Slashdot Mirror

1) People who still claim there were WMDs.

There were WMD's. There were simply no nuclear weapons. The classification "WMD" also includes chemical and biological weapons, both of which were found in Iraq.

Good. We are not controlling Bob's basis: he chooses his detection basis randomly. What we do is to send a bright-light state that does not cause a detection event if Bob chooses a basis not matching Alice's, but causes a detection event in a specific detector if Bob chooses the same basis as Eve. See figure 2 in the paper for illustration. Thus, half the time our bright-light state failes to induce any detection, which translates to just 50% detection efficiency. This would be a problem if Bob's photon detectors (unblinded, not under attack) were 100% efficient and the transmission fibre were lossless, which is however not the case. The photon detectors are normally only about 10% efficient, and there is typically a few dB loss in the fibre between Alice and Bob. Thus Eve can easily hide her 50% (in)efficiency in all practical cases.

In schemes where Bob uses "passive basis choice" (not in commercial systems but in many research setups) we can choose the detection basis for Bob and have 100% click efficiency.

As nearly as I can tell from the (garbled as usual) article this is about a combination filter and polarizer, not a new type of display. The pixels would still be liquid crystal and I see nothing here that would make them smaller.

Correct, these are just replacing color filters. With an added advantage(?) of already producing polarized light. However, one still needs to have a backlight, a liquid-crystal and transistors to control each pixel's brightness. While very cool, i don't see what advantage this would have for displays over say OLEDs which can also be patterned to be extremely small, don't require any polarizers or backlighting.

On the other hand the original article in Nature Communications does talk about other applications like spectroscopy and such.

The Neoproterozoic era was punctuated by the Sturtian (about 710 million years ago) and Marinoan (about 635million years ago) intervals of glaciation. In South Australia, the rocks left behind by the glaciations are separated by a succession of limestones and shales, which were deposited at tropical latitudes. Here we describe millimetre- to centimetre-scale fossils from the Trezona Formation, which pre-dates the Marinoan glaciation. These weakly calcified fossils occur as anvil, wishbone, ring and perforated slab shapes and are contained within stromatolitic limestones. The Trezona Formation fossils pre-date the oldest known calcified fossils of this size by 90million years, and cannot be separated from the surrounding calcite matrix or imaged by traditional X-ray-based tomographic scanning methods. Instead, we have traced cross-sections of individual fossils by serially grinding and scanning each sample at a resolution of 50.8m. From these images we constructed three-dimensional digital models of the fossils. Our reconstructions show a population of ellipsoidal organisms without symmetry and with a network of interior canals that lead to circular apertures on the fossil surface. We suggest that several characteristics of these reef-dwelling fossils are best explained if the fossils are identified as sponge-grade metazoans.

It was peer reviewed, so I would suspect that their methods weren't trash.

The orthomolecular biochemists

This word doesn't mean anything in scientific circles. "Orthomolecular" is a relatively new fad term for holistic nutrition/medicine. Examine here for an example.

have a unified theory of cancer and it's reversible now.

There is a unified theory of cancer, it primarily states that living things get cancer in the same way that iron rusts. It is inevitable, as a consequence of the fundamental properties of the system in question. It is not "reversible", a nonsense term in the biological context, and every specific cancer will require a different specific treatment.

Salvesterols

Google "salvesterols", 256 hits. Google "salvestrols", 35400 hits. Neither term is used in chemical/biochemical/molbio literature. The basic concept is that all "diseased cells" have specific enzymes which will convert specific plant-derived salvestrols into poisons, thus killing the bad cells. Evolutionarily, there is no way this would be maintained. The first mutant cell lacking this special enzyme would proliferate and the salvestrol would be of no use. See here for a representative site.

exploit the CYPB1P1 metabolic pathway; the Cytochrome P450-1 enzyme converts them to

There isn't a "CYPB1P1 pathway". CYPB1P1 is an enzyme involved in the oxidative breakdown of a variety of substrates. These enzymes are often used by animals to detoxify minor toxins from food. In the case of Aflotoxin poisoning, these enzymes are responsible for the production of potentially fatal liver damage by modifying the initially neutral compound into a potent mutagen/carcinogen/toxin.

picotannins

The word "picotannins" doesn't exist in the chemical/biological literature, or on the web according to Google. Perhaps you meant tannings at low ("pico") levels? Tannins are plant compoinds and are not synthesized by any known animal metabolic pathways. At low levels, some tannins may have benificial effects on diet. In larger ammounts, they tend to be poisonous to animals not specialized in consuming them. Specialized animals tend to have enzymes in their saliva to bind and inactivate tannins before they can be absorved in the gut.

which selectively, in vivo and in vitro, kill only tumor cells.

Not exactly true, but since technically the chemicals you're speaking of don't exist, I suppose I can't say.

I've met end stage lung cancer patients whose cancer has been rerversed.

This is wonderful news for them and irrelevant to your claims.

I'm not interested in any nay sayers or claims of quckery. I'm just not interested.

It is good to know you've decided you don't need to learn anything about a topic to which you obviously have no expertise, before making potentially life-changing decisions based on that erroneous assumption.

Contact me directly if you need more information or sources; I can point you to (free) biochemists who can explain this much better than I can and offer guidance. It's extremely important to avoid sugar; whereas our cells use atp for energy, cancer cells use sugars directly.

Cancer cells cannot use sugar "directly" in the way you imply, nothing can actually. All cells use ATP for energy, with a minor sprinkling of GTP. Some human cell types (brain/neurons) will only accept sugar from the blood as a food source, while others (muscle/skin/etc) will also accept amino acids, cholesterol, and triglycerides from the blood to use for food. Your liver actually synthesizes sugar (glu

• Excited: The first discovery based on a generic distributed computing infrastructure (BOINC)
• Sad: Distributed computing is rather commonplace today, and plenty of people have access to scalable Hadoop clusters that can scale on demand.

Yes, BOINC allows people to use idle computing capacity. But if we need plenty of computing capacity today, it is not that hard to get it: It is much simpler to simply rent a few EC2 machines, or get a computing grant from Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Amazon/IBM/NSF (you get the idea), and get such projects done much faster, rather than trying to use BOINC.

SETI@Home (and later BOINC) were revolutionary 10 years back. Today distributed human computation seems to be as revolutionary as distributed computing was back in 1999. reCAPTCHA seems more revolutionary in utilizing idle human capacity for a good purpose (digitizing books). The FoldIt project (see the recent Nature article), which also uses creatively human computation, seems much more fresh and interesting.

According to this article, maximum efficiency is about 80%, and these guys demonstrate a laser with 53% efficiency.

you should be able to dispatch with his pathetic claims in a matter seconds

No way. That takes decades of studies.

Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popovi & Foldit players

So if you've played Foldit you have helped with the authorship of this paper. Not only that, but since it is a biological paper, you are a corresponding author (by virtue of being the last name on the list).

I would highly recommend listing that on your CV, or at least in your application to the Nobel Committee.

What I want to know is what mechanisms are causing their Gallium-Nitride junction to conduct more reverse current above 227 C. They are currently projecting operating at 200 C for max efficiency but if it's as I suspect -- increased current flow with higher temperature -- then they can modify the doping mixture to get even higher temps and therefore higher efficiencies. This would also boost the Carnot Cycle efficiency limit for the secondary heat exchanger that operates after the GaN primary power generation. I'm reading from the slides.

You'll know after they receive the much deserved Patents, if this is proven correct.

What I want to know is what mechanisms are causing their Gallium-Nitride junction to conduct more reverse current above 227 C.

They are currently projecting operating at 200 C for max efficiency but if it's as I suspect -- increased current flow with higher temperature -- then they can modify the doping mixture to get even higher temps and therefore higher efficiencies.

This would also boost the Carnot Cycle efficiency limit for the secondary heat exchanger that operates after the GaN primary power generation.

I'm reading from the slides.

You are right. I know the paper well since I work in this area, and the article and summary are VERY misleading. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is perfectly safe as originally articulated -- this is merely a rephrasing of it, and an extension of it. It is a nice paper, but I wish journalists wouldn't try to sensationalise things by saying Einstein/Newton/Heisenberg/CowboyNeal is wrong... Here, I suspect the authors are slightly to blame for this -- note the peer-reviewed article is much more conservative and careful than arxiv version (which is perhaps what led to the misleading popular science article): http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nphys1734.html http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph0909.0950

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

Don't be too quick to jump to generalizations from a small set of data.

Both sides are distorting and cherry picking the facts to make their side look more plausible. Linking to the blogs of condescending one-sided pundits doesn't help convince anyone of the other side's position. Links to more neutral articles are preferable, rather than obviously one-sided diatribes that belittle others who don't believe in their way.

Scientists are usually pretty good at writing summaries and showing pretty graphs that the average person (myself included) can digest, so linking to accessible articles at the UN, NOAA, Journal of Climate, or even Nature magazine is preferable. There are many wiki articles that have active links to these articles. Or even just link to the wiki article on the global warming controversy

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100708/full/news.2010.343.html

There's plenty of other information out there, such as the fact that North Korea doesn't have a submarine capable of evading South Korean sonar arrays.
There's also lots in Korean, but that doesn't help you.

"A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft", Nature, 1993 C. Sagan et al., http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v365/n6448/abs/365715a0.html

If you happen to have access to Nature, this Philip Ball piece riffs on that topic.

Wikipedia is hardly a citation, you could have added before linking! The other is an anti-drug site making unsupported assertions. Hardly an unbiased source.

Here is a study:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/n645363732641104/

Summary, users with no previous usage experience did experience reduced reaction time on the first experience. Afterward they showed no reduction in reaction time. Users with previous experience showed no difference in reaction time whether using marijuana or not.

"(1 bong can intoxicate an individual as much as 100 ml of hard liquor in one go, plus marijuana intoxication is much faster)"

Yeah, but a bong isn't a single dose it is more like 5-10 (sizes aren't standardized). That is why they have one hitters. In an experienced smoker with tolerance a single hitter of even the most potent material isn't enough to feel a buzz.

Even so, I agree there is a smaller 'safe zone.' But the increased intoxication speed (near instant) allows for more easily controlled dosing. You can tell before the next puff how the last puff impacted you. In contrast, if you are doing shots you won't feel shot one until after drinking shot three!

Some more studies:

http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v25/n5/full/1395716a.html

"Although marijuana significantly increased the number of premature responses and the time participants required to complete several tasks, it had no effect on accuracy on measures of cognitive flexibility, mental calculation, and reasoning. Additionally, heart rate and several subjective-effect ratings (e.g., "Good Drug Effect," "High," "Mellow") were significantly increased in a Delta9-THC concentration-dependent manner. These data demonstrate that acute marijuana smoking produced minimal effects on complex cognitive task performance in experienced marijuana users."

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/misc/driving/s1p2.htm

Increased doses cause drivers to sit more upright and caused slightly decreased car following ability. However, in actual road test in a dense urban environment alcohol caused impairment relative to placebo, marijuana cause no impairment... but subjects thought it had.

http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/pot/a/blucsd030628.htm

This article refers to a peer reviewed long term study (sorry don't have the study itself) which finds there is NO permanent brain damage caused by marijuana use.

I don't have a handy study with regard to motor skill, only extensive anecdotal evidence. I've yet to see anyone significantly impaired with alcohol who didn't stumble and sway. I've never seen anyone on any dose of marijuana either sway or stumble. Believe me, I've seen and experienced VERY heavy doses of marijuana.

BP is just the liberals' whipping boy right now. They are riding it as hard as they can to drive hits to their worthless whiny blogs.

Oh yes, THAT'S all this is about.

You're clearly not quite used to having a full brain to work with, but don't fret. You'll figure it out eventually, but until you do, try to slow down. Telling the difference between those M's and W's can be really tough on the newbies.

http://www.slate.com/id/2173965
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n10/abs/nn1979.html

-FL

The needles are conical, about 200m diameter by 650m long, with 10m radius of curvature at the tip. They are made from a biocompatible polymer, polyvinylpyrrolidone, and mostly dissolve after about five minutes (they are highly water-soluble). The manufacturing process can be done at 23C (using a mold), avoiding damage to sensitive biological molecules. Each patch held 3 g of vaccine.

For comparison purposes, human hair ranges in diameter from 20-200m.

Here's the article, with some low-res pictures even for non-subscribers.

8 mo. of the harshest winter for 30 years = press says "weather". 4 we. of the hottest summer for 30 years = press says "global warming, doom, hellfire".

I have no problem with either explanation, but it sure should be consistent.

Your consistentcy problems are caused by looking to the press for an explaination rather than climate scientists. Climate is the long term statistics of weather and due to the signal to noise ratio it takes a couple of decades worth of data to observe a trend with high confidence. If you really do want a detailed and robust scientific explaination of what is causing the observed trend, then read the IPCC's WG1 report. Be warned the WG1 is heavy going but with the amount of layman-freindly explainations and commentry available directly from scientists and scientific institutions there really is no reason to allow the press to keep you ignorant and confused about the basics. If you don't know where to look then start with WP, it will give you a good run down of the science and the anti-science. If it's too much of a bother to read beyond the MSM then IMHO you should extend that apathy toward posting on the subject.

Plenty of extraordinarily distant GRBs have been observed already and no evidence has been found yet of variation of EM propagation speed across the spectrum over long distances.

No it fucking doesn't. Just because there's something you don't like doesn't mean you can pretend like it's not really there.

You know, it's idiots like you that give science a bad name. Ooh, a scientific paper! It must be true! Never mind how shaky the evidence is, or the lack of confirmation. No.

"I must go out and buy a sports car, because a scientific survey showed that people who own sports cars, stay healthier and live longer."

"And their analysis shows an excess of extinctions every 27 million years, with a confidence level of 99%.". We're talking about hard statistical analysis, there's absolutely nothing that goes in the way of your bullshit "anomaly/bias/incomplete data" explanation.

Right, nothing at all... Because of course "growing consensus" (from TFA) means "irrefutable fact".

And never mind all scientific the evidence that "The apparent periodicity is probably due to a statistical fluke or subjective bias."

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(89)90017-1

Or that: "Only 25% of these fish and echinoderm extinctions are real (disappearance of a monophyletic group). The remaining 75% is noise, chiefly 'extinctions' of non-monophyletic groups, mistaken dating, and 'families' containing one species only. The signal-to-noise ratio is very similar in echinoderms (27:73) and fishes (23:77). Periodicity in our sample is a feature of the noise component, not of the signal."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v330/n6145/abs/330248a0.html

If your interpretation of Occam's Razor is "if I can't see why things are the way they are then they mustn't be like this" you need to do some reading.

As opposed to your belief that, if you like what the paper says, it must be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.

"Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct"

Yes, it is. Except the report did not claim anywhere that it was intentional. Nor was it, considering that the dropping of tree ring data was made explicit in the original paper where the graph was used:

In one of the most notorious leaked e-mails, Jones, referring to the WMO report graph, described how he had "just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years". Jones was referring to the fact that climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park had used direct temperature measurements to reconstruct temperatures over the past 20 years or so in a graph in an earlier Nature paper [2]. However, while Mann and his colleagues had clearly labelled which temperature lines were derived from direct measurements and which referred to proxy data, the graph submitted by Jones for the WMO report did not.
- UK climate data were not tampered with

If they were intentionally misleading the public, why had the same graph already been published with the missing information?

"What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science."

The evidence of your post tells me that the misrepresentation of facts doesn't seem to bother you at all.

"Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct"

Yes, it is. Except the report did not claim anywhere that it was intentional. Nor was it, considering that the dropping of tree ring data was made explicit in the original paper where the graph was used:

In one of the most notorious leaked e-mails, Jones, referring to the WMO report graph, described how he had "just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years". Jones was referring to the fact that climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park had used direct temperature measurements to reconstruct temperatures over the past 20 years or so in a graph in an earlier Nature paper [2]. However, while Mann and his colleagues had clearly labelled which temperature lines were derived from direct measurements and which referred to proxy data, the graph submitted by Jones for the WMO report did not.
- UK climate data were not tampered with

If they were intentionally misleading the public, why had the same graph already been published with the missing information?

"What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science."

The evidence of your post tells me that the misrepresentation of facts doesn't seem to bother you at all.

there is some real controversy about tree ring data, and it's pretty clear that they thought that they were presenting the data in the clearest form.

If you can spare a moment to explain this a bit more, it would really help me out.

This is my current understanding of the situation. If it is incorrect in any particular I would appreciate the correction; I am not some shill spreading misinformation.

My current understanding is that they were trying to use tree ring data to determine what the temperature was in the past; tree rings were available going far earlier than we have actual measured temperature data. My understanding is that the tree ring data did not successfully predict the temperatures of the recent times, but that once the tree ring data got into recent years, they simply stopped using the tree ring data.

I just don't understand how this is acceptable in any way. If the tree ring data cannot correctly predict temperatures that are known, why should we trust that it can predict older, unknown temperatures? Here's a quote from that Nature article:

Had the tree-ring data been left in, it would not have implied that recent temperatures have been decreasing, but only that the proxy data no longer tracked direct temperature records, says Clarke.

Again I am perplexed. Why does he say the proxy data "no longer" tracked with direct temperature records? Why should we believe it used to track and no longer tracks?

Are there other tree-ring data series out there that do correctly predict the temperatures of modern times?

steveha

Of course there's the problem of those private emails revealing naked attempts to massage what qualifies for peer review and who qualifies as a peer to do the reviewing.

You're aware that the papers that Jones was referring to when he said he would "keep them out somehow" from the IPCC report were, in fact, not kept out, and did appear in the report?

This was, basically, a frustrated scientist blowing off steam in a private conversation. Out of a thousand stolen e-mail messages, one of them was frustrated and hot-tempered. Turns out, scientists actually are human.

Ah, here is Chu's paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09163.html

So this is conventional far-field microscopy. There is a hard physical limit to the resolution in far-field microscopes, about 250nm. Chu is demonstrating a way to leverage existing knowledge about the sample to coax out more information, e.g., the distance between what is already known to be two distinct fluorescent dots.

A far cry from "seeing objects" at that scale using far-field microscopy, as claimed by MSNBC. For that, you need near-field.

I wonder what the advantage could be to using clumsy far-field techniques like that instead of an existing NSOM instrument that is far more sensitive. In fact, the application mentioned in the paper, deciphering "the structure of large, multisubunit biological complexes in biologically relevant environments," is exactly the application that originally sparked the development of NSOM in the 1980's. Though of course NSOM is used for many other applications today.

Stick it to the man bro ! Down with capitalist pig science and invention ! Let the state do it !

Say, who turned out the lights ? Hmmm, the phone's not working ... where's my cell phone ?.

Frankly even the more "abstract" science largely 0comes from 1 of 2 sources : "scientists" who were really businessmen first and scientist second (or third, or fourth, in most cases), and the church. Massive government sponsorship for science is mostly less than a century old (and already they have a monopoly).

That's why it'd be a good idea for both private individuals and companies to be involved in science. Of course, you'd have to check something before you start believing it. Somehow we think that no checks are necessare when the state ("university"/"national center for X"/...) comes with science ? That's my second point. Yes individuals lie, and they lie a lot. Companies lie, and they lie a lot. But why does the state get a free pass from everyone here ? Government scientists lie too.

In actuality the best option, imho, would be to continue as science used to work : that everyone believes whatever they like to believe, and no-one gets shielded from the real world. Of course given our "tolerant" attitudes on things ranging from Darwinism to (A)GW, half of slashdot would break out the pitchforks before they let this happen. And of course, getting it spoon-fed from the government (only the "approved" discoveries, of course) is much easier. No-one really needs to know what history tells us about just how many gene lines survive in a natural selection environment, and how many die out (for every species alive today, there's at least a million species that died out, and probably more than that)

Scientists used to worship dissent, even stupid dissent.
Now it just worships government money.

"It's even worse than we thought", "jewish flesh is toxic to look at" (whoops, wrong state sponsoring)

TFA links the real article, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/full/nature09250.html

You can read the abstract without paying the fee.

In a nutshell, it is the radius, and they determined this trough a new experimental method.

They needed a few QED calculations, yes, but this is very solid physics, and I'm more willing to bet on experimental error (of either part) than theory error.

About GUT, you're just making shit up. Stop it.

Old radius: 0.8768(69) femtometres
New radius: 0.84184(67)femtometres

Our result implies that either the Rydberg constant has to be shifted by 110kHz/c (4.9 standard deviations), or the calculations of the QED effects in atomic hydrogen or muonic hydrogen atoms are insufficient.

source

It's not the absolute magnitude of the change that's so worrisome, it's the relative magnitude.

here's a link to the actual journal article (abstract only, need to pay for fulltext)
http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.724.html
Or
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.724

you've got it spot on. it's a neat new material. no mention of applications anywhere in the abstract, where people will often at least hint of an application if they've got a concrete one to sell.

the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy. And totally undetectable by radiation detectors, and presumably because this was achieved by a University research team well within the capabilities of a number of countries. Doesn't it make you feel safe to know that they published ful details in Nature.

Climategate's Final Days

Bullshit. If you think this means it's over, you're not familiar with the debate.

Immediately following Climategate Nature released an editorial saying no controversy found in the e-mails. That didn't seem to matter at all.

The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals. Point out any global warming denialist papers that have done the same. I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.

Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. They find one uncertainty or minor flaw in a study and suddenly volumes of studies -- even those unrelated -- can be thrown out and dismissed. If it isn't in Mann's research, if it isn't in the East Anglian e-mails, it's somewhere else. You just have to face that logic and move on past them. Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.

If you think this is the 'final days' of this mess, you are sadly mistaken. Not until first world countries find it hard to get by will the majority of them step up and realize it. The election of Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli shows you got a whole state who would like to sweep this inconvenience under the rug and want you to stop trying to hinder their economy with your "research and science."

Roman ingots to shield particle detector
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100415/full/news.2010.186.html

I don't understand why everyone is worried about the 'creative' industries while there is a much bigger (and imo more sinister) beneficiary of strong IP law, namely the biotech industry.
That's right, they need strong IP laws to make sure you don't copy their stuff without paying them.
Thank god this industry doesn't do crazy stuff, like patenting human genes.
Wait, that's not true:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100330/full/news.2010.160.html
While the patent was rejected in the US, the EU is willing to pay for it.

>>The contrail cover from planes reflect more light from the sun.

Also, it's important to state that up until this point, climatologists thought that contrails had a forcing effect helping to cause global warming. And still show it that way, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

However, papers like this: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6898/full/418601a.html rather convincingly argued that they have a rather strong forcing in the opposite direction (i.e. that they help to dim sunlight more than they trap heat).

While honest climatologists will admit that some areas in AGW are very well understood, and others are much less understood, dishonest climatologists will pretend that they know everything and how dare you for questioning the global warming groupthink. In fact, how they respond to reasoned criticism is often a clear giveaway as to which camp they fall into.

I strongly suspect most of the anger at UC is budget-concerned folk in the library system, not the rank-and-file researchers. They probably recognize a Nature boycott is likely bad for them and want this to not happen.

Here's a couple more links, to the ScienceInsider coverage (from Nature's primary competitor) and Nature itself:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/06/university-of-california-conside.html#more

http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cdl.html

A lot of papers were published in the 1990s claiming that endocrine disruptors such as BPA will cause children to have delayed onset of puberty.

Citation? Everything I've seen says BPA exposure advances puberty:

• A great overview of the research in Environmental Health Perspectives
• "Exposure to bisphenol A advances puberty", in Nature: like it says in the title, for female mice at least
• "Low dose effect of in utero exposure to bisphenol A and diethylstilbestrol on female mouse reproduction" in Reproductive toxicology: BPA makes female mice sexually mature faster.

A much better test would be to actually TEST their alertness, instead of relying on a subjective self-assessment.

They did that. From the press release:

Approximately half of the participants were non/low caffeine consumers and the other half were medium/high caffeine consumers. All were asked to rate their personal levels of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after being given either the caffeine or the placebo. They were also asked to carry out a series of computer tasks to test for their levels of memory, attentiveness and vigilance.

heya,

Err, yes it does, you silly twit.

And it's not just an "idea", it's an investment that they invested a bucketload of money in perfecting, probably more money than you and I have seen in our lives, and took them several years.

It's only naturally that after say, publishing a paper on it, they don't want to see other people come and read the paper, take those years of research, and make money off stupid consumers like you and I, without the original brains behind the invention getting a cent.

And they're a research institute. They're interested in creating good quality research, not in offshoring US jobs to China. It seems a bit ridiculous that you expect them to be a manufacturing house as well, in order to "keep" their inventment/research. That seems completely unfair.

The NIH does cancer research, AIDS research etc. You don't see Americans cry bloody murder when the NIH then goes to sue pharmaceutical giants that refuse to pay royalties do you? (I've already pasted the link to that above - but here it is again http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v6/n12/full/nm1200_1302a.html).

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Oh please....

As somebody insightfully pointed out above, the money CSIRO makes from these royalties will be used to fund more research - recouping the government's investment in R&D, so to speak. We may pay more for Wifi devices, if the manufacturers try to pass it on (although I suspect the highly-competitive nature of the market may mitigate that somewhat), but ultimately they'll be a net inflow back to the Australian people.

From your statement, I'm going to assume you're US - see here, your NIH sues a pharmaceutical giant over missing drug royalties:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v6/n12/full/nm1200_1302a.html

And NASA's been embroiled on the receiving side with patent litigation with Boeing.

Thing is, at the end of the day, this is the real world, and people like to protect the R&D they make. And as an Australian citizen, who's taxes fund this research, I would like to see the CSIRO being smart, as opposed to being dumb, and getting walked over by big manufacturers.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Mate, as an Australian, I have to say the CSIRO is one of the more respected bodies here. They're government funded (meaning we taxpayers fund them), but they are completely independent and they churn out some damn good research - sure, a lot of it's probably agriculture-oriented, but not all, as this shows.

To accuse them of being a patent troll is patently (pun intended :p) ridiculous.

Firstly, they're not a patent-house - they're a research institute, that does government-funded research. It'd be like accusing NASA, or DARPA, or say the NIH of being a patent troll. Here's a story of the NIH suing a pharmaceutical giant over missing royalties for an AIDS drug:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v6/n12/full/nm1200_1302a.html

I don't exactly see Slashdotters up in arms accusing the NIH of being a patent troll. Is this some kind of weird US-centric bias?

Secondly, they happened to pick a place that favours people litigating on patents - what's the big deal? You'd expect them to pick a place that disfavoured patent holders? Please, why would they intentionally sabotage their case like that, it makes absolutely no sense at all - you can take your pick of any of the 50 US states, and you happen to pick one that doesn't like patent holders? Don't be silly. They obviously have lawyers with half a brain, and they happened to pick the right state. I think

Cheers,
Victor

Ok, lets say you own a farm and you sell vegetables harvested from that farm. I own the adjacent property and inadvertently release a toxic substance contaminating the groundwater. Your farm is now barren due to the exposure.

Is it not logical for you to claim damages, including that of lost future revenue? I didn't steal anything physically from you but I still took something (revenue) from you. A concept of future revenue is common in damage claims. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v20/n3/full/nbt0302-210.html

First, the sun *does* emit a steady stream of 10-500 Hz radio waves -- it emits in a distribution much closer to a black body than white noise -- and has since long before WWII. It's the brightest astronomical source of just about all wavelengths below 1m (i.e. ~300 MHz), and a non-trivial emitter above that. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v161/n4081/abs/161091a0.html

The article you linked only suggests that what you are saying might be the case, and only under specific conditions.

That's very different from the claim that the Sun outputs a steady stream of such emissions.

There's a reason why radios still work when the Sun is shining. Biological systems are able to differentiate as well.

-FL

First, the sun *does* emit a steady stream of 10-500 Hz radio waves -- it emits in a distribution much closer to a black body than white noise -- and has since long before WWII. It's the brightest astronomical source of just about all wavelengths below 1m (i.e. ~300 MHz), and a non-trivial emitter above that. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v161/n4081/abs/161091a0.html

Second, most human-generated radio is well above 500 Hz. Heck, a significant portion human radio is well above 500 MHz. If you're being exposed to 250 Hz radio you should probably just go and power off your transmitter -- it's incredibly unlikely that you are anyone else is being exposed to 500 Hz radio from artificial sources, even at lower power levels, unless you built the thing yourself.

Well that's the "real mechanism" part. As for the "measurable effect", please see figure 3 of the paper. They used an injection to cause inflammation and then tested the response of the mice to touch and heat, showing both increased sensitivity after injection and a return to lower levels of sensitivity after their acupuncture, with mice without the receptors that would cause the adenosine to be produced having no such reduction.

The results of this paper are exactly as I said. To quote the paper itself, "These findings suggest that A1 receptor activation is both necessary and sufficient for the clinical benefits of acupunctures."

Well that's the "real mechanism" part. As for the "measurable effect", please see figure 3 of the paper. They used an injection to cause inflammation and then tested the response of the mice to touch and heat, showing both increased sensitivity after injection and a return to lower levels of sensitivity after their acupuncture, with mice without the receptors that would cause the adenosine to be produced having no such reduction.

The results of this paper are exactly as I said. To quote the paper itself, "These findings suggest that A1 receptor activation is both necessary and sufficient for the clinical benefits of acupunctures."