Slashdot Mirror

Yeah, split-brain != split mind

Put down the pop-sci books and go check out the actual research. That particular conclusion isn't supported by the evidence at all.

Ok. Does Nature count?

Aspartame sat sidelined by the FDA because of tests showing it was a carcinogen and neurotoxin

Citation needed. Last I checked none of those concerns turned out to have any scientific merit.

Since recent studies show that you are what you eat and food RNA can effect your genes [discovermagazine.com] the entire genetic modification of base food crops is a little worrying.

Why exactly would you expect a transgenes to be more or less likely to have an effect on you than any other gene? That study made no mention of GE crops and was just used by the anti-GE nutters Read this this or this for a complete take down of the nonsense that was said about that study.

Millions of years of symbiotic evolution is being altered in ways not even fully understood yet.

Do you also oppose every other method of altering plant genetics? Even conventional breeding has produced things that could not be found in nature, like corn (broccoli, strawberries, wheat, and cabbage are other crops created by humans). . And why should it matter that plants are being altered? Farms aren't exactly natural environments. And who says they are not fully understood? They are studied quite extensively, and while it is true that there could always be an unknown unknown, appeals to ignorance are not very strong arguments for rejecting known benefits.

I'm all for scientific advances but rushing to market and forcing this down people's throats is not a good attitude.

I agree that things should not be rushed for the sake of profit, but at this point, that argument holds very little water when applied to GE crops as a whole. Maybe two decades ago that would have been a more reasonable thing to say, but not anymore.

Because Monsanto has been so successful in India and South America, right?

They have been actually. Well, their seed has been anyway.

Actually the first one is not likely... however regarding the second... just today I read that the city of Naples is giving the green light to drill the first of what will ultimately be a 4,000 meter hydrothermal energy vent into the Campi Flegrei super volcano caldera just outside Naples. Scientists are worried about earthquakes and the remote possibility of precipitating an eruption. I find this far more sleep depriving than any thought of astronomical events. Oh and if you follow the story links, the only vaguely possible stellar catastrophe is a possible Gamma Ray Burster towards the center of the galaxy... a low odds threat at best.

Often absent from these discussions, and before the usual flamewars start, are solar power satellites, such as the ones JAXA is developing. This technology, while it may seem a bit blue sky at the moment is coming very much economically within our grasp over the next decade. All of the energy we need is flying right at us free of charge from the biggest nuclear reactor in the solar system, we just need to take advantage of it.

From the sound of it, it was just 10-15 students they all accused of the same thing

I haven't seen a report saying that they are students. But, regardless, how do we actually know they are innocent? There have been numerous targeted bombings and assassinations of Iranian scientists and academics. Some organised "terrorist" group has murdered these people, and others have supplied that group with information, weapons, money, safehouses etc. If this were happening in the U.S. - if American scientists and academics were being murdered by a foreign terrorist group - then Americans would be demanding justice, including assasinations and detention without trial. Maybe this man is innocent, but this dirty war is not. There are spies operating in Iran, and they will obviously claim that they are innocent if they get caught.

Zahiri's accusation is contact with Mojahedin-e Khalgh Organization (completely unrelated to the Mossad).

Mossad Caught Running MEK Assassinations of Iranian Scientists
Mossad hit-squads behind Iran scientists' murders - US official
Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran's nuclear scientists, U.S. officials tell NBC News

It doesn't help the "we're innocent" argument when U.S. officials have openly called for MEK to not be classified as a terrorist group, and the U.S. military has allegedly provided MEK with material assistance and special forces training.

Not if it is made with bomb-grade Uranium, which is also the easiest thing to make a bomb out of, but which isn't radioactive, although you might pick up the trigger.

The rest of your comments are rather nuanced, but Uranium IS radioactive, especially weapons-grade. It is absolutely false to imply that uranium is somehow not radioactive just because plutonium can be warm to the touch while uranium is not. Weapons grade Uranium (U-235) has a half life of 700 million years. Weapons grade Plutonium (Pu-239) has a half life of 2,410 years. Because the Pu has a shorter half-life, wg Pu is MORE Radioactive than wg U, but it is not true to say U is non-rad. There are impurities which could be present in the wg Pu (238, 240, 241) have shorter half-lives than the Pu-239 and increase the activity wg Pu. In short ALL uranium is radioactive, as are ALL elements with Z>82. Bismuth-209 (z=83) was measured to have a half-life of 1.9 * 10^19 years. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v422/n6934/full/nature01541.html

You are correct on the gamma being the radiation most likely picked up. Alpha would be stopped within the body, and for beta to be picked up outside the body it would have to be high energy and thus undesirable for use in nuclear medicine (collateral damage to surrounding tissues).

It does not sound like it happened right after the hospital.

But earlier that day, Apatow, who'd experienced a recent spike in his blood pressure, had a nuclear stress test at Cardiology Associates of Fairfield County in Trumbull.

From the description of why he was driving it appears this was much later in the day. Further down in the article

Lancaster, also director of non-invasive cardiology at Bridgeport Hospital, said a colleague knew of an incident in which a patient was traveling by plane the day after a stress test and set off alarms in the airport.

It very much depends on the procedure used and the isotopes though. Tc-99m has a half-life of 6 hours yes, which is still long enough to undergo a procedure and have more than 50% emitting when you are driving home. I-131 used for thyroid treatments has an 8 day half life. Low dose treatments for prostate cancer which remain in place have half-lives ranging from 2 weeks to 2 months. Theraspheres which contain Y-90 have a half life of 64 hours. All of these are long enough that the gamma radiation could possibly be picked up outside of a vehicle.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091125/full/462398b.html

.. I suspect we can ultimately fix almost all our patent problems by returning the patent office to central funding. Funding the patent office from patent fees has got to be our greatest mistake.

I have spent an instructive afternoon reviewing the nature of US Patent Office Funding:

• * www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy13pbr.pdf (United States Patent and Trademark Office FY 2013 President's Budget)
• * http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-112publ29/content-detail.html (Public Law 112 - 29 - Leahy-Smith America Invents Act)
• * http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v30/n2/full/nbt.2110.html (Nature paper on patent office funding.)
• * http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-05/congress-must-ensure-patent-office-funds-university-leaders-say.html (Bloomberg article on Patent Fee diversion.)

My initial impression that there was a 'greatest funding mistake' is way too optimistic. There is just no bottom to the Patent's office barrel of broken funding bits. But, let me list just a few:

• * Congress loves to steal the Patent office fees to fund other stuff.
• * Page 37 of the budget: "..More than half of all patent fee collections are from issue and maintenance fees, which essentially subsidize examination activities." They charge a small fee to file, and a much larger fee once your patent is granted. The ratio is about 3 to 1. Roughly 1/3 of all patent applications are granted. So, inherent in the design is a perverse financial incentive to grant patents regardless of the merits.
• * Page 12 of the budget: Currently they are backing up patent applications much faster than they clear them. 506924 patents filed last year. 669625 backlogged patents. So, they are currently trying to clear 1,176,549 patents using about 6600 examiners (178 patents per examiner per year.)
• * Page 60 of the budget: "Gap Assessment: Meeting this commitment assumes efficiency improvements brought about by reengineering many USPTO management and operational processes (e.g., the patent examination process) and systems, and hiring about 3,000 patent examiners in the two-year period FY 2012 and FY 2013 (including examiners for Three-Track Examination)." So, the plan is to streamline the process even more and hire many more inexperienced patent examiners. Yea! More crap patents!

So, we have a monstrous machine for issuing patents. It has to issue patents to stay alive. It is currently in severe pain because it can't issue patents fast enough. We need to 'fix' the situation by issuing patents faster.

Seems like the real fix would be:

• * Collect most of the money up front.
• * Force simpler patent applications
• * Say no a lot more often.
• * And slap any silly congresscritter that thinks this should be a money-making operation.

Miles

Ok here's some evidence: fresh of the press: Nature Geoscience One of the co-authors (Dr. Bas van Geel) is actually very skeptical of AGW, because all of the GCM's underestimate the effect of the sun on climate. I tend to agree with his ideas, based on measurements, seems to me more evidence based than the output of computer models.

Ok here's some evidence: fresh of the press: Nature Geoscience One of the co-authors (Dr. Bas van Geel) is actually very skeptical of AGW, because all of the GCM's underestimate the effect of the sun on climate. I tend to agree with his ideas, based on measurements, seems to me more evidence based than the output of computer models.

surely the crap spewed into the atmosphere by continuous seismic events must far outweigh your "graphed" metrics. Each side of the debate is hindered by FUD so choose your arguments carefully.

Even during the lead up to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, CO2 and equivalents emissions were much lower than they are currently (1.1 to 6.32 billion tonnes per year. Compared to about 30 billion tonnes per year at present). Atmospheric temperatures got far higher than they are at present (6-9C), but over a far longer period of time (~20,000 years)

Here's my source: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n7/full/ngeo1179.html

For clarification, their number is 0.3–1.7Petagrams (1Pg=1 billion tonnes) of carbon per year. Multiply by 3.67 to convert to CO2.

Multiply by 2.67 which is the ratio of the molar masses of two oxygen atoms to one carbon atom.

I hope you are being serious, because those are actually important questions and strike at the core of the science (not the politics) of Global Warming.

3/4 of the world is water how many consistent accurate readings do we have from the oceans before say 1950.

Sea surface temperature is a good global thermometer and was first systematically recorded during the Challenger Expedition from 1872-1876. Read "135 years of global ocean warming between the Challenger expedition and the Argo Programme" for more detail.

So we have sixty years of accurate readings world wide could there possibly be a 70 year trend that we are missing ?

The simple answer is: Yes, there could be a 70 year trend we are missing. The El Nino cycle was arguably only first described in detail in 1969, so it is possible there are other trends we do not know about.

The planet is 4 billion years old, the last ice age was 10,000 years ago I don't think the sample is large enough for us to make a good decision.

There are temperature paleo-proxies that can be used as thermometers for the deep past. Some examples include sediment cores, ice cores, corals, tree rings, and leaf remains which provide a variety of information about the climate based on stable isotopes and other indicators. Ice cores give us a continuous record going back hundreds of thousands of years, while other proxies give incomplete records from millions of years in the past. I encourage you to challenge the validity of these proxies and learn about stable isotope fractionation.

How much of the atmosphere is CO2... not 90 percent but less than one percent correct and what is the the human contribution to that only a small fraction.

The atmosphere contains about 820 Pg of carbon, approximately 0.04% by volume. Each year, the net flux of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuels and land use changes is estimated at approximately 4.1(±0.04) Pg -- only 0.5% increase per year.

We are not the cause.

While the Earth's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide has a disproportionately large effect on controlling temperature. To prove it to yourself, you can do a physical experiment with two soda bottles and some alka-seltzer. We are measurably the cause of a small net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (see above); however, if you want to be sceptical you should ask whether that short term increase will lead to a long term temperature change.

surely the crap spewed into the atmosphere by continuous seismic events must far outweigh your "graphed" metrics. Each side of the debate is hindered by FUD so choose your arguments carefully.

Even during the lead up to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, CO2 and equivalents emissions were much lower than they are currently (1.1 to 6.32 billion tonnes per year. Compared to about 30 billion tonnes per year at present). Atmospheric temperatures got far higher than they are at present (6-9C), but over a far longer period of time (~20,000 years)

Here's my source: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n7/full/ngeo1179.html

For clarification, their number is 0.3–1.7Petagrams (1Pg=1 billion tonnes) of carbon per year. Multiply by 3.67 to convert to CO2.

Where the disagreement is, is if that warming is a natural part of earths long term weather patterns

Source?

IF increased carbon dioxide causes warming
AND sources, sinks, and fluxes of carbon dioxide can be quantified
THEN the human contribution to warming can be estimated

While the effort put into the analysis in this paper is admirable, it sort of fades into the background of the glut of "we took existing data sets and made a network -- here's the picture" sort of systems biology papers that are being cranked out right now. I'm just wondering, of all the rigorous and higher-impactautism genetics research being done right now, why did this one in particular warrant a slashdot blurb? This certainly isn't the first (or even most compelling) research to uncover convergent biological processes in the autistic brain.

While the effort put into the analysis in this paper is admirable, it sort of fades into the background of the glut of "we took existing data sets and made a network -- here's the picture" sort of systems biology papers that are being cranked out right now. I'm just wondering, of all the rigorous and higher-impactautism genetics research being done right now, why did this one in particular warrant a slashdot blurb? This certainly isn't the first (or even most compelling) research to uncover convergent biological processes in the autistic brain.

While the effort put into the analysis in this paper is admirable, it sort of fades into the background of the glut of "we took existing data sets and made a network -- here's the picture" sort of systems biology papers that are being cranked out right now. I'm just wondering, of all the rigorous and higher-impactautism genetics research being done right now, why did this one in particular warrant a slashdot blurb? This certainly isn't the first (or even most compelling) research to uncover convergent biological processes in the autistic brain.

That's very interesting. Say, I have a fascinating link that may interest you.

The title of the linked article is "Organic farming is rarely enough". But it is difficult to back up that "producing the bulk of the globe's diet will still require chemical fertilizers and pesticides", and so they simply skip that.

Reference again, http://www.nature.com/news/organic-farming-is-rarely-enough-1.10519

S

however, during that same time period, the sea ice in the Antarctic, you know, at the other end of the planet, has been increasing. uh oh.

First of all, it's important that people know what "sea ice" is and its not. It *is* frozen sea water, which in the Antarctic mostly melts in the summer. It is *not* the permanent Antarctic ice sheets, which originate in glaciers (land ice, not sea ice, even though it is on the sea). The ice sheets are losing about 40 gigtons of mass per year[5].

Second, the gain in sea ice in the Antarctic is tiny, and it is not the result of atmospheric temperature decreases. There has been an increase in Antarctic atmosphere temperatures [1], accompanied by a stronger winds blowing cold surface water to the northwest which produces the increase in winter sea ice extent [2]. In the lee of the Antarctic Peninsula, which blocks this surface movement, there has been a dramatic decrease in sea ice [3]. Another factor is that slightly warmer surface temperatures can actually lead to an increase in ice extent by reducing the salinity of water near the edge of ice-formation[6].

Overall, the changes in polar sea ice are consistent with models predicting CO2 induced global warming [2][4], and in any case land ice is a much better indication of antarctic temperature changes, and that has being lost; if the small sea ice increases we've been seeing were due to cooling, we would see an equilibrium or gain in land ice.

CITATIONS:
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/abs/nature07669.html
[2] http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#wintertimeantarctic
[3] http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/278/5340/1104.short
[5] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010EGUGA..12.6127I
[6] http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf

Oh, right. Not allowed unless approved by the control freaks we have at the top of the political system at the moment.

I think it's time for ordinary Canadian citizens (and anyone else in the world that wants to help) to start firing off enough requests to Canadian government scientific institutions that we can eventually overwhelm the pinheads in charge of "messaging" and they let us speak with the people doing the work. We used to be able to do that easily, but it has been getting worse and worse over the years. It has achieved truly ridiculous levels of obfuscation with the current government. Scientists should be allowed to speak their minds on scientific matters of public concern. It's good research being paid for with OUR tax dollars. Stop trying to hide it from us for the sake of "controlling the message". If you want to save money, fire the expensive idiots in charge of the "messaging". Scientists are quite capable of delivering a useful message if you let them do their jobs.

If you ever wonder why scientific budgets in Canada continue to decline in terms of money available for research and scientific staff, but the "upper management" and "PR people" staff get bigger and bigger to manage the smaller pool of scientists, this is the answer. These people have nothing to do all day but spin the story to align with the politics of the day.

Agreed, atrocious summary and terrible title. Here's an alternate.

Survey Finds Too Little Dark Matter Near Solar System

The existence and approximate distribution of dark matter have become standard assumptions in cosmology. According to Nature, it "explains how structure arose in the Universe, how galaxies formed and how the rapidly spinning Milky Way manages to keep from flying apart." However, a paper recently accepted by the Astrophysical Journal studied stellar velocities in our part of the galaxy in an attempt to infer the amount of dark matter present near our solar system and came up with unsettling results. Moni Bidin, the study's lead author, concluded that "at most, only about one-tenth the amount of dark matter predicted by models could exist in the volume of space they examined." Astronomer Frederic Hessman, who is uninvolved in the study, put things bluntly: "If this is right, it turns everything totally upside-down." Physicists are calling for caution and several note the difficulty and sensitivity to error of the present results. Astronomer Chris Flynn, who approved Bidin's paper for publication, cautioned, "I wouldn’t throw out nearby dark matter quite yet” and “The measurement being made is very challenging, and there are a number of ways for it to miss the dark matter even if is there.”

Of course intelligence has a biological basis, it's just never been shown that genetics has a stronger effect than environment.

Wrong.

How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition.

Costs are relatively low, especially if you are paying attention to human life lost. The high order bit in the US is electricity generation, and ditching coal is a net win. For transportation, reduced driving (more bicycling where appropriate, walking to mass transit, that sort of thing) means more exercise, which has a measurable (and large) reduction in the mortality rate. Eating less meat (not NO meat, but much less) reduces GHG emissions, and is probably a minor health benefit (we get a lot more protein than we appear to need, at least in this country).

Other GHG mitigation choices are not especially death-y. Driving in small cars is not significantly more dangerous than driving in large cars, if everyone drives in small cars (note that the total crash risk is dwarfed by the total lack-of-exercise risk; our actions suggest that we either do not really care about risk, or are grossly misinformed, or both). Insulating houses does not make them more unsafe. Turning the thermostat down in the winter may even be good for us.

One flaw with your metric is that observed behavior in the US suggests that we are not actually that interested in minimizing human life lost. We've got a mess of bad habits here, and a shorter life expectancy than many other countries. We could pay attention to this and copy what appears to work from them, or (ahem) not. Turns out, not.

(Disclaimer: IAAP) This is actually not the first realization of a quantum network, that's not the point. Chinese and other researches have already created a quantum network link over up to 16km distance (see for example here: Experimental free-space quantum teleportation (only abstract)). Allthough strictly speaking this was only a 2-point link.
A quantum repeater which is elementary part of a quantum network has also been demonstrated with atomic ensembles.

The new thing here is that their quantum repeater used a single atom in an optical cavity as a photon storage device. The advantage of using only a single atom as qubit storage is the potentially much longer storage time compared to a group of atoms but it is much more difficult to get enough coupling strength to the photon.
This is why they use a cavity which is resonant with the atomic transition used in their setup. But even then you only successfully write a photon in 0.5% of all tries.
But that doesn't actually matter, all you need is to establish an entangled pair before your storage time runs out, so you just to need to repeat the write attempts fast enough.

To clarify: the applications are in quantum key distribution, distribution of entangled qubits for quantum computing purposes, it cannot be used for FTL communication, if ever it will be a very long time before this can be used for superior data transfer (look up quantum dense coding).

This is all basic research to learn how to handle single atoms, how to couple them to photons (so that you can use optical fiber networks) and how to increase fidelity of state preparation and storage time (the stronger you make the coupling to the photons the faster any quantum state will decay due to coupling to the environment). But the main purpose is (to be as cynical as possible) to advance the careers of the principal scientists involved, ensure the flow of grant money and produce phds:)
Seriously the setups they use (ultra high vaccuum, laser cooling etc.) will NEVER be used in any commercial application. You'd need some sort of solid state device where the physics is quiet different and you'd have to do the research all over again.
   

To put that in perspective, Dr. Paul Pharoah, a cancer researcher at the University of Cambridge said in a statement the results would mean an increase in lifetime risk of intracranial meningioma in the U.K. from 15 out of every 10,000 people to 22 in 10,000 people.

I have scanned the original paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.26625/abstract as well, and it is not very impressive as to its use of statistics. This AC in the thread gets the statistics right with respect to the original paper: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2777187&cid=39634199

But back to Dr. Paul Pharaoh's claim and correct use of Poisson statistics. When using Poisson statistics, the sample size is the number of positive events not the total population under study, in this case the 15 people with meningioma. One standard deviation is Sqrt[sample], so rounding to 4. This means that for any group of 10,000 people, there is a 68% chance that the number with meningioma is between 11 and 19. Similarly for that 22/10,0000 estimate, one standard deviation is Sqrt[22] ~ 4.6. For any 10,000 people in that group the odd are 68% that there will be between 17 and 26 people with meningioma. So we can see that there is overlap between the two expectations. From the 15 number to the 22 is about 1.8 sigma, and while 1.8 sigma hints at a result no self respecting physicist would publish that as a result; they would want to get at least three sigma certainty. And this report is no where near 3 sigma.
You state your claim of a 46% increase with a certainty that is not supported by the statistics. In some cohorts of 10,000 it is 46%, but in about the same number of cohorts it is 0%
A recent editorial in Nature comments on directly on sloppy use of statistics in cancer research: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483509a.html

improper use of statistics — the failure to understand the difference between technical replicates and independent experiments, for example.

It is relevant to the paper and our discussion.

For in-depth discussion on my above work I recommend my favorite statistics book, which has good coverage of the use of Poisson statistics: An Introduction to Error Analysis by John Taylor ; http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Error-Analysis-Uncertainties-Measurements/dp/093570275X - suitable even for a Frosh E&AS major.
* It is possible that clever use of Baysian statistics could push the sigma of the origial paper past 2, but I'd be surprised if they could get to 3.

If they do this then the likely outcome is that SKA will never happen. This sort of "compromise" as a way of avoiding having to make an actual decision is almost always the first step in a death spiral for the project. Case in point: the Joint Dark Energy Mission, which crashed and burned due to pointless infighting between erstwhile collaborators on the mission.

It would be nice, but there are probably copyright/licensing issues. It isn't much help (because it requires a subscription), but here's a link to the scientific article in Nature, although, honestly, I've not seen such bad photography presented in Nature in a while. Somebody needs to learn about proper exposure and contrast in photography -- either the original authors or the journal. I had to pull the images off the site and tweak them a bit myself before I was convinced of what the authors were claiming, and higher resolution would be nice. Even so, the interpretations look reasonable, and these structures are quite similar to those described for other dinosaurs specimens in the area.

Rosalind Franklin has credit. Her paper is published in the same issue of Nature as the Watson and Crick paper, it's two pages away. She'd have shared the Nobel prize if she hadn't died before it was awarded. She got a bit screwed, but she's hardly the first academic you can say that about.

There is a book dedicated to this very subject.

http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v4/n1/full/embor723.html

does however link to T Real FA at http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.42.html/, the paper in Nature Nanotechnology. So yes, it is in a near-vacuum. They're looking at changes in the resonance frequency of the nanotube as a gas molecule impinges on its surface.

Your best hope for home science is in bio

It depends on the sub-field of bio. Genetics of yeast or E. coli: easy and (comparatively). Structures of human neuroreceptors: difficult and expensive (particle accelerator required). Do-it-yourself will only take you so far: you can build your own thermocycler without too much struggle, but what about a system for purifying proteins? It may be tempting to do a half-assed job inexpensively, but the pros use equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars. (We have to - it would waste too much time otherwise, not just in the time lost by doing manually what a machine can do for us, but later when we discover that our exciting result was actually an artifact caused by a contaminating protein.) You can find some of this equipment used if you know where to look (and know how to detect junk), but it still requires a significant amount of disposable income.

The one field where amateurs really do have a chance is computational biology/bioinformatics. However, "amateur" in this case means someone with a sophisticated knowledge of math and statistics, which generally implies an advanced degree (and/or extensive professional experience) in a technical field.

at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day

I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone with an interest in the life sciences and a desire for independent learning. This was how I became interested in biology, and after more than a decade of higher education and professional research, I have done very few things that were as fulfilling as watching rotifers and protists feeding, and seeing how many species I could count in a drop of pond water. Even a cheap child's microscope is sufficient to get started, and you can buy higher-quality equipment (the kind that gets used in introductory bio lab in college) used for under $1000.

The problem, unfortunately, is that it's very difficult to do truly original and significant research like this. For the pure learning experience it can't be beat, and I suspect one could make some truly spectacular YouTube videos, but it's no substitute for doing science the messy way, with a real lab and real funding.

Dishonesty has become a real problem in science. Some recent cases (Judy Mikovits, Luk Van Parijs, and Dipak K. Das (aka the red-wine researcher)) reveal some serious misconduct from high profile researchers. Certainly, part of this is due to the increased pressure on scientific researchers. The other part of this is generational. Cheating and misconduct are certainly more prevalent .in younger generations (or perhaps its always been this way and they are just not quite as clever).

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1429.html

Political correctness has no place in Science research

What makes you think that political correctness has anything to do with the decision? Apparently the scientific board didn't have an "enormous preference for one over the other". According to a article linked in TFA:

Since 2006, South Africa has competed against a joint bid from Australia and New Zealand to host the project. The South African site has some compelling advantages: construction costs are lower, and it sits at a higher altitude. But the Australian site would be cheaper to insure, and is less likely to be encroached on by future development. The margin in favour of the winner was extremely narrow, the source says.

It looks like they were making the decision on very practical concerns. They are weighing the cheaper initial costs verses the running costs and practicalities over time. I can see no reason to complain about the process. The idea that political correctness had a part merely because South Africa is the favourite is in itself a form a political correctness.

I just spent several seconds wondering why GOP sponsored science required root access. "Pseudo" is the word you were looking for.

Sorry I had to sudo to post this on /. , my old handle here was the ratfynk and what I was trying to say was I have seen many anti "global warming" and obviously republican leaning pseudo science pundits desperately trying to discredit legitimate scientists that are investigating the theory of global warming. You know the same crowd that laughed when Al Gore stated that (if I remember his actual words correctly) " the greatest problem with advancement of the American economy is the reliance upon the personal automobile".

I have seen the real results of global warming on forests:

Take for instance the boreal forest from about the 50th parallel north which is under siege. We are very close to loosing the lungs of the northern hemisphere to beetle kill...just in case you are interested in what is really happening outside of cities and the the US

If any one thing caused the election of an obvious petroleum sponsored anti environmental, war obsessed president it was this statement and the boost that George 11 Rex Junior and Dick (the head) Cheney got was the fact that the leader of the democratic party was trying to pick a fight the auto/petro cartels.

At about this time the cut backs in grants to those studying environmental science started, and huge subsidies to the petroleum and then the auto industry became the norm. So instead of real research into how to co-exist with nature we still have a system of government bent upon subsidising the destruction of the environment.

Right now poor old Barrack is trying desperately to appease the oil industry so that the assholes that brought us 911 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and 4 dollar a gallon gas don't get back into power.

What does this have to do with planting forests or seeing if there are other strange connections within earth's ecosphere that can help heal the earth and thereby help stabilise the economy?

Well, if we continue to subsidise the usage of personal automobiles and ignore solutions like advancement in public transportation, climate science, natural energy production (bio fuel for example) then in a matter of years the cost of cleaning up after tornados and constantly having to put out fires both diplomatic and of the forest kind will make investing in the possible cures when it was possible will look like small change.

This is the price we will pay if the Republicans are re-elected. Essentially we will wind up paying pseudo scientists to study the reasons why we should ignore global warming instead of learning how to deal without having to put gas in our cars. As it is the Republicans are telling us to ignore the warning signs all around us and that in return they will put 2fifty gas in our cars and cut down all the trees to rebuild the mess that all the tornadoes and floods are making. Same way the assholes helped in New Orleans eh?

  Being a Canadian I am proud to say the by and large we did more to help New Orleans with the cleanup after Katrina than George Rex did! If the republicans are re-elected I am sure we will just bend over and surrender all northern Alberta oil and sit back and watch as our forests are either eaten by bugs or cut down to rebuild the mess the tornadoes are making!

The ratfynk

Exactly. The summary should of at least mentioned that there are serious controversies around the working and "quantumness" of the machine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Criticism http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110531/full/474018a.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nature%2Frss%2Fcurrent+(Nature+-+Issue)&utm_content=Google+Reader

The lab mouse is the closest non-primate relative on the evolutionary tree (I believe).

Not exactly. As I understand it, the closest non-primate relative to humans is a type of lemur.

The journalist is making it harder to understand what is going on.

IANAP but here's how I understand it thanks to google.

First, 85 tesla have been generated for very short instants in the lab so the article is wrong in saying 60 tesla is higher than ever achieved.

Graphene forms a two-dimensional lattice surface like a chicken wire fence.
For each molecule of graphene a single electron sticks out from the surface.
These electrons are free to hop around to other atoms.
In fact they act just like particles that have no mass and can travel at 1% of the speed of light. These quasiparticles are called massless dirac fermions. A fermion is a particle with certain properties, the nucles of a helium atom being one kind of fermion.
Electrons travelling at relativistic speeds is not earth shattering since that is what happens in gold atoms too. But the point is the electrons are free to sweep through the lattice without hindrance, and that if you can control the way the electrons move, you can control the apparent properties of the quasiparticles.

In 2010 Francisco Guinea in Madrid predicted that stretching graphene along all the axes of it crystal structure will make the electrons act as if subjected to a magnetic field.
http://www.gizmag.com/straining-graphene-creates-strong-pseudo-magnetic-fields/15891/
http://physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/pdf/386.Science.329-Levy.pdf

In July 2010 Michael Crommie proved the prediction, by growing bubbles of stretched graphene that stick up like pyramids from the platinum surface they were grown on. The electrons acted as if they were subjected to 300 tesla fields.
This technique works at room temperature.

The paper mentioned by the OP talks about designer Dirac fermions which means that you can create quasiparticles possessing the characteristics you desire by simply moving atoms around so they make electrons move in the way necessary to make the quasiparticles appear to exist. You can thereby freely mess with simulated mass, electrical and magnetic fields, etc. which might be very useful.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7389/full/nature10941.html

The technique used in the OP experiment is low temperature and nanoscale. But based on Crommie's work it should not be hard to imagine processes in the future that could allow similar structures to be built quickly on a larger scale.

This is an exciting a relatively new field of research apparently but breathless reports using terms like designer babies or designer electrons when it is really designer quasiparticles, and saying that the fabric of reality is being messed with, is just distracting and does not help people who are not prepared to dive into the actual research paper to find out what is going on.

Its not poor, well let me rephrase that, it may be poorly written in places, but its not content poor. Nature compared Wikipedia to Britannica and guess what? They were about the same. Nature defended their study here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7084/full/440582b.html Subsequent studies have come to the same conclusion, its really not better or worse then anything in print. Fact is: you cant believe what you read. You must follow through with loooking up the facts or read the editing history and disputed facts.

There are some huge projects that have been donated to the public domain - the Human Genome Project, the International HapMap Project, and there are smaller groups working in less commercialised sectors that release their data as public domain (Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration, Wellcome Trust, ..).

The problem is that there hasn't traditionally been a path to market for academic institutions and others conducting basic research, and that bringing a drug to market often costs more than the basic research, since you have to pay for human clinical trials and regulatory approval. For these reasons, the system has evolved whereby basic research is funded by the tax payer, the initial studies are funded by the tax payer, and then at some point everything is handed over to external corporations to commercialise. This is a big problem, because from this point onward the company is in a monopoly position, and has little incentive to lower costs for the patient (in fact, they have a strong motivation to raise costs for the end user whilst minimising their own costs). This might change in the next few years, as commercial pressures are prompting companies to drop research funding (Traditional drug-discovery model ripe for reform)

Keep in mind that, before the internet, it was a lot harder to do collaborative globally distributed research. The big question is whether the lessons/success of the "open source" model can be applied to parts of the research community in a way that still enables drugs to come to market. I'm pretty sure that it is possible, if the right model is discovered - e.g. collaboratively funded or X-Prize style systems for achieving basic research goals, leading to public domain data and drug designs, which can then be manufactured by drug corporations and sold for profit. The key to success is not about mandating that a particular solution should be used, but in creating a system that encourages both collaboration and competition in the respective areas where these work best.

Somewhat wrong. Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies.

I wouldn't call ~$1 billion USD a "small" cost by any measure whatsoever. Primary source (PDF Warning), secondary Wikipedia source. Note that these costs do not include post-launch (which I think it is safe to assume "marketing" falls under) costs, only that of the R&D to get to market approval. And while it depends on the circumstances, a lot of drug research at academic institutions is actually funded by corporations, not the government. Drug research is prohibitively expensive and requires 10+ years in most cases for the drug to reach market. You can't get investment for that from tiny startup companies.

Even the lowest boundary for drug development costs is $55 million: nowhere near something a small biotech company could afford (not by my definition of "small" anyways) out-of-pocket with no ROI for 10 years.

Citation for the parent: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5999/

n.b. the work [1] by Müller, Chu et al is related, but different, and the interpretation is strongly contested (e.g. [2])
[1] http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/02/17/gravitational_redshift/
[2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7311/full/nature09340.html

Lasers with cylindrically symmetric polarization states are predominantly based on whispering-gallery modes, characterized by high angular momentum and dominated by azimuthal emission. Here, a zero-angular-momentum laser with purely radial emission is demonstrated. An axially invariant, cylindrical photonic-bandgap fibre cavity8 filled with a microfluidic gain medium plug is axially pumped, resulting in a unique radiating field pattern characterized by cylindrical symmetry and a fixed polarization pointed in the azimuthal direction. Encircling the fibre core is an array of electrically contacted and independently addressable liquid-crystal microchannels embedded in the fibre cladding. These channels modulate the polarized wavefront emanating from the fibre core, leading to a laser with a dynamically controlled intensity distribution spanning the full azimuthal angular range. This new capability, implemented monolithically within a single fibre, presents opportunities ranging from flexible multidirectional displays to minimally invasive directed light delivery systems for medical applications.

In answer to your question, no this isn't a hologram, although in some sense it achieves a similar goal. Regular screens control the emission of light as a function of position. Holograms control not just the intensity of the emanating light but also the phase; this phase information carries all the extra information about the light field passing through a given plane. This new device controls the intensity and angular spread of the light coming from each pixel, which is also thereby controlling the full shape of the light-field being emitted from the plane of the screen.

With both a hologram and this directional-emission concept, you're controlling the angular spread of the light coming from each point, are thus fully specifying the light-field, and thus creating 'proper 3D' that is physically-realistic and fully convincing. (Assuming you have enough angular resolution in your output to create the small differences the eye is looking for, of course.)

As for why they are using a laser as the source light, it's mostly because they want detailed polarization control. (Coupling lasers into fiber-optics is well-established technology for telecommunications.) By controlling the exact mode of the laser-light propagation through the fiber, they can control the polarization of the light that shines out of the fiber, and thereby use conventional tricks to modulate that light. In particular, in an LCD screen, small fields are used to re-orient liquid-crystal molecules, which then either extinguish or transmit the light (based on whether the orientation of the LC molecule is aligned with the polarization of the light).

Overall it's an ingenious trick: have a light fiber emit light with controlled polarization. Then have a series of LC pixels on the outside of the fiber, whose orientation can now not just modulate the intensity of emission as a function of position along the fiber, but also as a function of angle for each position along the fiber. The end result is that you control the light field emanating from the device, and so can (in principle) reconstruct whatever full-3D image you want.

Of course the prototype in the article only has four LC channels along the fiber. Enough to create a different image on the front vs. the back of the screen. Not nearly enough to create realistic 3D. Also they are only controlling the angle in one direction (around the fiber axis), a

... by enumeration.

Nature 2000 paper Figrue 1 legend:

Four hours after the setting of the agar blocks (AG), the dead ends of the plasmodium shrink and the pseudopodia explore all possible connections.

Figure 1a shows "Structure of the organism before finding the shortest path"

Text: "The plasmodium pseudopodia reaching dead ends in the labyrinth shrank " (engrish)

SO, in short, organism first fills the whole thing, then retracts from the areas with no food. Same way water will solve the problem (first part).

What they demonstrated is that signal from one end of organism about presence of food reached the other end of the organism. It's more about memory than computation.

It's not a type of interferometry as they don't measure phase-shifts directly. They measure the diffraction pattern and infer the phase-shifts that would result in such an image. Basically measuring the Fraunhofer diffraction pattern and computationally reconstructing a sample that would create such a pattern.

As such if the sample was a plane normal to the electron beam they would see nothing in this method. The imaging is not done in the Fourier domain thou the reconstruction can be if you prefer. For the imaging it is merely a standard electron imaging array which is why on their webpage they can show "The [diffraction] image before it is reconstructed using a computer"

You don't actually need a lens for phase constrast measurement. That is why it is possible to do exactly this method for hard X-rays for which reasonable lens don't exist. See the following for example: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7314/full/nature09419.html

took me forever to find it, but here is the original article behind the Nature paywall

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n3/full/ncomms1733.html

the paper feels like it written by the marketing department for his company.

The actual article is open access: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n3/full/ncomms1733.html

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n3/full/ncomms1733.html