Slashdot Mirror

From the results page at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/multimedia/ 438900a_m1.html

"All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias."

Are you all idiots? I guess I don't really need to ask that question.

All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar.

There is also some question about how Nature arrived at their article lengths. On the page listing the articles in question, they claim, "All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar." However, if you look at the examples they used, in some cases it seems impossible for them to have arrived at similar lengths for an article.

For example, their smallest article, on Robert Burns Woodward, weighs in at just over 200 bytes, versus Wikipedia's 13.5 KB (this number doesn't include any "wikicode", or tables, external links, reference sections, etc). How could they have made such drastically different articles to be of similar lengths? Another example is the West Nile Virus article (WP's is over 5x the length of EB's).

It would seem that they either averaged all the lengths together, and compared those numbers, or they purposely trimmed content from the Wikipedia entries. This is not necessarily a good idea, since we're talking about science articles. The "lead section" text might provide an oversummarization to keep the section short (eg: electrons orbit a nucleus in a similar way to how planets orbit the Sun), while the rest of the text explains in detail what actual occurs.

So, there is some amount of ambiguity there, more than I would expect from a scientific journal.

Nature did these peer reviews and, presumably, paid them for their time, but did they bother fixing the errors?

I see Danny fixed the Mendeleev-was-the-13th-child error yesterday (and I don't think he's a Nature editor) so it appears Nature spent the money on expert input but didn't utilize that information (though that's one out of 163 errors).

What I really would like to have seen in this comparison is words per error.

Another interesting thing is that wikipedia has more articles (of the list) with no errors found: 4 vs. 2.

Nature also published an editorial which asks scientists to contribute to Wikipedia: "Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource."

Special Report

Nature
Published online: 14 December 2005; | doi:10.1038/438900a

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.

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

Source is here.

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

For those with questions, here are answers! Enjoy.

This Nature editorial asks scientific experts to kick in: "Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource."

Even if many Wikipedia articles are based on the 1911 Britannica that does not seem particularly relevant to this discussion as many (most) of the articles analyzed for accuracy are clearly post 1911 subjects.

They only compared articles that were preselected to have about the same length. Obviously that introduces a bias, but it's not clear in whose favor. The full Nature article is here.

Huh? Editing error.. well, here's the list.

One new interesting tidbit: about 12% of all nature authors consult Wikipedia on a weekly basis. I wonder how many consult EB on a weekly basis...

Two things are required, first the virus has to get into a cell, and second it has to be able to reproduce in the cell. Reovirus utilizes a very common receptor for entry into the cell and can apparently enter just about any cell in the body. Normal cells have mechanisms which prevent the replication of reovirus (and others) . Two thirds of cancers (possibly higher in metastatic cancer) have a mutation on the RAS pathway which result in the reovirus being able to replicate and kill the cell. As you suggest, there are an number of viruses which have demonstrated anti-tumour activity. Furthermore, several viruses have been genetically modified to be oncolytic. Reovirus is naturally occuring and appears to be the safest See: http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v5/n12/abs/nrc17 50.html

Here's the link to the original article for those who have access: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7069/fu ll/nature04186.html There's also a commentary in the same issue: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7069/fu ll/438750b.html Greetings, Hrshgn

Here's the link to the original article for those who have access: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7069/fu ll/nature04186.html There's also a commentary in the same issue: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7069/fu ll/438750b.html Greetings, Hrshgn

I think this guy should start reading. A lot of research in this area has been going on for quite some time.

Here's a link to a recent Nature article:
http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v5/n12/abs/nrc17 50.html

"Nature Reviews Cancer 5, 965-976 (December 2005) | doi:10.1038/nrc1750
Recent progress in the battle between oncolytic viruses and tumours

Kelley A. Parato1, Donna Senger2, Peter A. J. Forsyth2 and John C. Bell1

Abstract

In the past 5 years, the field of oncolytic virus research has matured
significantly and is moving past the stage of being a laboratory
novelty into a new era of preclinical and clinical trials. What have
recent anticancer trials of oncolytic viruses taught us about this
exciting new line of therapeutics?"

You can't effectively immunize against HIV, for example, because it's always changing.
Tell that to the crocodile's immune system.

Plus, even the HIV virus has a weakness. Block the cell-attaching mechanism, and you've blocked HIV.

The paper appears to be available here.

I eagerly await your analysis, seeing as I understand about 10% of the abstract.

Wouldn't a qubyte just provide an indeteminate number of somewhere between 0 and 255 zombie cats?

Correct. What was meant here is that the unitary matrix describing the evolution of the system has N^2-1 independent entries. For the qubits, they simply used two different eigenstates of the Calcium ions as described in their paper in Nature.

True, ocean currents will still move. They're definitely chaotic system and often behave "counterintuitively".

But all that warm water goes so far north largely because of (cold) water with high salinity. This water is dense and sinks. This is called North Atlantic Deep Water formation, and possibly drives deep ocean currents around the world.

This salinity gradient is the key energy source that "pulls" warm water so far north, more than the thermal or momentum gradients.

This gradient broke down during "the Younger Dryas cold episode, which chilled the North Atlantic region from 11,000 to 10,000 yr BP." "[This] is postulated to be a turnoff [...] of the North Atlantic's conveyor-belt circulation system which currently supplies an enormous amount of heat to the atmosphere over the North Atlantic region. This turnoff is attributed to a reduction in surface-water salinity, and hence also in density, of the waters in the region where North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) now forms." Paleoclimate claims are supported by oxygen and carbon isotope studies on plankton.

see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v341/n6240/ab s/341318a0.html

original article in Nature
news article in Nature

original article in Nature
news article in Nature

The research, published in today's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years.

So what? There has been a history of natual climate change cycles. Why would a relatively miniscule change in CO2 be the culprit for global change? 27% is not miniscule you say. well lets look at the composition of the atmosphere.

Think of the composition of the atmosphere in relation to the size of a football field. Nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That's how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field. So, you are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eighths of an inch--less than the thickness of a pencil. It's a lot more carbon dioxide, but it's a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern?

Well we still should take action, you say?

Like the Kyoto accord? Many articles estimate the effect of Kyoto, even with the US signed on, as reducing temperature change by 4 hunthreds of a degree over the next 100 years. Most recently, Nature 22 (October 2003): 395-741, stated, with Russia signed on, temperature affected by Kyoto would be-.02 degrees C by 2050. IPCC models estimate more, but none exceed .15 C. see Lomborg, p. 302. Wigley, 1998: "Global warming reductions are small, .08-.28 C."

Unfortunately it appears that there is nothing we can do in the near future. Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded that there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required. *

[from the article]...levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European team that wrote two papers based on the core.

Ah, good point. Methane is a much worse green house gas than CO2. Is this humanities fault? Well we raise cows and cows burb methane. Sorry, not a fraction of what termites produce.

The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? Lots.

Man, I am tired of these self rightgious echoterrorists scarying the shit out of my kids at school. What is even worse is that some industries or even governments may be exagerating the dangers just to scare people. Why else would we see almost daily headlines about how pacific islands are being washed over by rising sea levels. While while the average air temperature at the Earth's surface has increased by 0.06 C per decade during the 20th century, and by 0.19 C per decade from 1979 to 1998, the average temperature in Antartica has decreased and the thickness of the ice there is increasing. See article in Nature. This is important since Antartica has 90% of the world's ice. Greenland has 4% and the rest of the world combined has only 6%. So even if the world's temperature rise

According to Dr. Hwang... who has already proven himself a less-than reliable source, since he's admitted to lying about the issue of paying for ova. Who, if he is guilty of misconduct, has a great deal to gain from pleading ignorance and pinning the blame on others. Furthermore, if he's guilty and he goes down, he probably takes a lot of people with him, and it does a major blow to the prestige of South Korea's medical research program, so there would be a strong incentive for other people to back up his version of events whether it's true or not. Anyhow, who knows I suppose... but something just doesn't smell right to me. Part of it is the way this whole thing is being handled- first a graduate student comes out and says she donated eggs, then she retracts the statement, but now we find out a year later this kind of stuff was going on? This smacks of coverup- not candor. It does not inspire confidence in the Good Dr.

It'd be nice to think that scientists weren't capable of being corrupted, but the truth is they are as human and as fallible as anyone else. That's another reason I tend to doubt his version of the facts. Maybe that's cynical, but on the other hand, it's only cynical if it's wrong. Anyhow, if you'd like to take a look at the facts yourself, here's a couple of other articles.

First, _Nature_'s take on it (man I wish I could be a fly on the wall in the _Nature_ office right now) http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051121/full/438405 a.html. Second, the NYTimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/25/international/as ia/25clone.html

The photosensitive E.coli were just one of several entries in last year's Intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, which is an annual synthetic biology contest that takes place over the summer at participating institutions. With the help of a few professors and TAs, small teams of students propose, design, and "implement" actual genetically modified organisms.

Check out this week's Nature as well as the iGEM wiki for more information about synthetic biology and iGEM, respectively. Biology is definitely getting more and more interesting for engineering-minded students.

I highly recommend taking some biology, bioinformatics, or biotechnology classes if you are an undergraduate in CS/EE... exciting times, especially compared to the regular "IT" universe.

That is evolution. That is evolution happening in *one* generation.

This test is done every day in every large chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics company in the world, thousands of times. It is an industry standard. It is observable, repeatable, and proveable.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation sez that there have been roughly 10 trillion generations of bacteria in the history of life. If we can see bacteria go from starving to suddenly able to digest and live on lactose in just one generation, how much more could they do in 10 trillion generations? Develop eyes? Seems pretty low-caliber to me. Imagine how much more they could've done in that period if intelligently guided: we'd all be immortal, telepathic, and flying.

(here's a partial discussion of mutagenesis and restriction plating.)

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/p df/nmat1530.pdf

There's also a write-up on this available online at 'Nature' http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051114/full/051114 -13.html
It raises informative points which the interested amateur may do well to note.

To address point's raised in the discussion:
Although grasses are dominant in habitats across the world today, they weren't thought to exist until some ten million years after the age of dinosaurs had ended.
A significant change in the "first appearence" horizon of the grasses. Despite the parody that creationists present, real-world geologists (and palynologists in particular) are much more precise in the language they use. "Date of first appearence in the fossil record" is a concept that rapidly gets abbreviated in the popular press to "date of origin", but the two concepts are very distinct. Unfortunately, this gives unscrupulous people an opportunity to claim there is more dispute in the science of harth history than there actually is. There are disputes, but within the profession they're nowhere near as significant as the unscrupulous protray them to be.

The team collected 65-million-year-old droppings from the volcanic Deccan Traps of central India in order to study the diet of titanosaurs, the group of super-size dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus.
The discovery of the coprolites between lava/ tuff deposits of the Deccan traps illuminates the "was it the asteroid at Chixulub or was it the Deccan eruptions" debate. There have long been people who used evidence like this to argue that the Chixulub impactor was not the only factor. Also, since the Deccan volcanicity was going on before the Chixulub impactor, the "Chixulub caused Deccan" arguement has never had appreciable support in the profession. (Note - Diplodocus was extinct long before this, though it's descendents or relatives were still around.)

Now it seems that dinosaurs or other early mammals may have been the early grazers that gave grass a head start. Dinosaurs probably contributed minimally to this, Stromberg says: they mainly had the wrong kind of teeth for ripping up grass, and the titanosaur coprolites indicate that grass was only a small part of their diet.
RTFA is as over-used and under heard phrase as RTFM used to be.

(Note 2 - I should update my signature line to include the "FGS".)

I believe that the article on HAARP and the aurora iamlucky13 referred to was published in the journal Nature.

I first heard about all of the conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP when I was studying physics in graduate school. When I took a research trip up to Alaska, I asked my apartment building manager if she could take care of my plants. She totally freaked out because she had heard about this evil HAARP thing the U.S. government had hidden in the Alaskan wilderness.

All of the conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP are a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. The physics behind this project is complicated and not understood by your average Joe. People understand just enough of it to realize how little they actually know, and that scares them. After my apartment manager told me about HAARP, I checked out a few of the web sites claiming to tell the truth about HAARP. Some of these "experts" on HAARP claimed that because they had Ph.D.s they were qualified to judge the merits and true purpose of HAARP. These people probably got their "degree" by responding to an e-mail from some school in Nigeria that will give you a diploma based upon your life experience if you send $500. It never fails to surprise me how many naive people out there will believe anyone who claims to have a Ph.D. in something or will believe anything they read on the Internet. Nerds are supposed to know better!

These conspiracy theories aren't just ridiculous because of their faulty and inaccurate science. A major conspiracy to cover up a secret and illegal military experiment implies that the leaders of the U.S government are organized enough to restrict the release of information and coordinate their cover stories and propaganda. Our government couldn't properly coordinate the relief efforts for the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Does anyone out there honestly think our government is organized enough to orchestrate a massive cover up for the development of an evil death ray?

Then again, why should anyone believe what I have to say? I know people involved with HAARP and I have a Ph.D. in physics so I'm just another evil genius out to destroy the world. People like Art Bell who seriously believe that there is a conspiracy would probably think that I am a part of it and lying about everthing. I wish I was part of the conspiracy so I could go take that alien space ship they have hidden at Area 51 and leave the planet as soon as possible. I sure don't like the way our world is heading.

I believe that the article on HAARP and the aurora iamlucky13 referred to was published in the journal Nature.

I first heard about all of the conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP when I was studying physics in graduate school. When I took a research trip up to Alaska, I asked my apartment building manager if she could take care of my plants. She totally freaked out because she had heard about this evil HAARP thing the U.S. government had hidden in the Alaskan wilderness.

All of the conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP are a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. The physics behind this project is complicated and not understood by your average Joe. People understand just enough of it to realize how little they actually know, and that scares them. After my apartment manager told me about HAARP, I checked out a few of the web sites claiming to tell the truth about HAARP. Some of these "experts" on HAARP claimed that because they had Ph.D.s they were qualified to judge the merits and true purpose of HAARP. These people probably got their "degree" by responding to an e-mail from some school in Nigeria that will give you a diploma based upon your life experience if you send $500. It never fails to surprise me how many naive people out there will believe anyone who claims to have a Ph.D. in something or will believe anything they read on the Internet. Nerds are supposed to know better!

These conspiracy theories aren't just ridiculous because of their faulty and inaccurate science. A major conspiracy to cover up a secret and illegal military experiment implies that the leaders of the U.S government are organized enough to restrict the release of information and coordinate their cover stories and propaganda. Our government couldn't properly coordinate the relief efforts for the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Does anyone out there honestly think our government is organized enough to orchestrate a massive cover up for the development of an evil death ray?

Then again, why should anyone believe what I have to say? I know people involved with HAARP and I have a Ph.D. in physics so I'm just another evil genius out to destroy the world. People like Art Bell who seriously believe that there is a conspiracy would probably think that I am a part of it and lying about everthing. I wish I was part of the conspiracy so I could go take that alien space ship they have hidden at Area 51 and leave the planet as soon as possible. I sure don't like the way our world is heading.

I don't know why no one has ever really mentioned this, but there's a class of enzymes called lysins which are essentially bacterial bleach--they'll kill specific bacteria within seconds through lysis. Not just that, there's a lysin that's been found to be specific for the antrax bacteria. I find this to be a more likely and more interesting branch of research--I personally think these will be the next generation of antibiotics. Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6900/ab s/nature01026.html abstract doesn't really say much, though

But cloning is very inefficient. To derive a single line of embryonic stem cells, the Korean team used 242 eggs obtained from 16 volunteers (W. S. Hwang et al. Science 303, 1669-1674; 2004). Each woman was given hormone injections to force her ovaries to superovulate, producing 12-20 eggs per menstrual cycle instead of one.

Other researchers were surprised that so many women were prepared to undergo this procedure for a research project. Side effects of the treatment can range from general discomfort and emotional stress to clotting of the veins or stroke. "It's a painful procedure and there is risk involved," says Jose Cibelli, a co-author on the paper who studies cloning at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "It would never fly in the United States."

Ah thanks for this clarification. At first i was under the impression that you were trying to defend every person who claimed he or she was in touch with God.

I would like to add one more possible cause to your list of internal causes, i once read about. I suppose your doctors ruled it out: stimulation of the angular gyrus of your brain. Well at least i read electrodes could trigger an out-of-body experience in (AFAIK) one experiment.
Nature published it (http://www.nature.com/news/2002/020916/full/02091 6-8.html, need subscription, i don't have a subscription so i cannot read it now. As far as i remember it was a report from a brain surgery in Switzerland, a woman had an out of body experience while they were tracking locations of certain functional fields in the brain by stimulating them with electrodes. Reductionists craved that news.). This stimulation was done in an artificial way but i suppose scar tissue in the brain could also do this, as this can also cause epileptic seizures.

Anyway i wanted to add that i think you are dealing with this pretty rational, even though that's almost impossible with such things.

Of course, if the naturalist is right, things like "interest" are really non-existent. Chemical reactions don't display interest. They just occur. ;-)

So if I find a piece of paper with "1+1=2" printed on it, it must have come from a human? Or could it have been printed by a computer? Is it any less true when an unintelligent machine makes the "truth claim" than when a human does? Or is it not a "truth claim" when a machine makes it?

Imagine that you lived 3000 years ago, spoke some Eskimo language, and/or could not read. If you find a piece of paper with those marks on it, those marks would be 100% unintelligible. Which only goes to demonstrate that such a thing is subject to interpretation by humans. But if the naturalistic scientist is correct, then there is no "person" to do the interpretation. "True" and "False" are not meaningful categories in such a world. Imagine how silly it would be to suggest that chicken soup "believes" something or "interprets" something. But if the naturalistic scientist is correct, there is nothing fundamentally different between a bowl of chicken soup and a human being; the only difference would be something like degree of complexity of the chemical reactions. But chemical reactions don't interpret; they just exist.

Surely if natural evolution can make flies able to do amazing flight maneuvers with only a few hundred neurons it can make symbolic reasoning happen given a few billion.

This doesn't follow at all. You might as well hope that a tornado spinning for a billion years in a junkyard will somehow put together a brand new Dell computer: it's completely nonsensical even to suggest. Even setting aside the odds it makes no sense. There is no scientific formula for sentience ("mix two parts dirt with three parts water, shake well, and get ready for an argument").

Oh, and by the way: a fly has a few more neurons than a "few hundred": see here. It's more like 250,000. :-)

The latest Nature podcast has an interview with one of the researchers working on this: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7064/fu ll/nature04210.html

you'll need a subscription, of course.

Yes, here: Active control of slow light on a chip with photonic crystal waveguide. You (or your university/employer) have to have a subscription to Nature, though.

but yes, there's a link. Your full-text access may vary.

Very cool! But I have to wonder, on the picture featured on the Nature site, what is the woman with the open robe holding, and what is she about to do with it?? (http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/images/podca st2.gif) Call me prudish, but is this sort of thing really nature? :) - ME -

I know that this does not fit your criterium of being major organization free, but the journal Nature has a podcast covering each week's contents that is quite good.

Nature has a podcast now, too.

http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html

Nature recently started a weekly podcast. http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html

So the nuclear "establishment", get what they deserve. If you fuck up as bad as they has done, you just have to tollerate some oversight from the public. And that includes Womens' Institute.

Since there's a good chance brain behaviour doesn't depend on computations and timings much shorter than a milisecond, a simulation on a conventional parallel computer need not mimic the brain's layout of computation and communication, but can employ spatial and temporal multiplexing to achieve the same effect. This, coupled with that fact that an architecture with a small fast cache memory and a larger slower main memory is a good match for respectively holding neuron and synaptic states, makes me believe that current supercomputer architectures like Blue Gene would simulate a brain quite efficiently, given the right software.

In fact simulation of the cerebral cortex is one of the tasks Blue Gene will undertake

As of 2001 the location of the genes that causes Red/Green color blindness had not been located. We know that at least one of them is located on the X chromosome, but no idea where. In 1997 the gene that causes Achromatopsia, the complete inability to distinguish color, was located on chromosome 2 but this is the rarest form of color blindness. But say I had Achromatopsia, or that we located the gene for Red/Green color blindness, is there any hope of a cure? If you were to extract some of my stem cells, do some gene therapy on them, inject them into my eye and then flash my retina with a bright light would it grow back with a greater capability to distinguish color?

I know it's more sexy to cure debilitating genetic diseases but there's a lot more people out there with color blindness than there are people with hemophilia. Surely economies of scale dictate that we should get the first shot at a cure.

Here is a link to the mp3 of the Nature podcast on this.

I always think it is ridiculous how these genomic announcements happen. They choose to announce that they have ONE MILLION SNPs with big press release, but this data is available online as soon as its sequenced.

I'm reading the actual Nature article now (Vol 437|27 October 2005|doi: 10.1038/nature04204, refer here for those who have access). The structure they have built is a multilayer of Si and SiGe (10 nm Si and 16 nm SiGe, repeated ten times). You are correct that there are exciton peaks in the range of 1.3 microns to 1.5 microns. Specifically, there state:

Clear quantum confinement is seen, with strong exciton peaks that we assign to electron-to-heavy-hole (e-hh; ,0.88 eV at 0 V) and electron-to-light-hole (e-lh; ,0.91 eV at 0 V) transitions.

(0.88 eV = 1.41 microns, 0.91 eV = 1.6 microns) The impressive thing is that when they change to bias the, say, 4V, there is a huge change in absorbance across the 1.3 - 1.5 range. At 1.46 microns, the absorption goes from nearly zero to orders of magnitude larger. It's an impressive result.

Take a look at the original press release, dated 16 October 2002.

The article was published in Nature at the same time, and the video isn't new either.

Remind me why this is going up on Slashdot today?

Here is a link to the primary article.
 
And here is the abstract:
Learning to perform a behavioural procedure as a well-ingrained habit requires extensive repetition of the behavioural sequence, and learning not to perform such behaviours is notoriously difficult. Yet regaining a habit can occur quickly, with even one or a few exposures to cues previously triggering the behaviour. To identify neural mechanisms that might underlie such learning dynamics, we made long-term recordings from multiple neurons in the sensorimotor striatum, a basal ganglia structure implicated in habit formation in rats successively trained on a reward-based procedural task, given extinction training and then given reacquisition training. The spike activity of striatal output neurons, nodal points in cortico-basal ganglia circuits, changed markedly across multiple dimensions during each of these phases of learning. First, new patterns of task-related ensemble firing successively formed, reversed and then re-emerged. Second, task-irrelevant firing was suppressed, then rebounded, and then was suppressed again. These changing spike activity patterns were highly correlated with changes in behavioural performance. We propose that these changes in task representation in cortico-basal ganglia circuits represent neural equivalents of the explore-exploit behaviour characteristic of habit learning.