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I mean shit, look at Al Gore, if there was a list of everybody on the planet sorted by personal carbon consumption, he'd probably be in the top 1%.

Gore is carbon neutral isn't he?

I don't care how energy efficient his 20 bedroom house or his private jet are;

Gore doesn't have a private jet.

both inevitably consume a LOT more energy than your typical person's luxuries.

How does a jet consume energy without existing?

In a small contained lab environment we can sit there and measure how much of a greenhouse effect different gases have, but historical data doesn't even so much as show a correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change.

That's not true for any of the past 420 million years

IIt doesn't appear to harm ocean life

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.

plant life, or land animals either

Bullshit

as during one of Earth's "greenest" periods in history we had 20 times the present atmospheric CO2, really fucking massively sized insects, dinosaurs, and more.

Kind of irrelevant. We have existent species now. Those are the ones that have to be able to live. Really fucking massively sized insects, and dinosaurs are already dead.

Other data suggests that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow rises in climate, not the other way around

Nope:
CO2, increasing since about 1750.
Temp, from about 1900.

As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap.

Well, we've got a lot of science now, so we don't need to base our decisions on what you think.

It's entirely possible that the higher CO2 we're seeing is yet another rise following a climate change that we had no part in.

No it's not. It's from the combustion of fossil fuels.

And by the way, the arguments for stopping climate change so that we can save the economy are also incredibly stupid and self defeating.

Bullshit

We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.

Bullshit. Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP

Meanwhile we have seen on well more than one occasion where stupid economic decisions cause global long term collapse. Hurting the economy for what is probably much ado about nothing is therefore pointless

The 10 state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saw their combined economies increase by 1.6 billion in the first three years. Oh, the pain! The pain! Ouch! Stop the hurt!


Why did /. vote this bullshit +5, interesting? I would have thought anti-science grandstanding was antithetical to "news for nerds". This place really has dropped in discernment over the past few years hasn't it. .

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014...

Of course NASA is used to doing this.

The ocean below 1.24 miles hasn't warmed. The ocean above that has, and it turns out it has warmed more than originally thought: Link.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Doubled CO2 means under 2 degrees warming

"8th December 2010 13:24 GMT - A group of top NASA and NOAA scientists say that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise."

Yes, because a news site without links to the actual published research or subsequent scientific discussion is to be taken at face value. However, it didn't take much Googling to find that the so-called study being referenced in the link was authored by none other than Judith Curry, a well-known climate crank. Her work has been scientifically eviscerated many times over. In other words, she has no credibility.

The latest research, done by several different scientists at several different institutions over the past couple years seem to be averaging around 4C. The AR5 centered around 3C.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/ear...
""Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time," says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data. "

Why would a 150 year melt cycle be "right on time" in warming world? Never mind somebody made the headline "Unprecedented melting of Greenland ice".

How can a cyclical even be unprecedented?

Again, you are mixing journalistic sensationalism with actual science. That being said, irregardless of the event, Greenland is experiencing rapid mass loss. There have been multiple papers on the subject.

I believe Mr. Hansen left shortly after this. I could be wrong but I think it was around that time.

This had nothing to do with why he left NASA. HE RETIRED. He mentioned his retirement several years before he actually left. He worked there for 46 years. Now he's following his passion as the director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

I believe Mr. Hansen left shortly after this.

About nine months later.

Well the problem was that Democrats wanted to use it to win elections - "If you don't vote for us, the oceans will cover the entire planet and we'll all die!!" Eventually, people will realize that it's horribly exaggerated and nothing major will even happen as a result of "global warming" / "climate change" / "whatever other terms are used because the previous ones didn't inspire enough fear".

How come the EU are committed to 20% reduction on 1990 CO2 emissions by 2020, and want to negotiate that up to 30%?

How come the UK, is committed to an 80% CO2 reduction on 1990 levels by 2050?

Did the democrats get to them, or is there some non-american-centric science behind the policy?

FYI the terms "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" are both in use in the scholarly literature. For instance:
Global warming and changes in drought NATURE (2014)
Climate change and wind intensification in coastal upwelling ecosystems SCIENCE (2014)

So your suggestion that there is some change from one to the other is wrong. Needless to add, your suggested reason for this non-existent change is also wrong.

Yes the ocean is a FACTOR. The Sun is a greater factor.

The ocean is a factor in the Norther Hemisphere Glaciation 2.7 million years ago. (As you can see from the abstract to the paper the articles is about). It is a factor because it transported heat from the northern hemisphere to the southern. Hence the title of the paper: "Antarctic role in Northern Hemisphere glaciation".

The sun has a different effect entirely, it changes the amount of energy incident on the whole globe/

CO2? not so much.

CO2 has been a significant forcing of global mean temperature throughout the past 420 million years. Particularly for the current warming, it is the largest single forcing.

Gerry Potter's research led to what he calls "pro-drug paradigm" that is it's not a drug, it's turned into a drug by something, then becomes active.

I met one of this guys friends in Starbucks once and we became good friends and he explained a bunch of this stuff to me. Here's the short version:

The Cytochrome P450 enzyme CYP1B1 [1] only occurs in cancer cells [2][3]. When certain phytoallexins such as resveratrol and salvestrol are ingested these phytoalexins are converted by the P450 enzyme into piceatannol [4], which is fatal to cancer cells but not human cells [5][6].

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
  [2] http://cancerres.aacrjournals....
  [3] http://secure.salvestrol.ca/se...
  [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
  [5] http://www.nature.com/bjc/jour...
  [6] http://www.orthomolecular.org/...

Here's some articles and stuff:
http://www.thisisleicestershir...

"Prostate cancer drug so effective trial stopped"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/hea...

Pat ettenttion to the colors on this map: http://www.cancerresearchuk.or...

If you poke around you can find cliical repoets online. All people seem to get better and this stuff has been around since 2007.

So, I think they're on to something here... and it may be a a way to Patent Potter's second discovery (based on CYP1B1) which is not patentable. His first discovery based on CYP17 was patentable and sold for two billion untested.

They're awfully skint on the biochemical explanation.

Does anybody knows if exosomes would be removed from the blood stream if the "biospleen" is used? http://www.nature.com/news/art...

but what's the point in creating a retina with the same defective DNA?

Another 70 years of functional vision?

And furthermore, is the retina connected to the nerves somehow?

If it goes like other experimental retina transplants, yes.

The brain will cope the same way it does with other changes in the eye. Your retina contains none of the cells that were there when you were a child. Can you see?

Easy solution: Hire clones of Bennett Hasselton. He spends 10s of hours a week solving the hard issues facing the world such as distributed social networks and the optimal queuing for ice lines at Burning Man.

Clones of Hasselton? I thought gain of function experiments were on a moratorium these days.

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

"Age-related macular degeneration results from the breakdown of retinal epithelium, a layer of cells that support photoreceptors needed for vision. The procedure Kurimoto performed is unlikely to restore his patient's vision. However, researchers around the world will be watching closely to see whether the cells are able to check the further destruction of the retina while avoiding potential side effects, such as bringing about an immune reaction or inducing cancerous growth."

And this:
http://www.riken-ibri.jp/AMD/e...

"This is a very early-stage form of clinical research, and is intended to assess the safety of this intervention; it is not expected to yield significant improvements in visual acuity or other symptoms in the patients who participate in the study."

Generally the first stage testing a new clinical technique is to make sure that it does not cause harm. That's what they're doing with this test.

The linked article got it wrong, which is why the summary is wrong. As usual, the linked article is garbage and you have to dig into links you find there to get something close to reality.

Reasonably well written summary here: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-f...
Research here: http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Alas, THIS PAIR OF PAPERS shows rather solidly that there isn't any "missing heat" being stored in the deep oceans.

Nice half-truth. You ignored that these articles (particularly the first one) do show that energy is being stored in the upper oceans.

Alas, THIS PAIR OF PAPERS shows rather solidly that there isn't any "missing heat" being stored in the deep oceans.

Nice half-truth. You ignored that these articles (particularly the first one) do show that energy is being stored in the upper oceans.

If you don't believe, try looking HERE, and HERE.

I have quite a collection of official government raw data that show a very different truth than what NOAA claims.

Hell, even the majority of climate scientists admit that it hasn't really warmed for 16 years or more now. Their last best hope for explaining why their CO2-warming climate models didn't correspond with reality was that the "missing heat" was hiding in the deep ocean.

Alas, THIS PAIR OF PAPERS shows rather solidly that there isn't any "missing heat" being stored in the deep oceans.

Too bad, so sad. Which is sarcasm, of course. People should be celebrating (and some are). But too many are so caught up in their ties to research grants or their "CO2 religion" to admit they're looking more foolish by the day.

If you don't believe, try looking HERE, and HERE.

I have quite a collection of official government raw data that show a very different truth than what NOAA claims.

Hell, even the majority of climate scientists admit that it hasn't really warmed for 16 years or more now. Their last best hope for explaining why their CO2-warming climate models didn't correspond with reality was that the "missing heat" was hiding in the deep ocean.

Alas, THIS PAIR OF PAPERS shows rather solidly that there isn't any "missing heat" being stored in the deep oceans.

Too bad, so sad. Which is sarcasm, of course. People should be celebrating (and some are). But too many are so caught up in their ties to research grants or their "CO2 religion" to admit they're looking more foolish by the day.

I was rushed for time when I wrote that, it didn't come off too well. What I had in mind was from a future where people are being chosen for long term assignments such as a grand tour of the solar system (and part two), extended Mars mission -- or colonization -- where there are qualified volunteers of both genders. There's a lot more to this than sexual liaisons or pair bonding.

The Sex Differences in Psychology is a good read on what has been observed by experiment, there's some physiology in there too. And with any 'delicate' topic, the Wiki talk page for it shows an interesting struggle to identify and manage bias for a topic that is so rich with historical flavor it has its own category of humor.

But a most fascinating tangent from the Wiki page is this recent study Widespread sex differences in gene expression and splicing in the adult human brain (Trabzuni et. al 2013), showing "that sex differences in gene expression and splicing are widespread in adult human brain, being detectable in all major brain regions and involving 2.5% of all expressed genes."

Sequencing inherited genes has taught us that there's no more than ~0.5% variance among the races of the world. We have leveraged the smallness of that number into a scientifically based bias against racism and prejudice which we apply to classic arguments of "nature vs. nurture?" to stack the deck against "nature" when debating things like intelligence and ability.

This is good. This ~0.5% figure gives us a hard baseline for "humanness" superior to that applied by Phrenologists and early Darwinians. If I have inherited a certain gene that affects skull shape or skin color or susceptibility to a disease, I can expect a noble society NOT to apply judgment from it of inherent ability or potential.

So what about that ~2.5% difference in gene expression between male and female brains? "We are not alone." I mean that in the full Close Encounters aliens-are-among us sense, because when discussing sex-triggered gene expression we're firmly in "nature" territory. Science reveals the existence of an intelligent (yet 'alien') species on this planet. And even though your genes are expressed differently, you both fall within the ~0.5% genetic baseline.

This means "including women equally" in everything that matters in a direct or Monte Carlo 50/50 ratio or a process is NOT like that "gotta strive to ensure that all races are represented" thing. The human race is a successful species because of this working partnership. It is a successful one and we ignore or diminish it at our great peril.

By peril I mean that any enterprise without equal genders by default is ahuman. Not 'inhuman' with its connotation of injustice. Ahuman is "not us", creepy, weird, uncanny valley. I propose the gender coin toss+'merit' --- and not just 'merit' (plus equal action political metric) --- as a way to statistically implement what is our intrinsic nature, impose a system that can be agreed upon that eases us into gender parity as the likely default, but yet does what nature does --- when the toss weighs heavily to one side something new is tried.

Because there may be dynamics of gender interaction (not sex) that are not just necessary to evolve. By excluding gender at times through history we may have been losing ground.

For something completely different, see Women: How do they do it?

Care to supply a citation?

Evaluation of transmission risks associated with in vivo replication of several high containment pathogens in a biosafety level 4 laboratory says you're wrong, though.

http://politicalsciencereplica... [wordpress.com]
http://www.nature.com/news/201... [nature.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04... [nytimes.com]

One example?

wat

Taste is temperature dependent, and room temperature is the place where it works best (unsurprisingly given that's going to be the temperature of most of the stuff being eaten during its evolution) - coffee has a bunch of bad tasting stuff in it but your taste sensitivity drops off at high and low temperatures. Thus hot coffee or iced coffee is great, but lukewarm coffee is bad.

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

http://politicalsciencereplica...
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...

In all honesty, why aren't we already doing this? The problem with the world is dumb people. If we can selectively breed out dumb people, how would the world be worse?

Cardboard tasting Tomatoes: that's why.
http://www.geneticliteracyproj...
If you start selectively breeding just for intelligence, you may end up losing other traits. And no, I'm not suggesting our children will start tasting like cardboard. Perhaps that really hot blonde over there is dumber than you, but would you want to hit it?

Oh, the cardboard tomatoes don't taste bad just due to the lack of sugar: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2...

I thought the magic in spider silk was 2-part.

First, is the molecule-- but the second is how it gets "zipped" into a silk filament by the spider's spinnarets.

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

Just putting the genes into a silkworm WILL NOT PRODUCE SILK LIKE A SPIDERS!

Producing the proteins in goats wont fix the mechanical processing that spiders do.

This is why these things keeps failing. The protein is only part of the package. They need nano-structure spinnaret simulants to spin the solution with as well.

The right "to be forgotten" does not exist — you have no right to affect the contents of other people's brains, notebooks, and databases.

Sure, Google is a "KKKorporation", but you have no more right to demand, they forget about you, than you can you force your ex to forget the good times you've once had together. And, yes, wiping out individual's memories — selectively — is already possible.

You're kidding me right?

A woman working under biohazard 4 conditions, wearing a hermetically sealed suit, working with a patient she KNOWS has ebola and is infectious; gets Ebola herself, and you are seriously trying to play it off like it's no worse than HIV? Acting like a know-it-all expert on infectious diseases and trying to reassure everyone that this isn't going anywhere and isn't dangerous?

Look, I'm not trying to fear-monger here for the sake of it, and I'm certainly no ebola-expert, but trying to reassure everyone that this is just going to blow over with this idiocy about how safe Ebola is and how nobody can catch it unless they fucking lick infected blood when that is increasingly not the case just sets me right off. Even the media has done a complete 180 on their usual fear-mongering. Let's suppose for a moment that this woman did something out of procedure - she didn't clean her suit or something, and she touched it, then rubbed her eyes.

That's not HIV-level infectious. That's influenza/cold-level infectious, and that is extremely worrying, because the CDC seems to be grossly incompetent in this entire situation and I'm beginning to wonder if the corporations involved who have the potential to make literal billions to trillions off Ebola vaccines aren't giving little nudges here and there to maintain a certain level of incompetence in the matter. We aren't even quarantining Africa - the CDC says that wouldn't do anything. Like hell it wouldn't. The first thing we did when SARS was worrying people was to quarantine and shut down air travel, but apparently we're finding out only just now that this didn't work and won't work for Ebola, so let's just spend millions trying to screen for it ineffectively at the airports into our countries? I'm sorry, I'm not buying this. I'm not buying anything the mass media are telling us about this disease anymore. How many times does the mass media have to lie to people before they stop actually trusting them?

Did you know that one of the Ebola strains quite possibly moved through an air gap to cause infection?
http://www.nature.com/srep/201...

We also know that the Filovirus family can easily become airborne:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/jour...

This virus is spreading into the tens of thousands range in West Africa. That's an immense breeding ground for it to adapt to a new host. We know that Ebola strains can become airborne, and we keep having doctors getting sick with the virus in spite of hefty precautions against it. So why are we assuming it can't be airborne and can't be transmitted during its incubation period? Why are we assuming it has low infectivity when doctors in full protective gear are getting it? When people are literally getting this virus from just touching things that ebola victims have touched? Why is nobody taking precautions in case it IS highly infectious? This isn't some joke of a virus that kills 2% of the people it infects; almost everyone who gets it dies. This isn't something to be jovial and careless around, yet we took more precautions around SARS than anything we're doing with Ebola. It's fucking madness, and I keep seeing people parrot this bullshit that we shouldn't be worried, have nothing to fear if we aren't literally bathing in Ebola-blood like West Africans obviously are, and so on.

No, we DO have something to fear from this - you'd be foolish not to be worried - and I am not satisfied in the least with the way our governments are treating this whole thing. It's almost flippant. I think some serious discussion about this virus getting into western countries uncontrollably needs to seriously start happening. What are you going to do if Ebola ends up in your town? Have you even considered talking about it with your family? With your local community? Is the effort involved in being prepared really worth the risk o

You're kidding me right?

A woman working under biohazard 4 conditions, wearing a hermetically sealed suit, working with a patient she KNOWS has ebola and is infectious; gets Ebola herself, and you are seriously trying to play it off like it's no worse than HIV? Acting like a know-it-all expert on infectious diseases and trying to reassure everyone that this isn't going anywhere and isn't dangerous?

Look, I'm not trying to fear-monger here for the sake of it, and I'm certainly no ebola-expert, but trying to reassure everyone that this is just going to blow over with this idiocy about how safe Ebola is and how nobody can catch it unless they fucking lick infected blood when that is increasingly not the case just sets me right off. Even the media has done a complete 180 on their usual fear-mongering. Let's suppose for a moment that this woman did something out of procedure - she didn't clean her suit or something, and she touched it, then rubbed her eyes.

That's not HIV-level infectious. That's influenza/cold-level infectious, and that is extremely worrying, because the CDC seems to be grossly incompetent in this entire situation and I'm beginning to wonder if the corporations involved who have the potential to make literal billions to trillions off Ebola vaccines aren't giving little nudges here and there to maintain a certain level of incompetence in the matter. We aren't even quarantining Africa - the CDC says that wouldn't do anything. Like hell it wouldn't. The first thing we did when SARS was worrying people was to quarantine and shut down air travel, but apparently we're finding out only just now that this didn't work and won't work for Ebola, so let's just spend millions trying to screen for it ineffectively at the airports into our countries? I'm sorry, I'm not buying this. I'm not buying anything the mass media are telling us about this disease anymore. How many times does the mass media have to lie to people before they stop actually trusting them?

Did you know that one of the Ebola strains quite possibly moved through an air gap to cause infection?
http://www.nature.com/srep/201...

We also know that the Filovirus family can easily become airborne:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/jour...

This virus is spreading into the tens of thousands range in West Africa. That's an immense breeding ground for it to adapt to a new host. We know that Ebola strains can become airborne, and we keep having doctors getting sick with the virus in spite of hefty precautions against it. So why are we assuming it can't be airborne and can't be transmitted during its incubation period? Why are we assuming it has low infectivity when doctors in full protective gear are getting it? When people are literally getting this virus from just touching things that ebola victims have touched? Why is nobody taking precautions in case it IS highly infectious? This isn't some joke of a virus that kills 2% of the people it infects; almost everyone who gets it dies. This isn't something to be jovial and careless around, yet we took more precautions around SARS than anything we're doing with Ebola. It's fucking madness, and I keep seeing people parrot this bullshit that we shouldn't be worried, have nothing to fear if we aren't literally bathing in Ebola-blood like West Africans obviously are, and so on.

No, we DO have something to fear from this - you'd be foolish not to be worried - and I am not satisfied in the least with the way our governments are treating this whole thing. It's almost flippant. I think some serious discussion about this virus getting into western countries uncontrollably needs to seriously start happening. What are you going to do if Ebola ends up in your town? Have you even considered talking about it with your family? With your local community? Is the effort involved in being prepared really worth the risk o

Please keep in mind something from a couple of days ago...

"'Smart genes' prove elusive - Study of more than 100,000 people finds three genetic variants for IQ — but their effects are maddeningly small." http://www.nature.com/news/sma...

This twins study shows that general intelligence and academic achievement are affected by many different "aptitudes", not just "smart." Taken together with the Nature commentary, suggests that intelligence is just a part, maybe even a small part, of achievement.

If only this could seep into the general consciousness of the masses, then we might not have so many students think they cannot do something because they are not "smart enough."

it de-incentivizes using the military to confiscate international lands and resources, it increases the national security.

Unless your talking about Libia and it's resources, of course that doesn't count because it was the Europeans that started that brouhaha and dragged us in as an after-thought, and because their Industrial-military complex contractor changed their mind. Just because we told that dirtbag Gaddafi, that we would leave him alone if he gave up his WMD ambitions and quit sponsoring terrorism isn't any reason to actually leave him alone when he did.

I apologize that I don't have time to construct a proper reply, but this article gives a nice explanation of how majorana fermions can be used to make qubits (hopefully it's not paywalled, but I'm on a university network so it's hard for me to tell): http://www.nature.com/nphys/jo...

Because this is clearly inferior. Play with it a bit. Play spot the warming.

https://www.climate.gov/news-f...

Note:

1) 1998 - 2015
2) 1880 - 2015
3) 1978 - 1998
4) 1947 - 1957 - this is when all that sea ice grew.[1]

Odd is was so cold at a time of peak smog.[2]

[1]"In the early 1920s and 1930s, temperatures were high, similar to that of the present, and this affected the glacial melt. At the time many glaciers underwent a melt similar or even higher than what we have seen in the last ten years. When it became colder again in the 1950s and 1960s, glaciers actually started growing," says Dr. Kurt H. Kjær - in http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Nope, you are wrong :D
Why don't you read the stuff you link?, E.g. the referenced material? Like this: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2...

At the time the scientists were saying that a 5,000 year old ice shelf had broken off. Okay if it was 5,000 years old what broke it off the last time? the egyptians using slave labor to build the pyramids?

Really?

1) Larson B had been a stable ice shelf 200 metres thick with a surface area of 3,250 square kilometres for at least 10,000 years. (source)
2) Even if that wasn't the case you can still attribute climate change to a cause, and that cause doesn't have to be the same cause as previous climate change.
2 b) Climate change one to two orders of magnitude slower than the current climate change would not be expected to have the same mechanism.
3) It is not believed that Egyptians used slaves to construct the pyramids.

The weather changes it goes up and down and side to side.

Yes. And the current going up is primarily due to the enhanced greenhouse effect.

looking for a .01 degree change is like looking for a penny to pay a $1,000 bar tab. it matters yes but come on.

On the other hand a 0.8 degree rise has put a number of species at extinction risk, has displaced tens of millions of people per year, and kills about 150,000 people annually.

If you read the findings 2012 Canadian study carefully, you'll see that they could not rule out transmission due to droplets called fomites. This is a different mode of transmission than aerosol. The authors of the study suggested that further experiments would need to be conducted to rule out other factors. People have been routinely misinterpreting these findings. I urge anyone to read the "Discussion" section of the study in which this issue is clarified. http://www.nature.com/srep/201...

The black death appears to still be considered a possibility for how the mutation got enriched in the population. Another possibility is smallpox. And according to what I've read, it's more like 15% European heritage have one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation which provides limited resistance and 1% got two copies and have strong resistance but not complete immunity since some forms of the virus use other attachment points.

citation: http://www.nature.com/scitable...

Wrong. You probably got masking flavors.

http://www.nature.com/news/200...

Well Hawking himself have said that there are probably no event horizon http://www.nature.com/news/ste...

Go to the original paper, not TFA, and scroll to the bottom for a comment from the authors with links to complete data and longer discussion of the subject. Your concerns are all answered.

http://www.nature.com/srep/201...

The debunking has been debunked: http://www.nature.com/srep/201...

Scroll to the bottom to see the reply from the authors, as well as links to extended papers and data which debunks the debunking comprehensively. It's rather inappropriate to base criticism of work on the short papers published in Nature, which due to the page limit are understood to be somewhat incomplete.

How do you know that nobody knows if extinction rates are higher now? Have you researched it?

You read the literature. A good paper to look at is doi:10.1038/nature09678

Why do you consider this particular question to be subjective? Surely, any specific question can best be addressed scientifically.

I didn't say it was "subjective", I said nobody knows. There are a lot of things that science simply does not have an answer to. In some cases, we may find an answer, in others, we may never know.

There are many environmental impacts of our industrial activities. ... Before about 50-100 years ago, the bulk of habitat destruction occurred in temperate zones. Now, it is occurring in tropical zones, which have far higher biodiversity.

These are reasonable beliefs, but not actually facts.

Global warming is only just getting going.

Good, so we can take some time to think about it before we do anything, which is what I have been saying.

It can be expected to do very major damage

Again, belief, not fact.

especially to the "most-beloved" species - the large land animals. In part this is because these animals will be trapped in the wrong place.

Well, impacting "beloved species" isn't the same as a mass extinction. All large land mammals could disappear, for example, and that would be tragic, but it wouldn't amount to a "mass extinction". And that's the problem with all the fear mongering: people keep switching their claims and the supposed threats.

What makes AGW especially pernicious is that we've yet to really feel the effects of what we've already done. The warming will continue to increase over the coming decades, no matter what we do now. We have no idea what demons we may unleash.

We have a pretty good idea, because it already was warmer than this 100000 years ago.

This is a total non-sequitur. How do you figure...? You're saying that incentives won't work because as people cash in on the incentive to create green energy technology, the success of that technology will make the incentive less important?! That is illogical.

No, it's economics. Until I have developed green technologies, I can't cash in on them. As soon as I have developed the technologies, the subsidies will stop.

Surely, harvesting all the free energy raining down on us, right where we want it, makes much more economic sense - in the long term - than digging stuff out from deep under the earth and shipping it around.

There really is not much difference: solar cells and wind turbines don't give you perpetual free energy; they are devices that have considerable operating expenses and finite lifetimes.

If everyone was as reckless as you are, we would (might) not get there until we had exhausted every ounce of available fossil fuel. Why? Because we've already sunk the costs for the fossil fuel infrastructure, and nobody has to pay for the damage it causes.

That's not true either. The only reason we keep getting fossil fuels is because people constantly figure out new ways of recovering them, constantly invest in exploration, and constantly develop new equipment. We're just better at developing new fossil fuel technologies than new solar cell technologies.

Renewables are preferable to fossil fuel in the long term, but the obstacles are technological; the idea that there is some grand conspiracy by oil companies or "sunk costs" or any of that other stuff irrationally preventing us from going to renewables simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

personally, I t

DNA is magnetoresponsive. Magnetism itself is self-assembling, and since DNA has been shown to be magnetoresponsive http://www.nature.com/neuro/jo... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., it would be interesting to see if this origami folding can take place outside of the earth's magnetosphere, which has a magnetic harmonic at the same frequency as the resonance demonstrated by DNA.

Does anyone know anything about other self-assembling substances?

It's not finding places for people to live, it is finding land to grow the food necessary to feed people in the style to which they have become/are becoming/will become accustomed to. Basic food prices have been spiking for the last several years, although it hasn't shown up in significant changes in the super market yet because most of the cost of processed food comes from the processing not the ingredients. (If the price of corn doubles it adds only 11 cents to the cost of a quarter pound hamburger: http://www.g-feed.com/2012/08/...) After years of stability, the rate at which virgin forest land is being converted to agricultural production has also started to increase again, likely because increases in crop productivity has slowed to a crawl in many of the most productive agricultural regions of the world: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2...

I'm afraid you are mistaken. Antibiotics have long been linked to weight gain. This is something that has been common knowledge in the livestock industry since the mid 20th century. As farmers it's something my people are quite familar with. If you want something more recent my first google search pulled up: http://www.nature.com/nature/j... I'm sure there are other studies.

Given that you bothered to reference "lenght (sic) of time," I find it disheartening that you have also demonstrated apparent failure to comprehend or intelligently consider bounding problems, population density, transmission risks and rates, practical effects of seemingly low mutation rates, microbiology, and systems thinking. In short, all activities involving large scale administration of antibiotics to livestock at dosages resulting in appreciable treatment/prevention efficacy are practices which drive substantial and increasing risks to public health.

The math doesn't lie, and the trending curves of probabilities associated with widespread epidemics aren't exactly uplifting. I'll make a preemptive recommendation that you suppress the urge to post anything resembling a cliché "citation needed" response here. Given the circumstances at hand, devotion of your time to even a cursory review of the aforementioned subject matter would likely be a more productive activity. Such study will necessarily involve your review of all citations referenced in said materials, review of nested citations, etc. You wouldn't want to compound foolishness with yet more foolishness, would you?

I'm willing to admit that I may be entirely wrong in my assessment of your level of knowledge, with the corollary that you are simply betting that your benefits will outweigh your risk in this area for the duration of your lifespan. However, given that I know nothing of your mode of living or the measures of your personal resource reserves on hand for reaction/relocation/adaptation/insulation in response a large scale communicable disease crisis, I must hazard a guess that you're either (A) dangerously ignorant of reality or (B) very well prepared to deal with things turning shitty in a hurry. It is my measured estimation that the odds of your membership in the intersecting set are quite low, given your mid-range UID and the generally incongruous nature of the respective attributes of the A and B sets.

Indeed, IB Times wins the record of the worst ever summary of microbiology subject.
(mixing virus and bacteria and toxins. And multiplication and dead cells. W.. T.. F.. )

(Also, the magnets have nothing to do with the removal. They are just the mecinal technique used to move the metal beads around. It's the manose-binding lecitin on them that hold the magic.
It's not "removing Viruses and bacteria using magnets" but "removing them using lecitins which happen to be moved around thanks to magnets").

The nature paper it self is good, and the method is typical technique used for extraction / purification (so the principle is solid).

The relative novelty of this method is that, instead of using an antibody as the binding agent (something that needs to be targeted specifically. In vertebrate they are part of the *adaptive* immunity : immunity that the body needs to train) this method uses manose binding lectins (something that isn't specific and bind to lots of targets: bacteria, virus, toxins, etc. In eukaryote, they are part of the *innate* immunity: immunity you are born with, you don't need to train. Your body will already produce lecitins against sugar patterns that aren't frequent in your body, even if you've never encountered them).

Thus, its able to purify and extract from a patient's blood bacteria, virus and toxin *THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW beforehand* (i.e.: anything that presents a pattern of sugar on the surface that isn't common in the body and for which they have the corresponding lecitin).
(Where classical extraction usually rely on antibodies targeting what you would like).

It's a bit equivalent to use coal to purify blood: coal will indiscriminately extract any big organic molecule without you needing to know it in advance and thus is a valuable tool in case of poisoning

"When antibiotics are used to kill them, dying viruses release toxins"

Too bad SlashDot isn't a science web site...

Neither is the International Business Times, whence this article refers.

The web site for Nature magazine, however, is a science web site, and there's a much better story there on the same topic.

I know how that one turns out. Making such a basic mistake make me doubt the other claims being made.

Yes, I'd be inclined to pay attention to only the claims in the Nature news article on the same topic.

I call bullshit on this. Not a credible source, and whoever submitted the article bungled the science...

A better source is the article in Nature .

When antibiotics are used to kill them, dying viruses release toxins in the blood that begin to multiply quickly.

Is it just me, or is this sentence completely devoid of any scientificic sense in many different ways (antibiotics killling viruses? Toxins multiplying ??)

No, it's not just you, and, yes, that sentence is completely devoid if any scientific sense. Better sentences can be found in the news article from Nature .

Yeah, for years we were told magnet therapy was bullshit. Now there's money to be made by "legitimate" medicine, though, it's suddenly scientifically acceptable.

Well, there's "magnet therapy" as in "wear a magnet on your body", and there's "magnet therapy" as in "coat extremely small magnetic particles with a protein that binds to bacteria, viruses, and bacterial toxins, run your blood through a machine where the particles bind to the bacteria/viruses/toxins and get magnetically removed from the blood, and pump the blood back in".

It's quite possible for the first form of "magnet therapy" to be bullshit and the second form of "magnet therapy" to work.

Makes me want to go to Harvard.

Makes me not want to read the International Business Times, but to, instead, read the news article from Nature , as suggested in another post.

This summary is a butchered summary of a far more interesting article. Here is a far better source! [Cause HTML has Anchor Tags] I'm quite surprised at IBT's lack of knowledge. Viruses killed by antibiotics? Toxins Multiplying?

Wow I agree! Thanks for sharing this! This is much more interesting.. Maybe someone should write up a summary about the actual article....