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This was posted way back on March 13 here. There are links that don't require the intrusive NY Times registration. They are Spaceflightnow and Nature

The upshot is that if you treat people well, you will be treated well. Good deeds are rewarded, bad deeds are punished. And if you want decent morale, don't treat people badly.

Read the article. Then get your boss to read the article.

...it would probably exist as single-celled forms such as bacteria, cyanobacteria,
and fungi found on Earth. The most interesting thing, though, is that the
origin of such a Mars life form could probably not be Mars-based. On
Earth, we have mightily strained to hypothesize an origin of life in primordial
ocean soups and atmospheres
in the presence of electric sparks and self-assembling
molecules. These theories have been severely weakened
in recent years with the discovery of fossilized life forms on Earth with
an apparent age of 3.5+ billion years which, given the estimated age of the
Earth, would imply a much more rapid creation of life than the hypothesized
mechanisms would allow. If life is present on Mars, the Earth-origin
theories of life are weakened even further, in the absence of evidence for
the necessary atmospheres and oceans on Mars, and theories for extraterrestrial
origins of life would gain traction.

I know this is really off topic, but it is on, if the topic is "reasonibly absurd science". In Nature last December, they decided to publish a short note about an Austrailian matehmatician's work on The Best Way To Lace Your Shoelaces

No joke.

I know this is really off topic, but it is on, if the topic is "reasonibly absurd science". In Nature last December, they decided to publish a short note about an Austrailian matehmatician's work on The Best Way To Lace Your Shoelaces

No joke.

I have a nature article that says you are wrong. Here it says the Prometheus would be the first ship with an onboard nuclear reactor.

So I guess you didn't read this did you? Or maybe you don't know what nuclear power is? Why don't you just post what you think without being a dick.

Not a technical whitepaper, but there is a journal article (from Nature Materials)
here if you have a subscription for full text to the Nature Publishing Group. The research was supervised by Roberto Merlin, and that's the link off his page, so I assume he doesn't have rights to make his article available publicly.

However, most serious proposals for life at Europa suggest that it exists within the liquid water interior of the moon, several kilometers beneath the surface. Radiation will not be a problem there.

These results are irrelevant to the question of life within Europa. The only way it could matter is if free radicals (aka "nasty chemicals") created by the surface radiation could somehow be carried back into the liquid interior.

By the way, if you or your institution subscribes to Nature, you can read the original article (which wisely says nothing about life) here.

I go to a number of sites for "news" news; I find that the "same" news is very different coming from different countries:
BBC News, which everyone's familiar with;
CNN, the epitome of US government-sanctioned news;
The Economist, of course;
The Times of London,
Japan Today,
Pravda,
The Beijing Review,
Le Monde, and
The Tehran Times

...and a couple of sites for tech and science news:
EurekAlert, a great site for science and medicine press releases,
the former, but still running, Hacker News Network,
BottomQuark,
the phenomenal journal Nature,
Science magazine,
and, of course, The Source.

Some good comics, most of which you will all know, but which I love; here are a couple you might not know:
Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet, a comic that actually features a female sysadmin/techgoddess, and
Bateman Political cartoons, a fun political comic updated regularly.

And, of course, take a look at my sig... Click every day.

There were three back to back papers published in Nature (1953, No. 4356 pages 737-741): "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acids" by J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids" by M.H.F Wilkins, A.R. Stokes and H.R. Wilson, and lastly "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate" by Rosalind Franklin. Also available on Nature's website for free, as someone else has already linked in. At least Watson and Crick did put Rosalind Franklin (and Maurice Wilkins) in their acknowledgements, but then that was probably the most they could get away with and even then in their article they poo-poo the fibre diffraction patterns obtained by Franklin (and others) despite the wealth of information that was obtained. In her article she independently states "The structure is probably helical. The phosphate groups lie on the outside of the structural unit, on a helix of diameter about 20 angstroms. The structural unit probably consists of two co-axial molecules which are not equally spaced along the fibere axis..." Her view on DNA structure is based on data she collected. Watson and Crick's structure is largely based on the same data (which they obtained without her permission, ie they stole it) and they come to similar conclusions.

Or you can read a review piece by her biographer in Nature.

In case you didn't know, there's a good version of your sig in the opening stanzas of The Selfish Gene, quoted here.

Nature (where the Watson and Crick paper was published) is running something on this:
http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/

The page has links to all the original 1953 articles.

A virus was created from scratch last summer. Does that count as "one day"? ;-)

CD's don't degrade? Granted, that's relatively severe conditions, but it does happen.

In this case it's well worth it to RTFA:

She's lovely

Maybe it's just in my genetic makeup to fancy raven haired beauties who lick lollypops... Rrr.

My former undergrad prof, Dr. John Donoghue at Brown University, is at the cutting edge of research into neural implantable interfaces.

Monkeys Demonstrate Thought-Controlled Computing

Monkeybrain Joysticks Excerpts:

A rhesus macaque monkey at a Brown University laboratory can move a cursor on a computer screen just by thinking about it - playing a pinball game in which every time a red target dot pops up, the monkey moves a cursor to meet the target quickly and accurately. The monkey plays the game mentally, controlling where it wants the cursor to go by thinking.

The primary research Nature article is Connecting cortex to machines: recent advances in brain interfaces

Cheers,
Joel

This is the same basic technique that has been used to make knock-out mice, but apparently a lot of tweaking was necessary because the protocol used with mouse ES cells works very poorly with human ES cells. It sounds like this article is basically a proof-of-concept to share the method with other scientists.

If you're somewhere that has access to Nature's archives, you can read the two original articles this one was based off of:

Release of invasive plants from fungal and viral pathogens and
Introduced species and their missing parasites

If you're somewhere that has access to Nature's archives, you can read the two original articles this one was based off of:

Release of invasive plants from fungal and viral pathogens and
Introduced species and their missing parasites

If you're somewhere that has access to Nature's archives, you can read the two original articles this one was based off of:

Release of invasive plants from fungal and viral pathogens and
Introduced species and their missing parasites

The Archaeoraptor specimen was pretty easy to tell as a fake...there were all kinds of things that didn't match up. If they had tried to do the actual science, they would have found that it's left and right wings were part/counterpart of the same wing, that the tail was displaced, and that feathers abruptly stopped when you got to the piece of rock that the tail was on. There were plenty of warning signs and the people who were looking at it (a nonscientist and Phil Currie, who has a history of being easily duped) were just fools. Had they tried to publish it in a scientific journal, the peer reviewing process would have culled it out as bad science. That was National Geographic's fault for jumping the gun.

No, this one is pretty convincingly real, and I'd say that Nature is a much more scientific publication than National Geographic.

But don't take my word for it. Read the damned paper. Maybe that's a bit more convincing than a quick soundbyte on NYTimes or CNN. Just maybe.

My sources say it's name is officially Microraptor gui.

Do some research next time.

CS Monitor (thumbs-up)

Nature (ho-hum)

Computer User (thumbs-way-up)

The UK is the most advanced country in the world, went through the Agricultural, Industrial and Communications revolutions first.

China still leads the world in many fields of science. Their micro-surgeons are acknowledged as the best, they have the most practice thanks to a total lack of safety in the average Chinese workplace. They have some of the finest maths brains on the planet, and there are 1.2 billion of them.

China is a scientific nation, you can't move at most scientific conferences without bumping into a large contingent who are either directly from China or who are researching in Western Unis.

Oh wait, you know are demonstrating how people who know jack shit about a subject and are never going to go to a scientific conference or get published in nature still think their opinions are valid even if based on a total lack of knowledge.

Sorry I nearly missed your wonderful example of irony.

Stem cell research in China one of 32 matches for Beijing university in natures publications. How many people from _your_ alma mater have been published in Nature ?

I doubt this is fraud, Nature has a lengthy piece about those fossils with a lot of detail.
Seems quite a lot of people already studied those 6 specimens.
The Nature article

Well, I'm not a fossil expert but the peer reviewers for Nature are buying this one.... or should I say six... Supposedly there are 6 different skeletons of this new species and the find is being published by Nature. See the 'news and views' from Nature here ; the data is here but I think people without subscriptions may not be able to see it. Time will tell.

Well, I'm not a fossil expert but the peer reviewers for Nature are buying this one.... or should I say six... Supposedly there are 6 different skeletons of this new species and the find is being published by Nature. See the 'news and views' from Nature here ; the data is here but I think people without subscriptions may not be able to see it. Time will tell.

Simultaneously, the dinosaurs decided to develop hollow bones, a totally different lung system, flight muscles, brain modifications, dietary modifications, new digestive and excretory systems, new behavioral instincts, flight feathers, and everything else that goes along with aeronautical engineering. Just how that happened is somehow glossed over.

What is most incredible is how all the lazy news sources parrot this story uncritically, with literally no one asking the hard questions about how flight could evolve with all of these complex subsystems working together. If they present any controversy at all, it is only about which evolutionary tall tale is better than the others.

Examples: "Scientific" American, Nature, EurekAlot, New Scientist, ABC, etc.

It seems as if only creationists have the guts to pull the curtains from the wizards of awes and call a dumb story dumb. Want to add your entry to this storytelling contest? Send it in to Science and see if it passes peer review. They don't seem to be too particular these days, as long as you toe the Darwin Party line. You might even get NSF money and 15 minutes of fame. Try this science project: drop lizards out of trees and measure their flapping rates. Just be sure you take good lab notes and draw pretty graphs so that it looks scientific. Videos also make good supplementary material. Just don't show the blood on the ground and proves how absurd this all really is.

No - it is SEVERELY encumbered. The very first paragraph of the license basically says "You give us the exclusive right for any existing or future paper, electronic, or undiscovered forms of distribution of this article until the copyright expires. Oh yeah - ditto for all derivative works (translations, summaries, etc)."

The second para then says, "But you can print it on paper or post it on your own website or use it in teaching at your university."

And this is different from giving Nature the copyright and them then granting the original author an extremely restricted license exactly how?

This smells more like Nature is scared that someone is going to figure out a way to say "Nature - you don't own the electronic rights on papers published in your magazine - and never did. Too Bad." Something like the LEXUS-NEXUS fiasco where the courts held that LEXUS-NEXUS has improperly stolen authors works by redistributing them electronically beyond the original paper publication. And so they have come up with a creative way of trying to put contract law on their side while still spinning it as "We are good guys! Really!"

Read the article before "trashing" the work; it's quite elegant: http://www.nature.com/nature/links/021024/021024-1 .html

tRNA and small RNA (snRNA?) are members of the evil plot by scientists bent on intimidating those of us dinosaurs who went to a lot of trouble a dozen years ago to learn all the stuff that was then hot science. And it works!

The progress is staggering, and appears exponential. When HIV was idscovered, they said that a dozen or so years earlier the technology to identify the virus didn't even exist. HIV gets the unwitting assistance of host tRNA and other cellular machinery.

Of the RNA family, let's not forget about mRNA. Any other alpha-RNA's I should know about? Here is a quiz if you'd like to show off your acronymial brilliancce!

There was an article in the Mpls Star Tribune 2 weeks ago about the University of Minnesota licensing the rights to technology for creating stem cells from human bone marrow to a biotech firm called Athersys. The U of M researchers published a paper about this procedure in the July 4th issue of Nature. Here is a link to an article (not abstract) [nature.com].

I signed the Open Letter long ago, not because I agreed with every point, but because it was good to see something stir up some noise. I also licensed my thesis under the PLoS license, not because I think it has much legal value (it confuses "public domain" with RMS' concept of copyleft), but because I think that if anybody wants to copy that thesis, it can only help me, and besides the fuzz you created was great! As it turns out, all of those of my childhood friends who have become scientists have independently signed the Open Letter! :-)

One of my main beefs with the PLoS is the insistence of a centralized archive. True, it may be easier to build something good on the top of for example the existing Arxiv.org (I'm an astrophysicist), but decentralization is one of the fundamental principles of the web. It is wise to learn as much as possible from these architectural principles, and make use of them as fast as possible.

I have for long wanted to write an article with the many thoughts I have in my head, but time has not allowed me to. The future of scientific publishing is perhaps the topic that I would most like to work with.

I noted in the Nature debate (which I submitted a link to some time ago), that some of the non-profit publishers wouldn't let go of their published articles because they couldn't ensure the integrity of the articles. This has a rather obvious technical solution to most people here on Slashdot, in the form of signatures. Now that XML Signature is a W3C Recommendation, I think it is just a matter of implementing it, the problem is really solved.

As for finance (now comes the excuse for posting in this thread), it is a problem that needs addressing for the whole Internet community. Many different modes should be available, for example, a nice, printed journal set by a professional typographer will not seize to be attractive although the article is available on the web. Some may well find a steady income there. Also, micropayments is something that is worth checking out.

I would personally like to work on those solutions, so if anybody is hiring... :-)

I signed the Open Letter long ago, not because I agreed with every point, but because it was good to see something stir up some noise. I also licensed my thesis under the PLoS license, not because I think it has much legal value (it confuses "public domain" with RMS' concept of copyleft), but because I think that if anybody wants to copy that thesis, it can only help me, and besides the fuzz you created was great! As it turns out, all of those of my childhood friends who have become scientists have independently signed the Open Letter! :-)

One of my main beefs with the PLoS is the insistence of a centralized archive. True, it may be easier to build something good on the top of for example the existing Arxiv.org (I'm an astrophysicist), but decentralization is one of the fundamental principles of the web. It is wise to learn as much as possible from these architectural principles, and make use of them as fast as possible.

I have for long wanted to write an article with the many thoughts I have in my head, but time has not allowed me to. The future of scientific publishing is perhaps the topic that I would most like to work with.

I noted in the Nature debate (which I submitted a link to some time ago), that some of the non-profit publishers wouldn't let go of their published articles because they couldn't ensure the integrity of the articles. This has a rather obvious technical solution to most people here on Slashdot, in the form of signatures. Now that XML Signature is a W3C Recommendation, I think it is just a matter of implementing it, the problem is really solved.

As for finance (now comes the excuse for posting in this thread), it is a problem that needs addressing for the whole Internet community. Many different modes should be available, for example, a nice, printed journal set by a professional typographer will not seize to be attractive although the article is available on the web. Some may well find a steady income there. Also, micropayments is something that is worth checking out.

I would personally like to work on those solutions, so if anybody is hiring... :-)

It used to be produced by sucking it out of dead people but now is now synthetically produced due to CJD (human variant of 'Mad Cow' disease) risks-- it comes from the pituitary gland so is high-risk for transferring the disease (possibly!)

Scientists are now looking at producing HGH from animal semen because "semen is a body fluid that can be collected easily on a continuous basis" ... and in this press release from Nature, they "suggest that boars (male pigs), which can produce up to half a liter of semen at a time, could be similarly engineered to produce pharmaceutical proteins both cost-effectively and efficiently"

!!

I guess it goes
1. Get pig
2. Genetically engineer pig
3. Find someone to 'milk' half a liter ... "Look Daddy, I'm a farmer!!"
4. profit!

It used to be produced by sucking it out of dead people but now is now synthetically produced due to CJD (human variant of 'Mad Cow' disease) risks-- it comes from the pituitary gland so is high-risk for transferring the disease (possibly!)

Scientists are now looking at producing HGH from animal semen because "semen is a body fluid that can be collected easily on a continuous basis" ... and in this press release from Nature, they "suggest that boars (male pigs), which can produce up to half a liter of semen at a time, could be similarly engineered to produce pharmaceutical proteins both cost-effectively and efficiently"

!!

I guess it goes
1. Get pig
2. Genetically engineer pig
3. Find someone to 'milk' half a liter ... "Look Daddy, I'm a farmer!!"
4. profit!

This is exactly the kind of stuff being done today up at Dartmouth College. The fMRI Data Center is home to a public data warehouse of MRI scans. Publishing research involves more than just glossy pictures and a paper, the actual data should be shared to allow others to repeat the experiment.

The community has not yet decided if this is a good idea but they will come around.

An interesting overview about CI can be found at Nature.

Still, you need dedication for this job: A Ph.D. in chemistry plus solid computer science knowledge is still the norm. But those few who qualify are really sought after.

Disclosure: I am the Director of Chemoinformatics at start-up ChemCodes (www.chemcodes.com), so I know what I am talking about.

Locating downed planes in a forest or in heavy cloud cover/fog would be an excellent application. A larger drone with forward looking infrared (FLIR) could locate bodies and smoldering debris. In remote areas where planes sometimes go down, it's all about coverage of the area in as little time as possible to maximize the chance that the victims live. A swarm of camera-equipped butterflies autonomously looking for anything unusual might accomplish in less time and with less risk to search personnel what a search and rescue helicopter would do in a week. It's very interesting. Admittedly, for many scenarios a remote-controlled rat could be more useful, but this is all about expanding the possibilities.

In both natural and artificial situations people will spend their own resources in order to administer justice to those who "need" it.

This desire contributes strongly to cooperation and the common good. If there's no outlet for it, and these days it seems like there are precious few except vicariously at the movies, cooperation unravels.

This an excellent and easy-to-read story.

Sure, but the point is something which is at least a couple of years old and is not actually novel anyway, but happens to be in a meeting report in Nature and so journalist in the SF Times just happens to see (I don't have a great deal of respect for Science reporters - being a scientist) c.f. a 3 day old story not seen by a journalist (I've not actually seen it reported anywhere), which is both news generally w.r.t. people and more specifically of interest (I would have thought) to the hacker community considering the amount of bioinformatic analysis that has gone into the paper.

Anyway have a look at it. Like I said I'm not bitching (honest), just a little disappointed at the quality of editorial input here (I don't think I am alone).

Okay, maybe this is a stretch, but hear me out. I believe pi is considered to be normal. See here and here for background on what "normal" means. Essentially, it says the digits are equally distributed over the long run. I believe then, that you can also prove that by exploring sufficiently deep within pi, you will find every conceivable string of digits (ie, in any order you desire and of any length). I think my math is reasonably correct here, but feel free to put me back on track.

Anyways, if this is the case, all digital works are already rendered in pi. All past and future audio master recordings are already in pi. All source and binary distributions of all software are already dumped in pi. Etc.

So the implication is: Am I breaking simple copyright law or the DMCA by computing pi? Am I a criminal for posessing a sufficiently large dump of pi's digits? If I find the rip of a new audio CD in pi, can I keep it?

http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/0-TitlePrefContAc k.html

http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/Nature.html

here's the link at nature.com: http://www.nature.com/nsu/021202/021202-3.html

Coffee may help reduce plaque on teeth, as reported here and here. But I guess this involves drinking your coffee like a real man :P

D*mn this new keyboard. Here is the Nature Abstract on the this subject

For the visually oriented, there's pictures of halteres in the commentary in Nature along with another brief article. The technical description and data to support this theory about how the halteres were beneficial is here, but I think this is only accessible to Nature subscribers.

For the visually oriented, there's pictures of halteres in the commentary in Nature along with another brief article. The technical description and data to support this theory about how the halteres were beneficial is here, but I think this is only accessible to Nature subscribers.

Biofuel cells that could use our own body metabolic activity to power medical implants are also being developed. Here is the article

The research behind this Slahdot item has been published in Nature so at least in this case is backed up by a prestigious peer reviewed academic journal.