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The Wiki entry you reference has no citations that support the brain running on Ketones at all. Nor do any of the articles on Wikipedia that I checked. The only alernate fuel seems to be lactate, a byproduct of buring glucose: http://www.livescience.com/health/081001-brain-food.html. I've seen no indication that it can run on fatty acids; your muscles can though.

Gluconeogenesis using protein results in ammonia being released into the blood, which can build up in the brain, IIRC, but even if not in the brain, ammonia build up in the body isn't good either. I'd have to look at my materials at home for better references.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090808-smart-dogs.html

You can slow light down, speed it up, and even stop it altogether!

Seems that significantly fewer people see science as important http://www.livescience.com/technology/etc/090709-scientists-rock-just-not-much-before.html as it used to be.

Although many people see conflict between science and religion, it appears that science conflicts with itself more http://content.usatoday.com/communities/religion/post/2009/07/68494044/1

From another report from LiveScience, I gather that it would be most recognizable to you as being called just a "baby cry," but with a subtle sound the same as cats make when purring mixed in, rather than as purring with a crying sound, but the language is utterly ambiguous and it seems hard to distinguish when they mean meowing, purring, or whatever.

Unverifiable links by anonymous authors citing anonymous sources are no better than science fiction. At least Isaac Asimov signed his work.

There is jack and shit for evidence of intelligent alien life as of today. I'm sure the Russian hacker THOUGHT he could find images... where is the proof he did? Did he disseminate any of them? Any that cannot be easily dismissed as various atmospheric and interference phenomena? I mean, there are people who still think the moon images were faked, even though there have been extensive experiments and study done on them to verify them.

Oh, and about the astronauts acknowledging (way to use spell-check there, sparky) alien contact? Bullshit. With a capital fucking B. Lying does NOT help your credibility.

Face it. There is no alien life near us, we really did land on the moon, and the government is NOT all powerful and able to keep a secret of that magnitude. Suggesting anything else is pure lunacy.

"No one can explain why global temperatures have flat-lined." Well, some have suggested the lack of an El Nino effect, so if they are correct, then global temperatures should begin to rise beyond 1999 levels soon; the ten following years were still the warmest decade on record.

If there were a big conspiracy to muck with global warming data, tell me why they would screw around with pre-1970s data to lower temperatures, but leave the purported "flatline" data alone? If we don't have the power to change the climate of the Earth yet, then do you think the hole in the ozone layer was a complete scam, too? I recommend modding parent as anything but "insightful" or "informative."

Also, dendrochronology is a bitch.

Sorry, the point I was trying to make was that the injunction stopping the friend from carrying out the murder grows successively weaker with each ultra-realistic simulated murder

No, the point you were trying to make is that for some inexplicable reason you believe that. You've given no evidence, no arguments, nothing. You've just said, "Hey, it just makes sense to me that..."

If you have any evidence whatsoever that repeated exposure to simulated murder makes a statistically significant difference to people's willingness to actually commit murder, please present it. Otherwise, state your opinion as an opinion, unsupported, anti-empirical and baseless as it is.

You're aware--since you have an opinion on this issue and it would be unethical to form such an opinion without doing at least a little research on the matter--that there is a very significant correlation between easy availability of pornography and a large decrease in the incidence of rape (http://www.impactlab.com/2008/01/06/internet-porn-shown-to-decrease-incidence-of-rape/)? (curiously if you google "rape decrease pornography" the machine kindly asks you if you meant "rape INCREASE pornography", so deeply embedded is the "it just makes sense to me" in our culture.) The detailed structure of this correlation in time and space makes it pretty compelling that the link is causal: would-be rapists are using pornography as a surrogate for actually committing rape, rather than a training manual as a certain bunch of anti-empiricists want to believe.

Plausibly, the same phenomena could apply to other crimes of violence, and I believe there is some evidence to show that people who play violent video games are less likely to commit violent crimes. Oh look, here's Google again: http://www.livescience.com/health/070425_bad_video.html. Please note that finding someone who has committed a violent crime and then pointing to his use of violent video games for entertainment does not increase the Bayesian plausibility of the statement "people who play violent video games are more likely to commit violent crimes" one tiny bit.

So again: when you have something beyond your imagination to support your position, please share it.

But which side of your face/neck area would you be more comfortable with a stranger getting close to?

On a related note - when people hug each other which is more common - their head over your right shoulder, or your left shoulder? These would normally be people you feel safe with in the first place.

Anyway I still think it's less to do with understanding and logic :).

See also:

http://www.livescience.com/health/090624-right-ear.html

"In the second study, the researchers approached 160 clubbers and mumbled an inaudible, meaningless utterance (such as "babababa") and waited for the subjects to turn their head and offer either their left of their right ear. They then asked subjects for a cigarette (in Italian the request specifically was "Hai una sigaretta?" which can be translated in English as "Do you have a cigarette?"). Overall, 58 percent offered their right ear for listening and 42 percent their left. No link was found between the number of cigarettes obtained and the ear receiving the request. "

Note that no link was found in that scenario. If their conclusion was correct, there should still be a link right?

Well, unless these guys are wrong (or lying, paid for by big oil and coal of course!), our carbon emissions are heating Mars and Jupiter...

With the news that the winds are dying down?

http://www.livescience.com/environment/etc/090610-winds-are-dying-down-study-suggests.html

Oh well....I guess they could always fly them over Washington, DC.

Men and women do think differently, and that has been all but exhaustively proven scientifically. However, as a rule, men and women do equally well on broad measures of intelligence. And while men and women differ as to what areas they tend to do well in, either can do mathematics equally well. It's just that men and women will generally take (and may even require) different approaches to learning. It's not a bad thing, it's a good thing.

There's plenty of ways already documented. For this, we needed DARPA?

I liked the one that found out that men and women think differently.

it's also a theory as to why there was a 2nd prolonged cooling period during the last major ice age. A massive ice damn broke releasing millions of tons of fresh water that flooded the north Atlantic.

Actually, lots of other animals go through menopause. Even guppies!
http://www.livescience.com/animals/051229_fish_menopause.html

Fingerprints are a match or not, period

Hardly.

Sounds like a bunch of FaceBook losers...er....users... to me.

Just for fun, theoretically, you can put payloads into orbit and on routes to the moon/planets/asteroids if you give them a solar sail. (People could not survive that trip, unless encoded in data bits and silicon.)

Maggots and leeches are proving effective in medicine in various ways.
    "Maggots and Leeches: Old Medicine is New"
    http://www.livescience.com/health/050419_maggots.html

In round figures, people are about 90% bacteria by numbers, and about 10% bacteria by weight. Bathing too often may disrupt your bacterial ecology and lead to infections or skin problems, and growing up in too clean environments may lead to immune problems. Although exactly what is too much is problematical. See:
    "The filthy, stinking truth: The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick."
    http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/30/dirt_on_clean/

Until we actually landed on the moon, the best scientists still thought landers might sink into dust. Someday, we may turn the Moon into a green paradise using greenhouses and artificial lighting or mirrors.

Psychologically, the individual's perception is still the center of everything (though people try to move beyond that in their thinking). Quantum mechanics reflects this. Still, we may be living in a simulation in which case, like those living in Plato's "Cave", most of what we assume may be just a shadow of the truth:
    http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Anyway, just having fun with your points. I like your insightful comment that knowing enough to be dangerous (as opposed to nothing or lots) is a source of difficulties.

Here is the big issue with Moore's law and it was forseen in the 1960s:
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis."

So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.

Half of Britons do not believe in evolution, survey finds

A new survey in the UK found that 29 percent of teachers think creationism and intelligent design should be taught as science

More schools teaching biblical creation are to be established across the north east of England.

The cdesign proponentsists are everywhere. The sooner you recognize the problem exists where you are too, the sooner you can fix it.

Just checking. If not, time to reformat. If so, no one talks about this?

I got this URL for the article:

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090324-toddlers-listen.html

I only ask that you allow me to also say:

Christianity as it is practised in reality is, of course, fallible and flawed. But Christianity is (in a sense) the Christian ideal that Jesus set as a life pattern. The Christian method /works/, despite all the failings of the people claiming to 'practise' it.

In other words, If all or most "Christians" acted like Christ, I think people would enjoy them. He never *forced* his ideas on others and the only ones he upbraided were religious hypocrites. He set up some pretty good principles too. "More Happiness in Giving than Receiving" "Do unto others..." And they work. I don't want to sound preachy, but I'm sure you've heard of this: Why Money Doesnt Buy Happiness and Key to Happiness, Give Away Money.

As to why Christendom doesn't act Christian, well that is not for /. ...

An AC said it, but let me reiterate exercise don't make skinny, diet is way more important. If they want to make posters about fat dead people, they need to make ads against candy, chips, and fast food.

This ad campaign is either video game bashing or just wrong.

On a more personal note, I could be happy with either Colbert or Serenity -- while I am a huge fan of Stephen Colbert, I am also a huge fan of Firefly,... The Serenity name would go along a bit better with the whole theme of the space station, though. I'd bet money that what happens is Colbert wins, but they decide to stick with the theme and dignity and name it the second place name of Serenity . To recognize Colbert's contribution, they'll name the toilet on board the module after Stephen,... ;-)

Because it isn't really a natural form of sex....many people consider it as abnormal as necrophilia, pedophilia, or bestiality.

Really? Many researchers and observers of animal behaviors in the wild would disagree. Many species perform 'gay sex', and other homosexual behaviors, naturally. There's tons of research on the subject, you should do some reading some time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals http://www.livescience.com/animals/080516-gay-animals.html

When you come down to it, there really isn't any significant difference between recording fingerprints and recording DNA.

Of course there is - DNA collection involves the government taking a piece of my living flesh. That's a rather bright line for them to try to cross.

Then there's the problem that DNA isn't so reliable after all - but then, neither are fingerprints.

You might actually try to educate yourself. I know it's fun to be the ignornant tough guy type, but look what's its done for our president. You don't want to viewed like that, or do you?

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/060516_predator_panic.html

AAC=American Alpine Club.

Thank you.

Your Wikipedia link refers to professional football.

Actually, it is all football. Please reread.

See, http://www.livescience.com/health/060614_sport_injuries.html for injury stats.

Okay, your link says 418,260 football injuries, without saying how many participants; absolute numbers are misleading (as doti said). Further, the topic is deaths, not injuries, which was what the linked article refers to.

AAC=American Alpine Club.

Your Wikipedia link refers to professional football.

See, http://www.livescience.com/health/060614_sport_injuries.html
for injury stats.

Every year the American Alpine Club publishes "accidents in mounteering" and the figures show that both total numbers and per capita deaths are higher for football - from children all the way up to adult football players.

Indeed, climbing doesn't make it into the top 15 - see, http://www.livescience.com/health/060614_sport_injuries.html

One suspects that there are a lot more people playing football than climbing mountains.

Every year the American Alpine Club publishes "accidents in mounteering" and the figures show that both total numbers and per capita deaths are higher for football - from children all the way up to adult football players.

Indeed, climbing doesn't make it into the top 15 - see, http://www.livescience.com/health/060614_sport_injuries.html

I'd buy a metric f@ck ton of these if I could guarantee that they'd be filled with PETA members. What a bunch of retarded zealots. Lets worry about the f@cking animals once we've solved the whole ethical treatment of people issue. Maybe if we can all get them to read articles like this one and this one, we can convince them not to eat vegetables either and starve to death.

Either way the AP did a crappy job of making their point here.

True, but I don't blame them for not wanting to be the medium for social engineering

-_-

any black holes created would be tiny - so tiny that they have a very small chance of even swallowing any particles during their existence, and evaporate "within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second" (linky). That seems a lot shorter than the 5 years you say it would take to cause a problem.

There's a lot of people still trying to find genetic proof of homosexuality, in many cases for purely scientific reasons, in others, to justify the naturalness of homosexuality. Anyways, some links: http://www.livescience.com/health/080617-hereditary-homosexuality.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation

It follows, then, that in order for it to take more energy to produce the device than it will generate over its useful lifetime, the manufacturer would effectively need to spend twice as much on electricity as they sell the finished product for... And that ignores other overhead such as labor and raw materials.

Uh. Or they could just set the price above their total costs and still manage to sell them. Companies sell lots of things that make no sense, and successfully. Particularly in this case, people will obviously pay more for something "green" and their 'pay'ing price doesn't not have to have anything to do with the 'pay'back period.

Your overall point is still, of course, correct. This subject has been around long enough that even Googling finds some straight talk. The closest to the doom-and-gloom, "don't use solar power at all" articles and papers I could find were about heavy metal emissions, but even they put the ratio at 9:1 in favor of solar. http://www.livescience.com/environment/080227-solar-power-green.html

I did find one that clearly says solar may sometimes be bad for a bad install location (duh), and that solar is universally bad for gadget-scale use: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/03/the-ugly-side-o.html

Hopefully, we'll get to find out:

http://www.livescience.com/blogs/2008/09/18/phoenix-mars-microphone-turning-on-the-robots-ear/

...considering there is warming occurring on some of the other planets too...

That correlation has been pretty much debunked for quite some time. See: http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warming.html

...and our own planet has gone through several periods of non human induced climate change.

While this is true, no other climactic event has had such a change so quickly. And this according to observable fact.

And here is a video of these helicopters flying... http://www.livescience.com/common/media/video.php?videoRef=LS_080902_copter

The editors note that is now attached to the Register article that you link to really does not help to support your position. Incidentally I remember having read earlier that year that the warming trend will be put on hold this year because of a severe La Nina effect - apparently the National Geographic guys didn't get the memo.

The Register article DID help my position, however not as dramatically as I would have hoped :)

The Ice extent graph showed 10% more ice than last year, whereas the map showed 30% more pixels than last year. The two sets of data appeared to be contradictory, but they were not. Still, the 10% increase of ice from last year instead of their being almost no ice is a big difference.

Especially since it wasn't just national geographic reporting this, it was almost everyone!

Exclusive: Scientists warn that there may be no ice at North Pole ...
North Pole could be ice-free this summer, scientists say - CNN.com
North Pole could be ice free in 2008 - climate-change - 25 April ...
ABC News: North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008
FOXNews.com - Report: North Pole May Be Ice-Free This Summer ...
North Pole Could be Ice-Free This Summer | LiveScience
Summer may see first ice-free North Pole - Climate Change- msnbc.com
North Pole May Be Ice-Free This Year - AOL News
No North Pole ice for 1st time in human history?_English_Xinhua
An Ice-Free North Pole? - TIME

Just a simple google search for "north pole ice free" will give you 1000's of articles. Notice how every one of these articles has very little variation. Not even fox news challenged the claim.

So much for a free and independent press.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/080828-living-architecture.html

Darn the LHC is only number eight on the list. http://www.livescience.com/technology/destroy_earth_mp-1.html

Sucked into a microscopic black hole

You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader. [I love that part].

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. [Yeah, so then how will I place it *on* the Earth. Lousy instructions.] The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.

Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.

I demand more evidence

You sure won't find it in those links. No control-group study mention at all. You can as easily say "People who learn faster, remember more, and think clearer, exercise." Or 'the Moon is Cheese', given what's actually said about exercise.

The Yahoo "story"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080806/sc_livescience/howyourinnerathletemakesyousmarter

links to the "original story", that it repeats
http://www.livescience.com/health/080806-brain-exercise.html

which links to "a review of studies"
http://www.livescience.com/health/080709-food-brain.html

that only talk about nutrition in any factual way.

Dammit timothy, Get off /your/ lazy ass.

I demand more evidence

You sure won't find it in those links. No control-group study mention at all. You can as easily say "People who learn faster, remember more, and think clearer, exercise." Or 'the Moon is Cheese', given what's actually said about exercise.

The Yahoo "story"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080806/sc_livescience/howyourinnerathletemakesyousmarter

links to the "original story", that it repeats
http://www.livescience.com/health/080806-brain-exercise.html

which links to "a review of studies"
http://www.livescience.com/health/080709-food-brain.html

that only talk about nutrition in any factual way.

Dammit timothy, Get off /your/ lazy ass.

Vent and Seep Communities on the Arctic Seafloor
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_vogt.html

Boiling Hot Water Found in Frigid Arctic Sea
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080724-black-smokers.html

"Many miles inside the Arctic Circle, scientists have found elusive vents of scalding liquid rising out of the seafloor at temperatures that are more than twice the boiling point of water."

"The cluster of five hydrothermal vents, also called black smokers, were discovered farther north than any others previously identified. The vents, one of which towers four stories high, are located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Greenland and Norway, more than 120 miles farther north than other known vents."

Actually, NASA has said they're not going to use Japan. http://www.livescience.com/blogs/author/tariqmalik/

And here.

do it. check this out. It's semi-relevant and too cool. http://www.livescience.com/animals/prairie_dogs_041206.html

If you increase the lifespan of the average human to 1000 years would they remain fertile in proportion? Would a women remain fertile until about age 350?

I suspect there's going to be a lot of wrong information in response to this, as what people know often just isn't so.

"When a woman reaches her late 40s or early 50s, the monthly menstrual cycle that controls her hormone levels and readies ova for insemination ceases. Her ovaries have been producing less and less estrogen, inciting physical and emotional changes across her body. Her underdeveloped egg follicles begin to fail to release ova as regularly as before. The average adolescent girl has 34,000 underdeveloped egg follicles, although only 350 or so mature during her life (at the rate of about one per month). The unused egg follicles then deteriorate. With no potential pregnancy on the horizon, the brain can stop managing the release of ova." (slide 6)

If the anti-aging technology prevents the woman from reaching menopause, her body will continue to maintain her egg follicles. Menopause doesn't occur because the woman is out of eggs (as most people "know"), but rather because her body is old and has stopped maintaining them.

So, women would remain fertile for much longer. But no, not in proportion. Aging doesn't work like that (just like cavemen [lifespan ~ 18 years] didn't go through puberty when they were 3 years old).

As for overpopulation, it appears to be self correcting. The countries with the largest populations (eg, Japan) are experiencing negative population growth. I shouldn't think longer lifespans would change that.

I've read several articles saying that the best quality modern violins are as good or better than Strads anyway, but I can't don't remember where. I'll keep looking. In the mean time, this article from a few years ago has a different theory on the cause of the sound, and also makes the claim that in blind tests people often can't tell the difference (look about 2/3 down)

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/061129_violin_treatment.html

My personal opinion is that Stradivarius was just an exceptionally good artisan who worked with the best materials he could find, and made an excellent product. Modern manufacturers can do as well, or better.

My first violin instructor was definitely all about the magic of Stradivarius, and a much better player than I am now, so who am I to say.

nature usually doesn't keep things around that we don't have a need for!!!

http://www.livescience.com/animals/top10_vestigial_organs.html I wouldn't be so sure about that.