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The difficulty being, your references are estimates based on what dose threshold?

Well, you have to go three citations deep to reach the original model they're working off of. Which turns out to be a conservative application of Linear No Threshold. Which... isn't actually testable for any reasonable value of statistical significance over the populations they're attempting to apply it to.

The BEIR VII risk models are a combination of excess relative risk (ERR) and excess absolute risk (EAR) models, both of which are written as a linear function of dose, depending on sex, age at exposure and attained age. The BEIR VII risk models were derived from analyses of data on the Japanese atomic bomb survivors for all cancer sites except breast and thyroid; for the latter, they were based on published combined analyses of data on the atomic bomb survivors and medically exposed cohorts.40, 41 To estimate risks from exposure at low doses and dose rates, a dose and dose-rate effectiveness factor (DDREF) of 1.5 was used for all outcomes except leukemia.

The biological effects of acute radiation exposure >1 Gy are reasonably well-known, are the basis for the linear-no-threshold model, and completely inapplicable to this sitation, as even the most-exposed workers at the Fukushima accident site did even approach this dose, despite the multiple situations where workers were exposed to doses in excess of legal limits.

The biological effects of short term dose less than 0.05 Gy or low-dose long-term exposure are also reasonably well-known, in that there is no statistically significant effect.

Unless you're dealing with the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war, the linear-no-threshold model is nearly useless from an epidemiological perspective, and so are conclusions reached using it.

You mean like the overall long-term increase in Antarctic ice mass, despite breakups in the Western sheet?

False. Antarctic land ice mass is decreasing, and reliable estimates of Antarctic sea ice volume (or mass) aren't available.

Even if you meant to refer to Antarctic sea ice extent (not mass), you already ignored me when I told you that this is consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 page 811: " sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide."

But maybe you'll listen to the National Academy of Sciences, if you honestly don't think the National Academy of Sciences is "alarmist". Again, their recent report is educational. They address Antarctic sea ice in question 12.

The gradual, long-term non-warming that has occurred over the last 15-17 years, depending on who you ask?

Jane and Lonny Eacus have repeatedly ignored me whenever I've told you that there's been no statistically significant change in the surface warming rate. But if you honestly doesn't think the NAS is alarmist, you might learn something from their answers to questions 9 and 10. This point is particularly relevant: "More than 90% of the heat added to Earth is absorbed by the oceans and penetrates only slowly into deep water. A faster rate of heat penetration into the deeper ocean will slow the warming seen at the surface and in the atmosphere, but by itself will not change the long-term warming that will occur from a given amount of CO2."

I agree: science is a wonderful thing. You can appear to "prove" almost anything you want if you restrict your study to relatively isolated phenomena, and ignore the bigger picture.

No, that's not science the way it's practiced by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Meteorological Society, the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Scientists, the American Quaternary Association, the American Society of Agronomy, the

A recent report by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states "“almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.” (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013.)

I've never seen a gender breakdown of defensive gun use, but with a lower bound of a half million annual, the 250K number is not unreasonable. Even the extremely anti-gun Violence Policy Center estimates average annual defensive gun uses at around 67K.

I like this comment. It's a microcosm of the problem with trying to argue with people who refuse to accept any scientific findings.

You want studies about the safety of vaccines?
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php...
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php...
http://www.collectionscanada.g...

And even if they DID cause some harm, the lives saved by their use is still worth it.

As for your Expanding Vacuum thingy, because I don't know about it I'm somehow wrong? Instead of trying to explain to me why it's right you insult me? When I try and guess what the hell it is (based on the results of some quick googling) you try and take it as an insult? I don't know if your theory has any testable hypothesis. I said IF it is a variant of string theory, it probably suffers from the same problem as most string theories and isn't taken seriously because it's not testable.

You ain't challenging my beliefs in the slightest. I don't 'believe' in the big bang, or evolution, or that light travels in waves. I've seen evidence for them, studied them some and accept that the best way to describe and interact with the world is set out in the theories we have constructed. These theories are subject to change and improvement. God is absolute, unchanging, and very wrong. Hawking is old, crippled and has a chance of being right, or at least capable of making brilliant observations. I'll take my way any day.

I like this comment. It's a microcosm of the problem with trying to argue with people who refuse to accept any scientific findings.

You want studies about the safety of vaccines?
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php...
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php...
http://www.collectionscanada.g...

And even if they DID cause some harm, the lives saved by their use is still worth it.

As for your Expanding Vacuum thingy, because I don't know about it I'm somehow wrong? Instead of trying to explain to me why it's right you insult me? When I try and guess what the hell it is (based on the results of some quick googling) you try and take it as an insult? I don't know if your theory has any testable hypothesis. I said IF it is a variant of string theory, it probably suffers from the same problem as most string theories and isn't taken seriously because it's not testable.

You ain't challenging my beliefs in the slightest. I don't 'believe' in the big bang, or evolution, or that light travels in waves. I've seen evidence for them, studied them some and accept that the best way to describe and interact with the world is set out in the theories we have constructed. These theories are subject to change and improvement. God is absolute, unchanging, and very wrong. Hawking is old, crippled and has a chance of being right, or at least capable of making brilliant observations. I'll take my way any day.

Ashcroft vs. ACLU, 00-1293, http://www.nap.edu/netsafekids... http://www.nap.edu/netsafekids... you do not have protected rights to pornography nor obscenity.

Ashcroft vs. ACLU, 00-1293, http://www.nap.edu/netsafekids... http://www.nap.edu/netsafekids... you do not have protected rights to pornography nor obscenity.

There is not in any way "consensus" that "GMOs are safe"

Again the facts say otherwise.

The consensus is that they are safe.
American Medical Association
National Academy of Sciences
World Health Organization
Chief Scientific Advisor to the European Commission
Department of Agriculture
Food and Drug Administration
Environmental Protection Agency

Scientific consensus is that GMOs are safe.

In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

By that definition, creationism is not a theory. At best, it is an untested hypothesis.

In response to one of the Executive Orders by the President after the Newtown shooting, the did a study of their own and came to similar conclusions: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18319&page=R1

A metallographic examination (Fig. 10) of the tensile tested specimen showed a complete absence of grain boundary cracks.

We have found that if the U(IV)/U(III) ratio in fuel salt is kept below about 60, embrittlement is essentially prevented when CrTel.266 is used as the source of tellurium.

They recorded a crack depth of 0, and very minimal cracking for other sources of Te.

The evolution of fluorine gas was solved in 1970 by putting insulation (a reflective layer) around it.

Nevertheless it is clear that prevention of fluorine evolution from stored MSR salt will not be very difficult or expensive,

A decommissioning process was developed in 1997 and the original MSRE, without the later developments, improper defueling and storage and all, was decommissioned and now serves as a source of thorium for medical research at present. The original decomissioned procedure in 1969 was simply to turn it off and walk away. So we don't do that anymore. Wiki summaries:

Cleanup of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment was about $130 Million, for a small 8 MW(th) unit. Much of the high cost was caused by the unpleasant surprise of fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution from cold fuel salt in storage that ORNL did not defuel and store correctly, but this has now been taken into consideration in MSR design.

If the fluoride fuel salts are stored in solid form over many decades, radiation can cause the release of corrosive fluorine gas, and uranium hexafluoride.[94] This was due to radiolysis of the salt from remaining fission products, when colder than 100 degrees Celsius.[79] The salts should be defueled and wastes removed before extended shutdowns. Fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution can be prevented by storing the salts above 100 degrees Celsius.[79] Because some of the fission product fluorides have high solubility in water, fluorides are less suitable for long term storage. For longer term storage, fluoride containing wastes could go through a vitrification process to be encased in insoluble borosilicate glass suitable for long-term disposal.

Corrosion from tellurium—The reactor makes small amounts of tellurium as a fission product. In the MSRE, this caused small amounts of corrosion at the grain boundaries of the special nickel alloy, Hastelloy-N used for the reactor. Metallurgical studies showed that adding 1 to 2% niobium to the Hastelloy-N alloy improves resistance to corrosion by tellurium.[24](pp81–87) One additional strategy against corrosion was to keep the fuel salt slightly reducing by maintaining the ratio of UF4/UF3 to less than 60. This was done in the MSRE by continually contacting the flowing fuel salt with a beryllium metal rod submersed in a cage inside the pump bowl. This causes a fluorine shortage in the salt, reducing tellurium to a less aggressive (elemental) form. This method is also effective in reducing corrosion in general from the fluoride salt, because the fission process produces more fluorine atoms freed from the fissioned uranium that would otherwise attack the structural metals.[92](pp3–4)

Radiation damage to nickel alloys—The standard Hastelloy N alloy, a high nickel alloy use

Should include this as something that highlights the various likelihoods of unintended effects associated with crop improvement methods. Mutagenesis is at the top. Cisgenic GMOs (GMOs with genes from the same or closely related species) are toward the bottom. Note that the anti-GE movement tends to oppose them too, like these potatoes that were destroyed.

Ooh, is this another reference to the Martin shooting? Because out of the ~2 million defensive uses of a gun a year, one of them goes to trial since it's unclear what happened. He's acquitted. Martin attacked first. End of story. But no, you have one case plastered over the news so it's an epidemic.

No, Zimmerman CLAIMED Martin attacked first. We can't hear Martin's story because he is, you know, dead. An unarmed teenager talking to his girlfriend on the phone is APPROACHED by a middle aged man with a gun and he is the attacker? Really?

Ooh, is this another reference to the Martin shooting? Because out of the ~2 million defensive uses of a gun a year, one of them goes to trial since it's unclear what happened. He's acquitted. Martin attacked first. End of story. But no, you have one case plastered over the news so it's an epidemic.

Fun fact about that: through good old fashioned, non-controversial conventional breeding, a potato with toxic levels of solanine was produced. If genetic engineering did that, you'd never hear the end of it, yet strangely none of the anti-GMO organizations will put things in context by bringing up that topic (either that or they are simply ignorant of the both the science and the history of crop improvement, which is commonly the case).

It also ups the ante in the arms race of evolution, which isn't universally seen as a good thing.

It certainty is a bad thing, which is why millions of people protested conventional breeding when late blight overcame the conventionally bred resistances in tomato and when hessian flies overcame conventionally bred resistance in wheat. Oh wait, that never happened because it would be absolutely idiotic, yet somehow, when genetic engineering is involved, the same basic facts of population genetics are suddenly terrible and proof that the technique itself is bad. Perhaps it is because the vast vast majority of the opposition to genetic engineering is coming from those with no background in agricultural or plant science and thus due to their complete lack of context it seems reasonable to them.

Calling objection "hysteria" doesn't make it so. Some protesters are quite enlightened and think long term.

And most of the protesters are the agricultural equivalents to the anti-vaccine movement. And when you are doing little in the way of scientifically justifying your concerns, instead preferring to use bunk science, fearmongering, and outright vandalism on non-corporate projects and farmer's fields, you shouldn't be surprised when you get characterized poorly. Hell, there is no small opposition to even things like Golden Rice (biofortified with -carotene) and the Arctic apple (which does not oxidize when cut). I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason as to why that is, if not unscientific hysteria, because this stuff isn't looking good.

Just about everything carries risk (again for context, even conventional breeding conventional breeding carries risk), just about everything has some negatives that come with the positives, there are actual issues, and not every genetically engineered organisms will necessarily turn out to be a good thing. But to paint the anti-GMO movement as a whole as anything even remotely reasonable would be like saying young earth creationists simply have a dispute with the minor details of a few phylogenies.

You completely and totally misunderstand the concept. Substantial equivalence says that if a GE and non-GE plant are found to be the same functionally, they should be treated as such, and that the genetic fallacy has little merit (which, of course, is true). They still do millions in testing. Why do you think they haven't released the Actric apple or Aqua Advantage salmon, od dicamba resistant corn? Is Monsanto taking so long to release their new products out of the goodness of their own hearts? I don't tink so. Of course, even though no one has even proposed a plausible reason as to why genetic transformation would be fundamentally different from all the other genetic alternations humans make, the notion that genetic engineering and breeding are the same is ridiculous. One selects and inserts a single well characterized gene. The other randomly and haphazardly mixes thousands of genes and hopes to not make another toxic crop. Clearly, not the same.

Even when there is no way one could selectively breed a gene across species the way GM engineering transplants them

And that matters how? What, because one thing could happen naturally it is safer?

While I am sure there are some anecdotal tests that go above and beyond the level of treating genetic modification as selective breeding

If you completely ignore the massive amounts of testing that has been done all over the world. You are doing the same things anti-vaxxers do to spread their FUD.

Then explain the existence of farms. You have it backwards - we're one of very few species that doesn't do that.

It might seem that way at a local level but actually our farming efforts don't help your point much in the bigger picture.

During our hunter-gatherer period and before human population levels swelled, the land was a very diverse mixture of forest, scrub, plains, marsh, etc. As our agricultural activities increased we gradually began to change the landscape to suit our needs, squandering a great deal of valuable topsoil with our techniques and leading to much greater population growth in the short term.

In doing so we've essentially homogenised large areas of our planet and created a bunch of problems for ourselves and our fellow species. Worse, we're dependent upon fossil fuels to maintain our crop yields. I feel that collectively our farming and other activities are very much the viral behaviour the GP describes.

> I just don't understand the current astronomical obsession with nearby stars/solar systems and exoplanets.

Maybe you should read up on what astronomers are actually working on this decade, instead of what you *think* they are working on. Exoplanets are a relatively small part of the astronomical enterprise. This report is a good starting point:

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12951 (there is a free pdf download option if you register).

True story: A kindergarten teacher took her children for a walk in the woods. They saw a woodpecker for the first time. One of the children said, "Oh, it's eating insects." That's learning science. They observed the world and formed a hypothesis.

Showing kids videos of AT and CG pairs, etc., isn't looking at the real world. They're learning about pictures of AT and CG pairs. Or maybe they see plastic AT and CG pairs, like a museum exhibit I saw. But they don't actually see AT and CG pairs. They have no way of knowing whether AT and CG pairs exist, except from authority. And learning from authority isn't science. Science is learning from observation of the real world.

I could show kids a video of Santa's elves making proteins inside tiny cells. How do they know that AT and CG pairs make proteins, rather than Santa's elves? Videos of AT and CG pairs aren't a testable hypothesis. They're not observations of the real world.

I thought that it should be pretty easy for kids to understand AT and CG pairs, too. They're just like video games, right? http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/dna_double_helix/ Kids come away using words like "DNA" so they must be learning something, right?

Then I read the science teaching literature, including the National Science Education Standards http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4962 Actually, according to the science teachers who worked on the standards, even the concept of molecules are difficult for most high school students. That's what they say, and they have the experience.

You can get kids to repeat phrases -- and the way a lot of tests are designed, you can get kids to give the "right" answer to test questions without understanding what the words mean. The textbooks say, "surface tension is caused by molecular attraction.", Then the test says, "What causes surface tension?" and the kids answer, "Molecular attraction." But they don't understand molecular attraction. They're just repeating the words (which kids are very good at, since their minds are programmed to learn language). The proof is, you could just as easily write textbooks that say, "Surface tension is caused by Jesus," and the kids would answer, "Jesus." You could say, "Surface tension is caused by asdfj." Kids will repeat it. But they won't understand it.

Can you tell me how much testing is done to verify these things are safe?

A lot.

How long and how numerous are the human trials?

Why don't you tell me why they are necessary. Okay, a corn has a cspB gene, or a cotton has a Cry1Ab gene, or a soy has C4 epsps gene, or a papaya has prsv cp gene, or an apple has an antisense PPO gene. Why should that bother me, especially considering all the other mandatory testing?

I would be suspicious that anything developed in the past ten years or less is completely guaranteed to be safe for the duration of a human life.

You should be suspicious of things that you have reason to be suspicious of, not things that could potentially have an unknown unknown, which is pretty much everything. You can't prove that something won't be dangerous because you can't prove a negative, but there is neither reason to suspect that GE crops are dangerous nor is there evidence suggesting that GE crops are dangerous, unless you count Wakefield grade rubbish like the Séralini study. It irks me that when people say that some stuff about wifi or cell phones they are mocked but saying it about biotechnology is enlightened.

If you can convince me not to worry about that, I'm all ears!

Read these studies, and statements from various organizations like the WHO, FDA, EFSA, FSANZ,NAP, ANBIO, AAAS, ect. The scientific consensus on genetic engineering is pretty solid. You can hate on Monsanto all you want (although you should be aware that the business end, like the science end, is often fought with misconceptions, half truths, and downright FUD), and I'm not saying there are not nuances that should be rationally discussed (such as herbicide resistant weeds and resistance breakdown, although those are larger issues that have affected non-GE crops as well) but the science behind genetically engineered crops is solid. In many ways, the controversy over genetically engineered crops is the agricultural equivalent to the controversies surrounding evolution, climate change, and vaccines.

No, "natural seepage" will not cause millions of gallons of gas to drift out into the ocean every year,

Natural seepage in the gulf of mexico is about 140,000 tonnes a year, or 1 million barrels of oil. So, yes it does. Ok, it's only a fifth of the amount from the deepwater spill, but it's constant rather than one-off. Link: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10388&page=70

At the time of the spill, the liability was limited to 75 million bucks. That's definitely one regulation which increases risk taking!

Is someone paying you to post this?

Nope, you can remove you tinfoil hat now

Bullshit. You're equivocating for the same nonsense of the creationists.

A theory is a theory because it makes a testable, falsifiable, hypothesis.

This isn't true at all. You're redefining theory as the sole progenitor of hypothesis. You've got it backwards, there, chief.

The National Academy of Sciences lays it out for you:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6024&page=2

The fact that decaying oil is 'toxic' is orthogonal to my point. Decaying sea gull feces are 'toxic' as well.

In any case, whatever toxicity one finds is probably not a concern... for the ecology. With no help from man at all Earth dumps the estimated equivalent of over 3x the contents of an Ultra Large Crude Carrier into the worlds oceans every year, with the Gulf alone accounting for about a third of that. If life were unable to cope with the toxicity of decaying oil the Earth would be lifeless.

You see, not only can I read academic material, I can do math. The math tells me fear mongers like you, and the hysteria you've been trained to indulge, are full of shit.

This seems like a horrible comparison considering there are only 16% females in the scientific industry compared to men. Not only that but this is collected from data of known misconduct. I could easily see a female as being more likely to get away with scientific misconduct and thus they would not even be represented in this comparison. Used http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=2264&page=5 as reference for the 16% women scientist figure.

We should of course be concerned about toxicity in any plant or food and certainly any biochemical effects such as hormone interference, carcinogenic qualities and nutritional value. These are concerns about any food regardless of its provenance.

The Lenape potato, which was a conventionally bred potato that had toxic levels of solanine, is a good example of why this is so.

Also, to the dude who modded every comment I've made here troll, I work in plant science so if you've got any actual questions about this stuff I can answer them.

And of course, they don't tell us where these "studies" are.

Yes they do.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13497&page=292

Although my interest in this topic does not extend to me actually reading through and attempting to critique that list.

Link to the full 424 page paper is here.

Link to the (probably paywalled) WSJ article is here although the Yahoo version in the summary above appears to be exactly the same.

That is simply not true for two reasons: First, this is appears to not be peer-reviewed, and thus does not count as "medical research" by any means.

Sorry. no. This is the National Academies of Science. This is pretty much the gold standard of peer review; you really can't do much better than that. And, yes, NAS reports are very extensively peer reviewed.

You're right about this not being "medical research." This is a review. Reviews are not original research, they are summaries of research done by others-- in essence, a review is the peer review of an aggregate of studies.

The report is here: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13497

Yes, people are using Ada, in fact, it's been making a quiet comeback. Ada is the #16 most popular language according to the TIOBE programming language survey of November and December 2012, an increase from #19 in November 2011. Keller reports that by 2000 Ada use had decreased and then increased again. It's not huge compared to C or Java, of course; its use is focused in certain domains. In certain communities, such as aviation software, it continues to be a popular language and has been credited with helping to produce high-quality software within time and budget.

Historically, Ada was developed by the Department of Defense (DoD), and the DoD tried to make it the one and only universal language . An NRC report on Ada talks about this. Fundamentally, trying to make one language do everything was a bad idea, and predictably failed; there is still no one language that can be all things to all people, even many years later.

Ada isn't a complex language by today's standards, but it has a lot of "pickiness" that means you have to obey more rules. Is that a good thing? Well, you first have to understand what it was designed for - and then decide if that design is what you want.

Ada focuses on software that needs high reliability and yet absolutely no compromise of performance. If reliability isn't really all that important to you, or you can give up a lot of performance, then Ada's trade-offs may not work for you. For reliability, it has a strong typing system, and you have to use generics (etc.) instead of just saying "shut up and trust me" a la C. For performance, it doesn't mandate automatic garbage collection (as compared to Java or Python). Ada shines when you're writing programs that will could un-intentionally kill people if the program is wrong or takes too long. Think airplane flight controls, train systems, medical systems, that sort of thing. A lot of Slashdot readers have never tried to write software that could accidentally kill people, and thus can't understand why you might want a "picky" language like Ada. If your response to "it has a bug" is just "install this patch" maybe another language would be fine. But when mistakes can kill, having a language that helps prevent them can be literally a lifesaver.

The bacteria digested the oil, but what did they excrete. If they multiplied and now have no meal, they starve, and their carcasses in turn become something else. There was a process applied to the spilled oil by the bacteria. Is the remainder environmentally tenable? None of that seems to have been addressed.

Most oil spills aren't man-made. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico release an estimated 1 million barrels of oil per year (one ton of oil is about 6-8 barrels). The Deepwater Horizon spill was estimated to be just shy of 5 million barrels. So it was a substantial increase over natural oil seeps for the year. But in the grand scheme of things it wasn't a substantial deviation from the amount of bacteria which digest oil, excrete whatever it is they excrete, and decompose.

The Deepwater Horizon spill was a local disaster with large transient effects. But its long-term effects on the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico will be minimal if not negligible because the ecosystem has already been dealing with similarly large quantities of oil being released naturally every year for millions of years. The key was to disperse the oil so it could be broken down naturally (if at an artificially accelerated rate for a few years) by already-existing natural mechanisms, rather than allowed to clump up at the surface in an unnatural manner. The only question is what the long-term effects of the dispersants (soap) will be.

There are four regions offshore North America with known seeps. Two of these, the Gulf of Mexico and southern California, have a combined annual oil seep rate of 160,000 tonnes, derived by adding 140,000 tonnes, estimated from the Gulf of Mexico, and the estimate of 20,000 tonnes from Southern California.

source: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10388&page=192

Spills of that magnitude at one location might be rare but they still occur and looking at time in a geologic timescale they're simply not that big of a deal. Man has simply decided that it needs to feed of the seafood in that area, and swim on those beaches so a spill is something to complain about. A meteor impact wiping out 80% of all species on the planet you could deem damaging to the ecosystem, it's still a natural occurence, life still finds a way and the world still turns.

The pictures of dead fish sure prompt a lot of people to get upset I'm sure but it does not make this event even remotely unprecedented in nature.

I'm pretty sure that Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia (2011) from the National Academy of Sciences, contains all the gory details on the time to equilibrium. It's on a much larger timescale than you think.

Cite this, cite that. It's almost as if slashdotters expect me to maintain thousands of dollars in journal subscriptions just to back up my trolls, flames ,jokes and asides.

Do you have links to anything that documents Jupiter and Venus being out of chemical equilibria? I searched for a while, but couldn't find much more than a few lines, and I'd be very interested to know more.

For Venus, you have to look at the Soviet literature, as they did most of the exploration, and much of that is not on-line. See, e.g., Volkov, 1991. There is an interesting "tri-modal" distribution of cloud droplet diameters, and Iron, Phosphorus, Sulphur and Chorline have all been detected at altitude.

For Jupiter, look at any of the color images returned by spacecraft. All those different colors are different materials, probably polysufides, although AFAIK there is no consensus as to exactly which material makes each color. Whatever makes the colors, it must be operational on a grand scale, as the colors are consistent over at least a century, and the residence times in the visible layers of the atmosphere are much shorter than that. Perhaps the best evidence is the change in the color of Oval BA, where in less than a year a storm complex the size of the Earth significantly reddened with nothing else apparently changing. The authors of the above paper postulate an unobservable change in global temperature but, who knows, maybe there is a biosystem that thrives in and colonizes the large storms, and the reddening is byproduct of that. That at least has the advantage of being testable (by seeing if the reddening is a general, but delayed, feature of new mega storm systems).

Now, none of this is proof of anything biological on Jupiter, but if you want to take the opposite viewpoint, the Jupiter biosphere could be immense (comparable to or larger than the mass of the Earth), and still be consistent with our available data. For Venus, a biosphere could be a remnant from the age before the run-away Greenhouse, and could easily be comparable in mass to the maximum biosphere that currently could be active on Mars. Neither has gotten much spacecraft attention; I guess bugs in the air aren't as sexy as bugs in the permafrost.

Damn. I was just pulling my pitchfork and torch out of the shed.

That right there sums up the problem with the GMO debate (well, one of them). Caring about the process, not the product. You can bet your ass that none of the anti-GMO groups out there are going to see this and other problems that have arisen from breeding (like the Lenape potato and high psoralens celery) are going to take this story and call for more stringent research of conventionally bred crops where heaven only known how many genetic changes may be happening. No one is going to say that breeding is unpredictable with dangerous results,or that is should be labeled, or that it should be banned until the precautionary principle proves a negative, or anything else people say about GMOs, but if this really were the product of biotechnology, you know damned well that is exactly what they, and many others, would be saying.

Indeed - the US National Academy of Science was asked by Congress to investigate the "hockey stick" and found that it was valid back in 2006.

Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong:

Details of the claims and counterclaims involve lengthy and arcane statistical arguments, so let's skip straight to the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science (pdf). The academy was asked by Congress to assess the validity of temperature reconstructions, including the hockey stick.

The report states: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".

Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.

It is true that there are big uncertainties about the accuracy of all past temperature reconstructions, and that these uncertainties have sometimes been ignored or glossed over by those who have presented the hockey stick as evidence for global warming.

Climate scientists, however, are only too aware of the problems (see Climate myths: It was warmer during the Medieval period), and the uncertainties were both highlighted by Mann's original paper and by others at the time it was published.

Update: as suggested by the academy in its 2006 report, Michael Mann and his colleagues have reconstructed northern hemisphere temperatures for the past 2000 years using a broader set of proxies than was available for the original study and updated measurements from the recent past.

The new reconstruction has been generated using two statistical methods, both different to that used in the original study. Like other temperature reconstructions done since 2001 (see graph), it shows greater variability than the original hockey stick. Yet again, though, the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.

In fact, independent evidence, from ice cores and sea sediments for instance, suggest the last time the planet approached this degree of warmth was during the interglacial period preceding the last ice age over 100,000 years ago. It might even be hotter now than it has been for at least a million years.

Further back in the past, though, it certainly has been hotter - and the world has been a very different place. The crucial point is that our modern civilisation has been built on the basis of the prevailing climate and sea levels. As these change, it will cause major problems.

You cannot unknowingly/unwittingly make a toxic hybrid

Not true. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Lenape potato, which was a conventionally bred hybrid that ended up producing toxic amounts of the glycoalkaloid solanine, and celery which produced so much psoralen that it gave the people who harvested it blisters. I doubt those were intentional (although it is possible that the parents may have also had those traits)..

In order to hybridize, the plants must already be of the same Genus

Not related to the topic at hand, but that isn't true either. I've got a shipova tree in my yard which is a Pyrus x Sorbus cross. Triticale is another example, among plenty of others.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11826&page=7 Um yes they do. I can post the actual specs. The backscatter ones at MY airport run at 3 terahertz. NOT ALL OF THE devices run at the same frequency.

Yeah, it's not like variations of the flu have killed more people than all of our wars combined. It's not like we have a lack of organizations that believe in terror or widespread murders. Heck, we don't even have any environmental radicals that just might look at a world wide population reduction as the best possible thing that could happen to the environment. Nope, no reason at all to be concerned about this....

Here's a textbook on viral engineering; it's paywalled if that sort of thing bothers you, but the details can be found in there. You're certainly right that the methods involved are broadly messy, start with reproduction-competent vectors, and that some bits of the machinery get left behind, but like the cancer itself, the lack of the ability to reproduce prevents them from being able to exploit evolutionary mechanisms to support their survival. I guess the virus might be able to reproduce if the patient happens to have been infected with the original virus previously, or is currently infected by it, however. Presumably, to meet FDA approval, the process will have to be much more controlled to prevent such potential mishaps; I expect we'll even see synthetic virus printers some day.

Uh, the magnetic fusion research budget has been falling from its peak in the 70s, at the height of the oil crisis. Take a look.

So why don't we have fusion? Because it's damned hard. We don't have the understanding and we don't have the materials. Every single fusion concept through history has turned out to have weaknesses, and most of them turn out to be fatal flaws from a power generation standpoint. The tokamak is our best bet, and that's after decades of research have turned up unstable regions of operation that have to be avoided.

If you knew the history of fusion, you'd be inclined to be skeptical about every new proposal. There are things about plasmas that we don't understand. Simulation is often intractable. Analysis from a physics standpoint is difficult and prone to wishful thinking. This is why people work on stuff that's been vetted, rather than risking their time on something that likely has a fatal flaw.

Plus, the National Research Council has a long and detailed report on Severe Space Weather Events. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12507.html

It might interest you to learn that a National Research Council committee to "assess health risks from exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation," published by the National Academy of Sciences, disagrees with you.

In their report they state "An important task of the BEIR VII committee was to develop 'risk models' for estimating the relationship between exposure to low levels of low-LET ionizing radiation and harmful health effects. The committee judged that the linear no-threshold model (LNT) provided the most reasonable description of the relation between low-dose exposure to ionizing radiation and the incidence of solid cancers that are induced by ionizing radiation."

The premise of the linear no-threshold model, as its name implies, is that there IS NO safe threshold of radiation exposure below which no harmful health effects can occur.

I don't happen to think the authors of this study are "crackpots". A single alpha or beta or gamma ray hit on a single cell can cause chromosomal damage and increases risk of cancer to some degree. Yes, for small doses, the degree is slight, but it is not zero. It is not at all like water in the lungs, where obviously a single molecule or even thimble-full presents zero hazard of choking to death or drowning.

Thank you so much for posting this. I find the Supreme Court transcripts fascinating and agree with critics who argue the Supreme Court cases should be broadcast live on C-SPAN since they are infinitely more fun than watching an empty House do nothing all day.

On the topic of the Supreme Court debating scientific issues, it's interesting that the National Academies Press publishes a manual intended to educate judges on how to evaluate scientific evidence. The anecdotal evidence implies that not many of them read it.

Kudos to wiredmikey (and the ed?) for capturing that attribution of an attack is the key sticking point for military response.

Attributing attacks in a packet switched network like the Internet is just a fantasy.. Sure, you can trace an attack back to, say, China, but how do you know the attack originated there? You don't, unless China cooperates and gives your forensics experts access to their networks. Which probably will not happen.

So the hawks want to shore up some credibility for attribution. Here is the plan, from the linked DoD PDF:

This research focuses on two primary areas: developing new ways to trace the physical source of an attack, and seeking to assess the identity of the attacker via behavior-based algorithms.

Nice try Pentagon, but statistically-powered voodoo does not overcome the problem here: that the attacking machines could be controlled from anywhere, possibly even through teh 7 proxies. Lulz.

Maybe we should listen to the National Research Council when they write "deterrence of cyberattacks by the threat of in-kind response has limited applicability." (NRC Report, p.5)

I'll close with a suggestion: why not, instead of focusing on how and when we get to launch attacks, focus on bettering our defenses?

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11240&page=R1

then you can yap about smalpox need.

CO2(ppm) Warming
340 1K
430 2K
540 3K
670 4K
840 5K
1000 6K
2000 9K

Note that there are massive error bars associated with the concentrations, and the scenarios are merely likely. It may take hundred of years to equilibrate to the new higher global average.
Source

Some of us soldiers refuse to use the coffee or tea for religious reasons, so I'd welcome an alternative wakefulness aid in the MRE.

As far as caffeine goes, though, it's probably being used because it's trusted. I remember reading a while back that any new wakefulness drug needs to be comparable to a 600mg dose of caffeine in order to be acceptable. I couldn't find the reference on that, but I did find a military-published study on effectiveness of caffeine, which seemed to endorse its continued use.

And while I agree with you that the acceptance process for new drugs should be sped up, I'm glad they're not using servicemen as guinea pigs in the process - it's bad enough that amphetamines are still used as "Go pills" routinely. On the other hand, Viagra went unusually quickly from off-schedule to prescription for ED, perhaps we just need to find the right leverage on the FDA admins =)

According to "everyone", climate science is 100% settled and there is no questioning it

You fabricate a complete bullshit misrepresentation in order to make skepticism look reasonable.

Obviously an entire scientific field isn't 100% settled, duh. Just go to the global warming Wikipedia page, climate models don't agree whether the low emission world results in a 1.5 to 1.9 C warming in the 21st century., or whether the high emission scenario results in a 3.4 to 6.1 C of warming. The intense debates about climate sensitivity, the role of polar ice sheets, heat storage of the oceans, etc. are very real, but pretty boring. They tend to only get reported in the mainstream press when denialist assholes twist them. For example, the german researchers saying the the sun has been burning more brightly and its influence on climate has been undervalued got mangled in an Investor's Business Daily editorial into the utter lie that "researchers at the Max Planck Institute report [this accounts]for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years."

What's missing from the scientific process is a scenario, model, theory, ANYTHING that doesn't predict warming. When scientific popularisers say "the debate is over", that is probably what they are referring to. Or maybe they're saying the greenhouse effect is based on basic physics that's not sensibly open to question, so increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases WILL lead to warming. Or maybe they're saying the only credible explanation for the observed warming in recent decades is the increase in anthropogenic greehouse gases. Just because people make vague low-content statement doesn't mean they're untrue.

There are some very specific statements in support of the 100% solid set in stone idea. From the 2010 report of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering (the second one on climate change ordered by Republican bozos in Congress to delay action), Advancing the Science of Climate Change:

Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

Evidence of gastrointestinal problems from the MMR vaccine from the link in the main post: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13164&page=115 RTFA! Everyone acknowledges this point, the . Seriously, you have a massive negative emotional response to evidence. Are you ok? Idiot.