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You mean this, wherein independent confirmation (from a third source this time) found the same conclusions from trustworthy data?

Your understanding of the scientific method is a bit naive. Lots of incorrect results pass peer review even in the most prestigious journals and sometimes are discovered as being incorrect only years later (or never)... because there is always some "fuzziness" in real-world experiments or data analysis. Were the experiments designed correctly? Was the data read correctly? Were there any errors in the analysis (mathematical or otherwise)? Is the logic leading to the conclusions correct? Peers who read the papers may or may not spot the errors... sometimes because the errors are subtle, and sometimes because even the smartest peers don't fully understand the research in the first place. (And with regard to the this Norwegian government research... well it hasn't even been peer-reviewed yet.)

There are a lot of steps in research and in each of the stops bias can creep in even if the researchers are honest and well-intentioned.

For more about this see, i.e.:
http://www.nature.com/news/beware-the-creeping-cracks-of-bias-1.10600
http://www.niam.scarp.se/download/18.71afa2f11269da2a40580007299/Huesseman%2B-%2BBiases.pdf
http://radiology.rsna.org/content/238/3/780.full
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimenter's_bias

...and lots more. In some areas of research (specifically bio-medical) there have been estimates (based on meta-analysis) that as much as half of all published results are wrong, and mostly along the lines of the researchers inherent biases.

"Honestly I expected to find someone that made a compass out of a wrapper somewhere but alas the internet does not yet have everything."

It has lots. For example only old-school pigeons use their brain to navigate, modern ones just use the highways like us.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040210/full/news040209-1.html

The unfortunate fact is that there's no way to fix depression. SSRI's don't work except for the most extreme cases, and then only provide a moderate easing of symptoms. Therapy works for anxiety patients, but regularly fails to outperform placebo.

Apologies for posting Anon, but as a med student (older non-traditional student) with life-long depression issues, I share your pessimism regarding current depression treatments; SSRIs, SNRIs, Atypical Antipsychotics, I've tried plenty. That being said, there are some remarkable results coming out for NMDA Antagonists -- specifically, the antidepressant effect of Ketamine (which unfortunately has a lot of regulatory baggage). Very fast and robust response, unusual for antidepressants. Less well studied is the designer analogue Methoxetamine, which has a street reputation for having a similar effect.

On the non-pharmaceutical side, also some interesting data coming out on TMS and TDCS, but no personal experience however.

DNA breaks down too rapidly to be intact in soft tissues that old. One of Horner's students managed to find such soft tissues a few years ago, but since DNA has a halflife of about 521 years (depending on the environment), there isn't going to be any DNA left in it.

Except that actually the predictions have fit quite well [nature].

According to this article from last year on the same event, the event caused an increase in the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere of about 1.2%. That's apparently about 20 times the normal rate of variation, but the baseline level of carbon-14 is about a part per trillion, so we'd be talking about increasing the concentration of carbon-14 by about 10 parts per quadrillion. In contrast, the period of above-ground nuclear testing almost doubled the concentration at its peak in the early 1960s.

Given our indirect knowledge of the event in 775, it's unknown whether other radiological hazards would have been present in addition to the C14 spike, but there don't seem to be indications of mass dieoffs or famines.

Half life of DNA is 500 years, http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555 myth busted. So you can forget about dinosaurs, neanderthals and the like.

Sorry, copy-paste fail on the link. The actual link to the Nature article.

The Biggest "Spooky" System Ever Seen: 4 Entangled Ions (Jun 2009)

Ok, that's Discover magazine. Never quote discover magazine. They're the foxnews of science. I don't trust a god damned thing they say. I tried looking up the experiment and I just keep seeing the word "Study"... So I'm thinking this was all on paper. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't trust it. Actually entangling IONs would be big news and I should find it all over the net.

and Entangled diamonds , big enough for the eye to see (Dec 2011). We haven't managed the information transportation part with anything other than photons though but we're doing well on distance; quantum key transmitted wirelessly 144km.

With both of these, see my post above. To me these are just parlor tricks with optics that maybe... or even are likely to be examples of Quantum teleportation. But they are not proof. It's neat that people are doing this, but it's not the "Real-deal" yet. It's kind of like that meteorite with the possible fossilized martian bacteria. Was there life on mars at one time? Most likely. Is the meteorite proof of that life? Maybe, maybe not... we need something better.

Humanity has entangled stuff bigger than photons; The Biggest "Spooky" System Ever Seen: 4 Entangled Ions (Jun 2009) and Entangled diamonds , big enough for the eye to see (Dec 2011). We haven't managed the information transportation part with anything other than photons though but we're doing well on distance; quantum key transmitted wirelessly 144km.

was the article ever linked anywhere?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7423/full/nature11594.html

I went to a really good high school, and while I was taking the AP and honors classes, the kids with low IQ were, for the most part, not.

FTFY

Depending on how you look at it, that correction might be "true" in a way, although if you distort it that way, it doesn't really add anything to the discussion other than distracting from the core issue.

It's not that plain aptitude isn't a factor. It's that raw intelligence is really hard to measure and separate from cultural factors and just plain knowledge. So hard that we can't really do it effectively. You can use IQ tests to determine someone is mentally challenged, or you can use IQ tests to determine someone is a genius. But once you get away from these extremes, it gets very fuzzy. So you'll find that the average IQ of children are correlated to their economic status.

Well, that's to be expected, you say. Intelligent people clearly are going to be more successful than those who are less intelligent, and their children will inherit those traits. The problem is that when you take only adopted children in consideration, their measured IQ follows the same socioeconomic correlation as above, but with their adoptive parents socioeconomic status, not their biological ones, so not genetic. It just so happens that all those advantages of having educated parents will help you do better in an IQ test just as much as it will help you do better in a school test. I know, citation needed. I'm feeling generous today, so here's an article in Nature about the subject.

So here we have a dilemma.
An Anonymous Coward on Slashdot says the IPCC predictions are a dismal failure.
On the other hand David J. Frame & Dáithí A. Stone compared the IPCC model predictions against the observed temperatures and found the predictions to be accurate (source).

So I guess the question is who am I going to believe:
The unsubstantiated claims of an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot -OR- the detailed research of scientists that has passed the peer-review process?
Tough call!

Thank you very much for the praise.

Yes it would be nice to keep the albedo low in the arctic regions, but at least a dark area there is a one-off cost (it doesn't get worse once it is black) and you need a huge area to reflect a decent amount of sunlight due to the low light angles in the arctics.

I am personally more worried about the methane stored up there and the methane hydrates on the sea floor, but I just found an article that seems quite reassuring on that front.

Nurses with egg allergies could use the egg free vaccine

...what other obvious things we didn't really bother to check?

Well, let's see here:

Economics:

1) Sovereign debt is not like ordinary debt, so it's OK for the US to have a large deficit
2) A little inflation is good (but we can't tell you what the best value actually is)

Medicine:

1) Depression is a disease, and not a consequence of another disorder (as "fever" is)
2) Depression meds actually work
3) Obesity can be fixed by a) diet, b) exercise, or c) eating less
4) Every medical study that hasn't been replicated at least once

Psychology:

1) Seeing a psychiatrist has more benefit than not seeing one
2) Every study which hasn't been replicated at least once (More info)

Social sciences:

1) Every study which hasn't been replicated at least once

Physics, Chemistry, other "hard" sciences:

Nothing, really. Most everything of note has been replicated and confirmed by independent experimenters.

...what other obvious things we didn't really bother to check?

Well, let's see here:

Economics:

1) Sovereign debt is not like ordinary debt, so it's OK for the US to have a large deficit
2) A little inflation is good (but we can't tell you what the best value actually is)

Medicine:

1) Depression is a disease, and not a consequence of another disorder (as "fever" is)
2) Depression meds actually work
3) Obesity can be fixed by a) diet, b) exercise, or c) eating less
4) Every medical study that hasn't been replicated at least once

Psychology:

1) Seeing a psychiatrist has more benefit than not seeing one
2) Every study which hasn't been replicated at least once (More info)

Social sciences:

1) Every study which hasn't been replicated at least once

Physics, Chemistry, other "hard" sciences:

Nothing, really. Most everything of note has been replicated and confirmed by independent experimenters.

The patented fish are diploid and fertile. Female triploid salmon are sterile and cannot cross-breed with wildtype stocks. They are produced by heat shock and other methods (they have to be produced, as they are sterile). The female triploids are produced from the diploids for production purposes, so that if they escape, they cannot reproduce. Triploids even occur naturally but rarely (0.6%) in natural salmon populations.

However, several questions come to my mind:
1.What if someone, sometime, accidentally releases the diploid GMO fish? These fish grow faster than the normal salmon and therefore might have introduce a selective advantage to the introduced genes, even if the original GMO fish are reportedly less fecund.
2. Is the triploid production method 100% effective or might you have 0.1% diploids in there, capable of reproduction?
3. Male triploid salmon do have gonads and are are potentially (even if at a very low rate) slightly fertile. How long until a male escapes? I know that the males appear obviously different than the females (I used to fish for salmon in Canada as a youth) nevertheless, I cite Murphy's Law ...

A bit of reading for the interested:

A simple, clear presentation:
http://www.salmotrip.stir.ac.uk/downloads/SSPOpresentation.pdf

More hardcore molecular biology:
http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v104/n2/full/hdy2009108a.html

As the linked article isn't fully detailed, you might want to read the actual paper (seems to be free access). Among other things, they note that these photocell stickers retain their original 7.5% efficiency, which although not incredibly high, is still pretty decent, given how cheap this will likely be. It should be great for costs to have the actual wafer be reusable.

I was going to ask if anybody has any addititional information, but you can go through the press release.

The two big things that jump out at me are:
1. The quoted efficiency (7.5%) seems to be quite low - aren't other more traditional cells at 20% or more? I don't see any indication that these cells cost half or less than traditional solar cells which would make up for the efficiency losses.
2. There doesn't see to be any method of passing current from cells that are butted up or overlapping each other which means that there must be wires running to each cell. This would mean that the process of putting on different surfaces is not as simple as implied in the article summaries.

Anybody who can explain more about the application of these cells?

myke

And from the abstract of the actual paper referred to by the wuwt page :

"...Our empirical data from this unique field setting confirm model predictions that ocean acidification, together with temperature stress, will probably lead to severely reduced diversity, structural complexity and resilience of Indo-Pacific coral reefs within this century."

Remember when non-experts would actually listen to scientists rather than cherry pick what they wanted to hear? Good times...

I was trying to understand more specifically the human test diet, described as "composed of whole grains, traditional Chinese medicine and prebiotics (WTP diet)."

A PDF supplement ( http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/ismej2012153x1.pdf ) has more details, but is still cursory. Baseline food was "4 cans of gruel per day as staple food contract prepared in the form of cooked porridge." They include cursory nutritional info but not the grain used for the gruel. Bitter melon (presumably the "traditional Chinese medicine" part of the diet) was administered to "markedly modulate the human gut microbiota," inhibiting the growth of many strains of bacteria in the gut. Then prebiotics, presumably, were used to replace some of the beneficial bacteria suppressed by the bitter melon.

The omission of specific details on what the person consumed, the quantities, and the time intervals, seems so glaring that I am surprised that this study was published. Primary school science projects require more rigorousness. Granted, a study of one person is pretty limited in itself, but even that experiment can't be reproduced based on the published study.

TFA contains a direct link to the original article in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology FFS, can we advance to the next stage of logical fallacies now ..

Conventional wisdom has it that complex life evolved in the sea and then crawled up onto land but NPR reports that a provocative new study published in Nature suggests that the earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud. Paleontologists have found fossil evidence for a scattering of animals called Ediacarans that predate the Cambrian explosion about 530 million years ago when complex life suddenly burst forth and filled the seas with a panoply of life forms. Many scientists have assumed Ediacarans were predecessors of jellyfish, worms and other invertebrates but palaeontologist Greg Retallack has been building the case that Ediacarans weren't in fact animals, but actually more like fungi or lichens and that Ediacarans weren't even living in the sea, as everyone has assumed. "What I'm saying for the Ediacaran is that the big [life] forms were on land and life was actually quite a bit simpler in the ocean," says Retallack adding that his new theory lends credence to the idea that life actually evolved on land and then moved into the sea. Paul Knauth at Arizona State University has been pondering this same possibility. "I don't have any problem with early evolution being primarily on land," says Knauth. "I think you can make a pretty good argument for that, and that it came into the sea later. It's kind of a radical idea, but the fact is we don't know." Knauth says it could help explain why the Cambrian explosion appears to be so rapid. It's possible these many life forms gradually evolved on the land and then made a quick dash to the sea. "That means that the Earth was not a barren land surface until about 500 million years ago, as a lot of people have speculated."

Thanks for the informative post. I googled, and can confirm the author of TFA is infamous for absurd attacks on climate science and climate scientists. However, according to IPCC's schedule, a 2013 "second order draft" is circulating now to governments, who could be leaking them. While TFA downplays a 1 meter rise in ocean levels by 2100, that number is double it's previous estimate. Given a recent study claims oceans are rising over 3mm per year, even 1 meter may be low. How bad will it be if we see a 3 meter rise?

While the author is a wing nut, I'm encouraged to see these guys shifting away from "the Earth is not warming" to a discussion of how bad the impact will be. If I were Canadian, I could see plenty of upside to global warming. It's not 100% bad, just mostly bad... Shifting to a discussion of the impact would be a huge step forward.

Talking of stupid, anybody who takes this IPCC "draft" trolling seriously are being duped. The IPCC are climate change deniers, hiding behind a thin veil that can hardly be called "science"

The end game of the massive well funded disinformation campaign being to influence as many people as possible into taking strong climate change denial opinion. The problem is, the likes of Fox news and troll news like this one are succeeding very well in this aim, http://environment.yale.edu/climate/the-climate-note/>as this graph shows. Science and evidence be damned.

IPCC Disinformation campaign:

The slide above comes from the presentation of Hans von Storch to the InterAcademy Review of the IPCC, presented earlier this week in Montreal. The slide references the misrepresentation of the issue of disasters and climate change by the IPCC. von Storch is very clear in his views:

IPCC authors have decided to violate the mission of the IPCC, by presenting disinformation.

Not only did the IPCC misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but went so far as to issue a highly misleading press release to try to spin the issue and put an unprepared IPCC WG2 chair on the BBC to try to defend the undefensible. I was promised a response from the IPCC to my concerns, a response that has never been provided.

A former head of the IPCC, Robert Watson, says the following in the context of the 2035 glacier issue, but could be equally applied to the disaster issue:

To me the fundamental problem was that when the error was found it was handled in a totally and utterly atrocious manner.

The IAC Review of the IPCC is fully aware of this issue, and it will be interesting to see what their report says on the topic. Meantime, the IPCC is continuing its preparations for its next assessment in business-as-usual fashion.

Baloney. It's the political hacks who pounce on something like this and say "Look! The scientists revised their consensus predictions, *obviously* it's just politics because the truth never changes." They say this because politics is the only thing they (think) they understand. It's just as silly as when they get up on their high horses about "revisionist" historians -- revising history is what *actual* historians do. Revising climate predictions is what climatologists do, and in any case the rumors of what the new IPCC (you like them now?) forecasts will contain is well within the range that's been discussed all along, except for a somewhat more pessimistic sea level rise figure. If you'd actually been paying attention to science news instead of political pundits, you'd know that the recent buzz has been the remarkable accuracy of the original 1990 IPCC report (source: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1763.html). This is a remarkable piece of support for the anthropogenic hypothesis, since the computer models used in the late 80s relied heavily on atmospheric CO2 accumulation.

The only reason people like you think climate change is politically driven myth is because you weren't paying attention *before* it became a political issue. It was vigorously debated in the scientific literature well before it became a political hot potato -- check the abstracts on Google Scholar if you don't believe me. Now you can pooh pooh a 2 degree rise in global average temperature and 1 m rise in sea level, but that's because you have no idea what the effects of those changes will be. A 1m mean sea level rise means substantially more frequent flooding events. A 2 degree temperature rise has a huge effect on the distribution of vector borne diseases.

It sounds benign to say that there will be "new arid zones in the Southern United States", but only if you don't think about what the appearance of a new arid zone would mean.

And so I say, I'm ready for things to go to hell. I can't imagine a way out that is likely.

Oil and coal are needed for energy, and are running out. Phosphorus and potassium are needed for fertilizer, and are running out. Helium is needed for MRI, and is running out. Metals needed for just about every machine and appliance: all the high quality deposits for just about every metal is running out. You would not believe the rate and breadth at which we are consuming our planets resources.

Add to that the continuous destruction of habitats which means we are now likely living during the sixth mass extinction event, imminent effects of global warming and a population which is *still* growing at a steady 1.2% currently (humanity has already doubled once during my lifetime an we will probably double again), and you get people from the financial world writing these kinds of columns in Nature:

Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary)

Scientists are understandably protective of the dignity of science and are horrified by publicity and overstatement. These fears, unfortunately, are not shared by their opponents, which makes for a rather painful one-sided battle. Overstatement may generally be dangerous in science (it certainly is for careers) but for climate change, uniquely, understatement is even riskier and therefore, arguably, unethical.

It is crucial that scientists take more career risks and sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on the global-warming problem. Younger scientists are obsessed by thoughts of tenure, so it is probably up to older, senior and retired scientists to do the heavy lifting. Be arrested if necessary. This is not only the crisis of your lives — it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be brave.

You cannot believe how fucking depressed I am.

This article wins today's coveted "Most Hyperbolic Headline" award. First off, here's the actual link, for those of you with access to Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11652.html

To understand what the big deal is here, compare baking cookies in your house to a fancy industrial setup: In your home oven you can bake around 20 cookies at once, and you have to put them on a tray. Meanwhile, an industrial bakery has one of those fancy conveyor belt ovens -- dough goes in one side, cookies come out the other, and the conveyor belt itself is the tray. The conventional fabrication process for metallic nanostructures is more like the home method -- you need a tray (usually a silicon substrate, because those are pretty cheap and extremely high-quality), and an reactor of some sort (in this case a really fancy oven that costs more than your car, but still an oven), and you won't be getting any nanowidgets until the kitchen timer dings.

What this will NOT be useful for is logic circuitry. This group has managed to come up with a pretty good method of manufacturing metallic nanorods. That's all well and good, but bear in mind that all of these high quality nanorods are not attached to anything, and not particularly useful in and of themselves. Perhaps they can make individual nanorods into diodes, but even if they do they're still left with essentially a disordered heap of unconnected devices -- try throwing ten toothpicks in the air and having them land in a perfect grid. Now do it for a billion tiny transistors. You may notice that this process does not scale well.

This manufacturing method might actually be more useful in the realm of optics. The real breakthrough here is the fact that high quality metallic nanostructures can be grown without a substrate, and can be grown quickly and continuously. Metallic spheres and rods are actually quite interesting at the nanoscale, and behave in very counterintuitive ways (for instance, suspensions of gold spheres take on very different colors when viewed with reflected vs. transmitted light (See for instance the Lycurgus cup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycurgus_Cup). People are working away on using those properties to do something more useful than making a better shot glass (for instance, nanostructured metals show some promise at enhancing the efficiency of solar cells), and maybe this manufacturing method will help them out by bringing the cost of high quality research materials down.

Then again, maybe all we'll get is a few overblown press releases and another three weeks of this article on the front page at Slashdot.

No one has presented any threat related to AGW that is significant enough to cause human extinction.

Extinction level events caused by AGW have been part of the debate the past ten years at least. Maybe you weren't paying attention?
It's been played down because we don't know enough about the mechanisms to accurately predict what level of change is required to kick rapid shifts in the biosphere off; but it has happen before. Nature had an article concerning this earlier this year: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature11018.html?a_aid=3598aabf

The sea level rises are in line with the worst case scenarios from the consensus based IPCC report. If the estimates in the IPCC report are shown to be too conservative with regards to sea level rise, it's likely the other predictions also are too low. It has been estimated previously that changes up to +2C will be manageable with our current technology and within the current political framework. Anything above that would cause long term harm, +4C has been viewed upon as the breaking-point for human civilization.
Other reports recently suggests a best case scenario of +4C temperature increase, and worse case in the 8-10C range. The later is likely extinction level changes.

The main mechanisms for the fall of civilization (it's not caused by AGW alone, it's a combination of several factors that come together faster than we will be able to mitigate):
* Collapse of sea-based proteins caused by:
    - water acidification, caused by increased CO2 in the water
    - over-fishing
* Destruction of arable land, caused by:
    - Increase in temperature directly
    - Deforestation - causing soil erosion
    - Increased atmospheric energy leading to more extreme weather, both increase in droughts and storms
    - Flooding caused by sea level rise

Depending on how bad it gets, a significant portion of the worlds food production could collapse in a matter of years.

The actual paper is here: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n10/full/ncomms2146.html It's talking about miRNA *not* genes, nor does the paper claim or support the notion this is the single defining difference between humans and apes. For those who don't know, not all of our RNA encodes cellular machinery. Some RNA molecules regulate whether other RNA molecules go on to make a functional protein, this paper is describing a class of regulatory RNA that may act on many hundreds of targets. (To quote from the Discussion: "birth of a novel miRNA might influence expression of hundreds of genes"). In this instance, some of the targets regulated by this new miRNA are neural so it appears to be a very significant finding. It's a very interesting paper, utterly over-egged by the headlines. I suspect a dodgy press release/over excited journalists.

Why don't you link to the original article?

Thanks AC, the original link was quite horrible.

Why don't you link to the original article?

Name one that has come true, if you can.

"The world will get warmer."

Proof: Domingues 2008, Nuccitelli 2012, NASA GISS, NOAA NCDC, Hadley Centre, and BEST 2011 (preliminary).

Reposting since it seems relevant here...

Little Change in Global Drought in the past 60 Years [nature.com]

Little Change in Global Drought in the past 60 Years

Corresponding author Stephen Miller is the Judy Gugenheim Research Professor of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago in the US. He says in a statement:

It reads more like a transcript of a TV news segment. When you're watching TV they throw these titles at you before the person says anything to give them credibility, so you won't even notice that they never told you whether this guy actually had anything to do with the research. It doesn't work in print because people have the time to read it and realize she's not telling us key info.

The nanoparticles and Miller and colleagues used are made of a polymer called Poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLG), which...

The nanoparticles and Miller and colleagues? What? And why are random paragraphs in bold? As you scroll through the article there are four different paragraphs that are in bold for no apparent reason. Does she edit her work or just churn it out and post it?

Slashdot editors should start giving articles from Medical News Today more scrutiny. It seems like it's an office with about 5 people who pay this Catharine Paddock PhD to summarize articles in paywalled journals to drive advertising dollars. The other employees are two CEOs, a marketing director and a "Web Manager." Their other businesses are a database of hospitals, a medical abbreviation glossary, and a medical site ad service. Paddock's PhD is in "Business Administration." Summarizing the paywalled articles to raise awareness is fine, but she seems to be their only author and she can't get her facts straight. If she's contradicting herself in the first three paragraphs and we can't read the source material to verify, then reading MNT articles does nothing but drive ad dollars for MNT. Wait for some more reputable source to sum up the paywalled article and link to that instead.

You can. It's called a fucking Faraday cage.

No, actually, it's a PMC surface formed out of a dielectric slab.

Tech details here:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nmat3476-s1.pdf

From Nature :

“All of the articles have been submitted to journals, and we have received substantial journal peer reviews. None of the reviews have indicated any mistakes in the papers; they have instead been primarily suggestions for additions, further citations of the literature. One review had no complaints about the content of the paper, but suggested delaying the publication until the long background paper, describing our methods in detail, was actually published.”

"Research without Google would be like life without electricity," says Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural University in Jiangsu province.

It is generally possible to find information on the internet without using Google, but Google Scholar and the likes really is a world-class resource.

NASA/NOAA had to point out the IPCC model is horribly flawed as it doesn't take into account the fact that plants eat CO2. You'd sorta think guys that had built their career on CO2 would know what it does in nature, but apparently not.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/new_model_doubled_co2_sub_2_degrees_warming/

Also, the world is cooling, not warming per this recent paper: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html

There's some info here on Nature but it's pay walled

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.189.html

There's some additional info in a pdf from the same site here

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nnano.2012.189-s1.pdf

There's some info here on Nature but it's pay walled

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.189.html

There's some additional info in a pdf from the same site here

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nnano.2012.189-s1.pdf

The IBM research paper is available at http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.189.html The paper is protected by a paywall.

The IBM press release is available at http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/39250.wss

I recommend reading the comments on the New York Times article. My favorite comment so far is:

MC - NYC
The Singularity edges closer...

This may be true, but does your gut really get affected that much by your immune system? I know it does it various auto-immune diseases but that is the opposite to what you are describing. From what i've read the balance of bacteria in your gut is supposed to regulate itself but the bad bacteria can move in after the patient has had a heavy does of antibiotics to treat other infections.

Unless you were implying that the weak immunity requires heavy doses of antibiotics to treat recurring infections? I guess that makes sense, but just follow up each dose with a reverse enema of poop :)

In a word: yes. Changes in the composition of your gut bacteria don't just happen after treatment with antibiotics; for example, they can also result from alterations in diet (including moving to another country). These changes are associated with several diseases, including diabetes, gastric ulcers, asthma & colorectal cancer, though it's not always clear whether they are the cause or the effect (or both). The relationship between the microbiome and human health is pretty complicated and is an active area of research. I've written about it several times on my blog:

The microbiome & immunity
Gut bacteria & diabetes
More about diabetes & the microbiome

If you have access to Nature, here's a review from last year:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7351/full/nature10213.html

Not necessarily, I think the pendulum has swung the other way again, more recently.. at least, some.
And there's this, about their bite force, which suggests (but doesn't prove) predation:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v382/n6593/abs/382706a0.html

Which is a pointless exercise. A large earthquake can hit at any time, with or without prior 'smaller' shakes. The only way these people would have been safe is if they had spent their entire lives sleeping in their cars.

How do you come to the conclusion that a routine that saved lives in the past is pointless? Actually, how dare you? If it saved, or could have saved lives, that's the only point that needs to be made.

And the real reason so many people died is nothing to do with a lack of earthquake prediction, which is impossible, but because they were all living in unreinforced sub-standard earthquake-prone ancient buildings. The people that built those, or allowed people to continue living in them, or issued building consents for them, or however it works in Italy, are the ones culpable.

These scientists were on a government-appointed risk-assessment committee. They were supposed to be the ones giving the advice. Not even attempting to predict earthquakes, but assessing and communicating the factors of risk in the area. That would fulfill your aspect of "however if works in Italy". The advice they gave however, was "no danger", go drink some wine, and that many small tremors are favorable because they relieve seismic stress. How about ways to mitigate the risk in the event of an earthquake?

Moreover, it did not issue any specific recommendations for community preparedness, according to Picuti, thereby failing in its legal obligation "to avoid death, injury and damage, or at least to minimize them".

Source.

There seems to be a general notion here that 'running into the street' is a good plan when you're living in a big old stone building and you get an earthquake. This is false - when a bit earthquake hits you have literally seconds to get clear, and you're not going to make it. Dive under a table, stand in a doorway, and hope. The best advice if you live in a seismic zone is to live in safe housing. Nice wooden single-story houses do not fall down in earthquakes. I'd suggest living in those.

You are operating on advice given to you that is appropriate for your area. I suspect you don't live in stone housing, because I've received that very same advice, and none of the homes in my region were stone medieval housing. Unless you're a seismologist or on a risk assessment panel, I'd wager your received knowledge is good for your circumstances but needing adjustments in others. Sadly, it appears you gave more direction then those seismologists in Italy.

'The prosecution has focused on a statement made at the press conference by accused committee member Bernardo De Bernardinis, who was then deputy technical head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency.

"The scientific community tells me there is no danger," he said at the time, "because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable."' link

Basically A predicted a quake would strike based on multiple measurements...

A's prediction was pseudo-science. A's prediction was based on observations of radon gas emissions. He was an amateur seismologist, i.e., his science credentials are of the same integrity as that of ghost hunters or doctors who practice homeopathy. His crock "prediction" was bad for tourism, and though I believe that he should have the freedom to say whatever he believes, his statement was pseudo-science bollocks.

And for the record, the scientists who were charged for manslaughter were charged for a very specific statement. There had been many tremors leading up to the mainshock. The Civil Protection department stated, "minor shocks did not raise the risk of a major one. ...The scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy."

The first sentence is not technically correct: "...minor shocks did not raise the risk of a major one." The simple answer is seismologists don't know when, if, or where a mainshock will occur. We can only guess. And the notion of anomalies in the background seismicity--anomalously low or high--has been tried for over a century. It doesn't work. Hindsight is 20/20, and some large events are preceeded by either more or less minor earthquakes, but we simply do not know of a reliable way to predict major earthquakes based on minor earthquakes. Some major earthquakes happen with no precursors. Some happen after minor earthquake swarms. Some happen after a period of low seismicity--i.e., the fault is "stuck" and building pressure. In other words, we cannot rule out that the increase in minor earthquakes is a precursor to a larger event, but we also cannot say with any certainty that it does foreshadow a major event. We can say very little based on earthquake swarms, and we certainly don't have time to study them in the six months that they occurred before the mainshock.

The second sentence is not correct: "The scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy." Of course, the occurrence of an earthquake means that stress fault was released as energy. However, we cannot conclusively say anything about whether or not that expenditure of energy increases or decreases danger. Those minor quakes could load some section of a fault, they could indicate that a fault that was previously "stuck" is now moving, they could indicate that a dormant fault has been reactivated... they could indicate any number of things. If we are talking purely in terms of energy, though--which is what I assume that the Italian Civil Protection department was saying when he was talking about a discharge of energy--his statement is pretty silly. The moment magnitude scale is logarithmic. Every one step in magnitude is approximately 32 times the energy. Two steps is exactly 1000 times the energy. The earthquake that struck Italy was a magnitude 6.3. It would take 1000 magnitude 4.3 earthquakes to expend the energy of the magnitude 6.3. Of course, one could make the argument that the fault was right on the point of slip and just a little bit of stress release could relax it enough to not slip, but there is simply no evidence that I am aware of, anywhere, that minor earthquakes and reduce the load on a fault enough to prevent a major earthquake. In fact, Japanese scientists in the past looked into manufacturing small earthquakes by drilling holes into faults and lubricating them in the hope to release the built-up stress as many minor quakes instead of one larger one. They abandoned that idea.