Slashdot Mirror

Ok, try programming anything that runs on binary, trinary, analog, quantum, and biological computers. It's virtually impossible.

This is (almost certainly) probably wrong, but...

As I understood it, a message travelling at FTL will experience exotic negative time, since it is travelling faster than light. (At exactly c, it experiences 0 time) the sender and reciever do not experience this exotic time. However, the message itself acheives its apparent FTL by going backward in time as measured by the conversationalists respectively.

Combining normal time reference frames with imaginary negative time reference frames results in strange voodoo though. I would conjecture that because we don't see oddball neutrinos with antimass traveling at ftl velocities in particle collisions, that this kind of communication is not really possible. The closest thing the time reversed data transmission I can think of is the "charlie sends photons to alice and bob, they later compre notes" experiment:

http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-entanglement-speed-10000-faster-light/26587/

And the "charlie predicts if alice and bob entangled their photons" experiment:

http://www.livescience.com/19975-spooky-quantum-entanglement.html

I am not sufficiently educated to sanely discuss these findings, but others here are.

Interesting, list doesn't include APR, Science, Nature, or any of the science outlets.

Just the MSM, which all get their news from 1-2 sources.

Let's take a look:

APR: what's "APR"? Applied Physics Reviews? Applied Physics Research? The former African Physics Review, now the African Review of Physics?

Science: Higgs Boson Positively Identified

Nature: No story I could find specifically about the Higgs boson, just the "Seven days: 8–14 March 2013" column, which mentions it in an item ("The new particle discovered last year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva continues to behave just like the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics, according to results presented last week at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. The latest data indicate that the boson decays into leptons as predicted, and also dampen earlier hints that the boson decays into pairs of photons more often than the standard model allows. No evidence yet points to theories beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry (see Nature 491, 505–506; 2012).")

and various science outlets:

Science News: nothing at present

LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson

Phys.org: Now confident: CERN physicists say new particle is Higgs boson (Update 3)

and some random organization called "CERN" or something such as that: New results indicate that new particle is a Higgs boson

So a list that does include Science, Nature, and some science outlets does have some articles and, not surprisingly, they largely don't have the "God particle" stuff in the headline.

It links to an AP story with the headline "Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson", which says...

GENEVA -- The search is all but over for a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe.

Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.

The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the "God particle."

[...]

...and says nothing about the particle having anything to do with anything related to God, other than being popularly known as the "God particle" -- which is a fact.

Exactly. If there's no crater and no seismic shockwave, it's of no concern. Life goes on. Enjoy the fireworks when they happen.

K, here's the seismic event: USGS Seismograph. Magnitude 2.7ish. 1000 hospitalized. Are we concerned yet?

For a group who are supposed to hold the moral high ground because of their job, you should expect it to be considerably lower.

With what psychologists have discovered about those with a "moral identity", you should expect it to be considerably higher.

If you do win, and you are not happier will you give your money to charity? I would suggest that might actually make you happier.
http://www.livescience.com/2376-key-happiness-give-money.html
8-).

The older I get, the harder it gets to fight off becoming a cynical old coot. I have wondered why the USA is militarily involved in a country like Afghanistan. On the surface it does not appear to have anything in the national interest. Sure there were some terrorist training camps there. From the sparse media coverage of this war, the country appears to be run by 7th century goat herders. The drone war has been flattening those bases and the bad guys over there for a while though. What has been peculiar is this:

Why do we have boots on the ground when drones are working so well?
Why are we spending so much effort at "Nation Building".

Well well well. It appears there is a huge deposit of rare earths that were discovered by some of our geologists. Try Googling "rare earths Afganistan". Some reports claim a trillion dollar cache of the stuff has been discovered. I suspect there maybe a larger deposit than that. Check out just this one article.

http://www.livescience.com/16315-rare-earth-elements-afghanistan.html

Me cynical? Naaaa.

http://www.livescience.com/26017-kilogram-gained-weight.html Not an argument, just happened to be the next article i came across.

The military has been conducting experiments on soldiers for at least 20 years.

A sampling.

http://www.livescience.com/12991-10-outrageous-military-experiments.html

First of all, you can tell a LOT from this particular data point.

That aside, what are you insinuating? That a group widely and routinely chastised as espousing a "liberal" and/or "leftist" agenda by conservatives, opposed the now-cancelled US Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, and is opposed to nuclear weapons in general, is executing a propaganda campaign to make North Korea look more primitive than it really is when it comes to its rocket programs?

Are you serious?

After a veritable comedy of errors, North Korea finally has a successful launch, can't even get or keep the satellite launched from it into a stable orbit, and now an anti-nuclear advocacy group is really a secret US propaganda campaign to inappropriately embarrass the North Koreans, who are really more advanced in rocketry than all of their misadventures would indicate? The same North Koreans who just announced they have uncovered a unicorn lair?

Really? I mean...really?

Please â" I would love to hear how this is "propaganda", and how the DPRK is really a capable member of the space and nuclear clubs. To what possible end? Even IF it were true, why/how would that be a good thing?

Or is this one of those topsy-turvy bizarro-world lines of reasoning where anything and everything that is in ANY way opposed to anything related to any US or Western interest is automatically true and pure, but anything that originates from the US or West, in any way, shape, or form is always "propaganda"?

Nonense. The comparisons that have been done with the original IPCC report vs current data are showing their predictions were suprisingly accurate.

http://www.livescience.com/25367-first-ipcc-climate-report-accurate.html

It coulda been worse.

Setting aside the lack of detail and the characterization of an untested hypothesis as a theory, if you follow the link in TFA about the dissenting opinions you'll find this gem:

Methane explosion

But just what caused that massive methane release remained a mystery. Daniel Rothman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues wondered whether ocean-dwelling bacteria that churn out methane were the culprits.

His team found through genetic analysis that bacteria called methanosarcina evolved the ability to break down nickel and make methane as part of its metabolism about 251 million years ago. The bacteria may have exploded in population, thereby releasing the ocean's vast methane reserves. And because the bacteria add an oxygen molecule to methane during metabolism, an exponential rise in methanosarcina may have catastrophically depleted ocean oxygen levels.

So now bacteria are performing alchemy (converting Ni to CH4) and "adding an oxygen to methane" no longer produces methanol (CH3OH) or formaldehyde (CH2O), rather it is apparently just "methane with an added oxygen" which is apparently still a potent greenhouse gas.

Adding to this, if anything, the literacy rate in Gaza is higher than it is in the US:

http://www.livescience.com/3211-14-percent-adults-read.html

Yeah, you're right. Nothing could survive that... Sorry I asked

Wasn't there a Slashdot story on this recently?

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/01/17/223213/is-climate-change-the-new-evolution

That's all I can find. But they are a bunch of tinfoil hatters (surprise surprise!):

http://www.livescience.com/23027-link-between-climate-denial-and-conspiracy-beliefs-sparks-conspiracy-theories.html

And if it is natural, what makes you think we can do anything to counteract it?

Since total human carbon emission is about 3 to 4% (even by IPCC figures), we are not
going to make a big impact on the natural cycles even if we reduce to zero..

This is my favorite solution (solution).

The downside is that climate scientists have data from relatively recent volcanic explosions that naturally create the cooling side effect. However, no one AFAIK has artificially created this condition. This begs the question: what the side effects, and can what happens if you miscalculate, making things too cold?

I'm personally crossing my fingers and hoping this, or other similar projects, precipitate a Thundarr-the-Barbarian-like global cataclysm. Bleep this garbage -- let's all start over.

Mental exercise significantly decreases the chances of dementia. I'm 56 and involved in lots of things, not the least of which is coding for a large company. Someone once said "learning keeps you young" and he was right. My last career switch was at 53. I picked up a new, fairly technical hobby at 54 at which I'm becoming fairly decent. Earlier this year I completed a 4,400 mile solo motorcycle trip.

There are concessions, of course. My knees are blown out. I can't run or bicycle anymore, and put those things away with true regret. But other things have replaced this. Walks with the dog, (with knee braces) long motorcycle trips, and driving daughter and her friends to skiing trips. (I hang out in the bar and write. Some of my best articles have come from there.)

If you think your life is over at 50, I can tell you from experience, it is only if you want it to be. I see some of my contemporaries sitting in their barcaloungers in front of the boob tube waiting for life to end, and it makes me sad. A few of them used to be sharp, and can no longer carry on a conversation that doesn't involve reminiscing. The people I associate with tend to be decades younger than I, because they're still doing stuff and I am unwilling to give up on doing stuff.

At 65, my mother had a bad heart attack, resulting in a triple bypass. She quit smoking, started a new business, and now in her seventies is a successful small businessperson. But the biggest change I've noticed is that for the first time in years her thoughts are clear, she can carry on a coherent conversation, and she's interested in learning new things.

I thought it had been pretty much settled that activity (mental and physical) tends to keep the parts working. I'm not sure why this is a news item. But I note other threads like this, even in Slashdot, of people worried that their careers will be over at 40. Well, maybe if you're a trapeze artist, but otherwise, it's pretty much up to you.

Belief in God (or at least stating you believe e.g. Priests) doesn't seem to stop people doing bad things either. How does that even work in a religion where you can repent/confess and all your sins are forgiven.

Here is one way to logic not doing bad things without God, maybe not perfect. If you do bad things then you will think of yourself as a bad person, then will feel bad about yourself, that will make you unhappy, so don't do it. If you do good things then you will feel good about yourself and you will be happier. Kind self enforced karma. It seems to be true, there are studies that show doing nice things for others makes people happier than buying things for themselves. Ref http://www.livescience.com/2376-key-happiness-give-money.html. Another theory (no real proof) if you are nice you tend to think other people are nice (they may or may not be) but then you assume they aren't trying to be mean to you so you are happier.

In the end you can convince yourself of anything, if you try hard enough, God or no God it probably depends more on the person you are than the religious beliefs you hold.

So, how do you plan to stamp out racism? Genetic modification so everyone has William's syndrome?

I've also heard that Australia has refugee camps where they house immigrants until they can be proven to not be a danger to society. How do you feel about aboriginals using up your social services funds? It isn't like Australia is actually a shining beacon of multiculturalism.

Every year there are more black-on-white murder victims in the United States than in the entire lynching history of the KKK. Excuses for the behavior or shifting blame doesn't mean much to the rotting victims of reverse racism.

I don't want to take away the rights of other cultures in America. I just want the one major right that the other cultures have: The right of association. As in if I want to go off and built a new city, fence it off, and only let in people who pass a genetic test as white, the Federal government will keep its nose out of it like they've kept their nose out of the increasing black-on-white violence going on in our cities.

2000 years of history would disagree with you: http://www.livescience.com/16468-christopher-columbus-myths-flat-earth-discovered-americas.html

Since I never said that Columbus discovered that the earth was ,spherical (Not round as your indicated article states, a round earth would not rule out a flat earth. For instance, the quintessential wheel is both flat AND round.), for your statement to be true, the circumference of the earth would not only have to have been calculated by the Greeks, but then confirmed by them too by the circumnavigation of the world.

Or are you saying that the reaction of the mass of European people had been prognosticated some 1700 years before Columbus was born?

Plus confirmation that the world was round made a pretty big splash. (Though that was lessened somewhat by the fact that Columbus did not, in fact, find China (the East) by going west.)

2000 years of history would disagree with you: http://www.livescience.com/16468-christopher-columbus-myths-flat-earth-discovered-americas.html

So if something can be hacked it isn't smart? So smart phones should have been called slightly more powerful feature phones. Carrying on with that, you can hack a human with magnetic fields http://www.livescience.com/438-remote-controlled-human-sensation.html so none of mankind could be considered smart either.

You can legislate education, however. And as people become more educated, they become less religious. Win-win!

That is not true in the USA. The more educated you are the more likely you are to be religious. A recent survey states

According to the study, in the 1970s, 51 percent of college-educated whites attended religious services monthly or more, compared to 50 percent of moderately educated whites and 38 percent of the least educated whites. In the 2000s, 46 percent of college-educated whites attended on at least a monthly basis, compared to 37 percent of moderately educated whites and 23 percent of the least educated. The study defines the "least educated" as people without high school degrees.

So the study says that people with more education are more likely to attend church than those with less education.

That's old stuff: http://www.livescience.com/11022-herb-quells-cows-methane-laden-belches.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/7873998/Curry-for-sheep-could-curb-global-warming.html
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/new-cow-diet-reduces-methane-emissionsand-no-its-not-mms.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/jul/10/ruralaffairs.climatechange
Even garlic appears to help.

Here is one that doesn't make you answer a lame question:

http://www.livescience.com/22828-supersonic-flying-wing-nasa.html

It would be one thing if the "innovationwhatever.com" site wrote the article. They didn't. Yet they feel the need to try to profit of it. Utter douchebags.

It might only be 2012, but here's an article about this same brain from 2011, and it was actually discovered in 2008. "Old news," indeed.

So this old brain is nothing new?

It might only be 2012, but here's an article about this same brain from 2011, and it was actually discovered in 2008. "Old news," indeed.

Have you heard of metallic glass? That's one example of a material which is both very tough and hard. Perhaps I should have said "strong" instead of "hard" as that appears to be usually a more useful attribute. Here's some more info:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-01/new-metallic-glass-toughest-strongest-material-yet
http://www.livescience.com/10420-metallic-glass-hard-tough.html
Some choice quotes:

"Strength refers to how much force a material can take before it deforms. Toughness explains the energy required to fracture or break something; it describes an object’s ability to absorb energy. Most of the time, these qualities are mutually exclusive. “The holy grail is to get both those properties at the same time,” Ritchie said."

"The new glass has a far better combination of strength and toughness than any steel."

If you knew anything about these parasites, you would not write what you just did.

Cats are carriers. Rodents are part of their life cycle. Rodents infected with these parasites tend to be "more brave", some even to the point of taunting a cat to attack them. The cat eats infected rodents, and the cycle of the parasite is complete as it returns to the soil and rodents pick it up once more.

Humans are just unintended side show for the parasite, but since these affect behaviour in mice brains, it is not surprising these parasites affect human brains too.

http://www.livescience.com/5631-zombie-ants-controlled-fungus.html

Is another example of similar effects in non-mammals by other, yet similarly acting organisms.

In a similar unrelated note, there are experiments that show even more bizarre behaviours, like effectively a "personality transplant" by a swap of gut bacteria cultures between two mice. One aggressive and another docile. Swap their gut cultures, and you swap their bahaviours!

There is plenty of other research starting to appear in this area,
      http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110517110315.htm

So basically, how you eat may tell what you are/may become and your becteria and viruses play bigger part in your life than you can image.

BZZZT! Arrogant asshole is WRONG.

ice evaporates in a vacuum

Ice doesn't evaporate in a vacuum, it sublimates at pressures below 611 Pa.

the area is permanently dark and therefore extremely cold?

even in persistent shadow,

Oh now you acknowledge the persistent shadow. Whatever happened to

the solar heating of the Lunar day

?

the moon still does not get as cold as a Jovian satellite!

Really now? The Moon's coldest is around 70 K. I think it's a safe assumption that a permanently shadowed portion would be around that temperature, since there's no atmosphere to distribute heat. Of the Jovian satellites, only Europa's coldest is colder than that, at 50 K, and its mean temperature is 102 K. Ganymede's coldest is just as as cold as the Moon, at 70 K, and its mean temperature is 110 K. Callisto's and Io's coldest are both warmer than the Moon's, at 80 K and 90 K, respectively. Metis, ~123 K. Andrasta, ~122 K. Amalthea, ~120 K. Thebe, Themisto, Leda, Himalia, Lysithea, Elara, Carme, Ananke, Pasiphae, Sinope, ~124 K. Carpo, S/2003 J 12, Taygete, Eukelade, S/2003 J 5, Chaldene, Isonoe, Praxidike, Iocaste, Harpalyke, Thyone, Euanthe, Euporie, Callirrhoe, Megaclite, Autonoe, Eurydome, Sponde, S/2003 J 2, no data. Looks like Jovian satellites are a good 50 K warmer than our Moon's cold spots.

Your actual mistake, you pathetic excuse for a ganglion, is that you not actually anywhere as brilliant as you like to think you are, as evidenced by your choice of nickname. As you yourself admitted:

I can't imagine that there can be much anywhere near the surface.

No, you really can't imagine much of anything at all, can you?. Us ambulatory molds, on the other hand, can engineer train and traffic networks.

Poll here. Another 60% decline to take a stance on evolution to avoid conflict. They skip the controversial aspects or present it as something students only need to regurgitate for the test.

So that's a very strong majority of American students who aren't getting a real education about evolution. And we wonder why In America, 46% of People Hold a Creationist View of Human Origins.

A dwarf human is still much larger than a giant ant. :)

Just let kids play in the dirt ("clean" dirt ;) ):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/461138.stm
http://www.livescience.com/7270-depressed-play-dirt.html

I figure it's a bit like having an army with nothing to do, some of the jokers start shooting the civilians.

If you give them some real stuff to fight (even not so harmful ones),
1) They start having something to do
2) The "enemy" often has counter-measures that makes the immune-response weaker. This is often true for stuff like parasitic worms. That's why some desperate people actually resort to using worms to solve their autoimmune problems.

Here is a more complete article.

Article appears to be slasdotted..and sparse per prior posts. Any better links?
Oh that's right.. unlike the submitter or the eds.. I can use google.
http://www.livescience.com/20048-ridiculously-automated-dorm-room.html
http://www.berkeleyside.com/2012/05/01/cal-student-creates-a-ridiculously-automated-dorm/
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-video-berkeleys-most-ridiculously-automated-dorm-room-ever-20120501,0,2225746.story

In some cases I'd consider [autism symptoms] bugs, in other cases they're arguably features.

Someone on a board I hang out on told me that Asperger syndrome exists as a check on the social facade to prevent it from diverging too far from honesty. Consider this article about how extroverts answer personality surveys.

This hints at the key problem, which is (or ought to be) as much a quandary for religion itself as for scientific studies of it. Almost all of the questions in Gervais and Norenzayan's study related to religion as a literalist folk tradition — an aspect of lifestyle. This is how it manifests in most cultures, but that barely touches on religion as articulated by its leading intellectuals: for Christianity, say, philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought.

There have been a lot of Christian analytical thinkers who rationally think about their faith. Another survey states

According to the study, in the 1970s, 51 percent of college-educated whites attended religious services monthly or more, compared to 50 percent of moderately educated whites and 38 percent of the least educated whites. In the 2000s, 46 percent of college-educated whites attended on at least a monthly basis, compared to 37 percent of moderately educated whites and 23 percent of the least educated. The study defines the "least educated" as people without high school degrees.

So people with more education are more likely to attend church than those with less education. I don't think one would want to argue that getting more education makes you less rational and analytical.

For a long time, humans were pretty dumb doing little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, "so strange compared to other animals."

Why wouldn't they? It's pretty cool when it happens:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9139000/9139971.stm
http://www.livescience.com/7585-shark-pregnant-males-required.html

(although, not so much in insects ... those happen all the time)

Actually, scientists have been able to drill down to the mantle or at least magma chambers where the crust is thinnest.

  http://www.livescience.com/6959-hole-drilled-bottom-earth-crust-breakthrough-mantle-looms.html

This one has to get behind the 12/21/2012 doomsday prediction - http://www.livescience.com/14184-21-doomsday-predictions-apocalypse.html - and the other Armageddon predictions, e.g., http://www.spiritualresearchfoundation.org/articles/id/spiritualresearch/spiritualscience/armageddon . How can we have an economic disaster after the Earth has been nuked, fried by solar flares, invaded by aliens, and repossessed by god? But wait, there's more -- http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm .

I predict that the world will end on the day everyone agrees that it will never end. It is based on a corollary of Murphy's Law.

We should make it right. $1B would be appropriate for this incident provided the families get at least 10% and the general public gets funding to benefit all. They need roads, schools, and reconstruction of what was lost. It would also make good PR in the face of atrocity.

The Afghan economy could be bootstrapped on mining. There's hundreds of billions worth of iron ore alone. Politics will be a lasting issue as Karachi, Pakistan has the nearest seaport and Iran and China are neighbors. If the US is viewed in a negative light, this supply will go to Iran.

Solution: remove fuel requirement.
http://www.livescience.com/8649-solar-powered-uav-stay-aloft-years.html

No-one is going to read 329 warnings, but no-one is going to read sine tables either. Biomedical Informatics - and indeed any form of information clearing - is useful to the extent that we can avoid information saturation and filter down to what is actually important in some specific case.

There, of course, is the crunch. Services like PubMed are highly restricted, so the number of people with the skills to write data digestion software AND who have access to the data AND who have an interest (even a contractual one) to write such software is also going to be highly restricted. This limits the number of algorithms out there for analyzing the data and, in turn, limits the capacity of medical experts to make use of what is out there.

Has the full table of drug interactions been publicly published, in a machine-processable format? My suspicion is no. Given that repeat studies don't get published, as a matter of policy by journals, refutations of this analysis won't get documented and therefore any errors will be perpetuated. It doesn't help that medical journals are expensive to publish in and are biased in favour of sponsors. Further, because this is a meta-study, it is subject to the problem that 2% of scientists are guilty of misconduct and that patients are now so hyped up about side-effects that mis-reporting as a form of hypochondria may distort the results. It's not like doctors conduct tests to analyze these reports. There may not be any errors in this study, but if there are then neither we nor any doctor will know of it. The only obvious way to avoid that is to make analysis of the analysis a public affair.

And what if the table is fully accurate? Given that a tiny fraction of the publications ever get read, how many doctors will have a copy of that table? In paper or electronic form? Given the current economic climate and the tight budgetary constraints, it might take months if not years for the smaller doctor's offices to have databases containing the information. And longer for those databases to be usable in any practical fashion.

or the fact that a 320 slice CT generates so many layers of images that they can't all be carefully reviewed (and an abnormality may be so small it only appears in a couple of them)

That is so very, very true. And the problem is getting worse, not better. Scanners are improving all the time, the human brain is not, and the software used to convey data from the scanners to the brain is all that stands between the doctor and information overload. MRI scanners are up to 13T* - it's not altogether clear why as the 9.1T ones could see individual neurons, but there ya go - but since the bulk of hospitals use 2.5-3T MRIs and software is invariably written for the market, informatics on the BIG systems is primitive in comparison to the volume of data involved. Not that it's terribly good even for the smaller units.

*Yes, I know, 7.3T is the maximum that is authorized in the US for non-research purposes, but research scanners for living patients are much more powerful than that. And research is where you want the BEST informatics, particularly in this case because repeatability is going to be a serious problem.

Leeches are still used and so are maggots for wound cleaning. http://www.livescience.com/203-maggots-leeches-medicine.html

This author pitches essentially the same story on the same site two days in a row:
http://www.livescience.com/18678-incompetent-people-ignorant.html

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
-Winston Churchill

It seems as if they do about as well as younger women that undergo induced pregnancies: http://www.livescience.com/18289-pregnant-women-age-50-complications.html
But since those younger women are going for induced pregnancies they might not be that healthy either...

If those induced pregnancies weren't that much more dangerous than normal pregnancies, then it may not be so dangerous for older mothers and their babies if the eggs and sperm are good quality (whether donated or via some new-fangled stemcell thing) and the fertilization process is improved.

You'd have to have a relatively small influence (mankind's greenhouse gas emissions) cause a huge out of proportion change.

There are all kinds of compounds that can cause huge "out of proportion" changes. Aflatoxin can cause serious illness in most animals at the parts per billion level, for example.

It's sad you need to be informed of something as fundamental to science as this. As little as 10 years ago you'd often encounter righties who at least knew a little basic chemistry, physics or biology. Today, unless they're on the payroll of BP or Monsanto or some other multinational, even the grown adults on the right usually know less about basic science than I did as a child.

I suspect this is because the Republicans have become totally reliant on easily-manipulated far right religious fanatics and bigots. All of the old school Rockefeller Republicans have been scared off or actively purged from the Party over the past couple of decades. The irony is, it was the Rockefeller Republicans who invited that goon squad into the Party in the first place, after the Democrats finally purged them during the 1960's. Now the inmates are running the Republican's asylum.

It's interesting to see that scientists have started researching the issue, too. Just why have conservatives gotten so incredibly ignorant?

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice
http://www.livescience.com/18132-intelligence-social-conservatism-racism.html