Slashdot Mirror

This is Richard Eastgate, the researcher interviewed by the BBC in the original article published on the BBC website. To answer ScuttleMonkey's original posting - there are two peer reviewed papers in the latest edition of the journal Eye ( http://www.nature.com/eye/index.html ). They can be found as follows - http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v20/n3/full/6701 882a.html http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v20/n3/full/6701 882a.html I think the links work for non subscribers, but I can't be sure. Richard

This is Richard Eastgate, the researcher interviewed by the BBC in the original article published on the BBC website. To answer ScuttleMonkey's original posting - there are two peer reviewed papers in the latest edition of the journal Eye ( http://www.nature.com/eye/index.html ). They can be found as follows - http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v20/n3/full/6701 882a.html http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v20/n3/full/6701 882a.html I think the links work for non subscribers, but I can't be sure. Richard

Or, it could be something else:

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060320/full/060320 -9.html

For convenient podcast downloads for NON-iPod MP3 players, try iTunes + iTunes Agent.

iTunes
http://www.apple.com/itunes/

iTunes Agent - use any MP3 player with iTunes
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=54 9637

My Morning Playlist
Nature Podcast (science journal)
http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/

NPR 5-minute News Summary
NPR Health & Science
NPR Technology
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.p hp?type=topic

Democracy NOW! (news - better than NPR in some ways)
http://democracynow.org/podcast_help.shtml#feeds

Diggnation (latest general blog news from digg.com)
http://revision3.com/diggnation

This Week in Tech (weekly tech news)
http://twit.tv/podcastinfo

Security Now! (tech/security news)
http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm

President's Weekly Radio Address (comedy)
http://weeklyradioaddress.com/

and I used to listen to Ricky Gervais (comedy), but he charges $$ now.
http://www.rickygervais.com/podcast.php

http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_re sponse.pdf

Soft.

The Wikipedia error list is full of many of the same objections over grammar, obscure details that the reviewer thought should be included, matters that could be considered opinion, etc. Compare the lists for the Paul Dirac or Stephen Wolfram articles, or the details on discussing motivation for the Nobel Prize Committee. Some of the "errors" logged against Wikipedia are truly silly:

Pythagoras' Theorem Reviewer: Geoff Smith, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Bath, UK.

1. "This means that knowing the lengths of two sides of a right triangle is enough to calculate the length of the third - something unique to right triangles.'' is misleading. If you know two sides of a triangle and the included angle then you can always calculate the length of the third side.

Granted, there are some real questions about methodology here, but Britannica loses a lot of credibility trying to slant the whole thing as a one-sided attack on them.

Not a biochemist, but a biology student. Hopefully my answers can help....

1. How does the template interact with the DNA to cause self-assembly in the desired pattern?

The thing to understand is that the template is the DNA. DNA binds to other DNA rather specifically, with the A's binding to the T's and the C's binding to the G's. Normally, there's two strands, with one strand containing the binding partners of the other strand. However, in this case, there'll be only one long strand and a bunch of other "staples". The long strand will bind to itself and also the "staples" to form this structure. The self-assembly is induced because it's energetically favorable - the A's "want" to pair with T's, etc. When DNA is heated to around the boiling point of water, however, all of these hydrogen bonds between strands are broken (but, importantly, the strands themselves remain intact). So now a bunch of single-stranded DNA is floating around, but when it's cooled, it assembles into structures. Normally, two DNA strands that are complemenatry would anneal, but in this case, the scientist designs the strand to bind to itself instead. Because it binds to itself in specific places, it forms a predictable structure. In this case, the scientist also used little bits of additional DNA to hold the structure together.

RNA often forms itself into this sort of secondary structure in nature, but that's typically boring stem-loop structures. In this case, the scientist takes our existing knowledge of nucleotide secondary structure and tried to make his own more interesting secondary structure, to great success.

2. If I throw RNA in with the object, can the structure reproduce?

Sadly, it's not as simple as "throwing RNA in there", there needs to be certain enzymes and also the complementary strands of all the DNA in order to work properly. However, it is likely that with the correct mix of enzymes, DNA primers, etc that these things could reproduce themselves, although they'd have to be reassmbled afterwards. I don't think they can replicate themselves in their assembled form.

3. Since these are all based on a single gene, they all code for the same protein, right?

I must've missed the part about these coding for genes at all. DNA doesn't have to code for any genes, it can be just DNA that sits around and assembles itself into structures, which I think is what this is.

4. How could these structures be used for molecular computing?

Unfortunately, I don't know much about molecular computing, but DNA is a small, predictable, availible substance that we are rapdily getting better at manipulating. Because of this, it's probably the best bet for near-future nanotech, possibly including molecular computing.

If you are on a university or library connection, you can probably check out the main scientific article here, which has lots of cool figures and is probably a lot more informative than what I've said. If you're not at a place that can access it, you can find the publication itself anywhere that gets Nature (probably your public library and almost certainly your nearby university). It'd be in the 16 March 2006 issue.

One of the more memorable factoids from a neurobiology course I took years back was that the long-term desenzitation that one experiences from enjoying a capsaicin-rich diet is due to cell death in the taste buds. Short term adaptation does occur via another mechanism, but tastbud necrosis is important in the long term. This also explains why you feel the impact of the tex mex spice much more after not having had any for a few months - you have regrown the previously killed taste buds!

The tast bud death is however a necrotic effect - cell killing, via a vanilloid receptor - rather than suicide. See e g Caterina MJ et al, Nature 1997.

Here is the Nature article abtract:

"A magnetic torsional wave near the Galactic Centre traced by a 'double helix' nebula"

The magnetic field in the central few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way has a dipolar geometry and is substantially stronger than elsewhere in the Galaxy, with estimates ranging up to a milligauss (refs 1-6). Characterization of the magnetic field at the Galactic Centre is important because it can affect the orbits of molecular clouds by exerting a drag on them, inhibit star formation, and could guide a wind of hot gas or cosmic rays away from the central region. Here we report observations of an infrared nebula having the morphology of an intertwined double helix about 100 parsecs from the Galaxy's dynamical centre, with its axis oriented perpendicular to the Galactic plane. The observed segment is about 25 parsecs in length, and contains about 1.25 full turns of each of the two continuous, helically wound strands. We interpret this feature as a torsional Alfvén wave propagating vertically away from the Galactic disk, driven by rotation of the magnetized circumnuclear gas disk. The direct connection between the circumnuclear disk and the double helix is ambiguous, but the images show a possible meandering channel that warrants further investigation.

Some guy already discovered a new set of Roman ruins in Italy with Google maps.

Get yourself Google Earth and look around. I'm sure a couple of google searches will tell you where most of the nuclear tests have taken place.

This map will even show you where they've taken place.

I wouldn't even be surprised if many of these things are already cataloged someplace for Google Earth.

Cheers

Both of those are visible in Google Earth quite easily. Try checking the menu on the left and activating the Google community tabs, especially "military." Enthusiasts point out things like military bases, notable vehicles or facilities and, yes, nuclear test sites. There's an area where you can clearly see many of them in the American west.

Speaking of other manmade items found on google, last september a man found ruins of a roman villa near his house via Google Earth. It is proving itself to be a very fun and useful tool indeed.

It is a BAD source of information

Oh really?. Now, if you want a bad source of information...

... If, in addition, we make use of the natural electromagnetic interactions between nuclei and electrons in the matter to perform logical operations, we are limited to a rate of 10^15 operations per bit per second, yielding an overall information processing rate of 10^40 operations per second in ordinary matter. Although less than the 10^51 operations per second in the ultimate laptop, the maximum information processing rate in 'ordinary matter' is still quite respectable. Of course, even though such an 'ordinary matter' ultimate computer need not operate at nuclear energy levels, other problems remain -- for example, the high number of bits still indicates substantial input/output problems. At an input/output rate of 10^12 bits per second, an Avogadro-scale computer with 10^23 bits would take about 10,000 years to perform a serial read/write operation on the entire memory. Higher throughput and parallel input/output schemes are clearly required to take advantage of the entire memory space that physics makes available.

Your idea is so 60's. Seriously though, while this is a good idea, and will likely work, this is essentially growing spare parts, then transplanting them. The method you describe will actually result in a human being, who while may be your clone, will have a different "soul", while is admittedly a problem when trying to slaughter her to harvest that heart.

There is a better way! The ultimate goal of current research is not to grow another human replacement, but to grow cells that when injected into you, will repair/reconstruct any organs that you may have damaged. If you ever played Deus Ex, these will be like those nanorobots (nanites sp?) inside Dentons.
Except that the stem technology is already here, and does repair extensive damage, including brain damage. One example is in the following article

The injured brain interacts reciprocally with neural stem cells supported by scaffolds to reconstitute lost tissue Nature Biotechnology 20, 1111 - 1117 (2002)
Published online: 15 October 2002; | doi:10.1038/nbt751
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v20/n11/abs/nbt7 51.html
Use a .edu proxy if you do not have Nature Biotechnology subscribtion.

NASA's scientific consitituency is the scientists that make up NASA's grant applicants. Basically, it's the group of folks who are qualified & likely to win NASA research grants. It's an obvious statement that NASA doesn't have the funding to run *all* of the programs that people want to run, so his statement is a massive understatement of the problem.

The problem has been that NASA is not only declining to fund new satellite programs, they're also cutting funding for existing ones, and going back on promises to fund projects already underway. (Some commentary from Nature on the subject is at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7078/fu ll/439768a.html ...unfortunately you need to subscribe to read it. The short version is that more than one sattelite program has learned from a press releasese that their funding was being cut...sometimes years after they'd started building based on earlier funding, and just weeks after being promised this wouldn't happen.)

Nature

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7078/fu ll/439776a.html

Whoever wrote the originally submitted article doesn't know too much about the subject, like the difference between Google Maps and Google Earth, or that Google Earth has existed since 2000 under its previous name, Keyhole, or that the key thing is not just being able to see a nice picture (which we could do from static aerial, satellite photos since the 90s) but how it all integrates and navigates as a whole.

Disclaimer: IAAQIS (I Am A Quantum Information Scientist).

The actual journal article that New Scientist is referring to was just published: Nature 439 949. I'm not sure if that link will work if you're not at an institution that has a subscription, but you'll probably at least get to see an abstract.

A few bits of background: New Scientist's coverage of quantum information is sometimes horrible. Therefore, it's not surprising that the New Scientist article makes no sense but contains lots of exciting fluff. That said, these guys do have something interesting.

I skimmed through the Nature article, and it looks interesting. It's especially nice that they have an experimental implementation. Nonetheless, the bit about the quantum computer being "off" is just silly.

Here's a summary of how it works, stripped of some hyperbole and converted into something more like plain english (note: qubit means quantum bit).

(1) Create a "control qubit" and some output qubits, with the control qubit initially set to 0, which we will take to mean off.

(2) "Rotate" the control qubit into a superposition of 1 (on) and 0 (off), with most of the "amplitude" being for the 0 state (the qubit is mostly off)

(3) Apply whatever algorithm to the data and the output qubits, conditional on the control bit being on. (Note: we don't actually measure anything here--this is entirely a unitary operation).

(4) Perform a weak measurement on the output qubits, which has the effect of reducing the amplitude of the output qubits being in something other than their initial state (which can only happen if the control qubit was on and the algorithm was applied), since the amplitude for that was small to begin with.

(5) Repeat (2) - (4) N times, such that, if the output bits are unmodified after each algorithm application, you end up with the control qubit in the 1 (on) state. Otherwise, you get the 0 (off) state.

(6) Profit!

This is the simple version, in which you only get to learn whether the application of the algorithm to the data gives you the default output or not. There's a more sophisticated version in which you learn more about the data.

There are a few catches here. One is that N has to be reasonably large, or the probability of an "error" in step 4 becomes an issue (by error, I mean that the weak measurement gives us the wrong outcome). Specifically, the probability of an error is 1 - cos^2N (pi / 2N), which scales as O(N^(1-4N)). Fortunately, that is exponential suppression of error, which is pretty good scaling. Another catch is that their particular experimental implementation used a non-scalable encoding. This isn't a major issue, but it means we should wait for an experiment using a scalable encoding before we really break out the champagne.

From an article in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060220/full/060220 -10.html#B1

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7079/ab s/nature04523.html

From an article in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060220/full/060220 -10.html#B1

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7079/ab s/nature04523.html

Good response. I'll add to your anecedotal description of "Wikipedia vs. Britannica" that a survey performed by the highly respected Nature Magazine found that Wikipedia has fewer errors that Britannica, at least for scientific articles (see slashdot story too).

Both Wikipedia and Britannica have errors in them (some are factual, some are poorly worded sentences, etc.). It turns out that for scientific content, Wikipedia is more reliable (I wouldn't be surprised if, for highly controversial topics in politics and religion, Britannica has fewer errors per entry than Wikipedia, on the other hand).

But the most important point that people should take away from this is that no source is infallible. People have to stop believing that perfect sources exist. You should consider every source of information as fallible, and double-check any facts that sound suspicious or out-of-the ordinary. For truly obscure facts, you should be doubly vigilant to obtain multiple sources. This is not new to the internet age, either. When doing research, using only a single source is very sloppy... and it always has been.

I think too many people simply accept what they are told without questioning it (witness the number of patently false emails that get forwarded). On the other hand, once you are preparred to intelligently contextualize the data you get from sources, then flawed sources like Wikipedia and Britannica become extremely useful ways of getting the information you need.

Also, the original UCLA paper.

The paper is available at Nature Advance Online Publications - if you have access.

Yes, I am serious!

The Nature news report is based on another Nature article by Xu (subscription required) which does not mention feathers because there are none!

John Roach did this with a National Geographic article on the discovery of dilong paradoxus, also reported in Nature. Five fossils were found, the most decripit of which had "a partial coat of hairlike feathers", which in other articles are described as "evidence of hairlike structures" on its head and as "'protofeathers'". Need I point out that there is a world of difference between hairs and feathers?

D paradoxus' "hairlike structures" got turned into a rich, thick coat of fully-developed feathers by the concept artist. Excellent way to do science, no? Guanlong wucaii has no feathers.

Want to hear the logic for feathering it? I quote from the NatGeo article: "Holtz noted that, if the early feathers of Sinosauropteryx and the feathers of birds and other feathered dinosaurs are all expressions of the same evolutionary change, 'then we have to infer that tyrannosaurids also had some expression of the same trait [feathers]. [...] To infer otherwise would be invoking an evolutionary change for which we had no evidence,' he said."

Ta-dish boom! There you have it, folks: it has feathers because we think that they all did.

Obviously, several people really, really want there to be feathered dinosaurs, even if they have to glue each pinion on personally.

You definitely would NOT mention it to the press if you wanted to get published in a top journal like Nature, Science, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They have strict restrictions against talking to the press before the work is accepted and published. If you feel like ignoring these restrictions, then these journals can and will yank your paper. See, for instance http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/embarg o.html.

There are some movies of this work in the supplementary info for this article. These illustrate the various "bits" of the Epsilon-15 virus.

It all goes to show that there is some really good work going on in three dimensional imaging of very small things. We're even seeing parts on the inside of these small things - it's just spectacular.

There are some movies of this work in the supplementary info for this article. These illustrate the various "bits" of the Epsilon-15 virus.

It all goes to show that there is some really good work going on in three dimensional imaging of very small things. We're even seeing parts on the inside of these small things - it's just spectacular.

Erk, broken link!
Induction of cancer-specific cytotoxicity towards human prostate and skin cells using quercetin and ultrasound... whoops.

"the east is beginnig to eclipse the west"

Are you kidding?

Nature just published an article that touches on what you say in your post. I don't think you have a solid grasp of what is ACTUALLY happening. Take a look...

This article seems to suggest that, not only are you wrong, but the countries you cite (China, India and "the east") are actually at the BOTTOM of the scales in terms of scientific output. Now, you can argue that it's an American publication/study (and you may have a point) -- but I think you make my point by doing so. By any measure, American scientific output is at the top of the charts. And by any measure, "the east" trails behind by a wide margin.

I'm not saying that there isn't progress by the East. There is. But there is a loooooong way to go before their output "eclipses" the US in terms of scientific research and production.

Well, yes, that's another hypothesis, but the function of sleep is still pretty ambiguous. While there are a few proven effects of sleep deprivation, little is known about the evolutionary purpose of sleep. You might want to look at this article from Nature for a more comprehensive and up-to-date review.

Its not the count, its the content. Chromosomes are just the packaging for genes, and gene duplication or deletion can happen without reproductive failure. Science sees that happening today. Chromosomes' breaking or merging can happen, and as long as the genes are still there it doesn't automatically mean reproductive failure.

Anyways, on your chromosome question: humans have one less chromosome, but all the same genes, because 2 'chimp' genes simply fused together. Human chromosome 2 is chimp chromosomes 2P and 2Q fused together- it even still has all the broken bits of telomeres at the fusion point. Its just like someone combined 2 chapters together in a Word document by only removing the 'chapter break' mark, but forgot to remove all the end and start chapter formatting.

If you compare us with chimps, you see something like:

• Modern Chimps: "Start gene1A gene2A gene3A End" "Start gene4A gene5A gene6C End"
• Modern Human: "Start gene1A gene2A gene3A En"Starf gene4A gene5A gene6B End" thus the evidence points to...
• Last Common Ancestor: "Start gene1A gene2A gene3A End" "Start gene4A gene5A gene6A End"
• Earliest Human Group: "Start gene1A gene2A gene3A End"Start gene4A gene5A gene6A End"

Take a group of "last common ancestors" that's moved away from others (is reproductively isolated). if one of them gets the 2 genes fused, they would have no problem reproducing within the group- the genes still line up. If the group never rejoins other lca hominids, then the fused gene trait gets fixed in the now-speciating group. Note that they're speciating not because they can't interbreed but because they don't interbreed. Later on some ancestral chimp (post lca split) has a change on 'gene6,' as do the humans (but a different mutation) so that we get the 98% similarity instead of identical genes.

You can compare them yourself: check out what it looks like if you line up human and chimp genes next to each other. Not at all different by the plagarism standard. In fact, you can do a letter by letter comparison nowadays: here is the human genome, and here is the chimp genome.

And to cover a few well-refuted but always repeated creationist / ID claims made in slashdot threads, as I summarized elsewhere:

• A transitional species- a missing link- will always itself be a species Because "species" are actual lifeforms, everything else is just a clade- a grouping. So if you have a an animal species that becomes another species, the transitional form can't be anything but a species. This is because evolution is nothing but changes in allele frequency in a population over time, so at no point, with either modern scientists or Darwin himself, was anyone ever expecting to see a transitional form that wasn't itself a functioning, living species. Its not like the transitionals are going to be half-melted blobs melting from human into porcupines, like some frozen outtake from Species the movie.
• There are excellent examples of transitional species Check out Ape to Modern Man. Each one of the 20 main hominids is slightly different from its neighbor, but very different from a few neighbors down. No, the earliest ones could not be confused for modern humans, no matter how much you shaved and suited them up. (Note how you still have some morphological leftover traits-- take a look at your teeth, and notice the giant roots for your tin

Here is the blurb in Nature, Nature's Editor's Summary
and here is the PDF research paper The scaling laws of human travel.

It takes ten years for the planet to orbit its parent star, a common-or-garden red dwarf that lies about 28,000 light years from Earth, close to the centre of our Galaxy. P.S. I submitted this news today at 4 a.m. : 2006-01-25 04:10:30 Discovery of the smallest yet Earth-like planet (Science,Space) (rejected)

No problem:

Schoemaker M J, et al, (2005) Mobile phone use and risk of acoustic neuroma: results of the Interphone case-control study in five North European countries, British Journal of Cancer, September 2005.
Available from: Nature Journal .

Interestingly, Tony Swerdlow, one of the authors of the latest paper, also was an author of this paper which found an 80% increase in risk to acoustic neuromas (95% CI 1.1-3.1)

Hardell L, et al, (2005) Use of cellular telephones and brain tumour risk in urban and rural areas, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, June 2005.
Available from: Occupational and Environmental Medicine Journal .

This study had totally different authors, and found a three fold increase in regular digital phone users (>5 years of usage) living in rural areas.

There are a few more that I can get out of the files when I get back to work, but it is half past midnight our time and I can't think of the references off the top of my head.

/.-ers may be interested in this article by Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom which discusses various possibilities for doomsday (including formation of black-holes in HEP experiments). The gist of it is that we shouldn't become complacent about such events just because they haven't happened yet -- rather the fact that we observe that the Earth/Solar-System/Galaxy/Universe has existed so long is simply an observational effect.

Well, it almost killed me. It did kill two people I know off the top of my head. And countless others I've spent time with are doing serious jail time, like the kind with "life" at the end of it. So watch what you say.

Cocaine affects different people differently, like most drugs, both illicit and otherwise. Some people don't even feel it. But more importantly, the craving reaction; while you may have the occasional thought from time to time it might be fun to do, I feel about cocaine the way I feel when my head's stuck under water and I need some air. People like you have fun. People like me go insane, go to jail or die a miserable death. Such is life.

The difference between individuals' reaction apparently has something to do with the brain's inborn ability to regulate neurotransmitters, particularly glutamine and dopamine. I found this paper on the net about six months ago: http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v30/n1/abs/13006 00a.html when my life was going, shall we say, very poorly. Apparently this drug corrects the imbalance that creates the cravings. They went away and I haven't touched it since.

Addiction is an experience that can't be communicated properly. If you don't go through it, you can't understand it, not really. Trust me when I say to you it's not pleasant.

Desktop fusion is back on the table

Original Nature paper http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7073/fu ll/nature04420.html

The Nature article you cite still finds Britannica's accuracy in science articles to be marginally better than that of Wikipedia's. (The average is stated as: 4 errors per article in Wikipedia, 3 per article in Britannica.) This is hardly something you can spin doctor into "Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica," although I will concede that the difference is statistically small.

The methodology of the study cited in Nature has come into question; the article contains an addendum linking to supplementary information about how the data was collected.

So... according to Nature, Wikipedia "comes close" to Britannica in terms of accuracy, but does not seem to exceed it.

Furthermore, there are notorious examples of outright fabrications and falsehoods masquerading as fact in Wikipedia articles, mainly due to vandalism. This is a problem that Britannica doesn't seem to have. So... I stand by my statements.

While the parent was probably just flaming, you haven't exactly "checked your facts" either. ;)

Low levels of ionizing radiation seems to be actually beneficial to human health.

This is called radiation hormesis. And this theory started after they found that people who lived in such a distance from hiroshima and Nagasaki that they received low radiation doses. And, years later, this population, exposed to radiation, had much lower cancer rates than non-exposed similar populations.

You can check some references:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1150419 7&query_hl=3&itool=pubmed_docsum

http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n1s/full/74 00222.html

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00019A7 0-0C1C-1F41-B0B980A841890000&catID=4

http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm. html

http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2004/Hormesis-T heory-Toxins27feb04.htm

Are you reading from the Brown's Gas article?
Please to be noting, if you will, that since December, it's been categorized as "Pseudoscience", and that since the very first instantiation of the article, it's been written as a reference for what people mean when they say "Brown's Gas." It doesn't have anything that, in my opinion, serves to advocate the validity of the "phenomenon." It does state what proponents claim about it, however. I loathe Voodoo science (a good book, though, by the by) as much as/more than the next man, but I think it's useful to have a little information on what the scientific illiterati are referring to when they use a junk science term. Maybe that's just me.

Not finding an article on a gravity motor, I can only assume you're reading something like the Anti-gravity article, which speaks about the "hypothetical means of countering or otherwise modifying the effects of gravity, typically in the context of spacecraft propulsion."

By the by, does mechanical engineering involve actually reading things? I mean, I'm an engineer, but a computer/systems engineer, rather than a mechanical engineer. I guess maybe I'm just being punished by my literate background?

And as an aside, http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900 a.html. It's not, ya know, like, perfect, but it doesn't pretend to be. And neither are other sources.

If someone says electron microscope, he usually means a SEM or maybe a TEM but none of those have single-atom resolution.

Not so fast, tiger :) Your first observation is correct.

However, you can in fact see single atoms with a TEM. As always, Google is your friend. Check out this article on a scanning TEM

Spherical aberrations affect the resolution of an STEM by limiting the spot size of the focused electron beam. But by using correctors to compensate for these aberrations, Batson et al. were able to reduce this spot size to less than 1 Å. This allowed them to not only to image single atoms of gold deposited onto the surface of a carbon film, but to observe the relative motion of these atoms with subfemtosecond accuracy.

Hmm. According to Nature (you know, those guys that publish articles like this: "Stem cell engraftment at the endosteal niche is specified by the calcium-sensing receptor"), Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.

So, to say it in your terms, Wikipedia sucks as much as the Encyclopedia Britannica. They'll be more than happy to hear that. From you.

    -- Mark

Speaking as the last living Flores Man, I can well see what isolation has done to you poor Sapiens. Indeed, being segregated away from our beautiful Flores land somehow made your bodies huge, probably to the detriment of your brains. I can't imagine what life conditions you must endure living cramped on that small rock you call "World", but overcrowding alone must make it terrible! At least, based on what I read daily here on Slashdot.
Best regards.

P.S.: Anybody here with a short sister?

Dude!!oneoneone I bask in the mighty shine of your penis! You have seen through all lies and feeble attempts to wink the hoods of the humble populous by the evil scientists and hippies in "Ye Olde Boys Club". Surely, since it would have been a momumental challenge to determine the validity of scientific articles, the evil scientists and hippies were lazy and declared the Establishment of Wikipedia nearly as good as the non-Establishment Britannica Encyclopedia.

If they weren't lazy, they might have gotten experts in the fields of a random sampling of scientific articles, and reviewed articles from both the Wikipedia and the Britannica for historical and scientific errors as well as the quality of the writing. And they might have made a graph. If they were almost as smart as you. But you rule!!oneone

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

About the HIV/AIDS misinformation, please you could share the wealth of your knowledge and wisdom with those of us with so small penises, and publish an article that reveals the source and cure for AIDS. I mean, if it won't take too much time away from your schedule. You are obviously an expert on HIV/AIDS and conspiracies, and I am not worthy.

What we had was a comparison of 42 articles on science and something less than a ringing endorsement of the Wikipedia. Wikipedia science 31% more cronky than Britannica's.

Truth is, meaningful details about this "peer revuew" of the Wikipedia are hard to come by even on Nature's own web site: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

If something is too much of a pain, then people are going to avoid it. Wiki works because it is relatively pain-free to use

There is nothing painless about writing an essay for a popular audience that will survive meaningful editorial review.

hey, the article in this post looks soooo similar to the article in Friday's post "Radiation Robot Makes Troops Safer".
That is they problem with robots; you teach the trick once, and there they go repeating it forever!

Well, actually no it didn't. More that 30% more errors.

Here's the head to head, if you are interested

You know, Tycho is a smart guy, but he's completely wrong about Wikipedia. "A model of how and where distributed intellect fails"? Come on. The surprising thing about Wikipedia is not that you can vandalize it. That's rather obvious. The surprising thing is that it works so amazingly well. He must have missed the article in Nature that found Wikipedia to be almost as reliable as Brittanica, despite being maintained by unpaid volunteers and being two centuries or so younger.

And the trivia? There is a lot of trivia in Wikipedia that you wouldn't find in a print encyclopedia, but so what? That's what makes it fun. It would only be a problem if the "serious" topics were missing, which isn't the case.