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About the autonomous part...

What kind of autonomous pathogen detection systems do we have today?
I am not talking about strip tests.
I am thinking more in a way of pattern recognition system plugged into a digital microscope, combined with a database of say.. known bacteria.

Sounds to me that building something like that should be a logical practical application from the moment we managed to strap a digital camera to a microscope.
With an "on a chip" microscope for 10$, I wonder... Shouldn't someone be working on something like that?
And what is the current state of the "lab on a chip"?

I mean... I AM eagerly awaiting that holodeck as much as the next guy or girl, but medical tricorders MIGHT be a tad more important.

I was just reading that Microwaves can activate enzymes: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/asap/abs/ja802404g.html (although I found more on the article here: http://www.physorg.com/news135962124.html ). I could be confused about the non-ionizing part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave#Power

Another article http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/86/i28/html/8628cover4.html provides some interesting information on organic LEDs - OLEDs have interesting design applications since you can make them in flat sheets

(I think an illuminating wall would be way cool, but maybe thats just me :-))

Right now efficiencies are similar to the inorganic LEDs and fluorescent bulbs.

Maybe.

But the problem is whether these people have opportunity (or reward) to work in the field in which they are talented.

Also a problem in the US - If you're in science in most cases you need to either truly love the field or otherwise be motivated in some manner for other than monetary gains (or otherwise go into law/business and contribute brilliance there).

example:

Disparity of salaries between University Professors and Football Coaches - overall, who provides more long term gain to society and who are rewarded more in terms of salary (almost an order of magnitude difference)?

http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/86/i28/html/8628education.html

I'm going read the in-press papers about the total synthesis of snow flea antifreeze protein instead, though.

Scientists have been able to design new proteins that can catalyze reactions. In two landmark papers just this year (De Novo Computational Design of Retro-Aldol Enzymes, Science 2008 319, 1387; Kemp elimination catalysts by computational enzyme design, Nature 2008 453, 190), David Baker's group at the University of Washington was able to computationally design two entirely new enzymes from scratch. Of course, there's still a lot of work to be done as these enzymes are not nearly as efficient as natural enzymes, but these breakthroughs open up many great possibilities. Here's a summary describing the results of the Science paper.

Point three is called cracking. A quick google search finds some more information pretty quickly, and if you have disposable funds,
this or this seem like pretty good resources. There's also a Journal of Petroleum Geochemistry, if you're interested.

Lab re-creation is not really necessary; the commercial form of cracking is called petroleum refining.

A more detailed summary can be found American Chemical Society site, Chemical & Engineering News: Trading SiO2 Dielectrics for SANDs

Marks's group creates SANDs through a simple dipping and curing process. Monolayers of hydrocarbons or extended [pi]-systems are applied to the gate electrode via the reaction of organochlorosilanes with the electrode's surface hydroxyl groups.

Doesn't mean much to me but I get warm feeling all through me gutty-wuts when I read such geeky stuff.

Ok, I should have RTFA instead of the press release.

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/2008/130/i24/abs/ja801309g.html

SAMs deposited from vapour phase used as dielectrics for organic thin films transistors. Not exactly a novel idea, but possibly some iterative progress.

Still, this can never be used to manufacture anything resembling a modern CPU. RFID tags, as mentioned in the article, may be an application.

It's been a long time, but I had read something about a prediction that element 126 was the expected stable superheavy. Just as electrons have shells, and filled shells make elements chemically neutral (like the noble gasses), neuclei have energy shells that occupy a lower ground state energy when completely filled. Based on the known elements, 126 was predicted.

Here's some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbihexium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i10/8410notw9.html

I've never heard anyone believe in your claim that God had to be more complex just because we are complex. A higher power does not imply greater complexity. You personally can define all you want a higher power to be more complex in order to satisfy your claim of a logical fallacy that you attribute to creationists but you are mischaracterizing them for the sake of trying to prove them wrong. Given what you first stated though, there may be no rule that states extremely complex systems have to be created by even more complex systems but is there a rule that says it can't happen. For that matter, evolution itself is based on something simple becoming more complex so something as simple as the concept of God could easily create Man if the concept of evolution did the same in your mind.

The guy you responded to lost the point somewhere and you didn't get him back on track either. This isn't about the fastest or most powerful computer. It is about the weirdest computer. What computer do you know can detect human emotion and make moral decisions (yes, even some humans have trouble but they have the capability)? The human brain can perform calculations so it is a computer, an analog computer. How many of those are there? Not many. The wikipedia entry on 'computer' states the following:

And of course your solution to this problem is... less government! But back up a second. That's quite a leap saying that more powerful government gives more opportunity for rent seeking. If that is true, why did the EPA try to claim it didn't have authority to regulate CO2 emissions? Why have fewer species than ever been added to the endangered species list? Maybe the FCC shouldn't have any authority over the electromagnetic spectrum, parts of which were recently reclaimed, repackaged, and auctioned off? Why did the Department of Homeland Security bungle Katrina so badly? Why does DHS insist on spending big $ for radiation detectors that won't reliably detect smuggling and which are subject to false alarms, while barely pursuing other, more promising methods? Maybe they don't have enough people? It couldn't be because consolidating several agencies into one overall smaller agency was a bad idea, could it?

The problem is not the size of the government, it's the size of the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity in government and in corporations. It's the extent to which these organizations and systems allow problems to be hidden and covered up. In some cases, government authority has been used for rent seeking, but in many other cases, lack of government authority has been used to put together monopolies and to get away with short changing the people. Just look at the subprime mess, and the way the telcos have not provided services, even going so far as to sue government entities set up to provide services where the telcos would not. If Bush and Cheney had less government to work with, they'd have fewer secrets to keep! Yeah. Transparency, not size, is the key.

LMAO.. I think you got everything right except the last question:

Interesting idea, they're very different branches of mathematics so I'm having trouble working out how to combine them.

The idea in regression is to transform the IVs such that there is a linear relationship between them and the DVs. The transformations people make of IVs to make the relationship simple are a bit of a black art. Most people just get by with log since it solves any polynomial. It's easy enough to just keeping adding higher order polynomials until regression predicts a coefficient of 0 to tell you that you've gone too far, but that doesn't help much if the equation you're trying to predict parameters for is not efficiently modelled by a polynomial.

As for using differentiation to find the optimal transformation function, it's an interesting idea and I'm too tired now to work out if you could use it. A google search doesn't turn up anything quickly, with the following at least trying to determine the transformations automatically instead of guessing. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/ancham/1991/63/i20/f-pdf/f_ac00020a022.pdf?sessid=6006l3

The problem I keep coming back to is predicting the height of a ball bobbing on the surface of the sea given all the appropriate parameters. The see is best modelled as the combination of waves (duh), but I can't think of anything except the intuition of the modeller that would detect this case and suggest log was not an appropriate general function. I recall covering hmm, was it Maclaurin expansion, in my senior numerical methods course, but I never thought of applying that to regression at the time. Relying on google again turns up http://www.springerlink.com/content/44teyxefx9pa8058/ which looks relevant but I'm not subscribed to springer so can't view any more than the abstract.

I've published to professional journals (as a academic historian) before, and I've never had to surrender copyright to the journal (agreement was strictly for publishing rights).

For chemistry:

The undersigned, with the consent of all authors, hereby transfers, to the extent that there is copyright to be transferred, the exclusive copyright interest in the above cited manuscript, including the published version in any format (subsequently called the "work"), to the American Chemical Society....

From http://pubs.acs.org/copyright/forms/copyright.pdf

For physics:

Copyright to the above-listed unpublished and original article submitted by the above author(s), the abstract forming part thereof, and any subsequent errata (collectively, the "Article") is hereby transferred to the American Physical Society (APS)...

From http://forms.aps.org/author/copytrnsfr.pdf, which interestingly enough wouldn't let me cut-and-paste without using a hacked version of xpdf. :P

I read through all the replies to your post, and I'm surprised nobody seems to be aware of anthocyanin research, especially cyanidin-3-rutinoside:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304383505004647
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/abstract/M610616200v2
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jafcau/2001/49/i03/abs/jf001246q.html

Sorry about the first URL - it was the only way I could quickly figure out to get a link to the article. Just click on the Science Direct link on that page to view it (maybe the other link also works, but I didn't test it).

Of course, this research is only in its infancy and could turn out to be a dead end, but I'm surprised nobody here seems to be aware of it. And I'm late to the discussion, so nobody will read this anyway....

- T

Sorry, you are wrong. Nuclear power is fossil heat energy of a sort (it dumps it much faster than normal decay from uranium left in the ground, similar to how coal or oil dumps heat fast when it is burned, what took millions of years is now one day in a coal or oil burning "thing" or a year or two with a load of nuke fuel), leading to an increase in global warming because of the speed of the heat released compared to natural heat loss out of the atmosphere into space) and modern solar is cleaner than anything else out there and is as close to being a perfect heat and carbon and everything else "neutral" source as it gets.. Just the facts, you'll just have to deal with it and your last century now debunked business and alleged "science" FUD against solar.

  Nuclear power is just another traditional energy monopolist rape your wallet forever source, it is slightly greener than coal (and only if you completely ignore radioactive waste, including the mine tailings and ground water pollution, add those in, plus having wars fought over who gets to use and own nuclear, or threats of wars, and figuring in the cost of military protection for nuke plants and assorted waste for the next several thousand years), but that's about it, not even close to being "green". "Green" means heat neutral/less pollution, and with new anode coating advances and thin film production now hitting and being sold and a dozen new companioes springing up to supply them, we are at best only a few years away now from solar PV even being cheaper in financial cost than nukes on a watt per buck ratio. And if you haven't seen it yet, Sharp is now going to be building very large lithium ion batteries for home storage of solar generated electricity, meaning practical 24/7 use.

fission power = 20th century tech, fusion power (solar) = 21st century tech

And the combined tech doesn't even scale anyumore, look at yesterdays huge florida mass blackout, that tech is now past prime, the next wave of electricity will be widely distributed and independent of last centuries grid, meaning less potential failure nodes, no more one some little powerline or plant going down knocking out huge areas. Just because they shut the reactors down yesterday doesn't mean it worked, on the contrary, it just emphasized the design failures-the blackout still happened, and delivering the electricity is the *entire point* of having a powerplant and monopoly distribution system-no delivery=failure.. You have to look at the whole delivery stack, not just one component. Nukes failed it bigtime yesterday for all practical purposes, their design and implementation could not handle what was in essence a very small problem.

The old tech, including nukes, was OK for last century, but this century is going to need some adjustments, just "more of the same" old crap is not going to cut it. That would be like saying the solution to gas hog SUVs is just to build more of them so they might be cheaper. Sorry, that just fails the practicality test.

Ethics is an interesting concept - first thing that may come a person's mind :

"good and bad"
"wrong or right"
"black and white"

Personally, when one finds themselves in IT related predicaments, I'm guessing it's not that usual to land in a black or white situation, but one of a million shades of gray.

A few more:

"the way one lives"
"actions that land you on the right (good?) side of the fence"
"oath"
"creed"
etc . . .

What is a creed? One definition in an online dictionary defines it as ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/creed ) : " . . .any system or codification of belief or of opinion. . ."

eek . . . the entertainment industry (I'm guessing a person can come up with centuries or more worth of examples there) would have us believe in "good" creeds or "bad" creeds - religions, knights, assassins and more.

One might also ask - will your ethics lead you to copy chunks of the comments to the slashdot article above? Ethics in research and writing papers - that's a fought over issue as well. (people often hate to look in this mirror :)

Several professional groups have published "ethics" . . .

American Chemical Society ( http://pubs.acs.org/meetingpreprints/ethics.html )
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics ( http://www.aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=198 )
American Institute of Architects ( http://www.aia.org/about_ethics )
American Institute of Chemical Engineers ( http://www.aiche.org/About/Code.aspx )
American Society of Landscape Architects ( http://www.asla.org/about/codepro.htm )
Instutute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers ( http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html )

To pick a few. Look kind of like science/fantasy fans might see as guild rules :)

IT is no different.

People who strive for SANS/GIAC certification agree to their ethics as part of completing the certification process. ( http://www.giac.org/overview/ethics.php )

SAGE, LOPSA & USNIX share the same code of ethics - http://lopsa.org/CodeOfEthics

ACM - http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

CISA, CISM, CGEIT - ( http://www.isaca.org/Template.cfm?Section=Code_of_Professional_Ethics&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=20454
)

SSCP, CAP & CISSP (certification) ethics - ( https://www.isc2.org/cgi-bin/content.cgi?category=12 )

I'm sure there are plenty more.

I'm guessing there are very few if any CS or IT related courses that don't include some kind of ethics class or section.

Personally - when I was growing up - with a lot of computer enthusiasts in the neighborhood - some slided one way or the other (ethics wise) and some stood fairly firmly on one side or the other (usually the "old guys").

I've been in the professional IT industry for several years - and doing semi-professional IT stuff on and off years before that. Seeing I'm still there - I hope I'm on the an acceptable side of the fence :)

I've been involved in a few ethics dust-ups over the years . . . never got a horrible

While you are right that conventional coal plants can be made just as clean as gasification, it's just much more expensive to scrub a conventional coal plant than a gasification plant. The difference is quite significant.

Most of the savings is due to more beneficial thermodynamics. Syngas (the product of gasification) has a much higher concentration of CO2 than exhaust gas (the product of a conventional plant). This higher concentration (also higher pressure and temperature than at the exhaust stack) provide a larger driving force for the removal of CO2 from the gas stream. This larger driving force means that there is less need for capital investment in scrubbing equipment. It also means that less energy is utilized in scrubbing the gas. Finally, since gasification results in more complete oxidation of the carbon, the plant is overall more efficient. The result is cheaper energy from the same coal.

http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/85/i44/html/8544gov1.html

Adding scrubbing and sequestering equipment onto existing plants is estimated to add 75% to the cost of energy from coal. Coal gasification (with carbon sequestration) would only add around 33% to the cost of energy from coal.

Jbengt is entirely correct, plus since these reservoirs have proven "gas tight" to natural gas for geologic time periods, why do you think CO2 would be that different? Earthquakes that you describe would seem to be extremely rare, seeing as we don't have huge methane plumes coming out of the earth every time there's an earthquake.
The problem, as Jbengt said, is location of the fields and compressor costs, particularly compared to just venting it. There is also another way of sequestering CO2 that has been experimented with recently by the DOE: turning it into a gas hydrate that is denser than sea water and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, where it is largely stable in its solid form. See here: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2003/37/i16/abs/es026301l.html

Another paper out this week seems to directly contradict that headline.

What Dai (the Stanford professor) is actually claiming is that specially functionalized nanotubes gather at the back end of the digestive tract, and seem to dissapear. Pure nanotubes cause all sorts of problems. There's an important distinction there, but this is still good news for nanotube (and cancer) research.

just looking at the new base pair molecular structures here: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/asap/abs/ja078223d.html contrasting with the 4 bases existing in nature it is very unlikely that natural t-rna aminoacylases could recognize these new base pairs and even if they could, it wouldn't result in a new amino acid, it would result in one amino acid having an extra set of synthetic sequence(s) that code for it. these proteins are very specific, if they were not as specific as they are, we'd see a lot more proteins that just aren't right. very bad considering that something as little as exchanging aspartate for glutamate and vice versa can destroy a protein's functionality [one in particular I remember being extremely specific, an exception rather than the rule]

You're right. The intention here is not to create new proteins, but to tag DNA and possibly create new DNA nanostructures. At the end of the day, mRNAs that are translated to proteins still will only have access to the same set of tRNAs, and therefore, the same 20 amino-acids.

The article can be found here. [PDF download requires a subscription]

A more interesting discovery (in my opinion) -- from the Scripps Institute -- was made about ~10-15 years ago (IIRC) by Pete Schultz's group. They modified tRNAs so that specific codons (DNA/RNA triplets) could incorporate chemically-modified amino-acids into a protein. Some of this has led to interesting work on protein tagging, functional studies as well as the study of molecular evolution. All this is done with in vitro translation, as far as I know.

I was quite suspicious of their claim, so I read the original article.

The claim is that long DNA molecules (200bp) that have double helix structure (dsDNA) can "detect" each other over long distances -- as long as nanometers. Their claim is that sequence specific electrostatic type interactions -- which scale as 1/r -- lead to such recognition. Since the base interactions themselves are through H-bonds, the claim is that the base-pairs have subtle effects on the phosphodiester backbone (and the counter-ions around them) such that identical dsDNA molecules can recognize each other electrostatically without opening up. As stated in their introduction, this is quite controversial.

DNA molecules already "recognize" themselves by opening up and hybridizing, and the lower energy molecular pairs -- i.e. sequence matched strands -- are more populated than mismatched molecules. They try to address this : "We consider it to be rather unlikely in this instance, since the probability of bubble formation in unstressed linear DNA of the studied length is very small in contrast to the case where topological strain is relieved by bubble formation in small circular DNA molecules."

I'm not so sure that I would rule this option out because even partial hybridization changes the diffusivity constants of ssDNA/dsDNA molecules, which could lead to "pockets" of higher local concentration. I'm surprised that this wasn't elaborated more carefully, and that reviewers didn't jump all over this. Furthermore, I think they should have screened the electrostatics and changed the Debye length of these molecules and demonstrated a change in "recognition", at the very least.

In any case, I am quite suspicious of their conclusions, as many other biophysicists are.

Well, some bloggers like to think of themselves as free radicals!

Incidentally:

http://membership.acs.org/W/WNY/db2005/db0305.html

'Since I know the chemical profession best, I devised two questions, for instance, to tell a chemist from a nonchemist. Here they are:

(1) How do you pronounce UNIONIZED?
(2) What is a mole?

In response to the first question, the nonchemist is bound to say "YOO-yun-ized," which is the logical pronunciation, and the dictionary pronunciation, too. The chemist, however, would never think of such a thing; he would say without a moment's hesitation: "un- EYE -on-ized."

In response to the second question, the nonchemist is bound to say, "A little furry animal that burrows underground," unless he is a civil engineer who will say, "A breakwater." A chemist, on the other hand, will clear his throat, and say, "Well, it's like this -" and keep talking for hours.

There's my cue. Shall we talk about the chemical version of the little furry animal?"

~~"To Tell a Chemist" Isaac Asimov 1965'

Does true innovation even exist? I constantly stumble across discussions of "true innovation" (mostly the lack thereof) that never manage to define what true innovation would look like if we had it.

I did discover yesterday some interesting applications of Bounce dryer sheets.

* Cram one down the filler neck in your car's fuel tank and increase gas mileage by 430%.
* Tape ten sheets across both of your car's bumpers to prevent accidents--it repels other vehicles.
* Put a sheet in your dishwasher and your plates will be wrinkle-free.

And then I found this link from Chemical Engineering News, from which I gleaned the following perky keywords and electrostatically neutral buzzphrase:

polymers and enzymes, softergents, alcohol ethoxylates, cationic dialkyl quaternary surfactants, linear alkylbenzene sulfonates, combination of an alkyltrimethylamine with a fatty acid, monoalkyl quaternary surfactants (quats) or ethoxylated quats, specialty polymers and amidoamines, dispersants and opacifiers, biocides and rheology modifiers, protease and carbohydrase enzymes, manganese-based catalyst that activates percarbonate and perborate bleaches, dye fixative offering dye-transfer inhibition, fluorescent whitening agents, cyclodextrin chemistry to reduce odors, proprietary fragrance with zinc ricinoleate, temporary surface hydrophilicity, silica nanoparticles

No, no innovation at all. But careful not to breath the fumes of progress as it roars off in pursuit of the silicone nanosphere.

As Monkhouse once noted, "It got up to 94 degrees today - that's pretty good at my age." Since the era Monkhouse recalls when "safe sex meant a padded headboard" we've since, uh, licked that particular problem three times over. At the end of the day, the only innovation that matters is the innovation people are willing to pay for, and for most of us, what we're willing to pay for hasn't much changed since the CT boundary.

Digitization of actual content came later. When I started graduate school in 1998, I can still remember going to the old, crusty "bowels" of the health sciences library and looking up academic journals by hand -- it was really a royal PITA because the amount of journal articles you'd have to look up was quite astronomical, and you'd have to take several trips between your table/desk in the library and the shelf, to work on a given problem. But we found the information we needed.

By the time I graduated however, it got much better! The ACS put their entire archives since the 1800s online, and several other publishers got into that game as well. So now, you could search online and find the info you needed as well. The problem (that still remains, unfortunately), is that publishers are still clinging to their old, archaic copyright policies, and if your institution doesn't have access, you get a page asking you to pay. And the fees, for single articles, are astronomically effing ridiculous -- $50 or so for a single article!!!! Who in the h*ll is going to pay for that?!?! I understand that publishers do need to make a certain amount of money, within reason. Although I don't buy their justification of publishing costs -- these days, the typesetting is all done in desktop word processing, by the authors! And authors are asked more and more to do actual editorial tasks. Peer review doesn't even cost as much, since the experts don't get paid to do it. So the journals asking for $50 or so for a single article are just extorting people for far too much than they should actually be charging! Fortunately, it looks like the academic publishing market is slowly moving more in the direction of open access.

I think that you are correct. I know that I read somewhere that the helium will be in the top of the pocket, but apparently, there is more within the gas. That is cool. In particular, the seperation appears to be an ongoing process, via the wyoming plant, which is the world's largest.

Well, here's someone who makes your case for you, but the real question is how will we know what will happen unless we find out? There would be, I'm sure, protocols in place to avoid contamination problems. If Jonas Salk hadn't injected himself and his family with his polio vaccine, polio might be quite a bit more rampant today.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

You have no idea...too late. There are MULTIPLE contamination (both accidental and intentional) problems already. We are rapidly moving to biological armageddon, for a number of reasons. But heck, don't take my word for it. Google for GMO seed contamination. I hope that you will be appropriately outraged and shocked by what you discover and hammer your politicians ASAP.

Here's a couple examples:
http://www.biotech-info.net/control_issues.html
http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/2006/05/hawaiian-papaya-gmo-contaminated-by.html
http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/est/99/dec/dec-news6.html

Et cetera, et cetera, unfortunately...

Don't you think that they would have already done that? We're limited though because of the temperature differential. Efficiency would be great if we had an absolute zero sinkhole to dump the heat into, but we don't.

There's new reactors that can get 44% efficiency, they'd operate around 900C. Current light water reactors are 350C and get between 30-36% efficiency(there's a lot of factors in this, like whether they're using cooling towers).

Source

If we can get high temperature reactors good enough, that'll reduce fuel costs, probably be fairly neutral on O&M and construction - more expensive reactor components, fewer cooling components needed. More expensive reactor maintenance, reduced cooling maintenance.

Looking around at some of PLOS's competitors, the fees for open access look about right. It doesn't look like PLOS is gouging by any stretch of the imagination.

You can't really expect publishers to publish for free because there are real costs associated with academic publishing. Most academic journal publishers are nonprofits. It's not like your $2-3k is to eek out 1 more cent per share to meet quarterly estimates or something.

This is about "generating power in a fuel cell".

Poor Zachariah Heiden made some comment that included the partial sentence "unconventional metal hydrides can be used for a chemical process called oxygen reduction, which is an essential part of the process of making water", and all the context got thrown away.

The actual paper seems to be "Homogeneous Catalytic Reduction of Dioxygen Using Transfer
Hydrogenation Catalysts".

Well, here's an actual link to the paper if someone wants to actually read it: Homogeneous Catalytic Reduction of Dioxygen Using Transfer Hydrogenation Catalysts. Unfortunately, they don't let anyone read more than the abstract without an account or paying $25.

I'm a little offended by the suggestion not to read the paper because it's too confusing. But then, it's not like we can read it anyways without jumping through a bunch of hoops and paying unreasonable sums of money.

Looking at the dates detailed in the paper from Peter Burke's group, you can see that it was submitted in June and finished in September, while the paper from Alex Zettl's group was submitted in August and finished in October. Yet... neither of the articles has actually been published yet (they're both available online as pre-prints), and the press release only mentions the second paper.

Zettl's radio looks better in the lab (requires moving parts and a vacuum chamber), but Burke's getting a raw deal here.

Looking at the dates detailed in the paper from Peter Burke's group, you can see that it was submitted in June and finished in September, while the paper from Alex Zettl's group was submitted in August and finished in October. Yet... neither of the articles has actually been published yet (they're both available online as pre-prints), and the press release only mentions the second paper.

Zettl's radio looks better in the lab (requires moving parts and a vacuum chamber), but Burke's getting a raw deal here.

A great job of PR! Hopefully, there is really something to it. At the moment, it seems that they have set up a million dollars of high vacuum cryo equipment (I'm guessing) and transmitted audio from one side of the room to the other. You can "rent" web access to their paper for two days for $25 from the ACS. So much for taxpayer-funded open source literature...

Their project page has videos, simulations, and audio playback samples: NSF Nanotube Radio

Here is their journal abstract:

"We have constructed a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver from a single carbon nanotube. The nanotube serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio: antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator. A direct current voltage source, as supplied by a battery, powers the radio. Using carrier waves in the commercially relevant 40-400 MHz range and both frequency and amplitude modulation techniques, we demonstrate successful music and voice reception."

Research page at Blanchard Lab (part of the AE college of medicine) and the ACS paper about their research.

Can't say I understand this stuff, but for those who do, these probably should have been in the story snippet.

The datacenter prohibits photography but that doesn't mean we can't take a peek... These are all from google image searches, and not from the actual slashdot installation.

The webservers look almost exactly like the rack on the left in this picture: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/farm/orlov.jpg minus the fiber. The rack they're in looks almost exactly like this: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/img/83/i07/8307cover_Rackable.JPG

The database server looks just like the top machine in this picture: http://gallery.bioteam.net/gallery/bioteamBDC/DSCN1760

Many Bothans died to bring us this information. Some cars not for use with some sets.

Hot grits, soviet russia, penisbird, godwin's law, first post, etc. etc.

Yet another scientific story with big claims and little detail. 2nM accuracy sounds a little overstated.

Second they are using fluorescence to see the pattern and this at the very best has resolution of about 300nM.

In conclusion, we have demonstrated the feasibility of biocatalytic lithography. Catalyst-mediated soft lithographic technique offers the advantage of lateral resolution controlled by the range of motion of the immobilized catalyst rather than by the diffusive properties of molecular inks. This feature should facilitate the implementation of strategies for stamping nanoscale features. Further examination of stamping parameters and the application of this methodology to nanolithography are underway, and we will report our results in due course.

The point is to reduce the overall cost of being capable of running the test, not in vastly increasing the efficiency of running a massive batch of tests this way. Certainly there's downstream potential for it...

He launched a blog to attract attention to his research and created a website where he posted his manuscripts that had been rejected by Nature. But in early January of this year, he finally had a paper accepted into a real science journal--Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

Decades of research have created a massive body of scientific literature on climate change, and thousands of new studies on the subject appear every year in different science journals. Yet, within weeks of publishing his first peer-reviewed study, McIntyre was profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The article ran 2209 words and was written by reporter Antonio Regalado.

You have to drill around in the ParagonPlus submission guidelines, but at software you'll find the preferred (or knowing most editors, allowed) packages. Again, because ChemDraw caught on as a standard, and it integrated easily with Word, the chemists who submit to non-physical journals (Inorganic Chemistry, Organometallics, et al., tend to use Word or Wordperfect. Even the physicals are coming around (I worked for a senior editor in another capacity for a while, and the TeX macros changing between some old version of TeX, and tetex or whatever ships with Linux now was a major issue.), as students all know Word, and it's quicker to cut and paste from Mathematical and similar programs into Word than export and then embed in a TeX document.

So, yes, officially they'll accept TeX, but outside of J. Phys. Chem., you'll find very few users.

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http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/esthag/asap /html/es063049z.html#es063049zt00001

> Plus, ACS guidelines generally specify Word files as the desired submission format.

I can't find a statement of preferred format on the site, but they at least accept TeX files, according to this:

http://pubs.acs.org/paragonplus/submission/tex.htm l

If you'd still like to use LaTeX, you may find the following page of interest.

http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

Thanks for your response, and have a nice day!

I believe the OP was in Bioinformatics or similar field, and I'm a chemist. LaTeX only caught on amongst my people in p-chem, and even there, because of the rest of us, they had to learn to use Word. Our original Mac killer app was ChemDraw, which while it now runs on Windows (*sigh*), for years ran most cleanly on Macs, and due to some quirks in Windows metafiles, doesn't always convert correctly between Windows and Mac versions (frequently)h. Add in a couple of solid graphing programs that do good 3d graphs, and you begin to see why Mac on Desktop is so prevalent. This has caused both Mac inertia, (we have software, and don't want to/can't change) and a certain culture (I'll hire an undergrad as a scribe before I'd switch from Mac to Windows/Linux/FutureOS2000) to grow up around them. I know profs who keep around an OS9 mac, just for old files from the above.

Plus, ACS guidelines generally specify Word files as the desired submission format.

1. Diamond? WTF is diamond doing in the title? Cubic zirconia's nothing like diamond unless you believe the ads of people trying to sell you rings with CZ's in them. (And if you've played with gemstones, you might be able to spot those with your bare eyes: they have a 10% different index of refraction of light.

2. Zirconia has been used for a fuel cell 'catalyst' for a while. Here's a reference to a two-year-old paper about a related fuel cell system.

3. I say 'catalyst' in the above, because zirconia's only sort of a catalyst. While the zirconia remains more or less zirconia, it's not just offering a surface for reaction chemistry: it's actually exchanging oxygen with the reactants during the reaction.

4. Still, it's interesting and weird that the electrical potential is being transferred by protons, rather than electrons (as per TFA.) I'm not familiar with that, just with holes and electrons, so that bears more reading.

Alternative fuels basically require us to replace every car, truck, and generator in the developed (and the developing) world.

are we causing global warming ? Good question, we're not actually sure, and we don't understand the mechanism behind it (if so, please point to an accurate climate model, we can maybe tolerate 1% error margin, but certainly no more than that)

Furthermore. Climate models currently have (at best) 20% error margin PER YEAR. That means that we can predict what global warming is going to do next year, but after that the error is bigger than the measurement. After 5 years there is no signal left.