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Well it did get picked up in Nature news. http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051010/full/051010 -12.html

Or why not go to the original source instead of trying to understand what the hell the dumbed-down popular press versions are trying to say (which can be difficult when the journalists don't know squat about the topic they're covering)?

Nature's news story, which summarizes the original article by Elvin et al. (You need to be sitting at a Nature subscriber institution to read the latter.)

Or why not go to the original source instead of trying to understand what the hell the dumbed-down popular press versions are trying to say (which can be difficult when the journalists don't know squat about the topic they're covering)?

Nature's news story, which summarizes the original article by Elvin et al. (You need to be sitting at a Nature subscriber institution to read the latter.)

And you think that peer review is a safeguard? Remember the Schon affair where all his papers were peer reviewed, the guy almost got a Nobel prize before he'd have to retire, and in the end it was all made up! Give these guys credit for writing a paper that's too comprehensive to be written in Nature even though as they say "clearly the absence of such exotic dark matter would have considerable significance". I'm guessing that the significance of "no dark matter out there" are not in the field of physics but in politics and economy, like "what a waste of time and money!!" Getting through peer review at the Astrophysical Journal can take months, and if that's not a reason good enough to get it out unreviewed: if those two are right, then the solution was there to grab for anyone with a knowledge in GR calculations... and there's an awful lot of those!

These tiny arrays of dishes aren't going to show us much. We need arrays spread out across the entire solar system if we really want to see some interesting stuff. Like SWINE and OLGA

And even better, commentary article from Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051003/full/437794 a.html.

-Ted

WRONG ! Semantic Web expects minimal agreement within communities and domains, for example all camera companies agree on a 'camera ontology' and TV companies create a 'TV ontology', such domain specific ontologies may or may not be linked to a 'master ontology'.
SW is very much out there.. and is already weaved in to the Web of today..

Well again these may sound just 'specifications' and less of an 'ontology'.. then look in to the rapidly growing billion dollar industry.. bio-chem-pharmaco informatics.. ontologies are becoming backbone of their entire computing, data collection and analysis infrastructure..

Whats more..
Flip through last month's Nature Biotech and you ll find articles talking about ontologies, RDF & Semantic Web.. Yes, its already here
Remember, these Biologist are those people who finished the Genome project 2-3yrs earlier than it was orignally planned.. They are very good at collaboration, strong proponents of open-source and very hard workers.. Semantic Web is the right platform for them that gives them tools and a standard to share data seamlessly.. Lets just wait and watch what these people do with it...

AND...yes there's more.. 5 days ago NIH approved a 20million grant to group at Stanford to create a NATIONAL CENTER for BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY. Its the same group which developed the only OWL editor (Protege) available out there !
I just hope that those guys at NIH are not fools to give away hard earned tax payers money on something thats not gonna work

Nope, they've actually demonstrated rotating frequencies causing switching up to the 10s (and borderline 100s) of kHz. Much beyond that is pretty much impossible due to inductance. Propagation velocity has been measured by the team (http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v2/n2/abs/nmat 803.html;jsessionid=2BEBA5768D730301A7C432AF98F1AE 18) to be very high indeed.

This week's issue of Nature has an article
titled "Astronomers reject the term 'planet'". (Subscription required for full article.)

It seems that an "expert panel" was assembled by the IAU last year to settle this and other questions. Their current proposal is to eliminate the use of the unmodified term "planet" altogether. If their suggestion is adopted, you will have to include an adjective with the term.

The remaining question to be settled is whether acceptable modifiers may include location-related terms (orbit, distance to primary, etc.), or whether only adjectives describing a property of the planet are accepted.

Thus, one suggestion is that UB313, Pluto and Charon be classified as "Trans-Neptunian planets". But some panel members object to this on the grounds that "Trans-Neptunian" isn't a property of the objects themselves; it's a property of their orbits.

The current concensus seems to be that the panel may list a few acceptable adjectives, and leave the full list as a topic for further IAU discussion.

I suspect that the issue of people being upset by the planet count being other than 9 is something that the panel would consider a joke. Neither the media nor textbook publishers should be the ones deciding technical astronomical terminology.

It does seem to some people that objects like Ganymede and Titan should qualify as planets, though their primary isn't the Sun. And the Earth/Luna pair is often described as a "binary planet", as is the Pluto/Charon pair.

OTOH, there's a certain elegance to a definition that says planets must orbit the Sun. This makes the question of extrasolar planets quite trivial to answer: There clearly can't be any. Of course, that just means we'll have to think up another name for them. It's more economical to call them all "planets", with one or more adjectives attached, to point out what sort of physical object they are.

If a Luna-sized rock orbiting a white dwarf is a planet, why wouldn't a similar-sized rock orbiting Jupiter or Saturn be a planet?

And why would people outside the atronomical community presume to pontificate on the topic? (The good old First Ammendment, I suppose. ;-)

This week's issue of Nature has an article
titled "Astronomers reject the term 'planet'". (Subscription required for full article.)

It seems that an "expert panel" was assembled by the IAU last year to settle this and other questions. Their current proposal is to eliminate the use of the unmodified term "planet" altogether. If their suggestion is adopted, you will have to include an adjective with the term.

The remaining question to be settled is whether acceptable modifiers may include location-related terms (orbit, distance to primary, etc.), or whether only adjectives describing a property of the planet are accepted.

Thus, one suggestion is that UB313, Pluto and Charon be classified as "Trans-Neptunian planets". But some panel members object to this on the grounds that "Trans-Neptunian" isn't a property of the objects themselves; it's a property of their orbits.

The current concensus seems to be that the panel may list a few acceptable adjectives, and leave the full list as a topic for further IAU discussion.

I suspect that the issue of people being upset by the planet count being other than 9 is something that the panel would consider a joke. Neither the media nor textbook publishers should be the ones deciding technical astronomical terminology.

It does seem to some people that objects like Ganymede and Titan should qualify as planets, though their primary isn't the Sun. And the Earth/Luna pair is often described as a "binary planet", as is the Pluto/Charon pair.

OTOH, there's a certain elegance to a definition that says planets must orbit the Sun. This makes the question of extrasolar planets quite trivial to answer: There clearly can't be any. Of course, that just means we'll have to think up another name for them. It's more economical to call them all "planets", with one or more adjectives attached, to point out what sort of physical object they are.

If a Luna-sized rock orbiting a white dwarf is a planet, why wouldn't a similar-sized rock orbiting Jupiter or Saturn be a planet?

And why would people outside the atronomical community presume to pontificate on the topic? (The good old First Ammendment, I suppose. ;-)

The definition of a planet is disputed. Please see [[Definition of planet]] for more information.

Although planets are the principal component of the solar system other than the sun, a precise definition of the term is surprisingly elusive. This article details the questions that may arise when trying to formulate a strict definition of the word.

For most astronomers the issue will be decided by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). According to a published report from Nature magazine (corresponding entry at BugMeNot), the discovery of 2003 UB313 (which is a Kuiper Belt object bigger than Pluto) has forced the issue. An IAU committee which had already been working on a definition is now expected to promulgate one soon.

If that was all they'd done I find it difficult to see how this differs from doing a multiple sequence alignment for a family of proteins, then making a gene for the consensus sequence.

Checking the paper (and related News and Views article) in Nature itself (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7058/i ndex.html ) (subscription required) indicates they've done more than that. By including the effects of coevolution - where one position in the protein mutates in concert with another to maintain optimal contacts - they generate a substantially better algorithm for manufacturing particular folds. (ie: 25% success in achieving folding versus 0% for conservation alone. 60% presence of wild-type function in the 'designed' proteins.)

Full text of article, institutional/personal subscription required.

Abstract: Classical studies show that for many proteins, the information required for specifying the tertiary structure is contained in the amino acid sequence. Here, we attempt to define the sequence rules for specifying a protein fold by computationally creating artificial protein sequences using only statistical information encoded in a multiple sequence alignment and no tertiary structure information. Experimental testing of libraries of artificial WW domain sequences shows that a simple statistical energy function capturing coevolution between amino acid residues is necessary and sufficient to specify sequences that fold into native structures. The artificial proteins show thermodynamic stabilities similar to natural WW domains, and structure determination of one artificial protein shows excellent agreement with the WW fold at atomic resolution. The relative simplicity of the information used for creating sequences suggests a marked reduction to the potential complexity of the protein-folding problem.

From this page : a WW domain is the smallest, monomeric, triple-stranded, anti-parallel beta-sheet protein domain that is stable in the absence of disulfide bonds, cofactors or ligands.

http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html

Kilauea kicks out only 8,000 tons a day.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v351/n6325/ab s/351387a0.html;jsessionid=47E7825B96884284A97B6E5 C50343A70

Etna kicks out 13+-3Tg/yr, or roughly 1,171,000 US tons of CO2 per year...

Seems like a lot, but, US CO2 production is something a billion tons of CO2 per year. So, the volcanos give out 1/1000 of CO2 as the USA does.

Rock on!

Theory and modelling predict that hurricane intensity should increase with increasing global mean temperatures, but work on the detection of trends in hurricane activity has focused mostly on their frequency, and shows no trend. Here I define an index of the potential destructiveness of hurricanes based on the total dissipation of power, integrated over the lifetime of the cyclone, and show that this index has increased markedly since the mid-1970s. This trend is due to both longer storm lifetimes and greater storm intensities. I find that the record of net hurricane power dissipation is highly correlated with tropical sea surface temperature, reflecting well-documented climate signals, including multi-decadal oscillations in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and global warming. My results suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential, and--taking into account an increasing coastal population--a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the twenty-first century.

Sure it's controversial, if you hate science. Like when Republicans at the Heritage Foundation twist the number of hurricanes to hit the US mainland into "the number of hurricanes". And ignore that even those fewer storms in that category are still fiercer. There's "controversy" when Republican governors of Alabama lobby to deny the Greenhouse, then collect FEMA $billions for their favored reconstruction companies like Halliburton. I've got to admit that I'm running out of names to call these envirocaust deniers.

Hate to be cynical, but 2018? Given the recent track record of NASA funding I'll believe it when I see it.

The BBC had an article also mentioning this 2018 date. My favorite quote:

Dr Griffin dismissed suggestions that reconstruction of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could derail the programme.

"When we have a hurricane, we don't cancel the Air Force. We don't cancel the Navy. And we're not going to cancel Nasa."

Of course not, silly! We only cancel NASA for budget crunches, elections, pork barrel programs, presidential whims, new episodes of Star Trek, and when we can't find the straw to our juice box. Why the fuck would we cancel for a hurricane?

If you believe NASA has the same funding priority as the Air Force and Navy then allow me to sell you some prime real estate on the moon.

This theory also directly contradicts another theory I saw this month in Sky and Telescope, which referred to this article. This one is for the formation of the outer gaseous planets and the kuiper belt. The basis of the theory is that the orbits of all the gas giants should have been closer to the sun, as they would have required a much denser gas-and-dust cloud than would have existed as far out as they are now. As well, the kuiper belt would have formed closer to the sun.

Due to gravitational interactions between the gas planets and the kuiper belt objects, Jupiter's orbit shrinks and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune expand, with the latter two actually changing place and moving into much more elliptical orbits before settling down into their current orbits. These larger orbits put both planets squarely into the primordial kuiper belt and, well, cause the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Not that it's reasonable to chalk up Katrina specifically to global warming, but there is now solid scientific research that suggests that global warming is not increasing the number of cyclone-type storm systems, but is increasing their strength, longevity, and overall energy level.

Please refer to: "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years" by Kerry Emanuel, an established researcher in the field.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent /abs/nature03906.html

This is a new direction in research, and the overall data in hurricanes is not overwhelmingly extensive, but the data does not look inconclusive.

In short, global warming may well cause an increase in destruction caused by hurricanes in an ongoing and increasing basis. This is especially true when you combine their flooding potential with the rising oceans.

Sometimes, the big two (N and S) prone to publishing for political (we must suck up to this Author) reasons. New Scientist, by virtue of being a more general - don't need a graduate degree to be able to read a broad range of it's content - publication is more resistant to these kinds of problems

I like New Scientist but put more faith in Nature and Science. There are also some good narrow focus ".org's" out there such as RealClimate

I also like the Gaurdian. From TFA, "What did you think of this article? Mail your responses to life@guardian.co.uk and include your name and address."

I think every slashdotter who agrees with TFA sentiments should take a couple of minutes to write and suggest that they promote the author to "science editor" (if they have one?). Be sure to include any relevant qualifications (eg:B.Sc, Dr, etc) in your title.

There is much more to that already.

It is widely known that small RNAs can regulate translation of mRNAs by binding to them in the context of specialized protein complexes (e.g. RISC) but they can also target these same mRNAs for degradation or impair their production in the first place by blocking transcription.

I believe that you are refering to microRNAs (although there are many other types).
MicroRNAs are commonly thought to control expression of cognate mRNAs only by inhibiting their translation but that is far from being the actual case. In fact, while this may be a common trend among the characterized microRNAs from animals, most plant microRNAs act by degrading the target mRNAs. In addition, a recent letter to Nature pointed that many microRNA targets in animals may be degraded in the process: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/ab s/nature03315.html
(sorry, subscription only)

Furthermore, there is clear evidence from plant and yeast species that small RNA molecules can regulate the structure of chromatin (the bundles of DNA and histone proteins which constitute the chromosomes themselves). By regulating the status of chromatin you can also regulate the expression of the underlying genes. It is still not clear if the same happens in animal cells...but it is possible (and many say likely).

This adds to three different levels at which small RNA molecules can regulate the information flow from DNA->RNA->protein and we are just scratching the surface since most of these small RNAs and their targets are still being discovered (by the hundreds).

The funny thing is that until 1998-99 these small molecules (20-40 nucleotide long) were simply dismissed as junk...

Well, here is a relevant research paper: Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years.

A similar thing occurs with wasp larvae and spiders. The spider basically flips out under the control of the larva's venom and spins a web unlike anything it would normal have spun but which has a little protective pouch. The spider would then go into the pouch and wait until the larva kills it at which point it would be eaten. Here's a link to the abstract at nature.com for anybody who has a subscription there.

-Pinkoir

Dr. Ioannidis (who is Greek, like me) is right: I read daily public announcements from universities, as well as some scientific papers, and I have found that most of them are unimportant, wrong or simply motivated by financial reasons (some universities must use all their expenses allowance in order to continue receiving government money). Not only scientific papers are wrong (often the result of vanity), but students dislike studying science and technology. Recently RPI President Jackson called for a national strategy to overcome this problem. USA must invest more in science, otherwise rival nations. How would you feel to see a communist Chinese flag on Mars? You can prevent this by persuading your representatives to invest more in science and technology. The first step would be to enact more reasonable copyright and patent laws. Science, like free software benefits from openess, which is now hindered by copyright and patents. Richard M. Stallman has published an article in Nature about this, and you can read it here.

• Short ski resort stocks in fringe areas.
• Short insurance companies since hurricanes will tend to be more prevasive
• Short northern europe in general since the gulf stream will cool the area
  
  
• Buy energy stocks as more energy will be required to cool and heat with more temperature extremes
• Buy Wind, Wave, Solar, Nuclear energy stocks as the public will eventually demand more emphasis on non-green house gas sources.

And it's quite ironic that at about the same time Nature published Benner's opinion that the water is probably not where life originated.

I can imagine the conversations between these groups of scientists:

"Ooohh! We may have found water on mars!"

"Useless, but congratulations anyway."

"We just spent $X million dollars searching for water so that we can find the beginnings of life on other planets."

"Well, that's great, but our research shows that water is more likely to inhibit life than help it."

"Oh. Well don't tell that to the people signing our funding."

A poster to the extropy-chat mailing list pointed out that James Annan also created a global warming claim on the Foresight Exchange that people can bid on:

http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GW203 0

If I'm reading the current bid correctly, global average temperatures are predicted to rise 0.72 degrees celsius by 2032.

There's also a Nature news item covering this.

This research is already part of a massively well funded body of life science research going on today. Plants, fungi and bacteria are all being engineered to act as biological cleaning agents to:

a) extract lead, cadmium and copper from soil
c) extract oil from water
d) extract heavy metals from water
e) extract air pollutants from air

The potential for companies to generate plants to clean up their own "acts" as well as after-market plants which perform these jobs to other companies and even the general public is massive. Imagine pitching a rose which just looks nice, or a rose that looks equally as nice - but also is better for the environment because it breaks down carbon monoxide or breaks down CO2 twice as efficiently, helping the greenhouse emission problem?

Those decisions make financial sense, and that sense has been inacted now for over 10 years. Genetic engineering using exactly the same techniques as used here (with Agrobacterium used to generate transgenic plants expressing particular genes), or selective breeding for specific genetic traits, are two methods being used to generate plants that act as growing living biological cleaning agents, and this is already bearing "fruit" (pardon the pun). There are a number of well published studies in Nature journals which show factually that plants which have been generated using these technologies can (for example) remove lead and cadmium from soil:

Song, W.Y., et al, 2003. Engineering tolerance and accumulation of lead and cadmium in transgenic plants. Nature Biotechnology.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v21/n8/full/nbt8 50.html
http://www.nature.com/nbt/index.html

This research is already part of a massively well funded body of life science research going on today. Plants, fungi and bacteria are all being engineered to act as biological cleaning agents to:

a) extract lead, cadmium and copper from soil
c) extract oil from water
d) extract heavy metals from water
e) extract air pollutants from air

The potential for companies to generate plants to clean up their own "acts" as well as after-market plants which perform these jobs to other companies and even the general public is massive. Imagine pitching a rose which just looks nice, or a rose that looks equally as nice - but also is better for the environment because it breaks down carbon monoxide or breaks down CO2 twice as efficiently, helping the greenhouse emission problem?

Those decisions make financial sense, and that sense has been inacted now for over 10 years. Genetic engineering using exactly the same techniques as used here (with Agrobacterium used to generate transgenic plants expressing particular genes), or selective breeding for specific genetic traits, are two methods being used to generate plants that act as growing living biological cleaning agents, and this is already bearing "fruit" (pardon the pun). There are a number of well published studies in Nature journals which show factually that plants which have been generated using these technologies can (for example) remove lead and cadmium from soil:

Song, W.Y., et al, 2003. Engineering tolerance and accumulation of lead and cadmium in transgenic plants. Nature Biotechnology.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v21/n8/full/nbt8 50.html
http://www.nature.com/nbt/index.html

I was unaware of this development: a projection volume rather than a projection surface .

Not a joke, still from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, is this picture, which according to the page text, was actually taken back in February, and reported in the June 2005 issue of Nature. So while it's news, it's not new news.

Ok, I see your point.

However, do you think that this specific request from Joe Barton is valid, with the criteria you gave about detecting bias, for a study on global warming.

Personally, I think that Joe Barton's bias towards screwing over his constitutents in favor of his contributers is enough to make his criticism of a study published in Nature worthless. I think that if the study was funded by *any* group that thinks that maybe it's not such a good idea to not take into account the true costs of pollution, he'll use that to try to discredit the results.

Which is why I still think that the funding should be kept secret. While it may make it harder to detect bias on the part of the researchers, it's value in keeping politicians from playing politics with science is immeasurable. In politics, the source of funding is a valid variable to determine if a politicians actions are why he says they are. In science however, it's much (in a certain sense) simpler - you look at the data, results, and see if it's a reasonable conculsion to draw.

• Here is the detailed Index of Creationist Claims which provides short answers to a very large number of oft-claimed claims. Each has the terminology and links to allow a much fuller exploration of the answer.
• Very well-written and filled with references 29 Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ. For each of the 29+ evidences, they provide predictions and ways to falsify the claim.
• Arguments that even creationist themselves have said should be retired as arguments. Interesting how many of these arguments still get used.

For your specific points, these are very common questions / issues from creationists and others (except the bone question), so the Index is useful:

1. Chance and probability: CB010
2. Information and mutations: we do see beneficial mutations (CB101) and we do see information increasing mutations (CB102), and the 2nd law is irrelevant to evolution (CF001.1 to CF001.5) in our not-closed system. Intelligence: Here's a single mutation thats corrolated with increasing our ancestors' intelligence.
3. You want transitions? how many different types of transitional series do you want? (aka Dinosaurs-Birds, reptiles-Mammals, apes-humans, land mammals to whales.) Look closely at the 20 main hominids between apes and modern humans. Check out this picture. Where is the bright line between human and ape? They're all transitional.
4. unreliable dating methods (CD010.1 to 010.5. Dating methods have been used badly, and the bad applications are caught by science, but which dating method is itself unreliable? (And, because it is often mentioned, fossils and rocks don't circularly date each other, Ham to the cute quote contrary.)
5. aka abiogenesis. Of course, evolution as a theory (alleles change in a population over time) only applies to life. Fast answer: Evolution doesn't fail without a theory of abiogenesis. See also CB000 through CB090and the abiogenesis and probability FAQs. (Also cosmic, stellar, chemical and organic "evolution" have nothing to do with biological evolution. Same word, different meaning.)
6. Each of the falsifications in the 29 Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ provides a way to falsify Evolution, in exactly the way that creationists tend to not provide ways to falsify creationism.
7. We have very good ideas of how the eye evolved: (and see also

1. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb060805.shtml

2. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/index. html#a3

It does not matter who funded the studies
Actually, Nature requires that you disclose financial interest when you publish. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/compet ing.html/ Including: "Funding: Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through publication of the paper."

Heritable epigenetic variation is however not Lamarkian, it is Darwinian inheriance. You still need to have variation that is selected, even if it is epigenetic.

For example you still cannot make a striped giraffe by stretching a zebra's neck as no cells from the zebra's neck will end up in the next generation. The cells that make sperm and eggs were all determined before you got your hands around the zebra's neck.

This result (the twins not the zebra) is not at all surprising to people in the genetics field and helps formalize well established concepts of incomplete penetrance of genetic traits and somatic (non reproductive tissue) mutation

The twin study did not look at reproductive tissues, but if the variation in epigenetics holds true there children of younger parents should be more like their parents

The fact is, this generates pretty pictures, maybe a nice paper in some backwater of journal land, and not much else beyond froth.

The second is one of seven SI base units. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero kelvins.

The definition is made in terms of the most accurate way we have of measuring it - with the atomic clock. There's a description of how they work here.

In the future the definition may change - there are developments to produce "optical clocks" which are more accurate even than atomic clocks. Read about them here or here (subscription required). Of course, any new definition will be chosen to be compatible with the previous definitions, to within the accuracy afforded by those definitions.

I'm sorry but you are incorrect. The UHI effect has been studied and does not appear to have any significant impact on the temperature metrics. See for instance the following papers that have recently appeared in peer reviewed journals:

Peterson, T.C., Assessment of urban versus rural in situ surface temperatures in the contiguous United States: No difference found, Journal of Climate, 16, 2941-2959, 2003.

Parker, D.E., Large-Scale Warming is not Urban, Nature 432, 290, doi:10.1038/432290a, 2004.

Regards
Luke

I am not going to attempt to compare MSR's achievements with those of PARC or Bell Labs, partly because the latter two have been around for a lot longer. But here's a paper on the properties of NP-hard problems, published last week in Nature. Achliopats works in MSR, and so does Naor. These gentlemen are very much for real. So here we have a counter-example to your blanket claims; what are you going to do about it?

This is typical of the articles I've found on scholar.google.com. (This was cited a lot.)

Here is from nature(!) reviews:
Intelligence research is more advanced and less controversial than is generally realized.

Let us make this easier -- can you give references that show that intelligence measurement has fallen out of vogue among the real researchers? (What is the majority opinion?)

I am not in that field, but I have never heard anything like that has happened.

Again, you claim that Gould wasn't full of sh!t. Well, he did make large claims. They should be visible in the literature. I can't find any, but I'm not a researcher.

(In case you don't understand why I am arguing. I don't really care about IQ measurements. What gets my goat is intellectual dishonesty. I don't really care that much about politics. My strongest opinion is a hate for religion.)

You can't just wave your hands and say "oh yeah, others have repeated it, others have reviewed it, we're done here." Who are these others? What exactly did they find, and how closely did everything match the original inputs & outputs? What kind of "review" did they do? We're still just dealing with anecdotes and hearsay, not scientific analysis.

One could read it as a subtle hint to do some literature research. The CS article offers no published sources at all. The article is simply reportage (who, what, where), not a scientific article or report. In fact however, were one to simply follow up the complaints about "dupes" here on /. one would find this with a little searching. Doubtless further inquiry would result in additional information.

..when I see multiple peer-reviewed articles reporting that others have been able to duplicate this experiment. :P

Do you believe it now?

It was reported on in the press (MSNBC) and Slashdot had a lively discussion here and slashdotted a UCLA server. There is more at a (hopefully non-slashdotted) UCLA website.

It was reported on in the press (MSNBC) and Slashdot had a lively discussion here and slashdotted a UCLA server. There is more at a (hopefully non-slashdotted) UCLA website.

in true...this is just an initial step in biological modelling. We yet need more experimental data to develop reliable models, and build oriented models. Real biological systems are much more complex than our modelling capacity today. References?? http://www.nature.com/msb/index.html http://www.fosbe.org/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?puN umber=9270

The paper by the Canadians is nice, but (a) it's not really a transistor, since there is no gate electrode, and (b) single-molecule transistors have been done by several groups.

See:

Park et al., Nature 407, 57 (2000)

Park et al., Nature 417, 722 (2002)

Yu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 266802 (2004)
and others.

Nanotube-based transistors came before these, too, though that's a bit of a cheat since nanotubes can be microns long.

The paper by the Canadians is nice, but (a) it's not really a transistor, since there is no gate electrode, and (b) single-molecule transistors have been done by several groups.

See:

Park et al., Nature 407, 57 (2000)

Park et al., Nature 417, 722 (2002)

Yu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 266802 (2004)
and others.

Nanotube-based transistors came before these, too, though that's a bit of a cheat since nanotubes can be microns long.

>What the article lacks is one critical detail - how exactly they plan on doing all this.

They synthesize the gene in very small pieces on a solid surface using a microarray with microfluidics, cleave the pieces off the support, error check them, and put the pieces together. Clever.

Read about it in a Nature article linked to by their website.