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It's 30 micrometers long, according to this article on the Nature website.

Here is the link to the naturenews article if anyone would like it: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html

I'm not talking about original intent, I'm talking about contempory practice, the first peer-review policy I looked at to check your assertion was the journal Nature. It doesn't say anything about clarity or repeatability, it appears to back up what I said, quoth the policy...

"Nature journals receive many more submissions than they can publish. Therefore, we ask peer-reviewers to keep in mind that every paper that is accepted means that another good paper must be rejected. To be published in a Nature journal, a paper should meet four general criteria:
* Provides strong evidence for its conclusions.
* Novel (we do not consider meeting report abstracts and preprints on community servers to compromise novelty).
* Of extreme importance to scientists in the specific field.
* Ideally, interesting to researchers in other related disciplines."

....[snip]...

"The editors then make a decision based on the reviewers' advice, from among several possibilities:
* Accept, with or without editorial revisions
* Invite the authors to revise their manuscript to address specific concerns before a final decision is reached
* Reject, but indicate to the authors that further work might justify a resubmission
* Reject outright, typically on grounds of specialist interest, lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical and/or interpretational problems"

Original Paper (Subscription Required)

The number that gets dropped in the abstract is 104 W/mK. The highly oriented polyethylene fiber Dyneema has a listed thermal conductivity of 20 W/mK, so this figure would represent a significant advance from the polyethylene fibers currently out there. As you can also see, the "service temperature" for Dyneema tops out at 100C and it melts at about 150C. This new PE fiber with a higher degree of crystallinity would likely bump those numbers up slightly, but it would still be unsuitable for very high temperatures.

Theoretical calculations predict that by coupling an exothermic chemical reaction with a nanotube or nanowire possessing a high axial thermal conductivity, a self-propagating reactive wave can be driven along its length. Herein, such waves are realized using a 7-nm cyclotrimethylene trinitramine annular shell around a multiwalled carbon nanotube and are amplified by more than 104 times the bulk value, propagating faster than 2 m s-1, with an effective thermal conductivity of 1.28±0.2kWm-1K-1 at 2,860K. This wave produces a concomitant electrical pulse of disproportionately high specific power, as large as 7kW kg-1, which we identify as a thermopower wave. Thermally excited carriers flow in the direction of the propagating reaction with a specific power that scales inversely with system size. The reaction also evolves an anisotropic pressure wave of high total impulse per mass (300 N s kg-1). Such waves of high power density may find uses as unique energy sources.

The "fuel" used, cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, may be better known as the explosive RDX.

Did Nature Also Choose Arsenic?

The take-home message from the paper, as far as I can tell, is that the researchers showed that one can achieve performance comparable to commercial solar cells by using 1% of the expensive ultrapure silicon used in current PV's.

Heaven forbid that you double check the facts. Not to mention that there is no worldwide measure of the quality/accuracy of any academic papers released.

You're right. There are hundreds of crap conferences. The World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, is particularly notorious. They accepted both, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, and my personal favorite, David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler's seminal work, Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List. So let's just limit ourselves to a top conferences, shall we?

SIGIR is the top information retrieval conference in the world. The acceptance rate was 16% last year, which makes it an "extremely selective" conference in the research world. The acceptance rate has held around 15% - 17% for decades now, and in fact tended decrease as the number of submissions have increased. It accepts submission from worldwide and from both academia and industry.

This analsys from 2007 of papers over the previous 30 years shows that China has moved into 5th overall in number of accepted papers. This is in no small part to Microsoft Research Asia.

So yeah, there are a lot of people just copying stuff around, but there's also a lot of people actually doing extremely good work. You're a fool if you fail to recognize this do your jingoism and racism.

The Unicode standard is 18 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?

Because it's an English site. ASCII supports every character required.

Sorry, didn't RTFA. Somewhat and significantly are not lumped together in the survey breakdown linked by eldavojohn. Still, providing only three options ('significantly', 'somewhat', and 'not at all') doesn't allow for much precision.

Link is to an article that does not name who did the "survey." For all we know the whole thing was made up.

I believe the Science journal Nature did the survey. Here's the original article and a breakdown of the survey. Sample size looked to be 784.

Link is to an article that does not name who did the "survey." For all we know the whole thing was made up.

I believe the Science journal Nature did the survey. Here's the original article and a breakdown of the survey. Sample size looked to be 784.

The nature article to the news story seems very interesting. As retroviruses have to integrate themselves into the cells genome to replicate, if the retrovirus infects a germline cell the virus can become incorporated into the animals genome and passed to their offspring. This seems to be already happening with this virus and it gives a chance to study the process in action.

About 8% of our genome is probably from ancient viruses which "invaded" our genome millions of years ago. Generally they become deactivated by mutation but they have been implicated in the growth of mammal embryos and the placenta. It would be pretty cool if the placenta, a defining feature of most of the mammals is due to a virus!

> Unless, of course, you count the vast array of herbs used through the ages that pharmaceuticals are now based on.

This is not a good comparison if you'd want to make a pro-homeopathy argument. Homeopathy and herbalism are quite different.

I agree with you that medicine can be found in plants. Some plant extracts will cure infections, some will help wounds heal, some will calm you, some act as a painkiller and so on. I've seen it and felt it. I actually wouldn't know how many, but I'd guess a lot of pharmaceuticals are based on the molecules found in these plants. Nature provides in a lot of good stuff including antibiotics.

If I take some herbals or pills, I actually put molecules into my body which could have a certain effect on the biochemistry going on. You gotta take the right mix and right amount to get the right effect. If you use only a fraction of that amount it simply won't work, and an overdose or wrong mix can harm you badly. That's not so hard to believe or proof.

Homeopathy, however, works like this: I shake my water with molecules in a specific way, and now my water itself becomes the medicine. That's right, my water has a memory, it will remember the medicine solved in it, and it will change state and become a medicine all by itself! And because of my shaking and this water memory, I can now dilute my water with molecules by adding more water, shake it again, and it can even be a *stronger* medicine! I can dilute it, shake it, dilute it and shake it until the actual bottle *you* buy does not even contain the original medicinal molecules anymore!

This committee of British members of parliament now says: Shake it!

And rightfully so!

The shaking is a ritual. There's no scientific base for it. No logic reasoning will explain why homeopathics shake the way they shake. Gotta shake it violently! Imagine someone on the market shaking their medicine violently and diluting it with water again and again. Would you buy from them or shake your head, call it quackery and walk away?

Yes, water molecules can "change state" (form ordered networks) but that won't make it a medicine by itself and even if it did, it loses the ordered networks within fifty millionths of a nanosecond.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7030/full/nature03383.html

Reader FleaPlus contributes related news about NASA's proposed funding for scientific payloads on commercial space flights, which would be a huge boon to researchers.

Well, to be more precise, it's actually the commercial suborbital flights. For the curious, here's the text of my submission the summary is referring to:

Suborbital Science Gets Boost From NASA

This past week NASA announced that it would provide $15M/year for 5 years (pending Congressional approval) for launching science payloads on commercial suborbital spacecraft, which provide a more cost-effective and productive way to perform many types of research. The announcement was made at the first Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, where a few hundred scientists and rocket builders gathered to get a better understanding of each others' needs and capabilities. In addition to space tourism flights, several companies, like John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic, are competing for the lucrative scientific market to fly payloads for fields like microgravity biology/chemistry, atmospheric science, astrophysics, and space technology tests.

That prediction is based on the "Constrains on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change" paper, published on July 26th, 2009, right? The same paper that has been retracted on February 21st, 2010?

Granted, that is less a fact against you; rather, it's more against the "massive flooding" of the grandparent. It's bad science, and it's looking more and more like bad politics.

The retraction statement can be found here.

See the Nature abstract: Nanowire transistors without junctions. Quote: "These devices have full CMOS functionality." I don't understand why they are talking about "doping gradients" when they are making FETs.

Wow! Nature.com charges $32 to see the full article!!

The parent is right and should have mentioned that the comparison has been made by no other than the journal Nature.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
(unfortunately, not full article, another reason to appreciate community efforts like Wikipedia)

Encyclopedia Britannica protested publicly and asked Nature to retract itself.

Nature said OK, we will check our facts again. They did so and confirmed their original results.

I am not surprised to see comments like those of the grandparents reappear. What I find worrisome is to see that they get modded insightful.

Wikipedia is accessible everywhere in the world, to billions (I am tempted to write "billions and billions"...) of people.

It is a game changing accomplishment.

That's not what he's been saying at all. ""The science still holds up" though, he adds. A follow-up study2 verified the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954–1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant. "They are trying to pick out minor things in the data and blow them out of all proportion," says Jones of his critics." http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100215/full/news.2010.71.html "But Jones is adamant that this doesn't actually change the conclusion of the analysis. In a subsequent paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2008, Jones verified the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954–1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant to the outcome." http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/16/hacked-climate-science-emails-climate-change

The cabal exists, of that there is no doubt, certainly since the leaked emails.

Ridiculous. They had access to years of the CRU's communication and the mere shreds of emails they could come up with were bits and pieces of infighting and revealed them not as conspirators, but human beings. And what was the result of those emails passed within the CRU? Nothing, really. No FOIA request turned down (or evidence gone missing), no papers withheld from publication, no worldwide cabal. Again, I'll provide another link.

Two further points I want to make here. Among all the uproar of the CRU hack, where is the outrage that their server was compromised? Apparently thuggery is quite acceptable. Pity they couldn't find anything over a span of thirteen years that was more damning than bickering between scientists. Secondly, the timing of the emails is very curious considering the approaching summit in Copenhagen.

You said that you have dealt with scientists. That's good. It is too bad though that they aren't climate researchers as they could probably articulate climate change far better than I can.

100 pages? Well that's no fair, Nature usually doesn't take articles longer than 5 pages.

If you ever get a chance take a look at some of Baggerly's (MD Anderson / bioinformatics/stats) analysis of the number of rather embarrassing mistakes were used in developing genomic biomarkers used for a clinical trial at Duke. He has been giving talks around at stats conferences (and pharma's about this), its one of the best talks i've heard in recent years. But what it boils down to is the analysis (and input) programs used by Duke had a series of fundamental mistakes in it causes the results to be incorrect leading to an incorrect conclusions which unfortunately lead to a series of clinical trials which certainly should not have happened. After Baggerly attempted to respond negatively to the original series of articles being posted he reposted in a stats journal and basically got the clinical trial shut down. For slashdot readers, one of the rather many egregious mistakes here was the analysis program used has in its instructions the need for a header line, the input the Duke researchers used did not include a header line causing a shift in the results with regards to their input. My understanding is nature medicine refused to publish baggerlies initial correspondence with full details as it was "too negative" so he published in a stats journal which then got the critical coverage to shut everything down..

Here are some random links

Here is the original Potti genomics article:
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v12/n11/abs/nm1491.html

Here is one of the baggerly nature medicine letters describing what is wrong in summarized form:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n11/full/nm1107-1276b.html

here is the halt of the trials :

http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/copy108_of_whats-going-on-with-nih

http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/copy111_of_whats-going-on-with-nih

If you ever get a chance take a look at some of Baggerly's (MD Anderson / bioinformatics/stats) analysis of the number of rather embarrassing mistakes were used in developing genomic biomarkers used for a clinical trial at Duke. He has been giving talks around at stats conferences (and pharma's about this), its one of the best talks i've heard in recent years. But what it boils down to is the analysis (and input) programs used by Duke had a series of fundamental mistakes in it causes the results to be incorrect leading to an incorrect conclusions which unfortunately lead to a series of clinical trials which certainly should not have happened. After Baggerly attempted to respond negatively to the original series of articles being posted he reposted in a stats journal and basically got the clinical trial shut down. For slashdot readers, one of the rather many egregious mistakes here was the analysis program used has in its instructions the need for a header line, the input the Duke researchers used did not include a header line causing a shift in the results with regards to their input. My understanding is nature medicine refused to publish baggerlies initial correspondence with full details as it was "too negative" so he published in a stats journal which then got the critical coverage to shut everything down..

Here are some random links

Here is the original Potti genomics article:
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v12/n11/abs/nm1491.html

Here is one of the baggerly nature medicine letters describing what is wrong in summarized form:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n11/full/nm1107-1276b.html

here is the halt of the trials :

http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/copy108_of_whats-going-on-with-nih

http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/copy111_of_whats-going-on-with-nih

I don't think global warming was being studied 40 years ago. I think they were seeing a different trend.

Well the problem is you are citing the popular press, this is why the uptake of the MMR vaccine hit an all time low in the UK after the Lancet study was released. The media take the stories they like and not those with the most evidence.

Global Cooling?
Paul E. Damon and Steven M. Kunen
Science (6 August 1976): Vol. 193. no. 4252, pp. 447 - 453

Greenhouse Effects due to Man-Made Perturbations of Trace Gases
W. C. Wang, Y. L. Yung, A. A. Lacis, T. Mo, and J. E. Hansen
Science (12 November 1976): Vol. 194. no. 4266, pp. 685 - 690

Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the "Greenhouse" Effect
J. S. Sawyer
Nature (1 September 1972) 39, pp. 23 - 26

Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?
Wallace S. Broecker
Science (8 August 1975): Vol. 189. no. 4201, pp. 460 - 463

Hey -- Counsyl person here (colleen_at_counsyl_dot_com). Wanted to make a few quick points

1) The key precedents for what we're doing are the Jewish community's successful campaign for universal Tay-Sachs screening and the at-home pregnancy test. Please see blog.counsyl.com for more details!

2) If anyone is curious about the paper mentioned in the article, it is available in advance of publication at Nature Precedings. Authors are from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Counsyl:

http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4192/version/1

3) We have CLIA certification, the same as the millions of lab tests performed each year by Labcorp and Quest. FDA regulation primarily applies to implantables and drugs, while CLIA applies to tests that have an experienced laboratory scientist in the loop.

Since the invention of the scale, there have been reports of materials harder than the highest mineral on the scale, diamonds; so the Mohs scale may be changed in the future.

And the reference is:
T. Irifune, A Kurio, S. Sakamoto, T. Inoue, H. Sumiya "Ultrahard polycrystalline diamond from graphite" Nature 421 (2003) 599

A big meh to this slashdot story.

Nature summary:

Polycrystalline diamonds are harder and tougher than single-crystal diamonds and are therefore valuable for cutting and polishing other hard materials, but naturally occurring polycrystalline diamond is unusual and its production is slow. Here we describe the rapid synthesis of pure sintered polycrystalline diamond by direct conversion of graphite under static high pressure and temperature. Surprisingly, this synthesized diamond is ultrahard and so could be useful in the manufacture of scientific and industrial tools.

The real problem is that the band gap is still zero. These things have an on/off ratio of the order of 10 or less, orders of magnitude worse than Si, the material they are supposed to supplement.

For those of you trying to find the actual nature article, here. I know we hate paywalls, but it should really be required for submission to slashdot that a link to the real paper, not preview, be included.

I am not a stem cell biologist, nor am I a neurobiologist, and I will need to read the paper more carefully when I’m at home, but some of my thoughts:
There do seem to be some hurdles to using this in humans, but many are trivial in comparison, and the reason the authors didn’t do them yet is because they wanted to get this out there before anyone else did. For one thing, they haven’t shown this in humans yet, but it should work in human cells that’s their stated next step. These cells were grown using dead mouse “feeder cells” which is common in cell culture, but complicates things for human therapy. You don’t want even dead mouse cells or other people’s dead cells in something that is going to go into your brain. People are working on culturing without feeder cells, I’m not sure where they are on that. The method of getting the 3 genes in is also an issue. These guys used lentiviral transfection, which is not something you want for human cells. Earlier work on IPSC got it done by incubating cells with transcription factor –protein- modified to penetrate cells. That might be a good next step here, though it would probably decrease the efficiency.

A bigger issue to me is what they are transfecting. They’re putting in three transcription factors, Ascl1, Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l. One of them, Ascl1, is found in many cancers (according to wiki anyway) and might be tumorgenic. Especially if they find they can’t get it to work without viral transfection, that could be a concern. The other two though aren’t tumorgenic apparently. Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l are both associated with neuron differentiation, which is interesting.

They did overcome a big hurdle: these are not pluripotent, which probably means there’s less chance of causing tumors, teratomas. With induced pluripotent cells, that is a concern. If you were to inject IpsC into your brain, you don’t know what you’re going to get. You could get bone cells growing in there, cells which aren’t supposed to be there that could potentially cause tumor formation. This doesn’t seem like that will be an issue here, they apparently get all neurons, neurons which appear not to continue dividing. I do find it a little hard to believe though that these only produce neurons and never glial cells, though I’ll need to reread it a few more times.

This is also a interesting paradigm shift for developmental biologists: apparently you don’t have to go back to square one to switch cell fates, it will take longer and be less efficient to do so. IpsC take about a month to become pluripotent and then be grown back into neurons, and only about 1% of the cells do that if I recall correctly. These take a week.

For much of the study, they seem to be using 5 different factors, not the 3 minimal ones. They state that Ascl1 alone was sufficient to make these cells start looking like neurons, but the other two were needed for them to look and behave like mature neurons. Most of the figures were working with a combination of 5 factors. With all 5, they showed a good mix of different types of neurons, but that had less efficient conversion than the minimal 3. I’m wondering if you’d actually be able to get all the different types of mature neurons with just the 3. I’d guess it’s not that they intentionally did it that way, but they wanted to hurry up and publish ASAP, so they skipped doing that characterization for now.

One problem facing all these therapies eventually, as I understand it, is that you want to get one specific type of neuron for therapy. I have no idea what strategies there are to direct differentiation into specific types of neurons, but this seems like it would be the bigger hurdle.

An astonishing fraction of research "results" from China are just plain made up. No wonder they're so prolific! I don't doubt that they will eventually make significant scientific contributions as a nation -- they're 20% of the world's population, after all -- but they're going to have to clean up their act before the global scientific community starts to take them seriously.

The problem with presenting just raw numbers is that it does not reflect the quality of the research. Just last week, Nature has an article in its News section examining the rampant fraud and plagiarism in Chinese research publications.

This is slashdot, so I suppose it should not come as a shock that the summary makes claims that don't stand up to even a casual examination. About 15 seconds on google scholar produces the following paper:

    Correa, A.A. and Bonev, S.A. and Galli, G, Carbon under extreme conditions: Phase boundaries and electronic properties from first-principles theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.103, 1204 (2006)
link to article

The second paragraph of the article in Nature Physics (subscription required) that this story is about mentions at least 11 other papers on theoretical calculations and experiments on the melting of diamond. So no, this is not in fact the first time that the melting of diamond has been studied. Indeed, the linked article itself refers to previous experiments at Sandia National Laboratory that melted diamond, but were unable to accurately determine the temperature and pressure.

This is truly impressive work by some very skilled scientists, but let's discuss it for what it is and not what it isn't.

"Ah yes, scienceblogs. What a hotbed of unbiased information that is."

Of course, it's biased. It's written by real scientists, publishing peer-reviewed papers.

"McIntyre is the man responsible for the questioning of and the debunking of the Mann hockey-stick graph which the IPCC had to ditch after it was pointed out how ridiculous it was."

Yep. That's exactly what I mean, deniers can't admit that they were wrong and just repeat the same lies over and over again.

The "hockey stick" has been proved to be essentially correct:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/4411032a.html (but of course, "Nature" is also a part of the conspiracy)

http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_Comment.pdf

Or indeed oil, which was similarly demonstrated to possess "intelligence", as it can solve a maze due to a pH gradient. Interestingly, that work debunked the claims of intelligence made for this same mold 10 years ago - for solving mazes and finding shortest paths.

If we go to the referenced Nature article abstract we see that the development "yields programmed targets in all cases."

The correct terminology then would be "100% Success Rate" not "100% Accuracy".

P.S. Presumably "success" is defined by something like "90% Accuracy", to put an ironic spin on it. But it makes no sense to speak of accuracy in terms of percentage without a reference, such as "a single atom". So the criteria was probably something like X nanometers accuracy.

The article is wrong on many levels. The key word here is "direct". The 2002 transmission spectra you mention (and others like it) consist of light from the host star, passing through the atmosphere of the planet as it passes in front of it, which imprints spectral signatures of the planetary atmosphere on that stellar spectrum. So in this sense, its not a direct spectrum of the planet's own light, but of the star, modified by the planet in front of it.

The first spectrum of a planet, consisting only of planetary light, came from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which used a differencing technique:

planet + star [out of eclipse] - star [when planet eclipsed] = planet only

The star and planet could not be resolved (separated) by the telescope, but by using the known orbit of this eclipsing planetary system, and timing the observations carefully, a spectrum of the "planet's own light" was obtained.

The novelty of this latest result is that no differencing of this sort was required. Using adaptive optics to correct distortions due to Earth's atmosphere, the light from a star and the light from its associated giant planet where physically resolved, and a spectrum of the planet, all by itself, was obtained. Even with adaptive optics, however, very few systems have star-planet separations on the sky large enough to permit this technique.

"i'm saying wouldn't it be better to have your testicles inside your body and evolve sperm that develop at a higher temperature? its pretty ridiculous to have such an important organ dangling outside unprotected. i never understood why"

You know why they're dangling out there (and you're right about your implication it is a *twisted* design to accomplish that), but you don't know why sperm need reduced temperature. I went looking for info. All I found was that spermatogenesis is more efficient at slightly lower temperature (2 deg C lower for humans), and that the effect is widespread in mammals (e.g., mice apparently are optimal at 8 deg C below their regular body temperature). From the papers I found, I get the sense that while the effect on spermatogenesis is well-studied, the exact cellular reasons for it are not well understood.

Here's a link to the actual paper (rather than the press release), for those who have a subscription to Nature or are willing to pay $32 to read it.

"I've looked up his paper.

So why didn't you post the link. Could it be because it does not say anything about "a mini ice age". Matter of fact it doesn't even say the globe will stop warming, it says cold deep water will come to the surface and cool things off for a while while around two particular regions.

"So you don't believe the IPCC's scientists then?"

How can I agree with all of them when they only broadly agree on what's in the reports.

"So you're, it seems stuck, if you assault this guys credibility, of course you're also assaulting the IPCC's credibility"

No it's your political mind that's stuck, it seems to be having trouble understanding the republic of science. I simply assert the reports are the best science has to offer on the subject, I would be dissapointed in any scientist who couldn't find something in their field to bet on but you're Daily Mirror link is grossly distorting Prof. Latif's research.

This is how peer-review is supposed to work, you attack a persons ideas, if someone does not submit any of their work for peer-review and refuses to address obvious flaws then they rightly lose all credibility (eg:Anthony Watts). The ideas about climate that are left standing at the end of every four years go into the IPCC reports.

"But we all know what is motivating your global warming beliefs."

Please don't project your faults onto me.

...but since the articles are publicly available, doesn't that mean that they can be more widely reviewed than traditional peer-reviewed papers?

Not necessarily. Peer reviewed articles can be and often are available in public domain sources.

It didn't sound like it was research, but rather mathematical theory based on looking at existing principles from a different direction. If there is enough underlying research in newtonian physics and general relativity, then wouldn't that same research also apply here?

I can't say without looking at the model but odds are that the model would still need at least some specific experimental confirmation.

Granted, I'm no mathematician, but it just seems a bit cliquish to say "don't pay attention to this" because of where the first publication is happening.

Only if you don't understand why people say that. The quality of research articles and standards of publications are not all the same between all journals just like not all research is equally important. Getting published in a journal like Nature requires a quality of research and significance of the results that is much higher than many other publications. Accordingly it is more likely that an article in such a journal will contain research that is worthy of attention. This is not to say that articles published elsewhere are poor research or unimportant but like any data you need to consider the source.

Let me put it another way. Would you be more likely to trust the information in an article from The Wall Street Journal or from The National Enquirer? One has earned a reputation for consistently providing high quality journalism and the other is widely considered a tabloid frequently containing outright fabrications. The same principle is at work with scientific and mathematical journals.

India tried a similar scheme recently, which unravelled rather spectacularly.

American-trained scientists simply expect a greater degree of autonomy than more traditional cultures expect of them. Overturning the work of an established scientist is how one makes a career in the U.S. In India, this can be a career-ending move.

Is China, a philosophically Confucian Communist culture with an even stronger concept of "face" than India, going to be more or less successful at this scheme? I have my doubts.

E. Coli. Ok, it's not an animal but still. It ushered in the age of biotechnology and have not left since and take part in most of the research.

You're right, the linked article the summary is based on is an opinion piece about this article, and it's not about the proportion of virus DNA in our genome.

The real news from the journal is: "Here we show that elements homologous to the nucleoprotein (N) gene of bornavirus exist in the genomes of several mammalian species, including humans, non-human primates, rodents and elephants...Our results provide the first evidence for endogenization of non-retroviral virus-derived elements in mammalian genomes and give novel insights not only into generation of endogenous elements, but also into a role of bornavirus as a source of genetic novelty in its host."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/463039a.html

That section is mostly commissioned and if not submissions reviewed by editor (technically, not peer reviewed).

The author of the referred N&V article is the author one of the articles in the reference section...

For peer-reviewed article, I would go for:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/nature08695.html

written by bunch of Japanese:

Endogenous non-retroviral RNA virus elements in mammalian genomes

Retroviruses are the only group of viruses known to have left a fossil record, in the form of endogenous proviruses, and approximately 8% of the human genome is made up of these elements1, 2. Although many other viruses, including non-retroviral RNA viruses, are known to generate DNA forms of their own genomes during replication3, 4, 5, none has been found as DNA in the germline of animals. Bornaviruses, a genus of non-segmented, negative-sense RNA virus, are unique among RNA viruses in that they establish persistent infection in the cell nucleus6, 7, 8. Here we show that elements homologous to the nucleoprotein (N) gene of bornavirus exist in the genomes of several mammalian species, including humans, non-human primates, rodents and elephants. These sequences have been designated endogenous Borna-like N (EBLN) elements. Some of the primate EBLNs contain an intact open reading frame (ORF) and are expressed as mRNA. Phylogenetic analyses showed that EBLNs seem to have been generated by different insertional events in each specific animal family. Furthermore, the EBLN of a ground squirrel was formed by a recent integration event, whereas those in primates must have been formed more than 40 million years ago. We also show that the N mRNA of a current mammalian bornavirus, Borna disease virus (BDV), can form EBLN-like elements in the genomes of persistently infected cultured cells. Our results provide the first evidence for endogenization of non-retroviral virus-derived elements in mammalian genomes and give novel insights not only into generation of endogenous elements, but also into a role of bornavirus as a source of genetic novelty in its host.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/463039a.html

That section is mostly commissioned and if not submissions reviewed by editor (technically, not peer reviewed).

The author of the referred N&V article is the author one of the articles in the reference section...

For peer-reviewed article, I would go for:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7277/full/nature08695.html

written by bunch of Japanese:

Endogenous non-retroviral RNA virus elements in mammalian genomes

Retroviruses are the only group of viruses known to have left a fossil record, in the form of endogenous proviruses, and approximately 8% of the human genome is made up of these elements1, 2. Although many other viruses, including non-retroviral RNA viruses, are known to generate DNA forms of their own genomes during replication3, 4, 5, none has been found as DNA in the germline of animals. Bornaviruses, a genus of non-segmented, negative-sense RNA virus, are unique among RNA viruses in that they establish persistent infection in the cell nucleus6, 7, 8. Here we show that elements homologous to the nucleoprotein (N) gene of bornavirus exist in the genomes of several mammalian species, including humans, non-human primates, rodents and elephants. These sequences have been designated endogenous Borna-like N (EBLN) elements. Some of the primate EBLNs contain an intact open reading frame (ORF) and are expressed as mRNA. Phylogenetic analyses showed that EBLNs seem to have been generated by different insertional events in each specific animal family. Furthermore, the EBLN of a ground squirrel was formed by a recent integration event, whereas those in primates must have been formed more than 40 million years ago. We also show that the N mRNA of a current mammalian bornavirus, Borna disease virus (BDV), can form EBLN-like elements in the genomes of persistently infected cultured cells. Our results provide the first evidence for endogenization of non-retroviral virus-derived elements in mammalian genomes and give novel insights not only into generation of endogenous elements, but also into a role of bornavirus as a source of genetic novelty in its host.

Ok, so here's another one. What are coral islands really? What's the carbon levels in the sea as well as atmosphere over the geological timescales corals have existed?

For God's sake, can't you look up basic facts before you ask stupid questions? The coral that makes up atolls is *young*; it doesn't last because of wave erosion. To pick a random example, Narau's surface corals date from 300,000 to 5,000,000 years old. The last time we had a major ocean acidification event was the PETM, 55.8 million years ago.

The corals are going nowhere

Coral response to pH is extremely well understood, and it's very negative. Warming of water is also extremely dangerous to corals, who live within very narrow temperature bands and are not mobile. Anyone who's ever had a reef tank is well aware of this. You can see this effect in the wild with calcium carbonate-shelled organisms living near volcanic vents.

As for "the corals are going nowhere", how profoundly ignorant of the plight of the world's corals can you be? Over half of the world's reefs have already completely disappeared or are rapidly declining. Most of this so far had been due to pollution and overexploitation, but an increasing percent is due to the warming and increasingly acidic waters, measurements of which routinely exceed what corals can withstand. They're incredibly delicate organisms. The extremely hot 2005 Gulf of Mexico waters that fueled Katrina and Rita, for example, caused such a massive die-off that they put the Elkhorn and Staghorn corals on the endangered species list.

Seriously, read about a topic before you post on it.

and no, the seas aren't going acidic either.

"Anthropogenic ocean acidication over
the twenty-rst century and its impact on calcifying organisms". Ocean pH has decreased by approximately 0.075 since the industrial revolution.

And look, this isn't the first time this has happened. The exact same thing happened 55.8 million years ago. It was devastating. It left the world such a different place that we give it a new era name. We don't want to recreate that.

Yes. His group had a recent paper in Nature where they sequenced genomes from their Long Term E. coli Evolution experiment at generations: 0, 2000, 5000, 10000, 15000, 20000, and 40000.

Absolutely stunning piece of work:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature08480.html

What exactly are MS Office skills?

Your first full-time job after a year on unemployment and welfare:

Newport Training Facility Helps Unemployed Find Work

The baseline clerical skills needed for advancement in any trade or profession you could name:

Administrative Assistant : Hyderabad India

See also Observation of molecular orbital gating.

NASA has far too large a PR operation if they're doing this. If they're doing a full-scale game for PR, their PR budget is too big.

NASA is not paying for the development (read this or previous articles on the subject). The deal is more like the NFL working with EA to make a football video game (except probably with more control over the content), NASA contributes their name/marks/PR and the developer foots the bill for development in return for the profits they will reap later.

Obviously what PR budget NASA should have is arguable, but remember that a) they're prohibited from "advertising" by the space act, and b) a lot of what they do is both PR *and* designed to do the useful job of educating the public. That seems to be the aim of this game too, although again you could debate whether it can succeed.

The promotional end of NASA may now be the most effective part of the organization.

You realize that NASA astrophysicist John Mather won the Nobel prize in Physics in 2006, right? NASA's science divisions do a lot of good, useful (effective) work. They just don't get a lot of attention. Manned space flight is the expensive side show.

In an age of semi-autonomous and remote-controlled robots, manned space flight is an anachronism of questionable utility. But it is dramatic and catches the public's imagination (which is demonstrated on /. regularly), which makes it popular among politicians. The problem is that it's also expensive to do anything vaguely worthwhile with manned space flight (one of the reasons that its utility is questionable), so it usually doesn't have funding to match the set goals (at least since the Apollo program). So, NASA ends up looking ineffective because they're asked to do something which may not be a good idea in the first place and then given a level of funding with which the goal can't be accomplished.

Of course, I'm not saying that NASA as an organization isn't probably messed up in any number of ways, but the point is just that you shouldn't judge it by manned space flight.