Slashdot Mirror

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.

I bet it's something along with this:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.html

or this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827815.800-50-ideas-to-change-science-artificial-life.html

If it is. Then we can soon replace our plastic office plants with "living" plastic plants. Just add methane.

There was an article a while back in Nature
At least for pigs, an aseptic environment for the piglet, actually leads to a less healthy individual. Researcher Denise Kelly (University of Aberdeen, UK) explains that for the study, piglets were divided equally between an outdoor environment, and indoor environment, and one where they were fed a diet high in antibiotics. The outdoor raised pigs intestinal tracts had a significantly higher population of "healthy" bacteria than their indoor raised brethren. Further, the indoor piglets gene expressed more genes for T-cell formation while the indoor raised pigs had more genes related to inflammatory immune response.

Kelly also explains that the pig is a good model for this type of research due to similarities between the organisms found in human and pig guts and their comparable size in organs."

Now about EDC's (Endocrine Disrupting Compounds) had an article a while ago by pickins. Basically these compounds have been shown to feminize males.

A somewhat more disturbing article was published by the National Research Council (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12528) showing potential linkage between the chemical class called phthalates and decreased size of male testes. The article reports that the EPA needs to study the impact of phthalates as demasculinizing agents on male reproductive organs. Phtlalates are ubiquitous in the environment due to their use as a plasticizer. Traditionally the EPA has studied the effects of pollutants individually rather than as a class. The impact on exposure is permanent causing developmental problems (and if you want to see what an atrophied rat testicle looks ).

There also growing concern that this class of chemicals are actually impacting the ratio of male to female births. A decent summary is posted on .

As an analytical chemist working in the environmental industry, one of the challenges with this issue is that the concentrations we are attempting to measure are absurdly (though potentially significant) low. It is not uncommon for the studies to be needing levels of detection in the low parts per trillion range. Because we are not simply dealing with outright mortality (its fairly easy to tell when all the fish in a river are suddenly floating belly-up) and instead trying to understanding fairly subtle changes in the endocrine system of the impacted species (including homo sapiens) the issue is significantly more difficult to understand and address (slow shifts in the ratio of males-to-females)."

Most likely is that the Canadian scientists involved are not allowed to talk about anything they are doing, ( gag order ), especially this new stuff. But if one can get the information from other sources, the CBC can let the Canadians know that Canadians are involved in science still, although we're not allowed to talk about that either.

Honestly, this whole thing is a joke and just shows how becoming too PC is a weakness. If we would just profile we wouldn't need half the security we have.

Profile whom, and how?

Racial profiling is not only bigotry, a violation of the guarantee of equal protection, and a great way to motivate more hatred -- and thus more attacks -- against the U.S., but it doesn't work. As soon as you know that they're looking twice at people of Arabic descent, just send in an English/Jamaican guy.

You think a blond-haired blue-eyed woman can't be a terrorist? Think again.

Religious profiling -- what, you're going to ask me for a baptism certificate from a State-approved church before I can get on the plane? And again, a great way to motivate more hatred and more attacks against the U.S.

Any profile you set up, is just an incentive for the other side to recruit people who can pass as not fitting it -- and a way to make the 99.9999% of people fitting that profile who are innocent, angry enough at you to think of joining that other 0.00001%.

As for "behavioral profiling", it's pseudoscientific garbage.

You want a secure flight? The best idea I've ever heard to secure a plane against terrorists is that, just like we've got emergency oxygen masks, we should put emergency Louisville Sluggers in tubes running down the side of the plane. In case of emergency, the pilot pushes a button, the tubes rotate open, and you've got passengers armed with something every American knows how to swing.

Yah, the glory days.

Now you have people like THIS

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/09/former_los_alamos_physicist_ch.html

and THIS

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2007/07/oak-ridge-emplo.html

Call me a Karma-Whore, but here's the clickable link: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nmeth.1533_ft.html

The article is freely available here or using wget:
wget --referer="http://www.nature.com/regions/germany/" http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nmeth.1533.pdf

It seems that the images are accessible. Found these via Google:

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nmeth.1533_F2.html

Now linked for your clicking pleasure:

Images

There are existing techniques that give ~tens of nanometers resolution using fluorescence microscopy (discussed in a feature in Nature Methods ). Techniques such as PALM/FPALM/STORM (developed by Betzig, Hess, and Zhuang, independently) use photoswitchable fluorophores to image and localize single fluorescent molecules with high precision then reconstruct the image from these single molecule images. Another technique, STED (stimulated emission depletion, developed by Hell) uses stimulated emission to effectively shrink the size of the point spread function of a fluorescence microscope. Yet another technique, structured illumination microscopy (developed by Gustafsson), plays tricks with moiré patterns to extend the resolution of optical microscopy. All would, in theory, be applicable on Smith's array tomography samples.

On issue with superresolution fluorescence microscopy, however, is that the spatial resolution of an image is dependent on the density of antibodies bound to the sample. The Nyquist criterion defines how frequently one must sample the underlying structure (the neuron) in order to achieve a specific spatial resolution. In this case, each antibody that binds to the neuron is one sampling event. Therefore, achieving very high resolution requires binding more antibody to the sample than typical for standard immunohistochemistry. This can be difficult, especially in samples that are embeded in resin (as is required to get the 70 nm sections used in the array tomography method), as the embeding process can drastically reduce the antigenicity of the sample.

To trap just 38 atoms, the group had to run the experiment 335 times.

I'm guessing that the 38 atoms that they isolated were during different runs of the experiment.

Also not to call out Fox News, since I feel it's more of a general indication of science reportage in mainstream media, but I think it's astonishing that the Fox article basically takes this illustration of the magnetic bottle and simplifies it to the level of its own illustration, which is an antihydrogen atom kept in suspension by eight bar magnets.

Please use this link http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101117/full/468355a.html it was the original. Tired of the FOX News links.

The prestigious science journal Nature recently had an article on the best cities for science. They have some really cool interactive graphs showing scientific productivity of different parts of the world and how many citations each place gets. What struck me was how quickly China grew in terms of volume of publications, but how poorly their articles were cited. Whether that is due to papers being published in primarily Chinese language journals, the papers of being of poor quality, or the scientific community ignoring important papers coming from China for whatever reason is unclear, but I think it shows that other countries have a while to go before achieving scientific dominance.

Actually, this doesn't reprogram the cells to be IPS cells. It's a direct conversion, per the actual article from the actual source.

One advantage of direct cell conversions is that unlike embryonic stem cells or IPS cells stuck itno a human body, they're pretty sure these cells wouldn't be likely to cause tumors.

Oops, sorry, a real link.

Pawan Sinha runs Project Prakash which goes into rural areas of India where treatment for congenital cataracts is not generally available. They do the surgery, for free, and in some cases ask the recipient whether they would like to contribute to the research program, which tracks how patients learn to see after the surgery [pdf]. The oldest person to receive the surgery was 29, and has had limited recovery of visual acuity. Children under the age of 6 typically have excellent prognoses following the surgery. See Pawan's TED talk here.

Nature article(reg required)
Here we use a holographic stereographic technique and a photorefractive polymer material as the recording medium to demonstrate a holographic display that can refresh images every two seconds. A 50Hz nanosecond pulsed laser is used to write the holographic pixels. Multicoloured holographic 3D images are produced by using angular multiplexing, and the full parallax display employs spatial multiplexing. 3D telepresence is demonstrated by taking multiple images from one location and transmitting the information via Ethernet to another location where the hologram is printed with the quasi-real-time dynamic 3D display.

If you understand any of the above you probably need to spend more time outside.

ScienceDaily
"At the heart of the system is a screen made from a novel photorefractive material, capable of refreshing holograms every two seconds, making it the first to achieve a speed that can be described as quasi-real-time," said Pierre-Alexandre Blanche, an assistant research professor in the UA College of Optical Sciences and lead author of the Nature paper.
[...]
Currently, the telepresence system can present in one color only, but Peyghambarian and his team have already demonstrated multi-color 3D display devices capable of writing images at a faster refresh rate, approaching the smooth transitions of images on a TV screen.

Sounds like they've still got a way to go before we get Holo-TV.

Awesome. Has anyone done experimental verification with entangled triplets? I always seen them talked about as pairs only.

Yes: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v403/n6769/abs/403515a0.html

You are correct that the site did not correctly format the DOI link, but the research has been published. Here is the correct DOI link doi:10.1038/nature09518. Also, here is the link to the article on the Nature website: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature09518.html (link probably valid only for the next week or so)

While the Wired story doesn't show blatant bias unlike the Nature story, "Space tourism to accelerate climate change", it still remains that no mechanism for the claimed climate changes has been described. It's just, "These guys ran their computer model and this is what they got." That's extremely unhelpful.

There's also the actual research abstract:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7319/abs/nature09510.html

On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons

Moran Cerf, Nikhil Thiruvengadam, Florian Mormann, Alexander Kraskov, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Christof Koch & Itzhak Fried

Nature 467 , 1104–1108 (28 October 2010) doi:10.1038/nature09510
Received 08 January 2010 Accepted 14 September 2010 Published online 27 October 2010

Daily life continually confronts us with an exuberance of external, sensory stimuli competing with a rich stream of internal deliberations, plans and ruminations. The brain must select one or more of these for further processing. How this competition is resolved across multiple sensory and cognitive regions is not known; nor is it clear how internal thoughts and attention regulate this competition1, 2, 3, 4. Recording from single neurons in patients implanted with intracranial electrodes for clinical reasons5, 6, 7, 8, 9, here we demonstrate that humans can regulate the activity of their neurons in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) to alter the outcome of the contest between external images and their internal representation. Subjects looked at a hybrid superposition of two images representing familiar individuals, landmarks, objects or animals and had to enhance one image at the expense of the other, competing one. Simultaneously, the spiking activity of their MTL neurons in different subregions and hemispheres was decoded in real time to control the content of the hybrid. Subjects reliably regulated, often on the first trial, the firing rate of their neurons, increasing the rate of some while simultaneously decreasing the rate of others. They did so by focusing onto one image, which gradually became clearer on the computer screen in front of their eyes, and thereby overriding sensory input. On the basis of the firing of these MTL neurons, the dynamics of the competition between visual images in the subject’s mind was visualized on an external display.

1. It's a Wired article.

2. It's not really an article, it's a summary. /. doesn't have any experience with those being of poor quality, which is why this one caught it unawares. Its real purpose is to make you click on a link at Wired before googling for the real article that it doesn't bother to link to though it links to dozens of advertisers and a honey-pot of cascading abysses of other Wired articles - sorry, summarylinktraps.

3. The real article is in Nature, which is usually a little better at getting facts right. But also depends on revenue from what was known in the past as a "magazine", and so has embargoed truth and fact from the in-tar-webs by setting up what is known in the future as a "paywall". If anyone knows how to ePolevault this, please warez it:

Late middle Eocene epoch of Libya yields earliest known radiation of African anthropoids

Wow. That title must have made the "editors" at Wired put down their wiimotes for almost ten seconds.

Nature news itself covers this story a little better here.

You might be interested to know that the volunteers for this study were patients with severe epilepsy, and the neural recordings were from electrodes actually inserted into the patients' brains. Similar work has been done recording from the brains of e.g., monkeys in order to control a robotic arm (rather than control a video display). This involves invasive surgery that wouldn't be done unless there was also a medical necessity for it.

I am not sure if this article in Nature is free or not, but I found it more scientific than the daily med:

'Marilyn Monroe' neuron aids mind control

It doesn't have to be the biggest crater. Just big enough. An impact of that magnitude would have major catastrophic effects on the whole planet.

And, for what it's worth, I think pretty much the entire northern hemisphere of Mars wins any "I've seen bigger" contest. Link (and a PDF link for those without Nature access)

You are confused about who is claiming what, though it is likely that I, too, have reduced my CO2 footprint by about a ton per year.

"Gradual" is in the eye of the beholder. My childhood home was a zone 9, now it is a zone 10; I have seen the changes with my own eyes. Plant zones have moved about 100 miles north in 16 (?) years. (The baseline might be from earlier, so perhaps it is longer.) Assuming this continues, this should put pressure on peaches and pecans in Georgia and South Carolina in a few decades -- those are two crops that I know don't do especially well in zone 9. We can, of course, move our orchards north, but we had better start soon; some trees take a long time to grow to full production. Other annual crops, we can move more quickly.

My "feelings" are backed by scientific evidence, I merely did not include links. An earlier version of this is what first caught my attention, back in the early 1990s. That does not establish a causal link, but it does establish both an increase in CO2 and a hemisphere-wide warming trend. This is a nice discussion (with references) of direct measurements of predicted CO2 greenhouse effects; so it is a greenhouse gas, both in the lab, and in the atmosphere.

SO. Do you have scientific evidence that (a) it is not getting warmer or (b) there is not more CO2 in the air or (c) CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? I am quite familiar with all the usual claims about water vapor, alternate sources of CO2, solar radiation, etc, and would rather not preemptively post links to debunking sites, but seriously, what is the case for your position? Could you, perhaps, define "gradual", "long", and "adaptable"? Those are mighty squishy words from someone who insists on the use of Science.

It's not a matter of "crossing points of no return". It's a matter of there being tremendous economic, carbon cycle, and climate inertia. The time difference between "deciding to do something now" and "lasting effects taking place" is pretty large.

You are woefully misinformed about the atmospheric lifetime of CO2. Try here and citations therein. Yes, carbon fertilization effects in the biosphere exist. No, they don't even come close to scrubbing all the CO2 out for us on reasonable timescales.

And your attitudes toward scientific certainty expressed in your other post are rather ridiculous. There is already extremely solid evidence that CO2 has a substantial greenhouse effect. We don't know if it's 2 C or 4 C for a doubling of CO2, but even the low range is significant if we're looking at potentially multiple doublings.

Your attitude of "If you can't show it's broken, then I won't fix it" is completely contrary to how risk management works in any other discipline, with a reversed burden of proof. Nobody says "I'm going to keep building this bridge unless you can prove it will collapse". They say "Prove it's safe before you build it". Well, have you proven that doubling or quadrupling CO2 is safe? No?

People don't buy fire insurance because they think they can prove that their house will burn down. In fact, their house probably won't burn down. They buy insurance because they can't afford to take that risk. CO2 emissions mitigation is insurance. It's not going to reverse global warming, or even stop it any time soon. It's slowing things down, because we don't want to take the risk that something extreme will happen to the entire planet. It's like you're driving in the dark without headlights. You don't say "Well, I can't prove there are no cliffs around, so full speed ahead!" You slow down.

And if you're tempted to say "the insurance is too expensive", no, it's not. If we got up to a 5 C warming, that's pretty much the difference between an ice age and today, all compressed into a hundred years or two. That's not something humans are just going to trivially adapt to, no matter what faith you have in technology. Even if you did believe that climate policy was ridiculously expensive, that's still no excuse for avoiding testing your belief. (You're pro-science and believe in testing hypotheses, right?) If it really is as expensive as free-market types claim (and, by the way, economic mitigation policy is just correcting a market distortion anyway), we'll learn that quite quickly. Better to perform a fast economic experiment, find out we're wrong, and back off, than perform a long term climate experiment, and find out we're wrong about the hazards of climate change when it's too late to avoid them.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7084/full/440588b.html

http://www.sheknows.com/health-and-wellness/articles/800980/ability-to-handle-stress-depression-linked-to-variations-in-brain-structure-and-function

Everything is physical, everything. No magic, No soul, deal with it. Even nurture causes directly observable changes in the brain.

When i read this all I could think of the previous article about how a large company would not sponser the inventor of graphene but rather patent him out of existance. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101007/full/news.2010.525.html So it begins I would expect

If medical research were really as close-to-useless as The Fine Summary claims, we'd be hardly better off with modern Western medicine than with homeopathy and prayer.

True.

Top notch research is what makes all the medical breakthroughs, but this is only the top few percent of ALL medical research. IMHO one of the main reasons there are so much bogus papers out there is because of the publish or perish attitude in academia, which requires researchers to have a set number of papers published to be eligible for research funding, tenure, other career advancements. I know from experience (although not in medical research, but natural sciences) that sometimes you have to publish a paper even if you know that the results aren't meaningful, or of value to anyone. Then there are people who publish things that were not subjected to rigorous testing, double checking of data, etc. which can easily turn out to be wrong. Lastly there are the cheats. All I'm trying to say is that it's more of a science policy problem than a problem with the integrity of researchers. If the number of publications has to go up, then their quality will surely decrease. Very few research groups (the ones which have good funding) have the luxury of publishing only every now and then. But when they do it's usually a Science or Nature paper. This problem os quality VS quantity is most serious in China. However, not even journals such as Nature are immune to this.

If medical research were really as close-to-useless as The Fine Summary claims, we'd be hardly better off with modern Western medicine than with homeopathy and prayer.

True.

Top notch research is what makes all the medical breakthroughs, but this is only the top few percent of ALL medical research. IMHO one of the main reasons there are so much bogus papers out there is because of the publish or perish attitude in academia, which requires researchers to have a set number of papers published to be eligible for research funding, tenure, other career advancements. I know from experience (although not in medical research, but natural sciences) that sometimes you have to publish a paper even if you know that the results aren't meaningful, or of value to anyone. Then there are people who publish things that were not subjected to rigorous testing, double checking of data, etc. which can easily turn out to be wrong. Lastly there are the cheats. All I'm trying to say is that it's more of a science policy problem than a problem with the integrity of researchers. If the number of publications has to go up, then their quality will surely decrease. Very few research groups (the ones which have good funding) have the luxury of publishing only every now and then. But when they do it's usually a Science or Nature paper. This problem os quality VS quantity is most serious in China. However, not even journals such as Nature are immune to this.

... the study takes into account a rebounding of the Earth's crust called glacial isostatic adjustment, a continuing rise of the crust after being smashed under the weight of the Ice Age. [Slashdot summary]

Here the summary implies that previously published GRACE ice mass balance estimates didn't take GIA into account. At first I assumed this ridiculous implication must have been a mistake on Slashdot's part. Then I read the article:

... according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment. ... Often ignored or considered a minor factor in previous research, post-glacial rebound turns out to be important, says the paper. [AFP, Sep 8]

No, previous research didn't ignore (see section 2.2.4) GIA/PGR. These news stories are reporting on a paper by Xiaoping Wu et al. (free PDF). In table 2, Dr. Wu shows that his estimates are half as big as those in papers published separately by Velicogna, Chen et al. and Luthcke et al.

Luthcke et al. corrects for GIA using the ICE-5G model which combines many proxies and other empirical evidence regarding ice history since the Last Glacial Maximum, mantle viscosity and the Earth's various Love numbers. Chen et al. used the similar IJ05 model. Velicogna used multiple independent models to estimate uncertainty in the GIA signal. After reading Dr. Wu's paper, it's clear he never claimed that previous research had ignored or failed to correct for GIA.

That would have been a real surprise, because he wouldn't make a claim that can be disproven simply by skimming the papers he referenced. Nor is he rude enough (or at all, for that matter) to imply that the rest of the GRACE community ignored this important issue. Coincidentally, Dr. Wu worked for my advisor as a postdoc in the 1990s, in the same office that I'm currently using. I met him several months ago at the WP-AGU conference in Taiwan, and as far as I can tell he's overwhelmed by the bizarre attention his paper has gotten from the general public:

RUSH: There's a global warming story out. Guess what? Greenland and some of the ice floes, they're only going to melt half as much as originally forecast. So the polar bears are still going to have a place to live. I don't think they're going to melt, period. All of this is a sham.

"Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming [hoax], should be halved, according to Dutch and US scie

I think this is still off. My impression is that they considered that different elements and different substances like air, earth, fire, water, gold, lead, etc. were all composed of differing amounts of a single substance. This is what's known as the "ether", i.e. some sort of form of matter that everything existed in and moved through. The odd thing about it is that Lorentz and Abraham in the 1890s were trying to come up with a theory of the electron in part to discover why efforts to detect the Earth's movement through this ether failed (reference). It wasn't until Einstein & Co. came up with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics was discovered that the nature of atomic elements really begun to be understood.

The point is that while the alchemists' conception of the element was not very good, a truly better concept didn't really arise until the 20th century. Nobody seriously challenges quantum mechanics now, but it's easy to forget just how recent this understanding was really arrived at.

"but there are good reasons to subsidize them: they're better, and will cost the public less in the long run once we're converted to using them predominantly."

I challenge your statement. Show that they're better and cost the public less in the long run than Nuclear? You can't just make such a statement with no argument, evidence, or proof.

First, how are they 'better'? True, they don't use radioactive fuel, but that is a manageable problem - we can reprocess and re-use the 'waste' in breeder-reactor plants, and the final 'waste' products will be material which only remains radioactive for about 300 years, which we can safely store, and which should not cost us too greatly to store for a few centuries (the huge costs associated with storing nuclear fuel, I believe, only is incurred if you are trying to store waste for 100,000 years, but we DO NOT NEED to store it that long if we burn it off first.

If for no other reason than dealing with our current nuclear waste 'problem', we really need to start building breeder-reactors (or some other technology [maybe thorium nuclear?] which can burn off the long-lived waste). Building enough reactors to burn off the waste would, conveniently, also provide us with nuclear power for 200-500 years, according to estimates I've seen.

We know from 50 years of operational experience that U.S. Nuclear plants have about a 90% capacity factor (Source: Nuclear Energy Institute ) - that is the industry as a whole, will on average, generate 90% of the theoretical maximum 'faceplate' energy during the sample period (individual nukes do get shutdown for maintenance and refueling periodically, which is why the capacity factor isn't 100% - during operation they will, I believe, typically run at or near 100 percent, and for long periods - 3 to 4 years at a time with no outages). We also know that most plants that actually get built do pay for themselves and make a profit in the long run (I think TMI is the only exception, but not positive about that), all while selling electricity at competitive prices with other sources (coal is about the only one which, if you don't consider the environmental costs, is cheaper than nuclear, I believe).

Nuclear Plants are expensive, but when you look at the total lifetime power produced, they *do* make financial sense. If we can get the price of building nuclear plants down, which should be possible, that becomes even more true.

In operation, everyone agrees they produce almost no carbon dioxide (I think you can account a small amount of CO2 to a nuke plant for things like vehicles and grounds maintenance equipment [tractors, mowers, wheedwackers, etc], and emergency diesel generators to power the control and safety systems at a plant when outside power is lost), but it's pretty small.

Of course, operation isn't the only carbon we have to account for when considering carbon footprint: I found this article at Nature.com, which discusses the topic a bit.

There is the CO2 that would be generated in manufacturing the materials for the plant, transporting materials to the plant for construction, doing the actual construction (cranes, diggers, etc), which might add up to quite a bit of carbon - I'd like to find a source for what that is - but I don't think the carbon for building nuclear is worse than the carbon needed to build an equivalent generation capacity of wind farms - it takes lots and lots of wind turbines, since they run at about 30-40% capacity factor, to be equivalent to a 1-2GW nuke), and of course there is carbon for decommissioning of the plant (again, need to find a source for that number). There may also be carbon emissions associated with the mining, processing, and transportation of nuclear fuel.

Now what I'm about to say applies equally to any power source who's actual operation does not produce

Hmm. Isn't Wegman under investigation for plagiarism?
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/10/old_claims_of_bad_climate_scie.html

So what we have is a retired guy who worked as a mining analyst and an accused plagiarist against an accused fraudster and a lot of scientists. I don't think your argument from authority is as strong as you think it is.

There may not yet be any consumer devices that use graphene, but they are coming up fast. Now that Korean scientists know how to produce high quality graphene in bulk with roll-to-roll processing, it will probably start replacing indium tin oxide as the transparent electrode of choice in flat displays: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v5/n8/abs/nnano.2010.132.html Graphene will also probably appear in next-generation chemical sensors -- its so thin that individual molecules adsorbed on it can have measurable changes in its electrical properties: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v6/n9/full/nmat1967.html I don't know if Geim anticipated either of these, but I wouldn't be surprised. An interesting comparison is the story of Peter Gruenberg who did patent his Nobel Prize-winning discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gr%C3%BCnberg I wonder how much money he actually saw from the patent though. GMR-based hard drives are a multi-billion dollar industry, but there are hundreds of knock-off patents floating around too...

There may not yet be any consumer devices that use graphene, but they are coming up fast. Now that Korean scientists know how to produce high quality graphene in bulk with roll-to-roll processing, it will probably start replacing indium tin oxide as the transparent electrode of choice in flat displays: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v5/n8/abs/nnano.2010.132.html Graphene will also probably appear in next-generation chemical sensors -- its so thin that individual molecules adsorbed on it can have measurable changes in its electrical properties: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v6/n9/full/nmat1967.html I don't know if Geim anticipated either of these, but I wouldn't be surprised. An interesting comparison is the story of Peter Gruenberg who did patent his Nobel Prize-winning discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gr%C3%BCnberg I wonder how much money he actually saw from the patent though. GMR-based hard drives are a multi-billion dollar industry, but there are hundreds of knock-off patents floating around too...

Your first point seems to be an adhominem argument. I will not dignify it by saying more about it.

Regarding your last point, peer review is not intended to catch fraud; for some discussion, see e.g. here. The criminal justice system is for people who have committed criminal acts: committing fraud with taxpayers' money, as Mann has been alleged to have done, is such an act.

Took me a bit of time to find, but here's the link to the actual research paper (requires nature subscription):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09410.html

From the abstract:

Our data explain approximately 10% of the phenotypic variation in height, and we estimate that unidentified common variants of similar effect sizes would increase this figure to approximately 16% of phenotypic variation (approximately 20% of heritable variation)

The introduction of the paper states that "80% of the variation [for height] within a given population is estimated to be attributable to additive genetic factors, but over 40 previously published variants explain less than 5% of the variance." While this paper pushes that to 16%, it's nowhere near the limit of what can be detected.

I find it interesting that they've got a sample size of around 100,000 individuals for this study (actually a meta-analysis of summary statistics from 46 GWAS of 133,653 individuals), but still claim a need for more individuals. I suspect that'll still be said when a study is done on 10 million individuals, or a billion.

While beta amyloid is like a prion in that the protein is "misfolded" and forms a tangled insoluble protein mass. It is not "contagious" like a prion disease. Beta amyloid is formed after cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein by alpha-, beta- and gamma- secretase.

The current state of knowledge for Alzheimer's is still very hazy, for many years there has been a discussion whether amyloid plaques are the cause of Alzhiemer's or a symptom of some other problem. More pieces of the puzzle are continually being found but what is really happening still remains elusive. An article I read in New Scientist suggested that the plaques themselves may not be the problem. With the real damage being done by the shorter chains which are created when the amyloid precursor protein is first cleaved.

There may be links to prion diseases. This study in mice suggests that non-infectious prions make Alzheimer's worse. While this older story suggests their may be a protective effect. Bleeding edge science can be confusing :)

Errr - correct me if I'm wrong, but the carp and Zebra mussels were introduced by human activities, while the Kiwi's are in their natural habitat. There are many non-cuddly animals that have protected status. I do not know of any endangered species that is considered a 'pest' from reintroduction into another location.

As for mosquitoes, perhaps you could read this article on the importance of mosquitoes..

Just because you repeat it many times does not make it true.

Neither will denying facts make them false. You can blindly deny our incomplete knowledge all you want, but it makes you look like the idiot...

but to imply that there was some fundamental error or shortcoming in the understanding of flight over the past 60 years does not do justice to the way that modern science and technological understanding develop.

Okay, how's this:

"the performance of insect wings, when tested under steady conditions in wind tunnels, is too low to account for the forces required to sustain flight"

It is only in the past few years that the fact that "flapping wings generate additional forces during stroke reversals." was determined as a solution to the problem.

"the source of extra lift remains unknown." ... "An intense leading-edge vortex was found on the down-stroke, of sufficient strength to explain the high-lift forces. The vortex is created by dynamic stall, and not by the rotational lift mechanisms that have been postulated for insect flight"

When did the "hindsight" issue crop up? Only after the full 60 years or maybe it was after 2 hours with a paper and pencil back in the 1950s when someone said "hey, bees fly pretty slow compared to our jets - what's up with that?"

It's easy to recognize that something doesn't add-up. That's worlds away from having a plausibly-complete understanding of exactly how it DOES in fact work. Einstein certainly knew where General Relativity broke down, but he wasn't able to come up with a solution for it, and he had well more than "2 hours with a paper and pencil".

I see now it's not in-fact hindsight in your case, but unadulterated ignorance, which just happens to be pro-(omnipotent)-scientists rather than the more common opposite. I suppose you'd have been claiming we had a complete understanding of insect flight 15+ years ago, when there were many fundamental blanks in the equations. I'm sorry I wasted my time.

If you or anyone else are interested in the topic and would like to edify themselves rather than blindly tear-down others, here are a couple jumping-off points:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v384/n6610/abs/384626a0.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/50/18213.full

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uosc-lev030108.php

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/apr/featphysics

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5703/1960

Can someone comment on the support for red/green color blindness?

I recommend retroviral gene splicing.

It is, for example, possibly that the scalability (given the need for error correction, e.g.) is so bad, that using all what is available still is not enough for a meaningful size. (By meaningful, I mean here performing far better that a conventional computer built with about the same effort.)

OK, but if that's the case, there has to be a reason why scalability is that bad. Shor's algorithm can factor n-bit numbers with ~4n qubits. Laflamme's error correction works by encoding each qubit as 5. So, to factor a 2048-bit number in polynomial time, we "only" need about 40000 qubits. We currently know nothing in nature that prevents us to achieve that in principle.

The problem is entanglement. (...) With a quantum computer, you always have to look at the whole, due to entanglement, hence all known to work design principles do not apply anymore.

Sure, designing and building quantum computers is very different (much harder!) than designing and building current computers. That shouldn't be a great surprise, I think. Still, I can't see how that's an argument for saying things like "it will take 100 years" or "maybe it's impossible in principle".

Yes, and they are now where, 20? After 10 Years? And keep in mind that these are not "CPU", but "Storage", which is fundamentally easy in comparison.

The result I mentioned was done in 2008, not 10 years ago. Hey, 20 years ago we didn't even have Shor's algorithm, so most people doubted that quantum computers could be useful even in theory (and so, there were very few people studying it).

In addition to all this, there is a real risk that all the projected gains will vanish into, for example, a noise problem or the like. For current quantum devices, the internal state-model of the particles does not have to be very complex. It is quite possible that it turns out that the computing power and storage capability of a single, say electron, is limited to something a $4 MSP430 MCU can do. We would not have noticed that yet as no sufficiently complex computations have been done.

Sure, and if that were indeed true, it would be very exciting for theoretical quantum physics. It would mean that the evolution of a quantum system is not linear, so the Schrodinger's equation is not quite right, and everything after that would have to be changed. It would also probably mean that the state space is not really a Hilbert space, which would have very weird implications that would depend on the geometry of whatever replaced the Hilbert space. The point is, nothing in our current understanding even slightly suggests that. See for instance this.

Also remember that physics regularly adjusts its world model, when more experimental data becomes available. Quantum theory is a theory, the actual physical object may still behave differently in the real-world. And, as far as I know, Quantum Theory still does not mesh with Relativity, so there is a very big "this theory is incomplete or faulty" hint right there.

Sure, and gravity is also a theory, but it would be strange to bet in the 1950's that maybe making something orbit the Earth is impossible, because there may be things we still don't know about gravity (for all we knew, it could have been so). Even Newton's gravity, which is not quite right, is enough to make satellites orbit the earth.

Quantum mechanics seems to work *extremely* well, at least for the energy levels we're trying to make quantum computers work. Quantum Electrodynamics (the part of QM that's has to be right to build a quantum computer) is the most tested theory in human history, its predictions (which of course turned out to be right) are the most accurate ever made, even more than General Relativity.

It's true that it is incomplete -- it says nothing about gravity, and it's not

And it would also help the readers understand the article, a good referee report is quite illuminating. However, this has already been tried out by Nature in 2006

http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/

and didn't work so well. Apparently, scientists are somewhat reluctant to openly criticise each other's work. But there's PLoS ONE that is alive and well, giving us some hope.

Michael Nielsen has a fine essay about this in his blog:

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-future-of-science-2/

Btw, the Nash equilibrium, optimal solution for splitting $100 would be to offer $0.01 and keep $99.99. Would you accept that?

Of course not. The offer would offend my sense of 'fairness'. That's not limited to humans, either. I recall a study in which capuchin monkeys rejected rewards that weren't 'good enough'. It's not the ultimatum game, but it does tap into our sense of fairness.

Abstract here, pdf here

In this thread, we're talking about the open source, homegrown "pond scum" mentioned in the article, not industrial scale manufacture.

Industrial scale growth of algae for food or fuel may or may not sense. Turning algae into food or fuel also is a dirty business with lots of nasty chemicals and energy input. Homegrown food and distributed renewable energies may still beat it.

If you do want a protein source that's easy to grow in ponds or water, consider duckweed. It's easy to separate, doesn't require processing, and doesn't get bacterially contaminated as easily. It can also be used for bioremediation, and you can raise fish in the same pond.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v232/n5311/abs/232495a0.html [nature.com]

We're talking about the open source, homegrown pond scum mentioned in the article, not industrial scale manufacture.

Industrial scale growth of algae for food or fuel may or may not sense, but homegrown food and solar cells may still beat it. Turning algae into food or fuel also is a dirty business with lots of nasty chemicals and energy input.

If you do want a protein source that's easy to grow in ponds or water, consider duckweed. It doesn't require anywhere near as much processing, it can be used for bioremediation, and you can also raise fish in the same pond.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v232/n5311/abs/232495a0.html