Slashdot Mirror

"He says his work has implications for the way drugs are marketed. People often think generic medicine is inferior. But gussy it up a bit, change the name, make it appear more expensive, and maybe it will work better, he said."

Well I'd rather be convinced that cheaper medicine is better or the same as expensive medicine :).

"In the 18 subjects Miller studied, average earnings were $250 for a five-hour shift. That jumped to $350 to $400 per five-hour shift when the women were their most fertile, he said."

There's research that shows that women tend to actually appear more attractive during their most fertile days (and probably might behave in a more attractive manner too ).

http://www.radio.cz/en/article/52484

BTW there's also:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080226/full/news.2008.625.html
http://www.newlifeafterdivorce.com/Relationships/Married-fertile-women-prefer-single-men.html

Your title is wrong. This was NOT already done by the UW. Also, your content is wrong. Thomson did NOT use adult stem cells -- his lab reprogrammed adult *skin* cells. (That fact is even in the title of your linked story!) Thomson used retroviral infection, as did the Yamanaka lab in Japan that did similar experiments around the same time. The Harvard lab used adenoviruses, a different vector with different outcomes. The major difference between retrovirus and adenovirus? Retroviruses can get the target genes inserted into eukaryotic chromosomes, making the changes more stable. But adenoviruses can be less harmful to the cells they infect, and can successfully infect more cells per treatment. e.g. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v18/n2/full/nbt0200_150.html [nature.com]

Your title is wrong. This was NOT already done by the UW.

Also, your content is wrong. Thomson did NOT use adult stem cells -- his lab reprogrammed adult *skin* cells.
(That fact is even in the title of your linked story!)

Thomson used retroviral infection, as did the Yamanaka lab in Japan that did similar experiments around the same time. The Harvard lab used adenoviruses, a different vector with different outcomes.

The a major difference between retrovirus and adenovirus? Retroviruses can get the target genes inserted into eukaryotic chromosomes, making the changes more stable. But adenoviruses can be less harmful to the cells they infect, and can successfully infect more cells per treatment.
e.g. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v18/n2/full/nbt0200_150.html

They simply demonstrate that the world and universe contain much evidence of the presence of "design".

Mind sharing with us what this evidence is?

And please don't bring up that old Behe flagellum unless you want to bring some facts to the table.

Once again, ESA has discovered something we have know about for years now: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7039/full/nature03561.html First, they discover water ice on Mars... The paper itself is quite interesting actually. I don't understand why the press outreach for ESA needs to come up with claims like "Mars Polar Cap Mystery Solved."

According to a new study published in Nature that compiles data from many previous studies, old growth (primary) forests are net carbon sinks.

MSNBC has an article about it here.

I found this image from Nature magazine useful in imagining how 1 gm of graphene can have such a large surface area..

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6974/fig_tab/nature02311_F1.html

Science must 'push copyright aside' by Richard Stallman

I'm going to assume that you didn't RTFA, so I'll fill in some details about which you speculate:

A variety of features were analyzed, ranging from viability, growth, and longevity to numerous other biochemical and molecular features.

The authors admit:

"An important caveat, however, is that no matter how detailed our analyses, our ability to test for a particular characteristic in mice is limited. All we know is that, in the time frame examined, there were no detectable changes in the specific features that we studied."

Now, this work, performed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was published in Nature. [subscription required] It's hardly balderdash.

There's plenty of rational explanations for the presence of Junk DNA. For one example, retrotransposons commonly insert themselves and then are silenced by the host genome...it's an easier way to deal with them than deletion. But they remain. Sometimes (rarely) they can lead to new beneficial genes, but by and large they are just junk.

I'm still in agreement that just because we don't know what it does, we shouldn't assume that it does nothing. I really don't understand what you're trying to say about John Wayne Gacy, but it sounds like a bit of a Reductio ad Hitlerum.

I've pulled a few of those experiments as well; but I don't think that this is one.

My understanding is that the basis of this research is some work with voles. Certain vole species are monogamous, others promiscuous. Scientists have characterized what they believe is the genetic difference driving this behavioral difference in otherwise similar species(and they are relatively confident; because they've been able to manipulate vole behavior through genetic engineering(paywall, sorry, just because we almost certainly paid for that research doesn't mean we get to see it)). This study examines the same genetic difference between humans, and looks to see if there is a correlation between that genetic difference and human behavior.

And the fundies don't fail by being sceptical, they fail in the latter way.

Ahh, but just being skeptical about some topics and saying that your waiting for more evidence to make any decisions often times leads into personal attacks. Even in your original post, you say that the short and long answer is "Nope" which is an assertion even though TFA says:

If nuclides such as 32Si, 36Cl, and 226Ra respond to changes in the solar neutrino flux due to the time-dependence of 1/R2, then they can also respond to changes in intrinsic solar activity which are known to occur over time scales both longer and shorter than one year.

which refutes that and your #2 (since if the period is longer then a year, you would need more then 1 year to calibrate)

Not to mention that the sun is the cause for this study, but isn't required to generate the effects. The field or neutrino flux could come from another possibly stronger source that may only come every 32 million years???
What if it were tied to something like this or the binary star reference in here

Just to point out, the more informative full article is at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature07314.html

Don't know if you can get the PDF, I think it needs a subscription, but in the paper, they are in fact using viral delivery.

Also a technical note, induced pluripotent stem cells, the ones that made headlines last year, can definitely be adult cells. I believe they took fibroblasts from a 60 year old man, transformed them using viruses, and made the pluripotent cells. So it's not correct to say "they didn't use pluripotent cells, but rather adult cells."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature07314.html

This is absurd, I had to go through three different links to find it.

In case any of you were wondering, the mysterious three genes they used were the transcription factors "Ngn3 (also known as Neurog3) Pdx1 and Mafa," which are NOT the same as the induced pluripotent stem cell magic transcription factors. In those cases I think it was Oct4, Nanog, and c-myc.

Anyway, I find it interesting that an Ngn was used, I thought those caused neuronal differentiation.

ah, yes, I suspect if you wanted to burn it the suspected water/ammonia mix found in the ice could be a source of oxygen if needed, I also suspect methane would work really well in a fuel cell designed for it.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v400/n6745/abs/400649a0.html

when I said fuel, I didn't say burn.

All I'm trying to say is that we should examine the methods used to determine this "climate change"...that it is probably heating up more due to effects from the sun and the ever-changing distance between the sun and the Earth than from what we're doing down here

They have. Repeatedly.

It's not.

Solar variation is (mostly) a remnant of the typical denialist agenda: deny phenomenon exists, then when it can't be, attribute it to something *other* than mainstream scientific consensus. Greenhouse emissions are causing climate change: there is no two ways about it.

Indeed, I once heard (though I don't remember where) that when the industrial age began and there was incredible pollution (much more than today with all the regulations we have), it took several decades for the climate to respond, and several more decades to respond after changes were introduced.

How is that an argument against? All it argues is that climate change is slow. Do consider, on a related note, that all of this started happening when the industrial age _began_.

How accurately can you determine the age of a person that way? Especially around that age, when the body is changing rapidly and at different times for different people. Could you really develop a medical age test where the chance of false-positives is virtually nil but would actually catch anyone?

Actually, the doping tests basically have similar problems. They often keep the test mechanisms and thresholds basically arbitrary, sometimes secret, and not dependent on body parameters that are different for different people, so there is an unknown number of false-positives. A recent paper on this subject...

Of course the media reports such tests as unassailable, so when a rumor of a certain result surfaces, it basically becomes a pseudo-fact (instead of an interpretation of a test presented with other required evidence). Even though it's generally conceded that most of the atheletes are probably on the far extremes of the normal distributions in various attributes already, it seems that collectively people feel that there should be some sort of statistically valid test for various mechanism that people might use to physiologically "cheat" the system.

I doubt there could be any trustable test for age (including a passport or a birth certificate). But given the "anti-doping" mania, I don't doubt there will be someone that crawls out of the woodwork and gives people a test for what they are yammering for even if it isn't based on any sound scientific principles. The media will no doubt report it as a long awaited for "age-doping" test (or some other nonsensical name) panecea which will eventually get enough traction to revoke olymic medals, and overturn results of college and highschool athletics contests... Maybe we should all start an IPO watch on PWC-GMBH and CeresNano...

Who's the wise ass?

For starters, square miles of earth is a poor choice of units for either. The answer in both cases is "less than one".

Depending on how you obtain your uranium (seawater extraction, for example, which should be economically viable given a 50% increase in the price of uranium), you're right... You have to tear up orders of magnitude less ground to obtain uranium than silicon...

But it's still a silly comparison, since you need hundreds of times as much purified silicon to generate the energy you would get from your hundred pounds of uranium. The balance only shifts the other way after incredibly long periods of time using the silicon for photovoltaics.

Plus you missed most of the point of my comment. You don't just "scoop up" silicon. You need high purity silica, which is mined in a limited number of places where material of sufficient purity is available. In an open pit. And the dust makes silica mining every bit as dangerous for the workers as uranium mining. (Look up Silicosis).

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature07247.html

I would suggest that you RTFA, specifically Donald Berry's article where he analyzed this specific case. Worth a read, even if you think Landis is guilty.

Religious behavior is keyed much more to pleasing or displeasing a supernatural entity of one kind or another.

Actually, theism is the minority view among religions and religious practitioners. Human spirituality is much more general in nature, and faith-centric religions, such as the Abrahamic and Homeric religions, are a narrow in their spiritual scope and constitute a very non-representative sample. Most religions are not concerned with a deity or with deities, but with understanding and knowing oneself, and reaching a deep spiritual happiness. Even though a minority of Christians (for example) may find this in their religion, it is safe to say that most do not because that is not the tack of Christianity; instead, it is as you said: deity worship.

The approach of theistic religions of this sort is sycophantic prostration, not harmony or happiness; if these things follow that's fine, but they're beside the main goal of cultivating fear and an inferiority-to-a-god-or-gods complex. Some religions are deistic without this sycophantism, such as some forms of shamanism and the like; they center around the place and well-being of humans and of all the inhabitants of nature, even if they suppose the existence of one or more deities.

Purely materialistic and evolutionary theories, do not provide a very satisfying nor logical answer to WHY humans are so persistently, seemingly illogically and universally religious.

That claim is ignorant of evolutionary theory, of the scientific literature on the subject, and even of the popular literature on the subject. Spirituality could certainly provide selection benefits in terms of group dynamics, and investigations on this matter are ongoing. It's even to the point where evolutionary biology and anthropology are seeing overlap with genetics (even more than the usual population genetics overlap). A popular book making these rumblings more accessible is this:
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n12/full/ng1204-1241.html
This subject was featured on the cover of Time Magazine only four years ago. It's something one might just miss, but given your cocksure attitude about Christianity being absolutely correct to the exclusion of all other religions and systems of knowledge, I think it might be willful ignorance, or perhaps outright denial.

Could it be that the account we read in the first book of the Bible really is true?

This seems very unlikely. There are many creation myths, and the account in Genesis, like all the others, makes claims contrary to what we observe in nature. Everything from biological evolution to geophysics to speciation to astronomy to genetics to basic physics and everything else indicate that the creation myth in Genesis' account is not only a myth, but one based on no empirical evidence at all; it makes claims about the nature of the universe, and those claims are verifiably, demonstrably wrong.

Maybe there exists a Creator God who created us in His image, and placed within us a very deep seated desire to know and interact with Him? Is that scenario really so impossible

It is no more impossible than that the Hindu Vedas represent a true picture of the universe; but they are both at odds with the universe itself. They both make claims which, upon comparing with physical reality, are inaccurate. You seem to be saying that if your Christian story is even a little bit possible in principle, then it's as good as gold and should be believed, or at least nobody should have to require evidence to believe they are true. It's *possible* in principle that things fall up rather than down, but nobody is justified in believing they fall up, because upon inspecting nature, things, in actual fact, behave otherwise.

The Genesis creation myth, as with any creation myth, makes very specific claims about the na

The article talks about black carbon warming the climate, but it has nothing to do with your point. Your point was about what altitude the soot goes to, and the article I cited doesn't talk about that.

Beyond that, please note that the article says that while they may warm the atmosphere, they cool the surface, which is where we live. This is another article (by Ramanathan and collaborators) which says the same thing. One might then conclude that a removal of these "brown clouds" would warm the surface, consistent with TFA.

No, it's even worse (depending on your point of view). There won't be an "eco-fascism" phase, because with more than 50% of the world population urbanised, nobody remembers what the environment is supposed to look like.

All of the "exploitable" environment (the Amazon, most other remaining forests, the Arctic, Alaska, and anywhere else you can think of with any kind of economic value) will be razed/drilled/destroyed, which is going to result in further acceleration of habitat and species loss. Because urbanised people can't grow their own food, this is going to exponentially raise the destructive pressure on the environment outside cities to keep everyone fed, and their cars powered, etc.

This is linked to increasing pollution of all kinds (air, water, garbage, etc) and the "environment" as some of us remember it is purely history.

Our grandchildren will inherit something unrecognisable to us (there are already thousands of species and places that existed when you and I were young, that exist no more). Television and Hollywood, with the complicity of the great globalisers, has trained the world into perfect materialists (mini-Americans) who value convenience and profit above all else; for whom greed is the primary motivator; and for whom waste, pollution, injustice - if noticed at all - are merely acceptable side-effects of a selfish way of life. We have failed every human who lived to defend Nature, and every human who will follow who will never know it as we inherited it; and we have failed every other species on the planet. Even the trees.

"the world's two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week."

You can find the Nature abstract here. And if you have a subscription, you can read the full research and see the data they collected from experiments.

According to the Ars Technica article on this, the Science link will be here.

There seems to be a few more papers and articles on this but if you're interested you can search for optical metamaterials with negative refractive indexes.

"But it does show that there is MUCH we don't know about the issue."

I agree but recognise that the same can be said about any area of scientific enquiry. Science is more than a seemingly contradictory pile of factoids, it's a way of thinking that is never 100% certain about anything, and can never prove anything to anyone. But if it's not the best model of the Universe that we have then may God strike me down before I hit submit.

"unless you count a consensus of scientists as evidence"

A scientific opinion is not evidence, at best it is an "expert witness statement". However consensus is an intergral part of the "republic of science", scientific consensus is implied by the term "scientists say", eg: "Scientists say the Earth orbits the Sun". Have a google and find out what the consensus on GW actualy says and then we can discuss.

Vested interests cut both ways, IMHO the track record of science is much more impressive than the track record of politics and industry. Here are a couple of blogs to practice the art of skepticisim on. The first is run by a bunch of climate scientists who contributed to the IPCC, it's founder is M.Mann the guy who came up with the much maligned "hockey stick", the second is from nature.com. Other excellent sites include NASA, NOAA, WMO, MET, CSIRO and countless other (not so excellent) sites from national scientific and meterological institutions across the globe.

The second paragraph of the abstract says those results are only approximate, and vary considerably with the composition of the asteroid. There are also some suggestions that report you linked to was politically motivated, in an effort to get nukes into space.

One of the main advantages of the gravity tug approach is that it works the same way no matter the composition or shape of the body you want to move.

Here's the link to the abstract for the (close to original) Nature paper on the subject: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v393/n6684/pdf/393437a0.pdf

References: couldn't find the latest study, here and here for earlier comet-impact groundwork.

Note that the latest research being reported here is just new evidence for a comet, not new evidence specifically for a comet-climate link.

I know everyone likes a "big outer-space thing smashing the Earth" story, but there are certainly other theories of what caused the Younger Dryas cooling; the prevailing theory is a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation due to fresh water from Lake Aggasiz as the Laurentide ice sheet began to disintegrate. (Remember, this occurred just after substantial warming had already taken place.) There is a fair amount of evidence that this happened, although the clues are hard to piece together.

This comet-cooling theory is new (less than a year old, although pieces were in place three years ago), and it will take years to settle amongst the paleoclimate community. My understanding from other reading is that they try to piggyback on the THC collapse idea instead of competing with it, since there is evidence for it and it's hard to explain a cold snap of such a long duration (1000-1500 years) with a comet alone. I think the idea is that the cometary impact was responsible for the freshwater flux by breaking up the ice sheet. That is, it wasn't the warming that dumped water into the Atlantic, it was a comet. I'm personally somewhat skeptical, given the extent of the ice sheet and the timing of the event (right after a large amount of warming). Then again, maybe a cometary strike at the right place could do it, or could finish off an already-weakened ice sheet. I'm not a geologist.

Anyway, my point is that this is a very new result which has not yet had time to be thoroughly critiqued, and there are already existing hypotheses. This one isn't necessarily better, and it's also possible that a combination of factors were at work.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7204/abs/nature07130.html

I just posted the links to mutual cooperation as an aspect of species survival. Joe in the Caucasus Mountains may have no idea that you exist, but his care in packing and sending foodstuffs into general commerce is not directly correlated to personal gain (see, China's food exports) - his care is motivated by a cooperative survival instinct. The whole of our market-based commerce can come tumbling down where too many greedy fools destroy the safety margins/fail-safe nets. See, 1929, bank runs, the 1932 and 1934 SEC Acts, the current collapse of the housing market, the prior GWB collapse of the S&L market.....

The October 1987 market crash - all are examples of the failure of cooperation (and, deregulation to foster anti-cooperative practices).

http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4/n8/abs/nrmicro1461.html

The cooperative- survival system extends from micro organisms through the ecosystems to the top of the chain (US). What is fruit but a cooperative way to spread a plant's genome through food for another organism?

Why do chimps groom each other (yes, they are small society animals and the risk of a contagion becoming established in one individual makes grooming a "self interest") but mobility within social groups (females) makes most grooming an unnecessary duty for one or more Chimps - yet we don't see that expressed in the communities - the cooperative society survives.

Birds routinely have lookouts - who forgo feeding opportunities to safeguard the flock - once again, the behavior is detrimental to one individual, but increases the survival of the entire group.

Cooperation in complex, multi-species organisms is well established in so many organisms that even I can't list them all - from Lichens to the bacteria in our gut - Selfish motivations do not favor survival (consider pathogens that kill the host - eventually they die because they destroyed their food supply - and, with things like Smallpox, more advanced organisms create vaccines and destroy the selfish bacteria.

Horse pucky!

The Maslow-influenced / Ayn-Randian motivation does not square with the biological imperative of survival. Cooperation for mutual survival is well established in human behavior and is now being identified in other species as well. The leading new field is cooperation among microorganisms - see, http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4/n8/abs/nrmicro1461.html

The selfish jerk operation of humankind is contra survival. e.g. the subject of this thread.

Pixels are placed next to each other so that the maximum possible fill factor of 78% is achieved. [...]

The maximum transmission of a single pixel in the on state can be derived from the fact that the secondary mirror has a diameter equal to half that of the primary mirror and blocks 25% of the backlight. Thus, 75% of the backlight will reach the primary mirror. Simulations indicate that 95% of the light from the primary mirror can reach the pixel's output. In the experiment it was measured to be 61%, which can be further optimized.

The total amount of backlight that can be transmitted by a telescopic pixel display based on the experiment is pi/4 times 0.75 times 61% approximately 36%, and simulations show that up to 56% is possible. The current experimental value is 3.5-7 times greater than that of LCDs, and therefore for the same backlight intensity, the telescopic pixel is 3.5-7 times brighter.

That pi/4 (78.5%) filling density comes from the fact that the circle-shaped pixels are aranged in a square grid, if they arrange them in a hexagonal grid, they would achieve efficiency of pi/(2*sqrt(3)) - 90.7%.

Since you didn't include a reference, it took a bit of searching to find a good source. This source also has some good graphics about how the display works.

"The first prototype's contrast ratio was 20:1, mainly due to the use of non-collimated back light. This was a limitation of the current prototype, not of the technology. This is supported by simulations ... which show that a ratio of at least 800:1 is possible."

20:1 may not be particularly useful, but 800:1 is certainly usable, and modified with "at least" makes this a technology "at least" worthy watching for future development. It's not reasonable to judge a technology by its first prototype.

I prefer my doctors to get their medical articles from periodicals like JAMA.

Really? So, if your doctor saw a medical article published in some other journal, like Nature, you'd have her ignore the publication because it wasn't in the "right" journal? I think that's a pretty narrow minded attitude. Granted, doctors shouldn't be acting based on journal articles alone, but that applies to all journal articles, including the ones published in JAMA.

I was too lazy to google it this morning:

Nature Article on MIT Study

Actually, there were no statistical increase in deformities or birth defects among children in the region following the Chernobyl accident.

Yeah right, as if I could not see a steaming pile of bullshit this big. Extraordinary claims claim extraordinary proof: where's yours?

it was predicted that somewhere around 4000 people may die prematurely due to cancer from radiation exposure released by the reactor.

That's a study by the IAEA (and they would never-ever have an economic interest in promoting nuclear energy, would they?), and has been criticised for being cherry-picking: among other things, they considered only Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, whereas most of the fallout fell on the rest of Europe (see the EU parliament's report); also, the figure in their report is actually 9,000, not 4,000 as in the press releases they gave, because they, well, are lying liars.

2.4 million people may have been "affected" by the radiation, but this ranges from low to negligible doses that have no statistical link to cancer or birth defects.

You are counting only deaths, as if debilitating conditions were not to be put into the equation. 2.4 million affected people in Ukraine only is an enormous number, it's over 5% of the entire population. And that's "affected" as in "got a disease or a medical condition", not "received some radioactivity dose they never noticed".

Many people around the world live in areas of high natural background radiation, far higher then those exposed by fallout from Chernobyl, and suffer no increase cancer risk.

Really, come up with a source on that one. Far higher than Chernobyl and no cancer risk? You've got to be trolling.

... that my claims are anything but "extraordinary"! Where did you get this idea? Are you somehow of the opinion that just because I disagree with you (for good reason, by the way), that my claims must therefore be "extraordinary"??? How fascinatingly arrogant. Well, let's work on concrete statements rather than trying to read between the lines. Apparently, what you are asserting (at least), is that someone who disagrees with the IPCC reports has an "extraordinary" point of view. Wow. And YOU are accusing ME of being "different". Just wow.

As I have clearly stated here more than once, I am merely echoing what a lot of reputable scientists are saying. And I can safely say that at least some of them are scientists with much more credibility that the vast majority of the reviewers of the IPCC reports.

I mentioned before that you could find well-supported contrary opinions by spending only a few moments on Google. You have refused to do so. So, just this one time (because I dislike your smarmy attitude so much), I will indulge you and actually do just a little bit of your homework for you. I am not your daddy, so do not expect me to do it again.

I would like you to know up front that just as I stated was possible a few posts ago, I actually spent less than 2 minutes on Google pulling up these articles. The links below actually represent only a small percentage of all I found, and I did not spend a lot of time choosing among them. I could have spent a LOT of time following related links... but I figure that if you are actually interested in learning you can do that for yourself. I suspect that you can actually feed yourself too, if you try. But in any case, even if you disagree, if you do not hear opposing arguments then by definition you are being deliberately biased.

To anticipate a possible objection, I will state from the outset that most of these are not "peer reviewed" papers from "science journals", but they do contain a good many links to same. Read to the depth you care but if you do not care, then do not come back later and ask me yet again to do it for you.

To start, here are just a few pieces that support my statements about the problems with "peer review". These are only a few of the huge list I found. The amount of literature out there on problems with and utter failings of peer review, especially in recent years, is vast:

PROBLEMS WITH PEER REVIEW: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0124/p14s02-stss.htm

NY TIMES: "For Science's Gatekeepers, a Credibility Gap" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/health/02docs.html

Nature: Quality and value: How can we research peer review? http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05006.html



There is a lot more I could say here, but I believe that under the circumstances it would be pointless. Here are some more links. Understand that these are only a very small sampling of those that are out there. But (this one time only), you asked for some, you got some.

Letter from Chris Landsea http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/landsea.html

International Conference on Integrity in Science http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/002299.html

Economic Formulas in IPCC Report Criticized for Overstating Emissions http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=22786

Here's a DIFFERENT former IPCC participant: Former IPCC Member Slams UN Scientists' Lack of Geologic Knowledge http://newsbusters.org/node/13971

Yet another official IPCC reviewer criticizes the

Ahhh McDork my pet troll, you missed the fact that the hockey stick was from M.Mann the founder of the realclimate site in my link. I don't know what you hope to gain by the bullshit you post, does someone pay you? BTW: I see your links to trashy magazine columns and raise you a nature blog.

PS: Who was publishing when Copernicus was alive? Do you still beat your wife?

Aside from repeating the old myth that glass can actually sag over hundreds of years, the article says very little. Perhaps a bad summary.

The jist of linked the story is:

A group of scientists in Bristol, Canberra and Tokyo used a material (doesn't say what) analogous to glass, not glass. This material is easier to study. Using this material they claim they were able to understand better what happens on the atomic level as it solidifies, and why it never really becomes a crystal. Nowhere in the article does it explain why this will lead to "metallic glass"

Here is an abstract for the original article. Pretty complex wording, but nothing about metallic glass.

NIH: A bunch of self-serving PhDs that make policies about public health then go on to corporations that benefit from those policies. The NIH has yet to do a scientific study on weight loss. (Note: combining diet /and/ exercise in a study is not scientific, as you can't tell if it was diet or exercise that produced the result.)

That's quite a bizarre statement. The NIH does really run any studies, it's a funding body. The have an entire center dedicated to funding obesity research. Here's an example of an NIH funded diet and weight loss study.

Obviously any trial of say diet and weight loss has to involve exercise as a factor to be held constant, otherwise you never will be able to separate the effects. Having said that since we know both diet and exercise affect obesity there isn't a lot of point studying them both separately any more. What is now needed and what the NIH is currently funding a lot of are studies to find ways to actually get people to eat properly and to exercise more by making global lifestyle changes. Kind of life this one".

Reading TA would not have helped... it is still a mystery. It can only mean an isotope. The funny thing is that this article in Nature refers to heavy carbon as well. Heavy carbon that occured on earth. So, TFA this slashdot story is talking about is very vague and raises more questions than it answers.

There have been recent studies that correlate the inability to break bad habits with voting conservative. Its possible some of those patterns would be labeled as dumb.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n10/abs/nn1979.html;jsessionid=070E469625C952135C73D8F0D4416746

Dear Moraelin,

If you want to do science, you have to use numbers properly.

You can put some numbers into the Stefan-Boltzmann law (this guy does the same thing), and if the Sun's radiation was all that was keeping the Earth warm, the average temperature would be 278 degrees Kelvin, or 5 degrees Celsius. In fact, the average temperature of Earth is closer to 15 degrees Celsius.

Why the discrepancy? The atmosphere traps heat, allowing the sun's visible light to penetrate to the ground, but preventing much of the infrared light form escaping. This is referred to as the "greenhouse effect". This is roughly why almost all scientists agree that changes to the atmosphere (such as volcanic eruptions or human emissions of carbon dioxide and methane) can change the Earth's temperature.

Could the Sun be getting brighter, thus explaining global warming? Interestingly, in 28 years of monitoring from space-based observatories, the solar irradiance has only varied in amplitude by about 0.2% (that's 0.002). That represents changes in the brightness of the Sun caused by the 11 year solar cycle. There is no evidence that the solar irradiance has increased (e.g., Frohlich & Lean 2004, Astronomy & Astrophysics Review, 12, 273; sorry I can't easily find something freely available outside of a university library). By your estimate, we require about a 1.2% increase in the Sun's intensity to account for global warming. There is no evidence the Sun could be the main cause of global warming.

Incidentally, Jupiter is not getting warmer. A large storm is redistributing heat in the atmosphere, which is very different (I'd say the science media interpreted that one wrong). The Mars data is controversial, because it covers a short time span, and was measured with two different instruments. The measurements on Earth are more reliable.

Please spend some quiet time in the Chapel of Science, considering these facts.

--Endstar

i'm sorry, i don't understand how the leafy sea dragon is any more seemingly unadapted than a peacock. female mating preferences are genetic, Nature, thus a mutation could itself be responsible for mating preference to play a role in sexual selection.

Here is a fairly recent summary of solar effects during the modern global warming period. (Conclusion: solar trends have been pretty much flat since the mid-20th century, which fails to explain the late 20th century warming.)

"I'll go with waiting for science to get all the facts right and remove political/personal agendas."

Assuming you are serious, what is your definition for "facts" and how will you know when you have ALL of them?

I mean there are 11,000+ google scholar hits for papers using or citing the SEAWIFS data set. I don't even see the paper referenced in either link let alone a credible understanding of the biosphere. This is not to say the paper is wrong, it's just that the spin in the article is making me dizzy and I want to vomit.

As you can see from all the amount of research using the SEAWIFS data set there is no need for you to wait. And that's just one data set, our collective knowledge of climate (and the biosphere in general) has exploded since the 80's and the only political/personal agendas you need remove are the ones that are stopping you from being a true skeptic and practicing the scientific method.

Unfortunately this means getting a basic grasp of the existing body of knowledge and evidence, if that's too much then you may find reputable blogs worth a try, especially for mythbusting.

BTW: Whoever modded you insightfull also does not understand the scientific method. Science will never "get all the facts", waiting for that oxymoronic event to occur implies either ignorance or some sort of political/personal agenda.

The article gives a false impression of climate security based on the premise that higher concentrations of CO2 are leading to increased plant growth. While everything else in the article is wrong and/or misleading, it is true that increased CO2 increases plant growth, up to a certain point. The problem is, this is low-quality plant growth.

This Nature Journal article (2 Aug 2007, subs. required) describes research confirming increased CO2 concentration increases the mass of crop output. However, the nutritional content of the crops dropped and the growth of crop-destroying pests doubled.

This article in New Scientist reports research showing increased CO2 levels increase pollen production in ragweed. The researchers report a strong correlation between increasing CO2 concentration and increasing rates of asthma.

Similar findings, along with additional information, are described in this blog post.

Nature (Publishing Group) tried an interesting experiment back in 2006 where they solicited authors to participate in an "Open Peer Review". The jist: most of the editors and the authors found some interesting comments, but the comments were not as helpful as the traditional review process. Additionally, as one might expect, when everyone has the opportunity/responsibility to critique a work, few people actually did. Some interesting nuggets about the review process at Nature as well....

Nature has precedings too:

precedings.nature.com

Another junior academic here.

I feel like the original submitter question slightly confuses the issues of "paper vs. online", "pay access vs. open access" and "journal vs. something else." The fact is that the "paper vs. online" question is already nearly completely settled: journals have shifted aggressively over the last decade towards being online. Many of them still release paper versions--but nearly all academics access journals online nowadays. The business model has shifted from selling print subscriptions to libraries, to selling online subscriptions to institutions. Any decent journal nowadays is online, and searcheable both from the journal site and due to integration with other search services (e.g. Web of Science).

Journals are adapting, and online systems have helped them streamline their operations. "Two or more years" is no longer the norm. Good journals (with online submission) turn around papers in a few months. The paper is usually available online as soon as it has been accepted and typeset--so the publication is available to anyone interested long before the delayed dead-tree copy is shipped. Also, preprint servers (arXiv being the most famous) help academics get their results out quickly, while still publishing things in more official/traditional sources.

With respect to the "pay access vs. open access" question--this is a more difficult thing to change. Journals are very accustomed to their ability to charge for the spread of information. Many academics (myself included) consider this unfair (as they seem to do very little, relying on volunteer reviewers, and requiring authors to do quite a lot of editing and formatting themselves), and even detrimental to the free spread of information that is crucial to science. Despite the inertia of the entrenched players, things are changing. For instance, the Public Library of Science journals are all open-access, and are doing quite well at attracting high-profile science. The list of open access journals is growing all the time. The pressure has even induced many traditional journals to sponsor preprint servers (e.g. Nature Precedings), or to give authors the option of making their contribution open-access (usually through a page charge).

With respect to the "journal vs. something else" question... it's unclear why we should switch away from journals if they suit our needs. The current journal process (rigorous publication requirements, peer review, editorial oversight) is very important to modern science. It helps maintain the rigor and transparency, while reducing fraud and sub-standard work.

All of that to say that I'm a little confused by the initial submission. The situation is changing. Nearly everything is online. Open access is gaining traction. Modern journals bear little resemblance to the printed versions of a few decades ago... so the suggestion that they are "obsolete" somewhat misses the mark.

Ah. I should have clarified. I didn't read it on slashdot, of course [ I thought that'd be obvious. But I should have realized that there are trolls around] So here's where I read this article. Three days earlier. http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080604/full/news.2008.874.html?s=news_rss The online edition of the well-known scientific journal. And this was on June 4th. @ somersault : How did you guess?...