Slashdot Mirror

The study compared Neonicotinoids laced pollen to sugar water.

The published study offered the bees a choice between a sucrose solution with neonicotinoids and another sucrose solution without neonicotinoids. It was a fair comparison.

"The study compared Neonicotinoids laced pollen to sugar water."

What are you talking about??

From the actual paper in Nature: "bees of both species prefer to eat more of sucrose solutions laced with IMD or TMX than sucrose alone."

http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

We've been hindered by what is basically a cult ideology about unborn life that we cannot do experiments like this (legally) in the west.

The fact that this experiment was done in China rather than "the West" has nothing to do with religion. The application of the CRISPR-Cas system for genetic modification was only discovered in 2012, and molecular analyses and proof-of-concept experiments - performed in the US and Europe, mostly - are being published in high-profile journals almost every month. There are, at last count, at least three companies (two in the US, one in Europe) founded by the scientists who elucidated the mechanism that have the explicit goal of human gene therapy. In fact, one group (in the US) just demonstrated in vivo genome editing (in an animal model, because only a lunatic would try this experiment in humans first).

There is no legal barrier to performing these experiments on human embryos in the US or Europe. In the US, I believe researchers are still prohibited from using NIH funding for such experiments, but that would not stop them from using private funding (and at this point, VCs and private donors are practically flinging sacks of money at this system). Their hesitation is based on concerns about the ethics of potentially lethal experimentation on unwilling test subjects. No, not the embryos, but the hypothetical live births that would result from implantation. If they're really, really lucky, the off-target effects will be silent or embryonic lethal. If they're unlucky - and given how new the system is, it's very difficult to guess what would happen - they'll wind up creating new genetic afflictions. Everyone working on the system is very excited about the potential applications to human health; no one wants to bring the field to a premature halt by rushing into human experimentation and accidentally causing severe birth defects because they didn't understand how it worked well enough.

There is a secondary issue, which is that China is almost pathetically desperate to prove it can do the same caliber of science as the West, to the extent that it's starting to throw money at non-Chinese researchers to set up labs in China, and offers large bounties for high-profile publications. (They're also known to be desperate for a Nobel prize in the sciences.) So far they've tended to just cherry-pick relatively easy, unimaginative projects following up on research done in the West (to be fair, Western scientists have done this among themselves for decades), rather than making entirely novel discoveries. Thus there is an enormous financial (and social) incentive to jump into a fast-moving field and try the obvious - but ethically dubious - application to human health.

I remembered something about them digging up gut bacteria from something like 200 years ago in England - well before human use of antibiotics, and found that the gut bacteria in the corpses they exhumed were resistant to more antibiotics than modern versions.

But in looking for it, I found a study that they've found antibiotic resistances from 30,000 year old DNA from permafrost.

Which kind of makes sense. How did we develop penicillin? From Fungi. Which has been around for quite a while itself. Where did we develop many of our other antibiotics? By observing nature.

Evidence based medicine is commonly wrong because the evidence is interpreted incorrectly.

Around the 1600s, cedar leaf tae saved Jacques Cartier's crew from scurvy, 25 died the rest were save and when he got back to France was told there as no evidence this worked.

Prior to that Vasco de Gamma nearly diet near the Cape of Good Horn but his crew found eating citrus fixed it.

Hundreds of years later, evidence showed citrus prevented scurvy and it became institutionalized. Later it was boiled on copper kettles (which neutralize the C) and nobody noticed it didn't work any more as diets had improved, until sailors and polar explorers began dying. Similarly at around the same time the new process of warming babies milk to kill bacteria also killed the vitamin C and a new disease of the rich emerged: infantile scurvy. By 1933 vitamin C had be found and scurvy became much less widespread.

The point is scurvy has been around for 20 million years, it' s in recorded history for 5500 years but as of the Scott Antarctic expedition people were still dying of it despite cures being known since Egyptian times ("bitter herbs" all have ascorbate). It's not that the evidence is lacking, it's that there's a disruptive influence from commerce and industrialization. Some unintentional, some because of vested interest. History records that "the evidence was contradictory" and while this is true it never stopped being true that two fresh citrus a day prevented and even cured scurvy, of course more was better, ascorbate does not take up into the body in hours it takes days. so any time i the past 500 years it's been true people have been saying "look I know if I eat fresh fruit I won't get sick" while the medical community insisted, no, it' something else we disproved that. During Scott's antarctic mission the medically accepted ce for scurvy was a brew called "vitriol" containing sulphuric acid. That where evidence based medicine got you and this is one of the reason it's a UN right that you can deterring your own course of treatment to any illness. Science is just a sure it's right the nit's wrong as it is when it's right and it's been worn as recently as elat year, the recent fats ans cholesterol deacle as well as finding out sugar is the cause of cholesterol is proof at least to me that the conventional wisdom is neither.

It cannot be said this does not exist today. I'm not a TV guy and have only a very casual knowledge of the claims he made. ome I know are wrong and know why there are right and I know why but are rejected by industry. Given the near complete control by industry of antu to do with pharmaceuticals they are not the best ones to adjudicate this. The belief that if it's in our pharmacopoeia it's good and anything that isn't is bad it fatally flawed in many many ways.

I don't think they'll pursue this very far. All it's going to take is one thing Oz says that works that they say doesn't but actually does and now everything else they say is in question.

If you have unwavering faith in the pharmaceutical industry to be acting only out of the best interests of your health in an ethical manner at all times then you must not have seen these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://projects.propublica.org...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/soci...
http://www.plosmedicine.org/ar...
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

.

Frankly, I've always been a bit confused by the p value. It just seems more straightforward to provide your 95% confidence interval limits.

Actually, cutting down trees is a great way to optimize carbon storage, as long as new trees are planted to replace the ones cut down. It clears space for new trees, which grow faster and eat more carbon when they are young.

What? I say, what did you say, son? A quick google search would have proven you wrong, but you didn't even do that. Or, you know, having paid attention to any of these discussions here on slashdot in ages, since I bring this point up every time we have one. I haven't been bothering with links and citations until now, but nobody has asked so I didn't feel it was important since I'm not the only person who knows how to use google, am I? I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking I'm smarter than everyone, but I have this sneaking suspicion that I've been giving the average slashdotter way too much credit — and it wasn't that much, in my estimation.

Trees only sequester carbon for about 100 before they're broken down into CO2 and other stuff again.

It's not even that simple. The percentage of carbon which is released instead of being fixed into the soil is related to the rate at which decomposition occurs. However, even tropical rain forests are net carbon sinks. As well, when you harvest timber and build things out of it, you keep the carbon fairly well-sequestered, at least until the wood gets successfully attacked by a fungus or set on fire, etc etc. But mature trees fix more carbon than young trees, further complicating the issue. The truth is that planting the world over with trees is no substitute for not having cut them down in the first place, and no amount of wishing will make it so. That's not an argument against replanting, just an argument against any further cutting of old growth. It should simply not be permitted, unless those trees absolutely will fail regardless — and soon.

"...solar-powered green chemistry using sequestered carbon dioxide."

Trees. Quit cutting them down. Plant more. Problem solved.

Actually, cutting down trees is a great way to optimize carbon storage, as long as new trees are planted to replace the ones cut down.

Nope

The anti-depressant response to endurance exercise may be genotype-dependent. Read up on the OPRM1 A118G SNP (a genetic mutation of the mu opioid receptor); it's fascinating: http://www.nature.com/npp/jour....

This is incorrect, women have up to 4 as do some men. The X chromosome normally carries 2, and women have two. The Y chromosome, IIRC, generally carries 1. (yes, I'm aware that's wikipedia, but it had most of the details from numerous other links, so...) Color blindness occurs commonly in men if the Y chromosome carries a duplicate of the X chromosome's receptors (resulting in a 2 cone system). If all 4 are unique, you get a tetrachromat. But if you're going for sheer number, why not be like a mantis shrimp with 12-16?

http://www.nature.com/pr/journ...

It actually does work approximately that way, though I doubt poetmutt can justify their specific claim.

Fun fact about biology: everything you think you know about the limits of genetics is wrong. We keep discovering new nucleotides (5mC, 5hmC, 5fC 5caC) and new systems for both directly modifying DNA, modifying DNA expression, and spooky feedback systems with the ten-trillion-strong microbiome. It's pretty much the epistemic wild west out there.

Or, yours may be outdated...circumcision is back "in" again, it seems.
http://www.nature.com/news/doc...

According to the article in Nature at http://www.nature.com/news/exo... , it only improves normal walking speed on level ground.

Which is too bad. My sister in law's right side was mostly paralyzed by a stroke. She shuffles around, swinging her body weight on her good leg, and is quite the effort. I was hoping this could help her, but given her gait it's unlikely.

Heh.
This must be some new kind of energy ...
Every system you want to gain energy from has to be loaded with energy first. Both isn't possible without losing energy, at least in our universe which means any additional device on the human body makes the body lose more energy.

And probably completely unrelated:
The original article appeared on Nature on April 1st.

http://optics.org/news/6/2/6
http://www.nature.com/nmat/jou...

The writer of the original article should be shot, hung, shot, and then boiled.

It is riddled with so many inaccuracies that it's meaningless.
'10%' - yes - 10% is mentioned ' Our first devices already exhibit an extrinsic quantum efficiency of nearly 10% and the emission can be tuned over a wide range of frequencies by appropriately choosing and combining 2D semiconductors'
But going from that to LED efficiency is ridiculous.

It is comedically ridiculous to claim that it's going to result in products this year.

It's worth noting that the best existing 'warm white' LEDs bulbs can already produce about twice as much light per watt as compact florescent.
(if they are made with around double the normal number of LEDs and a more efficient power supply).

Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male). And I actually like looking at pretty girls. But at what cost? Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Things like Booth Babes drive people away. For those of you interested, it is illuminating to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to what I'm sure will turn into a flame war..... (Complete disclosure: I posed something similar a few weeks ago, but it's such interesting stuff, I posted it again!)

Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male). And I actually like looking at pretty girls. But at what cost? Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Things like Booth Babes drive people away. For those of you interested, it is illuminating to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to what I'm sure will turn into a flame war..... (Complete disclosure: I posed something similar a few weeks ago, but it's such interesting stuff, I posted it again!)

But it's nice that they listed the variants/genes in Supplementary Table 4 of their paper.

But it's nice that they listed the variants/genes in Supplementary Table 4 of their paper.

2) Anonymization of your data is really true

That has been shown to be increasingly difficult.

There is a lot of good data to be used to improve traffic in big cities for instance.

What does that have to do with a private taxi service collecting data on your movements? That's a matter for the municipal administration to solve.

I know how it sounds to complain that your one submission (out of the many /. receives) didn't get accepted, but I've tried submitting this recent scientific discovery (published in Nature Chemistry) a few times. IMO it's perfect material for Slashdot: a interesting new hypothesis (about a supposedly "well-understood" reaction) put to the test via regularly evolving experiments and apparatuses. And it was even largely funded through Youtube viewers (who the lead scientist thanks in the paper) and documented with (at least one) well-done video.

But /. never ran it. I can't help but think that part of the problem is that the scientist is Dr. Phil Mason, aka thunderf00t, who is known for his vids that expose Atheism+ and anti-Gamergate types as fools. Think about the lousy submissions that do often make it on the front page, especially those that push an agenda.

This is why things like Gamergate (and Slashdot's atrocious coverage of it) matter, even if you yourself don't personally care about videogames; it is a fight against neo-puritans who want to filter ALL types of content (not just games, comics, music, movies, etc) you're allowed to see, and refuse to acknowledge the work of those who don't buy into the "narrative."

P.S. Clearly I'm biased, so if any of you think that my article submission is unworthy for some other reason, let me know (seriously).

You're forgetting something:

The pattern of prevailing winds during the accident meant that most of the radioactive materials released from the plant were blown out to sea.

"Had the winds been less favourable, the consequences could have been more serious than Chernobyl,"

http://www.nature.com/news/muc...

Regarding fishing stocks:
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
http://www.planetexperts.com/t...

As for deforestation it would be a LOT worse if we didn't use chemical fertilizer to increase crop yields.

There's some talk on TED about overgrazing and soil erosion.

California has a long record of occasional severe and long-lasting (up to 40 years long) (one of many links)

droughts (all of which pre-date the car, and even the coal-fired power plant).

Sadly, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it" applies in more than way ... think about it.

California's problems have been made artificially far worse by politics - We have MILLIONS of illegal aliens adding to the already-too-large civilian population that needs water AND we have big agribusiness planting lots of water-hungry crops that are totally inappropriate for the region and only work with imported water (which was ok when neighboring states had few people and needed little water). And then, on top of all that, we have politicians pandering to all the "greenies" and demanding that large volumes of potable water get flushed into the sea to protect certain species, oppose desalinization plants, etc...

I hear they print using plastic.

Some of them do. Some print in metal. Some of them print biological organs and stuff. And even some of them do it in multiple colors.

Wouldn't you expect them to say "It's gotten x degrees warmer every year" for some value of x?

Notice they stopped postings graphs of how much warmer it is? They used to.

The sum total of all harm is itemised in one paragraph: "The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years."

How can the sea rise only on 30% of beaches?

climte.gov has a nice temperature dashboard that has all the data you can play with and graph in realtime. May I suggest you go and look at it to find out what x is? Aren't you curious?

The explanation for the 30% figure is twofold. If you'll notice, where they ripped up all the trees, erosion takes place. In the Keys, whihc they can't touch, not so much.

Also, they've been pumping groundwater out for ages. Do you think this leaves behind a great huge hole and a vacuum? No really, the land sort of sinks:
http://www.nature.com/news/sou...

So far globally the weather has remained mostly within the boundaries projected by climate models so they're doing ok.

Not according to scientists. Quote:

"The slowdown in the rate of global warming in the early 2000s is not evident in the multi-model ensemble average of traditional climate change projection simulations.......The loss of predictive skill for six initial years before the mid-1990s points to the need for consistent hindcast skill to establish reliability of an operational decadal climate prediction system."

Well, it wouldn't be the only hole in Relativity, but it would be a huge hole in Relativity. Which otherwise describes the observed Universe very, very well. It's not the best-tested theory in science; that probably goes to QED. Plus then you have to account for observations of massive stellar objects spiraling towards each other, which lose energy more-or-less as predicted by GR. See also the 1993 Nobel. New Physics is always fun, but I'm afraid that a null result would be better explained as experimental design flaws. You know, the way that every other similar experiment to date has been explained. The parallels with aether measurements are hard to avoid, but the alternative theories of gravity are, well...insufficiently predictive. Also aether was more of an assumption than a theory per se: there was never any evidence for it. Contrast with Relativity, which is undeniably a true description of reality.

All told, while I agree with you about finding new things beyond the delineations of our theories, I don't think that a null result here would necessarily lead to much. IANAP, any corrections are appreciated.

I'm guessing a "designer" came up with those hipster glasses?

Why bother with glasses when there are rechargeable button cell batteries that you can fix with double sided tape or a clip, to any pair of glasses?
Cameras come from the sides too. Where one could wear IR LED clip-on earrings.

And why point your week LED at a camera (which can be too far for the light to reach the lens) when you can point it AT THE FACE and "wash it out"?

It will age your skin though so additional facial creme might not be a bad idea.
Also, wearing a hat to minimize both sunlight and camera exposure.

Energy use puts one cap on brain processing. A single neuron firing requires at the very least 4x10^-12 Joules. http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v21/n10/full/9591146a.html At a brain power of 20 watts, that's 5 trillion firings per second, each firing equivalent to the state-change of a single flipflop feeding 1000 gates. That's ignoring standby/idle power dissipation.

A single firing doesn't mean much. A floating point number is 32 bits, requiring 32 flipflops (neurons). 5e12 / 32 = 156e9 flops/s, i.e. 156 Gflop/s. A very impressive number, if the brain were actually optimized to do floating point math, and didn't have to do anything else. But that's nowhere near 100 trillion.

The success rate for drug development is about 10-15%.

Now, you're probably spending $1B cumulative on all the failed drugs to get one hit. They key here is that you're not actually guaranteed to get a drug that works. You could easily spend more than $2B on a program like this, with a little bad luck.

Let's look at this differently. About 250 million antibiotics prescriptions are given out in the US every year. Let's have every one of those pay $10 over cost of manufacture and marketing (for example) to the drug companies who have developed new antibiotics in the prior 10 years (that collective effort helps all the antibiotics companies). Now you're spreading around an "extra" $2.5 billion every year, not just once. That's going to compensate for higher risk approaches more quickly and contribute to a longer term solution for this.

Which one is giving you issues? With noscript / firefox I had no problem with the science mag one. The nature one is really just a link to http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

So the irony is a bit thick with Mr. Nye.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

But hey he wants to believe in the climate doomsday good for him, I'd like to see that kind of money spent on an asteroid watch/defense system. That's something we know actually happens and in a world armed to the teeth with nukes the effects can be really unpleasant.

This has been debunked multiple times.

It has been both bunked and debunked: results are inconsistent. Testosterone causes aggression in some species of animals, but not in others. Some studies have found a causal link to human aggression, while others have not. It is not well understood. Citation.

The article is a little light on scientific details, has anyone ruled out some kind of volcanic eruption?

Nature has opened the actual article for free access online and that has the details, including

For particles reflecting solar radiation, clouds of CO2-ice or H2O-ice particles with an effective radius of 0.1 micrometres are favoured over dust. Alternatively, the plume could arise from auroral emission, of a brightness more than 1,000 times that of the Earth’s aurora, over a region with a strong magnetic anomaly where aurorae have previously been detected7. Importantly, both explanations defy our current understanding of Mars’ upper atmosphere.

It sounds more like a geyser plume to me (ice, not dust) but, if so, it's an awful big one. Hopefully, HiRise should be able to find the source.

So I'm a white male that's actually done a little reading on the issue of women and STEM. Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male), and it was illuminating for me to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to a flame war.....

So I'm a white male that's actually done a little reading on the issue of women and STEM. Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male), and it was illuminating for me to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to a flame war.....

I think this is it:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

I cited my statistics and will do so again:
http://sciencenordic.com/break...

http://www.nature.com/ng/journ...

The expansion hypothesis is not yet fully accepted. There are other models that explain redshift without expansion that make all the same predictions about CMBR, etc. Even ones that don't require magic "dark energy". http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.2485 http://www.nature.com/news/cos...

It isnt because your bias makes you refuse to read sceptical scientific discussions that they dont exist.

Projection isn't a river in Egypt.

Stop reading media crap or rebuttals by propaganda sites and, just for your educational purposes, read some scientific sceptical sites and make up your own mind.

Or maybe read some original papers on the issue! Of course, if it doesn't agree with Anthony Watts, then you'll probably consider it propaganda. Bet you never read these.

Also, there's no interaction here, and this isn't the first instance of computer-generated content making it through human filters. There was an article a while ago about submissions to scientific journals... I think this is the story: http://www.nature.com/news/pub...

In both cases, the content was "complete gibberish," not coherent submissions. These stories don't demonstrate the progress of AI; they demonstrate the low expectations of "meaningful," that judges/editors have in specific circumstances.

That said, there is compelling computer-generated content, such as this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...

driven by Big Agrochem trying to make shitloads of money,

You mean like every other conventionally bred seed they also sell? Better take a stand against conventional breeding. Or maybe you mean Golden Rice, developed by the International Rice Research Institute, or the Rainbow Payaya, developed by the University of Hawai'i, or any number of other GMOs I could mention that have bugger all to do with corporations and are developed by independent university, public, or NGO scientists (who nonetheless are likewise opposed while anti-GMO people ignore them or have the gall to accuse them of being corporate or even vandalize publicly funded GMO research).

acquire copyrights and patents on key food crops

You mean like conventional breeding already does and has been for a long time? You mean the patents that expire and are used in public domain works? By the way, do you have a fair alternative?

'bundle' their own special seeds with their own special pesticides and weedkillers.

Like conventional breeding? Also, selling two products that go together is immoral now? Really? Guess Nintendo must be absolutely abominable for selling gaming systems and the games that go with them for decades, those monsters. By the way, are you referring to the special herbicide (not insecticide as you wrongly imply) that went off patent in 2000? And furthermore, did it ever occur to you that maybe farmers have adopted the herbicide tolerant crops in such large number for a good reason?

You don't even want to take a tiny, tiny risk of killing off pollinating insects or having 'terminator' genes or antibiotic markers jump species.

The refusal to accept any risk at all is a flawed ideology. That's the kind of thought that leads people to refusing vaccines on a 'risk aversion basis.' When one considers your rational of terminator genes (never even been used) and horizontal gene transfer (common only on an evolutionary time frame, and no more or less likely to happen to a transgene than any other gene; maybe I say we ban conventional breeding because I don't want rice sd-1 to jump species hmm? What risk do you see the NPTII gene you refer to having anyway?), your argument falls apart completely.

only if you own shares in big agro (unless you think buying expensive seed and complimentary chemicals from multinationals and not being able to re-plant harvested seed is somehow going to cure third world hunger).

You forgot increased yield, decreased insecticide, safer for farmers and consumers, lower environment impact by replacing harsher herbicide and soil degrading tillage, and saving an entire industry from a devastating virus. You mean beside those benefits you conveniently neglected to mention? And even if none of that were the case, you'd still be wrong because you'd be saying that the present use of a technology is not good therefore there is no good use for it. That's completely absurd, and made all the mor

Yes, the journalist definitely wasn't following. There is a nice diagram included in the linked abstract, albeit a bit small, that shows the actual process. There is no block of silver, there's a block of mica with a thin layer of silver. Silicene is deposited on that, followed by the alumina layer. Then the silver layer with all the other stuff on top of it is detached from the mica, flipped and attached to the oxidised silicon substrate.

The jury is still out on that one. The studies a still not clear on if reduced caloric intake is effective or if it will work on humans.

A way to protect or extend your telomeres might be the only vaccine for death.

They created a structure with band gaps by layering multiple materials including graphene.

We describe light-emitting diodes (LEDs) made by stacking metallic graphene, insulating hexagonal boron nitride and various semiconducting monolayers into complex but carefully designed sequences. Our first devices already exhibit an extrinsic quantum efficiency of nearly 10% and the emission can be tuned over a wide range of frequencies by appropriately choosing and combining 2D semiconductors (monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides). By preparing the heterostructures on elastic and transparent substrates, we show that they can also provide the basis for flexible and semi-transparent electronics.

The technique they used was van der Waals epitaxy.

On the other hand, such layered materials as graphite, mica, MoS2 or GaSe, have a lamellar structure consisting of two-dimensional unit layers. Each unit layer is formed via strong covalent or ionic type bonds, while there is no strong bond between two unit layers; they are bound together via van der Waals-type weak interaction. Then layered materials can be easily cleaved and the clean cleaved surface has a very wide and flat terrace without an active dangling bond. When the thin film growth is investigated on such an inactive surface of a layered material, only weak interaction works between the substrate and the grown material. This results in far small lattice-mismatch distortion in the grown film even if it has a different lattice constant or a crystal structure from the substrate.

If you want pretty pictures, look here. This one is very unusual, because it exhibits a spiral pattern.

Since you are obviously cherry-picking your sources again (which I have pointed out to you before), let me add some recent sources from highly respected journals about the risk of low-dose radiation. Ofcourse, according to Mr. D. all these journals just publish pseudo-science. Reminds me of the old joke with the wrong-way driver.

"... First, it is clear that we have now passed a watershed in our field, where it is no longer tenable to claim that CT risks are "too low to be detectable and may be non-existent" (5). A large well-designed epidemiologic study has clearly shown that the individual risks are small but real..."
Journal: Radiology
Link: http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/...

"...We noted a positive association between radiation dose from CT scans and leukaemia (...) and brain tumours (...)."
Journal: The Lancet
Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

"Conclusions The increased incidence of cancer after CT scan exposure in this cohort was mostly due to irradiation. ..."
Journal: British Medical Journal
Link: http://www.bmj.com/content/346...

"The study supports the extrapolation of high-dose rate risk models to protracted exposures at natural background exposure levels."
Journal: Leukemia
Link: http://www.nature.com/leu/jour...

And with respect to Fukushima there were recent estimates from a Stanford guy:
"We estimate an additional 130 (15â"1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24â"1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposureâ"dose and doseâ"response models used in the study. We also discuss the LNT model's uncertainty at low doses. .... Radiation exposure to workers at the plant is projected to result in 2 to 12 morbidities. An additional [similar]600 mortalities have been reported due to non-radiological causes such as mandatory evacuations."
Journal: Energy & Environmental Science
Link: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content...

Let me know when someone builds a Predictor.

Not quite. The insecticide in question is the Bt toxin. It has a very specific mode of action, affecting only coleopteran and lepidopteran insects, like European corn borer and cotton boll worm, and of course its only going to significantly affect the things that are actually eating the corn. Contrast that to insecticide sprays, and you get benefits in terms of field level insect biodiversity.