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Here's an article about giant viruses. The short answer is, "there's a lot we don't know and modern technology is giving us a ton of new techniques for seeing things."

There's contention on the actual effect of the currents themselves though:

http://www.americanscientist.o...

and yes, oceans too.

http://www.americanscientist.o...

My favorite discussion of this topic is The Science of Scientific Writing. The authors' basic argument is that most people think science is hard to read because the ideas are complex; but instead, scientists can convey their ideas clearly by meeting the structural expectations of the reader.

For example, readers expect the subject of the sentence to be the subject of the story you're telling. They expect old information to come before new information. They expect the end of the sentence to be the "stress position", and for information there to be emphasized.

It is not overstating matters to say that this article has forever changed the way I write scientific prose. Highly, highly recommended.

Oh, and the other takeaway? It's not that science writing is opaque by necessity -- it's just that many scientists write poorly.

I know these sorts of articles are wildly popular these days, showing HOW DUMB ALL OF YOU OTHER PEOPLE ARE. I understand, it's very reassuring to see yourself placed in the top position where you can shit on everyone else. Thousands of years of tyrannical human elites agree with you. But you don't need everyone to see it. It just takes a single person to spot that something is wrong, point it out, and the viral internet takes over from there. That's how Tom Brokaw's fraud was exposed, someone said, "Hmm, that looks just like MS-Word" and then made the animated .gif that changed the world. Thinking that everyone needs to be a Photoshop expert is just naive and misanthropic. Reuters was also caught red-handed altering photos to conform to their narrative. It just takes one person to utter the sacred phrase "Hmm, that's funny".

That meme was a meme long before South Park and long before the word meme was coined. We joked about it in managerial accounting classes in the mid-'80s (software engineering major, business minor). A personal favorite variation from a cartoon that I remember from the cartoonist Sidney Harris "And then a miracle occurs..." which was first published in American Scientist in 1977.

I don't have polling data, but it does pass the sniff test to assume that one form of magical thinking, inculcated from birth, would tend to make the personality more at-risk of accepting other magical-thinking proposals.

Well, there are some studies which suggest what you say is true, but there are other scientists and psychologists who have claimed that supernatural beliefs and superstitions are "hard-wired" into humanity. Many anthropologists have argued that some sort of supernatural beliefs were necessary for the foundation of complex societies, but there's disagreement about the exact role or types of beliefs and their effects.

On the other hand, regardless of upbringing, there seem to be specific psychological traits that are highly correlated with religiosity, such as lower intelligence or various personality traits. There have been literally hundreds of studies on this stuff, and your proposal that various superstitious thinking may be related to and/or substituting for religious thinking has been studied for close to 40 years.

There seem to be no clear answers and a lot of contradictory studies about whether paranormal/supernatural beliefs are basically innate or mostly affected by psychological traits or intelligence, or whether nurturing children affects those tendencies in significant ways.

The only thing I can say is that people have believed weird nonsense throughout history, and even if you expunge various myths and bogey men, people will find other weird nonsense to believe -- whether it's aliens or conspiracy theories or whatever. You can even look at demographic stats and polls for other countries -- participation in institutional religion is very low in Europe, and many countries have relatively high numbers there of people who are nominally atheists, but various other types of occult and superstitious elements are exceptionally popular.

Bottom line: decreasing religious indoctrination of youth may have some impact on overall belief in "magical thinking," but many people will still find various weird things to buy into as adults. Aside from natural cognitive tendencies of humans to "ascribe meaning" to random or natural phenomena and such, religion is historically about defining social groups as well as beliefs, and there's a lot of evidence that people will buy into all kinds of weird crap if it seems like the stuff that most of the people around them are into.

Do you have a link? I've never heard of "peak phosphorus' before.

Google is your friend. http://www.americanscientist.o...

Apparently, this was one of those famous "that's funny..."-moments. ;-)

With ~150,000 megatons(*) worth of fission byproducts lying about, waiting for the next accident/natural disaster/Loss of cooling/war to be released into biosphere. The last thing we need, to is increase that inventory above the ~5,500 megatons we currently are producing each year.

(*)Note: Assumes Megaton's worth of fission isotopes is created for every 0.4tWh of electricity produced by a NPP, No accounting for decay since much of the radioactive food chain isotopes, (Internal radiators, Sr-90, Cs-134, Cs-137, I-129), are still around, and will still be around for decades/centuries/thousands of years.

World wide, atmospheric weapons testing released 100-200 megatons of fission byproducts. The addition of those radio-isotopes to our biosphere sent at least 60 million humans to an early grave

Fukishima's melt thru cores (reactor units 1,2 and 3) contained somewhere between 80 and 174 megatons worth of fission byproducts. If their contents make it into the biosphere, it would be very close to equaling All the atmospheric N-weapons testing to date. Sending at least another 60+ million humans to an early grave.

One can only imagine the outcome, if a significant portion of 150,000 Megatons worth of globally stored radio-isotopes were released into the biosphere. Mankind, being the apex predator, would be lucky to survive such a release.

.

Heroin overdose among experienced users with steady supplies are unheard of. Heroin is quite safe, actually.

The letal dose of heroin is 5x an "effective dose". I suppose some people who know what they're doing can avoid an overdose, but the gap between an effective dose and a lethal dose is a lot closer for heroin than for - well - every other illegal drug on this list: http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/200645104835_307.pdf

That sounds indeed highly dangerous. But here is the kicker: The lethal dose for Paracetamol is only about 3x of that "effective dose". One of the reasons you can accidentally kill yourself with it if you do not follow the instructions carefully. Yet most people never have a problem.

(No, I am not for legalizing the stuff. I am just pointing out your argument does not hold water.)

Heroin overdose among experienced users with steady supplies are unheard of. Heroin is quite safe, actually.

The letal dose of heroin is 5x an "effective dose". I suppose some people who know what they're doing can avoid an overdose, but the gap between an effective dose and a lethal dose is a lot closer for heroin than for - well - every other illegal drug on this list: http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/200645104835_307.pdf

Now that you know all this, you and all other prohibitionists, especially those in Congress, are engaged in willful murder.

That's a pretty serious charge. I think you should reevalutate your definition of "willful murder". There's a real difference between showing up at someone's house and shooting them, versus making a drug illegal, causing a drug-user to seek out less-safe alternatives, resulting in them overdosing. The thing is that if you make a drug legal, it has complex effects on usage. One result might be an increase in drug use and then an increase in death rates (not only from drug overdose, but also indirect increases in crime as users mug/steal from people to get drug money or driving cars while under the influence). Further, there are other things involved in the decision to make a drug illegal than simply "reducing the number of deaths in society" - for example, if legalizing heroin resulted in fewer deaths, but a lot more people destroying their lives with heroin (but still living to a ripe old age), the second alternative might be worse. In the Vice videos about krokodile, they claim that something like 20% of the population of one city in Russia is addicted to heroin. I question those numbers, but one can see how a city with 20% heroin addiction rates might be a worse fate than having a 1% addiction rate + a dozen addicts dying each year.
http://www.vice.com/vice-news/siberia-krokodil-tears-part-1

One thing that would be great would be to fund studies that's sole purpose is to verify/reproduce someone else's work. Obviously, with the current state of funding, this really doesn't happen. Once something is published, we as the next researchers are forced to take results as fact - which may not be true due to error, low yield, or (hopefully not) fabrication of results (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct).

I really do believe that incentivizing verification of results and repeat studies (with reasonable limits, of course) would improve scientific research tremendously. However, it's even less likely to take hold than moving away from "publish or perish."

... Cataclysmic events happen every now and then and causes extinctions and hardship on surviving organisms

Indeed, it appears that periodic cataclysmic events are required in order to keep evolution going.

We've seen several eras in Earth's history where life appears to "stagnate" at some level, proceeding with little-or-no change for long periods. The last of which was the "age of dinosaurs", which lasted 170 million years or so, depending on how you define the starting point. It ended with the Chicxulub impact.

We also see numerous examples of species which are largely unevolved; for example, ants have been around for 120 million years and one species of prehistoric ant is apparently still living in the Amazon. Coelacanths have been around in their present form for about 400 million years.

The overall impression is that life tends to "stagnate": once life evolves into an efficient survival mechanism, there's no pressure to evolve further. Evolution aims at being a better "fit" for the unchanging environment, but more complexity is simply not needed.

This is why I believe the Drake equation is overly optimistic. I think it omits the factor "fraction of star systems that experience occasional planetary meteor strikes". If we ever travel to another star, we're likely to find it teeming with life, but stagnated at some level.

This may be one factor (of possibly several) that explains the Fermi paradox.

The "doubling rate" identified in the article may be an artifact of Earth, and that's only if Genome complexity is even a reasonable measure to make. Lilies have 30x the genome size of humans - another explanation might be that genome complexity is related to genome size, which does not have much selection pressure. It's not a peer-reviewed paper.

Wonderful ethical question, but if the human race is known for anything, its the non-subscription to the magazine which ponders over such things.

I don't know, Scientific American seems to have a decent subscription rate, for example, and is also known for covering topics such as this.

That rather depends on what you're comparing it's subscription rate to. If you're comparing it to (say) American Scientist, which is in the same arena, but about 3-to-4 times as hard a read (which is why I reluctantly overcome my loathing for exporting money to America and indulge my brain cells there), then Scientific American has got a good subscription rate. If, on the other hand, you compare it to "Guns'n'Ammo Monthly", "Mass Murderer Weekly" or "Barely Legal Girls Getting Sodomised Hourly", then it's subscription rate rather sucks.

Wasn't it a PTBarnum-ism that "No-one, but no-one, ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the public."
(I think he was being specifically rude about the American public, but Brits are no better ; nor are Cloggies (but they have better porn, and put it on the bottom shelf because it's a health-and-safety hazard for the school children to climb up the shelving to get the porn and laugh at it). Noggins are pretty cool, until you ask them about getting tuna-friendly dolphin steaks for supper ; then they turn all "Guns'n'Ammo" on you.)

On the substantive issue, I'm pretty neutral about the ethics of the process. In a world where immense suffering is caused to immense numbers of farm animals purely to make excessively fat people fatter (the the detriment of their health!), then the existence or not of pretty small numbers of very carefully and very expensively created organisms is pretty unimportant.

Oh, and people still kill other people too, which is a fairly important ethical point too.

Why do it? Because it'll be hard. And, in the process of learning just how hard, we'd learn a lot about how organisms work and genetics works. Which would be moderately valuable. But I think there are more urgent things to do.

Here is a better rebuttal than I could ever write.

Quick! Break out your patent portfolio! It's an ice chest with a 'computer'...

Wake me up when they do cool shit like this in the field

There are cases where you can see where being on top gives you an advantage for staying on top. (There is an interesting essay about such distributions here: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/follow-the-money .) But I am not sure how that would work for bandwidth usage distribution. Not saying it doesn't, but I don't see an intuitive explanation.

http://www.americanscientist.org/ American Scientist is a bit more like the old SA. Much smaller circulation and not as timely but most articles are written by scientists not journalists.

American Scientist is a beefier Scientific American. It has review articles on recent findings written for a scientifically educated audience, as opposed to SciAm, which is written for sixth graders and businessmen. It's what SciAm used to be a few decades ago. Published six times a year.

Science news delivered periodically to your inbox. Some of them are customizable, so you can receive updates only on topics of interest to you.

Highly recommended:
American Scientist
Physorg

Also interesting:
Spaceweather
Nasa Science News
Nasa Earth Observatory
Discover Magazine

I imagine there are RSS feeds for most of these as well if you prefer that format.

"If carbon-12 is expected to remain the standard, and the scientitific community therefore prefers an integer divisible by 12, then we suggest using [the cube of] 84,446,886. Then 1 gram would be the mass of exactly 18 [times the cube of] 14,074,481 carbon-12 atoms. Consequently, 1 amu would be exactly 1/(2 x 3^2 x 1,667^3 x 8,443^3) gram, and 1 mole of any entity would be exactly [the cube of] 84,446,886 of those entities."

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.3743,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx

There was an interesting article about this here

Check out the Wikipedia article on the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is thought to be well over a light year across. Out on its fringes the influence of the sun's gravity isn't much stronger than the pull of nearby stars, or the galactic core itself. So whenever the oscillation reverses direction and the sun begins moving back toward the galactic plane, a lot of stuff out on the fringes doesn't move neatly with it. Some of it will become gravitationally unbound from the solar system, but some of it will find its orbit perturbed and start heading inward. Whether that's enough stuff to lead to mass extinctions here on Earth is another matter.

This article mentions disk tides, encountered most strongly as the Sol system passes thru the galactic plane, as the possible culprit in disturbing the Oort Cloud on a regular basis:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/perturbing-the-oort-cloud

LR parsing, TeX, METAFONT not good enough chops to satisfy you, eh? You must be pretty hot stuff to be unimpressed by that.

As for taocp being an "aggregat[ion] of algorithms" ... well ... it's hard to know what to say. I think you kind of missed the point of it.

http://www.americanscientist.org/science/pub/everything-is-dangerous-a-controversy

Primates evolved trichomatic eyes to find fruit better. Most mammals are dichromatic. Now humans eat more meat, cooked food, more starch from grains and more dairy from cattle. Each diet change affected the genes . One could argue the next stage- hyper nutrition and processed food- selecting against humans with metabolic disease like diabetes, obesity, and bad hearts. This was very interesting article.

I don't think any of these individuals are a clean slate so it's not a surprise that they may have strong pre-conceptions that come into play. It's not that "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe". Rather they already have some beliefs they consider true which they apply.

It's also no surprise that people in groups do not behave rationally. Even scientists and medical researchers can be downright stupid about things. I was listening to an interesting podcast this morning: http://www.americanscientist.org/science/pub/everything-is-dangerous-a-controversy

This is what counts for science nowadays?

http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.aspx?key=vo50G9YwnF6SwlOk2usL5R9EyqRLsNX+YiPzweX/0ZsH0IeSOOXIBip7qwN2/ZRY

Look carefully at the 'digital encoding' of the "simple tone" sine wave. ??? Really? What encoder is that?
cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_Transform

A good example from physics is the Millikan oil-drop experiment, where he threw out all the data that didn't fit what he was trying to prove -- but then claimed in his paper that he'd never thrown out any data.

Another take on Millikan: http://www.americanscientist.org/my_amsci/restricted.aspx?act=pdf&id=2706085559588

I beg your pardon but falsifying science seems far easier than cooking accounting books. This article gives some nice examples http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/physics-and-pixie-dust . Many of these examples have been published in nature&co and are not even very sophisticated in their forgery.
That being said, i do not think that the emails in question are nefarious. They are tons of private emails there are bound to be many that look problematic for outsiders.

And very often it's because you know or suspect that there's a reason why the data is flawed in some way, e.g. Milikan's Oil Drop experiment, or Mendel's work on variation

No, it shows that people (and sadly many scientists) don't understand their statistics. It showed a central tendency when looking at the geometric averages of faces. Of course higher sample sizes would have less variance, too bad the analysis didn't take this into account. Psychologists in particular need to start looking a little deeper at their SPSS results.

Interestingly, in the latest number of American Scientist there's an article which highlights this issue, using the study by Kanazawa (from TFA: "This builds on previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa"). In the article they calculate the 95 percent confidence interval based on the data used by Kanazawa. Kanazawa reported that attractive parents were 4.7% more likely to have girls, however the confidence interval reveals that estimates as low as -3.9% and as high as 13.3% are consistent with the data.

See Andrew Gelman's article in American Scientist that debunks the statistics behind the "having more daughters" data at least. The largest credible effect on sex ratio is around 3% differences between boys and girls among those in famine conditions... and this effect is due primarily to nonsurvival of boy fetuses in famine conditions. The more daughters from beautiful parents effect has been overstated to be on the order of 15 to 30% differences, absolutely absurd if you even stop to think about it. The original studies do not have the statistical power to distinguish between random fluctuations and a real effect and therefore they overstate any effect that you find by the size of the standard error rather than the size of the effect..

  I can certainly believe that beautiful women have more children on average though....

Scientists show that even scientists rarely really understand statistics...

The ideas that this article are based on are speculative at best, pseudoscience at worst. The premise that "beautiful women have more daughters" comes from a debunked 2007 paper by Kanazawa in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. The reason that his results do not hold up is that the sample size he looked at was too small to observe the type of sex ratio effects that one could reasonably expect to see--in other words, his data set was underpowered.

For a fascinating article on the nature of Kanazawa's statistical errors, see this article in American Scientist

This story was published in (IIRC) American Scientist a month or two ago. Yep, here we go : A Cipher to Thomas Jefferson.

Loath though I am to send money to America, I do find myself strongly tempted to subscribing to that magazine. Seriously good brain-fodder.

A great list of great books:

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-books-that-shaped-a-century-of-science

Except that there are not any safer viable alternatives.

BS, solar and wind are safer.

More radioactivity has been released into the atmosphere through burning coal than has ever been released by Nuclear means. More deaths have occurred due to Fossil fuels than nuclear energy.

I can imagine, just look at how many die in mining accidents. However uranium mining is also nasty.

No more than 20% of a countries supply can be powered by wind and have a stable grid (frequency fluctuations).

Improving energy storage can help. However increasing the efficiency of power plants can have a big impact. "American Scientist" has an article in the current issue, January-February 2009, about this. "Getting the Most from Energy: Recycling waste heat can keep carbon from going sky high" goes into how inefficient power generation is today in the US. Literally gigawatts of power go up smoke stacks, when a lot of that power can be captured.

That leaves 80% to be made up by Solar, Water and Geothermal.

SciAm had an article, "A Grand Solar Plan" about how solar power can provide 69% of the US's electricity by 2050. That's not enough? The Rocky Mountains alone has enough potential wind power to supply all 48 continuous states with electricity. Several places in NYC are already using geothermal power for heating and cooling. With a properly insulated building though body heat is enough to keep a room warm. Check out the "American Scientist" article linked to above. More than 100 years ago Thomas Edison's ConEd's power plants were more efficient than many plants are today. Not only did the plants produce electricity but they also provided heat to buildings with Combined Heat-power Plants, CHP, today called Cogeneration.

Falcon

What we need is a mainstream movie and miniseries about the hazards of coal; perhaps going through the life of a Chinese coal miner?

We have plenty of coal mining disasters here in the US, if people have been paying attention they know mining alone is dangerous. Wasn't it a year or two ago that some miners were trapped in a cave-in in the west?

Oh, and point out the cost/hazards of solar and wind while you're at it.

What are those hazards that nuclear power does not have? Solar uses a lot of semiconductors, the same semiconductors needed for nuclear power control systems. Wind turbines need steel and concrete, however nuclear power plants need much more of both.

Now if this fission/fusion works IRL feasibly well in an economic sense it might be used to reduce the amount of waste already generated.

It's not directly related but the current issue of "American Scientist", January-February 2009, has an article on recapturing wasted energy. "Getting the Most from Energy: Recycling waste heat can keep carbon from going sky high" talks about how current power generation is inefficient. Thomas Edison's ConEd was more efficient than many of today's power plants. Being located in NYC the steam used to turn the turbines was able to be used to heat buildings in the neighborhoods around the plants. Combined heat-and-power, CHP or today called Cogeneration, plants were more efficient. However when power plants were moved or built away from population centers the steam couldn't be used for heating, or in some cases cooling. Regulations discouraged this as well.

Falcon

The Gates foundation is too busy building Doomsday seed vaults with the Rockefeller foundation and Monsanto and genetically engineering mosquitoes.

There was a very nice article in American Scientist, which suggested that instead of defining this number of atoms, you could define the constant of Avogadro instead. Since this is linked to the gram via the weight of a carbon atom, this definition is equivalent. Since you are free to pick any number within the error bars of the current definition, they suggest to pick a nice number instead, just like the speed of light was defined as an integer. Their funny requirement was that it should be a perfect cube, since this would define one mole as a cube with an integer number of atoms on its side. This leaves essentially only one number: define N_A as the third power of 84.446.888!

Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.

The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population.

An interesting piece I ran across many years ago about ternary (and other bases -- try base-e!) systems, and how they _can_ be better at some things than binary.
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/14405?&print=yes

False. These stats cherry pick the type of airplane/pilot (large, commercial) but do not allow you to cherry pick the type of auto/driver (safe, sober). This is a good link. Another good link.

There are a lot of ways to skew the statistics. For example, pedestrian deaths are included in cars as opposed to the "shoe vehicle" category. However, ground victims of 9/11 are not considered. So, hit by a plain and your death doesn't count against airplane safety, but hit by a car and your death does count against auto safety. Weird.

I could not, would not, on a boat.
I will not, will not, with a goat.
I will not eat them in the rain.
I will not eat them on a train.
Not in the dark! Not in a tree!
Not in a car! You let me be!
I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I will not eat them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them ANYWHERE!

how much does it cost to safely dispose of this after the twenty years are up?

10,000 years??

(the little problem nobody wants to talk about)

> A variable will still be a variable

This is completely incorrect. The concept of a variable radically changes in a quantum computer because you are allowed superposed states.

> I'm not aware of quantum mechanics introducing any new operators

What in heaven's name are you imagining? Of course quantum mechanics introduces new operators. It completely turns classical mechanics on its head and introduces concepts that make no sense in a classical framework. Here's an example of a specifically quantum operator.

TSP is NP-hard, and quantum computers don't, as far as we know, make NP-hard problems solvable in polynomial time. Grover's algorithm, however, does allow you to search a database of N items in time sqrt(N) so it could provide many speedups to familiar algorithms.

> Chess, aside from being Zero Sum

Are you *trying* to look like an ignoramus? Zero-sumness has absolutely nothing to do with chess. Zero-sumness is about the payoff you get from game of incomplete information. It has nothing to do with the strategy you should use in a game of complete information like chess. I guess you just want to sound smart by throwing around technical terms you don't grasp.

> seriously doubt there is one unbeatable strategy, since a player cannot control the first piece the other player moves.

Woah! Where are you getting this stuff from? Are you just making stuff up as you write it? It's incredible. Whether or not a game has a winning strategy has nothing to do with whether you can control the other player's first move.

As I say, there's nothing wrong with not knowing stuff. But spouting garbage in response to someone's genuinely inquiring questions is nothing short of obnoxious and just serves to lower the signal to noise ratio on Slashdot.

Explores not only the birth of the hard drive, but its future. A few years old, but very informative!

(Load the pdf version if you have the time - it is formatted just like that article appeared in the magazine)

American Scientist (the magazine of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society) published an article in 2004 describing how much more efficient a novel new plant design can be. This type of plant is much safer to run and actually burns its own waste - minimizing the amount of waste that needs storage - and gets more energy out of burning the partially-spent fuel (even spent fuel from other older reactors). The site requires a subscription, but here's the abstract and link to the article for those sufficiently interested:

"It's been decades since a nuclear power plant was commissioned in the United States, but nuclear engineers mindful of problems with reliance on fossil fuels for long-term power generation continue to look at novel reactor designs. Loewen and his colleagues have evaluated one of the technologies under consideration for the next generation of reactors. It would exploit the physical and safety characteristics of lead--chiefly, a high boiling point--as a coolant in place of water. Such a reactor could use fast neutrons and operate at high temperature, making it capable of burning many of the radioactive isotopes in the spent nuclear fuel produced by the nation's 103 light-water reactors."
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/37188

read: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/56234;jsessionid=aaah7j1zW7KfWl

The relevant portion:

I ask you to honor my request to retract two brief passages, as follows:

On page 121: "Directions for the reproduction of plans, for energy and the extraction of parts from the current environment, for the growth sequence, and for the effector mechanisms translating instructions into growth--all had to be simultaneously present at that moment [of life's birth]."

On page 125: "From the probability standpoint, the ordering of the present environment into a single amino acid molecule would be utterly improbable in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life."

That is all, he is not retracting his entire article. It is impossible to tell this from the headline link, however; said headline presents the story as the scientist retracting his entire paper. Which is wrong, unless my reading comprehension is absolutely nonexistent today, but I don't think that's the case.