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My links didn't seem to format properly, so here they are in un-edited format : http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13671279 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2003.tb01876.x/abstract

These both clearly show social facilitation for cognitive tasks, with effects that increase as the task is complexified.

The article you put forth, by the way, doesn't support your initial postulate that the Ringelmann effect "means" the group cannot perform better than the sum of its parts. They did not disprove in any way the Köhler effect. They merely were not able to say that the variation was statistically significant. This is very interesting (particularly given that the second study, concerning word associations, indicates a decrease in performance in almost all group situations), but I can't find a follow-up work. Usually, this is the sign that there was a parameter that was unaccounted for and after correcting the structure of the experiment the results were "as expected", or merely that upon repeating the experiment they observed the expected outcome. Furthermore, I can't seem to find the paper you are putting forth in its full form, nor in a journal. The work in question seems to have been presented at two working groups (the EAESP General meeting 2005 and the Jena Social Psychology Task Group 2005), and then quite suddely vanished. The University hasn't kept the presentations (the wayback machine has archived them, but the links on the university's own page are dead : http://epb.uni-hamburg.de/de/node/3703 ), Dr Nina Plum now works as a consultant, and I can't find Gabriele Engelhardt on either the university's website nor an open search. Dr. Witte has retired, but only in 2011, and after 2005 there does not seem to be any collaboration between any of the three authors to deepen the elements presented in this research.

This isn't an attempt at character assassination, but I feel you're engaging in what would pass for irrational behaviour in conspiracy circles. Evidence that goes your way is necessarily true, despite being incomplete, not peer reviewed, nor having been followed-up, whereas evidence that suggests the opposite is "wrong" despite meeting all these criteria.

Actual science disagrees with you. UHI effects are very real, the discussion is whether we're able to manipulate the data so as to still being able to see what the true temperature rise is.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=24538066

Mercury's not good for you, heavy metals aren't good for you, but it's rather incomprehensible it would cause autism.

Agreed, but as continued research has shown for lead, for example, there are quantifiable effects to subclinical exposure. There are definite personality changes that go along with lead levels that are lower than those that cause traditional lead poisoning. Current, although perhaps still controversial, thought is that this is what causes many elderly individuals to become disagreeable: lead and other heavy metals are deposited in the bones, and as the bones de-ossify during the later stages of life those deposits are released into the bloodstream at low levels. It is also implicated in macular degeneration. Here are two references: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=838447 and http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=22174578

The levels necessary for this kind of shift are much lower than normally thought of for heavy metal poisoning, and since exposure accumulates, it seems prudent to avoid any unnecessary ingestion of mercury, lead, or other heavy metals. The amount of mercury in an injection does seem too small to cause autism, but that does not mean it should be thought of as benign.

Mercury's not good for you, heavy metals aren't good for you, but it's rather incomprehensible it would cause autism.

Agreed, but as continued research has shown for lead, for example, there are quantifiable effects to subclinical exposure. There are definite personality changes that go along with lead levels that are lower than those that cause traditional lead poisoning. Current, although perhaps still controversial, thought is that this is what causes many elderly individuals to become disagreeable: lead and other heavy metals are deposited in the bones, and as the bones de-ossify during the later stages of life those deposits are released into the bloodstream at low levels. It is also implicated in macular degeneration. Here are two references: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=838447 and http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=22174578

The levels necessary for this kind of shift are much lower than normally thought of for heavy metal poisoning, and since exposure accumulates, it seems prudent to avoid any unnecessary ingestion of mercury, lead, or other heavy metals. The amount of mercury in an injection does seem too small to cause autism, but that does not mean it should be thought of as benign.

By the rocket equation, mass fraction is determined by velocity and exhaust velocity is driven two things; the mass of the molecules being put out and the pressure/temperature of the combustion chamber.

A rocket goes up because of the asymmetry between molecules being flung against the top of the reaction chamber while passing out the bottom. I know that the chaos in the chamber means that the best way to think about this is a pressure parameter rather than the direction of individual molecules. But I've always wanted to know whether you could make a rocket engine more efficient by using electromagnetic fields to orient the molecules in such a way that the chemical reactions are biased to have more reaction products being flung up and down rather than side to side.

Taking the H2+O2 reaction as an example: The reaction proceeds in a complex way, however magnetic fields are able to affect similar reactions.

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

Perk? Maybe not, but caffeine improves focus, cognition, and memory recall. At least that is what these studies show, and most of them account for withdraw.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=21812869
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y414x83288221635/
http://www.stormingmedia.us/28/2891/A289133.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yj8v0h54w05x222q/
http://arno.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=7943
http://heldref.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,9;journal,31,55;linkingpublicationresults,1:119922,1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/a7k04226627g6326/

An "ordinary" quantum computer is no more powerful than a Turing machine. It probably can't even solve NP-complete problems quickly because there's no way of directing the observation step (where you pull the answer out of the numerous universes) in such a way as to make the right answer show up often enough. This is, technically speaking, an open problem (just like P vs NP), but most believe the answer is a negative (just like P != NP).

I said "ordinary" quantum computer because there have been attempts at making quantum hypercomputers (i.e. computers more powerful than a Turing machine). The best known is Kieu's adiabatic quantum hypercomputation scheme, but that appears to have been refuted. Quantum adiabatic algorithms can be useful (they're a bit like genetic algorithms, only on the quantum level), but apparently they can't bring quantum computers above Turing power; a bit like the Brownian ratchet in this manner, in that it's not as powerful as thought, but still useful.

To sum all of that up: it's unknown whether it's possible to make a quantum computer solve NP-complete in polytime, but most think it's unlikely. It's unknown whether it's possible to make a quantum hypercomputer as well, but most think it's even less likely (although if consciousness would disprove this, that would be... interesting).

The wiki article correctly cites an incorrect published article. There is incorrect data there, but it's not the wiki's fault.

There has never been a study of paraquat's impact on human health when smoked on pot. There have been many studies of what happens to rats when paraquat is smoked from tobacco, and despite how awful tobacco is, paraquat made things much worse.

There's no evidence that that wasn't paraquat combining with the tobacco to form Devastator, but it seems much more likely that it's just paraquat being awful.

Note that the citation you've got is a book on treatment of paraquat poisoning. That should tell you a fair amount of how paraquat interacts with humans.

Sure, most of it is converted into dipyridil - about 60%. The other 40% isn't. Incidentally, claiming dipyridil is in pot smoke is disingenuous in the same way that saying it's okay to eat a century old thermometer is okay because there's mercury in Coca Cola. Presence in trace amounts has nothing to do with presence in serious amounts. The characteristic flavor of almonds is hydrogen cyanide, one of the deadliest poisons there is, for example. Would you thus eat a bunch of hydrogen cyanide because you like almonds and cherries?

No?

By the way, dipyridil is really, *really* bad stuff.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16196558

Or is it a typo, and they meant stereo 2D?

It is stereoscopic 3D. There is a format developed by Philips called Declipse that provided a 2D + depth + occlusion + transparency data that could provide a useful multi-view, non-glasses-based 3D display.

You don't need them. Second result for googling myostatin and bone: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17589563 Even artificial increases in muscle strength are almost always accompanied by increases in bone density and joint strength. Your body isn't stupid.

Taking an aspirin a day will keep you headache-free

      Dear submitter,

      Since you insist on doling out pharmaceutical advice be aware that your statement is utterly false. Fortunately you won't be held as accountable as we practitioners are. Lucky you. I could lose my house because of something like this.

      You obviously have never heard of analgesic rebound headaches.

      Just in case you don't believe me. There, I'm bored. You look for the rest.

      A tip - if you have constant headaches, see your doctor instead of taking aspirin or some other analgesic every day.

      Love,

      A physician.

Not a subjective judgment in either direction, but for what it's worth, this paper abstract quantifies the heat imparted to Lake Cayuga as "equivalent to an additional two hours of sunlight each year".

This talks about neuronal replacement. It looks like your brain may have a write limit, it just automatically replaces worn out bits.

Really is a bridge to far for average Joe... :-/

Nah, the real bridge comes from the technology choice path dependency. Right now there are few options for anything non-windows to reduce the monopolistic marketshare of Windows.

Just today I started to conceive an ABM for the study of the Linux/OSX/Windows effect based on the polya-urn model. Let's see what interesting behavior can we get :)

Oh, and another bit of trivia: they actually had a higher average brain size than Homo Sapiens.

Larger than that of modern humans, and thus certainly larger than that of contemporaneous humans, yes. But:

And in a smaller body, too.

No. They were "shorter" in stature than humans, but more massive even than *modern* humans (*fit* specimens anyway, which is what we're considering): ~75kg "inhumanly"-well-muscled frame on a very heavily-built skeleton about 166cm tall for males. ref

Their body surface area to mass ratio is also smaller than that of humans. ref

So if we go by the popular brain-mass/body-mass metric...

...they should actually be a little *less* intelligent, on average; after all, the ratio of their body mass to cranial capacity (to say nothing of their brain size, of which cranial capacity is only an upper limit) is smaller, not larger. As for the brain morphology itself, the braincase and likely the brain were both shorter and more elongated than those of humans. Hard to imagine a more developed neocortex on such a brain, though perhaps it's possible. I don't have a source offhand.

So we're not talking just as in "looks like a human", but something that was definitely [!?] just as sentient and self-aware as a human.

You mean probably as sentient, or approximately as sentient. Nice try at perpetuating a false inferiority complex though.

Otherwise I agree with your sentiment that we ought to accord "being" or "right" to other intelligent creatures, except I wouldn't base this on something so philosophically shaky as mere "empathy" (which perhaps you used for expedience rather than precision).

Check this out for some fun reading:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/species.html/

Shame that one study about semen preventing cervical cancer if taken orally was fake!

True, but it does reduce the risk of at least one pregnancy complication.

(Yes, IAAD)

The placebo effect is a short term 'feeling better' from some mild problem.

I suggest you google for placebo surgery. Placebo techniques have given individual patients relief from angina pectoris, Parkinson's disease, and osteoarthritis of the knee. One patient in the Parkinson's study had not been physically active for years before surgery, but following placebo surgery she resumed hiking and ice skating.

It's clear that you are the one here who does not know what a placebo is. I suggest you start here.

Massage does no more then if you spent a quite hour reading a good book.

I love reading a good book, but I don't think that it can reduce depression and hostility and increase NK cells and lymphocytes in cancer patients, or help with migraines.

Acupuncture doesn't work. It has been tested in blinded tests.

As I've been pointing out, if you apply that same set of criteria to surgery, then surgery doesn't work.

As for these "blinded tests" of acupuncture, many used acupressure as their control, which is as ridiculous as using morphine as the control in your test of heroin. Others did not test acupuncture as it is actually applied, but used fixed point prescriptions that did not take into account the diagnostic methods of Chinese medicine - rather like testing if an antibiotic can treat sinus congestion without regard to whether the congestion is caused by an infection or not.

Better blinding, such as that used by John J.B. Allen et. al., compares two geninue treatments, one for the condition in question, the other for an unrelated complaint. This study of major depression found acupuncture more effective than the control.

You kill people. That's right, people like you lead people away from proven treatments until it's too late.

Look, jerkwad, I always suggest that clients see a physician at the very first sign that they might have a serious condition. It's right there on my website: "Shiatsu can also be a beneficial form of supportive care for people facing serious illness, such as cancer; it can help relieve stress and some of the side effects of invasive treatments. Shiatsu does not cure disease, but helps support and stimulate the body's own healing potential. It is not a substitute for conventional medical treatment."

Indeed, since I spend a lot more time listening to clients than a physician does, I may be able to spot early warning signs that would otherwise be missed.

The only time I would lead someone away from a treatment would be that if the condition is not life-threatening and is not going to degrade, I would suggest trying a less invasive therapy first - so yes, I will suggest trying bodywork to relieve chronic pain before going under the knife.

Of course, that's not leading anyone away from a proven treatment.

But whether you'll observe consistent responses to stimuli will depend on whether you're (a) measuring the right responses and (b) using the right stimuli. In this case, the stimuli were video images. Other researchers have found personality differences when using real stimuli. Maybe there is something about video stimuli that overwhelms individual differences?

Grandparent is actually correct: As you note, first sale applies. However, there is nothing stopping you from making some other agreement. In the case of movie rentals, the peculiar economics of movie production often makes this a preferable arrangement.

If you are a rental place, buying movies at retail makes it very expensive to build up a large collection, particularly obscure stuff that will take ages to recoup the initial investment, or the bursty demand for new, popular, releases. Instead, you can establish a revenue sharing agreement with the studio, who will furnish you with as many copies of a given title as you need at the cost of pressing, which is trivial, and then share the revenue from each rental.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118972449/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16851899
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=258

If you prefer some slightly more credible sources:

http://www.mdanderson.org/departments/newsroom/display.cfm?id=40C16848-750C-4143-A7382A752ED6E734&method=displayFull&pn=9cd50d60-76be-11d4-aec300508bdcce3a

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18462866

http://www.cancer.gov/Templates/drugdictionary.aspx?CdrID=43115

It's a compound that MD Anderson has been doing a bunch with - and a whole stack of clinical trials.

It does have some issues - it seems to affect mitosis on healthy cells http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13711465

Has anyone ever really tested this?

Yes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/business/30carbon.html

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14361282

Lemaitre published his paper in 1927, two years before Hubble published. He developed his theory and predicted Hubble's result before it was found.

All _scientific_ theories must be falsifiable, not just the great ones.

My point is that some theories come from an a priori assertion rather than being derived from empirical data. Relativity is that way.

From: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=19159583

"Among his chief inspirations to think about the origin of the universe, we draw attention to his persistent fascination of light as the primeval state of the world. Although this idea was originally seen in a theological perspective, religion played no direct role in Lemaître's hypothesis of 1931."

His theory was constructed with mathematics but was inspired by a desire to find a moment of creation and his attraction to the concept that "in the beginning there was light". This does not diminsh the Science in his approach, but I bring it up to point out that religious notions can inspire theories that are real science... unlike, I.D. which is not science. Furthermore, even when science is inspired by religion, religious people may still reject it :)

Yes, this heat can be used for things, but its tricky to find a customer for that much heat all of the time.

In Denmark, 60% of housing is connected to district heating. 95% of that heat is "waste" from power plants. If you have cities of more than a few thousand people in temperate/cold areas it's a viable strategy.

The most efficient internal combustion engine in the world is a diesel the size of a house that's in a container ship. It gets 50% efficiency.

For a heat engine, that's really quite good.

You're definitely right in that bigger is better: As you scale an internal combustion engine, the volume (and with it, energy per cycle) goes up as the cube of the scale, while surface area (and with it, heat radiated) only goes up with the square. So naturally, the huge diesels on container ships are among the most efficient real-life heat engines -- surpassed only by power plants.

But... turbines are also lucky to get 50%, actually! As I mentioned, the most efficient heat engines are the huge ones in power plants, and IIRC the best-ever-achieved is around 60%, using exotically-high temperatures and pressures (but I can't find a source for that.) This source cites 48% as a competitive efficiency for a coal-fired powerplant.

The point is that 50% is pretty impressive, actually.

Turbines do have big advantages: They're much more reliable than piston engines, because they're mechanically much simpler. But I'd like to dispel the myth that the reciprocating motion of piston engines is a major source of inefficiency. The K.E. of the pistons is negligible compared to the thermal energies involved. Rather, the reciprocating action is bad for reliability.

I wouldn't be surprised if the program did something like this (under disassembly):

push pointer
call GetAndProcessFace
push eax
push storedinfo
call CompareFace
test eax, eax
je badboy_logout
;Else good user, so terminate program
as the same user who it's designed to protect, instead of being linked to something secure like disk encryption under a password derived from a biometric hash. And with face recognition, it also has to deal with replay attacks, and again, it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't.

Correlation is a situation where two things happen with statistically significant coincidence. Simply said, if there are effect A and effect B, and if you have significantly more occurences of A and B happening together and of neither happening together, than occurences of A happening without B or B without A, then there is a correlation between A and B.

If A is "the person played violent videogames" and B is "the person murdered someone", then every case where someone played violent videogames and soon before or afterwards murdered someone is a statistical point in favor of the correlation between the two, but only if there also are cases where someone did not play violent videogames and did not murder someone soon before or after: unfortunately for Jack Thompson, the latter is becoming extremely rare, which reduces the significance of the former. Also, every case where someone plays violent videogames and does not murder someone is a statistical point against the correlation. Similarly, every case where someone did not play violent videogames yet did murder someone goes against the correlation. So far, evidence shows that any correlation between the two is extremely improbable.

Illusory correlation, like that inferred by Jack Thompson repeatedly between violent videogames and crime, is the situation where someone insists on considering two events to be related despite being not significantly correlated. Despite popular belief to the contrary, such illusory correlation behaviour is not correlated to schizophrenia (paranoid or non-paranoid, delusional disorder), nor with depression. So Jack Thompson is probably not technically insane on such grounds.

However, illusory causation, where the person infers causality between two supposedly correlated events, is a trait of paranoid disorders. Jack Thompson goes as far as making public claims (and suing according to those claims) that a causation exists between people playing violent videogames and murders despite the absence of even mild correlation between the two, and even interprets much of what happens to him in his professional life as having a causal link to this illusory causation in the first place (as evidenced by his claims of collusion between the Florida Bar or Supreme Court and the videogame industry). When his interpretations are rejected by the public (like when he unsuccessfully sued Janet Reno and RockStar), he rejects the result of the scrutiny instead of questioning those interpretations: that's a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. At one point he even fantasized himself as being Batman, FFS ! It makes him a very dangerous man in my book, because the paranoids are often capable of nurturing delusory fantasies of persecution and injustice that can push them to commit serious crimes.

Given some of his more religious statements I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that he has auditory hallucinations which he attributes to God... The other symptoms (disorganized thinking, absent or inappropriate emotional behaviour, etc.) are easier to hide and less prominent in paranoid schizophrenia.

Even if the guy is disbarred for ten years, if he really has paranoid schizophrenia, I would only consider the general public to be safe when he is committed to a mental institution.

Detection of dioxins by laser:

Real-Time Monitoring of Dioxins and Other Ambient Air Trace Organics

Dioxins in ambient air, bonfire night 1994

Rechem in Scotland was extremely popular with their incinerator, which they were reputed to run at a lower temperature at night, which didn't completely destroy the dioxins. By using a laser/gas chromatography, the environmentalists were able to prove that the furnace was being underpowered.

This is not disimilar to the ESA's approach. Their Rosetta probe is a development of a Matra Marconi (now part of Astrium) geostationary communications satellite bus. In turn, the Mars and Venus Express probes both used a design derived from Rosetta, with many subsystems (e.g. power) also shared.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17659402

Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

Actually toner is NOT a carcinogen because the carbon black (which is dubiously linked to cancer to begin with) is bound within a polymer matrix in the toner. For more info see this study related to carbon black as it relates to toner and California prop 65.

Three chromosomes for the maths-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dinosaur-lords in their halls of chicken,
Nine for polyglutamine doomed to die,
One for the pneumolysin on his dark throne
In the Land of Slashdot where the Firehoses lie.
One Sequence to rule them all, One Sequence to find them,
One Sequence to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Slashdot where the Firehoses lie.

Maybe somebody has already disproved this wild theory.

Bt corn seems to spread like mad.

I found one study that says that Bt corn pollen is OK to feed to bees, but I that's pollen, not corn syrup.

• DCA and a related chemical TCE were both found to play a prominent role in creating liver cancers with DCA accelerating the growth rate of liver cancer

• Later research found that DCA and its metabolites may have different roles in the cancer process and that dose-response is very non-linear because DCA inhibits its own metabolism.

• DCA has such serious side effects on the human nervous system that in a recent study 15 out of 15 test patients had to be taken off experimental DCA treatment because of toxic neuropathy and the study was terminated early.

• DCA has been found to prevent and reverses pulmonary high blood pressure

Well, many companies will control what can be published from the research they pay for, but when it comes to the government, that is not the case at all.

Naive today, aren't we? Government can choose to suppress research in a number of ways. Either through 'censorship' (see above), or lack of funding entirely as is the case with embryonic stem cell research.

In the case linked to above, the cult of global warming calls foul because the Bush administration decided to tone down the cultists' language. Not change their findings mind you... simply take out the inflammatory language. And that makes the cultists sad.

Worth noting: King George is not alone on the phrase "global warming." Even the fine gentlemen over at realclimate.org don't want you calling it "global warming" any more. They prefer "anthropogenic climate change" now. That way, they can claim victory regardless of the direction temperatures actually go...

Sea levels are falling in the arctic? It must be anthropogenic climate change. Ice getting thicker in Greenland? Yet more anthropogenic climate change! Temperatures falling in Greenland? ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE!! Woohoo! This is great! It works for hot AND cold! Awesome!! I wish we'd thought of this five dollar word for 'man-made' sooner! Tell all the troops to discontinue the use of 'global warming' and start using 'anthropogenic climate change' as soon as possible.

Phosphorus http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_e/latest_research/2005/ 20050615/20050615.html

Do they have any supporting data, other than hearsay and fear? The only thorough study of the idea that violent video games and violent tendencies are linked that I know of (here) failed to find any such link at all, even when the researchers entered the study expecting to find a link. And this is any link whatsoever, not just whether violent video games cause violent tendencies.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=34076 62

Sewage sludges from German municipal wastewater treatment plants possess high gold concentrations (280 to 56,000 g/kg in dry matter) similar to some ore deposits which are being mined for gold. In addition, the sludges exhibit elevated platinum (10 to 1,070 g/kg) and palladium values (38 to 4,700 g/kg), and low osmium (3 to 51 g/kg), iridium (0.6 to 26.5 g/kg), ruthenium (2 to 390 g/kg), and rhodium contents (2 to 352 g/kg Major amounts of these metals are already present within the wastewater solids before the raw sewage reaches the treatment works. Sludges from industrial areas tend to possess higher precious metal values than those from rural regions. Thus industrial discharges contribute significant quantities of precious metals to municipal wastewaters and sewage sludges. However, elevated precious metal contents in sludges from rural areas show that additional sources are present which remain to be determined by future studies

I don't know for sure if that's the case, but the fact that the ice depth is increasing in the interior doesn't necessarily refute climate change.

No, that is not the case. Greenland has been getting colder. It's very simple: The ice sheet atop Greenland has been growing, not melting. I have provided ample evidence to support this assertion. Evidence in the form of observations, not predictions and computer models. If you guys want to rationalize that thicker glaciers equals global warming, then go right ahead.

Actually a less fancy version of this technique was already used on mars pathfinder where several images were taken of the same objective and then combined to obtain better resolution.

"Superresolution image processing is a computational method for improving image resolution by a factor of n[1/2] by combining n independent images. This technique was used on Pathfinder to obtain better resolved images of Martian surface features."

Taken from the abstract of this article:

"...do we have any that can detect this sort of soft tissue beneath the bone? If so I think they should be standard equipment on any paleontological dig."

Yes. X-ray micro-computedtomographic scanning at what is rapidly approaching the submicron resolution level utilizing monochromatic intense collimated beams of synchrotron radiation coupled to high resolution scintillating film joined CCD detectors is fully up to the task. But you'll have to bring the fossils to it.