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However, I found another reference to that article which contained a few excerpts, notably:

oil industry profits from preferential treatment in tax laws and government support. While the non-oil industries are taxed at a rate of 18 percent, the oil industry is taxed at a mere 11 percent.

Which is provably false. Take a look at 2007 ExxonMobil Annual Report in which (on page 38 of the report, 40 of the PDF) you'll find EXO paid $32 billion in sales taxes, $41 billion in other taxes and duties, and $30 billion in income taxes, for a tax load of $103 billion.

On that same page, you'll see total revenues of $404 billion. And a net income of $41 billion. Meaning that for every 4 dollars in revenue, EXO paid one dollar in taxes. And for every dollar in net income, they paid $2.50 in taxes.

All that adds up to a taxation rate of either 25% on revenues, or 71% of gross profit. How that report gets to 11% is - I guess - left to the reader. So if the first big claim of that report that I can find is provably false, where does that leave the rest of the claims made by the unknown article, such as canals being dredged for oil tankers only?

An article in Nature (proprietry web) a month ago analyzed the genetic content of James Watson, the co-discoverer of the genetic code, and the 2nd of four known people to have their genomes fully sequenced. Dr. Watson had three thousand observed mutations of which 32 were in the database of genetic diseases. This included Retinitis Pigmentosa, kidney failure and other potentially devasting diseases. However, it is not known why they were not expressed in his case. This is all the more reason to keep insurance companies from canceling insurances to those who might have any sort of genetic defect.

P.S. No, they did not discover the gene for making stupid racist remarks, which forced Dr. Watson into retirement last year.

The original article is here here.

Something cool is that while traditional semiconductor lasers have an output wavelength that is very much controlled by the bandgap energy of the material, here the laser is substantially tunable by adjusting the plastic's thickness. (Of course, this is just adjusting the energy states too, but it seems more tunable.) From the paper, "Tuning the film thickness (45-160 nm) enabled access to lasing wavelengths across a 45 nm spectral window (434-479 nm)."

While it's not real-time electrical tuning over that kind of bandwidth, it's still pretty cool. Tunability is especially useful for detectors of various chemicals, and now this is getting into the wavelength range where more biological substances start to have their spectrographic signatures.

--
Electronics kits for the digital generation!

pollution of various kinds, and too much noise meaning that they can't communicate.

It's not just that it's noisy so they can't communicate. The Navy is maiming whales with it deep sea sonar. Kinda like how a gunshot blast beside your head damages your hearing. They are perfectly aware of this and they don't really care other than the PR problems, but that is being addressed. First they just tried to use bad science to make it OK. And then the blinded whales started beaching themselves. But at least one court isn't fooled by the carte blanc of "national security".

Disclaimer: I grew up in Virgina Beach, VA most of my friends and their families from back home are in the Navy. I want our Navy to be strong and safe, but I don't want to mutilate whales to do it. Good sonar didn't do jack shit for the USS Cole, and I don't think Iraq or Afghanistan has much of a Navy to worry about. How about a new better technology instead of just turning the volume up on the sonar.

All platypus jokes aside, I for one am surprised to see that the platypus genome was completed. Not long ago scientists were remarking at how difficult it would be, considering the platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes.

Add to that the fact that there aren't that many of them, in captivity or in the wild, and they generally prefer to stay away from us, and you get a rather difficult task just trying to get platypus DNA.

And of course, that also leave the question of what to build the genome from. Generally, when new genomes are built, other genomes are used for scaffolding, as a sort of guide for where genes might fall, how large they might be, etc... But then what organisms should be used for scaffolding when assembling the genome of an egg-laying mammal?

This is quite an accomplishment, I'd say. As someone who previously worked on plant genomics, I tip my hat to these scientists for their work.

And for those who have access to the journal Nature, here are the important links:
Abstract (should be accessible to everyone)
Full Text, HTML (subscribers)
Full Text, PDF (subscribers)
Editor's Summary (maybe for everyone?)
Supplementary Information (subscribers)

All platypus jokes aside, I for one am surprised to see that the platypus genome was completed. Not long ago scientists were remarking at how difficult it would be, considering the platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes.

Add to that the fact that there aren't that many of them, in captivity or in the wild, and they generally prefer to stay away from us, and you get a rather difficult task just trying to get platypus DNA.

And of course, that also leave the question of what to build the genome from. Generally, when new genomes are built, other genomes are used for scaffolding, as a sort of guide for where genes might fall, how large they might be, etc... But then what organisms should be used for scaffolding when assembling the genome of an egg-laying mammal?

This is quite an accomplishment, I'd say. As someone who previously worked on plant genomics, I tip my hat to these scientists for their work.

And for those who have access to the journal Nature, here are the important links:
Abstract (should be accessible to everyone)
Full Text, HTML (subscribers)
Full Text, PDF (subscribers)
Editor's Summary (maybe for everyone?)
Supplementary Information (subscribers)

All platypus jokes aside, I for one am surprised to see that the platypus genome was completed. Not long ago scientists were remarking at how difficult it would be, considering the platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes.

Add to that the fact that there aren't that many of them, in captivity or in the wild, and they generally prefer to stay away from us, and you get a rather difficult task just trying to get platypus DNA.

And of course, that also leave the question of what to build the genome from. Generally, when new genomes are built, other genomes are used for scaffolding, as a sort of guide for where genes might fall, how large they might be, etc... But then what organisms should be used for scaffolding when assembling the genome of an egg-laying mammal?

This is quite an accomplishment, I'd say. As someone who previously worked on plant genomics, I tip my hat to these scientists for their work.

And for those who have access to the journal Nature, here are the important links:
Abstract (should be accessible to everyone)
Full Text, HTML (subscribers)
Full Text, PDF (subscribers)
Editor's Summary (maybe for everyone?)
Supplementary Information (subscribers)

All platypus jokes aside, I for one am surprised to see that the platypus genome was completed. Not long ago scientists were remarking at how difficult it would be, considering the platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes.

Add to that the fact that there aren't that many of them, in captivity or in the wild, and they generally prefer to stay away from us, and you get a rather difficult task just trying to get platypus DNA.

And of course, that also leave the question of what to build the genome from. Generally, when new genomes are built, other genomes are used for scaffolding, as a sort of guide for where genes might fall, how large they might be, etc... But then what organisms should be used for scaffolding when assembling the genome of an egg-laying mammal?

This is quite an accomplishment, I'd say. As someone who previously worked on plant genomics, I tip my hat to these scientists for their work.

And for those who have access to the journal Nature, here are the important links:
Abstract (should be accessible to everyone)
Full Text, HTML (subscribers)
Full Text, PDF (subscribers)
Editor's Summary (maybe for everyone?)
Supplementary Information (subscribers)

All platypus jokes aside, I for one am surprised to see that the platypus genome was completed. Not long ago scientists were remarking at how difficult it would be, considering the platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes.

Add to that the fact that there aren't that many of them, in captivity or in the wild, and they generally prefer to stay away from us, and you get a rather difficult task just trying to get platypus DNA.

And of course, that also leave the question of what to build the genome from. Generally, when new genomes are built, other genomes are used for scaffolding, as a sort of guide for where genes might fall, how large they might be, etc... But then what organisms should be used for scaffolding when assembling the genome of an egg-laying mammal?

This is quite an accomplishment, I'd say. As someone who previously worked on plant genomics, I tip my hat to these scientists for their work.

And for those who have access to the journal Nature, here are the important links:
Abstract (should be accessible to everyone)
Full Text, HTML (subscribers)
Full Text, PDF (subscribers)
Editor's Summary (maybe for everyone?)
Supplementary Information (subscribers)

"This really is neat stuff."

Indeed, this IS the holy grail of analog computing. I remember first reading about memristors eons ago in SciAm and since (as TFA states) Nature has published their claims of demonstrating such a device I very much doubt it's "just marketing hype".

In case anyone has a nature subscription:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/abs/nature06932.html

A picture is worth a thousand words...

The bizarre characterization of this as a discovery instead of an invention originates in the paper itself.

The bizarre characterization of this as a discovery instead of an invention originates in the paper itself.

Anyway, it's not hard to trace the changes leading one species to another. I read stuff about Jack Horner modeling hypothetical intermediate dinosaurs; IIRC, someone later found a new species very similar to what he predicted.

There's a few other cases; walking sticks with and without a white stripe on their backs found in different vegetation types (still technically the same species, but becoming different).

There's a million more examples; nothing perfect yet, but, our current understanding is that macroevolution takes centuries (this will be proven wrong by a case study sometime in the next decade, I guarantee it. We are quite close right now, and remember that Darwin thought microevolution took millenia; we now know it can take as little as a generation - see the Grant's study on Galapagos Finches).

There is an interview with Alan Marscher on this week's Nature Podcast (24 April 2008). If you want to skip to the story, it starts at 25:19.

I submitted this in story form yesterday but also in recent news, Glasgow scientists have made a tiny switch that would make huge leaps in memory storage:

Scientists at the University of Galsgow have claimed a breakthrough that enables them to store 500,000 gigabytes squeezed onto one square inch making way for some hilarious storage for things like cell phones and iPods. The scientists working on it divulged, "We have been able to assemble a functional nanocluster that incorporates two electron donating groups, and position them precisely 0.32 nm apart so that they can form a totally new type of molecular switching device. This is unprecedented and provides a route to produce new a molecule-based switch that can be easily manipulated using an electric field. By taking these nano-scale clusters, just a nanometer in size, and placing them onto a gold or carbon, we can control the switching ability. Not only is this a new type of switchable molecule, but by grafting the molecule on to metal (gold) or carbon means that we can potentially bridge the gap between traditional semiconductor devices and components for nanoscale plastic electronics. The key advantage of the molecule sized switch is information / transistor density in traditional semi-conductors. Molecule sized switches would lead to increasing data storage to say 4 Petabits per square inch. This breakthrough shows conceptually that this is possible (showing the bulk effect) but we are yet to solve the fabrication and addressing problems. The fact these switches work on carbon means that they could be embedded in plastic chips so silicon is not needed and the system becomes much more flexible both physically and technologically. Since these switches are little balls of metal oxide they are made of similar stuff to normal semi-conductors but are much easier to manipulate as discrete molecular units." You can read more about it in Nature's Nanotechnology publication. In related news, researchers have claimed to harness terahertz radiation using circuits.

Another advancement in nanotechnology, thought I would post it here since it's probably not going to be used.

Organic farming is a pursuit of sustainable agriculture. There are many reputable articles that clearly points out the need for sustainable agriculture to prevent serious environmental degredation. Here one examples: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6898/full/nature01014.html There are of course examples that clearly show environmental benefits (such as increased soil fertility, increased biodiversity, higher energy efficiency etc) from organic farming. Heres one: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/296/5573/1694 As a Ag. college student, you should already be aware of this.

For the curious, here's the research abstract for the original article the Wired news bit is based on (unfortunately the article itself is behind a pay/subscription-wall):

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2112.html

Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain

Chun Siong Soon1,2, Marcel Brass1,3, Hans-Jochen Heinze4 & John-Dylan Haynes

There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

There is scientific evidence that points to genetic susceptibility, such as this description of a specific mutation:

http://www.nature.com/ng/press_release/ng0107.html

The parents are not to "blame", since this evidence is relatively recent, but the fault is not in their stars, but in themselves, to borrow a bit from the Bard.

The human brain is still evolving, very complex, and a bit fragile, rather like a program kludged together to make a ship date, then patched and repatched to fix bugs and add features. Schizophrenia is known to have family links, as are other mental disorders.

Our eyes can differentiate shades and hues of green better than any other colours -- this is an inherited survival trait from when it was important to see predators and distinguish ripe from almost-ripe

In related news, a team of physicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have developed a new way to perform radial velocity measurements to unprecedented precision. The current state-of-the art can achieve a precision of about 60 cm/s, enough to say, observe a Jupiter-class planet (such as the one pointed out in this article). However, this new method should be able to achieve a precision of about 1 cm/s, enough to observe an Earth-class planet.

The press release is available here:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2008/pr200808.html.

The journal article the press release refers to is "available" (subscription required) here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7187/pdf/nature06854.pdf.

The gist of the approach is to use a "laser frequency comb [combined with] a Fabry-Perot filtering cavity" to provide an improved, consistent calibration source. Strangely enough, it appears that spectroscopy is not (currently) limited by the resolving power of the spectrometer; rather it is limited by quality of the calibration source.

As these bands can overlap in wavelength, and the corresponding signatures from them are weak, decisive identification requires precision infrared spectroscopy. Here we report a near-infrared transmission spectrum of the planet HD 189733b that shows the presence of methane.

The people who publish scientific journals have been mining a lucrative seam for years.
Now, just as with music and video, they see their business model, and fat associated monopoly rents, being threatened.

Just as with the music and video industries, their efforts to stop the rot so far have been risible.

Their case has even less merit since, unlike the music and video inductries, the original authors of the works:
1. Have usually already been paid for their work, and
2. Actively want it be distributed as widely and freely as possible
Indeed, since a lot of (published) science is paid for by our taxes, one could argue 'the public' already owns it / the right to read it freely.

The argument that reputable journals provide a robust peer-review function withers somewhat in the light of many recent scandals that have 'slipped through the net'. The comparison with 'many eyes' from open source sprngs to mind. How long before something really poor or inaccurate is challenged on Wikipedia? Minutes?

Still, that's enough analogies - better stop before I try and slip in a car one, too...

More discussion on topic here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/Eisen.htm

Actually, these are such preliminary findings that they could be children or even dwarfed people. Nature, which is often held a bit above National Geographic among seems to be skeptical: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080310/full/452133a.html As an anthropologist, I would be thrilled if this turns out to be the same as homo floresiensis, but I'm not jumping to any conclusions until there is some more testing completed. Especially interesting is that it doesn't appear that the brain was unusually small in these specimens as it was in the Flores find, which indicates that this is a different situation entirely.

Don't get me wrong, education is no cure for a crappy personality, there are plenty of sloths and sycophants in academia. There are also the 'Ian Paisley" type reviewers who will put up rediculous objections that make it obvious to all they only skimmed the conclusion. Having said that, a half-hearted review by a semi-literate proffessor is still better than no review at all.

"I think there's room for improvement. Have people really ask questions and punch holes, note the questions and the defense and attach them to the theory, so people can see what questions have been asked and answered."

Yes, I agree that citations could be organised in a more usefull way. For a more fluid argument, sites moderated by practising scientists like this and this are becoming more common. Relating this back to the original point, if a degree only teaches you how to reseach a question it was worth the effort.

rant/
There is also the phenomena that when one has deep knowledge/insight/enthusiasim for a subject or procedure they tend to see others around them as incompetent, flippant or just plain crazy, others may see them as idealistic, pedantic or arrogant, neither 'side' is 100% correct.

No matter what the question, observation, or methodology, it is all ultimately based on one or more articles of faith. Once you realise that bit of philosophical trivia the question becomes: "What do I belive and why?". I belive in the philosophy of science because it's social implementation (the Frankenstien industrial revolution) has so far been usefull. Ironically I think the only way we can stop Frankenstien's shit from killing our garden is by the application of more science. On a more personal level accepting that the Universe 'just is' is a more elegant answer than 'God did it', neither POV is more liberating or correct than the other. /rant

Black exterior does not mean hotter interior, contrary to [what may be] common sense. Search for "black desert robe" or similar and you will find that it's not that simple. Why are roofs black?

See for instance, this article
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v283/n5745/abs/283373a0.html

I see this isn't likely to be productive, in that, from my view, you are simply deliberately selecting the most egregious disanalogous examples by which to make your arguments. ID is nothing at all like "flat earth-ism". ID is much more akin to String Theory, in that it is a nascent, recent field of uncertain testability, and ID will in all likelihood make predictions which are found to be erroneous with regard to particular biological structures (e.g. Behe's position regarding the bacterial flagellum), however, that doesn't exclude the -process of refinement- natural to scientific endeavor based on an underlying hypothesis (e.g. the bare notion of Design). Perhaps "irreducible complexity" will have to be discarded as a proposal per se, perhaps not--at this point we have not enumerated all "candidates", much less exhaustively analyzed them. Point is, while I consider evolution a very strong model (again, please check your tendency to slip into characterizing ID as "anti-evolution", because it simply is not except with respect to the -scientifically untestable- inference that evolution is the sole causal mechanism in play; "evolution vs. ID" is wholly a manufactured false dichotomy), I am unwilling to a priori exclude an inference from investigation based on the notion I "just know" it will be unproductive. That is simply destructive to science. If Einstein (or current String Theory theorists) were treated anything like ID, as soon Einstein proposed the Cosmological constant as a refinement to his original position ("He admitted Relativity is wrong!"), he'd have been hounded out of academia -literally decades- before Relativity and all its predictions were tested, which was still in-process this decade.

Who is it that is "trying to counter evolution" from your perspective? Not I, not Behe, as he directly said at Dover. What you are concerned about being "countered" is not at all the scientifically-testable proposition that "evolution occurs" (few seriously suggest such a stance), but your restrictive, scientifically-untestable -implied- usage that "only evolutionary processes occur" as a causal model of human origins. You only care about the second premise, which you can't test, and isn't scientific in that respect--while arguing the first premise, which is scientific, but which nobody in this discussion is debating. Your explicit argument doesn't match your implicit intent, for your personal reasons which seem to me, obvious. However, I'm perfectly willing to simply wait and let evolutionary processes resolve this. Agreed?

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080227/full/4511040a.html someone please

The actual abstract and article can be found on Nature's website and is entitled Hax1-mediated processing of HtrA2 by Parl allows survival of lymphocytes and neurons. Essentially what the researchers showed was that the gene Hax1 keeps cells alive when they aren't being stimulated with survival signals. This is interesting, for example, because cancer metastasis cells must survive in very foreign environments where they probably aren't receiving these factors. On the flip side, deficiencies in Hax1 results in blood cells dying early, causing a disease called severe congenital neutropenia.

Also see Ann Gibbons, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," Science, Vol. 297, 2 January 1998, p. 29 for evidence that our common female ancestor lived approximately 6500 years ago. I'm not making this stuff up; the sources cited are evolutionists.

First, you really should link to the articles in question, as that would be the polite thing to do: Cann | Gibbons (pdf).

Second, it is obvious that you have chosen a belief system and grasp at any evidence to support it, blatantly disregarding all other evidence. A google of those papers make them look to be two "classics" that creationists refer to again and again. The youngest is over 10 years old. Where are the more recent Science/Nature papers that confirm the conclusions of these papers? They don't exist.

Here is an acid test for good research: Does it stand the test of time? Is the field explosive in the scientific field 10 years later? Some examples of paradigm shifting fields are stem cells, apoptosis, and RNA catalysis. The papers you cite do not measure up to these standards and so are highly suspect. Good science gets confirmed by other scientists and not by conjecture or preachers who thumpin bibles. Where are the papers confirming the 6500 year old mitochondrial clock or have recent advances shown problems with the previous model? Do the research yourself if you are objective like you think you are--or you can remain blinded by your belief system. But if you wish to remain blinded by your belief system, don't burden others with your belief system like you are doing here.

When uninformed people have opinions on science that smell of belief and bias, my suggestion to them is to go spend five to seven years to get a PhD in a field of natural science. Don't cop-out and pick some religious school where you end up with a thesis full of bible quotes. Find a real state-run university without any allegiance to any religion. Do actual research out in the field (dig bones, sequence DNA, dissect plants, count the strata of geological formations, etc.), synthesize the data and write your thesis on what you have discovered. Don't lie and make up data to support your belief system! Even [insert your favorite religious prophet or diety here] wouldn't do that, right? Integrate the comments of your committee and defend your thesis in front of them. Once you have your PhD from the accredited state-run university without any religious affiliation, come back and examine your belief system from the perspective of a trained scientist. Until then, you are simply fooling yourself, discrediting the members of your faith, and annoying the knowledgeable.

You have a point, the actual science behind evolution isn't reaching people who are interested as well as it should be. thee's a lot of very interesting things being done that just don't make it into lectures very often outside of the occasional college lecture in the biology dept. like how chromosome 2 was formed from the fusion of two chromosomes which we found vestigial telomeres, which telomeres are normally found on the ends of chromosomes, in this case we found them buried in the chromosome as well as a second although vestigial centromere which is found only in chromosome fusion events. the subtelomeric duplications are located at base pairs 114,455,823-114,455,838 from the article in nature. which is located here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7034/full/nature03466.html as well as the wikipedia article on chromosome 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human) this explains why humans have 46 chromosome while the primates in general have 48. the chromosomes were not lost, two chomosomes fused into one, since each chromosome is paired, it went from 4=>2 [48-4+2=46]

Laboratory experiments mimicking the temperatures and pressures found deep within those planets suggest diamond production is indeed possible, but would be more likely to be an agglomerate mass of diamond microcrystals than the yottacarat diamond solitaire envisioned by Clarke. Uranus and Neptune would probably make for better diamond production than Jupiter and Saturn due to a higher abundance of methane and thus carbon.

That being said, recent research suggests that Uranus and Neptune are not sufficiently carbon-rich to have produced an appreciable amount of diamond after all.

I have not read all of your posts in this thread, and am not quite sure of your take on the whole belief, theory, fact dialog that seem to permeate the evolution debate threads on /., but I'm sympathetic to the cost of Nature issue. This is free and has some good content http://www.nature.com/news/index.html.

Back to the evolution issue - I like what the National Academy of Science recently published: "Science, Evolution, and Creationism" which you can read online for free http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11876
This is a good read if you are interested in the current state of the science of evolution, and it has a nice FAQ for some of the issues discussed in this very thread.

I work in AIDS research. The conflicts that are emerging in the field of malaria research are very similar to what we are experiencing in our field, which in both cases is a consequence of the severe funding bottleneck for biological sciences. The Gates Foundation has been an extremely important source of funding for basic science as well as providing resources for prevention and outreach in areas of the world suffering from the heaviest burden of these diseases. Unfortunately, the current funding philosophy seems to be to reward a massive sum of cash to a very select subset of scientists in the field. This has created some unfortunate divisions in our field. If you can access the article, see: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n5/abs/nm0507-515.html (I've also been able to Google for excerpts from the article.) Basically, both the Gates Foundation and the NIH have pumped massive funding into a single research consortium, leaving many other labs scavenging for funding to sustain their clinical research. Throw in some questionable data-sharing practices and lack of scientific collaboration by the consortium, and you'll obviously create a lot of resentment.

"Harvard makes a copy of the article freely available. What about those journals (Nature and Science, maybe?) that do not allow this"

How would Havard publishing online prevent them getting published in Nature or Science. Do you have any citations that say this?

"the author grants AAAS exclusive rights to use and authorize use of the work, but retains actual copyright and substantial reuse rights"

"Nature Publishing Group offers a range of reprints and permissions services for authors, readers, writers and commercial companies"

The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the provost's office

The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the provost's office

The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the provost's office

The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the provost's office

The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the provost's office

With regards to the "fake" tag, let's reference the originating article, shall we: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080129/full/news.2008.538.html Deep brain stimulation has actually been used since 1993 in patients with Parkinson's disease to stop tremors and allow them to use their muscles again. The next step taken was in psychiatric disorders; there was a case where they helped stop the obsessive thoughts in an OCD patient, and there was work being done looking at the effects of stimulating certain areas of the brain of people with clinical depression. Most of that is in a related Nature article you need a subscription to read, from July of 2005. It's linked in the article I linked to, if you have access to a subscription to Nature. So this sort of "deep brain stimulation" has been going on for a long time. The novelty here is that they're looking at the effects of stimulating different areas to target different brain functions. In the article regarding memory, they accidentally stimulated the fornix, which is a fiber bundle that leads to the hippocampus, and has been closely linked with memory since the case of HM back in the 1950s, who had surgery to remove the hippocampus in order to relieve his epilepsy. The seizures, which had been originating in the hippocampus, stopped, but he lost the ability to form new memories, much like the guy in Memento. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient) Deep brain stimulation has even been used to treat epilepsy, because the regularity of the stimulation helps to calm the erratic firing characteristic of a seizure. The point is, the idea of stimulating selected areas of the brain to get a desired effect isn't new. Neither is the idea that a small area of the brain is involved in formation and recall of memories. The interesting thing here is that stimulating that area can lead to recall. However, there's still a long way to go before we can say it's a "cure" for Alzheimers, if that's even possible.

I used to work in transplantation immunology, on the Facilitating Cell, which is a bone marrow-derived population that facilitates the engraftment of donor hematopoietic stem cells across complete MHC barrier with no evidence of GVH. The mechanism is unclear, but it appears to induce production of regulatory T cells, putting a damper on the effector T's that would lead to GVH. It also confers donor-specific solid organ transplant tolerance, more or less what happened here.

Agreed. But just like last time, the Slashdot summary is completely wrong. Last time, the linked article was titled "Nanowire battery can hold 10 times the charge of existing lithium-ion battery" and the Slashdot summary summarized "A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours..."

This time, the linked article mis-reported, and the Slashdot summary followed. The Slashdot summary is also inconsistent with itself: It refers to "increased battery capacity" and then has the title "Nanotech Anode Promises 10X Battery Life". "Capacity" is not "lifetime"; it is proportional to energy density.

In both cases it is about the same research and publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, which I link to in my first post in this story: abstract, fulltext, fulltext pdf - for some reason they are all freely downloadable. In terms of "battery life", they have only demonstrated 30 cycles (data in the supporting information for the paper), and only 10 in the actual paper!