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It's easy to fall into the Malthusian trap of thinking that overpopulation is the problem. I suggest you read Bookchin's classic essay Which Way for the Ecology Movement?, which lucidly and rationally debunks this idea.

In fact, the most recent estimates that I would consider objective are that post-2050, population numbers will decline significantly.

We need to stop blaming world population growth for climate change, when in fact the more static populations in the west are responsible for far more man-made pollution per capita. The focus needs to be on the real problems of pollution and climate change.

Please, less smoke and more solid info.

OK - here is another article, and at the bottom is a link to the actual study. However, you have to be a subscriber to d/l it or you can whip out your credit card.

Shall we propose this as the biggest OCR task this side of scanning the Rosetta Stone?

Nope.

The problem with LED displays is the reverse of the
problem for printing. In printing its tough to get
true black by combining cyan, magenta and yellow, so
they do 4-color printing, CMYK (K for black).

With LEDs, they want to do RGBW (W for white) to
get true whites, but the article doesn't say whether
they're doing three or four colors. Here's an
article on organic white LED:

Nature

Back in the 1960s, when the U.S. was planning the first Mars lander to look for signs of life, NASA scientists were proposing instruments such as traps for sand fleas. NASA gave Lovelock some money to look into whether they were going about this appropriately.

Lovelock did not believe that there was life on Mars and proposed that anomalous gases in the atmosphere was the best test for ruling out the presence of life on a planet. As described in Nature:

In his opinion, "life proclaims itself as a global phenomenon," leaving a clear fingerprint in a planet's atmosphere. This was where he thought the missions should be looking -- although he considered Mars's atmosphere to be that of a lifeless planet anyway.

Of course, a non-equilibrium atmosphere is a necessary, not a sufficient condition, so further work must, of course, be carried out before reaching the conclusion that life must be present, but it's so rare to see such strong non-equilibrium conditions that this is indeed exciting news.

A bit light on detail, I suppose, is a nice way saying there is _no_ detail. Stem cell "contamination" in tissue from alternate sources (e.g., blood) is not uncommon, and would suggest that one must show that the cells are indeed neural stem cells and not of another known type. I also find it curious that the linked article is directed to discovery.com, while a peek at the current online issue of Nature Neuroscience doesn't mention this "breakthrough" at all.

There are such things as immortal cells. You can make them in a lab.

These highly energetic rays can penetrate meters of solid concrete and are constantly slamming into the earth (most absorbed by the atmosphere, but more than enough left to cause trouble).

A brief overview is available from Nature.

Ever had a bizarre but completely UN-reproducible crash on your pc? Could be it was a cosmic ray, not just the "Ghost of Bill".

After years as a support engineer (thank god I got out of that) I can say with some surety that it is a much under-estimated cause of errors.

Unusual, but not impossible.

So, to cut a long story short - can computers (excluding specifically and expensively hardened army/nasa chips) ever be relied upon in these mission-critical situations?

Um, no. But it has never stopped us before.

Q.

Here is the original paper on the Nature site. Still, Kurtsiefer's home directory proves interesting as well.

Dear Dr Cerf

Last year, Jay Brockman and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana sent out packets with carefully crafted checksums such that only the packet with the checksum which solved their mathematical problem returned an ack packet.

article here

this kind of distributed brute force search could be useful in the huge search spaces of ai.

Furthermore, instead of a single computer pretending it is a neural network, a different application of distributed parasitic computing could allow a network of computers to be tricked into having each computer spend a few clock cycles pretending it is a neuron.

Would you support the development future network protocols which encourage these kind of facilities?

Thanks

See for example the work at Bell Labs reporting in 1998 which was also reported in the journal Nature (subscription required) as early as 1997. The mechanism by which this broad negative-TCE occurs is nonetheless spectacular -- the zirconia atoms basically get pulled in and fold over against each other as the oxygen atoms vibrate more intensely with heating. This recent announcement (and several more in the last few years) are Soundbite Science.

I find this hard to believe, considering the global warming proof being presented by fairly reputable atmospheric scientists. There's an article to the contrary located here (nature.com) that I found interesting. Regardless, isn't it a little absurd to assume that changes to the world are going to happen within a decade or two of us realizing the consequences of our actions? If we've really been doing this since the 1800s, it's obviously been a gradual build-up and not something that's going to happen in ten years. Enviromental alarmism or not, maybe we have ample time to fix our mistakes?

National Geographic
Nature

but much seems to be lacking yet, apparently not much is known about these insects thus far...

-tid242

click HERE for more info from Nature on this bug. Apparently it's related to the praying mantis, which is by far the coolest bug ever :-)

Of course it'll work. All you need to do is this. Just stop the light for however long you need to to make the object appear at the proper depth.

I just saw Susan Lindquist (as far as I know, the woman who came up with this whole idea) give a talk on Hsp90 (the protein in question) yesterday. Since NewScientist isn't exactly forthcoming with the article, here are a few alternate resources.

• Nature Science Update
• The Nature article that started it all. Check out the Full Text if you want the full story (but you'd better be a biologist if you want to understand it).
• Lindquist's HHMI page

I just saw Susan Lindquist (as far as I know, the woman who came up with this whole idea) give a talk on Hsp90 (the protein in question) yesterday. Since NewScientist isn't exactly forthcoming with the article, here are a few alternate resources.

• Nature Science Update
• The Nature article that started it all. Check out the Full Text if you want the full story (but you'd better be a biologist if you want to understand it).
• Lindquist's HHMI page

I think it's fantastic. I have about 6 sites I regularly view throughout the day (including slashdot and a few science sites). I had, of late, been trying to find other sites that served my surfing style. In particular, sites with headlines that weren't just rehashed news of the other sites I view. Google News is exactly what I was looking for.

Now I start at google and wander to other sites as needed. The list of news feeds to Google doesn't include some of the science sites I enjoy (Nature and New Scientist). It might soon as everyone jumps on the Google wagon.

Here and here are a couple of guys who agree with you...

This is a FANTASTIC book and I strongly recommend reading it, too. As we get farther and farther from Patient Zero for AIDS the whole "AIDS came from contaminated polio vaccine" theory gets more and more swept under the rug. It shouldn't. For an overview of ths book / topic, check out this article from The Atlantic magazine. What is really interesting is how the scientists are SO DRIVEN to disprove this theory - they are not objective at all. Check out, for exaple, this Nature article. These articles always say something like "Important Doctor X tested remaining polio vaccine sample Y and detected no trace of AIDS/chimp DNA" and the headline conclusion is that Hooper's theory has been disproven. Balony. There are not representative surviving samples for ALL lots of vaccines that were used and it would only have taken ONE SINGLE CONTAMINATED LOT to kick off the AIDS epidemic. Tests can NEVER prove there were NO containated lots of vaccine; it can only prove there WERE by FINDING ONE.

I say we trade the language gene for their AIDS immunity gene.

It would be beneficial to both species. Well, the language gene is arguably more trouble than it's worth, but these monkeys are dumb and will probably fall for it if we throw in a few extra bananas to sweeten the deal.

If you look at the bottom of the article there are a number of associated links listed. One of them is Nature, a British science journal. If you do a search at Nature (I used 'glucose' and 'hydrogen' as keywords) a number of relavent articles will show up. Unless you are willing to pay for a subscription, then you are likely to need to pass by your local university library to read them, as the results are just abstracts.

Sure, there is a lot of crap out there, but there is a lot of high quality research as well.

In june 2000 this was already published in Nature."Adhesive force of a single gecko foot-hair" by Autumn, Liang, Hsieh, Zesch, Chan, Kenny, Fearing and Full.

The complete reference for those who access a library or nature.com: Nature 405, 681 - 685 (08 Jun 2000) or simply the first reference if you search for gecko.

So this article could have been published LONG ago.

Scientists at Rockefeller University in New York announced today in the journal Nature that a protein used by a bacteriophage (a virus that kills bacteria) can be used to quickly detect and kill anthrax. Last year, it took days to check a building for anthrax spores, but this method of causing the bacteria's cell wall to burst and yield an easily-detectible dye would cut the uncertainty to a period of minutes. It can also be used in a drug to kill strains of anthrax that have grown resistant to antibiotics. Rockefeller University has additional info, and the NYTimes has an article.

The Nature article also mentions an interesting tidbit about a difference between Western and Russian medicine: "Such 'phage therapy' is routine in Russia - the concept is over 80 years old - but was ousted by antibiotics in the West." A nice reminder that ignoring one approach in favor of another can have disastrous results."

Nature Science Update: Eyes write

If you have a subscription to Nature, you can get a rather more accurate summary in this News and Views piece.

The research article itself is here.

If you have a subscription to Nature, you can get a rather more accurate summary in this News and Views piece.

The research article itself is here.

Because it's correct. If the only application of quantum computers were to factoring numbers their usefulness would be quite limited. Please look at this article in nature, which talks about the speedups derived from quantum computing techniques when solving NP complete problems.

When slashdot selected the same story just three short days ago, they also linked to an NPR story and a blurb on the nature website.

I'll one more, very important, link to the mix. You can read the abstract for free. Reading the paper itself is not free, unless you count going to your local university library for the dead tree copy as free. Before anyone else comments on the science behind this, please at least read the abstract, and hopefully have the knowledge to pass at least one introductory statistics course.

When slashdot selected the same story just three short days ago, they also linked to an NPR story and a blurb on the nature website.

I'll one more, very important, link to the mix. You can read the abstract for free. Reading the paper itself is not free, unless you count going to your local university library for the dead tree copy as free. Before anyone else comments on the science behind this, please at least read the abstract, and hopefully have the knowledge to pass at least one introductory statistics course.

those results will never get published in any scientific journal...

Let me let you in on something...in investigations of the natural world - you know, that thing outside the lab? - you often don't get to have a formal control group. Cosmologists, for example, don't have a "control" universe to check against. Neither do meterologists have a "control" Earth to check against.

And if you had RTFA, you might see that what they were looking at was not the average temperature, but the temperature swing between day and night.

Saddest thing of all is that your post was modded up.

If I understood the article correctly, jet contrails, locally counteract global warming, shifting the temperature down 1.8 degrees centigrade.

Nope. You read it wrong. They compared the difference in temperature between night and day. The existence of jet contrails are correlated to a smaller difference in temperature -- presumably, the days were cooler, and the nights were warmer than normal.

The idea is that sunlight bounces off the top of the contrails during the day, and reflects back into space. Thus, less energy is added to the environment during the day, which means that the jets have the immediate effect of cooling the earth, but only during the day.

However, the heat radiated up from the ground also gets reflected right back to the ground, just as if you'd put a big blanket over the earth. This has the effect of generally warming the earth, during both day and night.

So, there are all sorts of questions which are, hopefully, outside the scope of an article like this. I'm not sure, because I've only read the brief linked writeup, not the real paper published in Nature. Reading the paper costs money to read, and I'm cheap.

The questions I immediately have is: do the contrails have the net effect of increasing or decreasing the total amount of energy stored in the earths environment, i.e., do they actaually cool or warm the earth? Which has a bigger effect -- the light reflecting off the top and into space, or the heat reflected back onto the surface? What are the magnitudes of each of these effects across different seasons? What are the effects across different regions of the world? What effect does this actually have on the climate -- rainfall patterns, regional mean termperatures, or regional temperature variance.

I haven't read the paper, as I don't have a subscription to Nature, so I'm going solely by what I know and proof presented in the article:

The speed of light is a constant in a vacuum . Gravity can bend it, motion can alter it's speed, etc, etc. Since the light they're measuring, is obviously NOT in a vacuum, their calculations and reasoning, are flawed. Space isn't a vacuum, and it even mentions that in the article.

This article at nature.com talks about insect hearing and sites several interesting examples.

First we had bees as mine detectors then came the ratbots and now the spyfly-report on CNN gets slashdotted. These are just small pieces in a bigger puzzle, obviously released one after the other. To get the larger picture at once, you have to go to the DARPA site about the Controlled biological systems and see, what will be promoted next...

A new genus is impressive, but even more so is a new phylum! Remember it goes Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, then species.

For those who aren't familiar with archae, they are single-cell creatures that carry characteristics of both prokaryotes (e.g. operonal gene function), and eukaryotes (e.g. some genes have introns). They're pretty weird little things.

Although I have to admit, it is pretty cool they found the genus/species in NYC. Of all places.

'The European Physical Journal A article alleges that there were two instances in which raw data from the earlier experiments did not match the published results. Results "were spuriously created", wrote GSI physicist Sigurd Hofmann, lead author in all three articles. But the discovery of elements 111 and 112 still stands, he wrote.'

It appears that one of the leaders in nanotechnology, Bell laboratories, is under investigation due to allegations of scientific fraud on 3 counts. It appears that research published by Jan Hendrik Schön on the use of organic molecules deposited in thin films to be used in nanotechnology chips and the like appears to reproduce the same graph in three different papers one three different datasets.

The article, published by Nature, can be found here

Now, update to last weeks' issue of Nature, and it appears that Bell labs fraud has spread to supercomputers, where another paper (by the same author) using fullerenes and CaO to eliminate electrical resistance is under dispute.

Now I'm no boffin, but when multiple paper's by one person (who is first author on all of them) come under suspision on multiple occassions by people such as noble laureates, things start to look a bit suspicious... could Bell labs rise from this scandal in light of the WorldCom debacle?

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This story was not selected for slashdot, but could someone mod me up for bringing it to light... I seem to have some bad karma

It appears that one of the leaders in nanotechnology, Bell laboratories, is under investigation due to allegations of scientific fraud on 3 counts. It appears that research published by Jan Hendrik Schön on the use of organic molecules deposited in thin films to be used in nanotechnology chips and the like appears to reproduce the same graph in three different papers one three different datasets.

The article, published by Nature, can be found here

Now, update to last weeks' issue of Nature, and it appears that Bell labs fraud has spread to supercomputers, where another paper (by the same author) using fullerenes and CaO to eliminate electrical resistance is under dispute.

Now I'm no boffin, but when multiple paper's by one person (who is first author on all of them) come under suspision on multiple occassions by people such as noble laureates, things start to look a bit suspicious... could Bell labs rise from this scandal in light of the WorldCom debacle?

---
This story was not selected for slashdot, but could someone mod me up for bringing it to light... I seem to have some bad karma

Oops. Here's what I meant to post.

For those interested in more details than the BBC is reporting. The original scientifc articlle is in Nature, and here is link to a series of articles published on the subject. Many of the articles are quite technical, but perhaps some of you are amateur (or professional) paleontologists?

The summary of the lead article reads as follows: "The search for the earliest fossil evidence of the human lineage has been concentrated in East Africa. Here we report the discovery of six hominid specimens from Chad, central Africa, 2,500km from the East African Rift Valley. The fossils include a nearly complete cranium and fragmentary lower jaws. The associated fauna suggest the fossils are between 6 and 7million years old. The fossils display a unique mosaic of primitive and derived characters, and constitute a new genus and species of hominid. The distance from the Rift Valley, and the great antiquity of the fossils, suggest that the earliest members of the hominid clade were more widely distributed than has been thought, and that the divergence between the human and chimpanzee lineages was earlier than indicated by most molecular studies."

For those interested in more details than the BBC is reporting. The original scientifc articlle is in Nature, and here is a /a> to a series of articles published on the subject. Many of the articles are wuite technical, but perhasp some of you are amateur (or professional) paleontologists? The summary of the article read as follows: "The search for the earliest fossil evidence of the human lineage has been concentrated in East Africa. Here we report the discovery of six hominid specimens from Chad, central Africa, 2,500km from the East African Rift Valley. The fossils include a nearly complete cranium and fragmentary lower jaws. The associated fauna suggest the fossils are between 6 and 7million years old. The fossils display a unique mosaic of primitive and derived characters, and constitute a new genus and species of hominid. The distance from the Rift Valley, and the great antiquity of the fossils, suggest that the earliest members of the hominid clade were more widely distributed than has been thought, and that the divergence between the human and chimpanzee lineages was earlier than indicated by most molecular studies."

Cello, J., Paul, A.V. & Wimmer, E. Chemical synthesis of poliovirus cDNA: Generation of infectious virus in the absence of natural template. Science published online, doi:10.1126/science.1072266 (2002).

Nature have made access to the original research paper behind this story free. There's also a nice collection of older stuff about hominid evolution...goes back to 1925 and the discovery of the first "ape-man" of Africa.

Nature have made access to the original research paper behind this story free. There's also a nice collection of older stuff about hominid evolution...goes back to 1925 and the discovery of the first "ape-man" of Africa.

SOMETHING will survive

BULLSHIT!

The earth is TOAST!

This was reported in Nature over a year ago..

Still, a cool effect.

Recently as well, a binary Kuiper Belt Object was found (in addition to Pluto and Charon, though, I mean). The remarkable ubiquity of double-asteroids and KBOs in our solar system is trying to tell us something about the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and we're working on what that is. I personally suspect that, eventually, a binary extrasolar planet will be found (probably in transit), making this sort of thing even more exciting.

You know, I'd always thought it was similar to phenols (Remember Dr. Lister's "carbolic acid" [Phenol] antiseptic?), but it appears that triclosan interferes with an enzyme that bacteria use to form their cell walls. I don't know if it's the same thing that Penicillin-related compounds interfere with for the same purpose, though it does imply that bacteria may become resistant to it. It appears that triclosan, like a lot of antibiotics, can activate a "pump" that expels antibiotics from bacteria before they can do damage.

Poking around on Google also brought up an interesting article however, which pointed out that the "resistance" that triclosan induces is ALSO triggered by an awful lot of off the shelf foods from grocery stores...though on the other hand, I don't recall rubbing cinnamon or mustard on my hands like antibacterial soap, either...

I did a google search and found this interesting link. Nature has this article about a process that uses a quartz die and a laser to mechanically print features onto chips instead of photo-etching them.