Slashdot Mirror

For those with access, here's the actual paper:
Fan, Zhiyong, Haleh Razavi, Jae-won Do, Aimee Moriwaki, Onur Ergen, Yu-Lun Chueh, Paul W. Leu, et al. "Three-dimensional nanopillar-array photovoltaics on low-cost and flexible substrates." Nature Materials advanced online publication (July 5, 2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat2493.

One of the cool things is that this new process results in a flexible photovoltaic. In the paper they show that efficiency is maintained even after repeated bending of the material. Even if the energy collection efficiency is lower than conventional silicon photovoltaics, there are tons of applications for flexible photovoltaics, like having tents coated in the material (both for things like camping, but could also be hugely useful for the military, for temporary tents for disaster relief, and so on...), clothing that generates power, and so on... (Maybe even fanciful things like kites that collect solar and wind power?)

It's not a commercial device yet (and oftentimes these kinds of lab devices just don't scale to mass production that well), but it's an encouraging step towards more robust solar cells, which would aid in the more widespread deployments of solar energy.

"Hard core scientists aren't out making the pitch for carbon credits, my friend."

How do you define hard core scientists?

"Hard core scientists aren't out making the pitch for carbon credits, my friend."

How do you define hard core scientists?

"Hard core scientists aren't out making the pitch for carbon credits, my friend."

How do you define hard core scientists?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nature08121.pdf

(For those with access to Nature through school or work...)

A strong scientific consensus is derived from...
1. Overwhelming evidence via multiple independent lines of enquiry.
2. A high degree of predictive and/or explanatory power.
3. A lack of conta-evidence and a lack of equally valid alternative explainations.
(...) The strong scientific consensus on GW is that mankinds emmisions are causing the bulk of the observed warming and it will servely retard our civilisation unless we act to reduce those emmissions by ~70-80% over the next four or five decades.

So the consensus you are talking about is in part a consensus about the state of our civilization a few decades into the future.Would you mind telling us ...

1. What exactly is the evidence that we have about the state of our civilization a few decades into the future?
2. Have there been any empirical experiments aiming to determine the predictive power of people who claim to be able to predict the future? If so, what were the results?
3. What would you consider valid contra-evidence that could convince you that a consensus about the state of our civilization a few decades from now might be wrong?

"Try Webster's or the Oxford dictionaries. Look up "scientific method", and "science". You'll find nothing in there about "ordinary view" or "consensus"

A dictonary is not a particularly illuminating source for understanding scientific philosophy. Try researching the term Republic of science, it's an older alternate term for "consensus" and is indeed central part of the philosophy of science, it's what gives rise to the term "scientists say" as in "scientists say the earth orbits the sun". A strong scientific consensus is derived from...

1. Overwhelming evidence via multiple independent lines of enquiry.
2. A high degree of predictive and/or explanatory power.
3. A lack of conta-evidence and a lack of equally valid alternative explainations.

Of course it's every scientists duty (and wet dream) to find a logical or evidentry crack in a strong consensus but it's also every scientists duty to accept a consensus he cannot convincingly refute. The strong scientific consensus on GW is that mankinds emmisions are causing the bulk of the observed warming and it will servely retard our civilisation unless we act to reduce those emmissions by ~70-80% over the next four or five decades. The good news is it's "doable" if people can overcome their political predjudices toward the messengers.

"The earth is warming. Evolution is at work. Adapt, or die. And, in the end, no one will give a shit which you do. Except maybe your grandchildren, however many generations removed."

These sort of statements always confuse me as to what they mean by "adapt". Please explain to me why reducing emmissions through a free market cap and trade scheme that strives to make renewables economically viable is not seen as an adaptation? And yes this has little effect on me as I will probably be dead come 2050. However I already have grandchildren that "scientists say" AGW will affect if I make decisions based solely on a few pennies pressing on my hip pocket nerve. If my grandparents generation had thought that way in the 50's we would all be chocking to death under a layer of soot.

"That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists."

Ummm, no it doesn't. It's just that you're about 10yrs out of date in the consensus game.

Please refer to the recent climate confrence in Copenhagen (basically an interim IPCC report), the confrence gave six key messages as listed in their report (warning 5mb pdf). Key message #5 was Inaction is inexcusable

The conference was organised by a "star alliance" of research universities: Copenhagen, Yale, Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, Tokyo, Beijing - to name a few. It included 2500 participants from 80 countries and had 1400 scientific presentations.

The folk at Nature have also echoed their sentiments.

True this does not mean "at all cost" but that is a pedantic nitpick rather than a misrepresentation of the consensus opinion on the part of the OP.

For those with access, the actual scientific article is:
John R. Royer, Daniel J. Evans, Loreto Oyarte, Qiti Guo, Eliot Kapit, Matthias E. MÃbius, Scott R. Waitukaitis & Heinrich M. Jaeger "High-speed tracking of rupture and clustering in freely falling granular streams" Nature, 459, 1110-1113 (25 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08115.

The associated "News and Views" (Summary) is:
Detlef Lohse & Devaraj van der Meer "Granular media: Structures in sand streams" Nature, 459, 1064-1065 (25 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/4591064a

The previously-held belief in the field was that this breakup into droplets could be explained by inelastic collisions between the grains. That is, all the sand grains are bouncing off each other, but because these collisions are inelastic (the two particles slow down a bit relative to each other with the collision) the grains will, statistically, aggregate into larger structures.

However this new piece of work shows rather strikingly that the origin of the force is a very weak form of surface tension. In other words, the breakup into droplets occurs for the same reason as it does in water and other liquids... it's just the magnitude of the force that is much smaller. In addition to the high-speed photography the Slashdot summary mentions, they also used atomic force microscopy to directly measure the nanometer-scale cohesive forces between particles. In water, surface tension arises from the (rather strong) cohesive forces between water molecules (each water molecule 'sticks' to its neighbors). In sand, it appears that a very weak nano-scale cohesive force is nevertheless enough to generate macro-scale droplets out of micro-scale particles. The cohesive forces in sand arise from the weak Van der Waals forces (weak, but universal, surface attraction), and due to capillary forces. That is, ambient water bridges the sand particles and causes what is effectively an attractive force, which leads to an effective surface tension.

In the paper, they describe how they vary the particle type and ambient conditions, to demonstrate that these two effects are important. For instance varying humidity alters the cohesion and thus droplet formation. Also, altering the sand particles has an effect: e.g. rougher particles cannot stick to each other as much, thereby reducing this effect.

This is a neat piece of work because it involves just "known" physics. It is demonstrating that well-established physical effects (surface forces and capillary forces) can explain phenomena where their effect was previously assumed to be negligible. The surface tension in these granular media are about 100,000 times smaller than water, yet the exact same effects are observed: the surface tension, weak as it is, tries to minimize surface area. Coupled with well-known instabilities, this causes a breakup into droplets.

For those with access, the actual scientific article is:
John R. Royer, Daniel J. Evans, Loreto Oyarte, Qiti Guo, Eliot Kapit, Matthias E. MÃbius, Scott R. Waitukaitis & Heinrich M. Jaeger "High-speed tracking of rupture and clustering in freely falling granular streams" Nature, 459, 1110-1113 (25 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08115.

The associated "News and Views" (Summary) is:
Detlef Lohse & Devaraj van der Meer "Granular media: Structures in sand streams" Nature, 459, 1064-1065 (25 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/4591064a

The previously-held belief in the field was that this breakup into droplets could be explained by inelastic collisions between the grains. That is, all the sand grains are bouncing off each other, but because these collisions are inelastic (the two particles slow down a bit relative to each other with the collision) the grains will, statistically, aggregate into larger structures.

However this new piece of work shows rather strikingly that the origin of the force is a very weak form of surface tension. In other words, the breakup into droplets occurs for the same reason as it does in water and other liquids... it's just the magnitude of the force that is much smaller. In addition to the high-speed photography the Slashdot summary mentions, they also used atomic force microscopy to directly measure the nanometer-scale cohesive forces between particles. In water, surface tension arises from the (rather strong) cohesive forces between water molecules (each water molecule 'sticks' to its neighbors). In sand, it appears that a very weak nano-scale cohesive force is nevertheless enough to generate macro-scale droplets out of micro-scale particles. The cohesive forces in sand arise from the weak Van der Waals forces (weak, but universal, surface attraction), and due to capillary forces. That is, ambient water bridges the sand particles and causes what is effectively an attractive force, which leads to an effective surface tension.

In the paper, they describe how they vary the particle type and ambient conditions, to demonstrate that these two effects are important. For instance varying humidity alters the cohesion and thus droplet formation. Also, altering the sand particles has an effect: e.g. rougher particles cannot stick to each other as much, thereby reducing this effect.

This is a neat piece of work because it involves just "known" physics. It is demonstrating that well-established physical effects (surface forces and capillary forces) can explain phenomena where their effect was previously assumed to be negligible. The surface tension in these granular media are about 100,000 times smaller than water, yet the exact same effects are observed: the surface tension, weak as it is, tries to minimize surface area. Coupled with well-known instabilities, this causes a breakup into droplets.

Germany
Germany's voluntary commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 21 per cent compared to 1990 levels has to all intents and purposes been met, because emissions have already been reduced by 19 per cent.

France
In 2004, France shut down its last coal mine, and now gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power and therefore has relatively low CO2 emissions.

A study by De Leo et al. found that "accounting only for local external costs, together with production costs, to identify energy strategies, compliance with the Kyoto Protocol would imply lower, not higher, overall costs."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v413/n6855/full/413478a0.html

...that's where I get all my planetary science news! not. also. also. Why do people do this? This is the internet, not your local morning paper. You can go wherever you want to get this information. WHY NOT GO DIRECTLY TO THE SOURCE!?

However, we're moving away from such "crude" techniques towards more sophisticated analytical tools, since in many ways biochemistry is now technology-limited. Single-molecule work, such as that pioneered by Carlos Bustamante provide insights that would never be possible with classical methods, and on the other end of the spectrum, we're now working on characterizing the entire network of small metabolite molecules simultaneously and quantitatively. This kind of work just isn't easily carried out by amateur enthusiasts.

That said, there is certainly quite a bit of research that DIY biologists would be capable of performing, especially considering that they could have access to the same kind of resources that professionals do. For example, after amplifying a gene, no researcher will sequence it themselves: it's shipped of to a specialized lab that will do it, for a fee. That sequencing step requires equipment and expertise that's at a higher level than even the pros don't have.

But regardless of theoretical ability, the professionals retain the advantage that it is their job to work on these projects. The time they can dedicate to their work will be far greater than someone who does it as a hobby.

Back to the subject of "openness", the professional scientific world isn't nearly as closed-off as the article would have you believe. It is true that there is a persistent fear of being "scooped", but the standards are changing for staking your claim on a particular piece of research.

It used to be that a full manuscript in a scientific journal was the only thing sufficient to get credit for something. Now, people are gradually embracing online resources are a valid way to communicate, and by extension, to prove that they were the source of any particular bit of publicized material. Even non-finalized material is now more common to make public: Nature has a pre-publication online source for publishing findings, and there are journals devoted entirely to negative results, which was previously unheard-of.

The walls are coming down, it's just a question of finalizing the transition, and winning over the old guard.

Disclosure: I am a professional research scientist, one of the younger ones. I have a substantial hardware/software project in the works, which will likely be simultaneously published via classic journal, online website, and software via SourceForge.

A) There isn't, that is media driven.

To be fair to the mas-media they just reprint the lobbyists press-releases because conflict makes a good story and the psuedo-skeptics keep inventing new names for their think tanks but most of them can be tracked back to the Heartland Institute. If you remeber the "tabacco scientists" from the 80's you will recognise some of the names (eg: Fred Singer). They are nothing more than proffesional lobbyists in lab coats. That is not to say there are no arguments about the finer details but the idea our emmission can warm the Earth is now over a century old and the National academies of science first warned the US government that it was happening in the 50's.

Yes peer-review is imperfect but I challenge you to find one paper in a reputable journal such as Science or Nature that disputes the much maligned "consesus". As you can see there are nearly 40,000 papers in just those two prestigious journals alone. I realise that's an unfair challenge because it's a daunting task and since the IPCC have already done it I'm pretty sure you won't find anything. I would prefer genuine skeptics (and I think you may be one), read what the editors of (say) Nature think about the problem, talk to some IPCC scientists and look at thier reports.

I also agree it's true that it's possible to be paid by a FF company and still do honest science, however I ask you to be skeptical of people such as Carter who disagree with mainstream science, can't get a paper published on the subject and are paid by think tanks because, those traits put the in the same boat as young earth creationists. I also ask genuine skeptics to do a bit of their own geeky mythbusting before posting psuedo-skeptical drivel to slashdot as anything other than an example of anti-science.

B) The "gap" in opinions exists because one side is driven by lobbyists, the other by science. I agree it's a complex subject and I admit that without some background it can appear to be a simple case of experts who can't agree on basic answers. However that's exactly what the psuedo-skeptics want you to think in order to delay any action that would upset their sponsers. They are a cynical bunch of pricks who know they have lost the science argument, they just want to drag it out as long as it's possible to be paid to do so.

Here is just one example of that kind of political dishonesty.

"We're all going to look back 50 years from now and probably laugh at BOTH sides as more or less equally flawed."

In 50yrs I will either by getting a telegram from the Queen or be dead but I think in the next decade the coal industry are in for the same treatment the tabacoo companies recieved in the 90's. What this proponent of emmission control is saying is let's slow down this uncontrolled experiment on our biosphere and carefully examine how we can replace (or clean up) coal and let's do it with a free market based approach such as cap and trade rather than just another useless tax that allows the rich to pump out as much pollution as they can pay for while the rest of us suffer.

Disclaimer: Politically I describe myself as a "fiscally conservative, science based greenie" but I have not been interested enough to vote since 1978. OTOH I have followed the scientific and political arguments over AGW for almost three decades now and became convinced we have a serious problem when the IPCC released their 1997 resports, I have never seen Gore's movie simply because I knew

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/nature08096.html

Full story requires payment or subscription (which I don't have), but the blurb reads:

or changing your useragent to

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/nature08096.html

Full story requires payment or subscription (which I don't have), but the blurb reads:

It has been established that, owing to the proximity of a resonance with Jupiter, Mercury's eccentricity can be pumped to values large enough to allow collision with Venus within 5 Gyr (refs 1-3). This conclusion, however, was established either with averaged equations1, 2 that are not appropriate near the collisions or with non-relativistic models in which the resonance effect is greatly enhanced by a decrease of the perihelion velocity of Mercury2, 3. In these previous studies, the Earth's orbit was essentially unaffected. Here we report numerical simulations of the evolution of the Solar System over 5 Gyr, including contributions from the Moon and general relativity. In a set of 2,501 orbits with initial conditions that are in agreement with our present knowledge of the parameters of the Solar System, we found, as in previous studies2, that one per cent of the solutions lead to a large increase in Mercury's eccentricity - an increase large enough to allow collisions with Venus or the Sun. More surprisingly, in one of these high-eccentricity solutions, a subsequent decrease in Mercury's eccentricity induces a transfer of angular momentum from the giant planets that destabilizes all the terrestrial planets approx3.34 Gyr from now, with possible collisions of Mercury, Mars or Venus with the Earth.

Too bad the public at large doesn't understand this concept.

Fixed that for you. The anti-ESC crowd is running a very successful misinformation campaign. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not. It's all the more astounding because so many scientists who work on this are professors, teachers, yet they have so far been totally unable to get across to most people that these are never from aborted fetuses, they never can be.

Even GP got it wrong

Aborted fetuses aren't used as a source of stem cells since all the cells would be dead.

Not true, plenty of studies are done off of live aborted tissue. For example, studies on human brain development. The reason aborted embryos aren't used is that the ideal time for harvesting ESC is at 5 days, before the embryo implants and before you would know you're pregnant. That, and there are thousands of IVF embryos not being used for anything.

My reply wasn't particularly pointed at any given specific therapy - you actually mentioned only a general concept and concern. I was pointing out that this really does not, in and of itself, create any medical treatment or device. It's the beginning of a tool kit, if you will, to tease out how organismal development works. Whether or not it yields any medical treatment or drug at all is open to conjecture. There is a very long road between this result and my magical fountain of youth.

But to brighten your day perhaps - an important subtext of this research is how easy it is to get to what appears to be pluerepotent stem cells. Four proteins. Already three different techniques to get these into cells. Published research that others ought to be able to reproduce. Not only in this patent crazy country but everywhere else that has the infrastructure to do this kind of research. Which is relatively easy - certainly doesn't need any fancy expensive physics package like the LHC. IF medical therapies come of this line of research, it will be broadly known and likely broadly copied.

Stay tuned.

"Nature/reality is fantastic. Unfortunately most of us don't have the time or money to do every experiment for ourselves"

Whoosh

"I'm saying the peer-review system we have in place IS VERY POOR"

I am saying that the fact the modern world exists in all it's technological glory directly contradicts your opinion.

"I swear these days it's like they require you to prove that you're an asshole before they'll activate your slashdot account. You really couldn't find any other way to say you disagree?? Fucking hell."

In my opinon the idea of replacing peer-review with slashdot like moderation is stupid, but yeah I could have said it in another way, I could have said it was moronic, assanine, or even naive. Can you not see the difference between attacking an idea and a personal attack on the arsehole who holds said idea?

I posted these when the article was on the firehose for the benefit of the non-technical audience, but I guess they don't carry over when the story gets promoted:

Summary:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090527/full/459492a.html

Editorial:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/459483a.html

Summary for Scientists:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/459515a.html

I posted these when the article was on the firehose for the benefit of the non-technical audience, but I guess they don't carry over when the story gets promoted:

Summary:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090527/full/459492a.html

Editorial:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/459483a.html

Summary for Scientists:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/459515a.html

I posted these when the article was on the firehose for the benefit of the non-technical audience, but I guess they don't carry over when the story gets promoted:

Summary:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090527/full/459492a.html

Editorial:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/459483a.html

Summary for Scientists:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/459515a.html

Biologists have been making this glow for a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein But the novelty is that now you can make green offspring with no extra effort! For those with journal access to nature, the source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/nature08090.html

Slashdot is often at it's worst when it comes to science, especially when the story is even tangentially related to global warming. Judging from the summaries, the stories almost always seem to be submitted by people with an agenda. So they just post the most misinformed summary possible of a subscription-only original article. And Slashdot editors have time and again demonstrated their readiness to publish anything they think somehow proves global warming false.

If only open access publishing would become more commonplace. Then everyone could see the original article and actually make their own minds up.

Even now it would be nice if they at least linked to the freely available abstract.

Contamination. 'Nuff said.

Obviously. I'm sure they never accounted and corrected for that possibility. After all, it's not like these people are the type who would know anything about basic experimental science or anything.

Sometimes even the researchers think it's contamination, but the story's too good for journalists to pass up. A memorable example:

"Scientists at University of Alabama sequenced a 130-nucleotide long mitochondrial DNA sequence from dinosaur vertebrae, and found that it was 100% homologous to mitochondrial DNA from turkeys. However, the scientists themselves 'remain quite sceptical of our own work' and noted that they had been consuming turkey sandwiches in the laboratory."

Even though the triceratops-turkey 'finding' was never published and eventually dismissed by the researchers, the false result was leaked onto the internet, where it can still be found today.

This RNA synthesis paper, however, has no such caveats.

it's just that without Myriad, *no one* would know that having the BRCA1 gene was a precursor to breast cancer.

Are you ^!&%! kidding? Are people so bamboozled by the FUD of pharmaceutical companies that anyone who doesn't know the truth assumes that the big, nice company must have sunk a ton of time and money into finding this gene from scratch, and without them the gene would never have been found? The truth is very, very different, and this is why Myriad is so hated in the scientific community.

BRCA1 was discovered by Mary-Claire King, now a geneticist at the University of Washington, following over a decade of government-funded basic science work that started when she was a graduate student and then junior faculty at UC Berkeley. Back then genetics was hard work - not hard like today, *really* hard. When she started no one really believed that one could even find a gene for a trait that wasn't expressed 100%, it just seemed too complicated to pick one mutation out of a huge haystack when you had to allow for some people having the bad mutation yet having a normal phenotype. Remember this is before the human genome project, before automated sequencing; she even started before PCR. Just pinning the candidate gene down to one small region of one chromosome took over a decade of work by dozens of people.

As the process came towards fruition, they first narrowed the field to a small part of chromosome 17 (paper), then made a laborious map of the region of interest (paper), and then together with a group at the NIH, they identified the actual single gene we now know as BRCA1, sequenced it, and spelled out the mutations in it that caused breast cancer in the affected families (paper1, paper2). Notice that all of this was done completely in the public eye, with all of her lab's results published immediately so as to help other researchers advance the field with her. It was good science.

But wait, where's Myriad genetics so far? What's left to do? Didn't we already "discover" BRCA1? How could anyone patent it now? All good questions. The next thing to do was to make a copy of this gene, by itself, in a test tube. This would be preliminary work for all sorts of biochemical analysis. The act of copying a gene off of a chromosome onto a separate loop of DNA in a test tube is called "cloning". Cloning is still pretty hard even today, especially for long genes like BRCA1. It can take months, especially since you usually need to copy it in bits and then glue those bits together.

What Myriad understood, and perhaps Dr. King did not, is that a cloned gene (that loop in a test tube) is patentable because it's considered "artificial", even if it's a perfect copy of a natural sequence of DNA. Myriad jumped in at this point, threw their whole company into cloning the gene and then patenting it, and did it before Dr. King or anyone else realized they were in a race. Ironically, Dr. King's lab had probably already cloned it in pieces (usually a prerequisite to sequencing) but hadn't made a complete intact copy yet, and certainly hadn't filed any patents. Myriad did none of the prior work on BRCA1. They did not come up with the idea of hereditary breast cancer. They did not do the laborious work of mapping where BRCA1 might be. They did not pinpoint the gene that was BRCA1. They did not sequence

If you want to know the study's methodology, and moreover, the study's exact results, you should have followed the links. Follow this link, then click on "supplementary information". It has all the data from the study, including what errors were found. You can come back once you have an informed opinion.

Also, don't use 'summary of views expressed on Slashdot and receiving decent moderation' as evidence of anything. That makes me want to vomit.

I am not an American but it sure would help if certain American's and their pet lobbyists stopped using psuedo-science and lies to convince small-minded gullible fools that Al Gore has the power and/or charisma to corrupt the members of every major scientific instutution on Earth. I have even had such fools here on slashdot tell me I can't point to the journals Nature or Science when talking about AGW because apparently they too are part of Al Gore's global conspiracy.

Here are some examples of the lies and lobbying I am talking about, Senator Inhofe who's list of desenting scientists, has as much cedibility as the dicovery institute list of scientists that supposedly reject evolution but that has not stopped a large number of slashdotter's from waving it around like a magic wand that somehow makes facts dissapear. Then there is the "Heartland institute" run by one Fred Singer who was also prominent in the tabacco industry's anti-science propoganda. Another site that has raised it's ugly head and that can also be related to the anti-science lobby of the tabacco companies is called IceCap, this site specializes in conflating various regions of ice all over the planet and is incapable of ditingushing the North pole from the south pole. It is run by a guy who is on the payroll at the "Science and Public Policy Institute", who are in turn funded by the "Frontiers of Freedom" which is the lobbting brain fart of yet another (ex) US senator. Wallop and Singer are mates from the tabacco industries anti-science cmapaign, the major contributors to the Frontiers of Freedom include Philip Morris and ExxonMobil.

Yep, these anti-science and anti-environment politicians/CEO's have nothing but good intentions, they publish their propoganda to protect you from "environmental whack jobs" and the scientific community who make ludicrous claims such as smoking causes cancer or that a healthy economy and a healthy environment are not mutually exclusive. They have somehow convinced a large chunk of the US that it's not them who are running scams and lying it's the scientific community under the direction of Al Gore who are the liars and scammers.

"Get real."

How about you get real, pull your head out of the sand and drop the alarmist hyperbole, nobody is putting greenpeace in charge of anything but there is a problem and the anti-enviroment/anti-science rhetoric/popoganda coming from the US over the last decade is what has perverted any attempt at a real solution.

"(Yeah, I know. This will almost certainly get modded down to oblivion by KOSdot mods, probably modded "-1 Troll" but screw it. I've got the karma to burn.)"

I have no idea who KOSdot are and I'm not a fan of greenpeace but I agree that your misguided alarmisim should be moderated into oblivion.

Never use Wikipedia as a source - use a source you can trust, such as a peer reviewed journal or a long-established encyclopedia* instead.

Oh, wait...

It always amuses me that wikipedia-bashing seems to be predicated on the faith that "traditional" dead-tree-based sources of wisdom are somehow infallible, peer reviewers are always rigorous and impartial, and if it wasn't true they wouldn't print it.

If you think that, when five typical academics peer review a paper (usually an unpaid job with a tight deadline) they double-check any the maths and stats, reproduce any experiments described, then go through every one of the citatons, pull the sources from the library and check that not only is the citation correct but that its not just an onward (and potentially circular) reference and do a literature search to see if anybody has debunked it... well, I have a bridge that you might like to buy.

The real advantage of Wikipedia, though, is that everything goes on in the public eye - you can always look at the history of the article. With a traditional publication, any shenanigans happen behind closed doors.

(* which is a terrific link because if anybody questions the findings about the accuracy of Britannica you just point out that they were published by Nature... :-) )

This, as mentioned, is a bogus study.

It wasn't a bogus study. It involved a panel of experts, including nobel prize winner Roald Hoffmann; and Michael Gordin, the Princeton expert on Mendeleev. They've published their methodology, so you can review it. Your link, on the other hand, comes from an opinionist in USA Today, who basically makes snarky remarks about the situation without actually analyzing the situation. USA Today, while a fine newspaper by some counts, has by no means established itself as an arbiter of truth and rationality.

You can check the methodology for yourself: go here and click on supplementary information and you will see the whole list of errors they found, both in Wikipedia and Britannica. Whether it turns out Wikipedia or Britannica is more reliable, it is clear Britannica is not the pinnacle of reliability they wish they were. Look at the error list: in nearly every Britannica article they found an error.

Now that you've looked at the evidence itself, what is your opinion? Where were the errors in their methods? Do you find that their conclusions were poorly founded? You have no need to rely on USA Today, you can look for yourself. Which is always much more satisfying, in my opinion.

Long proven to be a skewed small-scale study carried out by biased researchers.

Proven where? What part of the results were skewed? Why do you believe the researchers were biased? A number of people were involved, including Roald Hoffmann and Michael Gordin. Are you saying they were biased as well?

They've published a list of the errors they found, so if you disagree you can go over the list and verify. Also of note is that there was an error in nearly every Britannica article they checked.

Let's not mention this study again, other than to ridicule it.

Why? It seems to be good research. Here is Nature's rebuttal to Britannica's arguments. Also, there you will find Britannica's argument itself. Read it, I think you will agree that the study seems to have been performed well.

Whoops, messed up my link. Here is a study someone did on the reliability of Wikipedia. Kind of interesting.

A case study tells you nothing about prevalence in the community.

Your "1/4000" prevalence estimate dates back to 1960. You're going to have to do better than that. Especially because the prevalence of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disease in the community is around 1/100.

Vardy et al say The findings supported a model of LSD psychosis as a drug-induced schizophreniform reaction in persons vulnerable to both substance abuse and psychosis.. That is to say, among a vulnerable segment of the population, with disorders of GABA metabolism, many drugs can induce an above-average pseudo-delerium, and that these delerious states are indistinguishable from each other, and from schizophreniform disorders.

Soyka et al illustrate a high concordance between high dosages of alcohol and schizophrenia. Do we then assume, naively, that alcohol induces schizophrenia?

Soyka et plus al further indicate that schizophrenia and schizphreniform disease is associated with multifactorial drug use. LSD is not a primary or singular etiological agent here.

Goswami et al present a large body of evidence that people with schizophrenia or even family members with latent schizphreniform tendencies self medicate" in a manner usually considered polydrug abuse. Again, do you really think that the polydrugs are causing the GABA disarray in their cortexes?

To date, the only drugs that have been proven to induce schizophrenia in humans, and schizphrenia-like symptoms in lab animals, and to increase the symptoms of schizophrenia in people already afflicted with it are the NMDA receptor antagonists such as ketamine or PCP. These probably induce their chronic effects through an oxidative cascade. No similar mechanism has been presented, much less demonstrated, for any specific, putative effects of LSD on neural development.

Finding fraud in China: As Chinese research expands, who is looking out for faked results?

I don't want to come off as more racist than I already do or anything, but the last few miraculous discoveries in China were faked.

e.g.
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v6/n10/abs/nmat2007.html

Is anyone trying to test this method of tracking flu outbreaks by watching search engine result trends to see if it really works in this case?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7232/full/nature07634.html

Or "Miniscule Mammoth". Descriptive, yet confusing.

Not all that confusing. (Not a real PDF unless you pay for more than the abstract.)

There are already several project to scan and/or make available ancient texts [see, for example,
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ or http://www.archive.org/ , not to say of the more specialist sites like http://www.etana.org/ (for ancient near-east history) or the impressive Posner Collection at
http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/ ]
However, most of these (with the remarkable exception of gallica and cmu)
  mostly present late XIX
early XX century editions of the texts. This is good, but I feel it is definitely interesting to get also some "primary texts" online, which is what this project is doing [I don't quite like that la "Description de l'Egypte" is under 8000 BC- 499 AD, rather than 1800 AD - 1849 AD: the books are ABOUT Egyptian Antiquities, yet they were written after the Napoleonic expedition!]

I was going to complain about the need to use wget to get the books to browse off line, yet I have just seen that there actually is an option to download the texts as pdf files (alas not djvu); this is really a nice surprise; actually, I was expecting the donating libraries to try their utmost to prevent this [not that it would ever works]

I would say that this is really a worthy project.

P.S.
  There is a small editorial here as well, but I don't know if it requires subscription to be read:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090420/full/news.2009.377.html

There are a lot of negatives when it comes to nuclear power but I am convinced that we needed to cut our carbon emissions yesterday

I agree carbon emissions need to be cut, but I don't think nuclear does it. Here's an article that questions whether nuclear power cuts emissions. As that one does, this one points out mining and processing of uranium emits CO2 as well.

the coal industry is going to take advantage of loopholes or changes so that (a) they get to go on polluting, (b) the legislators will act like they did something

I'm with you there.

Falcon

Actually, people ARE designed to run - even marathon distances. There is a paper published in Nature that described how humans actually evolved to be endurance runners. I can only link to the abstract, but you can find news stories about the paper using your favorite search engine.

I think the biggest reason people believe running is bad for you is the number of injuries that occur when people try to do too much, too fast. They figure they "used to run", and walk around every day, so how bad could it be? It can be really bad. Imagine you hadn't done any stretching for years, and decide to lock your knees and jerk down to touch your toes. Now do it 1000 times. (People generally run more than 1 step.) Would you be surprised if you pulled, or even tore, your muscles? Some people would. Some would even claim that stretching is bad for you. The better answer would be you need to slowly progress towards your goal.

So, you get people who realize they are out of shape and want to make a grand, bold statement about their newfound desire to be healthy - so they sign up for a marathon. They start training really hard, get injured, say running is bad for you and don't want to run ever again. The problem is that it takes time to properly train for a marathon. A LOT of time. If you don't run at all, it takes about 10 weeks to work up to running a 5k (3.1 miles) and that's training 30 minutes, 5 days a week. Once you are capable of the 5k, you can start a beginner marathon training program that takes about 16 weeks to build up to a marathon. Generally there is only 1 long run a week which might take less than an hour the first week but will eventually take 3-6 hours as the mileage increases. Most people don't want to put in that much time, look for shortcuts, and end up hurt.

So don't blame running. It is an intense activity and needs to be approached carefully, but isn't inherently dangerous.

One of the problems is that the peer reviewer is supposed to be an expert in the papers field (ex: climate science), rather than the methodology used (ex: statistics)

A popular example is Mann's flawed implementation of Principle Component Analysis, peer reviewed and then published by one of the very same journals that you are trying to use for your arguement-from-authority fallacy.

Lets examine what Mann was doing:

AlgorihmDescription.txt

Thats from one of the journals you cited, so you trust that it is an accurate summary of what he did, right?

I certainly do not think that an expert in EARTH SCIENCES should be doing that stuff without supervision from an expert in what he is actualy doing.

..and as it turns out, he screwed it all up fairly badly but got published anyways.

As far as that ice data... here we have an error margin thats over 50% of the magnitude of the estimated anomaly, and thats assuming they did things right to begin with.

I still don't see evidence that a statistics expert was involved. If you have some, please enlighten.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7236/pdf/nature07841.pdf

If you have access to nature.

From glancing at the article, this is not a replacement for blood yet, but they are moving in the right direction.

If you don't like the dumbed down version, the actual article can be found here. It is quite readable.

And it is a crappy summary - as usual. Violence is not even mentioned in the article.

pretty much anything that can cause cell-to-cell fusion at a neutral pH can do this.
http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v6/n11/abs/nrmicro1972.html
The initial stages of animal virus infection are generally described as the binding of free virions to permissive target cells followed by entry and replication. Although this route of infection is undoubtedly important, many viruses that are pathogenic for humans, including HIV-1, herpes simplex virus and measles, can also move between cells without diffusing through the extracellular environment. Cell-to-cell spread not only facilitates rapid viral dissemination, but may also promote immune evasion and influence disease. This Review discusses the various mechanisms by which viruses move directly between cells and the implications of this for viral dissemination and pathogenesis.

Scientific consensus is not evidence of anything. Whenever anyone says, "you should believe this because there is consensus!" you know immediately that there's some bad science going on. Not even the paper you link to draws that conclusion, because, well, it's not a valid conclusion.

A few years ago I entered into a correspondence with a researching psychologist. He told me explicitly that he had stopped doing research in a certain area because of what other people thought; it was too politically charged of a research area, so he stopped researching it. He didn't want to risk his career on that point, when there are other interesting things to research.

As far as papers that go against the standard idea of global warming, they do exist. Here is an article, and here is a non-paid summary of the article. Notice that the natural conclusion is that global warming is more related to aerosols than CO2. However, the author doesn't make that point, he instead says, "This will add more fuel to the debate as to what's causing the increase in sea surface temperature." He would have fallen into the neutral territory.

Global Warming is an area that is charged politically right now. Any careful scientist will be wary of making a strong statement either way, and will instead present the evidence, and let you draw your own conclusion.

Don't rely on consensus.

I found one. In less than two minutes on the internet, here is your paper. It shows that a lot of the warming in the tropical north atlantic is mainly due to a reduction of atmospheric aerosols, not an increase in carbon dioxide. Here is a summary of that article, in case you don't want to pay the subscription.

Of course it doesn't completely 'disprove' global warming, it would take more than one paper to prove that global warming is happening, it will take more than one paper to show it's not. All this paper is doing is trying to get closer to the truth of what's happening.

I'm wondering if you've ever actually read a peer reviewed scientific journal, and I seriously doubt you've ever done peer review. The reason I doubt this is because in my time, I've stumbled across articles that are opposing the standard view of global warming without even looking.

Note that papers like this come up all the time, they just tend not to make the news.

I think it is happening! Though do you read about this in the media? NOOOOO because we all associate climate change with warming not change!

Within the last few years papers seem to indicate that the threat of the Atlantic conveyor shutting down isn't as high as once expected, and that the effects would likely not be as severe as expected. There is e.g. "Climate change: A sea change", but you need a Nature subscription to read it. Anyway, personally I'm not as worried about that particular effect of global warming anymore.

You also seem to be unaware that the internet has sources for every piece of idiocy

No, I am well aware of that

providing sources doesn't settle anything

I disagree with that statement. If the original poster were to actually respond with sources (though I'm not holding my breath), it would show the source of their opinion. Often just seeing the domain of their sources tells a lot; if they cited these idiots or these other idiots as sources then we know they aren't thinking much about the actual science. On the other hand if they cited an academic or scientific source to support their claims, then there would be reason to believe the poster actually does think before spouting off rhetoric.

As it is, the poster is essentially just gossipping. They have provided nothing but noise, and I am asking them to support their statements (if they can).

Google says that you're wrong, and the journal Nature agrees with them.

Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data

That duck analogy is cute though.

These studies are actually about as unrelated as you can get. Both are trying to decode a parameter from fMRI BOLD response (as do hundreds of other studies), but they are looking at very different brain areas and different tasks. There are hundreds of rodent electrophysiology studies showing that specific hippocampal cells respond when the rodent is in a specific position in its cage. There is even a study showing spatially selective cells in the human hippocampus (Ekstrom et al., 2003).

The really remarkable thing about this study is that they have managed to find spatially selective voxels in an fMRI. Electrophysiology has provided similar results, but records from a region hundreds of thousands of times smaller and requires invasive surgery. Results here are patient-specific; there is no spatial map in the hippocampus, and place cells (or "place voxels," in this case) are located in different places for each subject.