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Chernobyl, Windscale, Three Mile Island.

Chernobyl was a very serious incident. WHO attributed 56 direct deaths and possibly as many as extra 4000-6000 cancer deaths in the long term. (source 1), (source 2). However, you can't compare the Chernobyl reactor to western reactors of that day and age and certainly not to new types of reactors with passive safety. Three Mile Island is considered to be worlds' second worst nuclear accident. The death toll? 0. Compare that to the thousands of people that die in Chinese coal mines every year. (source)

We're told that current nuclear plants are safe, and not like the ones that exploded or went up in flames. At the time the plants which are now acknowledged to be dangerous were being constructed, the public were also told that they were completely safe. The public can be forgiven for not believing that an industry with a history of serial lies on safety is now both safe and
truthful about it for once.

Also, I don't suppose they were actually intending to have any accidents, or for some of the radioactive leaks - though BNFL's own propaganda admits they deliberately discharged nuclear waste into the sea. Humans make mistakes, which is another reason nuclear isn't trusted.

Thirdly, terrorism. You don't get coal-fired suicide bombers.

Labeling in Europe does NOT work, and it falls short of what would be considered "pro-consumer." The labeling laws are helpful to keep protected producers more protected. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v24/n1/full/nbt0 106-23b.html

I'm NOT saying everyone should call every manufacturer -- instead, by removing labeling requirements and letting the competitive market give the consumers what they want, we'd see a better choice of quality, price and product numbers. If you and I wanted MORE labeling, we'd go to a store that worked with their producers to verify manufacturing and content, and we'd pay more. The market provides. If John and Jane didn't care at all, they could go to a store that bought the cheapest product -- the store would be the risk bearer in providing what the market wants.

Labeling in Europe does NOT work, and it falls short of what would be considered "pro-consumer." The labeling laws are helpful to keep protected producers more protected. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v24/n1/full/nbt0 106-23b.html

I'm NOT saying everyone should call every manufacturer -- instead, by removing labeling requirements and letting the competitive market give the consumers what they want, we'd see a better choice of quality, price and product numbers. If you and I wanted MORE labeling, we'd go to a store that worked with their producers to verify manufacturing and content, and we'd pay more. The market provides. If John and Jane didn't care at all, they could go to a store that bought the cheapest product -- the store would be the risk bearer in providing what the market wants.

Right now, I _HAVE_ to call because the labeling laws make it difficult to know what I'm eating. In Spring I called 15 "Zero Trans Fats" producers who verified that their products contain trans fats, just levels lower than the law requires (0.5 grams per serving). You might buy those products thinking their safe -- BECAUSE OF THE LAW! I had to take a step because of the law. Ridiculous.

At the moment, the Earth is at the beginning of a cycle

Some have wondered whether previous studies failed to spot die-offs associated with Milankovitch-linked oscillations because they pooled data from different parts of the globe. "People look at it from a whole bunch of different spatial and temporal scales," says Barnosky. "They may lump together, say, Oregon and southern Utah, where climate changes might be different."

Donald Prothero, of Occidental College Los Angeles, says that the fossil record used by van Dam is extraordinary, but questions how applicable his results will be to species other than rodents. "It's okay as far as it goes," says Prothero. "But I wouldn't necessarily extend the applications too far."

More info in nature. It seems to do with something called Milankovich cycles. But i guess 'wobble' is specific enough for stuff that matters.

CIA rates their average risk of getting Major infectious diseases as "intermediate" so they do have some competent level of medical care.

Read here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7109/fu ll/443254b.html

Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them.

The six are all foreign workers. Poor conditions at the hospital led to 400 kids getting AIDS, and now the Libyan "government" is trying these six in a death-penalty case to try to blame them for the poor conditions at the hospital.

Libya is a 3rd-world hell-hole, but it doesn't have to be. There's plenty of money, they just need to can the idiot running the place and get an actual government. Probably the best piece that I've read on Libya:

http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/in-the- land-of-the-brother-leader/12/

In Michael Totten's words: Libya is the most oppressive state on earth next to North Korea.

I would strongly suggest that anyone in Libya who may be reading this to read the "Declaration of Independence" of the US. There you will find that you have a duty to can the dictator. Note: DUTY.

Right here . Although I must beg to differ, with you - the mechanism wasn't obvious to anyone until this study. For what it's worth, it was in the "Letters" section of nature - it wasn't even a full article:

Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans

ANDREW FIRE, SIQUN XU, MARY K. MONTGOMERY, STEVEN A. KOSTAS, SAMUEL E. DRIVER & CRAIG C. MELLO

Experimental introduction of RNA into cells can be used in certain biological systems to interfere with the function of an endogenous gene,. Such effects have been proposed to result from a simple antisense mechanism that depends on hybridization between the injected RNA and endogenous messenger RNA transcripts. RNA interference has been used in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to manipulate gene expression,. Here we investigate the requirements for structure and delivery of the interfering RNA. To our surprise, we found that double-stranded RNA was substantially more effective at producing interference than was either strand individually. After injection into adult animals, purified single strands had at most a modest effect, whereas double-stranded mixtures caused potent and specific interference. The effects of this interference were evident in both the injected animals and their progeny. Only a few molecules of injected double-stranded RNA were required per affected cell, arguing against stochiometric interference with endogenous mRNA and suggesting that there could be a catalytic or amplification component in the interference process.

So I'm checking Slashdot during a break in my studying today and suddenly I see the material I'm covering is posted on the front page!

Makes me wonder whether it's too early to be tested on the material when the Nobel Prize was awarded AFTER the lecture I recieved on it. That's the field of biology for you though, dramatic changes are possible every year.

The central dogma has really been taking a licking with prions first, and now this.

The article doesn't really go into anything very scientific unfortunately. Here is an animation on RNAi that will hopefully explain the process visually for anyone that may be interested. http://www.nature.com//focus/rnai/animations/anima tion/animation.htm

"...do we have any that can detect this sort of soft tissue beneath the bone? If so I think they should be standard equipment on any paleontological dig."

Yes. X-ray micro-computedtomographic scanning at what is rapidly approaching the submicron resolution level utilizing monochromatic intense collimated beams of synchrotron radiation coupled to high resolution scintillating film joined CCD detectors is fully up to the task. But you'll have to bring the fossils to it.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/pressrel eases/20031208a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v428/n6985/ab s/nature02470.html

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/pluto.html

http://biocab.org/Cosmic_Rays_Graph.html#anchor_77

http://biocab.org/Global_Warming.html#anchor_32

Now I'd like to see someone try to blame the system wide warming on our driving SUV's. I'm sure someone out there will. LOL!!!!

Here's a very informative speech delivered this past Monday on the US Senate floor by senator James Inhofe Chairman, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It's not your normal uninformed rant we've come to expect from our politicians. http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id= 263759

Well there are a shitload of fuckin creationists on here, for Chrissakes. Just imagine their wailing and gnashing of teeth if they posted the finding of a 3.3 million year old hominin. Sure /. probably makes more money from stories that have 1000 posts, but even the editors have a tolerance level of crazy creationist claptrap crap.

I study supernovae for a living.

The Nature paper in which this work is published has a figure showing all the measurements of this supernova's brightness; you can see it on Nature's web site at

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7109/fi g_tab/nature05103_F1.html

There are four measurements near time of maximum light, in the red (r) and near-infrared (i) passbands. There are many more measurements starting about 15 days after maximum light in the rest frame, including some in a blue-green (g) passband. Here's what the researchers did to find the maximum brightness of this supernova, so that they could compare it to others:

    a) fit models based on the light curves of other supernovae to the r and i measurements,
                  and the late-time g measurements

    b) choose a different passband -- the greenish V passband of the Johnson-Cousins system,
                  which is closest to their own g passband (the one with no data at max light)

    c) use their models to estimate what the light curve in the V filter would have been

This can be a tricky business. Their major conclusion, that this supernova was more luminous than typical ones, is probably correct, but their claim that they can measure the peak magnitude in the V-band to an uncertainty of 6 percent seems a bit bold.

As the press release states, if atypical SNe are very rare, then this probably doesn't have any major impact on the use of Type Ia SNe in cosmology.

That's not their original paper, try this one:

http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf

This is the one with the classic line:
"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Grow them in those, "starving" countries where if they fuck up thier ecosystem it really doesn't matter given thier ecosystem aparently doesn't have the food they need

What a touching way to phrase the suffering of millions. Unless a particular gene bestows an INCREDIBLY advantageous attribute to a crop (like, say, the ability to fly), the gene's ecosystem penetration will remain minimal. If the advantage isn't powerful enough to make all other versions of the crop "obsolete", this "contamination" will increase biodiversity, not lower it.

I have yet to see such a a "doomsday" supermaize-quatrotriticale hybrid. Scientists appear to be focusing efforts on silly things like Vitamin A-enhanced rice to prevent childhood blindness in developing countries instead.

The big draw suposidly for these crops has been to help fend off world hunger, but what country are they being grown in? The grand ol' land of glut.

After you harvest food, you can move it. Notice how the grand ol' land of glut (forgive me for assuming you refer to the USA) was responsible for 61.8% of the world's food aid in 2002 (the most recent statistics I could find / are availble), donating more than the rest of the world combined.

Besides, what would it say if we refused to grow the crops that are supposed to be the salvation of the starving? If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us.

Besides, research like sub1a gene modification that allows rice to survive for weeks underwater addresses a problem the US lacks - namely, that of having the bulk of it's farmland flooded for weeks at a time.

Alergic to fish? Guess what? Damn good chance your alergic to said food contaminated with such genes

Now that's just silly.

Granted, soybeans with Brazil Nut genes have caused allergic reactions in those allergic to Brazil Nuts. Remember that the allergy is not caused by the nut itself, but by a single protein known as methionine. Also remember that DNA is nothing but a template for protein creation - every gene you have operates through protein manufacture. And, of all the genes in the Brazil Nut, only the one that synthesize methionine is responsible for the allergy.

In other words, you're not allergic to fish. You're allergic to parvalbumins, and only the genes directly responsible for creating these proteins have the chance to cause an allergic reaction.

we've been selecting from natural evolution what crop survived better (which would have happened anyways)

We haven't been breeding crops to find the ones that "survive" better. Presumably the ones we've been breeding through the millenia survived just fine before we started breeding the ones that were already surviving.

What we've actually been doing is breeding tobacco varieties that taste better and tomato plants with larger fruit and soybean with better nutritional value as livestock feed. Presumably cows would be unable to effect their own multivitamin-related desires on soybean evolution with direct human interation.

The physicist Stephen Hawking predicted in the 1970s that black holes would evaporate by radiating away their energy. For astrophysical black holes this is a very slow process, but extremely small black holes should last about as long as a snowflake in hell.

he trick might be to turn off the expression of the gene temporarily to rejuvenate aging organs, then switch it back in again to suppress cancer. That way, maybe Yossarian can have is cake and eat it too...

Wishful thinking. As much as people would love to blame the cause of aging on one particular gene or process, the truth of the matter is that aging is a complex and multi-factorial phenomenon that can't be addressed that easily.

Sure, stopping this particular gene might allow for more somatic cell repair but what does that do for the damaged mDNA due to free radicals in the mitohondria? And what about the telomeres protecting the ends of your chromosomes which would decrease with every replication? And what about damaged cells whose replication could cause the very cancer this gene was probably "designed" to prevent?

Not to be discouraging of this kind of research, but really it is just pie-in-the-sky type of stuff and should be regarded as such; the science just isn't there yet. And the irony of it all is that immortality most certainly won't be obtained in our lifetimes. Joseph Heller has to be smiling somewhere about that one.

-Grym

Further in the article, the statement gets a bit weaker:

"When the team looked for the protein in the human body, they found it in many places, including in neurons in the brain."

What can you expect from a former Newsweek reporter? Even if she is hot.

http://www.nature.com/news/about/aboutus.html#Chec k

Wikipedia is still, by-in-large, a respectable and reliable source of information when compared to professionally produced encyclopedias. For example, in a study where experts evaluated 42 entries between Wikipedia and Britannica's online version, the experts found an equal amount of *serious* errors (four each) along with 123 factual errors in the Britannica and 162 in Wikipedia. So, that means the professionally-produced encyclopedia had three errors for every four in an amateur and openly edited one. Not too shabby for free.

Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?

Then he should use, say, Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean, no one is forcing anyone to use Wikipedia. Of course, Britannica—while there is no risk of it being altered as you describe—when examined turns out not to be much more accurate than Wikipedia where they both cover the same topics, and Britannica has far less coverage in a lot of areas, but if your concern is only that you don't want to look at an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, then Wikipedia isn't the online encyclopedia for you.

The "Methods" section only says the methods are the same as in "Ringach DL, Hawken MJ, and Shapley R. Dynamics of orientation tuning in macaque primary visual cortex.", which I did not find on-line.
Nature generally requires an institutional subscription to read their papers (which I'll admit is pretty lame). Here's the methods section from the Ringach, Hawken, & Shapley (Nature, 1996) paper:

(It doesn't want to copy-paste, so I'm typing the text by hand. My apologies for any typos.)

Acute experiments were performed on adult Old-World monkeys (Macaca fascicularis). Animals were initially tranquilized with i.m. acepromazine (50 ug kg-1), anaesthetized with i.m. ketamine and maintained on i.v. opiod anaesthetic (sufentanil citrace, 6 ug kg-1 h-1). During recording, anaesthesia was continued with sufentanil (6 ug kg-1 h-1). During recording, anaesthesia was continued with sufentanil (6 ug kg-1 h-1) and paralysis induced with pancuronium bromide. Electrocardiogram and expired CO2 were continuously monitored and blood pressure was measured non-invasively at intervals of 5 min by a Hewlett-Packard Model 78354A patient monitor. Extracellular action potentials were recorded with glass-coated tungsten microelectrodes, exposed tips 5-15 um. Spikes were detected using a Bak (Maryland, USA) DDIS-I dual window discriminator and were time-stamped with an accuracy of 1 ms using a CED-1401 Plus (Cambridge, UK) data acquisition system. Strict criteria for single-unit recording included fixed shape of the action potential and the absence of spikes during the absolute refractory period. Small electrolytic lesions (2-3 uA for 2-3s, tip negative) were made along the length of each penetration. Details of the reconstruction of the penetrations and the assignment of cells to cortical layers can be found in ref. 30.

A Silicon Graphics Elan R4000 computer generated the stimuli in real time. The screen measured 34.3 cm wide by 27.4 cm high. The refresh rate of the monitor was 60 Hz. The mean luminance of the display was 56 cd m-2. The contrast of the gratings was 100% and their spatial frequency was optimal for each cell. The size of the stimulation patch was large compared to the receptive field of the cell; the side of the stimulus was between 6 and 10 times the spatial period of the optimal grating. The receptive field of the cell was centred in the middle of the stimulus. Therefore, both the classical receptive field of the cell and its surround were stimulated. Most cell responded with mean spike rates ranging between 2 and 40 spikes per second. A few cells with very high directional selectivity did not respond at all to the stimulus and could not be studied.

We ran stimulus sequences for 15 min (900 s or 54,000 frames). In a typical experiment we used an angular resolution of ~10^0. Thus, the set S usually contained 72 different images (18 orientations X 4 spatial phases). During the 15-min presentation each image appeared, on average, 750 times. If a typical cortical neuron fired ~5 spikes per second to the stoachastic stimulation sequence, we obtained a total of 4,500 spikes. We distribution these 4,500 spikes in only 18 orientation bins (because we average across spatial phases). Thus, for a uniform distribution, about 250 spikes are found in each bin. The large number of spikes and small number of orientation bins allowedc us to obtain smooth and accurate orientation probability distributions.

The circular variance v of a cell which has responses Rk at angles 0-180 is given by ... [math equation]. Circular variance is a measure of orientation bandwidth which is bounded between zero and one. Cells not tuned for orientation have a circular variance of one. Cells that are very sharply tuned have circular variance values close to zero.

For some additional context, here's the abstract: Orientation tuning of neurons is one of the chief emergent characteristics of the primary visual

Slashdot wants more characters per line Sky above 37Â375"N 122Â2222"W at Sat 2005 Jul 2 20:11 Slashdot wants more characters per line ScienceDaily Magazine -- News Summaries Slashdot wants more characters per line BBC NEWS | Science/Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Science News Online Slashdot wants more characters per line Molecule of the Day Slashdot wants more characters per line The Loom Slashdot wants more characters per line Cosmic Variance Slashdot wants more characters per line Scientific American news Slashdot wants more characters per line Sciencegate Slashdot wants more characters per line New Scientist Slashdot wants more characters per line LiveScience Slashdot wants more characters per line Science And Politics Slashdot wants more characters per line Chris C Mooney Slashdot wants more characters per line symmetry Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Discover Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Mathematician OTD Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line ESA - Cassini-Huygens Slashdot wants more characters per line NASA - Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line HiRISE Operations Center -- HiROC Slashdot wants more characters per line Cassini Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Slashdot wants more characters per line Saturn Today Slashdot wants more characters per line HubbleSite - NewsCenter Slashdot wants more characters per line MESSENGER Web Site Slashdot wants more characters per line Deep Impact: Your First Look Inside a Comet! Slashdot wants more characters per line Pluto, Charon, and other Kuiper Belt Objects including, Sedna, 2003 UB313, as well as Asteroids and Comets. Slashdot wants more characters per line Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Pharyngula

Here's some of the sources I use...

For general stuff, News@Nature is fairly good, although much of their content requires a subscription.

There's also a few blogs I regularly read which are quite good at offering in-depth analysis of recent scientific news in specific fields:

* Space science: Planetary Society's blog (note that the main author, Emily Lakdawalla, is on maternity leave, so at the moment there's some guest-authors of varying quality)

* Biology/evolution: Carl Zimmer's The Loom

* Pharmaceuticals: In The Pipline

* Future tech trends: http://futurepundit.com/

The home pages for the Royal Society of Chemistry http://www.rsc.org/ and the public face of the American Chemical Society, http://www.chemistry.org/, as well as the American Physics Society http://www.aip.org/. It's a lot of foraging, but it will get you the technical gory details. If your local library has it, Chemical and Engineering News has roundups both in the front of the magazine, and in a one-page science-technology roundup. The rest of the mag is pretty much chemical industry, but has articles on particular areas at times.

As a previous poster mentioned, Science http://www.sciencemag.org/ and Nature http://www.nature.com/ are good all in one stops.

Personally, I start every monday lunch off with browsing the table of contents of JACS, J. Phys. Chem., Organometallics, Inorganic Chemistry, and J. Org. Chem. If you're not a chemist, these will probably bore you to death, but it's where I get my science news from, other than the Tuesday NYT.

Tiny fossils are easy to get back to the lab, unlike, say, a multi-metre-long Tyrannosaurus rex, which takes a big excavation.

The 3D reconstruction of fossils isn't new. That's been done for, oh, probably close to 100 years. In the early 20th century, it was done by grinding down a fossil specimen millimetre by millimetre, sketching or photographing each surface, and then putting together a wax or paper model of each section until the 3D shape is reconstructed. It's been done for everything from fossil plants to fish and other vertebrates. Very laborious work.

More recently, people do the same thing, but take a digital picture of the sections and use software to assemble a 3D volume and select and render parts of it. If the object is relatively large (say, centimetres in size and larger), it can alternatively be subjected to medical CAT and other types of non-destructive 3D imaging techniques. This is routine for specimens such as dinosaur skulls, in order to see the interior without destroying the specimen. If the fossil is small and transparent, 3D imaging can be done with laser scanning confocal microscopy. But opaque, small (say, require the destructive serial sectioning method, meaning you have a nice, scientifically valuable 3D reconstruction at the end of the procedure, but no specimen anymore.

The new part in this technique is therefore the *non-destructive* 3D reconstruction of such tiny fossil specimens. That's where the particle accelerator becomes necessary to get sufficient resolution to be useful. This is much higher resolution than typical 3D medical imaging. The general technique isn't that unusual, because it has existed for years too. It is the application to microfossils that is relatively new (Nature registration required to view that last article).

Oh, and if people are wondering what "penis worms" are (the jokes are piling up by now), the technical term is Priapulida. More details at the linked page.

Yeah, I know. I'm spoiling the fun.

For the curious, here's the research abstract from the publication in Nature:

Electrical signals control wound healing through phosphatidylinositol-3-OH kinase-big gamma and PTEN

Wound healing is essential for maintaining the integrity of multicellular organisms. In every species studied, disruption of an epithelial layer instantaneously generates endogenous electric fields, which have been proposed to be important in wound healing. The identity of signalling pathways that guide both cell migration to electric cues and electric-field-induced wound healing have not been elucidated at a genetic level. Here we show that electric fields, of a strength equal to those detected endogenously, direct cell migration during wound healing as a prime directional cue. Manipulation of endogenous wound electric fields affects wound healing in vivo. Electric stimulation triggers activation of Src and inositol-phospholipid signalling, which polarizes in the direction of cell migration. Notably, genetic disruption of phosphatidylinositol-3-OH kinase-gamma (PI(3)Kgamma) decreases electric-field-induced signalling and abolishes directed movements of healing epithelium in response to electric signals. Deletion of the tumour suppressor phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) enhances signalling and electrotactic responses. These data identify genes essential for electrical-signal-induced wound healing and show that PI(3)Kgamma and PTEN control electrotaxis.

That's actually quite an awesome paper. It seems that when a wound is made, it makes a low resistance shunt across skin, which normally has a voltage difference across it. This stimulates wound healing activity. The current peaks at 10 microA cm-2 and persisted at 4-8 microA cm-2, with all the current vector pointing towards the wound center. This paper shows not only that that effect is easily demonstrated in vitro, but what are the molecular mediators of it, see the original article here.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent /full/nature04979.html

Geneticists have already found a "second code" in DNA, called methylation. And that NYTimes article also reduces the basebair redundancy to "wiggle room".

The underlying research, published in Nature magazine, is extremely interesting and valuable, no doubt valid. The NYTimes coverage is oversimplified into wrongness out of reporter ignorance, and an insult to both readers and scientists.

Abstract and full text PDF. (currently freely available).

Abstract and full text PDF. (currently freely available).

I built prototype search software that revolved around a product called Collexis. It has a medical demo you can mess around with. The beautiful thing is that it uses a taxonomy to fingerprint documents. It also takes in raw text and assigns it a fingerprint and then uses Sleepy Cat to quickly reference many records and match your fingerprint. Unfortunately, it's not built for "open" domains like everything on the web but works best when you have a finite domain and a large number of documents to search.

I feel the author fails to even address the first thing he should have in this article. Why move from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0"? This article is not intuitively laid out.

I found an article in Nature to be much more informative than the article linked in this story.

Care to prove any of those statements or is it just another Wikideadhead justifying the unjustifiable?

I think you meant to say {{citation needed}}

Care to prove any of those statements or is it just another Wikideadhead justifying the unjustifiable?

I think you meant to say {{citation needed}}

The Nature paper about the guy who can open email, control an arm, etc. just by thinking is available as a free pdf here. Or just the abstract.

The Nature paper about the guy who can open email, control an arm, etc. just by thinking is available as a free pdf here. Or just the abstract.

Looks like we found an Encyclopedia Britannica fanboy, here. Go read "Nature". It will straighten you out. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7084/fu ll/440582b.html

Terry woke up three years ago, and the story was rather widely reported back then. In fact, Terri Schiavo has, in her time, often been compared to Terry - in fact, their medical cases share almost no similarities.

The story itself has woken up in 2006, for reasons unknown. You can find a better article than the one of the front page at http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/full/060703 -5.html

This everything2 article is probably the best I found about Terry, including updates from 2004: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=147582 5

Also, some updates on the family's fight with health services, from 2005: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/6/21 /143438.shtml

I had meant to call it quits in that other thread of ours, thinking "well, he might be overreacting, but he does have some arguments, and while I disagree on the evaluation of those arguments, both sides have made their point, no need to carry this on for ever". But sorry, your summary is unfair, and I can't resist commenting on it yet again.

> The original paper would be interesting to read for such bias. I'd like to read some peer reviews which critique its statistical premise. But the article linked to neither.
>
> None of the people disagreeing with me in this thread have, either.

Well guess what? It's not open access. Here's the link to the abstract (and full text, if you have a subscription) of the original study http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/ab s/nature02842.html. The comment by Hein, also cited in the article does not even have a freely viewable abstract. It's in the same issue, however, so go visit your local library. In case you have access: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/fu ll/431518a.html. Further it may not be common knowledge that Nature is a peer-reviewed journal, indeed, but no, peer reviews are not typically made public at all in any journal I know. Likely there will be follow up articles in Nature or other journals, some very likely containing the critisicms you would like to see, but research them yourself, if you really want to read them.

> Most have just argued with me without logic, just defensively against the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media.

I have read most posts in that thread, and don't agree. Further, if you happen to count me in to the "most", please tell me, where exactly I have argued against, or even just implicitly denied "the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media". I'm curious, where exactly I worded bad enough to give you that impression. What I have argued, is that I do not think this particular article is an example of one written by a theocrat or someone pursuing a Creationist agenda.

I understand you disagree with me on the evaluation of the article, and - yes - I can live with that, comfortably even, and don't think any less of you for it. Hey, I might even be wrong, after all. However, what I don't like at all is people misrepresenting my comments. I hope this wasn't your intention, and I just got you wrong.

I had meant to call it quits in that other thread of ours, thinking "well, he might be overreacting, but he does have some arguments, and while I disagree on the evaluation of those arguments, both sides have made their point, no need to carry this on for ever". But sorry, your summary is unfair, and I can't resist commenting on it yet again.

> The original paper would be interesting to read for such bias. I'd like to read some peer reviews which critique its statistical premise. But the article linked to neither.
>
> None of the people disagreeing with me in this thread have, either.

Well guess what? It's not open access. Here's the link to the abstract (and full text, if you have a subscription) of the original study http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/ab s/nature02842.html. The comment by Hein, also cited in the article does not even have a freely viewable abstract. It's in the same issue, however, so go visit your local library. In case you have access: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/fu ll/431518a.html. Further it may not be common knowledge that Nature is a peer-reviewed journal, indeed, but no, peer reviews are not typically made public at all in any journal I know. Likely there will be follow up articles in Nature or other journals, some very likely containing the critisicms you would like to see, but research them yourself, if you really want to read them.

> Most have just argued with me without logic, just defensively against the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media.

I have read most posts in that thread, and don't agree. Further, if you happen to count me in to the "most", please tell me, where exactly I have argued against, or even just implicitly denied "the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media". I'm curious, where exactly I worded bad enough to give you that impression. What I have argued, is that I do not think this particular article is an example of one written by a theocrat or someone pursuing a Creationist agenda.

I understand you disagree with me on the evaluation of the article, and - yes - I can live with that, comfortably even, and don't think any less of you for it. Hey, I might even be wrong, after all. However, what I don't like at all is people misrepresenting my comments. I hope this wasn't your intention, and I just got you wrong.

Their 2004 Nature paper. (May require a subscription to view the full text, I'm not sure. I might have institutional access.)

There is also a relevant Wikipedia entry on the most recent common ancestor.

[...] questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later.

I would venture they did it for the same reason that US satellite systems lost polar icecap sensors and other climate sensors... Here are two articles from Nature and Science journal... Apparently this is a non-news outside of a scientific community, for some reason...

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060612/full/441798 b.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/312/578 0/1580

http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewrecord.php?request er=gs&collection=TRD&recid=A7421234AH&q=g.+kukla&u id=788325659&setcookie=yes

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972Sci...178..190K

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5638/ab s/270573a0.html

Dozens of others that are accessible to casual search.

Owned much?

No, they don't say "plunging into the next ice age", any more than the current articles claim that New York will be buried under a mile of boiling water next week.

However, the screeching hippies and the sensationalist press of the day spun it that way, just like they're spinning the current (modest) increase as the end of civilization.

<sarcasm>

</sarcasm>

I agree, both Rosetta@Home and Folding@Home are good projects.

One should point out, to those confused by the research being announced as having come from Japanese, Canadian, and American scientists, that many such scientific papers are as a result of collaboration of a number of scientists and/or labs, frequently in multiple countries.

Or, you could just go to Nature Medicine and look it up yourself. That's where the original article that the news is based on is located.

Is now better than real turf, apparently.

I wouldn't mind seeing a reference on a claim like that. I call BS. See http://www.discover.com/issues/may-92/features/aqu estionofsize42/

You should read the article you cited, where it begins to discuss the endocrinological differences between pygmies and average people, their extremely low birth size, their lack of an adolescent growth spurt, and so on. It seems your article actually supports me. Actually, essentially every reference I find which is newer than 1980 supports me. Mercedes de Onis is responsible for a great many studies you can look into if you're interested, but the canonical reference is TJ Merimee's paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM issue 316, pp906-91. That's in 1987, if you actually intend to look it up, and want to call your library to make sure they have it first. That paper discusses insulin-like growth factor (you can read more about that on the internet as IGF, not ILGF.) Studies show that the Bantu, Ituri, Efe and Mbuti - the peoples we refer to as pygmies from the Congo forests of Zaire - stop growing at between 10 and 12 years of age, have no postpuberty endocrine phase at all (the 13-15 year old omg how tall did you get last summer thing.)

More detailed studies have since been made, though they're not as easy to read. Another reasonable paper is RC Bailey's, from Annals of Human Biology, issue 18 pp113-20, which is from 1991. That paper focuses specifically on the near-total lack of IGF-1, which is the most common reason for non-dysplasic dwarfism (that is, the stuff that isn't about your skeleton binding early.) The group of conditions circling around IGF-1, IGTD and similar chemicals is known as GHD. In the pygmy peoples there's also been a demonstrated lack of ICF-I by Renaldo Martorel, and there are several statistical studies which suggest (we're not sure yet) a resistance to Partial Growth Hormone, presumably due to damage in GHBP's ectodomain. Alternate isolated peoples show problems in other parts of the growth sequence, such as the Mountain Ok, Aeta and Mamanwa, who are lacking Growth Hormone Binding Protien but who do not show the resistance to GH.

A more important paper, but one which is almost impossibly for a layperson to read, is E.Z. Tronick S.A. Winn's paper in the Journal of Pediatric Developmental Behavior, issue 13, pp421-4, from 1992. That paper addresses the complete lack of other problems, most notably reduced vision, mental retardation, brittle skeleton or fragile tendon disorders which would be expected if the lack of growth was based on dietary fault. In fact, the only dietary health problem commonly attributed to the pygmies is hypoglycemia, which is suspected to be largely due to the major and frequently unreliable usage of honey in their diet and trade relationships with surrounding peoples.

Another paper from 1992, Zhou Xianjin's paper to Nature in issue 376, pp771-4, suggests that the Efe may in fact have two seperate kinds of pervasive dwarfism, a flaw in the nuclear scaffolding HmGI-c and HmGI(y), which is critical during embryogenic cycle dependant phosphorylation. Awesomely, Nature actually gives the references for their papers online, which saves me a lot of retyping.

You can also look up the Mountain Ok from Papua New Guinea, who show deficiencies in GHRhR. Unfortunately, the Kongkandji, Indindji and Barbaram aboriginal peoples of Australia are essentially extinct, so we have no idea what kept them small; medical science, working largely from photographs, suggests thanatophoric or diastrophic dysplasia, both of which are genetic disorders with a high recurrence in spontaneous mutation, due to the damage being near the end of the appropr

This rang a bell in my memory. A quick search finds a slightly variant method (electrolysis of the oxide dissolved in molten calcium chloride) from 2000:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v407/n6802/ab s/407361a0_fs.html

So the basic idea was demonstrated several years ago in one form or another. It hasn't taken long to find the optimal electrolyte and turn it into an industrial process...

The importance of properly documenting scientific experiments has been the subject of much scientific discourse in the peer reviewed literature. Recently, a series of letters on the use of ontologies for representing scientific experiments was published in Nature Biotechnology http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v24/n1/full/nbt0 106-21a.html, in part discussing the merits of Soldatova's work. However, it is generally agreed that developing such mechanisms is important, as just reviewed in another Nature journal http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v3/n6/full/nme th0606-415.html.

As scientific experiments become more complex, using new high throughput and complex technology platforms, having things like EXPO and FUGO in place will become crucial. In fact there is no need to wait to hold your breat for three years as there are experimental ontologies already in use, the best example is for microarrays http://mged.sourceforge.net/ontologies/index.php. A key requirement is the development of software tools that implement these ontologies, so that end users are not required to download and understand the backend OWL, as the parent post suggests. The most likley route is to have this built into databases http://fuge.sourceforge.net/ as a controlled vocabulary in a manner that is tranparent to the benchtop scientist.

The importance of properly documenting scientific experiments has been the subject of much scientific discourse in the peer reviewed literature. Recently, a series of letters on the use of ontologies for representing scientific experiments was published in Nature Biotechnology http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v24/n1/full/nbt0 106-21a.html, in part discussing the merits of Soldatova's work. However, it is generally agreed that developing such mechanisms is important, as just reviewed in another Nature journal http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v3/n6/full/nme th0606-415.html.

As scientific experiments become more complex, using new high throughput and complex technology platforms, having things like EXPO and FUGO in place will become crucial. In fact there is no need to wait to hold your breat for three years as there are experimental ontologies already in use, the best example is for microarrays http://mged.sourceforge.net/ontologies/index.php. A key requirement is the development of software tools that implement these ontologies, so that end users are not required to download and understand the backend OWL, as the parent post suggests. The most likley route is to have this built into databases http://fuge.sourceforge.net/ as a controlled vocabulary in a manner that is tranparent to the benchtop scientist.

I couldn't find much about EXPO but I found some previous work.

They have a publication in Nature biotech: The failure of many bio-ontologies to follow international standards for ontology design and description is hampering their application and threatens to restrict their future use.
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v23/n9/abs/nbt09 05-1095.html;jsessionid=873A8C7D8ADA6CD6B7ABB60E1E 640D45

They discuss microarray experiments.

Microarray experiments are interesting from the massive data they produce and what you can get out them. In a microarray experiment, you looks at all the mRNA trancripts generated in an organism under specific conditions. You get a whole lot of data from this experiment and often the researchers are only interested in one specific question and the rest of the data goes to waste. However, when the data is standardized and made available other researchers can look at the same data with a different question. Or look over multiple datasets with standardized data. These are massive data sets and for other people and groups to use the data (or you using the data in a different way) depends on standardization.

Right now, to find other research, you do a text search for a name you know. But what if someone is doing a very similar experiment with a different set of proteins that have a different name? If you could search the structure of the experiment instead of just the text, you could conceivably pull relevant information that you didn't know about.

Interestingly, King has another paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1472463 9&query_hl=5&itool=pubmed_docsum

Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist.
King RD, Whelan KE, Jones FM, Reiser PG, Bryant CH, Muggleton SH, Kell DB, Oliver SG.

Department of Computer Science, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DB, UK.

The question of whether it is possible to automate the scientific process is of both great theoretical interest and increasing practical importance because, in many scientific areas, data are being generated much faster than they can be effectively analysed. We describe a physically implemented robotic system that applies techniques from artificial intelligence to carry out cycles of scientific experimentation. The system automatically originates hypotheses to explain observations, devises experiments to test these hypotheses, physically runs the experiments using a laboratory robot, interprets the results to falsify hypotheses inconsistent with the data, and then repeats the cycle. Here we apply the system to the determination of gene function using deletion mutants of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and auxotrophic growth experiments. We built and tested a detailed logical model (involving genes, proteins and metabolites) of the aromatic amino acid synthesis pathway. In biological experiments that automatically reconstruct parts of this model, we show that an intelligent experiment selection strategy is competitive with human performance and significantly outperforms, with a cost decrease of 3-fold and 100-fold (respectively), both cheapest and random-experiment selection.

I couldn't see big leaps of innovation coming from this kind of experimentation, but there is a lot of basic grunt work done in research that this system could automate.