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Hello,

    There may be two harder substances---though I think it is theoretical?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16610-diamond-no-longer-natures-hardest-material.html

    One is "wurtzite boron nitride" and the other is another carbon crystal, lonsdaleite, which apparently has a hexagonal structure rather than the diamond structure.

Best,

--PM

Well, okay, rarely seen a galaxy that might not have dark matter.

Then why was it warmer in many locations in 1945?

I've no idea what particular data you're referring to, but it seems pretty obvious that "many locations" isn't the same as "global". You may have meant 1944 as a local high, but it was no where near the highs of the last decade. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png

Why do they keep finding mistakes?

Because science is a continuing process of refinement.

Why did they feel the need to make adjustments to splice data sets together.

To make longer periods.

Don't get me wrong- I think GW is real. Not sure about AGW.

Then why are you disputing the temperature record?

But look at the 1880 to 2010 There was a lot of warming from 1880 to 1945. And a lot of cooling from 1945 to 1970's.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11639

There are upward of 70 microprocessors, 20 million lines of code (if you include multimedia tech) and hundreds of I/O ports in a typical upscale modern car. Manufacturers are moving towards in-car wireless networking to replace the enormous amount of cabling that current exists. Researchers have already demonstrated to seize control of the engine and brakes by hacking a couple of 2009 model year cars. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18901-modern-cars-vulnerable-to-malicious-hacks.html Considering that they won't let me use my ipod on an aircraft during takeoff and landing because IT MIGHT CRASH (tell me about it), yeah, count me worried about automobiles and other transportation as well.

Daryl Bem was asked about the James Randi Foundation prize in an interview in New Scientist (subscription required).

James "The Amazing" Randi, a fellow magician and prominent sceptic, has put up a prize of $1 million for anyone who can provide evidence of the paranormal. Are you tempted to enter?

No. He controls the entire process and he has never been totally clear as to what level of probability he would accept. He also insists on having all the rights to reporting what happened and that's not how we as scientists progress.

The world reserves of Indium tin oxide the only material commercially suitable for making the transparent semi-conductive layers of touch screens is rapidly running out.

This was covered some time ago in New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827873.100-parapsychology-lessons-from-the-fringe.html

Now thanks to Microsoft's ingenuity, we can finally embrace the technological advances of the 80's. Patent royalty is a small price to pay for such a breakthrough. I just wish they invent computer soon, so we don't have to mess with these "clicker devices"...

This Article 1. doi: 10.2337/diacare.17.2.152 Diabetes Care February 1994 vol. 17 no. 2 152-154

Also it was covered in New Scientist's "Feedback" column on 16 Feb 2008(paywall, but the first couple of paragraphs of the story are visible). Which I was reading on the toilet just last night, and now it turns up as a Slashdot headline. What's with that? You guys put a spycam in my bog or something?

Timely review of Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" . Especially the quote from the mid-century CBS news president Fred Friendly about the power of media empires, which was the inspiration for the books title: "At stake is not the First Amendment or the right of free speech, but exclusive custody of the master switch."

If people want to push their religion of evolution (it's a religion... it has not been and cannot be absolutely PROVEN)

You may be surprised to learn that it HAS been absolutely proven.

Wolfe-Simon's team took mud containing bacteria from the arsenic-rich Mono Lake and grew them in ever decreasing concentrations of phosphorous. Their rationale was that since arsenic is just below phosphorous in the periodic table, and shares many of its chemical properties and is even used as a source of energy for some bacteria, the bugs would be able to swap one for the other. That is just what happened.

From the New Scientist article. While it's possible, it hasn't been found in nature. The article also mentions why it might be unlikely. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19805-arseniceating-bacteria-point-to-new-life-forms.html

.Steven Benner, a chemist from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida, who works on alternative forms of DNA, is sceptical that the bacteria really do contain arsenic. "I doubt these results," he says, since in order to measure the modified DNA it has to be put into a water-containing gel, which would rapidly dissolve any arsenate molecules. Any hypothesis that arsenate might replace phosphate in biomolecules must take this into account, he says.

I'm pretty sure this was discovered some months ago...however, these articles don't mention anything about the bacteria's DNA. Perhaps that's the new discovery NASA made. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14537-arseniceating-bacteria-rewrite-evolutionary-history.html http://water.usgs.gov/nrp/highlights/arsenic.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7558448.stm

A quick Google for "arsenic bacteria" shows that these bacteria from lake Mono were already known to be special since they have an arsenic-based metabolism, so presumably they're already being studied by plenty of scientists.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14537-arseniceating-bacteria-rewrite-evolutionary-history.html

Of course having "DNA" (I guess it needs a new name since it's a new compond) based on arsenic raises the interest level a lot, assuming its true!

> Since they can make predictions with it, and have tons a data supporting there is an effect going on, you're wrong.

Um, no.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13280

I bet it's something along with this:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.html

or this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827815.800-50-ideas-to-change-science-artificial-life.html

If it is. Then we can soon replace our plastic office plants with "living" plastic plants. Just add methane.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html If this didn't do it, NOTHING will. The only fix is a lead device encased in copper with an explosive powder.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827831.000-ten-years-to-save-the-touchscreen.html

Thanks for the link. It had never occurred to me that when I'm being hypnotized, bacteria play sudoku in my brain!

I suggest reading the original paper. The theoretical machinery used is 4D and fully (spacetime) relativistic. If you can't cope with the physics literature, the press releases are more complete than the mangled stuff in the press (but the New Scientist isn't bad at all: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19727-how-to-cloak-a-crime-in-a-beam-of-light.html) Press release (Imperial) : http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_16-11-2010-9-5-43 Press Release (IoP): http://www.iop.org/news/nov10/page_45311.html . Regarding the chicken analogy, see http://www.qols.ph.ic.ac.uk/~kinsle/files/STcloak/

Taniuchi does say in this article "By expanding these principles, 81 types of bacteria could solve a full nine-by-nine grid" - the number of squares that can be solved seems to be entirely dependent on the number of bacteria types, and they were working with 16 types. I don't know how easy it would be to expand that to 81 types (I don't know what differentiates a bacteria "type" or how many variants are commonly available, etc). I assume there was some reason they didn't go with 81 types right away, but maybe it was just time limitations and the maths is solid enough that you can reasonably extrapolate up from a small sample.

This is the article the summary is actually referring to.

Scientists have captured antimatter before. I recall an interview with a physicist (I believe Colbert Report) who mentioned they had antimatter captured before. Doing a quick Google search, I found references to captured antimatter going back to 2002: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1957-antimatter-atoms-captured-for-the-first-time.html

An older article with considerably more detail. Not sure if it's the same bacteria.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19386-for-selfhealing-concrete-just-ad

Avoiding all patents is nearly impossible but only avoiding the ones you don't know about is slightly better.

Right. So the patent situation with WebM and Theora is worse than with H.264. If this is truly about patents, it's strange to go with something that is even more risky.

MPEG-LA has every financial incentive under the sun to sue implementers of WebM if they can, squashing the competition nice and cleanly. Yet.. they haven't? This time you're talking about a potential patent threat that has not appeared.

And so did you. In your very next sentence:

MPEG-LA are known to be sue happy and wanting money for licenses, regardless of any current good deals, is it not better to avoid them if possible?

Citations would help. Being "known" for something and actually doing something are two different things.

H.264 is technologically superior, is legally safer, and is fairly licensable to anyone. The only aspect in which H.264 is inferior to either Theora or WebM is in terms of ideology.

Avoiding all patents is nearly impossible but only avoiding the ones you don't know about is slightly better.

MPEG-LA has every financial incentive under the sun to sue implementers of WebM if they can, squashing the competition nice and cleanly. Yet.. they haven't? This time you're talking about a potential patent threat that has not appeared.

MPEG-LA are known to be sue happy and wanting money for licenses, regardless of any current good deals, is it not better to avoid them if possible?

You must be right, because anecdotal evidence is so valuable. Oh wait, a 2 second google search turned up this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-increases-risk-of-getting-shot-and-killed.html

Quoting:

Overall, Branas's study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher.

Good luck with that gun.

If only I'd known about this six years ago!

To quote Matt Ridley:

The discovery of how genes actually influence human behaviour, and how human behaviour influences genes, is about to recast the debate entirely. No longer is it nature versus nurture, but nature via nurture. Genes are designed to take their cues from nurture

Goodbye, nature vs nurture

Replace human for bee or for organism and I think the quote still stands. It is not that the behaviour of an organism is for the most part determined by it genes, or either that is is determined by it nurture.

Nurture will give direction, Nature will limit the abilities.

How much you'll train a dog, it will never be able to play chess. How much you'll train a toddler, it will never be able to have capabilities to follow a scent trail like a bloodhound.

MS said they dropped doing the heavy processing on Kinect itself... 1, 2, 3. What's left does at best "entry stages" of processing, which don't give you much... (especially since MS certainly keeps the juicy details of their approach secret, an approach to which entry stages are adapted).

512 megabytes of ram would sound big, yes, so I just checked - it's 512 megabits. Nothing too unexpected for a device dealing with lots of images.

And as I mentioned, the flash is 1 MiB; certainly nothing more than basic firmware.

From a New Scientist article covering the research mentioned here - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827801.300-mental-muscle-six-ways-to-boost-your-brain.html (sorry, subscription required for full text, but you should get one anyway):
"Several studies have shown that simply exposing people to light improves performance on many cognitive tasks."
and
"In another study, volunteers had their brains scanned as they performed a short-term memory task while exposed to either violet, blue or green light. The scans revealed that after just a few seconds of light exposure an area of the brain stem known to play a role in alertness became more active (PLoS One, vol 2, p 1247). Blue light was the most potent. Similarly, in simple reaction tasks, exposure to blue light is more effective in sustaining cognitive performance than green light (Sleep, vol 29, p 161)."

It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy. It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.

No more than non-biotic craft rely on misunderstandings of conservation of matter and energy (and relativity).

Semi-biotic craft seem to have several obvious advantages to me. We've already experimented with using excised brain tissue wired and train to control a flight simulator: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish-fly-fighter-plane.html

The advantages to this seem obvious. The idea of using biotic components is less ridiculous than the idea of faster-than-light travel (which requires a violation of everything we know about physics, as opposed to a highly improbable level of sophistication in genetic engineering).

You mean this kind of circular?

And here's the scary part about that.

Actually, the patent for the wheel was granted in Australia

So, are you being sarcastic, or did you not actually read the article you linked?

after reading the title, that is exactly what i was hoping for.

Awesome, let's make everyone exactly the same! I, for one, welcome our new heterosexual, uniform-skin-toned, drugs-and-alcohol-hating, women-should-be-in the-home-not-working, lets-pretend-the-world-never-changes population! </sarcasm>

Actually, it seems you should've read the article:

people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends' points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average

So, according to the hypothesis, liberals seek out novelty and challenges, have more friends, and gain more life experience. Those are generally acknowledged as positive traits - maybe the true genetic flaw is in those who lack a copy of this specific gene variant? Anyway, interesting to see this follow on from similar news in 2008.

Actually, the patent for the wheel was granted in Australia

Do you remember the Google Quantum Powered Image Search
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18272-google-demonstrates-quantum-computer-image-search.html

Some folks have questions about D-Waves technology, but there are people at Google who have been writing applications for Quantium computers.

The paper relating autism and vaccination has been retracted and the authors are suspended: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4743-controversial-mmr-and-autism-study-retracted.html. Flu vaccine is something else. It can't be called a vaccine because there is a statement that says that the coverage is up to 90% if there is a perfect match between the virus circulating and the virus of the vaccine. Some studies showed that the perfect match is about 40-50%, which lowers the effectiveness to 30-40%. Therefore washing hands is more effective.

Except for the fact that the assumption of homogeneity may not be true, see the first couple of points here.

I've been reading lots of stupefyingly idiotic stories recently, including this one (mountains will collapse and cities will be destroyed due to Global Warming).

It is now my firm opinion that the whole world has gone stark raving mad, and that the Scientific establishment has been so hopelessly corrupted by special interests, Government institutional and research funding and the new philosophy of post-normality, that it has regressed to a kind-of pre-enlightenment age.

It is my firm belief that the UN, a body that has a Human right commission chaired by Libya, should not be given any power over anything whatsoever.

You ARE aware of the placebo effect, right? It is a BIG problem for big pharma ...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html

--
"The Inner Space (of Mind), not Outer Space is the FINAL frontier."

Not only are garage bioweapons a risk, but there's a ton of knowledge that's readily available to anyone. Some of the sequencers available on the open market are capable of synthesizing polio virus from raw materials. Couple that with research such as this, where researchers accidentally created a 100% deadly organism, and you've got a big problem!

Money quote from the article:

"We wanted to make it clear to the scientific community that they should be careful, that it is not too difficult to create severe organisms."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html

Hopefully you don't live in Australia, as this guy has a patent on the wheel!

Click me. This article is paywalled after you read a few stories, but the paywall is a javascript popup. Noscript lets you read the article.

Here's an old article on an experiment that suggests that the speed of light may not be constant. Now as a disclaimer, I haven't followed up on this research, and don't know if they were ever able to repeat their results.

Don't forget, that as you approach relativistic speeds collisions with the interstellar medium (~1x10^-5 particles per cubic meter) will produce violent reactions on the hull.

At the University of Maryland they have levitated graphene flakes. Although this was not diamagnetic levitation. The story was discussed in an earlier /. post. HOPG (Highly Ordered Pyrolytic Graphite), a form of highly crystalline graphite, from which graphene is obtained in the lab, can also be diamagnetically levitated :)

that's a blob of water with air blown into it.
beer is carbonated/under pressure - bottom line - you need a gizmo to drink it:

NASA did a couple experiments with carbonated beverages:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast21sep_1/

By dispensing the drink into a collapsible bag inside the bottle, the pressure around the fluid can be constantly controlled, thus preventing the carbonation from coming out of solution too quickly. The image on the right shows the dispenser being used aboard the space shuttle. Note the tape stuck to the top-right corner of the dispenser that reads "50" -- astronaut humor. Image courtesy BioServe.

Similar technology should prove effective for carbonated space beers. Unfortunately it doesn't lend itself to the traditional frosty glass mug! Instead, beverages are dispensed into a special bottle (pictured above) that screws onto the dispenser. The bottle itself, which contains a collapsible bag, is internally pressurized. The pressure around the bag is slowly released as the beverage enters, maintaining the drink under constant pressure and producing a palatable soda or beer.

here's a piece about a space keg:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn276-beer-balls.html

While beta amyloid is like a prion in that the protein is "misfolded" and forms a tangled insoluble protein mass. It is not "contagious" like a prion disease. Beta amyloid is formed after cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein by alpha-, beta- and gamma- secretase.

The current state of knowledge for Alzheimer's is still very hazy, for many years there has been a discussion whether amyloid plaques are the cause of Alzhiemer's or a symptom of some other problem. More pieces of the puzzle are continually being found but what is really happening still remains elusive. An article I read in New Scientist suggested that the plaques themselves may not be the problem. With the real damage being done by the shorter chains which are created when the amyloid precursor protein is first cleaved.

There may be links to prion diseases. This study in mice suggests that non-infectious prions make Alzheimer's worse. While this older story suggests their may be a protective effect. Bleeding edge science can be confusing :)