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I don't know. I'm am a health care provider. In order for me to be found culpable of negligence, three things must be established:

1) That there was a duty of care (that I was required to provide). 2) That the duty of care was not met. 3) That the failure to meet the duty of care caused the harm experienced by the plaintiff victim. (That is, it can't just be some irrelevant failure on my part.)

Interesting read, and useful to see different points from different industries. Thank you. However from what I've read, the duty of care in this case would appear to be Risk Assessment, not earthquake prediction. They were supposed to assess and communicate the risks to the public. That would cover point 1.

Point 2 would be that they communicated "no danger" and go drink some wine. The idea that the smaller quakes were actually a good thing was also communicated, with the thinking that this alleviated seismic stress. In an area known for seismic activity, and many structures poorly equipped to handle a large earthquake, I would submit that the duty of care was not met.

Point 3 is actually well covered here. The residents had a routine of sleeping outside in largely open areas if there were any tremors. With "no danger" in their mind, they broke this routine, which would have put them outside watching their homes collapse, instead of watching them from the inside.

That this meeting was convened mostly to discredit and silence a resident who was making claims about predicting earthquakes shows where their true focus was, and it wasn't on their "duty of care".

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

I suppose that depends on who you talk to. Looking at all the irregularities around that meeting, I'd take any statements around that meeting with a healthy dose of skepticism.

But the point is, the occurrence of an earthquake was very improbable. This fact is not changed even by the occurrence of an earthquake shortly after.

What the scientists were asked to do is effectively the same as predicting who would win the lottery. This is just not possible - even if somebody still wins it every few weeks...

The scientists were on government appointed risk assessment committee. They said there was no danger in an earthquake prone town full of ancient fragile buildings. They weren't expected to predict an earthquake, they were expected to assess and relay the risk of the area. Instead, they focused on silencing what many view as the village idiot. This article puts it best:

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".

The only thing they minimized was public safety, and considering the gravity of their position, I can't disagree with them being held responsible.

"With the seismic history of the region, what sane scientist would claim that there was no danger?"

If the region has such a history of significant seismic activity, then surely the people who live there would be aware of this, and would already be doing regular earthquake preparedness, as is done in seismically active parts of the US?

A more relevant question is, can they prove that the specific individuals who died, would have survived if they had been warned by these scientists in the way that you describe. That seems flimsy and unlikely to me. At best, if these guys are 'shooting from the hip', you can maybe accuse them of doing a poor job and firing them. But culpability for deaths, that is stupid.

Read the article. Here's another link. The residents had a regular routine of leaving their houses and going to safer ground and sleeping in their cars when small earthquakes had hit. Based on the statements from that meeting, the residents stayed in their homes that night, the Italian equivalent of "no danger" fresh in their minds. Had that meeting never happened, they would have left their homes, and many would have been alive today.

Thing is, in a seismically active region, danger exists "all the time" ... 24/7. And the people who live in these regions know this. Should people avoid, say, going to work permanently then, if some level of danger is always there? Only idiots believe that "scientists" are magically able to predict earthquakes.

Only idiot scientists would allow a statement of "no danger" to come forth from their meeting. They took that responsibility on themselves (when they accepted their appointment to the "Great Risks" committee, and when that statement was made), and now that it's come back to bite them, they don't want it anymore. Perhaps they should have taken their position more seriously.

No, the people had no more reason to worry than usual, that was the message. It's not the scientists fault if they weren't worried enough already.

Read, learn, and retract.

The government asked for their assessment, and they gave the best prediction they could given the data they had. Nearly every other seismologist in the world would have given the same assessment. They are being sentenced to prison because they did not predict the quake, pure and simple. The lesson here is that if the Italian government ever asks your assessment on anything, the only valid response is "fuck off and die".

According to statements given to the prosecution, two members of the same committee disagreed with the assessment, albeit after the quake:

The suggestion that repeated tremors were favourable because they 'unload', or discharge, seismic stress and reduce the probability of a major quake seems to be scientifically incorrect. Two of the committee members — Selvaggi and Eva — later told prosecutors that they "strongly dissented" from such an assertion, and Jordan later characterized it as "not a correct view of things".

link TFA
I can see how eager you are to support scientists and hate Italy, but these were scientists masquerading as politicians. Reading through the various news reports on this paints the picture quite clearly. They let politics into their science, and people paid the price with their lives.

I wondered if there was more to the story than the summary indicates. I find it hard to believe a country like Italy would convict based on not having the ability to predict an earthquake.

I did some reading, and the charges have more to do with creating a perception that the earthquake risk was remote and being negligent in their duty to keep the people educated about earthquake preparation and vigilance.

Whether you agree that the scientist were negligent or not, the article title and summary are misleading and flamebait.

There is more to it, this article seems to detail it out pretty well. It's not "Scientists who failed to warn of Quake", it's more like "Scientists on Advisory Panel claim no danger". There was also another wrinkle in this, a resident and lab tech named "Giampaolo Giuliani" who was warning of earthquakes based on his home-made radon detectors. The article points out that the advisory panel appears to have been convened (at least partially) to silence or discredit Giuliani's predictions, and they held a press conference afterwards where they effectively said there was "no danger" and to go drink some wine.

This is about public officials in a position of trust trying to calm or silence the worry of the public. With the seismic history of the region, what sane scientist would claim that there was no danger? They're not in trouble because of their science, they're in trouble because they let their politics take precedence over public safety. There are other tidbits in the article that lead to this conclusion, showing that the meeting held that day was unusual in many regards, including the lack of routine earthquake preparedness warnings. It looks like the panel "shot from the hip" that day, and missed the mark so horribly that lives were lost as a result of the direction given. When you accept the responsibility of serving on a panel like that, negligence should be a punishable offense.

You didn't even read the Nature abstract on the DNA degradation story. Not everywhere on Earth is like a New Zealand swamp. The researchers estimated that a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C would be readable out to 1.5 million years. And this is in the "almost ubiquitous" presence of ground water. On a very dry planet which has dry ice glaciers (average Martian surface temp -63 C) DNA and an oxygen-free atmosphere DNA should be preservable for very long times. And if there is still biological activity, however rare, it should leave behind very lingering DNA traces, if DNA based.

Moon is actually drifting away from Earth - around 5 cm/year. 50 cm/decade, 500cm/century, 50m/millenium, 50km/million years, 50,000km/billion years, 250,000km/5 billion years. But that extends beyond the age of the solar system.

At the time of the theoretical collision, the Moon was only a third of the distance from Earth than it is today.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110803/full/news.2011.456.html

DNA methylation seems an interesting property that has been shown to be heritable in some instances (cannot remember citation, study involving desert plants in Arizona or New Mexico, USA), changing the phenotype without the genotype.

I believe the plant were Black cottonwood trees (Populus trichocarpa). http://www.nature.com/news/tree-s-leaves-genetically-different-from-its-roots-1.11156

Because those fluctuations do exist in the vacuum outside the plates (which is defined to have zero energy), the energy inside the plates is actually negative. The attractive force implies negative energy between the plates because force is the negative gradient of potential energy.

A force being applied in the context of the Casimir effect is definitely a vector. It has direction. Neither a positive or negative vector implies "negative energy": it simply defines the physical direction in which the energy is directed. The coordinates are arbitrary according to vector calculus. There are circumstances in which energy can also be considered a vector, but this is not one of them. The Casimir effect is definitely a measurable vector in a particular direction, and he clear implication then is positive energy. [Jane Q. Public]

Good grief, you're arguing with the definition of potential energy. I was referring to the fact that all conservative forces can be described as the negative vector gradient of a potential energy function. Many of your statements on this topic are confusing:

A force being applied in the context of the Casimir effect is definitely a vector. It has direction. [Jane Q. Public]

Yeah, forces are vectors...

Neither a positive or negative vector implies "negative energy": it simply defines the physical direction in which the energy is directed. [Jane Q. Public]

The force vector points from a region with high potential energy to a region with lower potential energy. That's why an attractive force implies that the Casimir vacuum has less energy than the standard vacuum. No energy is "directed" anywhere because we're talking about potential energy, not calculating Poynting vectors.

"Because those fluctuations do exist in the vacuum outside the plates (which is defined to have zero energy), the energy inside the plates is actually negative."

You're trying to get my goat. Haha. That isn't what it says. According to the article, the force is negative, in relation to the chosen physical framework, which (as it clearly says in the article) merely implies that the energy is lowered when the physical substrates come together. [Jane Q. Public]

The Casimir force between two parallel conducting plates is negative/attractive. Period. More complicated geometries can have repulsive Casimir forces, but that doesn't affect the attractive force between parallel plates any more than your meaningless caveat does. Perhaps you meant to say "According to the article, the energy is negative..."

The same phenomenon can be demonstrated with magnets. No "negative energy" is implied. [Jane Q. Public]

In my

TFS makes no sense at all; TFA is not much better.

Neither of those is the article. I don't think it's fair to criticize these researchers without reading what they wrote. I'm too lazy to find a free preprint for you.

Asymmetric effects of economic growth and decline on CO2 emissions (full text).

It appears to be open access.

The accuracy is the fundamental problem, with no error correction (or at least indications that there is an error), which is one of the biggest problems with their approach, it's worse than useless. In the protein folding experiment it got the correct answer just 13 out of 10,000 times.

Jeeze, I'm really starting to think that most people just shouldn't ever talk about Quantum, there's so many misconceptions and misunderstandings that trying to give people a little bit of information, since its so wildly out of context, even in the wrong context (misconceptions), that it only drives them further away from the truth, from reality. People latch onto the wrong points.

I barely understand Quantum Physics myself and I can tell that TFA makes all kinds of wild leaps in logic. Most of these things aren't true, and the way they explain the Schrodinger's Cat experiment makes the classic misunderstandings.

The reality is far less sensational: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v490/n7418/full/nature11505.html

The New Scientist frequently makes quantum leaps in logic. Or was that logic leaps in quantum physics? I GET SO CONFUSED! At any rate, the real article is a bit less sensational.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v490/n7418/full/nature11505.html

Misconduct, Not Error, Is the Main Cause of Medical Scientific Retractions

Other than Hendrik Schön are there some in Math or Physics that are as likely to commit misconduct?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6894/full/418120a.html

I remember reading that turning on regeneration in mammals required applying an electric current to the limb. Here's something similar: http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/news070226-8.html

From an earlier Nature story: http://www.nature.com/news/gas-cloud-hurtling-towards-milky-way-s-black-hole-may-harbour-young-star-1.11351

You are incorrect about Nature policy on Arxiv:
http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/confidentiality.html
"Contributions being prepared for or submitted to a Nature journal can be posted on recognized preprint servers (such as ArXiv or Nature Precedings), and on collaborative websites such as wikis or the author's blog"

The problem with ArXIv is that papers have yet to be formally peer-reviewed. It's certainly true that physicists post there and you can find (nearly) all papers there in some form - but many papers posted there don't make it past peer review. So that's why this is important.
But you know all that as you RTFS:
"Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles."

The reasoning behind my speculation is as follows:

(1) According to an article in Science News and others referenced from Slashdot, the Moon appears to be from 2 moons, both from the mantle, no major asteroid content, thus no mars-sized asteroid.

(2) If that is the case, then the best explanation is de Meijer's critical georeactor theory: calcium bergs blew up in the mantle. But...

(3) the de Meijer theory falls down based on the fact that the uranium/calcium bergs would create enough vapor pressure in going critical, that they wouldn't go sufficiently supercritical to blow out a major fraction of the moon, unless a *small* asteroid knocked one of them into the center of a group, or if another blast created shockwaves that compressed a collection of U-Ca bergs together. So it *does* require a small asteroid.

(4) If that is so, then due to the neutron bombardment, the U-Th, U-Pb, Pb-Pb dating of rocks is going to be off, but there will be great scatter in the estimated ages, and the event will be more recent than the dating indicates (2.3- billion years). But

(5) we have earth rocks that date older than that, too. So we should have evidence of the locations. That is, the Earth's crust should show evidence of the blast.

(6) Such a blast would shatter the Earth's crust, leaving rings of Kimberlites around the blast zone, that dated younger (because the rings are structural failures, and less contaminated by neutrons), while the center would date older, being more contaminated.

(7) Two such locations exist: the 850 mi-radius ring of Kimberlites around the Hudson Bay (search Canada kimberlite, and Greenland kimberlite), and the ring of Kimberlites around Vredefort that stretches from Brazil, through Africa, through North India, and into Austrailia.

(8) According to plate tectonics, both rings align correctly at the Permian extinction. Both rings have central rocks dating to about the age of the moon,

(9) At the site of the Vredefort blast, you have an area called the African Karoo. The lava sills (light gray in this picture) are excluded from a region which is heavy in Kimberlites, and indeed includes the city of Kimberly. The shape, size, and location of the excluded zone, at 230 ma ago, exactly matches the shape size and location of the Scotia plate, which remains volcanic to this day.

What this makes me think happened, is that an asteroid hit at an oblique angle at the location of a collection of georeactors, near the South Sandwich islands. The blast went supercritical, and blew out a close to half of the moon. most of the blast going back through the asteroid scar, but a lot of it going straight out. Crustally speaking, the blast destroyed whatever continent existed to the west.

The blast also sent shock waves through the earth. 1/3 of the way around the globe, another collection of georeactors was forced supercritical, creating a symmetrically round blast (the Hudson and its k

• Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica
• Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE
• Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements
• Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice under Warming Atmospheric and Oceanic Conditions
• Simulation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Nonannular atmospheric circulation change induced by stratospheric ozone depletion and its role in the recent increase of Antarctic sea ice extent

This little canard about Antartic ice being okay will continue well beyond being a pants-on-fire bald-face lie. We will have to wait until it is *so* obvious that Antartica is losing ice, that even Glenn Beck has to admit it. But then, the forbes (and the conservative think tanks) will just slip right on to another canard.

History repeats itself. We've seen this before.

Since you don't know the difference between north and south, water and land, surface are and volume, humidity and temperature, maximum and average, it is a complete waste of time to even discuss anything with you. Merely to note that you are yet another anonymous far right wing troll on the internet, who may or may not be being paid to preach genocide on the internet. Next to that truth, there's nothing anyone can say that is worse.

However, in the off chance anyone is reading this far, some useful actual science can be found at:

1. "Modelling the influence of snow accumulation and snow-ice formation on the seasonal cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice cover" http://www.springerlink.com/index/R23VXQQD8VPTJ5W0.pdf
2. "Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise" http://wuos.org/content/308/5730/1898.short
3. "Variability of Antarctic sea ice 1979–1998" http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000JC000733.shtml
4. "Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling" http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n2/abs/ngeo102.html
   1. High impact peer reviewed journals, as opposed to squibs from the far right wing WSJ editorial page. As Samuel L. Jackson might say, "Science, m****rf*****r do you speak it?" (Go on troll mods, rate me down, it's something you'll be ashamed of one day, smothering the truth to protect the lies. But being nice doesn't stop people who do evil for money or kicks, only the shunning of society.)

Actual research article

Wikipedia article on the architecture proposal

There was a recent confirmation of endocrine-disruptors such as BPA causing breast cancer in the female gene line which is passed on to not just the daughter, but the granddaughter and great grandaughter too... http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n9/full/ncomms2058.html

Way, way off. The numbers are more like a 30% decrease in yields, based on current farming methods. Considering that we haven't applied science to organic farming like we have to chemical farming, due to easy postwar chemical availability, the gap could probably be closed even more. Yes, conventional farms have marginally higher productivity. But you are off by an order of magnitude with your "5x" claim.

In "Future impact: Predicting scientific success", Acuna, Allesina, Kording predict the future h-index of scientist using their current h-index, the square root ofnumber of articles published, years since first publication, number of distinct journals, and the number of articles in top journals. They vary the coefficients of a linear regression with the number of years in the forecast and note that, in the short term the largest coefficient is (not surprisingly) the scientist's current h-index, but in the long term, the number of articles in top journals and the number of distinct journals become more important for the 10 year h-index forecast. They achieve an $R^2$ value of 0.67 for neuro-scientists which is significantly larger than the $R^2$ using h-index alone (near 0.4).

Additionally, they provide an on-line tool you can use to make your own predictions. (Click here to see this comment rendered in Tex.)

Bacteria are routinely present in the subsurface, eating the oil. Look up the subject of "biodegradation" in the context of petroleum geology. One of the reasons the "oil sands" in Alberta are the consistency of dense, viscous, almost tar-like oil is due to the effects of bacteria near the surface. However, usually the rate at which bacteria degrade oil is limited by nutrient supply (especially oxygen and nitrogen), chemistry of the water, and ultimately by temperature. Beyond ~60-80C, the number of bacteria and rate of their degradation greatly declines. A lot of oil fields are effectively "sterilized" by high temperatures, and you have to "innoculate" them with bacteria before the degradation will start. Often this happens at the time that a well is drilled into the reservoir, and this can create problems if it progresses too far (e.g., "tar mats", which clog up the system and slow the flow of the oil). So, no, they probably won't eat the rest of it. It would take quite a while (that's a lot of oil), and it might be too hot to get established. But it could reduce the ultimate amount that is recoverable.

This paper is focused on high-temperature subsurface biodegradation, but in the process also talks about some of the shallower/cooler biodegradation processes as a contrast. Unfortunately you'll need journal access to view it.

So...how were the results replicated? Did another, unrelated team of researchers use the LHC to achieve the same results? If not, what the fuck, science? Aren't irreproducible results the butt of jokes? Ah, nevermind. I don't have a Ph.D., so as I have been informed many times before, on this very website, how am I to question Ph.D.s? I promise to be more trusting and less vigilant in the future.

(Ed. note: I've been trying to post comments like this one since 2012-09-01, but they never appeared on my article at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. So I finally posted this reply at my website, Slashdot, and Mike Haseler's website Scottish Skeptic.)

Let's get the facts straight. Even doubling CO2, means its greenhouse effect would only rise global temperatures by 1C. That is half the threshold for action set by the IPCC.

But, this scam has nothing to do with their real science. These charlatans would be predicting the same nonsense if CO2's effect were twice as high or half as much, because the real contribution of CO2 is much smaller than the natural variation.

And let's not forget:

1. This scam is based on a rise in temperature from 1970 to 2000 which happens to be coincident with rising CO2. The overwhelming bulk of this rise has nothing to do with CO2 greenhouse effect.

2. Largely the same academics who cry wolf over this short term trend were crying wolf over the short term cooling before the 1970s.

3. It all stopped in 2000 (1998 to be precise). That's 14 years without warming, compared to the 30 year trend they say proves warming will continue till the earth fries (much like we were heading for an iceage)

4. And just to cap it all, it warmed the same amount, for the same period, before CO2 was measured rising between 1910 and 1940 and guess what ... we didn't end up global warming doomsday then either. [Mike Haseler, 2012-09-01]

0. Many diverse lines of evidence (paleoclimate, modern observations, fundamental physics) show that doubling CO2 warms the planet by roughly 3C.

1. Human CO2 forcing has increased dramatically since 1970, while solar irradiance, volcanic activity, cosmic rays, solar flares, etc. have remained about the same.

2. Even during the 1970s, most scientific papers were predicting warming.

3. Skeptical Science's "going down the up escalator" shows at a glance that this often-repeated myth about global warming ending in 1998 is wrong.

4. The rate of warming from 1910 to 1940 was about 0.13C/decade compared to about 0.18C/decade from 1975 to 2005. But scientists don't simply compare the rates; they examine natural and human radiative forcings which change the global climate's total energy, which is indeed an average over at least several decades. In the early 20th century there was a lull in volcanic eruptions which usually cool the climate by blocking out the sun over a few years. Early human CO2 emissions and a slight increase in the Sun's brightness also played small roles. Internal variability modes, which shift energy from one part of the globe to another (i.e. climate cycles) are also important. Temperatures measured in the 1940s were warmer than the models; this discrepency is thought to be due in part to Ar

No. No it wouldn't. Quantum entanglement does not allow for faster than light communication. Common myth.

-- MyLongNickName

Then what are these guys saying?

The lack of human testing is a pretty big issue. I went to an early stages of drug discovery conference last year and remember one of the speakers referring to clinical trials as "the place where drug candidates go to die." However the articles linked to in TFA are very light on details so we don't really know what they have tested at all.

There are five different plasmodium species that can infect and cause disease in humans and we don't know which one(s) this group looked into. Probably P. malariae, and if effective on just one of the species it would still be wonderful news, but we don't know from TFA. The other problem is that the drug "killed resistant parasites instantly." What does that mean? Do they maintain drug resistant plasmodium strains in their lab and when you have them in some petri dish with tissue culture medium that you can instantly kill them by adding the compound? If that's all they've got then it's not nearly as impressive as the article lets on. Malarial pathogens spend a lot of time inside of cells, both inside of red blood cells and also inside of cells in the liver, hiding from the host immune system and any anti-malarial drugs. The life cycle inside the host is fairly complex with different malarial stages having different responses to any drug administered. This is why traditional malaria treatments are multiple doses over at least several days. The other problem is that the animal model for malaria disease isn't very good. Again, we don't know from the articles linked in TFA exactly what animal model they used, but it's probably a mouse model. In that case, it's already known to be easier to kill malarial infections in the model than in an actual infection in humans.

I share your wish that the research group has lots of luck in their upcoming clinical trials; it sounds like they've gone about as far as they can without testing on the actual disease in human patients. I'm just not optimistic as clinical trials are difficult to pass, a one pill cure just sounds too good to be true, and then your comments about the drug class itself.

http://www.nature.com/news/robots-hunt-neurons-to-record-brain-activity-1.11289

http://medimoon.com/2012/08/robots-could-record-brain-activity-by-hunting-neurons/

"When you're talking about physically cutting into a baby's body, the burden of proof lies with those who would cut, not those who would not."

Ask, and you shall receive!

I find it very amusing that here on Slashdot, a few days after a paper claiming that such melts are actually not unusual, along comes another paper that is "gloom and doom".

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11391.html

Although warming of the northeastern Antarctic Peninsula began around 600 years ago, the high rate of warming over the past century is unusual (but not unprecedented) in the context of natural climate variability over the past two millennia.

Oh and the "not unprecedented" part...
That's just the way of saying "Yeah, sure. It happened before."
In this case, "before" lies somewhere between 9,200 and 2,500 years ago.
Then, during the most of human civilization's existence it cooled down, until around 600 years ago it started to warm up again.

Coincidentally, at about that time the 100-year war was raging across Europe, the Mind Dynasty replaced the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty in China while Mongols continued doing their thing all the way to Europe, in Americas Incas were spreading while Aztecs were busy sacrificing humans and Maya were busy with political turmoils of their own.

It is known to have worked out great for immunity, just like I originally said. Thanks for asking.

It even helped us beyond the original diseases:

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050307/full/news050307-15.html

The democrats caved and allowed the republicans to rewrite the bill The GOP realized that if their bill passed with Obama in the white house, he would get credit for fixing the health care system - even if the passed bill fixed nothing Realizing what they did, the GOP turned the noise machine up to 11 Realizing they were stuck, the democrats voted for the bill and Obama signed it -

You believe the Republicans wrote PPACA??? My god are you deluded. Obama couldn't even get his own party in line behind what he proposed. 34 Dems in the House voted against it! And no serious Republican idea was incorporated into it. It was nearly a thousand partisan pages written behind closed doors followed by an attempt to buy Republican votes with some bullshit riders/amendments. They never had any intention of working with the Republicans -- don't you remember the "sit in the back" commentary? Remember these concessions? (hint, they aren't republican concessions) http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-10/politics/house.health.care_1_blue-dogs-public-option-medicare-rates?_s=PM:POLITICS

Stop trying to rewrite history you troll.

I just said they at least managed to do something, which is more than we can say.

What they "did" was become healthier without their government's involvement. That should be obvious by the chart included in the same damn article that clearly shows a declining use of healthcare from 1998 through 2004: http://www.nature.com/news/mexioc-health-policy-graph-jpg-7.5922?article=1.11222

Seeing as how the Mexican "universal healthcare" bill wasn't even enacted until 2002-2003, it's tough to chalk up the reduced medical bills to government intervention.

Not really, that's just one guy who wrote a self published book full of misrepresentations and distortions. Read what actual scientists have to say about it here. The went through and did a comprehensive take down of that guy's nonsense. Alternatively, this is a fun well cited video. My favorite bit: he claims that transgenes are taken up by gut flora and continue to function, meaning that they could be producing the Bt protein that kills insects (which is totally harmless to humans anyway, but whatever). He cites Netherwood 2004 as proof. That paper's abstract ends with "we conclude that gene transfer did not occur during the feeding experiment." So they guy who wrote that site either does not bother to even look at the papers he cites, or he flat out lies. He is also one of the leaders in the anti-GE movement, and is very highly respected and often cited among those who espouse anti-GE sentiment. So what should that tell you?

But either way, if there is nothing wrong then there should be no reason against the labeling.

If there's nothing wrong why should the be labeled? There's tons of things we do to plants that are not dangerous that most people have never heard of, like mutagenesis and doubled haploid hybridization and selection of bud sport mutants. I don't think GE should be singled out. That is just using people's ignorance to scare them about genetic engineering by making it stand out as something different and unique.

If I have a choice between a gmo product that hasn't been in the food supply long enough to know if its okay or not and one that isnt a gmo product, I'd be happy to have the information to make my own informed choices.

That is easy to do already and I'll tell you how. Corn, soy, canola, cotton, alfalfa, sugar beet, summer squash, and papaya. Eight species have been genetically engineered in the US. Due to the way they are processed, anything containing them that is not labeled as organic or non-GMO contains genetically engineered crops. Now you know how to avoid them if you want, and you can do it without a label. However, they have been in the food supply for a long time, and tested even longer, and there is no reason whatsoever to think they pose any more of a health risk than any other crop.

That having been said, since Dr. Oz recommends avoiding GMO foods

That interview was horribly edited by the way. And somehow, those of us who support genetic engineering are the deceitful ones.

Eh, I just took the first google result on the topic to show that 'zero' may be an inaccurate assessment. I'm afraid I have to take a 50,000 foot view of the situation in order to see that most nutritional studies get it wrong the first, second and third times. I also see many nutritional studies that omit data or game their acceptance criteria to get the result they really wanted in the first place.

Remember when butter and lard and coconut oil would kill you, so we should use transfats, hydrogenated fats and margarine? I suspect that maneuver killed millions. Eggs are bad, eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good, eggs are bad again? Salt is bad for you if you remove the 50% of the study participants that showed no effects from eating salt, like Intersalt did. The lipid theory that 'proved' that saturated fats are bad for you had to eliminate 17 countries out of 22 to get that result. The truth in re-reading the study shows that patients who live in countries that eat high calorie, high energy, heavily processed and packaged foods had heart trouble

Not really, that's just one guy who wrote a self published book full of misrepresentations and distortions. Read what actual scientists have to say about it here. The went through and did a comprehensive take down of that guy's nonsense. Alternatively, this is a fun well cited video. My favorite bit: he claims that transgenes are taken up by gut flora and continue to function, meaning that they could be producing the Bt protein that kills insects (which is totally harmless to humans anyway, but whatever). He cites Netherwood 2004 as proof. That paper's abstract ends with "we conclude that gene transfer did not occur during the feeding experiment." So they guy who wrote that site either does not bother to even look at the papers he cites, or he flat out lies. He is also one of the leaders in the anti-GE movement, and is very highly respected and often cited among those who espouse anti-GE sentiment. So what should that tell you?

But either way, if there is nothing wrong then there should be no reason against the labeling.

If there's nothing wrong why should the be labeled? There's tons of things we do to plants that are not dangerous that most people have never heard of, like mutagenesis and doubled haploid hybridization and selection of bud sport mutants. I don't think GE should be singled out. That is just using people's ignorance to scare them about genetic engineering by making it stand out as something different and unique.

If I have a choice between a gmo product that hasn't been in the food supply long enough to know if its okay or not and one that isnt a gmo product, I'd be happy to have the information to make my own informed choices.

That is easy to do already and I'll tell you how. Corn, soy, canola, cotton, alfalfa, sugar beet, summer squash, and papaya. Eight species have been genetically engineered in the US. Due to the way they are processed, anything containing them that is not labeled as organic or non-GMO contains genetically engineered crops. Now you know how to avoid them if you want, and you can do it without a label. However, they have been in the food supply for a long time, and tested even longer, and there is no reason whatsoever to think they pose any more of a health risk than any other crop.

That having been said, since Dr. Oz recommends avoiding GMO foods

That interview was horribly edited by the way. And somehow, those of us who support genetic engineering are the deceitful ones.

It isn't in Nature, it's in Scientific Reports, one of 'over 80' journals from the Nature Publishing Group

http://www.nature.com/srep/about/index.html

It's a new journal, with no impact factor yet.

A lot of slashdotters love to rubbish media coverage of science. Well here's one of many examples where the news story is more balanced and revealing than the paper. No mention of feeding the world etc
From Nature's news story about this paper:
"When the researchers measured the aphids’ levels of ATP — the ‘currency’ of energy transfer in all living things — the results were striking. Green aphids, which contain high levels of carotenoids, make significantly more ATP than do white ones, which are almost devoid of these pigments. Moreover, ATP production rose when the orange insects — which contain an intermediate amount of carotenoids — were placed in the light, and fell when they were moved into the dark."

This one:
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120712/srep00507/pdf/srep00507.pdf

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Precisely. Does Ceasium-137 in the soil noticeably increase the background radiation in an area? No. Does this map showing C137 concentrations around the Fukushima area make you want to move there? Also no. I probably wouldn't want to live in Denver either but that is a separate issue.

According to wikipedia 1 Sivert == 100 rem. 0.1rem would be 0.001 Sivert or 1 mSv. According to a quick google there were hotspots = 5.82 microsiverts per hour. That's about 51 mSv per year or an increase of 5.1rem.

Where is he measuring this 0.1 rem increase? On Japan's south island?

It may be 100 Million times as strong as its predecessor, but in absolute terms it required 1.5 KILOWATTS of input power to generate 100 MICROWATTS of output power. Not the most efficient thing in the world - that's an input:output power ratio of 15 million:1 (nearly 72 dB).

GRACE can resolve nearly uncorrelated mascons that are blocks 400km on each side with a noise floor of ~1cm equivalent water height. (This is latitude dependent because GRACE's denser ground tracks near the poles allow for better resolution.) Each mascon has a mass of ~1.6 gigatons, and a fully-loaded coal train is ~10 kilotons, so GRACE falls short by about five orders of magnitude.

The improved laser ranging on the GRACE follow-on will increase sensitivity, and David Wiese analyzes improvements due to lowering the satellites' altitude and/or adding more satellites to the GRACE system.

You're right to suspect that detecting a tiny change in local gravity is limited by uncertainties in models such as atmosphere dynamics. I've discussed how GPS occultation data (among many other data sources) can be used to reduce these uncertainties.

Other anthropogenic effects such as groundwater depletion can already be detected with GRACE. Rodell et al. 2009 (PDF) and Tiwari et al. 2009 (PDF) observed this in northern India, and Famiglietti et al. 2011 (PDF) recently observed similar groundwater depletion in California.

CO2 levels parallel average global temperatures, in looking at the geological record, correct? That gives much credence to CO2 as a mechanism for current climate change.

Correct. Here’s a figure from Royer et al. 2007 which concludes that “a climate sensitivity greater than 1.5C has probably been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate system over the past 420 million years”.

What increased C02 in ancient times? It is also my understanding that volcanic action produced CO2 which raised temps, Correct? Also, at other epochs, certain orbital factors cooked CO2 out of oceans. In this latter case, I would expect CO2 levels to lag temps (and then force greater changes) and in the former (volcanic) case CO2 levels would precede temp rise. Correct?

Correct. I've discussed the difference between these situations.

Here is a related question: If the former case, volcanoes produced CO2 and that raised temps, that same rise should also cook CO2 out of the oceans, which would produce an even greater rise in temps. What could reverse this trend?

Human ingenuity.

CO2 levels parallel average global temperatures, in looking at the geological record, correct? That gives much credence to CO2 as a mechanism for current climate change.

Correct. Here’s a figure from Royer et al. 2007 which concludes that “a climate sensitivity greater than 1.5C has probably been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate system over the past 420 million years”.

What increased C02 in ancient times? It is also my understanding that volcanic action produced CO2 which raised temps, Correct? Also, at other epochs, certain orbital factors cooked CO2 out of oceans. In this latter case, I would expect CO2 levels to lag temps (and then force greater changes) and in the former (volcanic) case CO2 levels would precede temp rise. Correct?

Correct. I've discussed the difference between these situations.

Here is a related question: If the former case, volcanoes produced CO2 and that raised temps, that same rise should also cook CO2 out of the oceans, which would produce an even greater rise in temps. What could reverse this trend?

Human ingenuity.

And you are correct. If they printed it any smaller, the colors would start blurring together because of the wavelength.

Here's a picture if you want to see it. Although it is small, fidelity to the original image is clearly low. The technique could use some improving. Still cool.

US foundaton gives Africa countries donations to buy drugs from US pharma companies. They also encouraged South Africa and India to not develop their own generic AIDS drugs, rather buy them at full price from western drug companies. Loans for the payment of such are available at an affordable rate of interest.

Malaria vaccine results face scrutiny.

"New research shows that Intellectual Ventures is tied to at least 1,300 shell companies whose sole purpose is to coerce real companies into buying patent license that they don't want or need. Those who resist the "patent trolls" are dragged into nightmarish lawsuits."