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The trend in regards to sea-level rise is more like 0.12 inches per year; If their feet are getting wet it's not because of sea-level rise.

That's not the trend. That's the current rate of rise. If you look at the article you linked to, you'll note that the trend is that the rate is increasing. Further, the current rate also doesn't account for things that have not happened yet, - like the potential loss of major ice sheets like the Amundsen sea, which according to http://www.nature.com/news/ant... could lead to a sea level rise of 6 meters (though I think that has been recently revised downwards).

Further the sea level rise figure you quoted is a global average. The seas can and will rise faster in some places than in others.

But if it has ten legs you can charge $9/pound for it if it's lobster, $15/pound if it's shrimp.

The distinction between crustaceans (like lobster and shrimp) and insects is literally academic. In fact about five years ago a paper came out suggesting that insects are crustaceans, although this has been tidied up by introducing a new clade to sit between the Arthropoda phylum and the Hexapoda and Crustacea sub-phyla: Pancrustacea.

And in point of fact eating insects has at some point in most cultures been considered normal. In Europe cheeses were often traditionally eaten with their accompanying insect populations -- the cheese mite for cheddar for example, or Piophila casei larvae for casu marzu in Italy. It has only been in modern times that its even possible to create such foods without insect hitchhikers, and we have come to associate insects with harmful contamination -- which they may be -- and consider them harmful -- which they may not be, any more than fungal growth is necessarily harmful (e.g. blue cheese).

In my lifetime I've seen a big shift in attitude in the US toward bacterial fermentation, which was also associated with contamination. Americans were introduced to yogurt around the time I was in middle school; it was exotic stuff. When James Beard published his "James Beard Cookbook" in 1959, he had to explain that "sour cream" wasn't the same thing as spoiled cream.

... warmer weather is expected to weaken cyclonic activity, not make it stronger. Until about the end of the century, anyway. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-11-01]

No, read your own link: "It is likely - in my opinion - that manmade global warming has indeed caused hurricanes to be stronger today."

I've answered the more important question of "how much stronger?" by repeatedly showing Jane a paper by Prof. Judith Curry which concludes that "the increasing trend in number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes for the period 1970-2004 is directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature".

And once again, Grinsted et al. 2012 helps to answer the question of "how much stronger?" by measuring hurricane surges back to 1923 using tide gauge instruments. This yields a homogeneous record of empirical observations which is totally independent of models and confirms that "warm years in general were more active in all cyclone size ranges than cold years." (By the way, measuring instruments like tide gauges and thermometers aren't proxies.)

Jane, years ago I said that it's not clear how global warming will impact hurricane frequency because of factors like wind shear. I also said that hurricanes (overall, Cat 1+) might not be more frequent in the future for the same reason. That's also what Dr. Landsea's 2010 abstract said: [Dumb Scientist]

I know. You just proved my point: you were contradicting yourself. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-10-28]

No, those links show that I've been consistently agreeing with Dr. Landsea and the IPCC when they say that hurricanes (overall, Cat 1+) might not be more frequent in the future because of factors like wind shear. But once again, the IPCC and Dr. Landsea also agree that "the most intense cyclones" are different. That's why the "global" box at the bottom center of Fig. 14.17 has two metrics which go in different directions: Cat 1+ (metric #1) and just Cat 4/5 (metric #2). Again, that's what I've been saying for years, along with the IPCC and Dr. Landsea:

"... future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2-11% by 2100. Existing modelling studies also consistently project decreases in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, by 6-34%. Balanced against this, higher resolution modelling studies typically project substantial increases in the frequency of the most intense cyclones, and increases of the order of 20% in the precipitation rate within 100 km of the storm centre. ..."

Jane

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

And if you want to continue to publish, you have to follow the party line.

I guess these guys will never publish again! I guess you figured the Big Lie technique is always worth a try?

How much is Fred Singer paying slashdot shills these days? You aren't working for free, are you?

At this point, SNP genotyping is pretty much obsolete for health-related uses because you can now get a full genome sequence for about $1,000 from just a few drop of saliva - well the raw data, at least - a custom interpretation for a suspected genetic condition might easily run you $20K. SNP genotyping can still be useful for detecting losses or duplications of large parts of a chromosome ("structural" variations) - but mainly because the analysis software is more mature.

I am aware of the difference between the cost of data and the cost of healthcare resulting from said data, but the poster was explicitly asking about the relevance of "open source" raw data so that he could do the interpretation himself. I am also explicitly mentioning arrays, because this is the cheapest technology and the one used by 23andme. Nevertheless, this kind of technology (and yes, the genome too!) has not made a very meaningful impact in clinical practice, with the obvious exception of clinical genetics. Now, you probably already know that today it's much easier to get a diagnosis of some rare muscular dystrophy or some weird anomaly of metabolism thanks to genome sequencing. However, with the exception of some genetic conditions (BRCA1/2, Lynch syndrome, Cystic fibrosis), clinical genetics are only useful for a small percentage of the population. That is exactly what I am saying: there is great progress for a small percentage of the population with rare, high-penetrance, devastating diseases, but there is not meaningful genetic test for type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, COPD and other frequent conditions. I already explained the reason above but you can also read more about it elsewhere (for example: http://www.nature.com/nrg/jour..., frequent diseas)

Based on the presentations at the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) in Baltimore last month, many of the major healthcare organization in the USA are making plans to implement genetic testing for adverse reactions to these drugs. It may be a few more years before it all actually gets rolled out universally (there are currently a number of large pilot studies ongoing) - and it may just be full genome sequencing rather than SNP genotyping - but this is coming. It's a question of "when" rather than "if".

I agree, which is why I said that this kind of application is more mature and that's why I called it an "exception". I already occasionally ask for DPYD or UGT1A1 genotyping for my patients, so certainly this is not a very remote scenario. Nevertheless, some kind of HARD data will have to justify the expense: reduction of hospitalisations, chemotherapy mortality or something similar. Just showing that universal genotyping predicts ... genotype is not enough. There has to be a meaningful clinical advantage for a significant number of patients.

There were quite a few people who found out through 23andMe that they were carriers for dangerous BRCA variants. 23andMe almost certainly saved some people from dying of breast cancer. Personally, I'd say that not dying of breast cancer is useful.

Well, that is an interesting byproduct of chance and certainly these people were lucky. However, you are certainly aware that SNP genotyping is NOT a valid test for BRCA variants for many different reasons. So, I would counter argue that some people were also falsely reassured by a negative result of a suboptimal test.
If people need to know their BRCA status, they need a proper test (=sequencing with sufficient depth at an accredited lab), a proper interpretation of variants (especially class 2-3!) and discussion of the family tree by a medical geneticist. I understand that cheap DIY healthcare is appreciated in the US, but you can't seriously consider 23andme results as sufficient in this context.

There's another problem, which you could call 'Life finds a way'.

Penicillin was discovered in 1943 but it was only 3 years before the first resistance was observed. The same thing has happened to nearly every antibiotic developed since then, with resistance usually appearing within a few years - a constant game of whack-a-mole.

It takes 10 years and a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, there is little profit incentive to develop a product which has a potentially short and unquantifiable lifetime.

And yet, if you are worried about lowering co2, the smart money would be to focus on either the largest, which is china with 33-43% , or better yet, ALL nations. In addition, since co2 comes mostly from business and gov choices and uses, and not directly from ppl, it makes far more sense to normalize based on emissions / GDP, not per capita.

27% according to what I read, not 43%. I'm sure they are producing more now than 4 years ago, although I also know that China's past emissions have been over-estimated due to the fact that the coal mined there is of a poorer quality than average. On the subject of how to normalize measurement of emissions, doing it by GDP could be useful for some purposes, but most certainly not for any attempt at limiting emissions. When GPD/capita is so closely tied to CO2/capita, attempting to limit emissions based on GDP is essentially limiting people's right to make money based on how much money they make.

The link to TAFA to RTFA is http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Essentially they took the 'productivity' of countries, mapped them against average temperature, and then turned it around making that predictive. Utter nonsense.

According to their method, since the most productive industrial countries are all temperate, then warming will turn Germany economically into Italy and Italy into, I guess, Somalia?

Sure, THAT is likely to happen. How is this substantially different from the "warmer latitudes evolve lazier people" meme from the early 20th century? I thought we'd moved on from deterministic racism like that, or is it ok as long as it's cloaked in Global Warming fear?

Any purported 'economic' analysis of warming that doesn't see ANY mitigatory factors is more religion than science. To wit:
- even warming-convinced climatologists admit that the impact of warming on rainfall patterns is nearly impossible to anticipate. Warming will most certainly increase the evaporate take-up into the atmosphere from the 70%+ surface that's water, and that water has to fall somewhere.
- warming will shift optimal growing belts toward the poles, and vegetation growth has a warmth-bias; that is, there is a temperature floor for farming, but (as long as there's adequate water) not really a ceiling. So contraction of the too-cold biomes around the poles will net-increase the arable productive farmland on earth (not that we're actually short of food today anyway, but that's another point). Plants prefer warmth, and more CO2 is also beneficial for them. Not to mention that optimal-agri-zones will shift poleward, into 'fresh' farmland that wasn't previously as intensively farmed.
- on a more human scale, melting will open the arctic to regular transit, significantly reducing shipping costs from E Asia to Europe and all but obviating the Panama Canal chokepoint, this will likely cut transport costs for a host of goods.

I'm NOT saying that warming won't be a net-bad; inundation will badly affect a humanity that largely sited its preferable living places along coasts. (Of course, given a long enough timeframe they were doomed anyway.) But I see nothing in that study that recognizes or attempts to calculate *any* beneficial countereffects of warming. To deny that there will be *some* is at best histrionics, at worst simple mendacity.

Darwin just wasn't aware of epigenetics, but that doesn't make him wrong. Like many other scientific theories, we do additional studies and and refine the theories when we find results that they fail to explain or results that contradict our hypotheses. This isn't something completely new, but we're just scratching at the surfaces of how it works.

Here's one particular study in the area that's particularly interesting. What the researchers found was that people who's grandparents had suffered through a famine had lower mortality rates for certain diseases. What we're learning is that our DNA has some feedback mechanisms to environmental responses and isn't just a simple matter of passing along traits through genes. It's some really fascinating stuff.

The connection between "global warming" and hurricane intensity has been well established (PDF) by Dr. Chris Landsea and many other authors. Can Jane link to a peer-reviewed paper refuting Dr. Landsea? [Dumb Scientist]

How about your vaunted IPCC, and its "low confidence" rating for same? Further, that isn't a demonstrated connection. It says right in the abstract that it's a speculative projection based on models. And we know very well now that the models are severely flawed. There are papers on both sides of the issue, but of course you only want to present those on your side, as always. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-10-23]

As expected, you can't (or won't, which is indistinguishable) link to a paper debunking Dr. Landsea when he points out that higher temperatures cause more intense hurricanes. But you can't/won't admit that, so you just vaguely insinuate that other papers (which you don't have time to link, of course) deny that higher temperatures cause more intense hurricanes. Please consider reading Dr. Landsea's abstract again to look for "speculative" and try to read the bolded part:

"Whether the characteristics of tropical cyclones have changed or will change in a warming climate - and if so, how - has been the subject of considerable investigation, often with conflicting results. Large amplitude fluctuations in the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones greatly complicate both the detection of long-term trends and their attribution to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Trend detection is further impeded by substantial limitations in the availability and quality of global historical records of tropical cyclones. Therefore, it remains uncertain whether past changes in tropical cyclone activity have exceeded the variability expected from natural causes. However, future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2-11% by 2100. Existing modelling studies also consistently project decreases in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, by 6-34%. Balanced against this, higher resolution modelling studies typically project substantial increases in the frequency of the most intense cyclones, and increases of the order of 20% in the precipitation rate within 100 km of the storm centre. For all cyclone parameters, projected changes for individual basins show large variations between different modelling studies."

How about your vaunted IPCC, and its "low confidence" rating for same? Further, that isn't a demonstrated connection. It says right in the abstract that it's a speculative projection based on models. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-10-23]

Jane, please consider searching the whole paper for "speculative". And are you absolutely sure the IPCC gave a "low confidence" rating to the "same" statistic Dr. Landsea's paper mentioned, that the "globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2-11% by 2100"? Maybe the IPCC split up their TFE.9 table 1 into early and late 21st century? Would the "same" statistic as Dr. Landsea's "2100" quote be early or late 21st century? Are you absolutely sure the relevant box is rated "low confidence"?

What's really ironic is

We've been using "modern" measurements for hurricanes since about 1959, which just happened to have a record storm. BUT... that year also had an El Nino. And the strong El Nino of this year again made one more likely. Nothing terribly special about that, statistically. And nothing particular connecting it to "global warming".

The connection between "global warming" and hurricane intensity has been well established (PDF) by Dr. Chris Landsea and many other authors. Can Jane link to a peer-reviewed paper refuting Dr. Landsea?

If there's really "nothing particular connecting" a process that's intensified by global warming, then this year's high temperatures should be due only to El Nino with "nothing particular" connecting them to anthropogenic global warming. If that's true, it should be easy to confirm by comparing this El Nino to past El Ninos. Have you seen a graph of global mean surface temperature (GMST) during just El Ninos in recent decades (excluding Pinatubo)? Do you think that best-fit line through just El Ninos would have a positive or negative slope? Can you think of another metric than GMST which would reveal more of the cumulative radiation absorbed over the last few decades? Do you see why these questions are relevant to your claim?

P.S. Don't worry- if you can't or won't answer these questions then I will. But first you deserve a chance to show off your scientific skills. If you won't provide a graph, will you accept a graph made by a scientist who co-authored a peer-reviewed paper with Anthony Watts?

Prior to that time, hurricanes were only actually measured at all when they made landfall. Others were only estimated from ships or from shore. Which means most of them were never measured, and in fact we actually have no idea where Patricia falls in the severity range since records began.

Grinsted et al. 2012 measured Atlantic hurricane surges back to 1923:

"Detection and attribution of past changes in cyclone activity are hampered by biased cyclone records due to changes in observational capabilities. Here we construct an independent record of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity on the basis of storm surge statistics from tide gauges. We demonstrate that the major events in our surge index record can be attributed to landfalling tropical cyclones; these events also correspond with the most economically damaging Atlantic cyclones. We find that warm years in general were more active in all cyclone size ranges than cold years. The largest cyclones are most affected by warmer conditions and we detect a statistically significant trend in the frequency of large surge events (roughly corresponding to tropical storm size) since 1923. In particular, we estimate that Katrina-magnitude events have been twice as frequent in warm years compared with cold years (P < 0.02)."

“It is a solid, unusually large study of individuals exposed to very low doses of ionizing radiation,” says epidemiologist Jørgen Olsen, director of the Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen. The finding implies that some cases of leukaemia will even be caused by a high level of natural background radiation, he adds, “though the increased risk for an individual is going to be vanishingly small”.

http://www.nature.com/news/res...

And here is a picture, since you don't seem to do any research on your own of the many published and easy to find studies;

http://hamaoka.chuden.jp/engli...

If you give everyone an ultrasound then you find lots of nodules and cysts. Repeat the study in other parts of japan unaffected by radiation and you get the same.
http://www.nature.com/articles...

Yeah. No link, just a claim. And an odd one at that - although Life As We Know It requires carbon, carbon certainly doesn't require life to form.

Also see this.

I wonder, if you are slow, or am I so unclear... Did you not see the requirement for pairs of links? One to a prediction, the other — to its confirmation?

• Prediction in the year 2000: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
• Confirmation in the year 2013: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou...

• Prediction in 1967: http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibli...
• Confirmation in 2013: http://www.pnas.org/content/11...

AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015 in Scientific Reports (Nature).
Google Maps showing neutrino sources.
You can even see the Iranian reactor at Bushehr.

http://www.nature.com/articles...

In conclusion, a double barrier memristive device was realized with a highly uniform current distribution for the high and low resistance states, which indicates a non-filamentary based resistive switching mechanism. We have shown evidence that the use of an ultra-thin NbxOy solid state electrolyte layer of 2.5nm sandwiched between an Au (Schottky) contact and an Al2O3 tunneling barrier restricts the resistive switching mechanism to interfacial effects where both barriers are involved. This may lead to the observed drastically improved retention characteristic compared to the single barrier Schottky contact devices and may be based on confined oxygen ion diffusion within the sandwiched NbxOy layer.

here's the link: http://www.nature.com/news/rep...

interesting but irrelevant puzzles

Like "why does this lump of rock ruin my film?" and "as if we'd ever figure out how to stick two atoms together?"

If you want a practical application of neutrino detectors and their relevance today, you need look no further than Online Monitoring of the Osiris Reactor with the Nucifer Neutrino Detector which has direct applications in the field of nonproliferation. Here's a map of the world as a function of its antineutrino flux. It's a little low-res as of last month, but it looks really interesting - as in, it's a map of every nuclear reactor on earth - once you subtract out the background from decay of naturally-occurring elements in the crust.

Not only have we used knowledge of new fundamental particles to learn how to split and fuse the atom to release energies that would have been unimaginable to the Curies, we can use knowledge of newer, harder-to-detect, and "irrelevant" fundamental particles to detect bad actors trying to build bombs on the sly. If the fundamental particles underlying the first nuclear war are Nobel-worthy, surely the particles that are being measured in order to prevent history's second nuclear war, ought to be worthy of consideration, even if nobody's figured out how to make a bomb out of them.

The only GamerGate harassment is the harassment that the GamerGate community has to endure from malicious or delusional individuals such as yourself who seem to be hell-bent on slandering the name of a movement whose purpose is ethical journalism. Yes, it's about ethics in journalism.

For example, YouTube retards Sargon of Akkad and Thunderf00r

Thunderf00t aka Phil Mason is a respected scientist that has previously been published in Nature and is currently occupied as a research scientist in the Czech Academy of Sciences. A random Internet keyboard warrior has no right to call this man a retard.

http://www.nature.com/news/sug...

"They think they know" is no different from any scientific hypothesis, but if you read the paper, it's a pretty convincing case. The two lobes of the comet are each layered a bit like an onion and the layers between the two sides don't line up. They are largely independent. It's hard to come up with an alternative model that makes any sense with that evidence except independent formation and then fusing together. If it was one body that had a groove eroded in the middle between the two lobes then the layers would project more continuously across the gap.

[lol - captcha is "tavern". I think slashdot is agreeing with your hypothesis]

"Some studies and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report suggest that the recent 15-year period (1998–2012) provides evidence that models are overestimating current temperature evolution."

It's not clear why the models are wrong, but it's clear they're having problems. Here's another example, quote:

"The slowdown in the rate of global warming in the early 2000s is not evident in the multi-model ensemble average of traditional climate change projection simulations"

TBH though, it was kind of silly to think the models would be particularly accurate to begin with, they've always been the weakest section of the IPCC report (WG1)

"Some studies and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report suggest that the recent 15-year period (1998–2012) provides evidence that models are overestimating current temperature evolution."

It's not clear why the models are wrong, but it's clear they're having problems. Here's another example, quote:

"The slowdown in the rate of global warming in the early 2000s is not evident in the multi-model ensemble average of traditional climate change projection simulations"

TBH though, it was kind of silly to think the models would be particularly accurate to begin with, they've always been the weakest section of the IPCC report (WG1)

A photon is its own antiparticle, so there is no such thing as a photon of dark.
Which you know, of course.

However, not all photons are light (if we use 'light' in it's normal context of the visible electromagnetic spectrum), even though all light is photons.
Examples of photons which are not light include microwaves, x-rays, radio waves, etc.

That would almost allow for the article not to look like it was written by an idiot, except that TFA ( http://www.nature.com/articles... ) states that the spectrum used is with pulses at around 1560nm - way below the visible spectrum.

So yes as you say:- WTF? photons of light? OMG N00b!

No, it is still very much not out of date. Although horizontal gene transfer's role in evolution is still being understood, and it may be that the syncytin gene you reference is viral in origin, that certainty doesn't invalidate the standard Darwinian model so much as it adds on to it. To say it plays a larger role in evolution than mutation, at least right now with today's evidence, is quite an extraordinary.

From here:

In 2009, Regan Ashby, Arne Ohlendorf and Frank Schaeffel from the University of Tubingen's Institute for Ophthalmic Research in Germany showed that high illumination levels - comparable to those encountered outside - slowed the development of experimentally induced myopia in chicks by about 60% compared with normal indoor lighting conditions

The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development. The best evidence for the 'light-dopamine' hypothesis comes - again - from chicks. In 2010, Ashby and Schaeffel showed that injecting a dopamine-inhibiting drug called spiperone into chicks' eyes could abolish the protective effect of bright light

I guess the writer hasn't read this yet then?

More importantly, how did they estimate the amount of damage to be divided up? It doesn't mention it in the article or in the parts of the study I can read.

It's one thing to determine what percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere was released by the US..........it's quite another to convert that to a dollar amount.

When he arrived back in Paris with news of the cure he was told by everyone in the medical community they have no use for the words of savages and was in fact not until 1933 that we isolated vitamin C, enabled by Linus Pauling's 1931 paper (that Einstein could not make head nor tails of) that explained the atom in terms of living things enabling the fields of molecular biology and quantum chemistry and leapfrogging the infancy of biochemistry to the next quantum level.

"Explained the atom in terms of living things"? No, this is just babbling.
Also, it is not true that Einstein could not make heads or tails of the paper. I know what you're referring to, and you got it wrong.

Here's an example. You wrote:

"29 January 2015 Last updated at 00:55 - We've now seen several cases that don't have any symptoms at all, asymptomatic cases," said Anavaj Sakuntabhai who suggested the virus might be mutating.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health... [bbc.com]

Giggle. The virus didn't change. People did.

That is wrong. The virus does and did change. Here are some details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Rates of genetic change are 8*104 per site per year and are thus one fourth[20] as fast as influenza A in humans. Extrapolating backwards, Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus probably diverged several thousand years ago.[21] A study done in 1995 and 1996 found that the genes of Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus differed by about 55% at the nucleotide level, and at least 67% at the amino acid level. The same study found that the strains of Ebolavirus differed by about 37-41% across the nucleotide level and 34-43% across the amino acid level. The EBOV strain was found to have an almost 2% change in the nucleotide level from the original 1976 strain from the Yambuki outbreak and the strain from the 1995 Kikwit outbreak.[22] However, paleoviruses of filoviruses found in mammals indicate that the family itself is at least tens of millions of years old.[23]

And this:
http://www.nature.com/news/ebo...

Crick and Watson wrote it up (they didn't discover jack shit, they literally did acid all the time, bored, looking for a grad school thesis and literally pocketed Roz's notes when she was at lunch. Nice Jewish girl doesn't get the credit and this is why people hate England, prats like this. But I digress.

I already knew the Franklin, Wilkins, Watson and Crick story. Your version is gross mis-statement of the events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Read the section on DNA
http://www.nature.com/scitable...

When he arrived back in Paris with news of the cure he was told by everyone in the medical community they have no use for the words of savages and was in fact not until 1933 that we isolated vitamin C, enabled by Linus Pauling's 1931 paper (that Einstein could not make head nor tails of) that explained the atom in terms of living things enabling the fields of molecular biology and quantum chemistry and leapfrogging the infancy of biochemistry to the next quantum level.

"Explained the atom in terms of living things"? No, this is just babbling.
Also, it is not true that Einstein could not make heads or tails of the paper. I know what you're referring to, and you got it wrong.

Here's an example. You wrote:

"29 January 2015 Last updated at 00:55 - We've now seen several cases that don't have any symptoms at all, asymptomatic cases," said Anavaj Sakuntabhai who suggested the virus might be mutating.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health... [bbc.com]

Giggle. The virus didn't change. People did.

That is wrong. The virus does and did change. Here are some details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Rates of genetic change are 8*104 per site per year and are thus one fourth[20] as fast as influenza A in humans. Extrapolating backwards, Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus probably diverged several thousand years ago.[21] A study done in 1995 and 1996 found that the genes of Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus differed by about 55% at the nucleotide level, and at least 67% at the amino acid level. The same study found that the strains of Ebolavirus differed by about 37-41% across the nucleotide level and 34-43% across the amino acid level. The EBOV strain was found to have an almost 2% change in the nucleotide level from the original 1976 strain from the Yambuki outbreak and the strain from the 1995 Kikwit outbreak.[22] However, paleoviruses of filoviruses found in mammals indicate that the family itself is at least tens of millions of years old.[23]

And this:
http://www.nature.com/news/ebo...

Crick and Watson wrote it up (they didn't discover jack shit, they literally did acid all the time, bored, looking for a grad school thesis and literally pocketed Roz's notes when she was at lunch. Nice Jewish girl doesn't get the credit and this is why people hate England, prats like this. But I digress.

I already knew the Franklin, Wilkins, Watson and Crick story. Your version is gross mis-statement of the events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Read the section on DNA
http://www.nature.com/scitable...

Not sure how affected Google is going to be given Ray already knows about this,

http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-...

http://www.nature.com/articles...

Wireless communications may become more interesting in the future thanks to this pioneering research: http://www.nature.com/articles...

See also the theoretical paper: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... (http://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0703059.pdf)

It's not clear what the implications are for signal loss or if this is more of an illusion akin to beam steering.

Maudlin shows in the book I referenced how local indeterministic theories also violate Bell's inequality. But it's not just Maudlin: Bell himself proved what Maudlin claims. Howard Wiseman thinks that the confusion comes about for the reason that Bell had two papers. The first paper in 1964 argued from the twin premises of locality and determinism, leaving the impression that one could give up just one of these. In his 1976 paper, Bell made it clear that the problem derives from locality alone. Wiseman writes:

In 1976, Bell proved that his new concept of local causality (based implicitly on the principle of common cause), was ruled out by Bell correlations. In this 1976 theorem there was no second option, as there had been in the 1964 theorem, of giving up hidden variables. Nature violates local causality.

Maudlin is not mistaken, and is not alone. A more detailed paper by Wiseman: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.0351v2.pdf.

It's hard to believe psychology studies are more reproducible than cancer studies (11% reproducible): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

It seems you don't understand what it is you linked to or you're trolling, the key here is preclinical. That is, there's an 11% chance we can reproduce lab results on actual people in clinical trials, so if you're in the first round of an experimental drug 9 out of 10 times it won't work. That sucks, but our understanding of the body and cancer isn't better so we have no choice but to experiment in practice. It says nothing about how reproducible the clinical results are, but before it's through all the rounds and approved for general use I would think we know with 99%+ certainty they will work. Until then, well that's why we call them experimental.

It's hard to believe psychology studies are more reproducible than cancer studies (11% reproducible): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

The worst are the fanatics who claim that climate scientists are never wrong. They can think of a justification for everything. They use statistics the way a drunk man uses a lightpost: for support, rather than illumination. For example, at this point, it's pretty clear that the climate models overestimated the warming. It's no big deal, science will eventually correct itself, but watch as so many people can't accept that.

Yeah, yeah. Too bad that's not actually the case, because they are comparing apples and oranges. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

The level of agreement between climate model simulations and observed surface temperature change is a topic of scientific and policy concern. While the Earth system continues to accumulate energy due to anthropogenic and other radiative forcings, estimates of recent surface temperature evolution fall at the lower end of climate model projections. Global mean temperatures from climate model simulations are typically calculated using surface air temperatures, while the corresponding observations are based on a blend of air and sea surface temperatures.

You can at least get the abstract for the paper here: http://www.nature.com/nmat/jou...

Improvements in battery technology are one of the most important stepping stones in getting us to that Star Trek utopia. Obviously they're used everywhere, but with 'perfect' battery technology, you don't need to worry about peak load energy production (ie, you can produce clean energy sporadically and save it if power demand isn't high enough), you don't need gasoline for cars, and your smartphones won't take hours to charge.

It seems that the main advantage of this breakthrough is, among other benefits, eliminating the heating problems associated with high energy devices like car batteries. One of the biggest problems people have with electric cars is that you can't charge them faster than you can fill up a tank of gas. FTFA:

The electrolyte in such batteries — typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery’s two electrodes to the other during charging and discharging — has been responsible for the overheating and fires... The lithium itself is not flammable in the state it’s in in these batteries.

This is big, and I'm excited. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an overall solution to our dirty energy practices and clunky smartphones, but it's a big step in the right direction. Surely there will be design hurdles to overcome, which will probably delay implementation for some time, but this century is going to be great if we don't fuck it up too bad.

Also, if you can get past the paywall, here's a link to the nature materials article that the article didn't have: http://www.nature.com/nmat/jou...

The worst are the fanatics who claim that climate scientists are never wrong. They can think of a justification for everything. They use statistics the way a drunk man uses a lightpost: for support, rather than illumination. For example, at this point, it's pretty clear that the climate models overestimated the warming. It's no big deal, science will eventually correct itself, but watch as so many people can't accept that.

Given that social science studies are notoriously bad, why do we think things would be any better if we used "science" in police training?

We'd probably be better off if we made some structural changes, like limiting qualified immunity and requiring all interactions with the public and accused to be videotaped.

Given that social science studies are notoriously bad, why do we think things would be any better if we used "science" in police training?

We'd probably be better off if we made some structural changes, like limiting qualified immunity and requiring all interactions with the public and accused to be videotaped.

The cost comment was in reference to the complaint that OPEN journals cost upwards of 3000 dollars to get a single paper published.

That number is highly variable. There are plenty of open-access journals that cost only a few hundred dollars per article for publication, not several thousand. See here, for example. As that article notes, quite a few big open-access publishers admit that their internal costs for publishing are around a few hundred dollars per article.

As to the notion that the scientists are not being paid to audit the papers, then why do the paid journals only have a profit margin of 38 percent?

If I'm getting the papers for free, people are auditing the papers for free, my cost structure is a website, and people are paying me 20k for a subscription to access the journals... then why is my profit margin so low?

I think you are significantly underestimating the amount of administrative work that goes on in sustaining a publishing operation, even an online one. See the first big chart in the link above, which breaks down costs percentage-wise in publication, and see the amount needed for "administering peer review; editing; proofreading; typesetting; graphics; quality assurance... covers; indexes and editorial; rights management; sales and payments; printing and delivery; online user management; marketing and communications; helpdesk; online hosting... " etc.

There's a lot of random overhead required.

The profit margin if what you're saying is true should be closer to 97~99 percent basically meaning the journal has a small staff that matches X scientists with Y papers... and then whatever the web hosting costs which in any of these businesses is basically nothing.

Um... yeah... again, see above.

That said, it's clear that something fishy is going on with commercial publishers. As this article notes, the for-profit publishers seem to charge 2-3 times as much as non-profits, so it seems like they should be making more than 38% profit. I don't know what the explanation is there, other than that I imagine for-profit companies pay upper-level administrators more.

Anyhow, wherever that excess money is going, your weird conspiracy theory that there's some sort of "kickback" scheme to scientists or reviewers or universities just isn't happening.

The main problem with the current model of scientific publishing is that every publisher is effectively a monopolist. Because scientists can't publish the same results twice (it's unethical), each piece of scientific advancement is held by one journal published by one publisher. Therefore, university libraries don't have a choice and have to get subscription to all reputable journals. It's not surprising that a bunch of monopolistic publishers can charge excruciating fees. The most prestigious journals like Nature or Science can sell a small number of papers for exorbitant fees, knowing that everyone will subscribe anyways, and then use that money for god knows what: Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimates his journal's internal costs at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper.

On the other hand, open access publishing brings more free market into the system. A scientist can decide which journal to choose (based on the licence, prestige, reviewing time, target group, etc) and how much money to pay for it. Thus, publishers will have to compete for scientists' money, which should bring down the costs of open access publishing.

The Human Genome Project, assembling work from thousands of researchers, developers, and technicians worldwide had hundreds of authors.

                        http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

It can make sense in such a large project to list as many of the contributors as possible.

It has been found that there are taste buds for sweetness in the stomach, intestine and pancreas as well, so it's possible that these may have some effect.

http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

So in other words, they do help you lose weight as long as you don't change your other eating habits.

Not exactly. Artificial sweeteners in general have an impact on your gut chemistry. Here's a study that links non-caloric artificial sweeteners to metabolic diseases like diabetes: http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

How the hell else do you get fat? You consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase. It's really basic thermodynamics at work here...

It's true that eating more calories will contribute to weight gain, but it's not simply 'thermodynamics'. If you put chemicals in your body, a chemical reaction happens! Just like drugs, all food is based on nonlinear dynamics and chemical reactions. Your metabolism doesn't extract 100% of available calories, that depends on the bacteria in your gut along with a slew of other chemical activities.

Not to mention, food (and drugs) have an appreciable effect on our mood and actions. At this point, psychology depends on neurology, which in turn depends on metabolism, which depends on what chemicals you're putting in your body. The concept of a calorie is imperfect just like our aspirations of looking sexy are imperfect.

Nothing happens for some plant types, and even the authors of this study said may. They had good reason to.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/w518...

To quote from its abstract:

The consensus of many studies of the effects of elevated CO2 on plants is that the CO2 fertilization effect is real (see Kimball, 1983; Acock and Allen, 1985; Cure and Acock, 1986; Allen, 1990; Rozema et al., 1993; Allen, 1994; Allen and Amthor, 1995). However, the CO2 fertilization effect may not be manifested under conditions where some other growth factor is severely limiting, such as low temperature (Long, 1991). Also, plants grown in some conditions, where limitations of rooting volume (Arp, 1991), light, or other factors restrict growth, have not shown a sustained response to elevated CO2 (Kramer, 1981).

Note well that again they use the term may. This is because -- unlike you -- they seem to recognize that even though the effect is real and will have an impact in many locations and conditions, including those that generally hold in agriculture where one generally avoids growing plants in strongly resource constrained environments, one can certainly suppress the effect (or fail to observe it in the wild) in specific environments, and they go even further and note that the effect is differential according to plant type with some plant types more likely to exhibit a stronger response or be resource limited than others.

The bulk of this report simply works through specific food crop species and estimates their likely response to a mix of increased CO2 and the imagined climate changes that are predicted, or projected, or prophecied (as you wish) by the GCMs that so far haven't done a very good job of PP or P-ing the climate.

You would obviously like more papers:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

(Abstract: Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.)

Probably the best review article on the effect on trees, in particular, is this:

http://www.climateaudit.info/p...

where in laboratory experiments on trees increasing CO2 by 300 ppm increased growth by 50 to 60%. Idso remarks that the problem with laboratory experiments is the opposite of what you assert -- it is difficult to grow trees in the lab without constraining their roots and access to resources and work he cites (in less abundance as it was ongoing in 1993) suggested that the response in the wild is even higher.

In general, in the mean, increasing ONLY CO2 in the environments of most wild plants does, in fact, increase their biomass and the net biomass of the Earth has almost certainly substantially increased on average, allowing for changes in land use over the last century. The effect is pronounced and relatively enormous in trees (and yes, I can cite papers t

Uh, no. Here's an actual study: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou.... Note that absent larger than usual rainfall or soil nutrients, nothing happens.

So your turn, Mr Smarty-pants. Where are your citations? Note that you make an incredibly strong claim: that increasing ONLY CO2 increases biomass. And no - hearsay from someone else doesn't count.

Right now, you're just digging that smartest-motherfucker-in-the-room hole deeper and deeper.