Slashdot Mirror

I'm part of this research and I'm pleasantly surprised someone posted it on Slashdot. To answer some questions: The device is indeed a concentration-measuring chip (not just positive / negative, which would be simpler), and in a just-posted Nature Medicine paper it shows that the signal vs. concentration curve goes 1000x farther on the low end (and the high end too, i.e. more dynamic range) before blending in with the background than the same assay (and antibodies) used on ELISA. Plus, it is a simple device that performs identically in saliva, urine, different pH and temperatures, and which is generally rugged and not too picky about the experimental conditions. This is quite helpful too.

Another point of the publication is that this device can measure small but slowly increasing tumor marker concentrations in lab mice which are known to have cancer. The key is that these tumor markers can be measured with this chip, but are too small in concentration for the traditional platforms such as ELISA. This means you can (in mice, at least) get important early cancer growth trend information (from a blood test) which you probably wouldn't have been able to obtain before.

Just published in Nature Medicine Advanced Online publications (unfortunately requires subscription):

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nm.2032.html

Technical Report abstract

Nature Medicine

Published online: 11 October 2009 | doi:10.1038/nm.2032

Matrix-insensitive protein assays push the limits of biosensors in medicine

Um. I think that's the wrong article. Look at the date: it's published in 2008; that's hardly news.

Here's the correct one published ... um, on 15th—probably in U.K., since it's still 14th here.

Abstract from the actual paper:
"Electrically charged particles, such as the electron, are ubiquitous. In contrast, no elementary particles with a net magnetic charge have ever been observed, despite intensive and prolonged searches (see ref. 1 for example). We pursue an alternative strategy, namely that of realizing them not as elementary but rather as emergent particles—that is, as manifestations of the correlations present in a strongly interacting many-body system. The most prominent examples of emergent quasiparticles are the ones with fractional electric charge e/3 in quantum Hall physics. Here we propose that magnetic monopoles emerge in a class of exotic magnets known collectively as spin ice: the dipole moment of the underlying electronic degrees of freedom fractionalises into monopoles. This would account for a mysterious phase transition observed experimentally in spin ice in a magnetic field, which is a liquid–gas transition of the magnetic monopoles. These monopoles can also be detected by other means, for example, in an experiment modelled after the Stanford magnetic monopole search."

This topic has been visited numerous times. A particularly good article on theoretical computational limits appeared in Nature in 2000:

Lloyd, Seth. "Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation". Nature 406, pp. 1047-1053 (31 August 2000)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6799/full/4061047a0.html

FYI Slashdot, one of this decade's genuine breakthroughs in science has been finally breaking the diffraction limit for visible light microscopy. The results in the past couple years alone have been nothing short of stunning. Specifically the techniques which are capable of doing this are confocal microscopy, near-field scanning microscopy, stimulated emission depletion microscopy, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy and structured illumination microscopy. All of these techniques use visible light and can image at below the diffraction limit of ~250nm resolution, but most use complicated techniques using lasers etc. to do so. Except that last one, structured illumination. This technology is going to literally revolutionize microscopy and probably biology as a whole in the coming years. It is a very clever technique and produces unbefuckingleivably amazing images. With it, full 3D reconstructions of individual living cells with ~10 nanometer resolution, at frame rates in the several Hz range can be taken using a relatively simple LCD retrofit to a high quality transmission light microscope which is installed between the light source and the stage. Look at some of these movies taken of cell processes using the technique and try to keep your jaw off the floor. While the resolution may be higher, none of this is possible with SEM or TEMs due to the necessity of imaging in vacuo.

'If you think that fast and cheap DNA reading applies only (or even mostly) to monitoring of individuals, you do not have a real grasp of the scope and applicability of DNA sequencing.'

Indeed. For a great summary of what some of the people who really do grasp it think, check out the answers to Nature Genetics' question of the year in 2007 - 'What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000?':

http://www.nature.com/ng/qoty/index.html

Right now, commercial genome sequencing is about $50,000 USD with the Solexa/Illumina system. Several teams are currently competing for a $10 million USD Genomics X-Prize, which will bring it down to the $10,000 USD level:

http://genomics.xprize.org/

You can't accuse them of being under-ambitious (e.g., from Reveo: "The ultimate mission of this proposed program is to commercialize an instrument in 5-10 years that will cost less than a $1000 and sequence the whole genome and simultaneously the epigenome (methylation code) nearly error free in a minute for pennies per genome.").

This is a valid question and should not be marked "troll". It is a question that deserves a serious answer.

Another paleontologist has already answered it well, but I'll give my take as a fellow paleontologist.

The main point I make in the classes I teach is based on an old saying:

"Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it".

In the case of life, that history is mostly one of extinction -- the destiny for >99.9% of species that have ever lived. Humans are a species of life, so do the math, but wouldn't it be nice to "beat the odds" for a while?

Life on Earth has been through a heck of a lot, so I suppose the extinction statistic isn't surprising. There have been some very bad days on Earth -- days that are on par with Dr. Strangelove "doomsday" scenarios, but naturally caused. From paleontology we know that life will survive in some form even when things are extraordinarily bad, although it takes a while for the global ecosystem to get back on its feet afterward, which is what the cited paper is about.

Would we know about these natural hazards to life on Earth if it were not for paleontology? Probably many of them, yes. There are other ways to get at them. But it is only via paleontology that we can get a sense of the effects on life -- the response to the stress. As I also point out in classes, even if it were practical to whack a 10km asteroid into the Earth to see what would happen, it is an experiment we would not want to run. Fortunately we have a bunch of experiments that were already run, and it is more than just impacts:

What happens when ocean currents change configuration?
What happens when the oceans become more strongly "stratified" into layers ("Strangelove oceans")?
What happens during volcanic eruptions 100x greater than any in historical times?
What happens when sea level goes up or down?
What happens when half of whole continents are covered with glacial ice sheets?
What happens when whole groups of organisms become extinct?
What happens when atmospheric temperatures or compositions abruptly change (e.g., the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum)?

All of these are highly relevant questions to the long-term survival of humanity because they could happen naturally or, in some cases, analogous processes could relate to human activity. They are tough questions to answer, but we are fortunate to have access to previous changes that far exceed what we expect in the near future. If we are going to become extinct like most other species have, I'd rather go out knowing that I tried my best to understand and cope with the world that I live on rather than dying out because I was ignorant of my environment and the implications of decisions related to it. This is stuff we need to know. Ignoring it is like living in a house while knowing *nothing* about how to maintain it.

You can always question the priorities of a field of study as obscure as paleontology: is it more important to invest in, say medical science or the development of new energy sources instead of paleontology? You ask this question specifically, and you are right to ask it. Even though paleontology bears on the long-term survival of humanity, which is kind of important (!!), it might be hard to justify with so many urgent problems. I agree that medical science and energy are more important. But my answer is a fairly simple one: have you actually looked at how much money is invested in paleontology versus those other subjects?! ;-) The relative financial priorities aren't out of line, as near as I can tell.

PS: as it turns out, quite a few of the mass extinction events in Earth history are associated with changes in ocean circulation and phytoplankton productivity, which sometimes results in the deposition of organic-rich marine sedimentary rocks. A well-known exam

The abstract of the actual article is a little more informative, but still makes strange claims. I think they can compress a 10Ghz electrical signal into a 270GHz optical signal, with obvious ramifications in multiplexing, as you can then take 27 such signals at a time (theoretically).

But perhaps this all is a cycle, because there is peer-reviewed scientific basis for the prediction of catastrophic "Global Cooling." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6665/abs/391351a0.html [nature.com]

A quick look at the synopsis indicates to me that this is an article about the effects of atlantic currents on glacial cooling in the context of the ice age cycle. To quote:

A global coupled oceanâ"atmosphere model of intermediate complexity is used to simulate the equilibrium climate of both today and the Last Glacial Maximum, around 21,000 years ago. The model successfully predicts the atmospheric and oceanic circulations, temperature distribution, hydrological cycle and sea-ice cover of both periods without using 'flux adjustments'. Changes in oceanic circulation, particularly in the Atlantic Ocean, play an important role in glacial cooling.

How exactly, do such conclusions support your assertion of a natural short term cycle of global warming/cooling? Please be precise in your answer.

You quoted from newscientist.com. But this is a "pop" science source. Not a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

You're absolutely right that peer-reviewed journal articles are far superior to pop science sources. But the New Scientist articles he quoted accurately reflect the science in those peer-reviewed journals, which I've linked extensively so you can compare.

But perhaps this all is a cycle, because there is peer-reviewed scientific basis for the prediction of catastrophic "Global Cooling."

Huh? What in the full paper led you to that bizarre conclusion?

You quoted from newscientist.com. But this is a "pop" science source. Not a peer-reviewed scientific journal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist. But perhaps this all is a cycle, because there is peer-reviewed scientific basis for the prediction of catastrophic "Global Cooling." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6665/abs/391351a0.html What we must be suspicious of any power-seeking politician that wants to tax industry to support speculative ideas like global-warming.

Then look at effect sizes if you're worried about gaming statistical significance due to sample size. If you're worried about the file drawer problem, then you're welcome to Google around to see if there are any other trials involving the two drugs used (vCP1521 and AIDSVAX B/E). A search of the US gubment's page on clinical trials reveals none. Also realize, that the big journals require that a study that seeks to be published was registered beforehand, and I cannot imagine that an AIDS vaccine study will be taken seriously if it isn't published in one of the major journals. Though there are issues with this process, it does allow for a systematic review of publication bias rather than a vague reference that is meant to undermine the legitimacy of research.

Unlike glucose, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver. "When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose." Eating fructose as compared to glucose results in lower circulating insulin (pancreatic beta cell insulin release is controlled only by blood glucose levels) and leptin levels, and attenuation in the suppression of ghrelin postprandially.[53] These hormones are implicated in the control of appetite and satiety, and it is suspected that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.[54]

Or you could google it, read, say, this review see, this article in elsevier and see for yourself that it is already pretty well-accepted that HFCS is bad.
As to the link to your post: You assert that GMO haters are unreasonable, or something to that effect, and that there is no reasoning with them, (but that they're wrong; at least, that seemed to me to be your unspoken conclusion/assertion). In response, I suggested that they might be less wrong than you suppose, and further, that it's not entirely unreasonable to be careful when considering how next to mess with human food intake, specifically because, per my assertion, metabolism is ill-understood, and we know very little of what the body actually needs to function properly. And that it's not a priori unreasonable to assume that we have evolved uses for everything we used to eat, and that some of these new functions we were able to develop are now things we can no longer do without without breaking.
I'm really sorry that you were so shocked by my assertion that Americans are somewhat fucked by being forced to eat quite so much junk (just because HFCS is cheaper to produce than other sugars), but it sort of saddens me that you were so shocked that you couldn't even be bothered googling the two relevant terms just to see if there is a suggested link between HFCS and diabetes (and other metabolic diseases) before stating so triumphantly that my post contains "zero science".

I agree - most of this is PR, which can be ignored.

To me, the interesting thing is that these layers is that they do not represent a very long history. From Laskar et al. (2002)

For the best fit between the radiance profile and the simulated insolation parameters, we obtain an average deposition rate of 0.05 cm yr-1 for the top 250 m of deposits on the ice cap of the north pole of Mars.

Now, 5 x 10^-4 meters / year means that the top 250 meters represents ~ 500,000 years, and the entire 2 km thick cap represents maybe 5 million years. This is very brief in geological time, and interestingly may be connected to the big change in obliquity thought to have occurred about 5 million years ago. (Note - our ability to predict this back before about 5 million years ago is very poor.)

So, it's likely that not that long ago Mars had no North polar cap, and presumably it comes and goes over geologic time. What happens to the water, and how much the atmosphere increases during these periods, is effectively unknown. While many of the geologists who study Mars think that nothing much has happened there for billions of years, I think that many of the dynamists would disagree.

While these results are cool, the obliquity cycle was confirmed in 2002, in a paper in Nature, Orbital forcing of the martian polar layered deposits by Jacques Laskar et al., They used pictures of the layering at the edge of the polar caps, not radar, but its basically the same idea, and they showed good correlation with recent obliquity cycles.

Again, it's cool to see these layers throughout the caps, but I don't think that anyone has doubted the connection with the obliquity / insolation cycles for a while.

It's mentioned offhandedly in the article, and more definitively in the research paper that "The amount of learning correlated with the degree of cortical atrophy and was a good indicator of recovery".

It seems to me that getting a better indicator of recovery potential is well worth the money spent on research.

You appear to be opposed to the vegetative being kept alive unnecessarily. If anything this research will give families a better understanding of the odds of recovery of loved ones in a vegetative state, and make it easier for them to pull the plug if recovery potential is negligible, so perhaps you might end up supporting it.

It's also good to keep in mind that "we" (we being both taxpayers and private industry) fund a lot of research on all sorts of things, because for every new idea that turned out to be amazingly useful there are a lot of other ideas that need to be explored and then cast aside as useless/unprofitable/impossible/etc.

You sir are no better than who you responded to because you pidgin-holed a large group of people by saying something obtuse. It edges on trolling (though I doubt you will me modded as such).

It was snarky, but so was the GP. I did respond in kind. That's what is needed sometimes. Tubesteak was acting as if this is a crime, it's not, it's valuable research with good goals. He might value rat life differently. That's fine, but it's worth pointing out that animal rights advocates who speak out against paralyzing animals to find cures for paralysis rarely think they have anything to gain from that research. I think if they did realize they had something to gain from it, or if they had an ounce of empathy for those who are paralyzed, they would feel differently.

I do hate it when people word things that they think some groups might find disgusting so that it is round about.

That wasn't what happened. The authors explained their methods in detail inthe actual nature article.

It's important to remember that when reading about research on /., rarely are the summary or "the article" actually written by the scientists themselves. "TFA" is usually written by a staff writer at websites like newscientist, and the summaries are written by /.ers. Occasionally, a link is provided to the real paper, as it was here. That's the actual stuff straight from the horse's mouth. Before you critique the scientists for being incomplete or not including information, make sure you're reading the article that the scientists wrote to see if they did that, but the chain of people who brought it to slashdot left it out.

Tubesteak was taking advantage of that, acting as if the scientists were trying to cover up that information, when in fact they made no attempt to conceal it.

You're imagining things. For the last thirty years the only place where you have found incandescent lighing has been at peoples home.

Every mall, school, workplace already use flourescent lamps (though you might only recognize them looking like this instead of this).

Just because a crop is GM doesn't mean it is sterile, BTW.

Only if GM crops were sterile. Because they aren't superweeds are being created. These superweeds have the same resistance to herbicides as the crops that interbred with wild relatives.

Falcon

Nice selective quote, the sentance that precedes it was "...it's a political thing on both sides, the left have their 'truthers' and the right have their 'birthers' both as equally bat-shit crazy".

Presumably for your own political reasons you chose to ignore that and start into a rant about how the right are acting rationally and the left are bat-shit crazy. Then you go on to dissmiss Hansen because you don't trust him. That right there my friend is called arguing from authority and is no different to the creationist habit of calling people "Darwinists" in an effort to make the argument about choosing between God's authority and Darwin's authority (neither of which actually exist in any tangible form).

Besides, if Hansen is a liar and a cheat, how do you explain "alarmist" articles such as this one in Nature or this list of similar articles in Science, are they all part of the left-wing "cosensus" conspiracy? Do you really belive that they all respect Hansen because he is the second in command behind Gore in their conspiracy, or is it because your politics won't allow to consider that they might actually respect him because his predictions have been remarkably **accurate?

"...it is HONEST to disregard the word of someone who's been caught altering data to suit his conclusions time and again".

Yes, lying is dishonest, so why are you clinging on to your beliefs by inventing/repeating lies about Hansen? And why do lie to yourself by ignoring the mountain of data, observations, experiments, and predictions that do not suit your conclusions? Are you paid to make such "grassroot" comments? Or are you really gullible enough to fall for the anti-science conspiracy theories of less rationalright wing think tankslobbyists?

**A selction of Hansens accurate predictions, I belive the first four were made in his now famous 1988(?) testimony to the senate...
# - Cooling stratosphere. - observed by sattelite and used by (amoung others) Bob Carter to confuse people.
# - More warming over land and ice - observed
# - More warming over poles - observed, the phenomena is now known as Polar Amplification .
# - More warming in the winter - observed (IPCC 2007).
# - Rapid disintergration of Artic sea ice - observed (NSIDC,WMO,NOAA,ect).

You would think people who call themselves geeks would point out that Hansen made all those predictions using the much maligned computer models rather than poo-pooing the whole idea of models, as is often the case here on slashdot. I have argued with thousands of people like you over the last decade or so, over that time people with your opinion on AGW have shrunk dramatically due solely to the overwhelming weight of the evidence.

"look at a major problem in the medical world today."

Good idea!

I agree some drug companies attempt to abuse the scientific process even going to extremes such as publishing their own journals through front groups. They use the same disinformation methods as the tabacco industry uses for it's propoganda, which also happens to be identical to the disinformation methods that the fossil fuel companies are (successfully) using on you. If you were alive duri

Nice selective quote, the sentance that precedes it was "...it's a political thing on both sides, the left have their 'truthers' and the right have their 'birthers' both as equally bat-shit crazy".

Presumably for your own political reasons you chose to ignore that and start into a rant about how the right are acting rationally and the left are bat-shit crazy. Then you go on to dissmiss Hansen because you don't trust him. That right there my friend is called arguing from authority and is no different to the creationist habit of calling people "Darwinists" in an effort to make the argument about choosing between God's authority and Darwin's authority (neither of which actually exist in any tangible form).

Besides, if Hansen is a liar and a cheat, how do you explain "alarmist" articles such as this one in Nature or this list of similar articles in Science, are they all part of the left-wing "cosensus" conspiracy? Do you really belive that they all respect Hansen because he is the second in command behind Gore in their conspiracy, or is it because your politics won't allow to consider that they might actually respect him because his predictions have been remarkably **accurate?

"...it is HONEST to disregard the word of someone who's been caught altering data to suit his conclusions time and again".

Yes, lying is dishonest, so why are you clinging on to your beliefs by inventing/repeating lies about Hansen? And why do lie to yourself by ignoring the mountain of data, observations, experiments, and predictions that do not suit your conclusions? Are you paid to make such "grassroot" comments? Or are you really gullible enough to fall for the anti-science conspiracy theories of less rationalright wing think tankslobbyists?

**A selction of Hansens accurate predictions, I belive the first four were made in his now famous 1988(?) testimony to the senate...
# - Cooling stratosphere. - observed by sattelite and used by (amoung others) Bob Carter to confuse people.
# - More warming over land and ice - observed
# - More warming over poles - observed, the phenomena is now known as Polar Amplification .
# - More warming in the winter - observed (IPCC 2007).
# - Rapid disintergration of Artic sea ice - observed (NSIDC,WMO,NOAA,ect).

You would think people who call themselves geeks would point out that Hansen made all those predictions using the much maligned computer models rather than poo-pooing the whole idea of models, as is often the case here on slashdot. I have argued with thousands of people like you over the last decade or so, over that time people with your opinion on AGW have shrunk dramatically due solely to the overwhelming weight of the evidence.

"look at a major problem in the medical world today."

Good idea!

I agree some drug companies attempt to abuse the scientific process even going to extremes such as publishing their own journals through front groups. They use the same disinformation methods as the tabacco industry uses for it's propoganda, which also happens to be identical to the disinformation methods that the fossil fuel companies are (successfully) using on you. If you were alive duri

There haven't been large-scale experiments, but recent Japanese studies estimate that they can remove a kilogram of Uranium from the sea for about $200. That's still lots more than it costs on the market, but you know that there's more than $200 worth of energy in a kilo of Uranium! Google will show you more, but here's one link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v280/n5724/abs/280665a0.html

I found a number of articles saying there was recent solar energy research involving melanin http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1312/version/1 It does sound a bit too efficient though

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090702/full/news.2009.619.html Obama stopped nuclear recyling efforts too. So not only is Obama opposed to nuclear storage in one of the best places in the country, he is also going to obstruct recycling efforts which convert 96% of the waste back into fuel while leaving the remaining waste thousands of times less radioactive and less dangerous. Instead, Obama believes in cap and trade which merely shifts the production of carbon while putting a heavy financial burden on the order of thousands of dollars a year to every American citizen. Obama is essentially an anti-human extremist.

I think I can see where we are disagreeing here. I think you are generalizing and I am speaking to Meta/SR of RCTs in medicine. I am not sure what you do for a living, but in terms of medicine and medical education and medical research, which is what I do, the pyramid I provided from the center for evidence based medicine at Duke is the real deal. There are similar concepts from McGill in Canada who were really some of the pioneers in this. Here is a link to the pertinent paper. I don't know enough about the methodology of meta-analysis in other fields to comment on that. I can comment that, again in medicine, the Cochrane Reviews are pretty much the gold standard in medical research. You are right, it is some of the most complicated research to partake in, and you are right again, especially in the field of cancer research most trials still go unpublished. But when done well, and there are many, many, well done reviews, they are without peer.

The reason meta-analyses are often used as a gold standard is that they can (usually) command a sample size that is far beyond that of the usual primary study.

Correct, and therein lies the power....... Come on...you've gotta laugh at that one!

Here are some interesting articles that discuss your concerns.

I believe this is the article that is quoted. I submitted it to the editor, but who knows if it'll get up there. Science articles listed therein are cited from print form.

Behold the awesome pictures: Genes mirror geography within Europe

Although, I suspect that virus caused mutations are only a small portion: even random single nucleotide polymorphisms will tent to survive (if they're not deadly) in the geographic area they originated in, because people generally don't move far from where they grew up before reproducing and passing on those mutations (historically, anyway).

I also love the variation of headlines for this story. Slashdot and the BBC report it as "UK Royal Society Claims Geo-engineering Feasible," while the Financial Times reports it as "Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions". The Nature blog has an interesting entry about the variation in headlines.

There's been quite a bit of previous research done on Tetris, which has found that just about the only thing playing tetris improves is your ability to play tetris. The spatial expertise acquired while playing tetris is highly domain specific (eg. see VK Sims, RE Mayer (2002) ). In fact Tetris has so few measurable changes on behavior that it's often used as the control game for action video game research (eg. Green CS, Bavelier D. (2003)).

The global temperature change tracks quite nicely with solar output levels, which happen to be cyclic.

Actually, solar variations are too small to account for recent warming.

The politicians and scientists are making the tragic assuming that the earths temperature is supposed to be constant, and ignoring that it probably cycles up and down over a hundred year cycle.

I can't speak for politicians, but scientists aren't making any such assumption.

Are we affecting it? Possibly, but we are certainly not the dominant or controlling factor.

Actually, as I've shown, we're very likely causing the majority of the recent warming.

If that was the case then assuming their detector is perfect at detecting "was or is a smoker" they'd have a 63% false negative rate and a 30% false positive rate.

If they perfectly detected "is currently a smoker" they'd have a 100% false negative rate and a 30% false positive rate.

So your guess is completely off the mark.

Numbers from: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nnano.2009.235-s1.pdf

For comparison, WASP-18b's infall timescale is an order of magnitude shorter than that of the much-discussed OGLE-TR-56b6, 7 (assuming that Q is the same for both), and gives a current rate of period change of â"0.00073 (106/Q) s/yr. For low values of Q this would accumulate to a detectable change in transit epoch in less than a decade (for Q = 106 the transit time shifts by 28 s after 10 yr, which compares with a currently achievable timing accuracy of 5 s). Thus WASP-18b is a diagnostic planet, either (for a low Q) being an exceptionally rare object in which the tidal decay is directly measurable, or forcing a reappraisal to much higher Q values; either way it will help establish the dynamical ages of the class of hot-Jupiter planets. WASP-18 will also help constrain our understanding of stellar interiors, given that the Q value depends on the dissipation of interior waves excited by the tidal forcing.

So if the orbit is decaying, we'll be able to measure it in 10 years, otherwise there will be useful data to refine theories about tidal forces in the surfaces of stars.

So yeah, the idea of "deception" is a human construct, as is the idea of "evil." And one could argue (as a previous poster did) that successive generations developing behaviors which are in their own self interest (so they get more food) but may (as a byproduct) be deleterious to others (since they get less food) is not a surprise. But extrapolate this to humans, and you get the kinds of behaviors that we call "deceptive" and, since we have ideas about the virtue of altruism, we call such behaviors "evil." This is experiment is definitely interesting in terms of group dynamics and behavior, and also because the novelty of the robots' solution to their problem is interesting-- two very different lines of thought. This kind of "deception" is one obvious and common solution to the problem of limited supply and competitive demand.

Deception is most interesting, I think, when you pair it with understanding of the "other" --that one is not merely making a strategy to get more food, but that in the process one is taking that food from others. So when humans and our closest relatives practice deceptive behaviors (which are surely-- and here demonstrably-- evolutionarily beneficial) it's complicated by our... moral sense? Altruistic tendencies? That's fascinating! When robots start to develop guilt complexes for their deceptive behaviors and guiltily hand over their food to others when caught in the act, I'll be impressed.

We are not using the term "deception" here in it's standard (moral) sense, which would indicate knowledge that another individual is being "fooled."

Yeah I read it wrong the first time as well. It actually shows growth for the last three years.

More importantly, it shows a trend where recent years have a lower minimum than later years. Remember not to confuse weather with climate like Fieldings is. The long-term trend simply has irrelevant noise due to ENSO events, etc imposed on top of it. As I said before, the real problem scientists face is here

I see the statistics on your web site removed the Maurader Solar Minimum / Little ice age; most CO2 proponents do.

You might be referring to this paragraph: Abrupt climate change is a long-term warming trend imposed on top of natural variations which tend to swing wildly in both directions. If you mean that the temperatures remain inexplicably high after subtracting all those natural variations, you're almost right.

But that reference removed the ENSO events, and figure 2 shows a warming trend even before this subtraction.

Also, contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.

If we do not get some cycle 24 sunspots soon, we might be hoping for some global warming. I thought we where on the way but a cycle 23 spot showed up the the sun went quiet now for over a month; not good.

No, solar variability is smaller than greenhouse effects.

A raging troll blurted: "Does genetics explain the differences in human accomplishments?"

Who knew Jim Watson hung out on slashdot?

(The rest of your bullshit isn't even worth addressing)

Here's the older topic:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/08/0344248

And the older scientific publication: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7243/full/nature07971.html

The real difference in this publication compared to the previous one is that these researchers are making really compact bundles while the previous ones have more flexible (probably) hollow structures dependent on key localized interactions. These are more likely driven by the summation of lots of little effects.

Without having read the article yet, it seems to be a common theme of top-down vs bottom-up design, which is a topic that crops up frequently.

Hmmm... I agree that the assumption that the brain's working are "mechanical" is non-trivial, but I am not aware of any reason to believe it is false. You seem to be stating that it is an undisputed fact that the brain's workings are not "mechanical". Why? Do you have a source for this?

Here, let me clarify it for you. I hereby 'declare' as a key assumption that the Heisenberg Uncertinty principle is an important part of how nuerons work.

Okay, you just made the simulation much, much more computationally expensive. But not impossible.

Folding@home and other computational biology projects assume that various biological processes can be correctly simulated by a computer (and they can verify those results by looking at experimental data. To suggest that is not the case for the brain would require further proof.

In fact, the best way I can think of to test if the brain can be simulation is to build what should be a simulation of a brain if it can be and see if it acts anything like a real brain. It seems like simulating the brain of an animal with fewer brain cells (ex. a fruit fly) would be a reasonable simplified experiment, although it would be reasonable to argue that fruit fly brains work a lot differently than human brains so successfully simulating a fruit fly would not necessarily mean you could successfully simulate a human (although it would probably still give useful information about brains in general).

The basic problem with all the 'we can copy the brain' ideas is the basic assumption that 'it is a purely mechanical process'. That is kind of like saying "If we assume a box is made of wood, then we can build one out of a tree." No duh sherlock, but the basic thing we are arguing about is the thing you rather arrogantly assumped was true.

I did not mean to make such a trivial statement. I was giving an explanation of why what you said originally does not immediately make simulating a brain impossible: we can simulate something we don't understand. One of the goals of simulating the brain / parts of the brain is to attempt to understand it better. For example, with a real brain, using an MRI machine, one can get moderately good images of what the brain is doing, but no where near perfect. If the neurons are simulated, then finding the state of a neuron at any point in a (repeatable) simulation is trivial.

What the poster/article discusses is not in anyway close to being a worthwhile simulation of the brain in the way they imply.

Yes, we are probably at least 10-20 years away from the processing power to simulate every neuron in a human brain at a reasonable speed.

The spacecraft Galileo, on its way to Jupiter, performed a related experiment back in 1990. Details were published in Nature

The original article: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp200940a.html They don't really discuss the social/legal implications the news reports do, they do point out that it's a very limited study (18 sociopaths). The data looks pretty good, but I've seen small promising studies like this all the time that turn out to be an unrepeatable fluke.

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/mp200940a.html
most of the articles in this journal are genome association studys, which over the last few years have been largely wrong

Slashdot editors don't like their work, apparently.

These are better articles:

Mosquitoes against malaria?. Quote: 'In what AP describe as a "daring experiment" with "astounding" results, researchers found that ten people subjected to mosquito bites three times over three months whilst taking the drug chloroquine gained apparent immunity against malarial mosquito bites a month later.'

Effective Vaccine For Malaria Possible, Study Shows. Quote: "This unique method of immunization allowed the human immune system to direct its response to eliminating the P. falciparum parasite at the earlier, liver stage of its life cycle. (Chloroquine kills the parasite at the later blood stage.)"

Not to burst your bubble, but "our habitat", of large mammals in general becomes actually much better (esp. much larger, but also easier to farm) at a higher global temperature. The last "globally warmed" climate saw a rich civilization in Greenland, with huge orchards and wineries, lush forests, rich wildlife, etc.

Current global temperatures are, to the best available evidence, both higher and rising faster than they have ever been in the time in which there has been any human civilization. Certainly, during the Medieval Warm Period (a period of somewhat elevated global average temperature--though cooler than the current period--and particularly elevated average temperatures in the North Atlantic region) Greenland had a milder climate, though it wasn't anything like the paradise you paint. But, even if it was, Greenland isn't the world. Global change that makes arctic regions more livable also makes the places where people actually live now, and have built agricultural, industrial, and other infrastructure, less livable.

There is also the little tidbit that global warming stops desertification, and makes e.g. the sahara lose ground.

The source you point to ends with this note: Peter Cox, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorset, said: "This looks like an interesting study. However, the conclusion that Sahellian rainfall will increase under climate change must be considered as highly uncertain. Models differ in their predictions, with about as many showing decreases in rainfall as increases."

the absolute worst case sea level rise of 95 centimeters by 2100 should not be a problem for any US coastal city, or for Holland for that matter.

The source you point to doesn't support that that is the "absolute worst case" (which, in fact, it suggests is a couple orders of magnitude worse, at something over 68 meters), but that it was viewed as the worst likely case in a 1995 IPCC report, and its worth noting that more recent studies have suggested that the IPCC reports estimates were too conservative, e.g., this study, which concludes "Using MIS-5e to gain insight into the potential rates of sea-level rise due to further ice-volume reduction in a warming world, our data provide an observational context that underscores the plausibility of recent, unconventionally high, projections of 1.0 +/- 0.5 m sea-level rise by AD 2100."

"SOME biologists and neuroscientists will always be around who say what you want. If you can show that the mainstream opinion is against me, I'll happily concede the point, and thank you for enlightening me, but I doubt it."

Some studies of insect locomotion (which was where this discussion started) which use experimental data, modelling, or a mixture of the two to show that a great deal of locomotion sensing and control happens either in the limbs themselves before they reach any nerve centres, or in the thoracic ganglia. Nerve stimulation experiments have also shown that the characteristic "dual tripod" gait of hexapods is a mechanical oscillatory cycle that runs automatically when single nerves in the brain or mesothoracic ganglia are stimulated. The same is true for wing beats (which is some types share both muscles and central ganglia with the legs), which will cycle repeatedly when nerves in the thoracic ganglia are stimulated. The notable similarity in the data gathered from not only animals of the same species, but but those of different but closely related ones indicates that these movements are produced by a fixed "hardware" pattern generator, similar in principle to the electro-mechanical sequencers used in dishwashers and washing machines before microprocessor control became common:

(Note I apologise in advance for some of these only abstracts. Full scientific papers and book texts are hard to find on the web):

http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/82/1/512
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/45436/abstract

http://pt.wkhealth.com/pt/re/ejnr/abstract.00009274-200419070-00019.htm;jsessionid=KwpKVK0J1jTLRRXsZmb2QJJ53LlxD8s1Tnhv6l5Fqj9qNF2ncS7l!-1104825961!181195629!8091!-1

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v283/n5749/abs/283768a0.html

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109692463/abstract

http://www.cell.com/biophysj/abstract/S0006-3495(65)86706-6

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:5jTmyj1E8ywJ:biology.queensu.ca/~locust/Publications/locust%2520flight.pdf+insect+proprioceptors+ganglia&cd=75&hl=en&ct=clnk

"Oh really? You read it's mind then?"

There is absolutely no evidence that insects have anything that fits the description of a "mind" to read. Note though that some spiders may well have minds, e.g. Portia labiata, which displays a level of intelligence that makes many small mammals look like warm-blooded morons.

"Humans are predictable too. Doesn't mean they're not intelligent. They're just creatures of habit."

Humans are predictable en-masse, but not individually. Most insects on the other hand are entirely predictable individually, i.e. they always react in precisely the same way to the same sets of stimuli as another insect of the same species.

"Well, Jellyfish ARE pretty dumb, you know. The most complex behaviour I know of is in Box Jellyfish, which use simple visual contrast to avoid obstacles."

All jellyfish are sensitive to a variety of external factors such as light, orientation, water currents, temperature, and a variety of types of touch, so they're by no means as unsophisticated as you're trying to make out. It's notable that you avoid trying to deal with echinoderms, which like most animals with radial rather than bilateral symmetry, also lack cen

Two other sources that I would recommend on climate are Nature's Bolg and RealClimate. These are both very informative and more accessible that journal papers.

License to publish at Nature Publishing Group (publishing house of "Nature" series of journals, really big payer in the field of natural sciences) draws my favorable attention. The point is that the aurhor isn't required to give out the copyright of their published contributions, instead authors grant NPG a license to publish their paper. As it comes to reusing parts of published papers in future work, prior publishers' permission isn't mandatory. This doesn't work in case of review papers, which are commissioned by the publisher, where NPG is granted full copyright.

Does license to publish do any difference? Yes, because six months after publication the author has right to archive the manuscript in a free-access repository, even on NPG's server.

There's one more thing, which however applies only to biological sciences. Since 2008 those papers in Nature which publish organisms' genome for the first time are copyrighted under Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike unported licence.

To conclude, it's worth noting that the academic world is pushing publishers towards less strict publishing policies, thats a big example.

One of the leading science journals Nature just had an editorial requesting that scientific societies establish policies on tweeting an blogging of talks at conferences. They recommend either complete openess or complete closure. Much of this now done by tech-savy excited grad students chatting among themselves. But some scientific societies consider this a form of competitive pre-publication, particularly in biosciences where commercial speed is important.

This concern is not new. I've been at conferences in the pre-digital era where sneaky people tape record the talk and film photograph every slide. New technology in every cellphone make this much easier to do.

it's entirely possible that Mercury will tidal lock to the sun before that. It's already spinning so slowly we thought it was tidal locked for a very long time. A day takes 2/3rds of its year, and it's just going to get longer and longer until it takes exactly one year.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v429/n6994/full/nature02609.html
Abstract of the abstract : Mercury is tidally locked to the sun because of it's orbital eccentricity, and it has it's orbital eccentricity as the most-likely outcome (p=55%) from chaotic variations in orbital parameters in the formation of the solar system.
So, unless Mercury evolves into a significantly different orbit (possible, but only a few % of probability), it's going to maintain it's tidal locking. It's credible (I'm not a sufficient mathematician to say either way) that the tidal locking will jump between 2:3 and 3:4 or 3:5 as the orbit evolves.

December 28, 1968, almost 41 years ago: Melittin used as a Protective Agent against X-irradiation

Or maybe scientists aren't the brainwashed idiots you clearly think we are? We're aware that the sun exists, and that it impacts the climate. But the overwhelming evidence is that sunspots have a negligible impact on climate.

People are asking you for serious, peer-reviewed references not because scientists are idiots who "believe what they are told on the 11 o'clock news, and who can't be bothered to do any real research or even lookups on their own" but because we've spent our lives studying these issues and what you're saying contradicts all the evidence we've seen.

As that saying goes: there is no "disagree" button, and troll, off-topic, and overrated are not substitutes.

Or maybe climate is a complex beast and if you want you can probably find a paper to support your position. Therefore to truly understand you need to know the majority of the subject and its recent findings. Please read chapter 2 pages 188-192
Here is a general paper on the subject.
Of course I don't really expect you will be swayed.