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This is possibly the best writeup I've seen of it:

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

A salient point: "Worst of all is this statement from the paper: ÃoeThrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust.Ã In other words, the Cannae Drive worked when it was set up correctlyÃ"but it worked just as well when it was intentionally disabled set up incorrectly. Somehow the NASA researchers report this as a validation, rather than invalidation, of the device."

This article in Discover magazine about Jack Bitterly's* desire to use new flywheel technologies to power automobiles, is what got me excited about choosing engineering as a college major. It's quite sad that nothing ever came of it, other than a few highly specialized applications, such as the space station. (I read one claim that Kevin Costner's investment in the company was a total loss, but that it had a lot to do with NASA taking over the project and stiffing some of the creditors. Cum grano salis.)

I recently saw that a company called Velkess got a kickstarter project funded for 3-15kWh 48v flywheel storage systems, with expected product delivery dates in the 2016/17 range announced. We'll see if they deliver on promises and if they're in any way price competitive.

*Jack was 77 when that article was published in 1996. Every so often I've looked him up on the internet and as late as 2009, he was still alive and kicking and still working. I've also run across patent applications he has filed as late as 2013. Wow. I hope like heck I'm still that active and doing things I am passionate about in my 90s.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Hilarious!

The U.S. is helping China build a novel, superior nuclear reactor

Thorium Power Is the Safer Future of Nuclear Energy

China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium

Tell me more about Chinese renewables.

.

The eye pupil is known to exhibit interesting behaviour at times,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
one notable being photic reflex (which also affects a quarter of a population)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

IMHO, human vision is still incompletely understood at whole population (global) level,
with all sorts of exceptions and special trade-off cases being documented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://discovermagazine.com/20... ### check this one!

Finally, let's not forget, that it is well known that manly colour vocabulary is 4-bit, while females have true colour sets ;-O
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
http://io9.com/5919311/some-wo...
https://www.google.be/search?r...

Last but not least: make sure you see the image of the OP in fractional ways (say, top 10th of the image),
along with another person that sees it in the alternative mode. You may come up with surprises. ;-)

Also, published in a journal that disbanded and re-formed in 2010 because it was turning into a right-wing political mouthpiece . The actual successor to the original Surgical Neurology is World Neurosurgery. The fired editorial staff went on to create Surgical Neurology International, so they could continue to pretend their right-wing blog was a scientific journal. Now it appears to be turtles and pseudoscience all the way down.

An astronomer estimated the chance of being killed by an asteroid as 1 in 700,000.

As natural disasters go, any person is far more likely to die from tsunamis, earthquakes and extreme weather events.

I seem to have underestimated his legacy. In fact 0.5% of the males of this planet are direct descendents of Genghis Khan. It works out to 17.5 million male descendents for Genghis Khan. According to the table presented, in a small sample size of 46 men from Mongolia, some 35% carried Genghis Khan's markers in their y-chromosomes.

The 'Wall Street Journal' Parade of Climate Lies

Wall Street Journal: neutrinos show climate change isn't real! XD

And from the pot herself: remarkable editorial bias on climate science at the wall street journal

But you can breed together a tree and a beetle.

Or a beetle and a bacteria - http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Genetic mutations are largely a constant. Every generation will continue to exhibit mutations, the vast majority of which have no impact on procreation and are either carried on, or not.

But any effort to create a protein or change regulation changes the metabolism, which can be a selection pressure when competing for resources with native strains that don't spend the energy to make those proteins. For example, genetic alterations in bacteria for DNA computing elements) can disappear rapidly in a culture, sometimes this happens on the order of hours.

Apparently you're the one that fails reading comprehension. He stated that there are two things he disbelieves in, hence the word "and." If he only disbelieved in angels or "fairies" or whatever he would have simply written, "I don't believe that an infinite number of tiny, invisible fairies watching over us exist." Of course that is a bit of a straw man on his part since who actually believes that?

So to answer your question, I don't believe that any Catholic priest has proposed a big bang theory involving fairies, infinite or otherwise. That theory appears to have been developed yesterday by DexterIsADog as a straw man. But the actual big bang theory was developed by Father Georges-Henri Lemaitre in 1927, and he apparently doesn't believe in that either.

I don't believe that the universe was created ...

So you reject the scientific theory which so far seems to have by far the best track record in explaining the universe, the "Big Bang" theory? Is that because it was proposed by a Catholic priest?

On another topic, what do you think is the explanation for the Jews? How do you think they managed to survive for more than 4,000 years as a people with a common identity despite multiple deportations to far off foreign lands, pogroms, and even attempted genocide, only to reassemble in their native land and reform the country of Israel after being nonexistent for 2,000 years? Are there other examples of a similar nature that you can think of? How do you suppose that is?

How do they work?

Oh, right..

The Navy seems to have this kind of thing covered. http://blogs.discovermagazine.... If the gas turbine is 60% efficient, then this will be nearly twice as efficient as a nuclear plant. And the wind resource is not lacking. "The United Kingdom has been estimated to have over a third of Europe's total offshore wind resource, which is equivalent to three times the electricity needs of the nation at current rates of electricity consumption." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

nstruments on the other hand all sound different. The price is really not point. [...] More expensive does not automatically sound better.

So they what IS the point? They sound "different" but the difference would not be recognized as better. Why pay $40,000 for something that is not better?

If a professional musician took a 30k flute and played it, and then played a 60k flute and 2 different 20k flutes, all for other professional musicians -- you are asserting they could tell they were different instruments.

But could they tell by blind listening which was 60k and which was 20k and which was 30k? Or would they simply know that there were 4 different flutes?

One of the more classic ones was a double-blind test for violins

Yes, I cited that test in my original post.

but they were able to pick of which the test subjects they were playing

Not even that.

Next, Fritz and Curtin gave the recruits a more natural task. They saw all six violins, laid out in random order on a bed. They had 20 minutes to play any violin against any other and to choose the one theyâ(TM)d most like to take home. They also picked the best and worst instruments in terms of four qualities: range of tone colours; projection; playability; and response.

This time, a clear favourite emerged. The players chose one of the new violins (âoeN2â) as their take-home instrument most often, and it topped the rankings for all four qualities. As before, O1 received the most severe rejections. Overall, just 38 percent of the players (8 out of 21) chose to take an old violin home, and most couldnâ(TM)t tell if their instrument was old or new. As Fritz and Curtin write, this âoestands as a bracing counterexample to conventional wisdom.â

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

I guess I am used to the world of electronic music where even a top-of-the-line keyboard would probably only cost $2-3k tops and a fairly good one from a name like Yamaha or Roland could probably be picked up for around $1k or so.

The person your replying to was just being a snob; a cheap but perfectly adequate beginners/student/school band grade trombone is readily available for a few hundred bucks, and a respectable quality instrument can be had for a couple thousand bucks at retail. There's definitely a different quality, longevity, and craftsmanship between entry level student stuff and higher quality instruments, but the difference between a $2000 flute and a $60000 flute? I'd love to see a double blind.

Musical instruments get to be like audiophile gear; someone will always charge a ridiculous amount, because someone else will pay it and then claim its better.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

The Stradivarious is still more valuable for its historical significance, and the collectibility / prestige aspect -- but in terms of actual acoustic quality? Didn't stand up to a double blind test.

PS, on the flip side, the MSRP for a Roland V-Piano Grand is around 25,000. So your top end for an electronic keyboard was a bit low.

The trick is to gather the carbon dioxide efficiently. The Navy has an interesting method. http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Read TFA and this one. If you believe that "science" has become altruistic and above corruption, you simply have not been paying attention to science. Sure, there is some good science, but there are always crap programs as well. Many of which are performed at the direction of our Government. You know, the same people that won't fund NASA but can waste money trying to figure out if you are a sociopath by your tweets (and that's not the worst waste of science funding, just an easy target).

Um, yeah, I don't believe you for even a quarter second.

1. Nobody who runs a wind farm would refer to wind turbines as "windmills". Seriously, that's like a third-grade level mistake. This is a windmill. This is a wind turbine. Nobody in the industry would ever call a wind turbine a windmill, they'd get laughed at.

2. The typical bat in the US weighs about 10 grams. Even if we assume that the "trucks" are only pickup trucks that can haul 2 tonnes and your use of the plural only means two - about the lowest possible way we could interpret your "truckloads every year" comment - that would be 400 thousand bats per year. Your mere 700 commercial-scale wind turbines (less than 2% of the US total) would have long ago driven to local extinction any bats in your area.

The reality, of course, is that estimates for all bat deaths from wind turbines in the US combined range from about 30k per year to 800k per year. All combined.

3. Your "destroys the health of operators and technicians" line puts you solidly in autism-vaccine cookoo land.

Just ignoring your grossly inaccurate description of wind power availability, or the concept that a wind farm operator is going to hire someone who despises wind power with a red-hot passion to run their facility.

that the planet's orbit be stable over thousands of years

Very low thousands is plenty if the timing is right. If anything say a few thousand years pre-Copernicus contained astronomical accounts that deviated wildly from what we "know" today, we'd put it in the same category as the artwork and accounts of the flat earth resting on the back of a giant turtle.

If you read this paper, you see they settled on a moon the same mass as Kalgash but with the density of Saturn! How could such a system possibly arise?

Gas Dwarfs?
http://blogs.discovermagazine....

As for the how, with 6 suns dancing around, you've got plenty of candidates to provide the required components, and lots of opportunity for freak events, collisions, etc.

Honestly, I think, after you add in 'freak occurrences' we'll eventually find some pretty spectacularly improbable planets.

What's their definition of "most dinosaurs"? Maybe most as in, there was this one tiny feathered dinosaur that bred like rabbits and was everywhere? And do they mean "had feathers" as in had 3 tiny feathers on the top of a big lizardy dino head? Big dinos almost always had scales from what I've read. And perhaps size is part of is as is seen in recent animals and animals today... larger mammals have far far less fur except during the times of ice ages.

I found a couple of links that show scales, no feathers, of big dinosaurs. All this feather business is just hype.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

The scale-like structures you see on dinosaur skin are known as called tubercles, and resemble the polygonal desiccation cracks that you might see on a dried up mud flat (because we all investigate sedimentary structures

http://www.amnh.org/exhibition...

Very little dinosaur skin fossilized, so what we know about sauropod skin comes from impressions made when it pressed into mud or sand that then hardened and turned to stone. These impressions show that sauropod skin had small bumps and scales that didn't overlap. Some sauropods had bony growths in the skin called osteoderms. But no sauropods had hair or feathers.

While their head was inside a fMRI machine

Keep in mind that this is the same technology that found significant mental activity in a dead fish.

Ignoring the above and just going by the conclusion, it looks like it's just a case of 'players who expect a trap will not assist the NPC.'

Yes, but how? Peer review is not cutting it. Suppose you were not all that well educated on what has already been done, and what has not. You get an idea, try to find if anyone has done any work on it, but find none. You carry out the study and try to publish. A peer reviewer sees that it is essentially a rehash of the old idea, carried out with modern methods, and perhaps says it is novel enough for the journal. The editor agrees and your paper is rejected. What do you do? Well, I can tell you that nobody would abandon the paper if it is already in a written manuscript form. Instead, most scientists would not even go and generate more data for the paper, but rather, if they are even honest, cite the original work, but just mention it in passing and emphasize that what was done in their study was, in fact, slightly different. And they'd be right: The original papers probably used slightly different techniques. They now send the paper to a different journal and hope for a different referee (which in all likelyhood is going to happen, especially as you do get to recommend referees; the editor needs not abide by these recommendations, though). The odds are ever in your favor for if you were not aware of the previous publications before, it is a near-certainty that the average peer is not aware of them either.

Let's start deconstructing the story from the beginning. Why was the researcher not aware of the previous, perhaps well-known, work? Just wrong Google keywords? That, too, can be an issue, because in 30 years the terminology does evolve with the field. If one has not been there when it began to change, as fields become more interdisciplinary, the change might be difficult to see. And who was there since the beginning? If the current field is essentially a mash-up of people from several fields, medicine and physics, say, how should a medical researcher be aware of the stuff that has been done in physics? Should it be expected? I'd say yes, it should: Either you learn the stuff, or get a co-author who knows the stuff that you don't want to learn. However, publish or perish. You have to start contributing and publishing even before you have a good grasp on the field, so when you venture off to new paths, it is easy to get to hasty conclusions. This pressure to publish is why you keep trying different journals even after being initially rejected. If you don't get this piece out, you've wasted months of lab resources.

If the manuscript is rejected from one journal, surely, surely in this age of internet and open access to all kinds of information, the editor of the next journal will have the reports by the peer reviewrs at hand. Nope. What? Nope. With very few exceptions (notably PeerJ) peer review reports are not made public in any for or shared across journals (sometimes they are, when the publisher of the journals is the same). There are efforts to change this, but academia is a slowly moving beast, and is run by governments and government funding, something that is even slower to change.

Finally, after a successful shopping for peer reviewers, the paper is published. What about post-publication peer review? Surely someone will publicly point out that the results have already been known for a long time. Maybe the peer reviewer of the original submission should come out and denounce the work? No such luck. Happens very rarely, for people don't want to stick their necks out and contradict their peers when they know that these peers are going to be sitting on the other side of the peer review or a grant application at some point or another. See for example this piece of news on a recent writeup by a Harvard professor: He's essentially arguing that research showing previous research false is wrong and should not be published. My phrasing was perhaps too extreme, but read the article and judge for yourself; I think you'll g

What is "Retinal Display"
well Dr.Phil Plait has a dissertation on the subject and his PhD is in optics having designed a camera in the Hubble Telescope
http://blogs.discovermagazine....
The critical number is "5730 number as a scale factor; multiply an object’s size by that, and, if your vision is perfect (OOOooooo, foreshadowing!) you get how far away you can see it as more than a dot."
so 78 micron * 5730 = 0.45m which is about the usual place for holding your phone.

You can have any three of locally flat spacetime (i.e., Special Relativity), clear local connections between observable cause and observable effect, faster-than-a-massless-particle travel for massive particles ("FTL"), and formal logic.

Most working scientists would reject FTL, as there has never been any evidence supporting the idea that massive particles can exceed "c" _locally_, and an abundance of evidence supporting the idea that massive particles cannot exceed "c" locally.

Special Relativity ("SR") is extremely well-tested in part because it underlies the Standard Model of particle physics, which is also extremely well-tested directly using laboratory studies and also using astrophysicall observations.

SR's constant "c" can in modern terms be considered the sole free parameter of the (Poincaré) symmetry group of the flat space metric ("Minkowski space"). The parameter is usually seen as the velocity of a massless particle (with photons being massless particles _by definition_, although experiment supports the definition well), but it can be decoupled from the definition without requiring the mathematical structure of Special Relativity to be abandoned _locally_ (where in GR terms that would be in the local section of the fibre bundle). One could also pragmatically consider SR to be even more special than it is, but that it forms an (extremely) Effective Theory in practice.

Local causality is an important assumption for physical investigation. One might have to consider either a wide-reaching alternative like superdeterminism (in the 't Hooft sense) allowing for "conspiracies" by the universe to make _non-local_ causal connections in the very early universe, or some other of scheme to provide corrections to local causality in some non-classical limit. These are not exactly insane ideas, but local causality holds up very very well in everyday physics.

Finally, there might be some bug in the formal systems (perhaps in real number mathematics, perhaps in classical logic) that we use in mathematical physics. I don't think anyone has seriously advanced that as an alternative, although people will grudgingly admit that it's there (it gets raised sometimes in the context of Bell's inequalities, sometimes seriously, e.g. by E.T. Jaynes).

"Because general relativity" is not really accurate; although FTL is likely to violate one or more of the energy conditions, it doesn't really break GR. Lots of exact solutions of the Einstein Field Equations show closed timelike curves, and that is generally considered to mean that such solutions are unphysical. However that could simply be wrong. In ditching Special Relativity (and keeping FTL, causality, and logic) you break the condition that you can always use the Minkowski metric successfully in the limit where spacetime intervals go to zero, but that condition was built in to GR because of the success of SR. However, if you modify SR, GR just won't care. (GR doesn't deal in silly trivialities like comparing velocities, so any formal correspondence with a theory that does -- like SR, as the chief example -- is handy for practical purposes).

Indeed, "democratization" of causal cones comes up from time to time (Carroll at this link, for example and note the link to Geroch http://blogs.discovermagazine.... ) and the idea of using multiple causal cones whose null slopes differ from that of photons is headache-inducing but not manifestly unworkable *in GR*, which has vastly different symmetry groups than the Poincaré or Lorentz groups.

The lack of evidence for FTL means that if there is anything moving FTL it interacts very weakly and very rarely with non-FTL mass-energy and causes only extremely weak spacetime curvature. On the other hand, you could be a bit silly and abuse Wheeler's single-electron idea by extending it to all mass-energy, and formally describe vacuum fluctuations in term

Better color eyesight is a disadvantage for hunting and probably military type games where the enemy may hide. Color differentiation is great for picking the right berries, but in hunting, more colors means more visual noise. Since it's a game, women could possibly set their screen colors to simulate deuteranopia (red-green colorblindness) and possibly pick up that advantage.

Example of what camo looks like to color blind: http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/sg...

Camo picture is from this source: http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/sg...

Military experiences: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayi...

Colorblindness is a hunting advantage for primates such as capuchins. http://discovermagazine.com/20...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... "New Scientist reports that, faced with global warming and potential oil shortages, the US Navy is experimenting with making jet fuel from seawater by processing seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel.

More here: http://blogs.discovermagazine....

Er the speed of light is a postulate of Special Relativity, either directly (the speed of light in free space has the same value c in all inertial reference frames) or as the sole parameter (i.e., the speed of a massless object, where light just happens to be one type of massless object) of the Poincaré group, which is the isometry group of flat space.

You cannot have spacetime expanding or contracting in flat space; the observed metric expansion of space is an *enormous* violation of the flat space metric. So, you're on good grounds with "the speed limit may not apply", except for two things. Firstly, there is every reason to believe (via searches for Lorentz invariance) that our universe is locally Poincaré invariant, where local means in the limit in which spacetime intervals go to zero or alternatively in the local section of the fibre bundle or alternatively in the local region of a point. In fact, Poincaré invariance holds up extremely in much larger regions, which is one reason practically everyone who uses GR will switch to SR in the weak field limit for the sake of the much easier mathematics and for ease of reasoning (cf. the various don't-use-GR-to-solve-the-twin-paradox arguments from e.g. Baez (who advocates reducing it to SR by introducing pseudogravitational fields)). Secondly, except in certain null dust solutions, it is generally considered poor form to introduce GR observers who do not move along timelike geodesics (I'll use "FTL" as shorthand). It is certainly *plausible* that one could construct a metric which takes into account observers who move on spacelike geodesics, but if it were physical, then you are stuck with the choose-no-more-than-two-of-SR-FTL-and-causality. (There are arguments that one could alternatively abandon logic (Bell) or accept superdeterminism (`t Hooft) instead). Even as an investigation, GR-with-FTL-observers will lead you into analytical approximate solutions at best (probably -- if you do better, you should get recognition); relating that to gauge theory and QFTs will be even harder.

The Alcubierre metric is fully locally Lorentz invariant. There are no FTL observers in the sense above. It can be looked at as a test theory of particular numerical methods on 3+1 foliations, which is Alcubierre's principal area of study (he literally wrote the textbook). He often uses it to probe at corner cases (and possible weaknesses) in both ADM and BSSN and especially the software used in 3+1 modelling. It has also been used to raise questions about semiclassical gravity.

Finally, for completeness, the "democratisation of causal cones" comes up from time to time, most recently in the context of FTL neutrinos. Carroll deals with that at http://blogs.discovermagazine.... and emphasises the point that what one worries about it “closed spacelike curves on which physical particles move". What he does not say is that the ratio between the speed of light and the maximum attainable speed of any physical particle should be identical in any theory with local Lorentz invariance (and indeed in Special Relativity); this is well-tested against both SME (in the SR case) and PPN (in the GR case). While theorists would love to play with observers on timelike geodesics, there is not one iota of evidence to suggest that any such observer exists.

Come get the )(*)!# Bees Nest in my tree please, they're doing fine. Also I thought the pesticide link was conclusive? How about banning imidacloprid and clothianidin as well?

If we would be able to break these theoretical speed limits, this would automatically imply we would also be able to travel through time or at the very least send messages into the past.

But in our universe is there really a Time dimension to travel through to the past?

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-p...
http://discovermagazine.com/20...

I've never found it convincing that there is a past to go to, at least from the perspective entities in our universe bound by its laws (from the perspective of "someone outside" running the "simulation/VM of our universe" all bets are off ;) ),

Java would be a Flying Carp. Invasive, taking over and destroying every ecosystem it gets into.

PHP is more like a Bluegill; a good place to start (fishing or programming) but most people move on to better things.

If you're going to moan and groan about GMO food, at least learn what you're moaning and groaning about. Nobody anywhere ever splices insect DNA, or DNA from any other species for that matter, into any food that lands on your plate. Those stories you hear the contrary are one of three things:

1) A sci-fi movie
2) An urban myth
3) Experimentation to better understand genetics

The third item has never made it to your dinner plate. Concepts derived from it may have, but the actual act of copying genes from one species into the genome of another has never been used to commercially produce any food you've eaten. All commercially sold GMO foods are modified with very tiny (compared to natural mutations during normal reproduction) changes to small sets of proteins.

Here are a few inconvenient facts for the anti-GMO crowd:

1) Monsanto has never spliced a gene from one species into another and then sold it to you.
2) You yourself however are the result of exactly this process. We all are. In fact the human placenta comes from a gene that is actually foreign to is what is otherwise own natural DNA. Same with about 100,000 other genes we carry.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

3) Natural mutations caused by normal breeding are much larger, are much more unknown, have a much bigger potential for causing harm than the ones Monsanto introduces into its stock.
4) GMO has played a huge role in ending world hunger as of late. It also follows that being anti-GMO can kill people and cause wars in the same vein as anti-vax.
5) All supposed "studies" showing GMO foods cause harm have been debunked as junk science during peer review. Every single one of them. Keep that in mind before you go linking to me the one about the rats with colon cancer (debunked; they used rats already known to be prone to this kind of cancer, and the results were unable to be reproduced) and the pigs with stomach cancer (also debunked; the "researchers" behind this study cherry picked their data, and likewise the experiment was not reproducible.)
6) The organic industry makes much higher profit margins than the GMO industry, and they actively fund the junk science like I mentioned above so that they can get people like you to buy more of their product.

Honestly, the anti-GMO movement makes me think of a bunch of peasants with pitchforks and torches standing outside of an old lady's house making up stories about the demons she summons inside, and then they somehow have themselves convinced that this is a fact and it actually happens, so they go and burn down her house because they "know for certain" that she practices witchcraft and has seen actual demons.

I mean really, you guys are THAT bad. You guys regularly make claims about GMO that are just outright false (just as you did,) but they're lies you tell so much that you're convinced they're true, and endless stories of "my cousin's roomate's aunt's friend worked there and saw them put a fish gene in a tomato" and things equally absurd.

But the evolution of referees is a huge problem. You see, if they keep evolving, they'll be down to only two stripes, and wars will ensue.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05...

http://www.sciencefriday.com/s...

Space research represents very little of our national budget about 0.48%

As opposed to what many Americans think. ;-)

And yet out of struggling with Alchemy even great scientists learned from it.

http://discovermagazine.com/20...

My favorite is Barbara Shipman. This woman got a PhD in mathematics and discovered bees were doing a 6 six dimensional mathematical dance in 2 dimensions for communication.

What is this silliness, that "humans" in the broad, blanket sense could not digest starch? Feh.

We already know from analysis of Neanderthal remains that they could digest starch, and did in fact eat things like starchy tubers and grains. By 8000 years ago, it's generally accepted that the Neanderthals were no more, at least as a distinct population, and that any remaining Neanderthal-specific genes had been absorbed by the wider Cro Magnon population. (Interestingly, it sounds like the Neanderthal genes might give their descendants, i.e. non-sub-Saharan-Africa humans, extra resistance to viral infection.)

This study, where evidence from one individual is extrapolated to the entire human population, sounds silly in the extreme. "One Size Fits All!" never really does.

Cheers,

Or they could have been using something starchy as a toothbrush.

What is this silliness, that "humans" in the broad, blanket sense could not digest starch? Feh.

We already know from analysis of Neanderthal remains that they could digest starch, and did in fact eat things like starchy tubers and grains. By 8000 years ago, it's generally accepted that the Neanderthals were no more, at least as a distinct population, and that any remaining Neanderthal-specific genes had been absorbed by the wider Cro Magnon population. (Interestingly, it sounds like the Neanderthal genes might give their descendants, i.e. non-sub-Saharan-Africa humans, extra resistance to viral infection.)

This study, where evidence from one individual is extrapolated to the entire human population, sounds silly in the extreme. "One Size Fits All!" never really does.

Cheers,

Perhaps I should be avoiding discussing too much into an area the physics of which I'm rather fuzzy on. If the sound occurs at the same frequency, you're absolutely correct that there would be no additional information, as the wavelength would be all that increased due to the faster speed of sound. Now my uneducated assumption was that the underwater environment would have adapted dolphins to using higher frequency sound as a result of the increased speed of sound to get similar wavelengths to what would be used in air and allow for much higher data per second rates as a result.

This would seem rather crucial, as I believe wavelength is very important when echolocation is involved. Longer wavelengths would give a much poorer picture of the object generating the echo.

It's also possible I was completely wrong about the it being related to the amount of data in the first place, and it's some other factor, such as the long wavelength itself that's issue. But the bottom line is, I'm just trying to come up with potential explanations for the results reported in a study I read a year or two ago, and it really comes down to whether or not their results were accurate. A fact I'm beginning to doubt myself due to my complete inability to find it again.

Regardless, there's a wealth of other information questioning dolphin intelligence. http://blogs.discovermagazine.... gives a glimpse into some of it.

Just wanted to mention Alfred Wegener, the man who proposed continental drift, only to be dismissed for nearly 50 years before being accepted.

Or, you can read about Barry Marshal who discovered that the bacterium H. pylori caused peptic ulcer disease, leading him to win a Nobel Prize in 2005. he published it in the 80's and if wasn't widely accepted until some 10 years later.

So regardless of the AGW debate, your assertion that it must be true because there is no widely accepted theory disproving it, is complete horseshit.

There is no doubt that women have made many important contributions to science. One may argue this one or that is or isn't a genius, but there is little doubt that science would be poorer without their contribution.

Madame Wu and the backward universe
Marie Curie - Biographical

Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know
Pioneering Women in Computing Technology
The 50 Most Important Women in Science

I read TFA and I don't see where this comes from: but would alter scientists' understanding of how stars can be powered

It sounds like Thorne and Zytkow proposed the scenario and predicted what one would observe, followed up by people like the guy quoted in the brief article (Podsiadlowski), and these astronomers are putting forth a candidate based upon their observations being similar to what the theory suggests. I'm missing the part that alters the understanding. Podsiadlowski, by the way, has been thinking about these objects for a very long time.

but if confirmed, they could spark a hunt for underlying biochemical mechanism.

Thanks, came to post the same. Some birds can "see" the magnetic field of earth to navigate. It doesn't seem too far fetched that some territorial creatures would develop an electromagnetic sense of direction, or develop emergent behaviors therefrom.

Seems to me that the nano/micro-sat crowd is demonstrating that to not really be as much of an issue.

Don't distort his reality anymore by showing him the truth!

Seems to me that the nano/micro-sat crowd is demonstrating that to not really be as much of an issue.

The mystery of the origin of the Indo-Europeans may be solved within the next 2 years , and yes I know Discover is not a peer reviewed journal.

The timeframe is correct for the supposed origin of indo europeans in Europe.

So... are we living in the matrix or what?

Horrible things have been done, in the name of science, and specifically eugenics. Does that necessarily mean that any studies into eugenics is evil? I say, "Not only NO, but HELL NO!"

No, but the road to a virtuous outcome is a tightrope over an abyss. Eugenics faces a number of ethical challenges:

1) Who determines what is and isn't a fit trait? Government, parents, etc.?
2) What happens if a mistake is made -- either in who or what trait should be targeted?
3) Should people be allowed to abstain, or is participation compulsory?
4) How is the process done? Killing, sterilization, or non-sexual reproduction?
5) If the process is voluntary and non-destructive, how do we ensure equal access to "better" children?

Each of these points is an entire essay of ethical nightmares in and of itself.

If scientists announced tomorrow that they could screen for cystic fibrosis, with greater than 99% confidence, and abort the fetus early in the first trimester, would you object to that?

Putting aside the method proposed, the problem is where do you draw the line? We know that cystic fibrosis is a recessive mutation in a single gene, and you can't get it if you don't have two damaged copies. Eliminating it seems relatively easy to do under nearly any scheme within two generations once testing becomes universally available.

Okay, so that's one disease down! Now how about diseases where your genes only propose a risk of a disease? Should we block any genes that cause risks of disease? How big of a risk? What about deformities? What if a disease or deformity has a protective effect? (e.g. Sickle-cell v. malaria, or the cancer-preventing effects of a rare form of dwarfism.) Who gets to choose which is more important, looks or health?

What about mental illness? Take the infamous MAOA gene. "Defective" versions that produce less MAOA result in people who, if exposed to excessive violence as a child (e.g. child abuse, war zones, gangland killings, etc.), have a tendency to grow up to violent criminals and sociopaths -- or in another day and age, effective warriors. Do we weed that out despite the fact that most people with the gene grow up to be healthy and effective members of society?

That brings up two more issues. The first is epigenetics -- the methylization and expression of genes as influenced by the environment, some of which can be passed down in childhood. What do we do about genes that are good in the right place and time and bad in others? If we can't "clean" the genes, should we just cut them out as a risk factor?

The second is far more pernicious: what about traits that influence personality? What about traits that influence political leanings? We know that there are some biological correlations to party affiliation and that certain specific genes tie to political partisanship. Should we allow traits that encourage dissident thought or liberalism or conservatism to be bred out of the populace? Even if an oppressive government isn't invovled, should parents be allowed to customize their children to be more receptive to their own belief structure?

Forced sterilization? If we got so far along that we could screen for all the many conditions that make people's lives so miserable, sterilization wouldn't be a necessity. Instead, Mother can pick and choose traits, simply rejecting any and all number of undesirable traits.

As another poster has pointed out, that quickly becomes a "haves and have-nots" issue. Unless poor people get equal access to what will initially be a very expensive technology, you risk breeding a genetic overclas