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Given the amount of fraud in Chinese science it makes a lot of sense to wait for confirmation from a more credible source.

And even if Chinese science were whiter than white, your blind-acceptance is decidedly un-scientific.

You're assuming the article is true. Chinese scientists have a reputation for making stuff up.

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 hate to nit-pick, but it was published in Nature

First, the study of climate (or astronomy) is not strictly a science. There are no opportunities to conduct controlled experiments.

That's not true. Computer models are experiments used in many other fields. Here's an example of a computer model being used in cell biology. Quite obviously it's not science if you tinker around with it until it tells you what you want to hear, and will always lose out to real-world experiments if the real world disagrees with it, but they can be experiments.

And there's plenty of science to it besides computer models. CO2 absorbing heat, measuring the levels of CO2, etc.

Many other fields of science don't have controlled experiments as their basis. Evolution has little room for experimenting, but is still science.

Lastly, we ARE doing the experiment. Stupidly, we are doing it with the same petri dish we live in. The Koch brothers are surely going for a nobel prize.

wouldn't, in the course of the suits, the patents get thoroughly vetted by the USPTO, under scrutiny of the court

Nope. The patent stands until the USPTO invalidates it. They're motivated to churn through patents and get paid for them ... the USPTO isn't necessarily interested in making sure the patents are any good. And, the legal standard to overturn a patent is quite high. (Sorry, it's only a partial article)

Or am I applying too much logic and common sense to the patent system?

Far too much, sadly. It's a rigged game, with bad outcomes.

The article in Nature says no such thing. It is far more nuanced, tentative and uncertain than your summary.

Human ancestors in Eurasia earlier than thought

Wagner: "it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents."

Wagner apparently wanted Spencer and Braswell to rebut any rebuttal of their work before publishing.

No, they needed to address the existing evidence which contradicted their work. If there is strong support for a hypothesis "A" and you write a paper saying "not-A", it needs to contain some explanation for why all those previous papers were wrong and you're right -- rather than just presenting your conclusions as if you're the first person ever to think of this problem. Wagner considered that this had not happened in this case, and that he had failed in not enforcing it.

how would you falsify the hypothesis "mitigating climate change will be cheaper and less painful than adapting to it"?

How would you falsify the hypothesis that adaptation is cheaper than mitigation? Unfortunately we only have one world, so we don't get to do this as a lab experiment, and we will both be denied definitive falsification. So we just have to go on the current balance of evidence. If you were living in the projected path of a hurricane, would you demand a lab experiment to show that it was going to hit before agreeing to evacuate?

nobody ever experiences the average weather over 30 years.

We've been round this, what, three or four times now? Yes, we both agree that climate's not weather and that long-term regional/global climate models don't make accurate local weather predictions. Neither do local weather models make long-term global climate predictions. I don't know why you expend such effort arguing for perhaps the only point that we do agree on.

How different do you think the next 200 years is going to be?

I refer you (again) to IPCC AR4.

Even in the most dramatically exaggerated claims of sea level rise, you're not going to see anything that would interfere with say, a specific building lasting for 200 years.

Unfortunately, as you keep pointing out, weather varies a lot more than climate in the short term: so while (say) a 1m sea-level rise might not seem like much, it's going to vastly increase the frequency of catastrophic events -- for instance, your hundred-year floods may now be ten-year floods. To take a more specific example: in Bangladesh, a 1m sea level rise would take out >15% of the country and displace ~20 million people.

I am mildly disappointed the editor didn't not(ic)e you can just download the kmz and see the same thing, just not within the browser.

Don't forget the scanning tunnelling microscope to be used in driving each of the motors. Oh boy, building them will certainly fix the economy... even if it will only be the China's economy to be fixed.

To be fair, I think the "scanning" and "microscope" are the expensive part of a STM, and not really necessary to drive a motor. There are all sorts of devices that can generate streams of electrons cheaply, though it's unclear what the requirements are to drive the motor - in the worst case, it may require something similar in complexity to a STM for precision and a supercomputer to do the job of aiming and timing the power source that's done by a human with a STM in this instance. In that case, it's going to be a while before this sees use in an actual nanoscale device.

Homo sapiens has had more impact on biodiversity than any other species. The Great Oxidation Event lasted hundreds of millions of years and, while we have no means of establishing a survey of taxa from that era, it was most likely the result of a very large number of species, and indeed is such a long period of time that many speciation events could readily have occurred. Further, the autotrophs that released the oxygen in the first place had no means of affecting many of the anaerobes that live deep underground—and we do.

Here are your citations for humanity's impact. Suffice it to say that many of them will still be noticeable in a few million years:

• Climate Change, Human Impacts, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs
• Consequences of changing biodiversity
• A continent transformed: Human impact on the natural vegetation of Australia, which went on for something like sixty million years before we screwed it up.
• Tropical forest recovery: legacies of human impact and natural disturbances
• The Future of Biodiversity, the abstract for which starts: "Recent extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times their pre-human levels in well-known, but taxonomically diverse groups from widely different environments. If all species currently deemed "threatened" become extinct in the next century, then future extinction rates will be 10 times recent rates. Some threatened species will survive the century, but many species not now threatened will succumb. Regions rich in species found only within them (endemics) dominate the global patterns of extinction."
• Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Conservation
• Biodiversity inventories, indicator taxa and effects of habitat modification in tropical forest (PDF)

I don't know why you then decided to compare humanity's effect on biodiversity to that of mass extinction events, but let me explain to you why they are completely different.

When an extinction event occurs, there is a single source of pressure that living organisms must accommodate, or at most a couple: the sky is darker, the air is colder, the atmosphere is now filled with water rather than ammonia, et cetera. Humans have not been exerting this kind of pressure at all. We systematically destroy ecosystems, replacing hundreds of species of plants and animals with just one or two (which are, naturally, attuned to depend on us feeding, fertilizing, irrigating, and sheltering them) and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us.)

This is too much for evolution to handle. Especially due to chemical poisoning, many of the hardiest species most likely to survive a natural disaster have been snared by exotic and unexpected genetic vulnerabilities. DDT was found to act as a sex hormone in birds, for example, causing males to develop female genitalia. As a South African, I'm sure you're aware that it's still in use, combating Malaria, even though it has been banned in many countries.

We are whittling down biodiversity in ways that the Great Oxygen Catastrophe didn't. It selected one major branch of the tree, the organisms that depended on a reducing atmosphere, and marginalized them, creating room for the healthy and d

With these electrical motors, who needs oil? Put more electrical motors all over the place, attach some solar cells and wind tunnels, get moving, fix the economy.

Don't forget the scanning tunnelling microscope to be used in driving each of the motors. Oh boy, building them will certainly fix the economy... even if it will only be the China's economy to be fixed.

I'm thinking plasma pumps...

Nano my ass. The fucking abstract:

Electrons from a scanning tunnelling microscope are used to drive the directional motion of the molecule in a two-terminal setup.

When your motor "power delivery" mechanism looks this big, your motor it's hardly a nano-device anymore.

I can't tell if you're trolling or just stupid. You're given a scientific publication and you're asking for citations? Fine, then take a look at this diagram titled "vertebrate evolution", which shows that Aves (birds) are a divergent branch of Archosauria (prime lizards), which evolved from diapsida. Wikipedia will tell you that Diapsida are reptiles. That diagram is contained in the 2nd reference in TFA, quoted as "Hillier, L. W. et al. Sequence and comparative analysis of the chicken genome provide unique perspectives on vertebrate evolution. Nature 432, 695–716 (2004) ". It took me all of two mouseclicks to find it.

How about asking the 'net: http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=are+dinosaurs+reptiles?

Still not good enough? Maybe the authority of Berkeley will do then? Read the entire first paragraph of both, not only the title.

I'm not going to do any more spoonfeeding for you. If you want more citations I suggest you go find them yourself. The references list in TFA should be a good starting point. And before you go and try sophistry: "dinosaurs may have evolved from reptiles but they are not reptiles" is as true as "humans may have evolved from apes but they are not apes". If you want to go that route, please also explain why humans are not mammals.

Seriously, you couldn't find an article written by someone who reached the second grade* as the link for something that is actually interesting.

Yeah, or even better, they could have found someone who went beyond a crappy activity book for 2nd graders... oh wait they did!

But feel free to notify the editors of Nature and the authors of the paper that their usage of "non-avian reptiles" in their abstract is wrong.

Make sure to cite the activity book so they know this is legit.

Mr. Rucker (har) may also want to read the actual paper in Nature. You'll need to view it through a library that has a subscription, though. The citation is:

Kirby, J. et al. 2011. Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation, Nature 476, 429–433 (25 August 2011)

It is strange that the "climate-change/global-warming religion" didn't prevent its publication. I also don't see much evidence that "CERN is not offering much press on this", given that the paper is in Nature, a rather well-known scientific journal, and CERN itself has a press release about it, where this statement is made:

"The CLOUD results show that a few kilometres up in the atmosphere sulphuric acid and water vapour can rapidly form clusters, and that cosmic rays enhance the formation rate by up to ten-fold or more. However, in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, within about a kilometre of Earth's surface, the CLOUD results show that additional vapours such as ammonia are required. Crucially, however, the CLOUD results show that sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays - are not sufficient to explain atmospheric observations of aerosol formation. Additional vapours must therefore be involved, and finding out their identity will be the next step for CLOUD."

There are more details on that page, such as this PDF, which states:

"This result leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could also influence climate. However, it is premature to conclude that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate until the additional nucleating vapours have been identified, their ion enhancement measured, and the ultimate effects on clouds have been confirmed."

Emphasis added.

If he doesn't like the account from Discover Magazine/Phil Plait, there's also this one from PhysOrg.com. Maybe with these sources he can manage to find one that isn't as liberally biased as he seems to think most of reality is.

I know it's bad form to RTFA, but you should at least take a look at figure 1. Maybe that will explain your confusion (or your heritage?)

It was published in the journal Nature. Not that hard to find. To bad you have to pay to see the full paper but Nature is available in many libraries if you're interested enough.

I've similarly posted in many climate threads about my friend's research dating back 15 years now that strongly suggested that cosmic DUST (not ray) accretion is a strong climate driver, based on variations in the Earth's orbit sweeping out slightly different parts of space and thus accreting different amounts of dust. Just like the Perseid meteor shower changes slightly each year because the relative position between the Earth and that quasi-static dust lane changes from year to year, the Earth encounters more or less dust along its entire orbit, and any periodicity in the orbital variation changes dust accretion. Dust accretion is strongly suspected to influence terrestrial cloud dynamics, and, therefore climate.

Here's my friend's article (in Nature, so this isn't some fly-by-night idea, but rigorous science, and, knowing the second author well, as I do, I can vouch that it is *highly* rigorous and objective science): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v378/n6557/abs/378600a0.html But don't take my word for it: the article has 89 references according to Google Scholar (about 3x the impact factor of Nature, so raising their statistics). There were a couple of follow-up articles as well.

If you want that you will have to look up the original paper, but for these methods the analytical (measurement of the sample in the lab) and calibration uncertainties (i.e. uncertainties in measurement of decay rates) usually total to less than 1% these days, so a 100Ma difference in ~4500Ma is significant. Also notice that they quote the dates to 3 significant figures. They wouldn't do that unless the dates were on the order of 10Ma precision.

It is NOT a failing of the "academic marketplace" to not quote the uncertainties. They would unquestionably be present in the scientific paper because in radiometric dating work it would not be published otherwise. The reviewers would reject it. Their absence in this article is entirely the fault of sloppy journalism in the press release. That also extends to the failure to cite the actual paper, which is in the most recent issue of Nature. And there's your answer in the abstract: 4360+-3 million years when the results are statistically combined from U-Pb and Sm-Nd dating methods. Wow. Generally speaking they seem to be quoting 2-sigma results, which is pretty standard for radiometric dates.

A lot of neat synthesized compounds have been found in nature after they've been made by people. A very similar example is how last year using very similar methods buckyballs (big carbon molecules with 60 carbon atoms in the shape of soccer balls) have been found in space http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/07/carbon_buckyballs_found_in_spa.html. Buckyballs have also been found on Earth in craters from meteorites and they are believed to have been made in the impact. Since buckyballs are large enough to contain very small molecules, there's been work trying to take these buckyballs and trying to extract atoms which were inadvertently trapped during the C60 formation. http://cnx.org/content/m14355/latest/ There's hope that this technique can help us learn about atmospheric issues from long ago as well as learn about isotope ratios and the like.

Unfortunately, Spitzer will not be operating forever. Indeed Spitzer has already run out of liquid helium, making most of its sensitive instruments inoperable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope. Spitzer will likely have very little functionality by 2020. There's some slight good news in that Spitzer is in a heliocentric rather than geocentric orbit, so it won't need to be deorbited (often we need to deorbit satellites so that they don't contribute more space junk or engage in uncontrolled deorbits and hit something back on Earth). So Spitzer can keep working until the very end of its instruments.

The really bad news is that there's a lot of effort to cancel the James Webb Telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope which will replace a lot of what Spitzer does and some of what Hubble does. Without Webb, when Spitzer goes, the US will have essentially no major space based telescope capacity. We will have let all that capacity be in the hands of Europe, Japan and China. Just as the center of particle physics moved to Europe when the LHC was built their and the SSC was canceled, so two the center of astrophysics may move to Europe. We are engaging in a slow steady decline. Neil deGrasse Tyson summarized the problem very well- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_F3pw5F_Pc- We have stopped dreaming. The American dream is ending. We might yet stop it, but right now it looks like the US is going the way of all failed empires, falling slowly into stagnation.

You forgot about Greenland, which has a huge chunk of arctic ice on top of it that would, if melted, raise sea level by, say, 6 to 7 meters.

Sea Turtles and Monitor Lizards can even get hundreds of pounds in weight yet none are warm blooded.

Apparently leatherback turtles are warm blooded:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v344/n6269/abs/344858a0.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/springwatch/meettheanimals/leatherback.shtml

There are warmblooded fish too, e.g. bluefin tuna and some sharks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_bluefin_tuna
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104543

You can find the actual paper online if you'd like. Being as it is through Nature, and he is not writing it as part of an NIH-sponsored project, the paper is behind a paywall.

Fortunately it is in the main Nature journal, which is possibly the most subscribed-to journal in science; hence if you don't work for a place that subscribes, you can probably get it at your local library.

And no that is not an endorsement of putting academic research papers behind paywalls.

This data -- or at least the end-result manipulated data -- has been debunked, and the methods used to manipulate it seriously called into question (see the Wegman Report). But the alarmists just keep going along as though that never happened and nothing is wrong.

Wegman report? Do you mean this Wegman report

The guy has been completely discredited. He is a fraud and a plagiarist, and if GMU has any integrity at all, he will soon be an unemployed ex-faculty member.

BTW, who's paying you come here and spout this propaganda `Jane Q. Public'? Which right-wing `think tank' or petroleum-funded `research institute' do you work for?

here you go fuck head:

Increases in Longwave forcing inferred from Outward longwave
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
Trends in Forcings
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123222295/PDFSTART
Downward Longwave Radiation
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/philipona2004-radiation.pdf
Downward Longwave Radiation
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml
29000 data sets, press release:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/
29000 data sets
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html
Global Energy Imbalance:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html
Isotopes:
http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf

Here they are, but I doubt you will try to understand them:

First you need to understand this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwave_radiation

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123222295/PDFSTART
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/philipona2004-radiation.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html
http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf

"The claim is that we need to live like hippies and give all our money to Al Gore and friends or THE ENTIRE EARTH WILL BE RUINED FOREVER."
no one claims that. Only people claiming that people claim that.

" But global warming isn't a scientific issue - it's a political issue, "
No, it's a scientific issue, what to do about it is a political issue.

" so you've picked your side (democrat) "
hahaha, now your boiling it down to the side of the Aisle?
democrats like:
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Jon Huntsman
  Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
  Chris Smith
  Tim Pawlenty
Bob Inglis

oh, wait those are all republicans, my mistake.

In order to support their religious base, The POLITICAL stance of the republicans has been 'no global warming' however if yo look at many of them and there votes, you can see a different picture.
But hey, I actually pay attention to these details, and like researching what different representatives vote for,.
What I don't understand is people like you, who are provably wrong, that keep on spouting your lies. Why?

And shoot, I forgot

http://www.nature.com/

Blaaaah to Science. They can't separate their organization's goals (political correctness overkill) from the science reporting. Try nature instead.

Since my workplace has a subscription, I usually read Nature. But Nature News is also highly recommended and free: http://www.nature.com/news/index.html

Also, have a look at The BBC Science and Nature Podcast Directory.

I particularly like "Material World" and "Science In Action". "The Inifinite Monkey Cage" is a science-based comedy show; not much good for education, but definitely worth a listen.

The Nature Podcast is an excellent guide to the week's science news. Because of the bredth of subjects that Nature covers, the podcast is aimed at an intelligent general audience and so assumes very little prior knowledge. Similarly, the Front pages of Nature are aimed at non-specialists and definitely worth your time.

Also, have a look at The BBC Science and Nature Podcast Directory.

I particularly like "Material World" and "Science In Action". "The Inifinite Monkey Cage" is a science-based comedy show; not much good for education, but definitely worth a listen.

The Nature Podcast is an excellent guide to the week's science news. Because of the bredth of subjects that Nature covers, the podcast is aimed at an intelligent general audience and so assumes very little prior knowledge. Similarly, the Front pages of Nature are aimed at non-specialists and definitely worth your time.

Errrm, ... Nature magazine? Just get a subscription.
Sorry, but this seems so much like a blatantly obivious no-brainer to me.

I'm afraid that I have some bad news for you: Even non-biologists might end up making some pretty massive child-support payments(and having to put up with some fairly nasty organisms).

While horizontal gene transfer, in nature, doesn't seem to be as common in large eukaryotes as it is in bacteria, there are trillions and trillions of viruses out there, and sometimes they are sloppy. You definitely contain nontrivial amounts of their DNA, some of them might have acquired a few little bits of you...

>>Wear long, loose white clothes.

Or black clothes, like the Bedouins:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v283/n5745/abs/283373a0.html

Seriously, this entire Ask Slashdot is just hilarious to me. Our collective fat asses are supposed to tell desert natives how to keep cool and hydrated? Heh.

An alternative technique to Optogenetics is called Magnetogenetics, which in my opinion may have even more clinical relevance. In optogenetics, viral vectors are used to transfect the opsin of choice in the neuronal population of choice, and then those neurons can be stimulated by the wavelength of light specific to that opsin. The newer and less well known technique of Magnetogenetics, uses viral vectors to transfect a specific ion channel that opens in response to magnetic stimulation of a certain frequency (see http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v5/n8/fig_tab/nnano.2010.163_F1.html). This means that once the virus was injected and the new receptor in place, stimulation can be done with a "magic wand" type stimulator, and wouldn't require fiber optics to be implanted in the brain or mounted to the skull. This would be considerably easier to use from a treatment perspective, and would have less room for hardware failure, etc. Of course, it would also be easier for a non-medical professional to activate such a system... Clearly more work needs to be done in both fields, and it's certainly an exciting time to be in neuroscience!

hijacking first thread to link the source (subscription/university login req'd), since the posted article doesn't.

Just google "Single-cell biological lasers" and you get some free sources for the article. Looks like they "shined" blue light on a cell which was positioned between 2 mirrors. So out of the 3 parts needed for a laser, 2 of them were not biological. I say good news that they grew cells capable of lasing the light but the article headline really jumps to conclusions and dramatizes it a bit, what am I saying? Nature.com had the article.

The unreasonable part is that some moron can block my consent to such experiments. When did we redefine freedom as "what lawmakers decide".

I think there is overlap with the ethics of selling human organs:

Organ sales: Compromising ethics

What proponents of the selling of organs for transplant call a 'choice,' I call the right to be cruelly exploited. Democratic societies have always limited our ability to harm ourselves, hence, workplace safety, child labor, or minimum wage laws that forbid a 5-year-old to 'choose' to take a dangerous, low-paying job. (Even when someone faces dire poverty, we do not permit him to sell himself into slavery.) Similarly, the laws barring organ sales are intended to protect those who, out of economic desperation, would be harmed by those with more money.

What's more, it is a highly dubious proposition that selling an organ offers even the very poor meaningful recourse. A few years after taking such a perilous step, the seller is apt to find himself in unchanged economic circumstances, albeit with one fewer kidney and the attendant health risks. There are better ways to respond to the problems of poverty than by expanding the opportunity for the rich to harvest the organs of the poor. And there are better ways to reduce the waiting list for kidney transplants: I particularly admired FL Delmonico's noting what preventive medicine can achieve.

It is true that we need to expand the pool of organs available for transplant, but there are ways to do that without endangering the most vulnerable members of society. One plan would make the use of cadaveric organs routine, switching from the current opt-in system to allowing those folks with, for example, religious objections, to opt out. It is curious that those who resist such an approach show more concern for the sentiments of the dead than the health of the living.

The Hidden Cost of Organ Sale

I assume you see nothing wrong with this, nobody in need of help? Three men charged in 'dungeon' castration

Laws establish limits, its been that way since before recorded history.

The reason is that the frequencies cell phones use are below the spectrum of ultraviolet light. It is near the spectrum of ultraviolet light where the first ionizing radiation occurs, which is required to be able to cause cancer.

99% of all carcinogenic substances do not emit ionizing radiations. On the other hand it is known that microwaves alter the physiology of the brain:
http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v29/n5/full/jcbfm200914a.html
http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v26/n7/full/9600279a.html
There are a lot of scientific articles pointing out that low-power microwaves can damage brain cells or alter their physiology. Since that's the primary effect of a ionizing radiation (cancer is a secondary effect of the induced damage), none can exclude that microwaves can cause cancer because "ionizing radiations are required to be able to cause cancer". They're not.

The reason is that the frequencies cell phones use are below the spectrum of ultraviolet light. It is near the spectrum of ultraviolet light where the first ionizing radiation occurs, which is required to be able to cause cancer.

99% of all carcinogenic substances do not emit ionizing radiations. On the other hand it is known that microwaves alter the physiology of the brain:
http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v29/n5/full/jcbfm200914a.html
http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v26/n7/full/9600279a.html
There are a lot of scientific articles pointing out that low-power microwaves can damage brain cells or alter their physiology. Since that's the primary effect of a ionizing radiation (cancer is a secondary effect of the induced damage), none can exclude that microwaves can cause cancer because "ionizing radiations are required to be able to cause cancer". They're not.

Here is at least some information for it at Nature. Wherever there is some usable energy, some kind of life seems to attach to it. Fascinating.

It's not so simple though. There will surely be companies who aren't concerned with the loss of ability to defend their "product" as intellectual property, but that won't stop them from creating organisms that might be dangerous.

Here are some of the more disturbing organisms that should be closely guarded (most are not) to prevent contamination of the natural gene pool:

Goats that product spiders silk protein in their milk
GMO cows producing human milk
Transgenic Salmon
GM fruit crops producing BT toxin in Hawaii
Maize, wheat, sweet potato

To gain a different perspective on GM, look for a movie called "Light Years", an Isaac Asimov adaptation of a novel by Jean-Pierre Andrevon's - Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar (The Machine-Men versus Gandahar). In the story, the people of Gandahar have genetically engineered the perfect utopia. Things take a turn for the worse when their existence is threatened with complete destruction by an organism which they had accidentally created during genetic experiments 1000 years earlier.

Unlike the prophecy in the story (...what can't be undone, will be), in our GMO world, what can't be undone - really can't be undone.

I can't help but think you're biased. You may have your reasons, but the arguments you put forth may stem from said bias and doesn't really address GP.

i.e.

1. No, GMOs do not create monocultures. Is it possible that a single genetically modified supercucumber sweeps the world because every farmer wants to grow it as it's cheap and resistant and whatnot? Yes, that's a possibility. On the other hand, there might be 20 new supercucumbers genetically engineered. Not all farmers might accept a singular supercucumber (for a variety of reasons). In the event that a singular supercucumber does sweep the world and some supercucumberfungus destroys the world's supply of cucumbers, we might have been sane enough to keep a few 'ordinary' cucumber strains left for just such a scenario.
Regardless of the above scenarios, it's not GM in itself that produces them.

2. You've got me there. Patents on food (and medicine, imho.. probably software too, but I digress) are stupid. But who is to say that if you spent your life combining cucumbers until you get a supercucumber, you can't patent that? In fact - you can; http://www.freepatentsonline.com/PP20666.html . So this is not limited to GMO.

You make a second remark here that rather harks back to the first. Here you suggest that e.g. a cucumber that is a derivative of the supercucumber falls under their patents and so forth and so on. If derivatives are made, how does that gel with the whole monoculture argument? Doesn't a monoculture by definition require there to be only a single strain?
Now, yes, I understand that the diversity in the strains is dependent on the number of generations and actual combinatorial and mutation rates and so forth and so on meaning that the second generation is just about as likely to succumb to the supercucumberfungus as as the first generation - but what about 10 generations down? If 'contamination' occurs naturally, then how is a monoculture ever to be established, globally?

3. If they're built to require -more- pesticide, then don't claim the GMO process in and of itself. Blame the engineer who decided that was a brilliant thing to do. Maybe they hold stock in pesticide producing companies or something; otherwise, producing a supercucumber that is not only resistant to regular cucumberfungus but also doesn't require quite so much pesticide as commoncucumber, sounds like a good idea and more likely to take off among farmers (pesticides and all the regulations that come with them aren't cheap).

And finally the bit where I suspect your bias... "tasteless product". I'm not sure if you meant 'morally offensive' when you said 'tasteless', or literally "not being very flavorful". If the former, carry on. If the latter.. well, tastes differ between crops, seasons, years, and persons of course.. but I wouldn't really try the whole "tasteless product" thing, given that - just for example - research has shown that you can genetically modify a tomato to taste better than the run-of-the-mill standard tomato, in part because said standard tomato has been bred to be bigger, have better shelf life, take less nutrition from the soil, etc. (not so successful in terms of 'taste', there).
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n8/abs/nbt1312.html

Note that the researcher does point out that home-grown tomatoes, or those at the farmer's market, may also taste better. This says nothing of the mass-production tomato in your local grocer's/supermarket/thing, though... regardless of whether the label states GM or not, which was your argument.

I'm not too keen on eating GM stuff myself (mostly due to point 2), but then I do still eat beef and oh boy is that a rotten industry (cornfeed, antibiotics as per the article, etc.). I suppose I could switch to soy-based meat replacement products.. but then I'd just be supporting the deforestation of Brazil's rainforests. Time to grow my own food and stick to chikun? :)

Well, except that the first link is almost a year and half old; and the second one is not a peer-reviewed paper published in Science, but an opinion piece; maybe with a bit of sour grapes flavour that D-Wave's actually peer reviewed paper was published in Nature!

But, hey, they credited me on the PovRay rendering of the actual chip, so it's all cool! And yes, I do have a "conflict of interest" statement to make ("designed the chip", from the link above); but I also do get tired of people waving old IEEE Spectrum opinion piece and saying: "See, all Electronic Engineers agree that there is nothing to see, move along!" ;)

Speaking for myself though,

Paul B.

Following a committee meeting just a week before the quake, some members of the group assured the public that they were in no danger.

If this is true, this is decidedly different from telling the public that they don't know whether there is any danger. Saying "I can't predict earthquakes" is fine. Saying "You are in no danger" would probably be interpreted differently than "We have no indications that you are at an elevated risk."

In the aftermath of the quake, which killed 309 people, many citizens said that these reassurances were the reason they did not take precautionary measures, such as leaving their homes.

More specifically, the accusation focuses on a statement made at a press conference on 31 March 2009 by Bernardo De Bernardinis, who was then deputy technical head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency and is now president of the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research in Rome. "The scientific community tells me there is no danger," he said, "because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable".

Hasn't it been established that movement of GPS ground stations (slippage) indicates increased risk of earthquakes? That was the basis for claims that the New Madrid fault line is overestimated ... and the above quote employs the exact opposite logic.

It appears that the crux of this case rests upon "he told me to say" versus "it's not our job to tell the public." But the civil servant who "summed" up the scientist's summary appears to have fallen victim to treating this like a forecasting of the weather. He will probably regret maintaining a neutral report and should have just said "inconclusive" instead of "looks good."

Vincenzo Vittorini, a physician in L'Aquila whose wife and daughter were killed in the earthquake and who is now president of the local victims' association '309 Martiri' (309 Martyrs), hopes the trial will lead to a thorough investigation into what went wrong in those days. "Nobody here wants to put science in the dock," he says. "We all know that the earthquake could not be predicted, and that evacuation was not an option. All we wanted was clearer information on risks in order to make our choices".

He says that the committee had precious information that was not passed on to citizens, for example on which buildings were most likely to collapse in the event of a strong earthquake. Vittorini thinks that those charged are not the only ones to blame, and that further investigations might eventually place greater responsibilities on politicians at the local and national level.

Indeed, this sounds to me more like a case against Italy's Civil Protection Agency instead of scientists and seismologists. Not that they couldn't predict the quake but general failure to provide earthquake plans and proper materials/handouts/PSAs to the public.

These virtual particles are tiny compared to atomic matter and exist for short amount of time, such a short amount of time thier very existence is below the uncertainty thresholds. They are a consequence of the fundamental uncertainty in position and momentum. They are created out of the vacuum.

So the question the experiment attempts to answer is does the electron behave like an object that reacts symmetrically in all dimensions, or is there so aberration, that is, is it not a perfect sphere. To a very high accuracy the paper claims that it is a sphere.

However that is not the full story. The paper is based on the idea that the aspherical shape would be larger than the standard model predicts. Adjusted models predicts a larger aspherical aberration. Since this experiment did not detect large aberrations, these other models, extensions of the Standard Model seem to be less than accurate. Form what I read, the standard model predictions are orders of magnitude lower than current sensitivity so it remains unclear if the electron acts like a sphere or something that is almost like a sphere.

What this experiment does is provide a novel and fascinating method to probe subatomic particles, as well as establish an upper limit on how big the abberation could be. Good science.

"Adult stem cells aren't pluripotent." Don't bet the family jewels on it. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7220/full/nature07404.html

I would bring your attention to graphene nanoribbons and bilayer graphene FETs where scientists have been able to induce a bandgap. nanoribbon, bilayer, bilayer and nanoribbons (the last two are by people from my school, and I know some more papers by them in the pipleline about opening up a gap in graphene).

It might be a while before CNTs or graphene penetrate commercial market. But there is a big reason for that: the inertia of the semiconductor manufacturing industry. A lot of equipment will need to be upgraded and even changed in the foundries. There has to be a huge return on investments for such a major overhaul, e.g., 100's of GHz of operating frequencies (IBM FET), better manufacturability, cheaper raw material (which it is for carbon) and not to mention compatibility with CMOS design and architectures. There's a long way to be trodden, and I wouldn't lose heart at this point just because we've not been able to deliver on CNTs.

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2011.74.html According to the abstract, the key contribution is an optical implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform (which is pretty cool). They only tested their work using fibre, not just laser beams or w/e is implied by the headline.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the importance of astrocytes. I didn't know that they are linked to certain neurological diseases. But at least for information processing they seem to be quite unimportant. There is a study that was published in Science where the researchers basically knocked out the signaling of all astrocytes in mice and the behaviour of the animals changed only marginally. A summary of this debate was published last year in an open access article in Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101110/full/468160a.html