressures make the formation of solid diamond when the liquid cools more likely as a result. At low pressures, it's more like graphene or strings of carbon, with bonding to neighbors in 2's & 3's instead of 4's. At even higher pressures it develops into a metallic structure. So the term "liquid diamond" actually has significant meaning and isn't just media buzzwords.

Here's a Chemical and Engineering News article from last month about it.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i37/Helium-Headache.html

The problem isn't the amount of helium in the earth. It's the dislocation caused by the government selling it at an artificially low price for some years, thus undercutting building new refining capacity. This current mess that we just mostly avoided would have been from suddenly shutting off the government supply and causing a price/availability problem.

Full Disclosure: This effects me directly. I work with Dean Olson, the guy quoted in the article. Unavailability of helium (the price wasn't so bad, but it just wasn't available. i.e. The supplier says it costs N dollars a liter of liquid helium, but you need X liters, and we have one fourth that amount available.) kept a new NMR system here offline for some months, thus delaying a bunch of research (And of course, that has a knock on effect of increased cost down the line. You have to keep paying the salaries of the researchers while they wait and do something else.)

Hopefully we can get back to our usual form of governmental funding neurosis soon rather than reaching a new and interesting level of insanity.

It'll be a while, it currently take more energy to make a solar panel than it can generate in it's lifespan and costs more than coal or nuclear without the subsidies.

No longer true since 2012

Fat isn't the flavor. Fat does improve the perception of flavor. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf061537k

Yet another PAYWALLED paper. Click if you love the Gizmodo "Gee-Whizz" summaries. Otherwise ...

$35 for 48 hours of reading. And exactly how much of that actually goes to the researchers or back to us who undoubtedly paid for at least parts of the research if not the whole thing thru Fed or state $.

Nano Letters = http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400998t?journalCode=nalefd

.

You do realize that solar power is another example of 'causes more pollution during production than it will ever save during its lifetime' right?

Funny, that's not what some think

The great thing about deep-sea trash is that it decomposes extremely slowly compared to stuff at shallower temperatures, so it'll be around for a while...

Awesome! Maybe in a few thousand years, someone will mine it for old copies of the Atari ET game catridge.

The great thing about deep-sea trash is that it decomposes extremely slowly compared to stuff at shallower temperatures, so it'll be around for a while...

Why is it that every time foreign people do something amazing, someone has to question them about the actions of their governments?

Because that's the only thing they can contribute. They don't understand the science, but they do understand geography.

In this case, I'd say it's more a fault of the articles than the reader: I'm a molecular biologist, and I can't figure out from the summary or the blurby article what's going on.

“Our results show a novel, synthetic designed computing machine that computes iteratively and produces biologically relevant results,” says lead researcher Prof. Ehud Keinan of the Technion Schulich Faculty of Chemistry. “In addition to enhanced computation power, this DNA-based transducer offers multiple benefits, including the ability to read and transform genetic information, miniaturization to the molecular scale, and the aptitude to produce computational results that interact directly with living organisms.”

Honestly, aside from "DNA-based" and "read and transform genetic information," that sounds exactly like the computer I'm currently typing on. There are no concrete examples of how this could be useful in any article I'm coming across. There's no video of this thing in action. It's all buzzwords and promises.

The actual article can be found here behind a paywall. The abstract:

As computing devices, which process data and interconvert information, transducers can encode new information and use their output for subsequent computing, offering high computational power that may be equivalent to a universal Turing machine. We report on an experimental DNA-based molecular transducer that computes iteratively and produces biologically relevant outputs. As a proof of concept, the transducer accomplished division of numbers by 3. The iterative power was demonstrated by a recursive application on an obtained output. This device reads plasmids as input and processes the information according to a predetermined algorithm, which is represented by molecular software. The device writes new information on the plasmid using hardware that comprises DNA-manipulating enzymes. The computation produces dual output: a quotient, represented by newly encoded DNA, and a remainder, represented by E. coli phenotypes. This device algorithmically manipulates genetic codes.

So... in other words they made sequences in ecoli which can be used as a calculator. A very, very, VERY slow calculator. This is not a novel concept people have used DNA for computations before. DNA based computers are probably never going to replace electronic ones, I mean fundamentally, DNA is slower than electricity. Even life finds DNA to be too slow for such calculations, which is why your thoughts are conducted via sodium and potassium gradients. The fact that they don't mention any real uses for this means they couldn't think up a good reason why you'd need to do computations with DNA. "aptitude to produce computational results that interact directly with living organisms" bullshit.

So, I'd say that Israel sounds like the most interesting thing here. I now know that the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel has a PR department that works VERY hard to make their results sound interesting.

I will say that the techniques here could have real uses and could be important, just not at all in the ways that are being discussed. It could lead to a useful lab technique, maybe. But making a living computer? I'd sooner believe that North Korea had invented cold fusion.

It isn't just the immune system that it affects. It has been shown to decrease muscle strength--including the heart. It also readily reacts with the chlorine in household tap water to form chloroform, a recognized carcinogen.

Here was the link given, I haven't had time to read it and see what novel addition she made but the abstract outlines the basic architecture...

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl300173j

Ok did the research, she "invented" the wheel, they have been using this method since at least 2007. Her method uses "a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogenated TiO2 (H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell. H-TiO2 acts as the double layer electrostatic core. "
http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf

Not so novel: "Incorporating the utilization of carbon nanotubes cathode and TiO2 nanotubes anode in energy storage, a nonaqueous hybrid supercapacitor was developed in order to significantly increase the energy density of the supercapacitor."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18019169/

Also dr yat li which she claims was "supervising" her seems to think he invented it a year ago without her help. Notice his name is on this article with other doctors but her name is missing: "Hydrogenated TiO2 Nanotube Arrays for Supercapacitors"
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl300173j

She basically did a chemistry experiment that had already been done and published, she invented nothing

Why group them into a network? Doesn't that increase the risk of an embolism?

From the supplementary materials PDF, it looks like these particles are about 300nm in diameter. That's a fraction of the diameter of a single red blood cell, individual particles wouldn't be big enough to block even our smallest capillaries. However, 300nm is about the size of a large virus; I don't know how immunogenic these things are, but even if moderately inert they'd likely be targeted by our normal debris-removal functions, as the immune system really does not like virus-sized foreign particles.

W engineers designed microscopic probes that dip into a fluid sample – saliva, sputum or blood – and apply an electric field within the liquid. That draws particles to concentrate around the surface of the tiny probe. Larger particles hit the tip and swerve away, but DNA-sized molecules stick to the probe and are trapped on the surface.

I read through the entire article link, and didn't learn a whole lot about how it actually performs. The above paragraph was the only technical information included. From what I can see, neither really tests performance against really challenging samples with a lot of crud or difficult-to-extract material. We only have the PR blurb's claim that it's better than a typical Miniprep column.

Found a couple of papers that might be more relevant:
Size-Specific Concentration of DNA to a Nanostructured Tip Using Dielectrophoresis and Capillary Action (Has downloadable PDF)
Nanotips for single-step preparation of DNA for qPCR analysis (Paywall)

Ok, from the first paper, we find out what this is really for:

Extracellular DNA is of great interest in the fields of disease diagnostics and environmental molecular biology. Unlike the genomic DNA in normal cells, extracellular DNA is the free DNA released from dead cells. Thus, extracellular DNA circulating in body fluids can be used as an early indicator for various acute diseases such as cancer. For example, the concentration of extracellular DNA for a normal person is 30ng/mL, but the concentration is increased to 300 ng/mL for a cancer patient. When the issue comes to environmental monitoring, extracellular DNA dissolved in lakes and soil is an indicator for environmental quality because the dissolved DNA is generated from cell lysis and excretion. In spite of such a great potential, the study of extracellular DNA is limited by the standard sample preparation methods.

The conventional methods begin with filtering, centrifuging, and collecting DNA from a raw sample. In aggressive experimental protocols, genomic DNA from normal cells is released and mixed with extracellular DNA. In addition, a few hours is required for the sample preparation process, which can degrade and mutate extracellular DNA.6 As a result, the original information of extracellular DNA is partially or completely lost. Therefore, a rapid process that can concentrate extracellular DNA is very important for identifying pathogenic information. This paper presents a size-specific concentration mechanism directly extracting extracellular DNA from a sample mixture using a nanostructured tip. The concentration process is performed with two sequences: (1) an alternating current (AC) electric field is applied to attract DNA and other bioparticles in the vicinity of a nanotip; (2) only the DNA is size-selectively captured onto the nanotip by the combination of dielectrophoresis and capillary action. In the analytical section, the forces involved in the concentration are estimated to investigate the capturing process. An analytical model is presented for capillary induced size-selectivity that is described as the function of the ratio of a particle to a tip diameter.

Basically, this is a special purpose method for concentrating extra-cellular DNA while leaving whole cell material intact. It's not meant to compete against a Miniprep, but analyze a whole different type of sample material; you are trying to fish out what genetic material is already floating around outside of your cells. Really a niche kind of research thing, I don't know if this will make a whole lot of impact, either practically, academically, or economically.

Interesting to see what they actually found as TFA doesn't mention it. Assuming ECHO is Enteric Cytopathic Human Orphan, Adeno is Adenovirus and Cox is Coxsackie virus which can cause swelling of the tissue around the heart. Yeessh...

http://pubs.acs.org/appl/literatum/publisher/achs/journals/content/esthag/0/esthag.ahead-of-print/es400509b/aop/images/large/es-2013-00509b_0006.jpeg

Basically the same catalysts have been reported previously. In this new paper, they don't bother to highlight the fact that their films are extremely thick, so of course they get great catalytic activity (though it's an oxide, so the series resistance might just be a problem...)

That seems likely- data from other instruments on Cassini has suggested that aromatic hydrocarbons such as benzene and anthracene form high in Titan's atmosphere. The altitude (~1000km) is consistent with the location of the glow, and the emission line fits- a mix of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons has long been thought to be the source of a 3.3 micron emission line seen in interstellar dust.

They established the origin of the hydrocarbons by measuring the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio. Organic compounds made by living things on the surface of the earth will have a small amount of carbon-14 incorporated. Just about all the carbon-14 that had been present in the oil will have decayed with no opportunity for replacement, Their results for their oil-soaked sand show ratios of a few tenths of a percent of the atmospheric value, making it it likely that the vast majority of the hydrocarbons present were from sources which had been dead for eons.

Also, they have profiles of the same oil taken at the source well, surface slicks, and contaminated sand. While the oil degrades with environmental exposure, there is clear similarity among the compositions of the samples. The supporting information gives a lot of details on the experimental methods.

Works fine for me - and looks very interesting too.

Your current credentials do not allow retrieval of the full text.

Works fine for me - and looks very interesting too.

I have a basic knowledge of chemistry, and I can recognize some of those names from my introductory chemistry and biology books. You can look them up on Wikipedia and find out what they did.

Here's one http://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/91/3/09103-scitech1-Nozoe155.jpg and here's his entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Djerassi

The first reason I find these signatures so attractive and interesting is that it shows you how a great chemist's mind works. They're not single-minded nerds. They're human beings. They have a sense of humor. Their ideas are flying all over the place. Ask them for an autograph and they slip in a little idea about chemistry. You can understand why ideas come to chemists in their dreams.

There's such a thing as chemistry humor. Sometimes you have to understand the chemistry to get it, but if you do, it's very funny.

It's an important lesson to those who think that everything important in chemistry is as formal and dull as a patent application.

Strictly speaking, that's not correct, because a significant amount of xenon is generated during uranium fission reactions and some of that will decay to stable Xe isotopes. I don't know if that is possible to recover in commercial quantities at a reasonable price, but there are ways to do it.

It appears that this was translated poorly from the original Italian.

I don't think so. If the full article was in Nano Letters, they published it in English.

You beat me to it. I don't know HOW that abstract made it through. The ACS kept telling me that they could only maintain their current level of quality publishing if I kept giving them money, but I didn't realize they actually meant it!

Yup, from a different summary I read they claimed it was a bundle of 7 molecules (6 around a core), apparently (for what their explanation is worth) because a single one would be destroyed by the TEM.

I am by no means a TEM expert, but I did spend a semester learning to use one in grad school (in a bio class all my materials chemistry classmates taunted me for taking), and it only a minute or two at relatively low acceleration voltages to completely trash each cell I was imaging, so I'm not surprised by this at all.

It appears that this was translated poorly from the original Italian.

I don't think so. If the full article was in Nano Letters, they published it in English.

It's not clear where the tunneling electron microscope idea came from.

I'm guessing the poster figured "TEM" meant tunneling election microscope, when it really means transmission electron microscope, vs. "STM" (scanning tunneling microscope). Though jeez, the article actually spells it, out, so it's a pretty lame mistake.

It's also not clear that the picture represents and image of either single or double stranded DNA. It appears to be a linear polymer of a number of double stranded DNA molecules. You can see a helical structure, but it appears that that you are looking at a group of DNA molecules bound together.

Yup, from a different summary I read they claimed it was a bundle of 7 molecules (6 around a core), apparently (for what their explanation is worth) because a single one would be destroyed by the TEM.

A bunch of their articles are now free to read - http://pubs.acs.org/page/Nobel2012

antibiotics (which remain in the meat, even after cooking

Citation needed.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf00047a035

http://mbioblog.asm.org/mbiosphere/2012/08/antibiotic-residues-in-fermented-sausage-meat-target-beneficial-bacteria-leave-pathogens-alone.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134130/

These and other references were brought to my attention at a time I had recently recovered from, yet another Streptococcus throat infection, where I could scarcely swallow for three days. I decided to give up beef, chicken, pork and rely only on fish caught in the lakes or ocean. Over a period of two years I did notice the severity of respiratory infections decline and when I did take antibiotics they actually worked. Though anecdotal, I did recall antibiotics had little to no effect before I changed my diet. Eventually a dairy allergy would remove all cheese, yoghurt, milk from my diet and I find the period from initial detection of a respiratory infection to recovery to be down to less than a week, where I once would suffer these occurances for up to two weeks. I believe there is merit to these studies, particularly regarding the constant presence of low levels of antibiotics in the body creating a breeding ground for resistant strains (which are on the rise) and leaving my immune system impared to some degree, as all antibiotics are toxins which target certain organisms, but also have a degree of collateral damage (killing non-bacterial cells.)

I'm a PhD student in biochemistry and microbiology and would like to point out that nothing in the parent post makes sense. Consuming low levels of antibiotics would not have an effect on the incidence and severity of respiratory infections. Also antibiotics are not generally toxic to humans at prescribed doses, particularly those fed to livestock, and especially not at the very low levels that could be encountered from food. Some antibiotics can cause organ damage with chronic exposure but would not have an effect on respiratory infections.

In summary, the issue of chronic low level exposure to antibiotics is a concern at the population level and their effects can not be teased out at the individual level from an anecdotal point of view.

antibiotics (which remain in the meat, even after cooking

Citation needed.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf00047a035

http://mbioblog.asm.org/mbiosphere/2012/08/antibiotic-residues-in-fermented-sausage-meat-target-beneficial-bacteria-leave-pathogens-alone.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134130/

These and other references were brought to my attention at a time I had recently recovered from, yet another Streptococcus throat infection, where I could scarcely swallow for three days. I decided to give up beef, chicken, pork and rely only on fish caught in the lakes or ocean. Over a period of two years I did notice the severity of respiratory infections decline and when I did take antibiotics they actually worked. Though anecdotal, I did recall antibiotics had little to no effect before I changed my diet. Eventually a dairy allergy would remove all cheese, yoghurt, milk from my diet and I find the period from initial detection of a respiratory infection to recovery to be down to less than a week, where I once would suffer these occurances for up to two weeks. I believe there is merit to these studies, particularly regarding the constant presence of low levels of antibiotics in the body creating a breeding ground for resistant strains (which are on the rise) and leaving my immune system impared to some degree, as all antibiotics are toxins which target certain organisms, but also have a degree of collateral damage (killing non-bacterial cells.)

antibiotics (which remain in the meat, even after cooking

Citation needed.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf00047a035

http://mbioblog.asm.org/mbiosphere/2012/08/antibiotic-residues-in-fermented-sausage-meat-target-beneficial-bacteria-leave-pathogens-alone.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134130/

"A novel class of orally active antimalarial 3,5-diaryl-2-aminopyridines has been identified from phenotypic whole cell high-throughput screening of a commercially available SoftFocus kinase library."

"One of these frontrunner compounds, 15, was equipotent across the two strains .. and superior to chloroquine in the K1 strain .. Compound 15 completely cured Plasmodium berghei-infected mice with a single oral dose of 30 mg/kg." link

FWIW, the talk was about a novel IR sensor. So there's at least that. TFA is a (typo-ridden—wtf is "florescence"?) Nature Blogs article, presumably from someone who was in the stands yesterday and thought it deserved a little bit of attention for being neat. I think most of the PR inflation, at least in this case, happened right here on Slashdot.

You're right; this is mostly a function of the "new and improved" Slashdot... I sort of went off on a semi-unrelated tirade against science journalism, in general. If they got this concept to work with actual NIR fluorophores, then that is at least interesting. Though it sort of proves my point that the "journalist" here totally missed what was interesting--i.e., people have stuffed fluorescent probes into red blood cells before--which is why you shouldn't blog about talks at ACS meetings unless, perhaps, you were involved in the actual research.

At least the abstract for the talk uses the correct word.

As much as people on Slashdot whine about the editors not actually doing any editing, I think there is a parallel trend with some journal editors (at least in my experience with physics journals). It seems they do less and less editing, trying to offload that to the author. All they do is tweak the LaTeX formatting to get it to flow right, and if that takes too long or they run into LaTeX issues with how you used the template, they expect the author to either fix it or pay a fee to have them fix it. (Yes, I know this is Nature's blog and not the journal, probably run by different people... but still a reminder of a broader trend.)

...and it turns out that was submitted via POST for some unfathomable reason. Here's the correct link.

FWIW, the talk was about a novel IR sensor. So there's at least that. TFA is a (typo-ridden—wtf is "florescence"?) Nature Blogs article, presumably from someone who was in the stands yesterday and thought it deserved a little bit of attention for being neat. I think most of the PR inflation, at least in this case, happened right here on Slashdot.

Hopefully we'll find out soon. The talk was given yesterday afternoon, and there doesn't appear to be any other information available on it yet. I'm guessing, though, since this is a very chemistry-oriented team, and the actual piece de resistance* is the IR sensor, they may be collaborating on, or even completely outsourcing, the clinical maturation of the project.

*Not going to try the accents here.

Hey, I'm just quoting the paper. These amounts are referenced from other papers, which may have been using different techniques for measuring the concentrations.
Here's the North Sea one: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021967301005295
Here's the Mediterranean: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es020125z
Here's Hawaii: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X10001839

I was all set to make a snarky comment about what free fluorine would do to your stationary phase (not to mention the tube containing it), but by golly, they'd long since figured out how to deal with that, too.

The TFA is just a BS article that says nothing.
 
A better link (and is in the TFA) is Nanoporous Graphene Could Outperform Best Commercial Water Desalination Techniques
 
However that references Nanoporous graphene could outperform best commercial water desalination techniques
 
Now we finally we get to the actual link Water Desalination across Nanoporous Graphene (which unfortunately you need to have the right credentials to see - which I don't)
 
How come I can follow those links and the TFS can't?

In oil spills, the oil floats on top of the wate, not the other way around. How can this help clean up oil spills?

If you read the summary, you'd learn that these things stride on the border between the oil and water, not between the oil and air - they're in the perfect place to clean up the oil.

If you clicked on the link, you could have even just looked at the picture. Then you wouldn't have had to read anything. Slashdot Posters: Lowering Expectations Daily.

You've got it backwards. The cost of materials for sequencing is dropping to $1k, but the data analysis (stitching together all of the short DNA reads to assemble a full genome sequence) still costs well in excess of $1k. For example, a 2011 Chemical and Engineering News article suggests that the cost of the analysis was still ~$100k.

The production of 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef results in about 22.1 kilograms (49 pounds) of CO2 emissions - including production of grains and feed, methane released from the cow's digestion adjusted as a CO2 equivalent, materials, production and shipping.#ref1 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f The loss of natural habitat potential from 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef is estimated to be 17 square meters (183 square feet).

http://ecofx.org/wiki/index.php?title=Beef

Hmmmmmmmm...who to trust?

On one hand I see that cpu6502 suspects that our current warming spike is entirely natural.

On the other hand I see that the U.S. National Academies and the science academies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russian, the UK, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, NASA, the American Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Chemical Society, the American Meteorological Society, the Geological Society of America, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Australian Institute of Physics and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics think cpu6502 is wrong.

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=05192010
http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html
http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/aaas_climate_statement.pdf
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/ssi/american-physical-society.pdf
http://www.agu.org/sci_pol/positions/climate_change2008.shtml
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_SUPERARTICLE&node_id=1907&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.pdf
http://www.geosociety.org/positions/position10.htm
http://www.euro-acad.eu/downloads/memorandas/lets_be_honest_-_festplenum_03.03.07_-_final2.pdf
http://www.aip.org.au/scipolicy/Science%20Policy.pdf
http://www.iugg.org/resolutions/perugia07.pdf
http://planet3.org/2012/03/11/a-brief-guide-to-the-scientific-consensus-on-climate-change/

Published in June 2011: A Vaccine Strategy that Induces Protective Immunity against Heroin.

And a subsequent press release entitled Successful lab tests on a potential vaccine for heroin addiction

Published in June 2011: A Vaccine Strategy that Induces Protective Immunity against Heroin.

And a subsequent press release entitled Successful lab tests on a potential vaccine for heroin addiction

Actually, the authors call it a battery in their paper. And it is.

Here's the salient part of the paper:

In this work, we demonstrate a novel electrochemical cell named a “mixing entropy battery”, which extracts energy from the difference in concentration of two solutions and stores it as chemical energy inside the electrode material’s bulk crystal structure. This approach allows us to overcome the challenges of supercapacitor electrodes based on activated carbon. This device consists of a reversible electrochemical system where the salts in the electrolyte are the reactants and the electrode stores ions. We employed two different electrodes: an anionic electrode, which interacts with Cl ions selectively; and a cationic electrode, which interacts with Na+ ions selectively. These electrodes are initially submerged in a low ionic strength solution (river water) in their discharged states, when the electrode materials contain the respective ions incorporated in their structures. In this dilute solution, the battery is charged by removing the Na+ and Cl ions from the respective electrodes (Figure 1a, step 1). Successively, the dilute electrolyte is exchanged for a concentrated solution (seawater), which is accompanied by an increase in the potential difference between the electrodes (Figure 1a, step 2). At this higher potential difference, the battery is discharged, as the anions and cations are reincorporated into their respective electrodes (Figure 1a, step 3). The concentrated solution is then removed and substituted by the dilute electrolyte (river water), which results in a decrease in potential difference between the electrodes (Figure 1a, step 4). We note that the exchange of solution could also be carried out via a flow process, which could be attractive for large scale energy extraction.

Do you honestly have any fucking idea how big the Pacific is, or how big the planet as a whole is? Not trolling here, just honest questions. Do you know anything at all about ocean currents or dilution rates expressed not in parts per million, but parts per quintillion over time spans measured not in years or even months, but in days? How about decay rates? How about statistically significant exposure thresholds for even remote potential for damage to cellular structures? For fuck's sake, do you have any idea whatsoever about anything you're commenting on, or was your post just for "the lulz?"

As radionuclides are analogues of micro nutrients to living organisms dilution does not apply. What applies is bio-concentration and in nature, due to those properties of the radionuclides, they will be absorbed by the smallest of sea creatures and plants facilitating their entry into the food chain as they are eaten.

Plutonium is a analogue of iron and iron is a sort after micro nutrient in the ocean, consequently most of it will find it's way into the food chain. At least, thats how the science tells us how bio-concentration works. Of course there are other ways for radionuclides to end up in our food chain but this is specific to your points which are often made by those who think "dilution is part of the solution". The fact is the opposite is what is occurring.

You are part of the problem, and congratulations on feeding Yet Another Media Earnings Frenzy Over Absolutely Nothing At All. Yes I know what I'm talking about, and no I don't give a flying fuck about being modded down here. Take it or leave it. My advice to you is simply this: find something else to do with your spare time aside from feeding the beast of rampant stupidity. I recommend a formal education beyond the community college level on the aforementioned topics for starters. Have a nice day.

No, you don't know what you are talking about and you should take you own advice. The process of bio-concentration and radionuclide micro nutrient analogue has been studied, peer reviewed and has an ever growing body of science to refer to. The article Radionuclide Bioconcentration Factors and Sediment Partition Coefficients in Arctic Seas Subject to Contamination from Dumped Nuclear Wastes would be a good place to start if the science is an adequate refutation of your assumptions.

A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health

Differential Effects of Glyphosate and Roundup on Human Placental Cells and Aromatase

Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Produce Teratogenic Effects on Vertebrates by Impairing Retinoic Acid Signaling

Go here http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 for slightly more accurate information. It's about 13:1 adsorbent:CO2 by weight. Not pretty, but not catastrophic.

Ahh yes, there appears to be a typo in the article linked from the summary. The article from the summary says:

each gram of the material sopped up an average of 1.72 nanomoles of CO2

While your article (which was linked to from the other article) says:

1.71 mmol CO2 per g or 75 mg CO2 per g of adsorbent.

Which makes it 1000 times better than it appears to be in my post above.

Go here http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 for slightly more accurate information. It's about 13:1 adsorbent:CO2 by weight. Not pretty, but not catastrophic.

Someone, somewhere, made a math or transcription error. This http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 says they get 78mg/g. You need about 13 g of this stuff (the treated fumed silica) to adsorb 1 g of CO2.