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Astrocytes are linked with the repair of spinal cord injuries. And as of 2008 stem cells can be made from pretty much any normal adult cell http://www.nature.com/stemcells/2008/0810/081030/full/stemcells.2008.142.html .

The possibilities for the rehab of spinal cord injury patients is enough to make this an easy application of stem cell research, which might just earn the stem cell researchers some much needed good publicity from Washington.

What has SO2 and trees to do with the subject in question?

Oh, right. Nothing.

“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.”

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/449382a.html

(See end of the article for the scholarly references)

No, the data you link to is the data that's been massaged. Specifically, it's been highly averaged. The actual AVHRR data has much better resolution. Play around with the plotting tools at ESRL : http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/db_search/DBSearch.pl?Dataset=NOAA+Interpolated+OLR&Variable=Outgoing+Longwave+Radiation

That's exactly what I *did* use to create my figure. Though I had to use uninterpolated OLR data to get March 2011 data. Both data sets we've linked to are at 2.5 degree resolution. That doesn't prove that the paper's authors don't have access to higher resolution data, but no high-res data is available at the link they cite, and, I find it extraordinarily suspicious that their little blobs of peak OLR are spaced at exact multiples of 2.5 degrees apart, and lie exactly on the grid boxes for the ESRL data.

You can generate figures for yourself that match the article's figures very neatly.

No I cannot. Or rather, I can, but only by engaging in statistical and graphical flimflammery. You try it.

As for the rest of your points:
1: Yes, contentious, but I'm quoting the geology party line here. The extraordinary claim is that despite seismological evidence to the contrary, earthquakes are preceded by warning signs: that claim is the one which requires extraordinary proof.
2: Very clear. The fault in question is in 7 km of water, close to a gigapascal of pressure. Because of Henry's Law, you don't have gaseous bubbles of anything at that pressure: all gases are in liquid solution. Thus, the gas molecules move with the water. Which is sloooowly.
3: The figures do not match the expected behavior of a plume of material released from a point source on the Japanese coast.

Oh, while we're quoting figures in the article, how about Figure 3, which show OLR "events" in Tohoku which are as large or larger than the ones they're interested in, occuring on Feb 22, 2011, and Jan 28, 2010. These are ignored because they're not larger than the error bars. But these error bars are bullshit: do we really believe that the natural variability of weather on March 9 is one sixth as much as on Feb 24? I sure don't. They're computing standard deviations using 6 data points, which is a recipe for disaster.

Now the company is worried that the molten pool of radioactive fuel may have burned a hole through the bottom of the containment vessel, causing water to leak.

They're saying there "may have" been a breach - not that there "was" a breach.
What's really strange, is a lot of reputable sources are reporting this wrong.

In fact, a note from the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (JAIF) quotes Banri Kaieda, the nation's Economy, Trade and Industry Minister, as saying that it is "a fact" that there were holes created by the meltdown. That would likely mean at least some of the uranium fuel is now lying on the basemat below, or perhaps even outside the concrete containment.

But nowhere in their linked report does it say anything about a breach in the containment vessel.

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Banri Kaieda said it is a fact that the
water injected into the No.1 reactor leaked away because of a hole or holes
created by the meltdown.
[...]
The operator, TEPCO, said on Thursday that most of the fuel rods in the reactor are believed to have melted and sunk to the bottom of the reactor's pressure vessel.
TEPCO says the melted fuel has apparently cooled, even though much of the injected water is leaking through holes at the bottom of the vessel.
Under a plan decided last month, the utility was to fill up the containment vessel with water and set up a system to circulate the water through a heat exchanger.

Not that I can really blame them too much for mixing up some of the terms, considering how many different "vessels" there are.

Though, it does seem TIME got it right:

It's important to note, however, that the worst has not come to pass, nor do experts believe that it will. In that scenario, all of the rods would have fully melted, collapsed, and burned through the pressure and containment vessels, causing a large radioactive leak outside.

WSJ too:

Within 16 hours, the reactor core melted, dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel and created a hole there. By then, an operation to pump water into the reactor was under way. This prevented the worst-case scenario, in which the overheating fuel would melt its way through the vessels and discharge large volumes of radiation outside.

The nuclear industry lacks a technical definition for a full meltdown, but the term is generally understood to mean that radioactive fuel has breached containment measures, resulting in a massive release of fuel.

I'd like to read more about your second link, but it says the NRC report is "confidential". Got a closer-to-the-source link? Or at least a newer one? (the report is from March)

But our short-sited congress cancelled the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

I don't see where the project was cancelled. It has not been funded and was deferred. It looks to me like they are putting their money to use in similar areas of research anyway: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110427/full/472402a.html

...which is so very minuscule compared to the money we waste on enriching mega-corporations, imperialism and warmongering.

Or was this just a chance to rant about some other bullshit that has nothing to do with the topic at hand?

Wrong. Invertebrate model organisms are how most discoveries about the mammalian brain started off and continue to be how we discover the basics. On the most obvious level, THIS IS A NEURON. Same type of cell your brain is made up of.

Most of the important early discoveries in the invertebrate nervous system that were shown to hold in the mammalian brain had to do with the dynamics of individual neurons, not systems. The important discovery here is at the system level, not the single neuron level. While quite a few people would disagree, I couldn't care less about the dynamics of the insect olfactory bulb if they do not translate to the primate brain.

As far as one individual meganeuron in your head, maybe not. I think the histologists of the past would have realized if there were giant neurons similar to this. In the 1800's, they were using advanced staining techniques to show the shape of cells, I think if one neuron were synapsing with that many neurons, it would have shown up with golgi staining back then, or with the brainbow mouse [scienceblogs.com] more recently.

The average neuron in cerebral cortex makes on the order of 10,000 synapses. I would not be surprised if you can find neurons that make more than 50,000, particularly in small regions with a large number of long-range projections (e.g., VTA and striatum). I would be surprised if anything goes wrong if you kill a single one, which was my point. I'd also be very surprised if they don't fire action potentials.

FWIW, tracing the full extent of the synaptic connections of a single neuron in a mammalian brain is hard with any of these techniques, because you are typically labeling a large number of cells and trying to trace them through a large number of slices. Ed Callaway has a solution for labeling all presynaptic neurons targeting a single neuron, but I'm not aware of any good solutions for targeting postsynaptic cells.

The concept of bottlenecking information when sparsity is necessary: that probably IS a valuable lesson for human brains. It probably isn't a single cell, but the concept is still possible with a smaller number of cells.

This is possible, but I would say "maybe" and not "probably." There are computational principles that seem to apply in some brains but not others. (For example, intracellular recordings suggest that sequential firing during singing in songbird HVC is probably generated by synfire chains whereas sequential firing in the hippocampus during navigation likely has a more complex basis.) It's possible this principle holds in the mammalian olfactory bulb, although I would think a relatively large population of neurons would be involved. But, I would be surprised if it holds in neocortex. Most neocortical neurons are not all that sparse in comparison to neurons in archicortex, and connectivity patterns in neocortex are vastly different. The point is, we really don't know how sparseness is achieved in our own brains, and this article doesn't really add much on its own, although it suggests a path for further investigation. Since the article summary conveniently ignores the fact that this work was performed in an insect model, it makes it appear as if this strategy is used throughout the human brain, when this is very far from established.

Wrong. Invertebrate model organisms are how most discoveries about the mammalian brain started off and continue to be how we discover the basics. On the most obvious level, THIS IS A NEURON. Same type of cell your brain is made up of.

Most of the important early discoveries in the invertebrate nervous system that were shown to hold in the mammalian brain had to do with the dynamics of individual neurons, not systems. The important discovery here is at the system level, not the single neuron level. While quite a few people would disagree, I couldn't care less about the dynamics of the insect olfactory bulb if they do not translate to the primate brain.

As far as one individual meganeuron in your head, maybe not. I think the histologists of the past would have realized if there were giant neurons similar to this. In the 1800's, they were using advanced staining techniques to show the shape of cells, I think if one neuron were synapsing with that many neurons, it would have shown up with golgi staining back then, or with the brainbow mouse [scienceblogs.com] more recently.

The average neuron in cerebral cortex makes on the order of 10,000 synapses. I would not be surprised if you can find neurons that make more than 50,000, particularly in small regions with a large number of long-range projections (e.g., VTA and striatum). I would be surprised if anything goes wrong if you kill a single one, which was my point. I'd also be very surprised if they don't fire action potentials.

FWIW, tracing the full extent of the synaptic connections of a single neuron in a mammalian brain is hard with any of these techniques, because you are typically labeling a large number of cells and trying to trace them through a large number of slices. Ed Callaway has a solution for labeling all presynaptic neurons targeting a single neuron, but I'm not aware of any good solutions for targeting postsynaptic cells.

The concept of bottlenecking information when sparsity is necessary: that probably IS a valuable lesson for human brains. It probably isn't a single cell, but the concept is still possible with a smaller number of cells.

This is possible, but I would say "maybe" and not "probably." There are computational principles that seem to apply in some brains but not others. (For example, intracellular recordings suggest that sequential firing during singing in songbird HVC is probably generated by synfire chains whereas sequential firing in the hippocampus during navigation likely has a more complex basis.) It's possible this principle holds in the mammalian olfactory bulb, although I would think a relatively large population of neurons would be involved. But, I would be surprised if it holds in neocortex. Most neocortical neurons are not all that sparse in comparison to neurons in archicortex, and connectivity patterns in neocortex are vastly different. The point is, we really don't know how sparseness is achieved in our own brains, and this article doesn't really add much on its own, although it suggests a path for further investigation. Since the article summary conveniently ignores the fact that this work was performed in an insect model, it makes it appear as if this strategy is used throughout the human brain, when this is very far from established.

There a number of reasons to be highly skeptical of the AGW cabal. For one, there is such a thing as an AGW cabal, that was targeting CO_2 (and oil) long before there was any evidence or models at all that suggested that it was a problem.

I strongly suspect that this is wrong.

Evidence of CO2 causing a problem was available since the late 50s. There was a scientific consensus since the late 70s.

Who is in this AGW Cabal, and how did it get a hold on every scientific organisation of national or international note?

Since 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement, no scientific body of national or international standing rejects the findings of human-induced effects on climate change

It is at this point perfectly clear that the AGW cabal have tampered with data, cherrypicked data, and cooked up fits designed to minimize or eliminate "problems" for the theory, like the medieval optimum and little ice age.

Except that all investigations into such matters have shown that not only is it not perfectly clear, its patently false.

Everybody knows that Mann's infamous hockey stick graph is wrong at this point ...

Unless this "everybody" person has even a passing acquaintance with science. Nature magazine (you won't know what that is, will you) wrote "Academy affirms hockey-stick graph" in response to the NRC (you won't know who they are either) report that affirmed Mann's results. (Which have since been reproduced many times).

The truth is that at best we do not really know if CO_2 is a major influence on climate

That might be the case if we read only industry propaganda. But the greenhouse effect is no secret to science.

Sensationalistic, atleast.
Did they restart? Techreview says "yes", Nature says "No":
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/05/analysis_suggests_fukushima_re_1.html

This is especially interesting to me because another experiment failed to detect any evidence of dark matter, which seemed to contradict the (not quite statistically significant) hints that CDMS may have detected dark matter last year.

I'm also confused about which experiment this is. It says it is in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, but it isn't mentioned on either of the websites for the mine. Is it part of MINOS or CDMS, or is it something separate?

Regardless, I have been really excited about these detectors for the last couple years (even more so than the LHC), and it is great to start seeing data.

Here's an article he got published in Nature back in 2001

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/stallman.html

here's a related article: Give postdocs a career, not empty promises the author advocates letting a much smaller fraction of PhDs continue on to post-docs, forcing the rest into industry, and then keeping on those post-docs who don't make the cut to faculty as career non-tenure-track scientists. makes sense to me.

See "The Future of the PhD. Basically, the entire world is producing more PhDs than jobs for them.

In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more â" but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia.

Germany seems to do well on labor issues. Not just for academics, either. The country has an organized apprenticeship system turning out good technicians.

Here's the details. Yes, there are obvious problems with repeats, but it's still noteworthy that we can get such good contigs in all that data. And no, I'm talking about de novo sequencing, not with a reference genome.

Good question. First, I didn't say we don't know how to look for it.
I said we looked for common terrestrial forms. My first suggestion
is to look for uncommon terrestrial forms also. But we could broaden
that a bit.

How about we limit the search to chemical based life. Then we can
come up with a scientific definition. The definition would include
organized chemical processes that reduce their own entropy at
the expense of the environment with the goal of reproduction.

Then you begin to look for unexplained chemical processes. Like
excess methane on Mars. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1758
Or Formaldehyde http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050221/full/news050221-15.html

From TFA "Michael Mullan, a biomedical researcher who is now head of the Roskamp Institute in Sarasota, Florida, patented the sequence in 1995, then sold it to the AIA."

A little bit of googling shows that the AIA is affiliated with Archer Pharmaceuticals: "Archer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Archer) was founded in 2008 and specializes in targeted drug discovery for Alzheimer’s disease. Led by Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer Michael Mullan, M.B.B.S., Ph.D. and Chief Technical Officer and Associate Chief Scientific Officer Fiona Crawford, Ph.D."

The AIA is also related to the Roskamp Institute: "The foundation for the Institute’s work was set more than a decade ago by Roskamp’s two lead researchers, Drs. Michael Mullan and Fiona Crawford. They were key members of a pioneering team of scientists who, in the early 1990s, discovered that the onset of Alzheimer’s was directly related to the accumulation of a protein called ß-amyloid." The staff page lists about 15 people.

And then that http://www.sptimes.com/2003/02/20/TampaBay/Alzheimer_s_research_.shtml and that http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6961/full/425889a.html.

I would not be surprised if the institute is running out of money and they are trying to make a quick buck in settlements. The guy has published at a high level but as far as I understand he was neither the lead nor the senior investigator on the initial study so I don't understand how he could have sold the rights to a foundation that he obviously created just for the purpose of suing.

Just out of curiosity, how do you envision the root of such a bias to become genetically favored?

I imagine when you have easy access to milk and difficult access to other types of food, your survival chances are better if you can digest milk. Anyway, I guess instead of having me form hypotheses, when I am not in the field, you should best read what the researchers have to say. For example: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v39/n1/abs/ng1946.html

But, as you say yourself, the problem is not cheese, so "cheese culture" is probably irrelevant. The example paper above, researches the correlation between the lactase genes and the history of animal domestication.

1st: This story is not new. They have paper out there about this techniques. (2010 Aug) http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v5/n10/full/nnano.2010.192.html 2nd: sub-10 nm ribbons have a bandgap due to quantum confinement. Their 4K measurement doesn't really proves it, so something is not kosher. Or at least this is why they say "metallic" nanoribbons. That techinque is not that useful for digital electronics. 3rd: There are other ways for doing sub-10 nm GNRs, which are actually semiconductors. This is what I do for living. I think it is still promising for future electronics. It is just my opinion, while there's no proof, neither con, nor pro. Others (IBM) might have different opinions about it, but this question is not decided yet.

Geothermal is currently 0.2% of world energy production. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but we aren't going to be able to scale it up 500x, even when using controversial techniques such as enhanced geothermal. As you can see from the nature article, even experts at MIT say the most we're going to get is something like 10% of US energy that way, and that's if we find a good way to understand and deal with the earthquakes it can cause.

Geothermal may be part of the puzzle, just like PV or Wind, but none of those is a panacea, even when combined. We'll need something scalable and available everywhere for baseload. Right now that's either coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear. Only one of those won't run out in the next 100 years, thus there are folks like me who support nuclear as the only currently practical option to scale up. At the same time, we should pour research into other low-carbon methods and use them where practical.

Complete Genomics claims they will be able to sequence a genome for $5,000. Although, I haven't heard from them in awile..

Here's the original non-lame paper
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n3/full/ncomms1211.html

and a bbc article for good measure:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12612209

But colliders have failed to turn up direct evidence of the super particles predicted by the theory. The Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, for example, has found no evidence of supersymmetrical quarks ('squarks') at masses of up to 379 gigaelectronvolts (energy and mass are used interchangeably in the world of particle physics).

The LHC is now rapidly accumulating data at higher energies, ruling out heavier territory for the super particles. This creates a serious problem for SUSY (see 'SUSY's mid-life crisis'). As the super particles increase in mass, they no longer perfectly cancel out the troubling quantum fluctuations that they were meant to correct. Theorists can still make SUSY work, but only by assuming very specific masses for the super particles — the kind of fine-tuning exercise that the theory was invented to avoid. As the LHC collects more data, SUSY will require increasingly intrusive tweaks to the masses of the particles.

So far the LHC has doubled the mass limit set by the Tevatron, showing no evidence of squarks at energies up to about 700gigaelectronvolts. By the end of the year, it will reach 1,000gigaelectronvolts — potentially ruling out some of the most favoured variations of supersymmetry theory.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110228/full/471013a.html

So, they are planning on some increase in energy levels between now and 2012. Not an order of magnitude, I know, but 1000 is nearly 50% more than 700, and that's not "about the same" to me. So I think it's a combination of acquiring more data, and slowly increasing the energy levels (to LHC's maximum output, I assume?) until either supersymmetric particles are detected, or we have turned up the energy so much without finding anything that we have to give up on SUSY.

Hours after Joseph Pickrell put his genome on the internet, an anonymous blogger took the data and concluded that he came from Ashkenazi Jewish stock. Pickrell, a genetics graduate student at the University of Chicago, Illinois, was sceptical about the claim. But after talking to relatives, he discovered that he had a Jewish great-grandfather who had moved to the United States from Poland at the turn of the nineteenth century. "It was a part of my ancestry I was totally unaware of," he says. The blogger, who writes under the pseudonym Dienekes Pontikos at http://dodecad.blogspot.com/ had commandeered Pickrell's DNA as part of the Dodecad Ancestry Project, an ambitious project in which cutting-edge genomic analysis meets Web 2.0. Pontikos analyses genetic data submitted by followers of his blog to reconstruct personal ancestry and human population history — and reports his findings online. He is part of a small but growing group of 'genome bloggers', a mix of professional scientists and hobbyists proving that widely available tools for computational biology could enable recreational bioinformaticians to make new discoveries. "They are not amateurs. They are far from being amateurs," says Doron Behar, a population geneticist at Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, who studies human history. "I cannot stress enough the level of appreciation I have for their efforts." Pontikos has so far analysed several hundred thousand single-letter DNA variations from more than 2,200 individuals. That includes more than 200 submitted to him by readers of his blog, who had had their genomes analysed by genetics testing firms such as 23AndMe, based in Mountain View, California, with the remainder coming from publicly available datasets. The readers volunteering their genomes (identities stay private) are mostly keen to delve into their own ancestry. But Pontikos, who is from Greece and describes himself as an "anthropology dilettante", is more interested in unfurling the history of populations that tend to be overlooked by human-population geneticists. For instance, his analysis of genomes from people living in northern Eurasia reveals a genetic connection between populations in northern Finland and central Siberia (see 'Meet the ancestors'). David Wesolowski, a 31-year-old Australian who runs the Eurogenes ancestry project (http://bga101.blogspot.com), also focuses on understudied populations. "It's a response, in a way, to the lack of formal work that's been done in certain areas, so we're doing it ourselves," he says. Wesolowski and a colleague have drilled into the population history of people living in Iran and eastern Turkey who identify as descendants of ancient Assyrians, and who sent their DNA for analysis. Preliminary findings suggest their ancestors may have once mixed with local Jewish populations, and Wesolowski plans to submit these results to a peer-reviewed journal. But Pontikos sees little point in formally publishing his findings. "I can bypass them entirely, and have the entire world review what I write," he wrote in an e-mail. Indeed, comments on his blog — "could you please provide the eigenvalues for the principal component analysis", for instance — read like the niggling recommendations of a manuscript reviewer. ...

Maybe he is opening his genome to anybody who wants to study it. Since it is the only Open Source genome, I'm sure there will be plenty of research, and he could benefit from it (not financially, but it's a nice relief to be assured that you can not have alzehimer, diabetes or whatever.)

They aren't. I was just pointing out that the suggestion that all Americans consume too much protein isn't entirely correct.

Either way, the point I was trying to make originally wasn't that Americans consume too little protein in terms of bulk numbers, but rather as a percentage of calories in their diet. Americans on average take in about 15% of their total calories from protein. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends 10-35% from protein. Thus, the average American could double the percentage of calories that he or she takes in from protein, and still be within the recommended range.

More to the point, that's the only calorie source that's so far off towards one end of the range. Our fat intake is a little on the high side of the range, average carbs are right in the middle, but protein is way low. (Source: about.com) Further, eating more protein during weight loss results in more fat loss, less muscle loss.

So I maintain my original assertion that Americans don't get enough protein.

http://clinicaltrialsfeeds.org/clinical-trials/show/NCT01029925

Additional suggestions that maybe a "simple" solution does exist, but in the same sense that Alexander had a simple solution for the Gordian Knot...

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1865024/dca_research_on_brain_cancer/
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100512/full/news.2010.236.html?s=news_rss

More about DCA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid

= 9J =

I don't mind negative comments, it's part of the layman peer-review process. If the information is worthwhile on Slashdot, it'll usually pick up a mix of knee-jerk negative reactions, knee-jerk positive reactions, a few funny comments (which I enjoy the most), and some thoughtful opinions after some reflection (that we can then learn from).

"It seems that DCA may be promising, although you probably should have included links to more objective websites. The study appears to be legitimate research, but a human trial of only five patients is hardly conclusive. I'm going to pass this information on and hope it isn't all nonsense."

That was the purpose of the post, to give an additional option most haven't heard of yet appears incredibly promising. I wish your friend the best of luck.

If you want more information about the trial, here it is...

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1865024/dca_research_on_brain_cancer/
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100512/full/news.2010.236.html?s=news_rss

It looks like UCLA is now paying attention and starting their own trial for using DCA on recurring breast cancer (breast cancer that was once treated, but has returned).

http://clinicaltrialsfeeds.org/clinical-trials/show/NCT01029925

= 9J =

How about a link to the paper?

Take General Relativity. It is a theory that makes some predictions, is getting increasing support, but is not as testable as the photoelectric effect which has many practical applications. These practical applications are key because such routine use of theory tends to validate it. Any theory that remains in the lab is simply going to be that, a theory. General Relativity is supported, it describes the way the universe might be, and is the simplest explanation, but it certainly does not explain how the universe has to be. This unlike QM, which due to the practical applications seems to describe how the universe works, at least within the domain.

Whoa, hold on. I agree with the sentiment of your post, but you picked the wrong example.

General Relativity is very well tested and extremely established. Besides the "gravitational lensing" effect that we observed to confirm it for the first time, we have by now tested it in several other ways. Every time you use a GPS device you're depending on it (to see why, look for "relativity" here). Beyond that, we're still testing it in the lab and confirming it with increasing confidence (see here, for example.)

So, while it's true that Quantum Mechanics is much more tested (mainly due to the fact that it's much easier to test it in many different ways), General Relativity is not on shaky ground by any standard -- unlike these early-universe hypotheses like this one of "multiverses", etc.

Yeah, it wasn't clear to me either how they'd get the MoS2 into the transistor channels either. To build such a thin structure suggests some sort of vapor deposition process if they were to commercialize it.

Digging through a couple of the links, I finally found what this experiment did in the supplemental information PDF. Their current method doesn't sound like it scales to building arbitrary chips yet:

Our device fabrication begins with scotch-tape based micromechanical cleavage of commercially available, naturally occurring crystals of molybdenite (SPI supplies) using the method previously developed for graphene fabrication. The scotch tape with ultrathin crystals is pressed against the surface of a substrate composed of degenerately doped Si with 270nm of SiO2. The substrate is imaged using an optical microscope (Olympus BX51M) equipped with a color camera. Single layers of MoS2 are located with respect to fiduciary markers. Monolayers can be easily identified by their optical contrast. We have previously established the correlation between the optical contrast and thickness as measured by AFM for a number of dichalcogenide materials, including MoS2. With this method, we can produce cca 1-3 single layers per area of 1cm2.

If I interpreted that correctly, they're laying down MoS2 on the substrate with scotch tape, and then going back with a microscope and camera to figure out where they got the desired MoS2 monolayers in order to build their transistors. That works for an experiment, but I can't see that working in a fab. :-)

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

The article makes an all too typical assumption. That is, that it assumes that the effect is roughly linear. The problem is that, like they've found in Antarctica, if there is enough melting, three things can happen. One, the sheet can start to float, and two, as more pieces break off due to this effect, more ground is exposed which acts like a heat sink. LAstly, as the ice melts, the land itself rises out of the ocean, exacerbating the issue.

Combined with the fact that ice has essentially no transition phase between solid and liquid, what's ice a few degrees lower can literally ALL melt in a region in short order. 1 or 2 degrees hotter is a massive change as a result, and it won't even take 100 years at the rate its accelerating.

http://www.satimagingcorp.com/gallery/aster-greenland-ice-sheet.html
This is all too typical. Note the snow covered ground near the glacier and how it stays barren.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/02/antarctic_ices_american_inunda.html
Also, the water will rise significantly in the northern hemisphere because of the two combined effects. This accelerates the melting in Greenland even further.

One nice thing, though, is that real estate up there will be cheap and the climate will be somewhat viable to live in again. ;)

Graphene actually can be made to have a bandgap so this problem may only be a temporary one.

Here's a paper which discusses graphene's band gap: Direct observation of a widely tunable bandgap in bilayer graphene

Here's a free article discussing this: Tunable Graphene Bandgap Opens The Way To Nanoelectronics And Nanophotonics

In fact, here's an article about IBM doing research on this very topic: IBM opens bandgap for graphene

Note that the date of the article discussing graphine with a bandgap is after the date of the article linked in the slashdot summary discussing that graphine can't have a bandgap. Sounds like the authors of the articles need to talk to some more people and get their facts ironed out.

Actually, Stirman, not Stewart. Anyway, there is a second independently developed system that does approximately the same thing, just without Harvard's PR department behind it.

It would be collegial to mention that this other project exists, no? (Especially since their software is also available, and since you know it exists.)

'That's a google search for who discovered DNA...If crick is listed at all, he is listed second in every case on the first page of results.'

- DNA was discovered by Frederick Miescher in the 19th century.

- The original DNA _structure_ paper listed Watson and Crick as authors in that order:
http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/archive.html
This is presumably why they've been listed this way ever since.

- If either is mentioned in the default 2-line results excerpt when I run your Google search, both are (with one exception).

- The first hit mentions only Watson in this excerpt, but in the specific context of discovering the correct base pairing, which was indeed his individual insight, as he explains here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecyvr8a-0D0

Nobody is going to forget Crick, unless of course the Palin-Voldemort campaign is successful in 2012 and all books are burnt.

I've read the Feynman essay, and it's a useful point as far as it goes, but it doesn't address the issues that I brought up at all: people (and animals) are a lot harder to experiment on than inert objects (marbles don't punch back). It has a lot more to do with the fundamental difference in complexity than it has to do with sloppiness.

But you do bring up a much more general point about experimental protocol that you overlooked in your description: a measurement is meaningless unless you also provide the resolution at which it was assessed. The famous example of this problem is trying to measure the length of the coast of England with various size rulers, which led to the development of fractal geometry etc (see also: scale space).

With regards to your replication of F=ma, to bring that experiment up to the level of Mr. Young's work, you would have found that F=ma broke down at some scales, and discovered quantum theory and relativity. Of course, that rigor took physics over 300 years of further effort!

Just a note on Freud: I happen to research neuroscience, and while I wouldn't call my educational path the most typical, my only encounter with Freud in a class was that some of his later work pioneered the study of neural networks.

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2724.html

Brief Communication? No reference to the concurrent larger study by the same authors?

Major parameter indicating activity - volume?

Fig 1 shows piss poor correlation that in my college physics lab would earn me a "redo".

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nn.2724-S1.pdf

Supp Tab 2 shows surface area (again, dubious parameter) and some kind of anchor labeling (ROI) (my guess, distances between those labels, but feel free to google it up).

Tab3 adds "mean cortical thickness" - again, integral parameter.

Size of sample is pathetic: 58 healthy adults (22 females; mean age M = 52.6, s.d. = 21.2, range = 19–83 years)

At this variation of age and God knows what other parameters, this is just plain unconvincing.

Besides all the dubious quality of this "brief communication", the results are predictable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala#Emotional_learning

"In complex vertebrates, including humans, the amygdalae perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events."

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2724.html

Brief Communication? No reference to the concurrent larger study by the same authors?

Major parameter indicating activity - volume?

Fig 1 shows piss poor correlation that in my college physics lab would earn me a "redo".

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nn.2724-S1.pdf

Supp Tab 2 shows surface area (again, dubious parameter) and some kind of anchor labeling (ROI) (my guess, distances between those labels, but feel free to google it up).

Tab3 adds "mean cortical thickness" - again, integral parameter.

Size of sample is pathetic: 58 healthy adults (22 females; mean age M = 52.6, s.d. = 21.2, range = 19–83 years)

At this variation of age and God knows what other parameters, this is just plain unconvincing.

Besides all the dubious quality of this "brief communication", the results are predictable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala#Emotional_learning

"In complex vertebrates, including humans, the amygdalae perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events."

Until we are in a situation where we have one or more resources under significant and consistent pressure over a long period of time that eats up more and more of our collective time and energies trying to manage and maximize, then this mathusian doomsday scenario hasn't even left the drawing board - let alone the hanger.

Oil and

Fresh Water

Quit watching so much Star Trek. Reality can be a cast iron bitch at times.

I'd start doodling if I were you. If your talents don't run that way, try some reading.

Last weeks issue of Nature mentions gene hackers who study newly posted human genomes for interesting DNA. We are somewhere in the "third decade" of sequenced human genomes- that is between 100 and 1000 fully sequenced genomes published so far. There are interesting things remaining to be discovered in this huge mass of data.

but I'm fairly sure that if you're living a reasonable lifestyle then genetics completely dominates. After that it's probably as much down to happiness as anything else.

That's what you get for 'being fairly sure' instead of actually investigating. We've noticed a lot. We've noticed that exercise keeps your telomeres long. Also important in that study, the more exercise, the longer the telomeres. There are lots of studies like this that show exercise can reverse the effects of aging. This one is not related to aging directly, but exercise helps you grow new brain cells. Some researchers at Berkeley did a 20 year study of more than 100,000 runners, and found that the more you run, the longer you live, up to 50 miles a week (the benefits probably extend beyond 50 miles a week, but they couldn't find enough people who run that far to get good numbers). It's pretty clear there are a lot of things you can do to live longer.

You also may consider reading a book about nutrition, since you likely have some misconceptions in that area, too.

As shown by this research: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101128/full/news.2010.635.html

Rather straightforward, isn't it? Why *does* a cell die, anyway? As long as it can grow and replicate, it shouldn't. Except for the telomere TTL-signal. Once we intervene in that, I think aging could be reduced or slowed drastically. I doubt there is much risk of cancer: cancer is when cells don't respond to normal apoptosis signals and keep growing. While removing the TTL-signal could be risky, I'm confident that cells with only the Time To Live removed could still respond normally to other signals. And while cancer *may* be lethal, aging is *always* lethal.

It's behind a paywall, but here is the actual paper that wasn't identified in the link.

The way the submitted stories seem to overwhelmingly favor paywalls, and when I see that a thoughtful person usually finds and posts a relevant link with no such restrictions, I can't help but wonder if Slashdot has some kind of "kickback" arrangement with several paywall sites. I wonder the same thing when I see multiple submissions for a particular story and the one that makes it to the main page tends to be someone's ad-laden blog. I have no idea if that's all a coincidence or not and have seen no evidence either way. Yet, if it isn't a coincidence wouldn't it be more like journalistic integrity to include a one-line disclosure in the final submission?

Sure, lots of times the unrestricted links are some kind of "printable" version that gets around the paywall instead of finding an alternate site. I understand that Slashdot probably wouldn't be allowed to post such a circumvention. Still, it's a rare event that one news outlet has a total monopoly on a given story. I'm betting that exceedingly few news items and press releases have no freely-accessible alternatives at all.

It's behind a paywall, but here is the actual paper that wasn't identified in the link.

Some organic growers use it. They use a lot less of it,

I see a lot of [citation needed] following the crucial statements in support of this claim. "Reduction and elimination of chemical pesticide use is technically challenging." however does have a cite.

only specific chemicals (with little to no synthetic stuff):

"Synthetic" by itself does not particularly concern me. There are certainly synthetics -- like, say, the one in TFA -- that are bad. But it's not the "synthetic" descriptor that makes it bad, nor does describing something as "non-synthetic" make me embrace it in my tree-hugger arms.

For example, sulfur is a "non-synthetic" anti-fungal used in organic farming. And there's no obscure study by the Bayer corporation needed to demonstrate the dangers of sulfur runoff from farming.

Here's a Nature article which says (with offline cite) that it isn't clear whether organic farming is better or worse in terms of environmental damage from runoff -- which is a larger issue than just pesticide use but clearly affected by it.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not bashing organic farming as useless or counter-productive. It has it's benefits, not the least of which is trying to figure out how to solve these problems without saying "well what can we cook up in the chemical plant?". I'm not convinced the pesticide issue is actually one of them, not inherently anyway.

According to this 2005 Nature News article about Clauset and his research, the observation that social interactions (deadly feuds) follow a power law distribution dates back at least half a century. Along a similar vein, Neil Johnson (of University of Miami) and research collaborators recently produced a decent model for this kind of distribution (see their paper in Nature from last year).

According to this 2005 Nature News article about Clauset and his research, the observation that social interactions (deadly feuds) follow a power law distribution dates back at least half a century. Along a similar vein, Neil Johnson (of University of Miami) and research collaborators recently produced a decent model for this kind of distribution (see their paper in Nature from last year).

Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical ‘wires’ I am not a Biologist. Can some one verify if this is the original paper?

It certainly looks like it. One interesting feature that was left out of the /. summary is that the 'wires' in the circuit are quorum sensing molecules - or signalling molecules that are sent and received by all the bacteria in a group. Except that the abstract refers to 'orthogonal' quorum sensing receivers and producers, so I guess each colony make one compound and senses another? Interesting stuff.

Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical ‘wires’
I am not a Biologist. Can some one verify if this is the original paper?

Still not seeing any citations, but perhaps you should be reviewing your own examples. The hockey stick has been confirmed by multiple independent lines of evidence:

McIntyre 2004 claimed that the Mann 1999's hockey-stick graph shape was a result of the analysis method used (principal components analysis), and was not statistically significant. However, the National Center for Atmospheric Research reconstructed (Wahl 2007) the graph using a variety of techniques (with and without principal components analysis), and with some slightly different temperatures in the 15th century, confirmed the hockey stick. Furthermore, independent measurements from boreholes (Huang 2000"), stalagmites (Smith 2006) and glaciers (Oerlemans 2005) all confirm the same dramatic recent temperature rises. Mann 2008 combines these with ice cores, coral and lake sediments to confirm the same hockey stick shape over the last 1300 years, without requiring the disputed tree-ring data.

If you're referring to Steig 2009, perhaps you can point us to evidence that discredits this? You'll have to forgive us for not taking your claims that it is "unmitigated bollocks" at face value. Rather, measurements from the GRACE satellite (Velicogna 2009) show very clearly that the Antarctic land ice sheet has lost around 900 gigatonnes in the last 7 years, and this loss rate is accelerating, even in the previously-thought-stable East Antarctica (Chen 2009). The Antarctic sea ice sheet is actually increasing, however, for numerous possible reasons, but at a lower rate than the land ice loss.