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Figure 3 looks suspiciously like an atomic-level image showing the antibody b12 bound to the surface protein of the HIV virus. However, I'm not sure how able they are to make such an image perfectly accurately - the 1998 article they cited for the structure of gp120 said the structure was determined at a scale of 2.5 angstroms.

Article reporting the milliHz hum in 1998
IDA (International Deployment of Accelerometers) used to detect the hum.
Article in Nature (1979) assesses if IDA can be used to detect very low frequency seismic data. Looking at the figure 1 of amplitude(?) ("MD counts" at Rarotonga station not shown on the current IDA map) I can see the aftershocks in 2 hour intervals after the Indonesia earthquake, but the subj frequencies could be detected only by obtaining the spectrum (Fig.2) at mHz range which frankly looks like white noise - irregular beats.

Most interesting figure is Fig.3 which shows the 0.43-0.52mHz of the _processed_ spectrum measured at six different stations around the world at Hour 25 and on. The Alaska station (CMO) has much clearer spectrum compared to the closest (?) RAR station.

All of it must have meant something for a seismologist which I am not.

Accusations began to fly in March, when Science published a report from scientists led by Rusi Taleyarkhan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who claimed to have triggered nuclear fusion in a beaker of organic solvent. The paper appeared to howls of protest, both from leading physicists who were sure that the authors were mistaken and from other researchers at Oak Ridge who had examined the work and claimed to have uncovered serious flaws.

Though the Nature newsbrief doesn't mention her, the lead author and the main experimentalist was Naomi Ginsberg, a PhD student in Lene Hau's lab. You can read the article abstract on Nature's website: http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nature0549 3 The AFP wire item also gives credit where credit is due: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1028

I am currently working towards a PhD in this subject. I think that the first thing to realize is that he has not yet made a motor. He has molecular ratchet as proof of concept towards a molecular motor.
          In layman's terms this is how the ratchet works. First, the molecule is essentially a dumbbell with a ring around it. The ring can move freely back and forth across the dumbbell, but prefers to be at either end. The dumbbell can be bent only near one end, which prevents the ring from moving. The ring catalyzes the transition from bent to strait, to allow motion. The thing is, is that the ring needs to be next to the bend for a significant amount of time to unbend the dumbbell.
            So, when the ring is next to the bend, it can straiten it temporally to move across. When it is far away, it can no longer move across the bend, and since the second binding site is far away from the bend, it is stuck there. If you have two dumbbells looped end-to-end with one ring, then you would have a molecular motor. The ring is acting as "Maxwell's Daemon" to allow movement across the system.

Here's a link to the actual journal article if you care to read: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7127/pd f/nature05452.pdf

Nature and several other journals owned by Macmillan

http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml /02_intro.xml&style=xml/02_intro.xsl

Nature and several other journals owned by Macmillan

http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml /02_intro.xml&style=xml/02_intro.xsl

>an example of a prestigious journal published by a for-profit company?

http://www.nature.com/nature

1. The memory is nonvolatile (technically speaking), but bits decay in about an hour.
2. The technology is not at the point were word length is a concern. The researchers were reading and writing individual bits. About half of all bits were deemed defective (having an on/off ratio of less that 1.5)
3. As said above, bits last for about an hour. I'm sure they intend to improve this.
4. Bits were written using .2 second pulses of 1.5 volts and read using .2 volts. I doubt any attempt was made to optimize these quantities. Remember, voltages are not being applied directly to the molecules storing information, they are applied to sets of perpendicular nanowires. The electrodes controlling these nanowires might be the cause of the slow switching time.
5. There is no mention of power requirements in the article

The piece on Yahoo! News was pretty low on details, so here's the abstract from the Nature paper:

A 160-kilobit molecular electronic memory patterned at 1011 bits per square centimetre

Jonathan E. Green1,4, Jang Wook Choi1,4, Akram Boukai1, Yuri Bunimovich1, Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin1,3, Erica DeIonno1, Yi Luo1,3, Bonnie A. Sheriff1, Ke Xu1, Young Shik Shin1, Hsian-Rong Tseng2,3, J. Fraser Stoddart2 and James R. Heath1

The primary metric for gauging progress in the various semiconductor integrated circuit technologies is the spacing, or pitch, between the most closely spaced wires within a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) circuit1. Modern DRAM circuits have 140 nm pitch wires and a memory cell size of 0.0408 mum2. Improving integrated circuit technology will require that these dimensions decrease over time. However, at present a large fraction of the patterning and materials requirements that we expect to need for the construction of new integrated circuit technologies in 2013 have 'no known solution'1. Promising ingredients for advances in integrated circuit technology are nanowires2, molecular electronics3 and defect-tolerant architectures4, as demonstrated by reports of single devices5, 6, 7 and small circuits8, 9. Methods of extending these approaches to large-scale, high-density circuitry are largely undeveloped. Here we describe a 160,000-bit molecular electronic memory circuit, fabricated at a density of 1011 bits cm-2 (pitch 33 nm; memory cell size 0.0011 mum2), that is, roughly analogous to the dimensions of a DRAM circuit1 projected to be available by 2020. A monolayer of bistable, [2]rotaxane molecules10 served as the data storage elements. Although the circuit has large numbers of defects, those defects could be readily identified through electronic testing and isolated using software coding. The working bits were then configured to form a fully functional random access memory circuit for storing and retrieving information.

Also, an interesting bit from the very end of the paper:

Many scientific and engineering challenges, such as device robustness, improved etching tools and improved switching speed, remain to be addressed before the type of crossbar memory described here can be practical. Nevertheless, this 160,000-bit molecular memory does indicate that at least some of the most challenging scientific issues associated with integrating nanowires, molecular materials, and defect-tolerant circuit architectures at extreme dimensions are solvable. Although it is unlikely that these digital circuits will scale to a density that is only limited by the size of the molecular switches, it should be possible to increase the bit density considerably over what is described here. Recent nano-imprinting results suggest that high-throughput manufacturing of these types of circuits may be possible29. Finally, these results provide a compelling demonstration of many of the nanotechnology concepts that were introduced by the Teramac supercomputer several years ago, albeit using a circuit that contained a significantly higher fraction of defective components than did the Teramac machine4.

It is time for the major science journals to fuck off and die, you can't read that paper unless you pony over $30 to the cunts that run Nature as a profit-making venture. Yes, Nature publishes great research, yes someone has to co-ordinate reviewers etc, yes it costs money to publish their dead-tree, but that is an exorbitant price. Scientific journals contain work that in most cases rests upon a base of tax-payer funded science (as it should be) and the scientists in those disciplines belong to large organisations (e.g. AAAS) that could easily publish their own online journals, cutting out the middlemen of the dead-tree publishers. The physicists got their act together, why can't other academics. $30 !! Fucking cunts!!

The article is out of date. Shutting down the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation would only drop northern Europe's temperatures a few degrees, and that cooling would be exceeded by the global warming necessary to shut down the THC, leading to a net warming of Europe (albeit less than other parts of the world). However, there would be a huge drop in winter temperatures over Greenland and the Nordic seas. See Rahmstorf's short Nature review.

Here are the press release links: Nature, Hubble Space Telescope, European Space Agency and Subaru Telescope. The COSMOS project web page can be found there.

Only two hypotheses are consistent with the radiometric and morphological characteristics of the dark patches: either we are observing liquid-filled lakes on Titan today, or depressions and channels formed in the past have now been infilled by a very low-density deposit that is darker than any observed elsewhere on Titan. The absence of any aeolian features in this area makes low-density, porous, unconsolidated sediments unlikely. This, combined with the morphologic characteristics of the dark patches, leads us to conclude that the dark patches are lakes containing liquid hydrocarbons.

This other location at the Cassini site, and this older article from the BBC.

The original article is in the journal Nature, but you need a subscription to view it. You can still read the abstract, though.

This other location at the Cassini site, and this older article from the BBC.

The original article is in the journal Nature, but you need a subscription to view it. You can still read the abstract, though.

Further back, "In 1992 ... so called prion knock-out mice [were created]. ... Strangely enough, mice lacking the prion gene are apparently healthy".

While other studies have found, "abnormalities in circadian rhythms and sleep" and ataxia late in life.

Proportionally, such symptoms may occur in 13 year old cattle (see halfbakery link).

So, to follow the new year's theme of predictions, I fully expect to be able to buy prion free beef by 2025.

Disclaimer: IAAQIR (I Am A Quantum Information Researcher).

Worse, they talk about "repeaters" to extend the range past 120km - which is scary, because it implies they are decrypting/recrypting at the repeater.

Not necessarily. It's possible in principle to build a "quantum repeater", which receives, "purifies", stores, and retransmits qubits without measuring them. By purification, I mean using either quantum error correction, or quantum entanglement distillation in conjunction with quantum teleportation. Such a scheme was proposed by Duan, et al, in Nature 414 413 (2001).

Duan's scheme gives polynomial scaling of resources with distance, which is good news. The bad news is that building a quantum repeater requires reliable quantum memory, which is experimentally difficult.

The lower tech alternative is "cascading" or simple chaining of QKD transceivers. The catch here is that if one of the intermediate transceivers is tampered with and compromised, you lose.

Anyone else experiencing the webpage reloading itself endlessly?

Go to http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061204/pf/061204-1 0_pf.html

Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe


A SNP in the gene encoding lactase (LCT) (C/T-13910) is associated with the ability to digest milk as adults (lactase persistence) in Europeans, but the genetic basis of lactase persistence in Africans was previously unknown. We conducted a genotype-phenotype association study in 470 Tanzanians, Kenyans and Sudanese and identified three SNPs (G/C-14010, T/G-13915 and C/G-13907) that are associated with lactase persistence and that have derived alleles that significantly enhance transcription from the LCT promoter in vitro. These SNPs originated on different haplotype backgrounds from the European C/T-13910 SNP and from each other. Genotyping across a 3-Mb region demonstrated haplotype homozygosity extending >2.0 Mb on chromosomes carrying C-14010, consistent with a selective sweep over the past 7,000 years. These data provide a marked example of convergent evolution due to strong selective pressure resulting from shared cultural traits--animal domestication and adult milk consumption.

You can get it fron Nature Genetics if you have institutional access.

If you want to know why Lactose tolerance is a big deal read this (mainly because it's a nice example of Gene-Culture co-evolution).

--Simon

No it hasn't. That's why the French team's work has appeared in the top journal Nature this week. The editor has written a freely accessible summary with links to the research article. The first paragraph of that is freely available.

No it hasn't. That's why the French team's work has appeared in the top journal Nature this week. The editor has written a freely accessible summary with links to the research article. The first paragraph of that is freely available.

> How many times have you been rammed from behind? How many of those were from someone following too closely? How many times have you been tailgated?

None :) I try my best to avoid situations where I'm being tailgated. It's not just always possible. But I think you didn't understand my point : I was speaking about statistics and the entire driving population. Otherwise, if I only think of myself, who never had an accident (minor or otherwise) in 15+ years of driving, with 170,000km on my present car, then I could therefore assume that my driving practices are excellent and that I should not question my driving! By the gods, I didn't even have accidents where 'it's all their fault!' :) ah faulty logic, where would I be without it :)

> They are directly comperable. If you "kill" 80 years of man-hours, you have taken away the equivelent of one lifetime. Is it somehow better to take 1/4 of the life period from 4 people than 100% from one person?

I disagree. There are a couple of things wrong with your assessment. First of all, you are comparing killed time with killed people? Wow... just... wow. I don't value my time above the safety of others. I think that it's better to all equally share the load of 'killed time' (which is rather small for an individual), rather than for one person to lose his life to an impatient driver. That's the reality of traffic. You have to share the road, and you'll always meet someone who goes slower or faster than you. I do realize that it applies to all the drivers out there, from the slower ones to the fastest ones. This means I always pay extra attention not to get in the way of other people ... up to a point. After all, the road belongs to all, not just the fastest drivers. Just like I have to cope with the inevitable bad driver, you have to cope with the inevitable slower driver.

The second one, which also relates to the rest of your post, is the false assumption that tailgaters improve the flow of traffic. The studies I found indicated that they actually slow down the traffic! Here's a non-scientific report (sorry, I can't find the real ones only tonight, took me a while to find them the first time.. so you don't have to take my word for it, hopefully, your google-fu will be stronger than mine) http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000911.html. And here's another : http://www.nature.com/news/1998/981126/pf/981126-8 _pf.html. And another : http://www.dctech.com/physics/features/0700.php.

Basically, tailgaters tend to overreact to small changes in speed to the lead car. This leads to a domino effect where the preceding cars slow down more and more, creating a important slowdown in the traffic in the long run.

So, in the end, not only are you endangering others (reduced reaction times, reduced visibility) but you are also slowing down traffic. I am therefore not thanking you :p

Z.

I grow tired of this. Thanks for the discussion :)

> Oh, I'm not frustrated. I have fun weaving in and out of traffic at three times the limit in bizzards

I liked that one :)

It's not as obvious as "10^20 > 10^12, therefore cosmic rays would have created them by now".

The amount of energy available to create new particles is governed by the total energy of the incoming particle and its target, as measured in their center of momentum frame. The LHC is a collider, so all of that 7 TeV is available to create particles. But an incoming cosmic ray of energy 10^20 eV striking an atmospheric atom has an energy in the cosmic ray-atom center of momentum frame which is proportional to the square root of its energy in the Earth's rest frame (see here); i.e., on the order of only sqrt(10^20) or 3 x 10^10 eV.

So, crudely, the LHC at energies of ~10^13 eV can be more effective at producing new particles than ultra high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) atmospheric showers at 10^20 eV.

However, I've read that cosmic rays with center-of-momentum energies of ~10^14 eV have been observed, so I think those proportionality constants I'm ignoring will turn out to matter, and that UHECR particle production energies are more significant than LHC (but only by an order of magnitude or so). For a more detailed discussion of black hole production, try Landsberg's review, or Ringwald and Tu.

Incidentally, for doomsday worriers, Hut and Rees showed back in 1984 that it is likely that two such cosmic rays have struck each other in our past (not the Earth's atmosphere) — essentially an ad-hoc collider experiment — which means a center of momentum energy ~10^20 eV. So we're safe from the universe-destroying scenarios (like tunneling out of a false vacuum), since our universe hasn't ended yet, but not necessarily from black hole production (which we would not have necessarily noticed before now).

A longer summary article of the recent paper whose abstract is referenced above is here. Note that this is a recent article. The Antikythera Mechanism has been discussed before on /., but this paper is recent.

A longer summary article of the recent paper whose abstract is referenced above is here. Note that this is a recent article. The Antikythera Mechanism has been discussed before on /., but this paper is recent.

Straight to the Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/ab s/nature05357.html

Please look at this low cost alternative CO2 Sequestration system.

The integrated energy strategy offered by Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.

I feel we should push for this Terra Preta Soils CO2 sequestration strategy as not only a global warming remedy for the first world, but to solve fertilization and transport issues for the third world. This information needs to be shared with all the state programs.

The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place. These are processes where you can have your Bio-fuels, Carbon Sequestration and fertility too.

  Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/fu ll/442624a.html

Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehm...r_home.h tm

This Earth Science Forum thread on these soil contains further links ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-te rra-preta.html

The Georgia Inst. of Technology page:
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/dday.pd f

There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.

Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.

Here is a great pyrolysis process , ( http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.

If pre Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.

We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7118/fu ll/nature05240.html

Well, there are also better treatmens nowadays, the laser-based treatments for example. So there is a lot of progress! But the value of these new methods can be really appreciated only when tested in realistic settings, in animals or humans (sometimes even that last step can be decisive, see for example the recent tragic human trial of antibodies. Therefore I propose to market new methods as new methods, and new breakthroughs for those cases that really have proven to be a breakthrough.

copy-number variants are "taking up some 12% of the human genome. That doesn't mean that your DNA is 12% different from mine (or 88% similar), because any two people's DNA will differ at only a handful of these spots" [nature]

Looking at the writeup from Nature. They clearly state that these results point to maybe a 0.5% difference among individuals, or 99.5% identical. That's 20X less variation than this crap article would have you believe. The actual research deals with CNV's = copy number variants. So for a given stretch of DNA, different people in a population might have that region duplicated or triplicated which does not really allow them to make anything different, but it might alter the levels of expression of those genes. As this DNA is found in multiple copies it had largely been believed to have a low number of genes, as is the case of most highly repeated DNA, but the researchers have evidence that these repeated domains do contain a large number of unique genes. In a short summary/analogy:
Some people are 8 feet tall.
Some people are 4 feet tall.
Therefore, people vary in height by 200%.

It's obvious to see the failed logic in that case, that's the same thing here, just because 10% might potentially be variable, that doesn't mean any single person even exists at each extreme.

I don't think you can point to any peer-reviewed papers which demonstrate any of the significant facts you just claimed.

Your claims are wrong. You may want to start reading here:

False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction (Dec. 4, 2004)

Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" (Dec. 4, 2004)

On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick (Jan. 6, 2005)

Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stock" controversy (Feb. 18, 2005)

and

Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

The academy essentially upholds Mann's findings, although the panel concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding...

Yet another slashvertisement for New Scientist claptrap. Will the pseudo science crap ever stop? If I wanted to read that shit I'd go there, PLEASE stop posting it here.

"New" Scientist? If this is the new science I don't want anything to do with it.

At least they do not claim to be scientists, just "New Scientists". New Scientist = euphemism for Pseudo Scientist.

Give us some real science please. You won't find it at New Scientist, nor will you find it in Nature.

You can find real science in publications like those overseen by the following organisations: ACS, RSC, AIP, IOP, AMS, Elsevier, etc., etc...

See the difference? Probably not...

"by the year 2000 the oceans will be empty of all fish!" that sort of thing. 2000 got here and low and behold none of the bad things(tm) happened.

[Some scientists] estimate that large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10% of pre-industrial levels. source

2002, 10% left - that's close enough for me

We know this worked *how*?

Actually most scientists publish in journals that everyone can read.

I don't know about "most", but certainly not most mathematicians, physicists, or engineers. Certainly not in journals my school can pay for. We have tremenduous difficulties getting some of those journals and information, which is contrary to the spirit of science and academic collaboration. There are huge problems with publishing in the sciences. Witness for example the resignation of the board of editors of Topology and the rants of John Milne.

Science ought to push copyright aside.

I've never heard of a university library that turned away the public.

Have you been to the university libraries of many different countries? Here in .mx that has happened to me.

FYI, all journals (that I've published in) require us to pay to publish our articles

Which is a damn shame... The cost of having people publish, peer review, and publish journal articles is already indirectly paid by taxes and government, sometimes private investors, but it shouldn't come directly come out of the scientist's pocket, and this cost certainly shouldn't be inhibitting the public at large from gaining access to information. Again, I speak for the hard sciences most of which are pursued for their own sake; perhaps in scientific applications with more interest for Big Business the rules are different.

A. The author is Gavin Schmidt and was not one of the co-authors of the "hockey stick" study.

B. There were three authors of the "hockey stick" study (Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes), not a "duo".

C. The "hockey stick" is more credible than the criticisms leveled against it.

D. The "hockey stick" has no bearing on this debunking of Monckton.

Simple thermodynamic reasoning is not sufficient when ppCO2 operates in a complex chemical system.

and how is it keeping it from coming back out into the atmosphere via normal thermodynamic means?

This Nature paper discusses the process. See the second paragraph.

The real bottleneck, as the article describes, is finding a way to sort the little guys. There isn't a standard technique (yet) to efficiently separate large quantities of the semiconducting and metallic tubes, or to separate the tubes by size. If either or both of of these advancements are made, those findings will be worth all the hype!
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v1/n1/abs/nnan o.2006.52.html/
This article describes how you can separate carbon nanotubes by diameter, bandgap, and electronic type. Maybe you should do a little more searching before making statements like that.

My guess is that (in a nutshell) they examined the histology of the eye after transplantation, and made conclusions based what we know of what the normal eye should look like.

Reuters being a popular press outlet, it's understandable that they wouldn't give a quite detailed explanation, but here is a link to the Nature article:

http://ww w.nature.com/news/2006/061106/full/061106-10.html

It's not much better than the Reuters bit, but at least it offers a link to the abstract at the bottom (and the full pdf, if you have access to Nature).

There have been several attempts to develop electricity generators using the tide, such as these:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/04/business /main2153298.shtml
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/040322 -7.html;jsessionid=E3647E0B96B907DE7AF07B7FC3B0361 4
http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-05/features/oce an-energy/
I'm skeptical of the original article's device because it apparently is from "New Scientist," which recently reported on an Amazing Antigravity Device (not that I trust Discover much these days). But the wave energy gadgets have been proven to generate electricity (11kV for the third one), and you can use that for conventional desalination. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power .

Presumably it can't be used for cooling, though -- can't simultaneously equip the Wave Beam and the Ice Beam. 8)

As I understand it, about half the world's desal capability is located in the Middle East, mostly in Saudi Arabia, and there it's oil-powered, done by high-pressure sprays against a grating. Even in the Middle East it makes up only maybe 3% of the water supply.

Long-term, we should be looking at greatly reducing the need for freshwater by making irrigation more efficient -- it makes up about half of our demand -- and that means drip-irrigation systems and maybe gengineering of plants for salt tolerance.

* Monckton categorically states that the temperature of the oceans has decreased, without using sources. From what I know though, temperatures have increased. Can't find a bullet proof link for it (was looking for NOAA timelines, but no luck), but you can use coral-reef die-offs as a good proxy.

Again I am pointing out to the submitter: why not mentioning the original peer-reviewed article (OPRA)? At least the source of it: Nature. Insasmuch I despise this pileload of pseudoscience which Nature is, it has the highest impact factor among the general science journals with peer-reviewed articles.

I am pretty sure tons of specialists that visit ./ regularly would appreciate that. All academics have free access to Nature and many industrial scientists do as well.

Here is the OPRA link.

I'd love to see a citation for a claim that 10% of articles in what is commonly regarded as the world's most authoritative encyclopedia are "non-factual".

Your wish is my command!

I guess "non-factual" seems a bit strong - I would take that to mean that the entire article had to be totally bogus. I don't think anyone is claiming that. But for a weaker definition of "non-factual": "An article containing at least one major non-fact", the figures are indeed about 10% for both Britannica AND Wikipedia.

The 'Nature' survey is the one that's generally quoted. They took 42 science-related articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica and asked a bunch of highly regarded experts in the field to carefully fact-check each article. They found FOUR significant factual errors within those 42 articles in each encyclopedia. That's a hair under 10% for those of us who are counting...but close enough. In addition to those four 'significant' errors, there were also 162 minor errors in Wikipedia and 123 minor errors in Britannica.

I don't have a link to the Nature article - but here is a story about the story:

      http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900 a.html

I understand that subsequent surveys have shown that the minor error rate in Wikipedia has improved significantly (as you might expect for an encyclopedia that's updated so often) - and that by some measures at least, Wikipedia is now more reliable than Britannica. With Wikipedias error rate fast improving over Britannica - and with breadth of coverage VASTLY outstripping Britannica - we have to stop calling Britannica "the world's most authoritative" and hand that title to the Wikipedia.

In this particular case, there were 30 copies of the virus in the genome. They worked backward to create the original virus. The resultant virus was disabled so that, after replicating once in a cell, the daughter viruses could not replicate. So there was no risk.

In the human genome, the researchers point out, are the pieces from other viruses. 8% of the human genome codes for HERV proteins or their regulatory subunits. If these pieces are activated, they can reassemble to create a new, working virus. This happens naturally.

All of these HERVs are viruses that, throughout human evolution, we and our ancestors have more or less come to terms with. At some point, many of them were probably devastating. But those that caught the virus, survived, and reproduced were able to mitigate the effects of the virus. These are viruses we've reached a "détente" with. They no longer rampage through the population. In fact, some of the proteins they produce are vital to our survival. One of these retroviral proteins permits implantation of the placenta. Without it, we'd all have placentas that don't attach to the uterine lining -- like mice, which as a result, aren't very complex when they have to be born.

Yes, HERVs are related to cancer. This occurs naturally. They act in a transposon-like manner, and they can pop into areas where they either damage mechanisms that prevent cancer or control cell replication. If we don't study these viral remains, we won't learn about them, won't learn what we can safely disable further -- and what we don't dare eliminate from our genome because we are dependent upon it.

These researchers were not Dr. Frankensteins, messing with things man was not meant to know. They were careful, they were deliberate, and theya re beginning the investigation into what could be an incredibly crucial topic in molecular biology.

Remember -- these are viruses that we learned to live with, more or less. By studying them, we can learn to mitigate the damage they still present.

Gosh, where to begin. I've had to become knowledgeable about this in the last 18 months due to being a bit strange biologically, and here's a simplified summary of what I've found out.

It's simple for most of us - we either have 46xy chromosomes, a male body, and a male gender identity, or alternately, 46xx chromosomes, a female body, and a female gender identity. Some of us are Gay, some Lesbian, some straight, some bisexual, some asexual, but that's beside the point.

First, I'll start with the hundreds of different syndromes that collectively are called Intersex Conditions. What is Intersex? A practical definition is that the body is neither wholly male nor female. Some definitions insist that the condition must be present at birth to be "truly" Intersexed, others require both male and female characteristics to be present. Depending on your definition, 1.7% of the populace are Intersexed, but in only 1 in 1000 is it noticeable, and causes a problem.

Now to Genetic Sex. 46xx equals boy, 46xx equals girl, right? Not necessarily. From Nature :

But in most cases of anatomically complete XX men -- who have functional testes, but without a Y are infertile -- SRY is involved. For this reason, it has long been called the gene that defines 'maleness'.[1]

But now Giovanna Camerino of the University of Pavia in Italy and colleagues have found another gene that is equally important to the process.

The team studied a family in which four brothers were each XX. None carried the 'male' SRY gene. Instead, the team reports in Nature Genetics [2], they each have a mutation in a gene called RSPO1.

See what I mean? Then there's conditions like Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, where a 46xy girl results. For real biological weirdness, look at 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5ARD) syndrome, where a child who appears to be a girl until puberty becomes a boy afterwards.

I say "girl" and "boy" because that's what they look like externally.

But gender - or gender identity if you like - appears to be a consequence of brain morphology. Just as there are Intersex conditions that can give people cross-gendered genitalia and secondary sex characteristics, it's possible to have a cross-gendered brain. Most are familar with how exposure to the drug Thalidomide causes foetal deformity of the limbs - though many have limb deformities without exposure. But few are aware of the effect of the drug DiEthylStilEstrol, a drug commonly administered to pregnant women in the 50s, 60s and 70s. A 5 year study of DES-sons showed that 1 in 5 had some degree of Gender Dysphoria - basically, they thought like girls, they had girls emotions, and a male body felt terribly uncomfortable to them. Their brains were female, and we now know from dynamic MRI scans, autopsies, and examination of individual brain cells that male and female brains are far more different that we'd believed even ten years ago.

So in addition to the obviously Intersexed, there's the people who have Congenital Neurological Intersex, or Harry Benjamin's Syndrome, or Transsexuality.

How and why do I know all this? I had one of the really odd conditions. Until age 47, I was thought to be a male with partial androgen insensitivity, slight hypogonadism. Then weird stuff happened, and my body rapidly feminised - something I'd dreamed of but knew was medically impossible. Turns out it's not, I know 7 other cases now of women with HBS who have spontaneously feminised between age 40 and 55. There's at least 3 different mechanisms that can cause it. Being a Geek Girl, I blogged about it as it happened, of course.

Neither Gender nor Sex are easy things to determine for a tiny minority of