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Not true. One of the leading researchers who publishes in peer-reviewed journals has repeatedly criticized studies supporting gun control when they went against the evidence.
http://www.nature.com/news/firearms-research-the-gun-fighter-1.12864

None of the firearms researchers was ever accused of falsifying evidence -- merely of coming to conclusions that the NRA and their supporters disagreed with.

Perhaps you're thinking of John Lott, who didn't back up his hard drive, and lost his paper documentation, and couldn't remember the names of any researchers, and who created an online meat puppet named Mary Rosh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott#Controversy

The really silly thing about the dust-up with AMS is that the PAMELA experiment (later confirmed by Fermi) made the exact same measurement and is credited with the discovery. AMS just re-did it with smaller error bars. Here's the original PAMELA paper from 2009: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7238/full/nature07942.html (preprint here: http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4995 ) The dark matter interpretation isn't even new. All AMS has brought is smaller error bars.

It's technical.

Okay, basically there are a bunch of noble gas isotopes (He, Ne, Ar, and Xe). Some of these are generated by radioactive decay of isotopes within the Earth, and some are not, having been generated by nuclear fusion in the stars that eventually went supernova and were subsequently swept up by gravity to form the solar system. Over geological time, the ratio between these essentially "fixed"/inherited/initial isotopic amounts in the Earth and the newer "radiogenic" isotopes changes. This can be measured in the present-day atmosphere, which amounts to a kind of time-and-geographically-averaged sample of what is currently outgassing from the entire Earth. By contrast, if you isolate/trap some of these gasses in minerals or fractures and fail to mix them with newer radiogenic sources over time, then they're going to preserve the isotopic ratios from the time that they first got trapped and last interacted with the isotopic mixture that was slowly outgassing from the Earth at the time. The change in the isotopic ratios are something you can pretty easily project backwards if you know the average composition of the Earth, which we do (based on some types of meteorites that fall here and that represent undifferentiated leftovers from the formation of the solar system). Measure the isotopic composition of the fluid sample, look along that line describing how the isotopic ratios have changed over Earth history due to known rates of decay and concentrations, and you can estimate the corresponding age of the sample. The focus in this paper is Xe isotopes, but they have data for Ne, He, and Ar as well.

This is *not* a traditional radiometric dating method, which ordinarily uses minerals, not fluids. Furthermore, for minerals it's usually fairly easy to look at the mineralogy of a sample at a microscopic scale and assess whether it is likely the system has remained closed (isolated from isotopic exchange with its surroundings) before analyzing the sample. For example, if a feldspar grain containing K has been partly altered into micas, this shows up clearly and would indicate that any result from the K/Ar method wouldn't reliably give you the age of the feldspar.

The method with the fluids is almost the reverse. If the system had not remained closed/isolated (the normal expectation), then the multiple isotopic systems shouldn't yield a similar age. They do (within measurement uncertainties), implying the bold interpretation that the fluids have indeed been isolated for that long.

An additional wrinkle is that they are analyzing fluids both from fractures and from what are called "fluid inclusions", which are microscopic (typically 100 microns or less) pockets of fluid trapped within individual mineral grains (trapping fluids at the time the grain crystallized). Being able to compare those two types allows some additional assessment of mixing between fluids of different generations and origins (e.g., shallow crustal versus deep mantle fluids) and a host of other subtleties. Additional information is also provided by comparing to previously-published fluid analyses from other locations (South Africa and Australia) that are already known to be about the same host rock age. In any case, finding that fluid inclusions have an "ancient" isotopic signature isn't that big a deal (it means the minerals haven't been recrystallized by processes since then). The big surprise is finding that even the larger fractures seem to show the same signature rather than that of water with more modern isotopic compositions. That's amazing. And deserves some skepticism, which the authors try to address by looking at the other isotopic systems.

That's about as far as I can get with only a few paragraphs of explanation. It only scratches the surface, but I hope it helps.

IEEE Spectrum apologised for that article:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/hardware/big-win-for-the-losers-at-dwave

It's a quantum computer all right, just not a universal quantum computer. But it should still show quantum speedups for discrete optimization problems.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/04/further-proof-for-controversial-quantum-computer.html

So far, tests have been very promising:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829173.500-commercial-quantum-computer-leaves-pc-in-the-dust.html

If it continues to speed up like this, there are some very exciting times ahead of us!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/8054771535/ (Rose's Law, the quantum computer equivalent of Moore's Law)

[quote]Scientists have long known that the locations of Earth’s geographic poles are not fixed. Over the course of the year, they shift seasonally as Earth’s distributions of snow, rain and humidity change. “Usually [the shift] is circular, with a wobble,” says Chen.

But underlying the seasonal motion is a yearly motion that is thought to be driven in part by continental drift. It was the change in that motion that caught the attention of Chen and his colleagues, who used data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to determine whether ice loss had shifted and accelerated the yearly polar drift.[/quote] Source

As you see there are 'natural' causes for this. But according to this article the scientists are concerned of the differences from the 'natural' patterns of these changes and link these to the 'accelerated' climate change we're currently experiencing.

Here's the article I think you are referring to, published in March. Behind a paywall of course. Just kidding :-) It looks like anybody can read it. VERY interesting, with actual numbers and the "price versus impact" chart is awesome. What is shows is open access journals still have significant costs, but that they are in range of the costs it takes for a society to fund them or for submitters to pay, or that with a little subsidy from a host university or other institution, it should be possible to cover. Those numbers make it pretty obvious it's the way we are going, but it's going to take some time, and even when we get there the traditional publishers are still going to have a huge mountain of older journal articles that they can sit on forever and mine for money every time someone wants to access them.

All good questions. Some investigations are yielding some some answers.

"Bottom-dwelling fish in the Fukushima area show radioactivity levels above the limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram set by the Japanese government. Greenlings, for example, have been found to have levels as high as 25,000 becquerels per kilogram." That's more than just a little excess.

In concrete terms, losses to the fishing industry exceeding a billion dollars are mentioned, with "many fisheries" still closed as of November 2012.

Was the evacuation necessary? Well, it's the government's decision to make, and they made it. Some 4,500 square miles – an area almost the size of Connecticut – was found to have radiation levels that exceeded Japan’s allowable exposure rate of 1 mSV (millisievert) per year. 310 square miles were declared "permanent" exclusion zones. Estimates of the lost economic value of these losses range from $250 to 500 billion.

What precisely are those long-standing problems?

I ask because I actually know people who are starting to demonstrate the rudiments of intelligence using simulations of ~100,000 neurons.

Per upthread, that's a long way from a brain, and in fact we don't even know how all of the brain is wired, let alone how it works. But you might want to consider this and this and this.

If they're attempting the impossible, you should let them know not to waste their money.

autistic intelligence have been done for years with neural nets, the limitation is abstracting this basic equation estimation technique (which is all the neural construct really do.) and I guess the article describes a need way to overcome some obstacles.

IMHO the biggest challenge is really training data, you dont have enough of it, take a project like OpenCog, they've done simulations in secondlife, and this is problary the best route available for the moment. The best route would be to stuff the AI in an actual body, cause there is more training data in the real world than anywhere else.

What precisely are those long-standing problems?

I ask because I actually know people who are starting to demonstrate the rudiments of intelligence using simulations of ~100,000 neurons.

Per upthread, that's a long way from a brain, and in fact we don't even know how all of the brain is wired, let alone how it works. But you might want to consider this and this and this.

If they're attempting the impossible, you should let them know not to waste their money.

The researchers find a target the drug companies take it from there, but increasingly it is the first part that is most expensive.

Ok, my turn to demand a source: Which target took $4 billion to identify?

Right now the industry side spends $135 billion on R&D for which it gets ~30 new drugs approved per year plus new research on already approved drugs. Most of that is spent on phase II and III clinical trials, which are costing up to $100M each these days. For pretty much all drugs the vast majority of money and man hours are spent on developing and proving the drug (in industry), not on the target.

It may in fact be cheaper for society to do all this on the government dime, there is a lot of waste in the drug industry a lot of it from its very nature as private research. Fixing this would involve the government massively increasing research funding and deliberately killing an industry, not likely in the short run.

A little of that waste in private research is due to university research: most of the targets identified in the literature turn out to be irreproducible or unusable:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug_target.html

I think there's a lot of room for an enlightened government to more efficiently turn dollars into drugs than the present system, but I'm not convinced yet. Especially not now with the congressmen in charge of the NIH dumping peer review for their own religious and political views.

[source needed]

Sorry, a couple of years ago I looked at a year's worth of drug approvals and came up with 15%. The actual data (1998-2007) say 24% came from academia:

http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v9/n11/full/nrd3251.html

Firewalled, but there is a great discussion at In The Pipeline that breaks out the numbers:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/11/04/where_drugs_come_from_the_numbers.php

Of course more and more university research is funded by Pharma these days, especially the efforts that are most likely to lead to new drugs. Which column would you put that drug in?

Using a word like deniers to label people whose opinion you oppose is morally offensive. Climate changes this rapidly fairly commonly. http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097 If you review the vostok data the Holocene is already much longer than any recent interglacials, from that data we can infer that a glaciation lasting approx. 10000 years is about to descend and ruin human civilization. I'm not saying greenhouse gases are not causing global warming. What I'm saying is that is a hell of a lot better then dealing with another ice age. . The theory for long term global warming seems to be based on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIS_11 Hitting a window of 30000 years width 400000 years ago while simultaneously predicting the Milankovitch cycles at the time is a lot to bet the fate of humanity on. Picking MIS-11 out of the last five interglacials seems to me like cherry picking your data to support a populare opinion. Further, the guy who wrote the book picking MIS-11 wrote a book claiming the exact opposite in the seventies. New data on MIS-11 refutes it's pleasantly warm reputation. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2748712/ IF you look at all the scientific evidence other than the geologically insignificant data for the last 130 years it is abundantly obvious that a long-term ice age is much more likely than long-term global warming.

Bringing the numbers closer to human-scale, a 300 parts per million is the same as 3 parts per 10,000. Similarly 400 is 4 parts per 10,000. So basically, we've gone from 3 molecules per 10,000 to 4 molecules of CO2 per 10,000 molecules of air.

In the same period, plankton levels have declined over 1% per year since the late 1970's. John Martin at MBARI postulated that the decline was due to a decline of dissolved iron in the oceans. He's quoted as saying "Give me a tanker full of iron and I'll give you an ice age." A series of experiments, IRONEX and SOFEX demonstrated that he was right - adding iron caused the plankton to bloom. The SOFEX bloom lasted longer than the 45 days allotted to collect plankton samples. IRONEX demonstrated that the predators could find the bloom and feed on it.

You want to reduce CO2 levels? Stop hunter-gatherer style fishing and start farming the oceans. Of course, then the problems will be keeping the earth warm enough to avoid another ice age and preventing fish rustlers from making off with your harvest.

Maybe something like this? It's not like battery technology is just standing still while portable devices proliferate.

It depends on what is meant by duplication. If two groups are researching the same thing using the same means regarding the same factors, then that is doing something in parallel. I can see that as a (possible) waste of money that could be used to research something else concurrently. Only slight related, when it is different agencies funding the same party, then you have fraud: http://www.nature.com/news/duplicate-grant-case-puts-funders-under-pressure-1.9984

Replication is different and would not fall under duplication as it is done serially. First, one group does research into the topic followed by a separate group that tries to reproduce the results. Trying to replicate the results at the same time as another group that is unfinished with their research is potentially wasteful.

If the results are useful, then I am sure some entity will try to reproduce it without government funding. If the project was politically-motivated, then I am almost certain another party will fund research into that topic without need for government funding.

Personally, I wish the news would do a little research into past projects that were duplicated to either prove or disprove the issue with duplication. They just want a fight between the two parties to get more readers. I guess this was too hard for them to find: http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.serve&File_id=2dccf06d-65fe-4087-b58d-b43ff68987fa Page 20 talks about duplication between the various agencies. Skimming through that report really makes me want to have the NSF cleaned. For example, "An Indiana University (IU) professor received a $263,281 grant from the NSF to study the social impact of tourism in the country of Norway." Funding that over cancer research?!?

And these people, and these people, and these people, and these people, and these people, and all the other farmers who willingly buy them. But yeah, other than them, who needs crop improvement techniques?

And these people, and these people, and these people, and these people, and these people, and all the other farmers who willingly buy them. But yeah, other than them, who needs crop improvement techniques?

The Slashdot summary and 3rd party source says "skin cells", but the paper indicates the specific cell type used were "mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs)"

Well, fibroblasts are common in the skin, and you can easily get fibroblasts from taking a small patch of skin. You're right that they're not the keratinized cells that make up most of the skin, but they are in the skin.

Induced OPC cells integrate into their normal niche, insulating neurons (at least at the cellular level). Didn't see much discussion of whether or not it altered the hypomyelinated ("shiver" mouse) phenotype.

It did restore at least some myelination but not all of the axons, and I didn't see anything about it improving the shivers.

PS. Got off topic there. Anyway, here is the figure in question, I tested it on my phone, that shouldn't be behind a paywall. LM and N are the panels to focus on. It appears that not all the axons are myelinated, but the ones that are look like they're completely ensheathed.

Searching for "shiver" I didn't see anything about a reduction in shivers in the treated mice. That would have been pretty huge had it rescued the "symptoms" of the condition, so I'm going to assume that at this first pass it wasn't enough to "fix" these mice enough to detect. It would have been really nice had it done that, but this is just a first pass. Hopefully subsequent studies will refine the process to the point where most of the axons are remyelinated, then it may actually fix MS or other diseases.

For discrete molecules, you can only win a "composition of matter" patent on something that does not exist naturally. You can, however, patent a method for extracting, manipulating, packaging a natural product or even a specific use for it. The courts seem to have created a distinction between polynucleotides and small molecules; i.e., awarding a patent for a sequence of DNA is basically the same as awarding a composition of matter patent on a natural product and should not be allowed. If anything, they should treat unique, non-natural sequences under copyright law like we do with patterns of symbols/widgets that represent information. Any idiot can make DNA--I'm doing it right now--but any idiot cannot design a sequence of DNA that folds into a smiley face.

Drug companies may exchange the anion of a salt or use an ethyl group instead of a propyl group, but to get the composition of matter patent, they must prove that the new molecule rises to the level of "intellectual property" in that it changes the properties and is non-obvious to an expert. Over the years, "non-obvious" has been fairly rigorously defined by trial and error and the input of a lot of experts. Thus, I really don't see how the Supreme Court needs to get involved in this case. They are scientifically illiterate and susceptible to irrelevant philosophical arguments about life, evolution, etc. A better fix, IMHO, is to treat all polynucleotides as natural products and only allow patents on the methodology of their isolation/use/etc. If a company really, truly comes up with a crazy break-through based on a heretofore unknown sequence of DNA/RNA, then treat it like a trade secret. It works for Coke.

The current system for awarding patents for what is basically a series of A, C, G T/U that you dug out of a longer series encoded in a polymer unquestionably stifles innovation because it allows companies to block anything involving a particular gene. (They already exclude personal use for obvious reasons, i.e., you can't tell your cells to stop expressing a specific gene.) A trickier issue arises with organisms that have been designed for particular experiments, like a strain of yeast, or a mouse with a particular set of genes knocked out or a bacteria that is programmed to insert a section of DNA from a specific plasmid template. The designers of these organisms put a lot of work into them, but the final product can be cloned, not unlike an MP3 of a song. Unlike an MP3, however, they will do it themselves (given enough Barry White), so you can buy one and then just keep a population going in the lab. So how do you balance the rights of the inventor to profit without competition for a limited time (i.e., incentive) against the slippery slope of patenting entire organisms? Last I checked, they limit these patents to organisms whose genes were manipulated artificially, but it won't be long until humans fall into that category.

It would seem that scientific publishing in the current model is on the way out. Let's look at some of the problems.

Tenure and status are influenced [highly] on publication. Thus, there is an incentive to publish trivial results, to publish results using shaky statistical reasoning, and to publish erroneous and fraudulent results. (Example)

Because of the emphasis on "quantity" instead of "quality", few results are independently verified. (Example)

Journals demand that scientists turn over the rights of publication in order to get published. The journals, in turn, charge outrageous fees to view the work - so high, that most of the work is inaccessible to the general public. (Example)

The fees are growing so large that smaller universities can no longer afford journal subscriptions. (Example)

The journals do not pay for peer review, or editing, or (in the modern age) even printing and binding. So far as anyone can tell, they are rent-seekers; they provide no services of note to the scientists, their readers, or the community in general. (Example)

It is entirely possible to masquerade as a scientific journal. In fact, journal quality is a spectrum that contains completely bogus, slightly spurious, mostly useful, and high quality. Being published by a notable company such as Elsevier is no guarantee of quality. (Example)

There is enormous monetary value in published papers which validate the particular positions or opinions. (Example)

These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure people can find other problems with the current system. Sadly, I can't think of any way to fix the current system. It has so many inherent problems that we should probably transition to a different model, but I don't know what should be.

The problem with antibiotics, rather, is that you have to finish the entire run lest you'll end up merely training your infection to become resistant. So it's not strictly a problem of prescribing the stuff too often; it's that plus far too many people starting to feel fine then not finishing the cure.

Moreover, recent studies show that antibiotics kill a lot of the "good" bacteria in the gut, and it takes some time to recover, if at all. During that time, the patient is vulnerable to various other diseases. Some might even be caused by a lack of the right bacteria.

See poop transplants

There are "balancing" antibiotics which are actually used for this purpose as well - two separate ones with different effects. I've been on them in fact, and it did wonders for some persistent issues I'd been having.

The problem with antibiotics, rather, is that you have to finish the entire run lest you'll end up merely training your infection to become resistant. So it's not strictly a problem of prescribing the stuff too often; it's that plus far too many people starting to feel fine then not finishing the cure.

Moreover, recent studies show that antibiotics kill a lot of the "good" bacteria in the gut, and it takes some time to recover, if at all. During that time, the patient is vulnerable to various other diseases. Some might even be caused by a lack of the right bacteria.

See poop transplants

And this.

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

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

Let's take a look:

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

Science: Higgs Boson Positively Identified

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

and various science outlets:

Science News: nothing at present

LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson

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

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

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

Discovering that which the maths already shows exists is hardly a great discovery. Or perhaps some of you are dumb enough to think maths (in a fundamental sense) can be wrong.

...or right. As Bertrand Russell said, Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.". The full paragraph in which that appears explains in more detail:

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of _anything_, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. Both these points would belong to applied mathematics. We start, in pure mathematics, from certain rules of inference, by which we can infer that _if_ one proposition is true, then so is some other proposition. These rules of inference constitute the major part of the principles of formal logic. We then take any hypothesis that seems amusing, and deduce its consequences. _If_ our hypothesis is about _anything_, and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.

Shorter Bertrand Russell: math is all about making some assumptions for the lulz and seeing what comes out the other end, not about Truth-with-a-capital-T.

(And Gödel's incompleteness theorem indicates that no set of assumptions is sufficient to let you prove or disprove every possibly "this is what comes out the other end" statement.)

Here's a fact. In the early days of nuclear science, the 'neutron' was considered a 'state secret' and its existence was missing from public science books of the time.

I guess by 1932 the "early days of nuclear science" had passed.

Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better. When it comes to the major disease vectors, "it's difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage", says insect ecologist Steven Juliano, of Illinois State University in Normal. A world without mosquitoes would be "more secure for us", says medical entomologist Carlos Brisola Marcondes from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. "The elimination of Anopheles would be very significant for mankind."

The link to the actual paper is at the end of the Science Daily article, under "Journal reference".

It's an doi link which ultimately resolves to http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2013.24.html

The lack of specifics comes from reading about it via a news aggregator in the popular press. Going to the horses's mouth gets you all you could possibly want:

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat3575.html

From the Supplementary Materials PDF:

Tc,p = 0 Values

(STO 1.2nm / Co-doped Ba-122 13nm) x24 . . .= 17.0K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 20nm) x24 . = 22.3K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 20nm) x16 . = 22.9K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 13nm) x24 . = 22.4K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 13nm) x16 . = 22.5K
Single layer Co-doped Ba-122 . . . . . . . .= 20.5K

The question -- as it always is -- is: What is the operating temperature range for this material? Because if it's still "refrigerate or die", applications will not expand much beyond where they are today.

I don't have a subscription to Nature Materials, but squinting at the thumbnail graphs available for free, looks like the transition temperature is somewhere around 17-24 Kelvin. As far as I can tell, main advance here is in improving Critical Current Density and Irreversibility Field limits.

Also, tag for story summary: whereisthefuckingpaper

Just fyi, the scientist whose budgets are being cut agree with you. We cannot adequately fund science, education, and social services while gratuitously financing gratuitous military spending and asinine wars on drugs, brown people, etc.

We should first cut it all by 10% per year for a few years, make all those federal contractors show declining profits despite their lobbyists efforts. We should then evaluate which government financed industries tightened their belts but still did the work and which just pocketed the same amount while cutting real work. Any industries in the second category should continue getting cut.

Colin Macilwain. Science should be ready to jump off ‘the cliff’. Nature 491, 639 (29 November 2012) doi:10.1038/491639a

These aren't real scientists asking that government money stick around, but lobbyists for companies that feed upon science funding. Scientists love more government money of course, but many scientists understand that far must be cut, especially in military spending.

Sequestration merely provides an opportunity to re-evaluate what is important. Our question should be : Do we decide "important" by consulting lobbyists or by looking at the work that gets done.

Are you looking at the same link I am? There's a video at the bottom of the article showing them in all their wired up glory. http://www.nature.com/news/intercontinental-mind-meld-unites-two-rats-1.12522

If only there was a paper explaining it~

Did you read the paper? if so please show me where it's rubbish. If not, STFU and let us adults who have read the paper talk about it, m'kay?

. One heat-stress metric with broad occupational health applications4, 5, 6 is wet-bulb globe temperature. We combine wet-bulb globe temperatures from global climate historical reanalysis7 and Earth System Model (ESM2M) projections8, 9, 10 with industrial4 and military5 guidelines for an acclimated individual’s occupational capacity to safely perform sustained labour under environmental heat stress (labour capacity)"

SO they took known data involving sustaining labour under heat stressed and applied it to the climate change.

They aren't making data up.

YOU otoh are claiming an increase in temperature does not effect production based on..what, your ass?
please, tell me, specifically, what you find wrong with the report:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nclimate1827-s1.pdf

You apparently can't read comments when they don't agree with your logic.

I'm not saying the data is wrong; I am saying there is NO PROOF OF CORRELATION because there are more external variables than you can possibly count or even use. Therefore, the report is a conjecture of unproven relational attributes and theoretical, hypothetical, time-wasting attempts to tie information together into something that proves *ANY POINT* in relation.

That data can be read, reported, graphed, and put into reports all you want. What you can't do, unless you're completely lacking scientific process, is to tie something that has hundreds of thousands (and I'm just making that number up, BTW) of external modifiers to data points and to say that they are related in a cause-effect relationship.

The fucking data is fine. The use of the data in generating a relational cause and effect REPORT is COMPLETE BS.

Did I stutter on this reply, or is my initial comment clear now?

If only there was a paper explaining it~

Did you read the paper? if so please show me where it's rubbish. If not, STFU and let us adults who have read the paper talk about it, m'kay?

. One heat-stress metric with broad occupational health applications4, 5, 6 is wet-bulb globe temperature. We combine wet-bulb globe temperatures from global climate historical reanalysis7 and Earth System Model (ESM2M) projections8, 9, 10 with industrial4 and military5 guidelines for an acclimated individual’s occupational capacity to safely perform sustained labour under environmental heat stress (labour capacity)"

SO they took known data involving sustaining labour under heat stressed and applied it to the climate change.

They aren't making data up.

YOU otoh are claiming an increase in temperature does not effect production based on..what, your ass?
please, tell me, specifically, what you find wrong with the report:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nclimate1827-s1.pdf

Also, it does not seem as if the zircons rode to Mauritius on the wind, says Robert Duncan, a marine geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. âoeThereâ(TM)s a remote possibility that they were wind blown, but theyâ(TM)re probably too large to have done so,â he adds.

How big is too large? Apparently dust gets blown quite far: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100809/full/news.2010.396.html

Or could they be from an asteroid?

It seems like the page was up at some point:

http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/category.html?code=archive_news

Wow, that was hard. Here's a good one from the most recent issue.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11905.html

Two words:
1) somatic mutations: http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/somatic-mosaicism-and-chromosomal-disorders-867

2) mosiacs: http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/science/2368/chimeras_and_mosaics.html

Mutations happen all through the life of an organism. If that mutation happens in a germ cell (sperm or egg) the mutation is passed down to every cell in the next generation. However, if the mutation occurs in a somatic cell (non-germ cell), then when this cell divides (during growth) all the resulting cells carry the mutation.

In chimera (similar, but slightly different) you can have a person with one blue eye and one brown eye.

According to this article on Nature.com the diameter is estimated to be 15 meters, with a mass of 40 tonne!

This publishing model already has some competition. Here is an article from a similar pay-to-publish-under-professional-editorship journal: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326

My concerns with such models, despite the excellent credentials for the objectivity of the present crop of promoters/purveyors, is that as an author, you are buying your way into people's attention. It is difficult to imagine a fire wall separating advertising intentions from pure scientific communication that can really work when the motives are thus configured. And what on earth would keep a bunch of well funded liars like American Heritage Institute from buying up all the articles they want? Meanwhile out in real world of academic publishing [yes oxymoronic] it would appear that "Academic researchers want to make their papers open access for the world to read." is a bit off the mark: wisely or not, researchers often choose less-than-open journals for their papers

This is just reality: highly skilled STEMs are now getting pristine rewards on par with other skilled professionals, like medical doctors, lawyers etc... For this situation to stay this way, STEM should regroup and create their own professional association which requires qualification exams etc... This will ensure that all STEMs are judged on established standard of qualifications and not from some dubious Ph.D. (or else) obtained from lesser known universities (e.g. from China and India). This is not too far stretched. Indeed many companies now are putting coding-exams in their hiring policies because they got burned too frequently. STEMs in managerial positions should hire only STEM professionals that have qualified to the "STEM exams". A very good read: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html "To Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who studies PhD trends, it is "scandalous" that US politicians continue to speak of a PhD shortage. ..."

The results are described in a letter published this week in Nature Biotechnology

looks to be paywalled, @ $32 for a single article?

So here's an article about this guy setting up multiple websites to astroturf his reputation online AFTER he was disgraced. It looks like this is a continuation of his shameless strategy:

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473138a.html

http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030120/full/news030113-10.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111122112023.htm

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120730-caffeinated-seas-pacific-northwest-caffeine-coffee-science/

http://researchmatters.noaa.gov/news/Pages/caffeine.aspx

Man, if you want to start getting down to the part-per-trillion and part-per-quadrillion levels, we'll be able to see variation in 'pollution' levels for any known substance. Example, the National Geographic article notes the 'polluted' seas had caffeine levels of 45 ng/L. Compare that to a 12 oz. drink with 100 mg of caffeine in it. The 'pollution' we're talking about is at 0.0000016% the concentration found in caffeinated drinks.
I know a lot of scientists really want to ask and answer questions like "can increasing caffeine levels 0.000002% in the environment cause problems?", but the fact is until we actually understand how the environment works as a system and how living creatures' bodies work as a system, we will not have the tools at hand to answer them. The statistical tools we have developed instead of this systemic knowledge are constantly abused, either by failing to control for variables, or simply ignoring basic assumptions underlying the physical and/or statistical model.

Top level scientists in the 21st century are dropping the ball.

http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030120/full/news030113-10.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111122112023.htm

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120730-caffeinated-seas-pacific-northwest-caffeine-coffee-science/

http://researchmatters.noaa.gov/news/Pages/caffeine.aspx

Dr. Steven Chu brought authority and evidence-based science to the US Cabinet. Former professor of physics at Stanford, he shared a Nobel prize for physics in 1997 for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. he continued to publish science while serving as Secretary of Energy.

His very expertise and lifelong, professional interest were very lamely attacked by the right wing machine, typically accusing him of avocating raising oil prices and gas prices.

Having Dr. Chu there did more to forward the cause of science in the US Government in generations. How many administrations could walk down a hallway and access a scientist at the top of his game? He should be held and paraded around on slashdot's shoulders for his hard work.

Dr. Steven Chu brought authority and evidence-based science to the US Cabinet. Former professor of physics at Stanford, he shared a Nobel prize for physics in 1997 for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. he continued to publish science while serving as Secretary of Energy.

His very expertise and lifelong, professional interest were very lamely attacked by the right wing machine, typically accusing him of avocating raising oil prices and gas prices.

Having Dr. Chu there did more to forward the cause of science in the US Government in generations. How many administrations could walk down a hallway and access a scientist at the top of his game? He should be held and paraded around on slashdot's shoulders for his hard work.

It is off topic, but the ability to digest lactose as adults evolved somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. The greatest ability to digest lactose as adults is clustered in the Arabian peninsula, southern Iran and Pakistan, far western Africa, and northern Europe (southern Scandinavia, Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, Denmark, northern Germany, and northern France). I couldn't tell you though if the genetics are the same but it seems unlikely given the geographical clustering.

Yes, it is the same mutation you are talking about. The associated mutations (or "snips", SNP -- single nucleotide polymorphisms) are all the same, even in the West African tribes, and are thought to be of a common origin.

However, there actually is a known case convergent evolution of lactase persistence, fully described in this Nature Genetics paper: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v39/n1/full/ng1946.html . The authors analysed genotypes of East African pastoral tribes where lactase persistance is also widely spread, and found several alternative mutations in the same regulatory region. The most common of these mutations is thought to be ~ 7000 years old.