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Fact is, there is no scientific evidence that any antibiotic resistance is coming from give antibiotics to cows.

There's plenty of evidence. Here is just a quick grab of a recent Nature news feature that reviews some of the literature. Data is accumulating, and it says exactly what you would expect: bacteria are notoriously indiscriminate in their hosts over enough generations, and they're more than happy to pass on the tricks they've learned, not only to their progeny but also via horizontal transfer to whoever or whatever else is nearby. No one's saying indiscriminately dousing farm animals is the only or even the worst vector for resistance. But it is one of them, and considering the overwhelming majority of antibiotics used in the states are used on farms, it presents a significant risk – with very poor and typically inexpert motivation – that does need to be curbed.

Nice to see another big science project providing results. The data from all these recent big experiments should be quite helpful in winnowing out some theories. It looks some supersymmetry theories appear inconsistent with the data being seen. Things seem to be resolving towards the standard model, and yet it has problems. Interesting times ahead I'm sure.

Electron Shape Measurement, Most Precise Yet, Rules Out New Physics Theories
Observation of micro–macro entanglement of light

Nice to see another big science project providing results. The data from all these recent big experiments should be quite helpful in winnowing out some theories. It looks some supersymmetry theories appear inconsistent with the data being seen. Things seem to be resolving towards the standard model, and yet it has problems. Interesting times ahead I'm sure.

Electron Shape Measurement, Most Precise Yet, Rules Out New Physics Theories
Observation of micro–macro entanglement of light

What they have demonstrate is how a graphene structure can be made into a tunable oscillator by constructing a rather crude but working FM 'radio-transmitter' using one.

You are correct. And crude is an apt choice of wording... From the supplementary information (scroll to the bottom), there are links to: pdf containing data on setup, testing, and characterization as well as a .wav file (confusingly labeled "movie"). It appears to be a sample of a transmitted sound sample of "Gangnam Style!"

The sound quality of this sample is more on the order of a noisy AM radio broadcast, but given the technology being used, quite impressive, nonetheless.

FWIW, there is a (somewhat) better write-up at redorbit.

And, yes, the 100MHz in TFS refers to the carrier frequency, which is but one of several that they tested. But, it also happens to be in the FM radio band and hence the (attention-grabbing) title.

What they have demonstrate is how a graphene structure can be made into a tunable oscillator by constructing a rather crude but working FM 'radio-transmitter' using one.

You are correct. And crude is an apt choice of wording... From the supplementary information (scroll to the bottom), there are links to: pdf containing data on setup, testing, and characterization as well as a .wav file (confusingly labeled "movie"). It appears to be a sample of a transmitted sound sample of "Gangnam Style!"

The sound quality of this sample is more on the order of a noisy AM radio broadcast, but given the technology being used, quite impressive, nonetheless.

FWIW, there is a (somewhat) better write-up at redorbit.

And, yes, the 100MHz in TFS refers to the carrier frequency, which is but one of several that they tested. But, it also happens to be in the FM radio band and hence the (attention-grabbing) title.

What they have demonstrate is how a graphene structure can be made into a tunable oscillator by constructing a rather crude but working FM 'radio-transmitter' using one.

You are correct. And crude is an apt choice of wording... From the supplementary information (scroll to the bottom), there are links to: pdf containing data on setup, testing, and characterization as well as a .wav file (confusingly labeled "movie"). It appears to be a sample of a transmitted sound sample of "Gangnam Style!"

The sound quality of this sample is more on the order of a noisy AM radio broadcast, but given the technology being used, quite impressive, nonetheless.

FWIW, there is a (somewhat) better write-up at redorbit.

And, yes, the 100MHz in TFS refers to the carrier frequency, which is but one of several that they tested. But, it also happens to be in the FM radio band and hence the (attention-grabbing) title.

But we cannot depend on success any more than buying a lottery ticket to feed a family.

No one is saying that we should "depend" on it. And there are serious physicists and mathematicians who do doubt that these systems will ever work, but most of that concern is practical: that the fundamental difficulties involved are just too big to ever scale to practical sizes.

Because my career isn't in theoretical physics, I can get away with making controversial statements that at least should be considered.

That you can "get away" with something isn't a reason to do it. And if your career isn't in theoretical physics, computer science, math, or particle physics, then that's all the more reason you shouldn't throw out controversial statements as gospel when they likely are wrong. There's a massive difference between "We should consider if maybe X is true" and "X is true."

Managing 1,000 entangled particles would require the universe to keep track of a staggering amount of information. Does the underlying machinery have information-space this big? No one knows.

Quantum entanglement appears to be a key element of photosynthesis, and systems of more than a hundred million entangled photons have been achieved.

From the Center for Disease Control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpKZvnJwicA

It wasn't profitable to continue research ahead of disaster. Shareholders demanded a better return. (Though Pfizer felt obligated to their history in this area did maintain a small program.)
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-19/health/ct-met-antibiotics-pipeline-20130319_1_drug-resistant-tuberculosis-resistant-bacteria-ketek

How did we get here?
It's likely that we wern't careful to preserve the efficacy of antibiotics. Using wide spectrum antibiotics instead of $$ testing and treating for a specific organism. Surely livestock didn't need it for faster weight gain.

http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture/prescription-for-trouble.html

Bacteria have "learned" to share resistance thus increasing the threat to us.

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/antibiotic-resistance-mutation-rates-and-mrsa-28360

The Slate article mentions there were two Nature papers, but the article summary above only gives a link to one. The papers are:

This one came up with 20 year frequency for these sized events: A 500-kiloton airburst over Chelyabinsk and an enhanced hazard from small impactors

This one looked a bunch of YouTube videos and analyzed how it broke up as it went through the atmosphere:The trajectory, structure and origin of the Chelyabinsk asteroidal impactor

The Slate article mentions there were two Nature papers, but the article summary above only gives a link to one. The papers are:

This one came up with 20 year frequency for these sized events: A 500-kiloton airburst over Chelyabinsk and an enhanced hazard from small impactors

This one looked a bunch of YouTube videos and analyzed how it broke up as it went through the atmosphere:The trajectory, structure and origin of the Chelyabinsk asteroidal impactor

The boycott of Elsevier was primarily related to their "bundling" of journals---the act of forcing libraries to buy subscriptions to their low-impact, narrowly focused, but very expensive journals in order to have access to their high-impact, high-circulation journals. See http://www.nature.com/news/elsevier-boycott-gathers-pace-1.10010

Think about this process.

Elsevier prints journals for which they receive their content FOR FREE from academic researchers, most of whom are funded by taxpayer money. They then receive FREE peer review of those articles from the academic science community, many of whose salaries are paid from taxpayer funds. They then turn around and sell those articles back to the very universities whose professors provided the content and peer review (for FREE), which are also funded by taxpayers. And THEN they have the audacity to price gouge in the process.

Nice work if you can get it. But don't expect to not be called a profiteer.

Ummm ... have nuetrinos actually been detected yet?

I seem to remember a LOT of attempts in a number of deep dark places around the planet, but can't remember any instance where anybody maintained that they'd actually detected a puppy.

Yes they have. Were you thinking of dark matter? If so, the latest results show nothing. A review paper from this summer discussing the hunt can be found here.

One more article on the topic
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n8/full/ngeo1892.html
"A runaway greenhouse could in theory be triggered by increased greenhouse forcing, but anthropogenic emissions are probably insufficient."

According to this even pigeons have a small area of binocular vision. Notice the difference between the owl and pigeon. The owl is biased toward the attack while the pigeon is biased toward the defense but they both have binocular vision in at least a small part. Look at these illustrations showing hawks and crows. Notice the relatively large area of binocular vision. Not as big as owls but bigger than pigeons.

If you do your statistics right, the likelihood of a Type I error is unaffected by sample size. When you use an arbitrary threshold for determining a significant effect (typically 5%), the number of papers attaining that threshold "by chance" (=5%) is independent of sample size.

http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html

Maybe I phrased it badly. Also I gave the wrong link. The correct one is: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html and is worth reading.

The point is that the error being made in research isn't purely a statistical one. It originates in various bad practices, such as "flexible" study design and an ignorance of statistical power. The smaller the sample size, the greater the standard error of the mean. Thus, studies with small sample sizes are more likely to produce an estimate of the population mean that is very different from the true value. Negative results aren't interested and don't get pursued, so we're left with a bias. The result is that under-powered studies are more likely to produce large, "interesting looking", effects which get published in top journals.

If you do your statistics right, the likelihood of a Type I error is unaffected by sample size. When you use an arbitrary threshold for determining a significant effect (typically 5%), the number of papers attaining that threshold "by chance" (=5%) is independent of sample size.

http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html

Maybe I phrased it badly. Also I gave the wrong link. The correct one is: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html and is worth reading.

The point is that the error being made in research isn't purely a statistical one. It originates in various bad practices, such as "flexible" study design and an ignorance of statistical power. The smaller the sample size, the greater the standard error of the mean. Thus, studies with small sample sizes are more likely to produce an estimate of the population mean that is very different from the true value. Negative results aren't interested and don't get pursued, so we're left with a bias. The result is that under-powered studies are more likely to produce large, "interesting looking", effects which get published in top journals.

I'm not going to help edit, because I have little or no use for what common consensus is. I'm interested in fact and truth, not public opinion.

Q.E.D., you are, then, part of problem, and have no right to whine or complain because you can't be bothered to help fix it. Go use Britannica, then... which was found as late as 2005 to be generally no more accurate or reliable than the Wikipedia, with broadly similar error levels. Or how about Nature, who themselves state that retractions in their journal have risen ten-fold in the last decade, even while the number of submissions has only increased 50%. Because they're utterly reliable and the peer-review process can't be subverted, right? How many times was that now-discredited MMR vaccination study reprinted as golden gospel, for how many years? How many times has an outsider to academia and private industry journals made a stunning breakthrough that might have come sooner if only some critical bit information had been publicly available, instead of buried in a back-issue of a private publication? How many millions or billions of dollars have been wasted re-reviewing science that was based on something once taken for truth by the major journal in its field, only to later be proven false?

Like any other information source, Wikipedia will only be as correct and factual as the people contributing to it can muster, and without the help of subject matter experts determined to make sure the truth is told, it will be bottomed on the knowledge available; the Wikipedia, however, has a much larger pool of knowledge and experience available to it - if people choose to take part - than any journal or trade magazine. If people who have and can source/prove/demonstrate the facts on developing, highly technical or contentious subjects would commit to contributing as much to making sure the Wikipedia is accurate as they do to closed academic journals that no one but academics ever read, then we'd be in a much better place, with a better educated populace, as a result of access to true and up-to-date information, as opposed to last year's conjecture and common wisdom. For that matter, how many times did Britannica, for example, choose not to cover a subject - or not cover one in as much detail as was available - in order to conform to demands of governments and corporations, which do not affect the Wikipedia? Somehow I doubt they'd have ever penned more than a footnote - much less an entire article - about FOGBANK... oh wait, look, not even a footnote.

What would lead you to believe that a group of 10 supposed experts in a field editing at a journal are infallible and never make mistakes, but 100 or 1000 people - some of whom may also be just as expert, or even the same experts - cannot come just as close to truth and fact? What makes you think the scientific and history communities have more than a few dozen things they can all settle on as incontrovertible, accepted fact that no one can reasonably debate? Let me guess, you're the same anonymous coward that was arguing a few weeks ago that nobody can make money on making open-source software and that all FOSS sucks because only large corporations get anything done?

How about show me an established article in the Wikipedia - and not a revision someone is vandalizing - that is purporting something to be "fact" that is provably just "public opinion", and wrong at that... and I'll show you an article you should have just fixed, assuming you can demonstrate said fact from a reliable, neutral source. Otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude you're just mad because someone reverted your edits on an article when you tried to assert a claim on a debatable subject and couldn't back it up.

I'd also really like to se

I'm not going to help edit, because I have little or no use for what common consensus is. I'm interested in fact and truth, not public opinion.

Q.E.D., you are, then, part of problem, and have no right to whine or complain because you can't be bothered to help fix it. Go use Britannica, then... which was found as late as 2005 to be generally no more accurate or reliable than the Wikipedia, with broadly similar error levels. Or how about Nature, who themselves state that retractions in their journal have risen ten-fold in the last decade, even while the number of submissions has only increased 50%. Because they're utterly reliable and the peer-review process can't be subverted, right? How many times was that now-discredited MMR vaccination study reprinted as golden gospel, for how many years? How many times has an outsider to academia and private industry journals made a stunning breakthrough that might have come sooner if only some critical bit information had been publicly available, instead of buried in a back-issue of a private publication? How many millions or billions of dollars have been wasted re-reviewing science that was based on something once taken for truth by the major journal in its field, only to later be proven false?

Like any other information source, Wikipedia will only be as correct and factual as the people contributing to it can muster, and without the help of subject matter experts determined to make sure the truth is told, it will be bottomed on the knowledge available; the Wikipedia, however, has a much larger pool of knowledge and experience available to it - if people choose to take part - than any journal or trade magazine. If people who have and can source/prove/demonstrate the facts on developing, highly technical or contentious subjects would commit to contributing as much to making sure the Wikipedia is accurate as they do to closed academic journals that no one but academics ever read, then we'd be in a much better place, with a better educated populace, as a result of access to true and up-to-date information, as opposed to last year's conjecture and common wisdom. For that matter, how many times did Britannica, for example, choose not to cover a subject - or not cover one in as much detail as was available - in order to conform to demands of governments and corporations, which do not affect the Wikipedia? Somehow I doubt they'd have ever penned more than a footnote - much less an entire article - about FOGBANK... oh wait, look, not even a footnote.

What would lead you to believe that a group of 10 supposed experts in a field editing at a journal are infallible and never make mistakes, but 100 or 1000 people - some of whom may also be just as expert, or even the same experts - cannot come just as close to truth and fact? What makes you think the scientific and history communities have more than a few dozen things they can all settle on as incontrovertible, accepted fact that no one can reasonably debate? Let me guess, you're the same anonymous coward that was arguing a few weeks ago that nobody can make money on making open-source software and that all FOSS sucks because only large corporations get anything done?

How about show me an established article in the Wikipedia - and not a revision someone is vandalizing - that is purporting something to be "fact" that is provably just "public opinion", and wrong at that... and I'll show you an article you should have just fixed, assuming you can demonstrate said fact from a reliable, neutral source. Otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude you're just mad because someone reverted your edits on an article when you tried to assert a claim on a debatable subject and couldn't back it up.

I'd also really like to se

This overshooting is by almost all of the prediction models. It is consistent with a systematic error in all model building.

Or it's consistent with our understanding of natural variability in the climate system that there will be periods when temperatures are under the smoothed trend line that climate models produce and there will be periods like the late 1990s when they are above the trend line and the models are just projecting what the expected long term average and trend will be, not the short term natural variability. What could be more telling about the skill of a climate model would be to go back and rerun it with actual input of the variations that occurred in the major sources of natural variability such as ENSO, solar variability and volcanic eruptions. There has been some recent work in that direction (see Kosaka and Xie, 2013). Unfortunately when a typical GCM model run takes 2 or 3 weeks on large expensive supercomputers it's not practical to do a lot of that.

This is one of the reasons I advocate waiting rather than acting on the alleged AGW threat.

That's rather like a smoker saying "I'll wait until I get lung cancer before I quit."

Experimentally entanglement is shown most strongly in the form of Bell violations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem

as e.g.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/abs/nature08363.html

did.

Possibly more importantly, pseudoscience is the articles worst nightmare.

The defensiveness now built into some fields (and here I'm thinking climate science), because of unrelenting, personal attacks does put important discussions like this into a defensive context.

And this is another bitter fruit produced by the anti-science industry, because these discussions are important to have. There are a lot of mistakes in science, but (seeming to me increasingly) there is also data falsification and fraud. [Retraction watch](http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/) is a great website, but it makes sickening reading, and I suspect that it only scratches the surface.

I mean, sometimes, no fucks whatsoever are given. How that got past peer review blows the mind. And any of these.

Remember this letter to Nature (FFS!) pointing out that 70% of the papers in one of their issues didn't say what the error bar represented. How that got past the reviewers is mind boggling. Imagining how it got past the authors requires mental gymnastics. (Since the letter, Nature articles are much better, but Peer Review is not what is catching the errors).

So, lets talk about errors in scientific research, and lets talk about scientific fraud. It's important because its rampant, and despite that there are nutjobs seeing it in their peculiar light lets not be put off. This conversation needs to be had more often, because the problem is dug in at the highest levels of academic prestige.

Props to the Economist for bringing this up. I'd like to see this discussed in Cell, Nature and Science. And I'd like to see credible career protection for whistle-blowers.

Yes:
Amgene paper
Bayer paper
Slashdop dupe from more than a year ago

Yes:
Amgene paper
Bayer paper
Slashdop dupe from more than a year ago

I'm thinking of something sort of like a high-tech paper that could be read by a microscope. An adaption of the microfiche idea, but using something a lot more stable than film, a lot cheaper than film, and with a binary coding rather than photographic images. I envision it as being "normally" processed by somthing vaguely like a cross between paper tape readers/writers and mag tape readers/writers. It would NOT be a cheap medium to have the ability to process, but it would be cheap to process once you had the equipment. And it would be intended just about solely for archival purposes.

Atomic force microscopeis your friend.

It is probably also important that the measurements were of microwaves... from a single point, so there is no direct 2D measurements involved that would make a camera or any vague sense of a camera relevant. The actual article has the figures available for free, even if the article itself is pay-walled. Of note, it is in the letters section of Nature, meaning they were trying to get the results out quickly and tersely, so it wouldn't be surprising they don't have any general public oriented animation, even if someone is planning to do such PR work down the line.

I can't get the link in TFA (in sciencemag.org) that points to the article in nature.com to work. I think this is the article in question.

15 years of no warming despite CO2 emissions continuing

Convenient use of a record high as your starting point. Care to redo your calculations with any other window? Maybe, say, a 20 year window? Or even a 10 year window? What about a 12 year window?

greatly increased Arctic Ice coverage,

[Citation needed] and [Confusing a rebound from a historic low to slightly less historic lows with an increase over average].

increasing Antarctic ice thickness

[Confusing weather with climate] and [Lack of understanding of ice formation]

increasing Antarctic sea ice coverage

[Cherry-picking specific regional ice data points] and [Mistaking surface for volume].

no observed retreat in Himalayan glaciers

[More reading needed]. See also http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n3/abs/ngeo1068.html

I'm just the guy who has been making physical chemistry arguments that show that CO2 has no net effect on the heat capacity of the atmosphere for the last few years

... which has nothing to do with the problem of CO2 trapping IR, or with why the atmosphere is heating up.

arguing instead that what warming we saw was from increased water vapor emissions, which maintain a tight equilibria with their rate of emissions

Water vapor cannot drive long-term heating. A single cold-spell will remove water vapor from the air, which will reduce temperatures, which will remove more water from the air.... Water vapor is the result of warming, not a forcing.

thus the lost decade global growth lead to a lost decade of warming

The global economy was working in overdrive until 2000-2001, and again from 2005 to 2008. Your own data calls you a liar.

bringing AGW idiots to take because they are ignoring the real threat from CO2--ocean acidification and the collapse of already overstressed fisheries.

I'm glad you'll find that all kinds of scientists, but especially marine biologists and oceanographers would love your help in spreading message. Care to sign up maybe with an organization like NOAA or the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute?

But hey, let's all ignore physics

Says the guy who mistakes anecdotes for data, cherry-picks his time frames, misunderstands the overall and problem and thinks that he has a better understanding of physics than Physicists.

Tell you what, write a paper about your insights, and if you're right, the Nobel prize in a few areas is yours. How is that for an incentive to go show up all the AGW believers? You'll be right up there with Galileo, Kopernicus, Pasteur, and a few other up-enders of the consensus.

Altmetrics is a new-ish bibliometic service for scholarly journal articles, including Nature, which is where this was published. Altmetrics includes mainstream media coverage as as well as social media appearance counts e.g. SciBlogs, Twitter as valid data. Physorg is mentioned but I do not see Slashdot. We, the Slashdot collective, demand recognition!

* Unless we are deemed insufficiently social? Anti-social? Of course not.
** Altmetrics is beta-ish, possibly open source, so my indignation is mostly insincere.

Wouldn't it make more sense to fix the root cause of this problem, that is, overfishing?

Heh heh heh. Overfishing. I mean, that's part of the problem, but did you forget about acidification? (Let's just gloss over nuclear currents for a moment.) The significant sea creatures that can tolerate it gracefully are brittle stars and jellyfish. Algae will do okay as well, but kelp won't -- the increased acidification promotes algae that competes with it. So you get a big soup of stars, jellies, and algae. Mmmmmmmm good.

As for what the jellyfish become food for, it's everything below it, like always. Unless you have a problem with bottom-dwellers there's no reason to complain about that. The real issue is what we're doing to our biosphere that's causing these problems.

By all means, stop overfishing, HAHAHAHA. But that won't stop this.

Ok treatment cost you nothing directly in your country. But how many new treatments get developed there?

This is what economists call an "opportunity cost".

Not by the bacteria themselves. I don't think E.Coli do carbon fixation, not yet, anyway. From my understanding, E.coli get their carbon from eating stuff like glucose, rather than from the atmosphere.

I don't have access to the full figures on the paper, but this preview figure seems to show glucose going into the cell

You would be making glucose through photosynthesis in plants or algae or cyanobacteria (I guess?) and THAT would pull carbon from the atmosphere. So yeah, I'm guessing this would still be carbon neutral unless you were somehow getting glucose from something you dug up.

Or there are some biologists out there working for a corporation that requires patents on all research. For some reason they don't agree with this. They are sticking it to the man by preempting their corporate master and posting anonymous coward.

Apparently not. From the comments in the linked article:
"Spiegelman said patents weren't an issue here as he had filed patent applications on this before giving any presentations at scientific meetings on the findings (presenting something publicly before filing would itself invalidate patent applications)."

Here. I'm not Evil Pete, but just googled "billy meier" site:nature.com and that's the only hit. It's now up to six comments.

Here's the paper. The top 32 climate models overestimate temperature by between 71 and 159%.

(and the fact that you think it's a big deal that they tune models to fit past data, as that is the CORE of modeling in general)

Forget "how you test how accurate a model is". Simply look at the divergence between the model output and actual reality. Actual reality is the arbiter of how good the model is especially if you're going to use that model to predict the future. That graph is from a Nature Climate Change Study. It shows the average of the top 32 climate models.

Black holes are not particularly special; the event horizon isn't some solid barrier things crash into. It's merely the point of no return, beyond which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.

That's the conventional view. However lately an argument has been presented which essentially says that if you pass the event horizon you'd burn up in a massive "firewall". And from what I gather, the argument has been very hard to dismiss...

Not-quite-random links here and here.

Research suggests non-celiac wheat allergies actually do exist. Research. Of course, people erroneously self-diagnosing from stuff they've read on the internet and elsewhere also do exist. That does not make you an expert on wheat intolerance, though.

Research suggests non-celiac wheat allergies actually do exist. Research. Of course, people erroneously self-diagnosing from stuff they've read on the internet and elsewhere also do exist. That does not make you an expert on wheat intolerance, though.

"Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming." Nature

...human influence is *always* a contributing factor to weather. Heck, the influence of butterflies is *always* a contributing factor.

The question is, "how big is that factor"?

The answer? So small as to be immeasurable.

http://www.nature.com/news/extreme-weather-1.11428

"Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming."

But on a site that is supposed to cater to educated people (nerds per the masthead), why not use a more technical description instead of one you might find in USA Today or some other media directed to a 6th grade education? Even the word target is much more accurate than recognize.

The term "recognize" is used all the time in the technical literature when discussing how proteins bind to, well, pretty much anything - DNA, small molecules, or other proteins. In fact, the abstract for the actual Nature article uses the phrase "molecular recognition". You may find this unacceptably colloquial, but it's common usage in the field at this point.

(Yes, I am a biochemist.)

What I explained does not make the typical IQ test subjective, it makes it misunderstood: it is simply a test of pattern recognition skill, rather than some sort of generalized, inherent intelligence (which probably doesn't even exist, as people can always be taught to learn better.) If individuals display a consistent drop in performance during IQ testing, trusting that the tests have been constructed in the same manner with comparable problems, then that really does say something coherent and meaningful, even if it's been wrongly described or isn't clearly understood—for example, that the subjects have been less motivated to hone their learning ability.

The study is actually very aggressive and very thorough about including a diverse collection of individuals from different backgrounds (both users and non-users), and can safely be assumed to be properly controlled for most describable variables, as the dataset was collected for a multitude of applications.

If the IQ test were completely uninformative or unrepeatable, it would've been thrown out long before its incompleteness was recognized.

Two problems.

- First, the link in the GP post isn't about IQ. You're arguing apples (IQ) when the subject is oranges (mental health).

- Second, you overstate the results of Røgeberg's research.

Does marijuana lower IQ? New study challenges link

In an interview, Rogeberg said he's not claiming that his alternative explanation is definitely right, just that the methods and evidence in the original study aren't enough to rule it out. He suggested further analyses the researchers could do with their data.

The Duke scientists, who learned of Rogeberg's paper late last week, disagree and said they conducted new statistical tests that ruled out his explanation.

Rogeberg says they need to do still more work to truly rule it out.

As the researchers debate, experts unconnected to the two papers said the Rogeberg paper doesn't overturn the original study. It "raises some interesting points and possibilities," but provides "speculation" rather than new data based on real people, said Dr. Duncan Clark, who studies alcohol and drug use in adolescents at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said observational studies of people like the Duke work can't definitively demonstrate that marijuana causes irreversible effects on the brain. In an email, she said Rogeberg's paper "looks sound" but doesn't prove that his alternative explanation is correct either.

Pot smokers might not turn into dopes after all

What do the original paper's authors make of Røgeberg's analysis?
Madeline Meier, a psychologist at the Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, who co-wrote the original paper with her colleagues, says that Røgeberg's ideas are interesting. However, she points out that the authors of the first PNAS paper restricted their analysis to individuals in middle-class families and those with low or high socioeconomic status. The outcome suggests that the decline in IQ cannot be attributed to socioeconomic factors alone.

In their original analysis, Meier says, she and her colleagues controlled for socioeconomic status and found that in all socioeconomic categories, the IQs of children who were not heavy users remained unchanged from adolescence to adulthood. Therefore, she says, socioeconomic status does not influence IQ decline.

I probably shouldn't bother because I think your mind is made up but I'll mention a few.

First, the reduction in Arctic summer sea ice is affecting northern temperate zone weather and is probably a factor in the weird weather we've experienced over the past several years.

Ocean acidification is starting to affect crustaceans in the oceans such as oyster farms on the Oregon coast having trouble with larvae mortality. A just published paper in Nature finds that acidification will reduce the release of dimethylsulphide (DMS) by phytoplankton. DMS is an aerosol that helps in forming clouds and generally has a cooling effect so less of it will be a positive feedback of global warming.

There have been drought conditions most years in the American Southwest since 2000, so much so that both Lake Powell and Lake Mead on the Colorado River are around 100 feet below full pool now. They are cutting releases from Lake Powell for the first time in response. This is a predicted effect of global warming.

Those are just a few of many examples that could be listed.

It's caused by natural cycles in the ocean mostly, as a new paper convincingly shows.

There are actually about a couple dozen companies that could realistically compete, in addition to labs like Church's. (This list includes them, along with some ancillary service companies.) The eight participants mentioned were merely those parties that had announced intent earlier; the rules have been revised and the other six gave up. The fact that it never attracted participants like Illumina, arguably the biggest name in sequencing, shows that the technology just isn't commercially viable enough, even with the possibility of the $10M subsidy if they win.

Latency is completely irrelevant for the intended purpose. It's clearly mentioned in TFA that link speed and efficiency / beam focus are the critical concerns. I don't think parent understands that NASA's purposes don't always involve simplistic consumerist notions of two-way low latency traffic, such as with computer games.

Latency will always be constrained by the speed of light. I don't see the point of lamenting the speed of light in a criticism of a new technology, when that ought to be dead obvious.

About the cloud issue:

The laser on NASA’s upcoming LADEE mission will communicate directly with Earth using a different approach that is less susceptible to atmospheric interference. It encodes information AM-style by tweaking the amplitudes rather than the frequency of a light wave’s peaks.

And:

LADEE carries NASA’s first dedicated laser communications system. With a bandwidth of 622 megabits per second, more than six times what is possible with radio from the distance of the Moon, the system can broadcast high-definition television-quality video. But even though its AM optical system is good at penetrating Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, it will still need a backup radio link for cloudy days when the laser is blocked. To minimize this problem, LADEE’s primary ground station is in a largely cloudless desert in New Mexico, with alternative sites in two other sunny spots: California and the Canary Islands.

Nature | News - Lasers boost space communications

"Explosions at Fukushima actually vaporised an incredible amount of plutonium."

Where's the evidence of that? Most of the emissions have been more volatile stuff (e.g., Iodine and Cesium) and stuff in solution in water (strontium-90), because that's what can most easily leak out of the containment. The release of more refractory (high temperature of vaporization) isotopes is quite small at Fukushima in comparison to Chernobyl. In fact, scientists didn't detect significant Pu until a very careful survey was done and reported about year later. The Fukushima results are several orders of magnitude lower (by about 10000x) for Pu. That matches the observed fact that the cores at Fukushima were never directly exposed to the open atmosphere, whereas Chernobyl's was literally blown to pieces and strewn across the terrain. So, claiming that "an incredible amount of plutonium" was vaporized is a bit of an exaggeration, unless you're referring to plutonium that is still trapped inside of the reactor cores and buildings rather than released into the surrounding environment, or unless you mean that any amount of plutonium released in the atmosphere is an "incredible amount" (in which case I refer you to the decades of weapons testing that strew the stuff all over the planet and are still detectable as background). It's bad in the vicinity of Fukushima inside the exclusion zones, but in concentration, total amount, and distance, it is a lot smaller than Chernobyl by every measure.

The Russian effort to contain Chernobyl was an admirable effort under much harsher conditions than Fukushima.. That led to a much more desperate approach that included shovelling the pieces of core back into the building, dumping tons of concrete, sand, and all sorts of material on there, some of which it was later determined did not help, but made things worse. Dumping sandbags on top of the thing from helicopters wasn't exactly a carefully-considered solution, although they did try to mix as much boron (neutron absorber) as they could into it. Given the situation and the many unknowns about what was going on, the way it was done is not surprising, but it did lead to a rather unstable structure that is anything but "safe as possible for the foreseeable future". You can't be serious about that when the Ukraine has been spending years building a new containment structure because the old one is leaky and in danger of collapsing. By contrast, most of the main structures at Fukushima are still intact (the hydrogen explosions were *outside* the containment), which makes the task of entombing the reactors somewhat easier and less hazardous, and it doesn't have the same kind of urgency because you don't have radioactive graphite blocks burning and large pieces of fuel all over the ground in the area. Fukushima isn't a good situation, but it doesn't justify the same kind of desperate and risky approach as at Chernobyl.

"And yet, the people around Fukushima were definitively told by government scientists that radiation below a certain level was COMPLETELY harmless."

If they were told that, then it was wrong. If, on the other hand, they were told that radiation exposure below a certain level was no worse than the kind of exposures that people accept every day when they fly on a plane, eat a banana, or just sit in a room with natural radioactivity all around them, then that would be fine. There is indeed a level of radiation below which there is no point worrying about, because we get exposed to that much regardless of what we do. That's why "background radiation" isn't zero.

The suggestion that this is some kind of experiment is nonsensical. People are studying the area to understand the risks and the best strategy for containing and remediating the area. Accusing people of participating in an intentional medical experiment on the citizens of Japan by using supposedly sub-standard containment practices is grossly offensive.

And yet you confused gene-expression with genetics.

I did no such thing. In the first post I mentioned that there are numerous things to detect and measure, none of them were genes. I really hope you are not trying to claim that the only cause of suicide is genetic disorder.

BTW, the funding is there as always:

According to the referenced article this is a wide field study with 64 references to track down. Funding for certain projects is not always obvious, but harder when you have to research that many connections. Shelters to hide fund sources are not something new or unheard of.