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If so, you might enjoy the Nature story rounding up that was published yesterday of the new results...

Damn. I'll try that again in English- If so, you might enjoy Nature story which rounds up yesterday's results...

If so, you might enjoy the Nature story rounding up that was published yesterday of the new results...

Don't forgot Sonic Hedgehog (SHH), an important protein used in development.

Which ends up being an unfunny problem for doctors, that have to explain to a mom that her baby's congenital malformation is caused by a "Sonic Hedgehog Mutation": http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7074/full/439266d.html

I think Shakespeare may have had a particular point about the meaning of names... hmm.

Don't forgot Sonic Hedgehog (SHH), an important protein used in development.

Which ends up being an unfunny problem for doctors, that have to explain to a mom that her baby's congenital malformation is caused by a "Sonic Hedgehog Mutation": http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7074/full/439266d.html

It sounds like it is straight out of a South Park episode... More seriously, there is an interesting article about the brain and video games which touches on these issues in the last issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n12/abs/nrn3135.html (subscription needed).

Here's a step-by-step guide outlining how difficult it would be to clone a mammoth. you have to gestate the damned thing for example....

The blog post now has a neat video Love the way some of the critters are moving backwards....

Many many years ago I read a study that determined that the only species that could go poof and it wouldn't matter was the mosquito. It wasn't this one, but it said more or less the same thing-
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

The article links to this Nature story that asserts that completely eradicating mosquitos would have no measurable effect on the environment. They don't really do anything but spread disease. They might have a role as a food source for other animals, but they don't appear to be very significant.

But we might be missing an important part of the chain, and wiping out the mosquitos might throw the world completely out of balance. Then again, humans have so many reasons to hate the little buggers that it still might be worth it.

Also, it's important to note that this particular mosquito is an invasive species of mosquito. It was never around in most of its ecosystems in the first place...

This article asks the correct question:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

The real question is not how to eradicate mosquitoes, but how do we regulate human population on a world scale ?

Frankly, mosquitoes are small killers, and are a way to regulate population without too much damage, most notably where human's density is exploding.
People reproduce themselves at an alarming rate, without bothering about resources, which is a short-sighted view.

I'm not a religious nut, but I'm pretty sure that if we kill mosquitoes, another bigger danger might appear, like a very dangerous virus, or more probably a massive famine.
As resources will get scarce, their price will increase so much that only rich people will be able to eat normally, and when you have hunger, violence and war are not too far (I won't elaborate on human exploitation).

If you see earth as a giant living organism, you should realize that we are merely fleas, and we procreate at an unsustainable rate for the planet, doing a lot of damage. Somebody will have to pay the price, and it will be our grand-children.

The worst enemy of humanity is humanity itself !

I won't post again why wiping out mosquitoes is a terrible idea, someone else has already done that but ill link to a paper in nature from the lab my partner works in. They are infecting mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacteria called Wolbachia that prevents the spread of Dengue but doesnt harm mosquito populations. There are ongoing field trials going on here in Australia and similar research in Vietnam. Seems like a much safer option to me... http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7361/full/nature10355.html

The article links to this Nature story that asserts that completely eradicating mosquitos would have no measurable effect on the environment. They don't really do anything but spread disease. They might have a role as a food source for other animals, but they don't appear to be very significant.

But we might be missing an important part of the chain, and wiping out the mosquitos might throw the world completely out of balance. Then again, humans have so many reasons to hate the little buggers that it still might be worth it.

Since clearly a lot of people didn't read the article or the link in the article that directly addresses this...

Although we can't totally rule out QM as having a meaningful effect on neural circuits (and thus "consciousness") Brownian noise is almost certainly a bigger player. The brain in humans sits at a cosy 37 C. Molecules are bouncing around in there like crazy. Interestingly, the basic currency of neural communication, the action potential, seems to be an attempt to achieve something like digital signaling on inherently noisy and probabilistic hardware.

One of the most interesting papers arguing that QM has an effect on living systems is here (behind a paywall, sorry):
Coherently wired light-harvesting in photosynthetic marine algae at ambient temperature

Feel free to explain how electromagnetic therapy is supposed to do anything about that.

As for the "drug companies don't want a cure" argument -- if any company, drug or otherwise, could get their hands on a cure, they'd be over the moon with joy, thinking about the license to print money that they'd found. If a drug company really thought Burzynski was onto something, they'd try to buy him out, not supress him.

This positivist interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the underlying dynamics are deterministic and our knowledge is only limited by "measurement uncertainty" is demonstrably incorrect: The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers

Will educational games (more serious and presumably less fun than an ordinary first person shooting rampage through a novel virtual environment) improve your ability to make decisions or track objects, analogous to the improvements documented for recreational FPS games? The US government wants to know because it's recently become clear that playing video games does improve performance. Nature Reviews Neuroscience has a nice review on the issue this week, "Brains on video games" http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n12/abs/nrn3135.html

.... if it can (maybe) be measured: Direct measurement of the quantum wavefunction

And eat your own shit. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7368/full/478156a.html

That turns out not to be correct even in general.
Specifically for humans, retrotransposition turns out to be commonplace.
About 3,000 times over a lifetime commonplace.

MINOS as it now exists can only check the 730 km trip from CERN to Italy, not the 18-metre (60-light-nanosecond) trip across the iron "hadron stop" at the end of the decay tunnel at CERN, which may be at the heart of the result. This is because MINOS uses a matched near detector / far detector layout, whereas OPERA measures from the original protons (which are "upstream" from the hadron stop).

Posted by: John Costella | November 18, 2011 01:37 AM, Neutrino experiment affirms faster-than-light claim - November 18, 2011

The 60 LnS thick hadron stop, and neutrinos getting to a detector 60 nS too soon is just plain suspicious.

How timely, I just read a blog post about brain plasticity. Basically, the list of activities that do not alter the brain is probably much shorter than the list of activities that do. The human brain is constantly rewiring itself. Here's an article about a study that shows brain plasticity may be even more radical than we thought, possibly even reprogramming the genomes of individual neurons: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/11/genome.html

It sounds to me like you just read the summary and stopped there. Or maybe I am just pretty dense. Why do you accept think this study disagrees with the other one? And if it did, why would you favor this study over the other one? If you read the articles, they are actually talking about two different things.

The original study is you scoff at is based on nearby measurements, while this new one is based on mathematical modeling. The original study measured plants at "around 9 becquerels per kilogram, much lower than the 500 Bq kg–1 safety limit for human consumption." Whereas the new study "provide[s] the first comprehensive estimates of contamination across Japan following the nuclear accident in 2011."

If you read the articles, they don't actually disagree. They have different purposes. One measures specific plants, and the other tries to guess overall radiation for the entire country. This new study merely recommends that "the Japanese government to carry out a more thorough assessment..." The article goes on to explain the discrepancy between the mathematical models and the actual soil samples. It says "once in soil, caesium will become bound to mineral components, which limits its uptake into plants." Aha!

Hmm. Based on the observations is the abstract I'm linking to, that hypothesis would need us to assume all the variability in the fault's displacement rate is cyclic and has a frequency less than 1 million years: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v390/n6656/abs/390157a0.html

I don't know enough about seismology to know whether fault lines having cyclical, unstable displacement rates on shorter time intervals than 1 million years is realistic or not. It seems reasonable that there would be some variability somewhere on the temporal spectrum. Even assuming there are oscillations in the displacement rate when you sample with a high enough frequency, though, the oscillations would have to be larger than a certain magnitude to be important on the scale of noticeable earthquakes.

On line schools and tech schools have better class times that let's people work and go to school at the same time + as well continuing education That is not just MBA / PHD level stuff as continuing education.

Text books are out dated, have high cost and some times are out of date. E-books / some kind of wikipedia like systems.

Tests just based on creaming need to go! They need to be open book, more hands on, some times group based, and maybe even open Google.

Don't judge people with not best witting in testes or other places when you have people out there that are real good at wiring let that tech guy do the tech part and the witter do the wittering part. That is part of why there are so many essay writing service out there and based on reports about them alot of people doing that are good witters so why should some on fail or get a lower grade just because they are not a good witter.

Filler classes should not count as part of the GPA.

Gen edu's should be cut down for some majors in some ways / also over all there must be some that can be cut down.

Filler classes should be cut down as well.

Feature creep in some colleges has pushed the # of credits / classes needed out to 5 years for what used to be 4 years. We need to cut most 4 years planes down to 3 and some of 5 years stuff to 4. Also have a 1-2.5 year plan for tech apprenticeships / tech schools.

NO forced meal planes and forced living in dorms that cost more then renting on your OWN for a sheared room and bathrooms If you can find room mates renting can save you even more.

At the higher end the PHD system needs work and last thing we want is for even more people to be pushed in to it.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472261a.html

I think this is the actual article(paywalled), in case anyone else is wondering about the details & has access to the journal.

Where does TFS say the "car" is made of less than 18 atoms?

It is pretty cool, IMO. Similar stuff has been done before, but I didn't know of any cars where the wheels actually provide the propulsion. Then again, I am no expert in the field, by far.

Extinction from habitat loss is the signature conservation problem of the twenty-first century. Despite its importance, estimating extinction rates is still highly uncertain because no proven direct methods or reliable data exist for verifying extinctions. The most widely used indirect method is to estimate extinction rates by reversing the species–area accumulation curve, extrapolating backwards to smaller areas to calculate expected species loss. Estimates of extinction rates based on this method are almost always much higher than those actually observed. This discrepancy gave rise to the concept of an ‘extinction debt’, referring to species ‘committed to extinction’ owing to habitat loss and reduced population size but not yet extinct during a non-equilibrium period. Here we show that the extinction debt as currently defined is largely a sampling artefact due to an unrecognized difference between the underlying sampling problems when constructing a species–area relationship (SAR) and when extrapolating species extinction from habitat loss..

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7347/full/nature09985.html

This is a complete misunderstanding of what the canfield ocean was, or what the paper describing it was about. A more complete description of the paper can be found here. This is one of those things taken completely, completely out of context by a bunch of panic mongers. The actual paper is here.

No, this is a different research group experimenting with some of the same stuff another research group tossed an article out about a few years back. That other group is known for doing weird Friday afternoon studies that have caught the attention of the fun scientists and boring scientists alike.

A reversibly photoswitchable GFP-like protein with fluorescence excitation decoupled from switching
Of course, since it is in a Nature subjournal, you'll need to pay for it or find an institution to grab the full text from.

A paper published in Nature back in December describes the cause: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n8/full/ngeo1188.html

Here we combine our earlier data with measurements taken in 2009 to show that the temperature and volume of deep water in Pine Island Bay have increased. Ocean transport and tracer calculations near the ice shelf reveal a rise in meltwater production by about 50% since 1994. The faster melting seems to result mainly from stronger sub-ice-shelf circulation, as thinning ice has increased the gap above an underlying submarine bank on which the glacier was formerly grounded. We conclude that the basal melting has exceeded the increase in ice inflow, leading to the formation and enlargement of an inner cavity under the ice shelf within which sea water nearly 4C above freezing can now more readily access the grounding zone.

Hmm.. are you referring to this Nature article titled "Gravitational redshift of galaxies in clusters as predicted by general relativity"?

Do you believe any explanation from Tokyo Electric at this point? They have told enough lies about Fukushima that I now assume they are lying every time they open their mouths. Has this been verified by an independent 3rd party?

I would tend to agree about TEPCO. Anything they say needs to be taken with a healthy dose of Potassium Iodide. Given that, I'm not sure it's been 'verified' - one explanation is that the readings are spurious, but for another, less panicky take on the issue, read this.

Your link shows no evidence that "AFP is a crummy screening test". Were you hoping that nobody clicked the link, and just took your word that it was correct?

My impression is that ColdWetDog was hoping whoever clicked the link would follow Wikipedia's explanation of how the statistics of screening tests work, and using that explanation, understand the logic of why AFP is not used as a general cancer screen by filling in the blanks themselves.

But that's ok, maybe you didn't understand him, so let me elaborate a bit in steps. The "Specificity" of the AFP test is the percentage of True Negatives (patients without cancer), divided by Reported Negatives (AFP tested negative). Now, the specificity of the AFP assay varies with the laboratory, cut-off criteria used, and particular cancer -- but something like 90% is reasonable for an AFP test (better for some cancers, worse for others, not applicable for many). That sounds good, right?

Well, next step is figuring out your Positive Predictive Value. The interesting thing about this parameter, is it varies with Prevalence. If you define your tested population as a group in which you already have reason to suspect cancer, you can get a pretty decent PPV. Now, elevated AFPs are rare in the healthy general population. Thing is -- while it might not seem that way emotionally -- statistically, cancer is also considered a rare health condition (from an epidemiological standpoint). The net result is most tumor biomarkers applied to the general population, end up with low PPVs -- even tests with specificities of 90+% can end up with PPVs in the single digits or less.

While I don't have a specific link for AFP, the general state of population-wide cancer biomarker screening is not good: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110323/full/471428a.html

but perhaps you are a genuine "shill" for one of the big pharmaceutical companies.

Oh, you were just shitposting. Carry on then.

We are pushing to many people into college and parts of the old model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages that part of are based on just don't fit to day.
Reform the PhD system or close it down
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472261a.html

Now the older college system can be cut down to 2-3 years

community college do the basics and some tech / apprenticeships type stuff. So we can use that as a starting point.

Now as for tech school they do some stuff right (teachers in the industry) (more hands on) (more up to date topics) but other parts not that well.

apprenticeships need to be added to Tech jobs / tech schools / college.

Now a college based CS may be good for high level stuff but for a lot of other IT not so much that lot of people with 4 year CS who are very clueless with IT work.

Now in a tech school you can learn alot about IT work but there should be a apprenticeships system added to it.

Also IT sever, desktop, help desk IT workers should not be forced to have CS level programming. Some stuff like VB is ok and what the tech schools due but in a CS your are taking high level programming and even then that at some colleges lacks more of the programming language part Now at time for people doing sever, desktop, help desk type work is better off doing an apprenticeship.

Does non coding IT work really need Calculus?

Also can get rid being forced to pick major?

see how I'm saying apprenticeship not internships they need to be more trades like with at least mini wage and real work (no you are just a copy or coffee boy).

Also there should be trades like continuing education that is not just Masters or PHD CS. No continuing education on new OS's, systems, and so on.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110216/full/470316a.html

5 seconds of googling for ya

Nature, Sep 29 2011.

Scientists show that the protein, Tet3, is responsible of wiping of the male pronucleus methylation patterns after fusion between sperm and egg.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7366/full/nature10443.html

As for the maternal DNA, demethylation, as far as I know, is unknown but occurs as well.

I'm curious if the disease that arises from these poor conditions is related to epigenetic changes that IMPRINT (are not demethylated, and thus passed through generations). As many are finding out, epigenetics are much more intricate and important than previously conceived.

As the PHD system needs work

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472261a.html

MBA? that is a masters but do you realty want a work place there the basic jobs needs Business Administration skills?

Never-mind the side-effects. It might not even work! This article is awfully one-sided. NPR recently had a much more in-depth overview into the debate about resveratrol and aging. Basically no one has been able to reproduce the original study with the same results, the original authors have even lowered their initial claims, and a few articles published in Nature even dispute that resveratrol activates sirtuins (the claimed mechanism that "prevents aging").

Also, lifespans are actually *falling* in many communities (in the US at least). Contrary to what big pharma wants you to believe, well-being also includes healthy lifestyle and nutrition, not just some expensive pills.

It's bogus. (Yes, I am a physicist.) OPERA used portable atomic clocks, which were moved to the the two labs and then synchronized via GPS (see this article). GPS thoroughly incorporates general relativity (which includes special relativity). It has incorporated GR ever since it was first built, because if it didn't, it wouldn't work. At all. No, not even well enough for hiking and driving. Here is a review article on relativity in GPS. GPS uses coordinates called Earth-Centered Inertial (ECI). These are coordinates (t,r,theta,phi), where the spatial coordinates are spherical coordinates that rotate along with the earth, and t is the time coordinate of a hypothetical observer in a nonrotating frame at rest relative to the center of the earth. General relativity is completely agnostic about what coordinate system you use, so this choice of a coordinate system is not a choice that has any physical significance; it's just a bookkeeping thing. Van Elburg assumes that GPS was constructed by people who didn't understand relativity, and therefore GPS times need to be corrected for relativistic effects. That's just completely wrong.

The idea that an ancient cephalopod would arrange objects into patterns — even unintentionally — is highly speculative, says Roger Hanlon, a marine biologist at the Marine Biological laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. "There's nothing in the scientific literature that suggests that modern-day cephalopods do anything like this," he notes.

In their natural environment, octopuses do sometimes grab shiny objects, says James Wood, an expert in cephalopod behaviour and associate director at the Waikiki Aquarium in Hawaii. "They're curious creatures, and they certainly do manipulate their environment," he notes. But while octopuses may pile up rocks outside the mouth of their sea floor dens, for example, they are not known to bring animal remains home. "I've yet to find a vertebrate bone in a cephalopod midden."

No, Cory Doctorow gets it right. I've watched the video and, to promote my own posts for moment, I summarise above, but he's responding to comments by both Rolf-Dieter Heuer and Lynn Saint-Amour. You can see when he starts to compose his response, it's at 44:10 on the video just after Lynn Saint-Amour says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." His remarks also reply to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who asserted that patents, as a commercial tool, do not serve as a way to measure the basic research which produces "substantial change" instead "incremental change" (13:40) Therefore primary research serves, Heuer believes, as the most important driver of innovation.

In this context, Gurry is speaking up for the idea that traditional IP instruments should be used as the primary tools to drive innovation and to measure it. Don't be fooled by the mild tone of these kinds of meetings, it really is a tunnel-vision view. He's disagreeing with everyone who spoke before him.

In this case, the groupthink is right on and Francis Gurry's counter-history, such as it is, is patently(!) absurd. People are responding to his specific point about the web, which Cory accurately summarised. Thanks for the reasoned deviation from the party line, though. (I see it's been modded flame bait, now, but I disagree) You deserve an equally good counter-argument and I'll try to give it.

The context is a question posed to the panel: "How can countries, how can organisations improve in the area of innovation." In response to that question, and to the idea of measuring innovation that the Global Innovation Index aims to realise, everyone else on the panel talked about the important of things other than (you could say: in addition to) patents and traditional intellectual property tools. Daniele Archibugi included in his discussion of business innovations, an emphasis on the importance of institutions like schools (17:49) and of the infrastructure for innovation -- including the commons of the internet. Naushad Forbes called patents a "limited indicator of new product innovations and an almost non-existent indicator of new service and new business model innovations" (25:53), meaning that they do not account for the range of different kinds of innovation. Leonid Gokhberg talked about "differentiated policy mixes for different industries" as well as for different types of companies (33:57) because "innovation should be taken in its broad sense, including its non-technological, social, and environmental [effects]" (12:14).

Rolf-Dieter Heuer talked about how the Index fails to measure true innovation because it measures patents and not basic science, which he argues is the essential driver of innovation, essentially an inaccurate indicator instead of the thing itself (13:32). He values "substantial change" over "incremental change" (13:40). As an example of this problem, he cites the invention of the world wide web, which because it was not patented would not have shown up in this index, and yet reflects an important innovation of current age (to understate the case).

Francis Gurry addresses his concluding "white card" comments in response to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, but they apply as much to Lynn Saint-Amour's remarks, indeed you can see him begin to compose his words at 44:10 after she says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." She talked generally, not terribly on-topic, about how innovators can use openness to their advantage and the value of non-traditional channels of innovation (the last point at 17:48).

In the context of everything that came before, Mr Gurry's specific comments about the world web web reflect a dogmatic misunderstanding of how the web came to be and how it worked, especially in the 1990s. It's a bizarre and irrelevant counter-history, as I assume is being argued elsewhere in this thread as I compose this long and detailed reply. In brief, if the web had been patented and commercialised it would indeed have been routed around, as Lynn Saint-Amour said. Also, it would not have returned the patent profits to basic research, as Francis Gurry suggests, because then it would have become applied research and the funds would have funded incremental change in the commercial environment, to use Professor Heuer's words. Gurry does not seem to have been listening to the academics and policy advisers around him. They're all saying "tradition IP instruments can't do it all." His response is that "intellectual property is a very flexible instrument" (50:13), essentially "oh yes it can too do it all."

I fancy you can get a measure of the in

Nature is a pretty well-established journal.

They start out this article from 2009 with "Birds are dinosaurs. That's hardly the stuff of headlines any more, as data have streamed in revealing anatomical similarities between birds and the theropod dinosaurs from the tips of their noses to the tips of their feathered tails."

These kids are going to keep playing on your lawn, Mr. Grumpy, go back inside.

It was a Nature article. The Weather Underground has a thoughtful discussion.

Sorry, global cooling was never the rage among scientists.

Found the answer:

Like other populations outside Africa, the Australian Aboriginal man owes small chunks of his genome to Neanderthals[4]. More surprisingly, though, his ancestors also interbred with another archaic human population known as the Denisovans. This group was identified from 30,000–50,000-year-old DNA recovered from a finger bone found in a Siberian cave[5]. Until now, Papua New Guineans were the only modern human population whose ancestors were known to have interbred with Denisovans. [more about Denisovan connection follows]
[4] Green, R. E. et al. Science 328, 710-722 (2010).
[5] Reich, D. et al. Nature 468, 1053-1060 (2010).

.

[parent:] if they have Neanderthal genes it needn't be from 75,000 years ago

But then they would share many other mutations with other sapiens sapiens (sapientes sapientes?). It's not undistinguishable.

It's easy to find Neanderthal markers, but it's extremely difficult to tell what function they have. I share more or less the same % of Neanderthalness with a Pakistani and a Chinese. We are very similar in some things and very different in other things. For each of those hundreds of millions of base pairs you need to compare thousands of people who have them, with other thousands who don't have them, and check which difference keeps appearing. It can be anything. Or it can an innocuous mutation, you never know. It took them years to find which 12 genes determined eye color, they're still trying to sort out hair and height; and google's just started with intelligence in nordic europeans. Moore's law's been a great help, as crowdsourcing.

http://www.nature.com/cr/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/cr2011158a.html#Results

It's strange that they searched through miRNA db, but not against all human DNA to check if there is location other than LDLRAP1 containing exactly the same sequence as MIR168a (I did, and - no).

"Since it is such a potentially high profile experiment, the cynic in me wonders why it didn't get published in a higher profile journal. Of course, not every important discovery is published in Nature or Science, but one wonders"

I am not sure I understand this. The original article was in Nature.