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Bypassing the layers of blogs, here's the actual paper. But it costs $32 to read more than the abstract.

This is an application of superparamagnetism. Paramagnetism is ordinarily a weak phenomenon, but there are some new materials for which this effect is much stronger.

It's too early to tell if this is useful. Right now, it's in the category of "minor development in materials science overpromoted as a major breakthrough". It might turn out to have some relevance to MRI imaging or disk drives, both of which rely on fine-scale magnetic effects.

The electromotive force (e.m.f.) predicted by Faraday's law reflects the forces acting on the charge, â"e, of an electron moving through a device or circuit, and is proportional to the time derivative of the magnetic field. This conventional e.m.f. is usually absent for stationary circuits and static magnetic fields. There are also forces that act on the spin of an electron; it has been recently predicted that, for circuits that are in part composed of ferromagnetic materials, there arises an e.m.f. of spin origin even for a static magnetic field. This e.m.f. can be attributed to a time-varying magnetization of the host material, such as the motion of magnetic domains in a static magnetic field, and reflects the conversion of magnetic to electrical energy. Here we show that such an e.m.f. can indeed be induced by a static magnetic field in magnetic tunnel junctions containing zinc-blende-structured MnAs quantum nanomagnets. The observed e.m.f. operates on a timescale of approximately 10^2-10^3 seconds and results from the conversion of the magnetic energy of the superparamagnetic MnAs nanomagnets into electrical energy when these magnets undergo magnetic quantum tunnelling. As a consequence, a huge magnetoresistance of up to 100,000 per cent is observed for certain bias voltages. Our results strongly support the contention that, in magnetic nanostructures, Faraday's law of induction must be generalized to account for forces of purely spin origin. The huge magnetoresistance and e.m.f. may find potential applications in high sensitivity magnetic sensors, as well as in new active devices such as 'spin batteries'.

Readers with subscriptions can see the whole paper.

You've seen little advance because you're not reading much on the matter I think

this for instance

or that

or maybe this

In short we are within a factor 10 of achieving ignition, meaning a long, self-sustained fusion reaction outputting more energy than is expended to maintain it. In 1968 we were within a factor of 1000 of achieving this.

The ITER deadline for achieving his is 2020.

"As far as I know, the Arctic is a pretty deep ocean, why not survey the ice from the bottom?"

Expense. However there are some historical records from the sonar on military subs.

Oh, and there's a news story linked from Nature's front page on the topic:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090227/full/458019a.html

It also links to a second paper at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature07864.html

Oh, and there's a news story linked from Nature's front page on the topic:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090227/full/458019a.html

It also links to a second paper at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature07864.html

Not without being a university student (or something like that)...

However, the abstract is available here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature07863.html

It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide.

You're not contributing to the reasoned discussion here.

Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.

A large amount of science disagrees with you. (And by the way, it's more like 388 ppm today.)

There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band.

This is false, and is directly contradicted by the line-by-line radiative transfer codes which calculate this absorption (e.g., MODTRAN), as well as actual spectral measurements of increasing IR saturation in the CO2 bands (e.g., here).

In particular, this response to another poster is also false: "The re-radiated infra-red radiation would mostly be outside of those spectra and would either radiate out into space or radiate into the earth. Your conceptual model about radiation bouncing around between CO2 molecules in the atmosphere does not agree with the physics of absorption." Molecules radiate infrared according to their temperature. If they absorb IR from molecules of a similar temperature, then the re-radiated IR will be in the same band as the absorbed IR. Since nearby molecules are generally of a similar temperature, "radiation bouncing around among CO2 molecules" does happen. That is, in fact, what leads to the exponential temperature-forcing relationship you mention: partial absorption by nearby molecules radiating in similar bands as they absorb. Which, again, is verified by actually calculating the radiative transfer. There is a vertical thermal gradient, so eventually the high cold layers are passing most of what makes it out of the warm lower layers, but by that time some more of the outgoing IR has already been re-reradiated back to the surface.

The best estimate is that a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from the pre-industrial value (290 to 580 ppm) would increase global temperatures by 1.2C.

(Pre-industrial is usually taken to be 280 ppm.)

Yes, the forcing/concentration relationship is logarithmic due to partial saturation of the absorption bands, and yes, CO2 doubling leads to an unamplified ~1.2 C of warming by itself. However, the net feedbacks in the climate system are positive, according to theory, instrumental observations, and paleo data regarding the climate sensitivity. That increases the climate sensitivity from 1.2 C to somewhere between 2-4.5 C.

Based on our current CO2 output it will take us another 100 years to reach 580 ppm, by which time we will have probably exhausted our fossil fuels anyway, if we believe the gloomy forecasts about petroleum reserves.

Ha! Not even. "Current CO2 output" isn't going to stay the same; it's been continually increasing. Under high emissions scenarios we could pass 800-900 ppm this century. Don't forget that petroleum is not the only source of fossil fuels: coal is far more abundant. Power plants use fossil fuels too, more than the transportation sector. And if we really want to go digging in the sands and shales, there's probably several thousand ppm worth in there, although it would take a few centuries to exhaust all that.

So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun.

Solar irradiance trends and cosmic ray trends disagree profoundly with the modern warming period, as I'm sure has been pointed

Michele Rucci's lab figured out a while back that microsaccades improve our perception of high spatial frequency stimuli.. here's the article.

The Nature Podcast -which, by the way, all of you nerds should listen to if you do not already do- covered this story some three weeks ago. They say Titan. Their reasons are, roughly:

* Although Europa is our best bet for an independent origin of life -life on Mars may share causes with life of Earth- studying this would involve intimate measuring below the surface. Drilling in Europa, though, may be a century, and not just two or three decades, away.
* A Titan mission, although unlikely to find life, may more easily and more thoroughly study the surface of the satellite. This has to do with Titan's atmosphere, and the possibility of launching a hot-air balloon to map the surface.
* The third reason: hot-air ballons are cool and romantic. Also, we could for the first time devise a floating lander. More fun and romanticism. Floating on lakes may be a one-off, but ballooning may be useful for many other cellestial bodies in the Solar System.

So, Titan.

I suppose I did read your

this

broadly.

To properly address your point then, I offer you some examples where average scientifically-minded people think of evolution as a Darwin-centric idea, or where Darwin is a synonym for natural selection:

• Darwin Fish bumper stickers
• The infamous Darwin Awards
• The term Social Darwinism
• National Geographic's obsession with Darwin for the man's 200th birthday anniversary, including tonight's show Darwin's Secret Notebooks
• Various articles published in respected science journals like Nature, such as Kevin Padian's Darwin's Enduring Legacy, stating that "perhaps no individual has had such a sweeping influence on so many facets of social and intellectual life as Charles Darwin."
• The annual "international recognition of science and humanity," called Darwin Day Celebration

These are just a few examples of how Darwin is used to encapsulate the entire field of evolutionary biology. Sure, professional biology scientists may not use Darwin's name so casually, but is there any wonder why average people who support the theory of evolution also appear to idolize Darwin?

http://www.researchportal.be/en/projects.pdf?classifications=B330_iwDisciplineCode&page=0&ordering=title&descending=false&itemsPerPage=50

The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM,55Ma) marks the onset of the Eocene and is characterised by a sudden worldwide temperature increase of ~5oC, lasting for ~100.000 years. The release of large quantities of methane from the seafloor probably played a key role in this event, but the primary cause is unclear.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7132/abs/nature05591.html

The Eocene and Oligocene epochs (approx 55 to 23 million years ago) comprise a critical phase in Earth history. An array of geological records supported by climate modeling indicates a profound shift in global climate during this interval, from a state that was largely free of polar ice caps to one in which ice sheets on Antarctica approached their modern size. However, the early glaciation history of the Northern Hemisphere is a subject of controversy.

If we didn't have those blasted ice caps hanging over our heads, the modern era of global warming wouldn't be half so terrifying, and we could better focus our energies on fleeing the fauna.

> It appears that it also mentions a power supply and a 41% efficiency. That makes it not a perpetual motion machine.

If you truly want to know the physics behind what's wrong with this thing, read Nature (subscription required).

Frankly, they might as well have patented a hover car powered by Mr. Fusion and a flux capacitor, but that would have been more realistic.

That said, it does explain why you can be so oblivious to the flaws in the system when you don't immediately realize that this entire "invention" is pure BS.

Guess what the latest photos of the Sun show - NO sunspots.

Temperatures have also been going down, not up recently.

I tie an onion to my belt loop and I have never had piles.

Analogy time. If you're trying to optimize code for speed you want to work on the region of code where you're spending the most time in already. It's the same as with temperature on the earth. The biggest input is the Sun. If the Sun cools down, as it apparently does periodically (periodic ice ages are fairly well documented and proven), then things get colder.

If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that.

Sorry to break it to you, but you are not the first to consider this. This has been well studied, and the conclusion is that whilst the sun may well have some effect on the climate, it hasn't had a significant effect on the global warming phenomenon. Here's a link to a Nature paper, if you want to read the research:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7108/abs/nature05072.html

I'll leave it to someone else to provide a car analogy.

OK, you're in a car with a group of friends and it's getting uncomfortably hot. Some of you say the extra heat is because of the running engine, others say the sun is producing more heat. One of your friends has a PhD in physics, does the sums and works out the extra heat is from the engine, and also points out that the weather hasn't changed. Another friend suggests that whilst working out the cause is interesting, the solution is the same: opening a window. SL Baur decides not to believe in the science, decides against opening a window, and suggests trying to apply a thermostat to the sun instead.

No nuclear nation failed to detonate its first implosion device.

Well, maybe one.

All externally-visible indicators (i.e., what you can see from seismography or other remote sensing, rather than watching the actual test instrumentation) were pretty unimpressive for any full-fledged nuclear detonation. Either it was faked (not that easy to do) or a fizzle.

And a fizzle is exactly the kind of failure that you have if you mis-engineer the tamper, the containment, or even the explosive lens. I.E., why you can't just run down to the local home improvement superstore and whip up everything except the fissile.

Getting the plutonium is hard; it requires a pretty large infrastructure investment in breeder reactors, centrifuges, etc., and also takes a long time. Getting the rest of the bomb is "just engineering", but it's very precise engineering with some very specific critical knowledge which is not generally available (and takes some serious experimentation to figure out for yourself).

BTW, I like the quote in the Wikipedia "fizzle" article:

This North Korean debut test was weaker than all other countries' initial tests by a factor of 20,[8] and considered possibly the worst initial test in history.[9]"

[8]# ^ Todd Crowell."A deadly kind of fizzle." Asia Times Online. Retrieved on 2008-05-04.
[9]# ^ Staff Writer. "Special report -The fizzle heard around the world." Nature.com. Retrieved on 2008-05-04.

The presence of this deletion in many Indian populations with varied geographical and ancestral backgrounds raises the question of how geographically widespread it is outside India. We therefore also analyzed 63 world population samples, comprising 2,085 indigenous individuals from 26 countries including all five continents. The 25-bp deletion was observed in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia, (all heterozygotes) but was absent from other samples. Thus, the deletion is a common variant in individuals from South Asia, present in Southeast Asia, but undetectable elsewhere (Fig. 3 and Supplementary Table 5 online).

The supplementary materials give the sample sizes for each of the ethnic groups that were sampled and the number of deletion carriers. Most of the individual samples are small, but in the aggregate they do strongly suggest that the deletion is practically non-existent outside of South Asia and a few neighboring areas.

This does raise the question of how the media got this 1% prevalence estimate, unless I completely missed it in the article. In general, media outlets don't report the contents of peer-reviewed articles, they report the contents of press releases that accompany (or precede) the articles.

I think the reason for this is that the capsule attracts the immune cells first, and only later releases the chemical that signals a threat, see the abstract of the real article: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat2357.html So by injecting the capsule early (and by using a very aggressive form of cancer) they are able to have a more dramatic result since the immune system cells are already present at the location in large numbers.

I would want to read a real paper on it in a journal.

If you're that fussy about your sources, at least read down to the bottom of the article to see if they have citations. Like this one:

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat2357.html

Congratulations, a well reasoned and genuinely skeptical post. Your self-confesed ignorance also implies you are intellectually honest but unfortunately it has let you down in a few places.

There is no consensus: just plain wrong

"So far I have not heard an expert on either side of the debate come up with convincing arguments to explain the other side's evidence." - Try here or here. There are very slim picking on the other side of the fence, but here is a list of individual scientists that disagree with all or part of the consensus.

"The problem with global warming (as I understand it) is that there is conflicting evidence as to the cause." - Multiple uncertainties are catered for by the error bars in this graph of known forcings. There is generally more uncertainty and possibly unknowns in the +ve/-ve feedbacks caused by these forcings although some such as water vapour are well known.

To cut a long story short, humans are NOT responsible for ALL the changes (eg solar flux in the graph above) but we are responsible for most of it. Most so called "skeptics" I have read over the last 25yrs or so subscribe to the "single cause" idea and build their strawmen by painting climatologists with the same brush.

Note that the list of skeptics link also defines the "the consensus" and is worth quoting...

The scientific consensus was summarized in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as follows:
1. The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 C since the late 19th century, and 0.17 C per decade in the last 30 years.
2.There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities", in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.
3.If greenhouse gas emissions continue the warming will also continue, with temperatures projected to increase by 1.4 C to 5.8 C between 1990 and 2100. Accompanying this temperature increase will be increases in some types of extreme weather and a projected sea level rise of 9 cm to 88 cm, excluding "uncertainty relating to ice dynamical changes in the West Antarctic ice sheet". On balance the impacts of global warming will be significantly negative, especially for larger values of warming.

Of the 31 papers not written by El Naschie in the most recent issue of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, at least 11 are related to his theories and include 58 citations of his work in the journal.

And it's actually a theoretical-physics journal, with a relatively high impact factor of 3.025 for 2007.

Ignore idiots like him and read peer reviewed journals and abstracts before basing your own judgment.

As I and others have pointed out below, your citations do not refute the book's claims concerning acupuncture or anything else and you are the one making a fool of yourself. Perhaps if you'd taken your own advice and at least read a more reliable book review: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7197/full/453856a.html you wouldn't have made such absurd accusations against Ernst & Singh but there really is no excuse for this.

Yes, water vapor is the major green house gas only being augmented by carbon dioxide. This just points out that most of the people in the global warming camp know about as much real science as most kindergarten classes.

Normally I try to be more civil, but this calls for a "Hey dumbass, Ken Caldeira has forgotten more about climate science than you will ever know".

In particular, he is well aware of the greenhouse effect of water vapor. See here for more discussion.

A more sensible fellow was interviewed on TV recently who said that most of our climate change is driven by the Sun

Why is he more sensible? Because it supports the conclusions you want to reach? In particular, why is this fellow's claim more sensible given the large amount of evidence that most of the modern global warming is not driven by the Sun (e.g., here, here).

and that the best way for us to spend our capital in regards to climate change is to learn to adapt

We're going to have to adapt regardless, because we're already committed to some anthropogenic climate change even if there were no natural change, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't mitigate the problem. It's less expensive to adapt if you have a less extreme climate to adapt to. A real solution, as noted by pretty much every economist who works in this area, is a combination of mitigation, adaptation, and technological R&D. Read Nordhaus's latest book for a good lay overview of the policy problem.

The climate is composed of myriad systems that we still haven't enumerated, cannot properly inter-relate (since we don't know them all) and already contain enough energy that we couldn't drive them in a particular direction if we wanted.

We can't dial in an exact climate state, but we can drive the climate in different directions. We're already doing it with CO2. Reducing CO2 will reduce and slow the warming due to CO2. This is not a difficult concept. The system doesn't respond instantaneously, and it's not realistic to completely halt emissions, but we can slow them to mitigate the resulting climate change.

if somehow we did manage to force a change, the system would likely react in a way we wouldn't be able to foresee

It is not really that hard to figure out that returning CO2 emissions to closer to pre-industrial levels will direct the Earth system to closer to a pre-industrial climate.

I mean awesome in the original meaning of the word, not the current overused teen lingo nonsense. The animated 3D X-rays of the ancient device that enabled the reconstruction are particularly geekworthy. http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/antikythera/index.html

Forgot this link http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7204/abs/nature07130.html which is more for the older geeks among us.
Much more scholarly.

Ok, so they are going to use 200KW for 10 minutes or about 34kWhrs. These guys make a system that is probably currently the best bet for power density vs orbital safety, the EEV version has 1306 Wh and weighs 15.6kg. At 80% discharge that's about 1KWhr. That means that you need ~530Kg of batteries, at $10K/lb that comes out to $12M to launch the batteries for this thing. I was going to suggest ultracapacitors but it turns out they suck for energy density, on the order of less than 6Wh/Kg! Reading on wikipedia (yeah, I know) Lithium Ion batteries with nanowires achieve almost 15kWHrs/Kg (.75 * 4,2000 mAh/g @ a nominal 3.6V per cell) so developing them would save almost the entire launch cost AND get us better batteries for all sorts of terrestrial applications!

Has Griffin said anything yet about this particular quote of his?

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/12/transition_team_trouble_at_nas.html

If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar. Because it means you donâ(TM)t trust what I say is under the hood.

A Berkeley group has already reported this in Nature using similar methods: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/abs/nature06713.html)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9524256?dopt=Abstract
http://www.nature.com/onc/journal/v22/n48/full/1207139a.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WWY-45K1406-T&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=b88d0fc0f181cae87b8a1bd7686a8caf
http://books.google.com/books?id=7NAvFJ-oDn0C&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=p52+oncogenesis&source=web&ots=f9fRAXEbkc&sig=Kdl7bxvWMFM18E2deunfget71ds&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA74,M1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/25300q641u238965/

Note that in the above papers, Epstein-Barr explicitly subverts the P52 mechanism to its own ends (which is an interesting result).

Chemical Engineers are fascinating to me. My wife is a ChemE, and got her PhD from one of the labs which did this work, but her specialization is cancer therapeutics and protein modification. To have that scientific breadth in the same lab seems crazy to me.

The actual paper can be found at Nature Nano, it's a few months old at this point. For all of you jealous researchers who claim to have already done this, it has all the usual citations. If you're lucky (and published), maybe you got one!

Published in Nature's Nano journal: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n9/abs/nnano.2008.206.html

It doesn't need to be injected -- inhaling oxytocin spray makes people more likely to hand over their money to a trustee to invest.

This joins the 10^122 article published some time ago about strange coincidences between basic physics constants. Very interesting... almost in a numerological point of view !

I believe this is the paper, from Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7137/full/nature05678.html

Subscription required, but it should be accessible from most university networks.

Also Lamarckian style, or at least very flexible in the short term inheritance
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v14/n2/full/5201567a.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

I find the article to be more of a review of past work than actual news. It covers several topics that anyone could read about by picking up a recent biology textbook (siRNA, the ribosome, alternative splicing, etc). I'm surprised this is on the front page of slashdot, while Nature dedicated almost an entire issue regarding the future of DNA technology, including the current state-of-the-art on personalized genomes. Now that is news for nerds.

Speaking of earmarks, Palin says "sometimes these dollars go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France... I kid you not!" ( Palin speach).
Nature magazine studied the origins of this earmark and it seems to be pertaining to olive fruit fly research in order to safeguard California's Olive Oil industry (link between stories) and so perhaps collaborating with France is what she disagrees with? France was conducting this type of research and it seems the money was spent to fund this research abroad. Regardless, she speaks of fruit fly research as though it was completely ridiculous... But of course, genetic research may be against her beliefs.

You said, "... you're a drooling ideologue..."

Someone disagrees with you, and you engage in a personal attack? It's a fact, you are justifying a system in which a manufacturer can keep fraud secret.

You said "... hundreds of drugs are approved every year and only a handful turn out to have unknown risks..." [my emphasis]

The February 2008 article in the highly respected journal Nature, 2007 FDA drug approvals: a year of flux says, "The US FDA approved 17 new molecular entities (NMEs) and 2 biologic license applications (BLAs) in 2007, the lowest number recorded since 1983." That article includes a chart showing drug approvals for every year since 1996.

An August 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal, Sick Patients Need Cutting-Edge Drugs says "The FDA approved just 16 new drugs last year, and is on pace to approve only 18 this year. That's down from a high of 53 in 1996 and 39 in 1997." That article says more drugs should be approved. But that is the position of a very ignorant person, who doesn't understand the widespread sloppiness of drug development.

Read the November 23, 2006 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, to which I linked above, Dangerous Deception - Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects. That and many, many other articles show that drug fraud is common.

The November 23, 2006 NEJM article, Observational Studies of Drug Safety - Aprotinin and the Absence of Transparency says, "The full safety profile of a new drug is rarely known at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Most drug-development programs designed for treatments of symptomatic indications are underpowered to detect any increased risk of rare drug reactions or change in background event rates attributable to the drug. Large, post-marketing, randomized, controlled trials provide robust data on drug safety but may be subject to multiple sources of bias."

Again, "The full safety profile of a new drug is rarely known at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)", and only 16 drugs were approved in 2007. [my emphasis]

The evidence shows that the FDA is correct when it doesn't approve many drugs. The vast majority of clinical trials, experiments on people, show no benefit whatsoever. That's because new drugs are usually proposed based on wild guessing, not because of truly scientific investigation.

A large percentage of people in the U.S. are drug enthusiasts. They shouldn't be. Drugs, even ones that are considered beneficial by everyone, usually have negative side-effects.

You said, "... you're a drooling ideologue..."

Someone disagrees with you, and you engage in a personal attack? It's a fact, you are justifying a system in which a manufacturer can keep fraud secret.

You said "... hundreds of drugs are approved every year and only a handful turn out to have unknown risks..." [my emphasis]

The February 2008 article in the highly respected journal Nature, 2007 FDA drug approvals: a year of flux says, "The US FDA approved 17 new molecular entities (NMEs) and 2 biologic license applications (BLAs) in 2007, the lowest number recorded since 1983." That article includes a chart showing drug approvals for every year since 1996.

An August 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal, Sick Patients Need Cutting-Edge Drugs says "The FDA approved just 16 new drugs last year, and is on pace to approve only 18 this year. That's down from a high of 53 in 1996 and 39 in 1997." That article says more drugs should be approved. But that is the position of a very ignorant person, who doesn't understand the widespread sloppiness of drug development.

Read the November 23, 2006 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, to which I linked above, Dangerous Deception - Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects. That and many, many other articles show that drug fraud is common.

The November 23, 2006 NEJM article, Observational Studies of Drug Safety - Aprotinin and the Absence of Transparency says, "The full safety profile of a new drug is rarely known at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Most drug-development programs designed for treatments of symptomatic indications are underpowered to detect any increased risk of rare drug reactions or change in background event rates attributable to the drug. Large, post-marketing, randomized, controlled trials provide robust data on drug safety but may be subject to multiple sources of bias."

Again, "The full safety profile of a new drug is rarely known at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)", and only 16 drugs were approved in 2007. [my emphasis]

The evidence shows that the FDA is correct when it doesn't approve many drugs. The vast majority of clinical trials, experiments on people, show no benefit whatsoever. That's because new drugs are usually proposed based on wild guessing, not because of truly scientific investigation.

A large percentage of people in the U.S. are drug enthusiasts. They shouldn't be. Drugs, even ones that are considered beneficial by everyone, usually have negative side-effects.

The evidence I've seen suggests that excessive MDMA use decreases the density of serotonin receptors/transporters but not cell bodies. I don't think the effect is visible at doses relevant to most recreational users. Consider this letter to Nature regarding the risks of using MDMA in human research:

Even more important for the human case is a study by Insel et al. (1989) performed in monkeys. This group found that administration of 2.5 mg/kg of MDMA twice daily for four consecutive days in rhesus monkey did not reduce the density of 5-HT uptake sites, although 5-HT and 5-HIAA were decreased by 50-70%. However, 10 mg/kg given twice daily for 4 days decreased both the number of 5-HT uptake sites and 5-HT levels.

That's 2-3 times a normal recreational dose of MDMA, twice a day, for 4 days straight. That's a lot of MDMA, and no damage as measured by serotonin reuptake sites could be observed. So it's not as simple as causing "brain damage, which increases with every dose." This is what I mean by scientific fraud. People taking extreme results, and applying them to real world situations that don't even come close to real world situations. And then they make public policy based on those unrealistic results. Here's more:

Finally, it is noteworthy that changes in the number of 5-HT uptake sites in sensu stricto do not only indicate a loss or overall damage of 5-HT terminals,but also include adaptive modulations of 5-HT reuptake sites. In fact, subchronic (less than a month)administration of 5-HT transporter ligands like antidepressants (SSRIs, TCAs and tianeptine) has also be reported to reduce 5-HT transporter mRNA and radioligand binding to 5-HT transporter (see e.g., Lesch et al.1993). Hence more research is needed to address the question how to interpret discrete reductions of 5-HT ligand binding in human brain.

Translation:Uptake sites may be downregulated, instead of destroyed. The same kind of downregulation has been seen with SSRIs, and we have no problem giving them to humans. Trying to pass off receptor downregulation as "brain damage" is still more fraud.

The innovation going on behind the scenes is trending to make the pay-per-view technical journals less relevant precisely because of their exclusionary nature which relies upon a monopoly on the accepted forms of professional communication.

Ever consider the concept of signal to noise? Sure, you can find almost anything on the Internet if you look hard enough. Sometimes, I just want to find what I'm looking for, organized in a coherent fashion and perhaps backed up by some organization with a real telephone number.

Or just somebody with some toehold to reality.

So I just saw this, the actual article isn't out yet. Although it is further proof of your point, I think you would be interested in it

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/124974.php

And another one

http://www.nature.com/stemcells/2008/0810/081009/full/stemcells.2008.132.html

Basically you can get HES like cells from human testis. No treatments to come out of it of course, since it was just recently discovered, and unfortunately wouldn't work in females, but still important.

It's worth pointing out that this is another example of HES cells being used in valuable research.

There's an informative video in Nature about the phenomenom and the experiment: http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/x-rays/

They even show how to take x-rays using scotch tape.

In Biochemistry 'The Great Pentaretraction' is along those very lines. One swallow might doesn't make a summer of course. Here's another swallow (as it were).. these guys are real fraudsters, the first group were simply relentlessly incompetent.

Given that most recent studies have determined conservatives to be coward, violent and unadaptable as well as uncaring, and even kind of stupid, being messy doesn't seem that bad in comparison.

No one broke the monkeys' spines. The article states that the spinal neurons innervating the wrist muscles were temporarily blocked using a local anesthetic. What's particularly amazing about this study is that the monkeys were able to quickly learn to control their wrists using the cortical neurons that the computer was monitoring, even if those neurons were not involved in control of the wrist before paralysis.

I'm a friend of the paper's author and am certain that neither the researchers nor any sane review board would have allowed monkeys to be permanently injured to perform this study; it just wouldn't be necessary.

I'm not a physicist so I can't answer your question, sorry. Maybe the info below will help...

Original press release about the image:
http://soi.stanford.edu/press/agu05-98/

Nature abstract from the 28 May 1998 issue (full text requires payment, or you can go to the library!):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v393/n6683/abs/393317a0.html

My reading of the abstract [1] indicates that they have found 5 SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) on chromosome 20p11 that show a linkage to baldness. There is NO mention of a *gene* or genes in that region (though one could presumably look up candidates in one of the human genome browsers). If the genes are of unknown function (or worse yet are gene regulatory regions, or siRNAs or still something else which is not a classical gene) then it will still take a fair amount of work (years unless we get very lucky) linking that chromosome region to the biochemistry involved.

If you are "approving" topics for science.slashdot.org you at should at least know enough about the topic (genomics, gene defects, etc.) to tell when a submission has folded, spindled or mutilated the actual science involved.

[1] http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ng.228.html

The actual journal article can be obtained here

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmeth.1256.html

As always, it might require a subscription to verify this, but there are no attached video files. The authors apperantly have not put the pictures together into movie files, which is strange. Anyway, this is one case where the summary is not at fault: there simply are no videos.

I think you'll get an answer as soon as you define *thinking*

Yep, you sure will. I brought up some similar ideas a while ago (browse down through that thread).

I'm pleased to note that I've come a bit further on defining intelligence ("thinking") since then: The difference is whatever separates the great ape's cerebral cortex from the rest of the mammal brains; it's bound to be something to do with the differences in myelination of the neurons in the CC compared to the rest of the brain. How that contributes to consciousness, I don't know.

Incidentially, the proposed model for AI that I linked to here would not work because the odds are staked against you. It took millions of years to get people to the point where we could really think; and to attempt to randomly generate that (and hope for success) has about the same odds as a nuclear missile suddenly turning into a bowl of petunias. We must start with something really, really simple, make that work, reverse engineer the human brain (we're making progress), and then try to recreate that using the simple neuron model we had developed.

Anyone want to throw me a grant so I can quit my day job?

Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail for the first confirmed discovery of an extrasolar planet.