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They have never been able to accurately predict what the weather will be tomorrow. It is arrogant for Al Gore (who incidentally also invented the Internet) to claim he knows what the effect will be decades from now. The largest cause of CO2 emissions is natural activity. The most abundant greenhouse gas is water vapor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_effects_in_Earth.27s_atmosphere

3 myths in one go? Not bad. First link on google for climate myths gives 3 rebuttals: Chaotic systems are not predictable, CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas and finally CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas

It's a better idea to get your science from scientists rather than politicians. The CO2 emissions by living organisms are part of a closed cycle, and those isotopes don't match the composition of the atmospheric CO2 that's currently ~26% higher than it's been in the last 650,000 years. Other sources such as volcanoes emit 100x less than humans do. Also, water vapor isn't relevant because it has a short lifetime in the atmosphere and isn't well-mixed to the top of the atmosphere. I've discussed all these issues at length.

Yup, the security theater established in general by the airport authorities is laughable. And the USA is not alone in that. So far, I have passed through Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, among other airports (no USA as I do not want Amarican visa requirements).

I have a theory about how terrorists could get dangerous materials in an airplane (I hope the anti-terror officials have already though of this), here it goes:

Let's say some bad-guy gets a bag like this (laptop bag with wheels and extensible handle[made of metal]).
The same guy, gets some aluminum powder, iron oxide, one or two sparklers and a fire starter.

Then, the guy puts everything inside the extensible handler (some of them do not have anything inside) and takes it with him to the plane cabin. The cocktail is not shown in the x-ray because of the metallic nature of the handle).

To finalize, while in the plane, the guy can setup the cocktail in his seat and take it to the toilet. Inside there he uses the fire-starter to ignite the sparkler which will ignite the aluminium/iron mix and cause a thermite reaction.

As a possible modification, the cocktail could be covered with ice to make the thing explode.

WTH, I'll post it as anonymous if it helps of something. note that it is not my objective to give ideas to terrorists... it is just that every time I pass through the security check area I feel very uncomfortable knowing that this would be possible. BTW, this idea was based on a documentary I saw of one guy smuggling a knife in a commercial flight using this method.

And does that explain the warming noticed on Jupiter, Titan, Pluto and various asteroids to name a few?

There are several hypotheses regarding the warming observed on Mars and Pluto.

You don't believe in evidence. There either is evidence supporting your claim, or there isn't.

I said "I believe there is evidence". I'm'a assume English isn't your first language (for now; more on that below) and explain that the phrase means "I'm not certain, but I think evidence has been found".

But since you're calling me out on it, I'll look at your links. Link the first:

This powerful combination of two studies presents persuasive evidence that violent video games do indeed increase aggression in some players.

Link the second:

Playing violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can increase a person's aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life, according to two studies appearing in the April issue of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Furthermore, violent video games may be more harmful than violent television and movies because they are interactive, very engrossing and require the player to identify with the aggressor, say the researchers.

Link the third:

After 40+ years of research, one might think that debate about media violence effects would be over. An historical examination of the research reveals that debate concerning whether such exposure is a significant risk factor for aggressive and violent behavior should have been over years ago (Bushman & Anderson, 2001). Four types of media violence studies provide converging evidence of such effects: laboratory experiments, field experiments, cross-sectional correlation studies, and longitudinal studies (Anderson & Bushman, 2002a; Bushman & Huesmann, 2000).

Link the fourth:

The link between anger and aggression is far from clear, and they would like to see similar results reproduced with other test groups and using different games and experimental setups. It's also worth noting that they attempted to measure a wide range of additional factors during their study, but many of these measurements produced statistically insignificant or contradictory results.

This is the first one that doesn't claim the connection is well-established, but it does find a causative link between aggressive behavior and violent media. It attempts to establish that there is an additional factor. Link the fifth:

After an average playtime of 56 hours over the course of a month with âoeAsheronâ(TM)s Call 2,â a popular MMRPG, or âoemassively multi-layer online role-playing game,â researchers found âoeno strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,â said Dmitri Williams, the lead author of the study.

Teenagers experiencing 56 hours of fantasy violence over one month and then self-assessing their feelings. 'Nuff said, I hope. Link the sixth:

A brain mechanism that may link violent computer games with aggression has been discovered by researchers in the US. The work goes some way towards demonstrating a causal link between the two - rather than a simple association.

Link the seventh:

After an average playtime of 56 hours over the course of a month...

Same as five.

Carbon nanotubes are known to be toxic. Wouldn't having them next to your body in a situation where you are likely to bleed be kind of unnerving? http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13946-nanotubes-toxic-effects-similar-to-asbestos.html

The NewScientist i was reading a few days ago was talking about planes going wireless (that's right, WIRELESS) to save weight on copper wiring. They call it fly-by-wireless.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327245.300-flybywireless-set-for-takeoff.html

They also claim it has other benefits, such as not having to worry about wires snapping and redundancy. I'd still feel a bit weird flying in a plane with no physical connection to the engines/wings/other.

As alluring as it is to presume the US is better than other countries regarding nuclear waste, it just ain't so.

We're already making use of the Lagrange points that from the basis for this. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sits at L2 more than 1,000,000Km away and the successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope is going there too. This earlier article has a few more details on the science; Why future astronauts may be sent to 'gravity holes'.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/2021228

http://www.mcmaster.ca/opr/html/opr/media/main/NewsReleases/2005/NR_bunce.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/3044.shtml

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524812.300-giant-eagle-evolved-in-record-time.html

"Leo Gross and his colleagues at IBM in Zurich, Switzerland, modified the AFM technique to make the most detailed image yet of pentacene, an organic molecule consisting of five benzene rings"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17699-microscopes-zoom-in-on-molecules-at-last.html

Wrong. Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quote:

The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.

Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.

The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:

the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.

An inaccurate but funny meme is insightful? In fact, geeks get the girls. If you're not getting any, maybe you're not as smart as you think you are.

You are obviously new here.

Well yes, my UID has more than four digits. I am in fact new here! However, if you need help getting laid, you might want to peruse this journal (mine under another account I signed up for whan I lost my password), and if you believe the meme you might want to have a look at this article.

A lot of people -- like the author of Talking Back to Prozac -- claim that some drug trials (especially for popular antidepressants) are compromised to the point that getting drugs like Prozac approved required requires a surprising amount of massaging of the data from drug trials just to get to the point where the drug seems to perform better than placebo. This New Scientist article from last year about how antidepressants' effects may have been exaggerated, has a good definition of a particular form of publication bias that is apparently common:

It's called the "file-drawer problem". A study fails to produce interesting results, so is filed away and forgotten - a practice that might mean antidepressants don't work as well as doctors think.

If that's true, then it's a gambit that would get less and less effective over time. Certainly, drug companies have a very large commercial interest in boosting the apparent effectiveness of their drugs by "enhancing" the results of their trials through selectively ignoring results they don't like. It does sound somewhat conspiracy theory-ish, but it seems like there's increasing evidence. Plus, if it's true that antidepressants are less effective than many doctors believed in the past, that's more evidence that the trials drew incorrect conclusions.

There are dozens of contradictory studies out there. One will show correlation, the next one won't, and some even suggest possible causation of the release of radon, a known cancer-causing agent. Here are a couple:

http://www.midtod.com/9603/voltage.phtml
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7460-large-study-links-power-lines-to-childhood-cancer.html

It's too early to say that there's a causal relationship between power lines and cancer, but it's disingenuous to suggest that there's no possibility ELF has an effect on the human body.

What about testosterone level?

That would interest me greatly. This article explained a lot about my relationship with women over the years. I don't usually have a hard time getting laid, but I have a hell of a time getting a steady girlfriend. Even though I'd far rather have a committed, monogamous relationship, NOBODY believes this.

I suppose stopping deforestation and planting more trees is beyond the top 1 issue.

Remember the three wise monkeys? Well that's the way we are approaching the solution. Most people are so enthralled in advancing blindly into the future and an eye on profit margins, that the future generations be damned. Then there are questionable solutions, which avoid the real issue and in fact worsen the problems, such a biofuels. Turns out road building are also doing more damage than expected:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327236.700-roads-are-ruining-the-rainforests.html

Yes, planting more trees and deforestation are amongst the real solutions, but how do we convince the various governments to act when they are being offered dollar signs to act as monkeys.

I hate to break it to you, but the military already has microwave weapons:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725095.600

I've seen video of them in action, and while they're not quite to the level of a taser, they definitely have a deterrent effect.

This ignores all the radars and radios that the military uses that will cook you if you stand in front of them (although that was not a design goal).

I just made up a batch of "RF HAZARD EXTREME DANGER" signs at work the other day for pod shop or avionics, can't remember.

-b

homosexuality is not a flaw? I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it.

And yet, homosexuality exists, and separated twin studies show convincingly that there is a genetic basis for it. So maybe there is a flaw in your reasoning? Various hypotheses have been proposed, that homosexuality may benefit the family group rather than the individual, that it was only recently in history that it became usual for homosexuals to not have a regular partner of the opposite sex, that homosexual men rank higher than straight men on various tests of agreeableness and other positive personality tests, etc. Try Evolution myths: Natural selection cannot explain homosexuality and The Economist: The evolution of homosexuality.

Actually, the evidence currently suggests that there is probably some neurological basis towards a predisposition to believe in religion. There is some evidence that tending towards belief in the divine would have benefited early groups of humans, thus creating an evolutionary drive towards belief. Studies of separated twins show that belief or not belief in the pair is not just random, inferring a genetic basis of belief. See for example Why do we believe in God? by Robert Winston, or Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests. There are many other papers in a similar vein.

So, maybe people don't choose to be feel religious after all, in much the same way as people don't choose to feel homosexual.

P.R. Alert: This Slashdot story is a public relations release. The misleading Slashdot summary says, "Other sources have picked up the story...". In reality, they are inserting press releases everywhere they can, and the kind of work being done is not new.

It was proven long ago that dogs can smell chemicals associated with cancer. For example, see this 2006 article in National Geographic News, Dogs Smell Cancer in Patients' Breath, Study Shows. That's part of what started the present interest in making a machine to detect cancer.

This February 2007 article is more interesting: Compact lung-cancer breath test may be possible. Quote: "The test uses 36 chemical dots that react to telltale compounds in a person's breath. The dots change colour when exposed to compounds that signify the presence of lung cancer."

This February 2007 article gives more information about how it is done: US Scientists Prototype Breath Test For Lung Cancer

Even Oprah's magazine had article in June 2009 about dogs sniffing cancer and making machines to imitate dogs: Sniffing Out Cancer. Quote: "The researchers are collaborating with scientists at the University of Maine, who are trying to mimic the dogs' cancer-sniffing abilities with laboratory machines." Another quote: "So far, the Pine Street Foundation dogs have done 25,000 scent trials for ovarian cancer."

Slashdot: Not quite as current as Oprah? Old news for nerds who were playing video games and wouldn't know the difference?

Many researchers are doing similar work. For example, see the February 2008 article, The Cancer Breathalyzer. Quote: "Dr Yousef ... believes that the breath test will provide a more convenient and rapid method for diagnosing serious diseases than blood or urine analysis, and will require minimal medical intervention."

Other researchers are studying the possibility of using blood tests to detect cancer. See the December 2007 article, Study points to possibility of blood test to detect lung cancer.

Here is a November 2005 research paper that surveys some of the issues of early detection of cancer: The Progress and Promise of Molecular Imaging Probes in Oncologic Drug Development.

and natural CO2 production is 20x mans ... but it damn well won't stop the "consensus" train. The only good thing about N2O is that its not something you can tax the population over, at least directly. Can't wait to see who the N2O bogeymen are going to be.

I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. There seem to be an endless number of internet ninjas promoting claims like this, despite the fact that CO2 hasn't risen above 300ppm in the last 650,000 years. But then we come along and the concentration skyrockets to 380ppm in a matter of decades, which is 35x faster than any increase in the last 650,000 years.

As other posters have remarked, natural CO2 production and absorption aren't relevant to the current CO2 problem because they balance each other. Our emissions and volcanoes are the only sources of CO2 that aren't balanced, and humans emit 100x more CO2 than volcanoes.

Here you go.

Fat women have always hit on me. Now I know why -- they're stupid!

However, from TFA:

Dr. Jonathan Friedman, an associate professor of surgery and neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine noted that the causal relationship here is not clear.

Another possibility is that The brains of overweight people have more receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin than those of people of normal weight, suggesting that being overweight may be down to more than just eating habits and may have an origin in brain chemistry. Clearly, more study is warranted.

From the New Scientist article on the ssubject of big people with little brains:

In an as yet unpublished study, Thompson's team has shown that exercise, which improves cardiovascular health and blood flow, protects the very brain regions that had shrunk in the current study. "The most strenuous kind of exercise can save about the same amount of brain tissue that is lost in the obese," he says. This indicates that it is blood flow that drives brain health, not the other way round. As these areas undergo the most remodelling throughout adult life, they may be more sensitive to any changes in oxygen supply and nutrients, Thompson suggests.

But Deborah Gustafson at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who previously found that overweight women had less brain tissue than their leaner counterparts, questions whether obesity is driving brain atrophy or vice versa. She points out that brain atrophy in the frontal and temporal lobes, which also control eating behaviour and metabolism, could cause weight gain. "There are not enough longitudinal data available for us to know which is the chicken and which is the egg."

While you trollish jocks are off watching football, we're getting laid.

Now go back under your bridge.

If you can't shoot it or blow it the fuck up, we really don't have the patience for it.

Mythbusters!

Unless you are basically giving us a chance to call a member of the female persuasion whose twat we will never touch

BUSTED!

I think it's time to retire that old worn out joke, since according to this New Scientest article, we get laid more often than normal guys.

Is smart sexy? Our knee-jerk reaction - reinforced by cultural stereotypes of Star Trek-convention attending geeks and a seeming obsession with ditzy, pretty starlets - would argue otherwise. Nerds are, well, nerds.

Increasing scientific evidence shows that brains count for a lot in mate choice. And now - for the first time - researchers have directly linked a male's cognitive performance to his luck with the ladies.

"Males that are better problem-solvers are mating with more females," says Jason Keagy, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who studies not the mating rituals of the political elite in nearby Washington DC, but those of a bird native to the forests of eastern Australia.

I submitted this to slashdot last week, but unfortunately it was rejected. The article has a pretty funny picture of a skinny nerd with glasses (Not unlike what I used to look like before I ditched the specs and grew a goatee) and two hotties.

Does anyone have any more details on this Gravitational Effect?

As subject says. If there is a "Y" cromosome, well, you have a male then...

Yes, except, no.
People with genotype XY, and non-active (mutated) SRY. Female phenotype.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16934

social rejection massively reduces the intelligence and injects aggressiveness in children.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051

Semenya is a woman who has every right to feel badly treated. Apart from anything else, athletes are closely supervised whilst undergoing urine tests, and any physical ambiguity would have been spotted long ago.

It's clear that there has been no deliberate deception here. If tests were needed, then simple human decency should have required that they were done privately and discreetly. Questioning her gender, in the most public and humiliating way possible, is absolutely disgraceful.

As the previous poster points out, you're allowed to have good genes. And even if Semenya does have an extra Y chromosome, that's not against the rules, and it may not even be an advantage, as this article explains.

As much of a fan of NASA as I am (and have been, since the mid-70s), I am seriously beginning to doubt the agency's ability to get back into the business of taking big trips. Even if NASA gets us back to the moon, we're likely to be greeted by the Chinese, or some commercial operation's management (welcome to Bigelow at Tranquility!).

It seems almost silly to be developing a return to space program, when commercial space is doing the same thing, for less money, and is closer to actually ACHIEVING it.

Funny you should mention this. Per this source, American manned space flight is in serious doubt. If true, I'd say even unmanned American space flight is in jeopardy as well. Why buy space toys when you can buy votes?

Exactly. Why the hell does the summary go into depth on TWT's? They've been around since WWII, and have been extensively forever.

Cause Joe Sixpack never heard of them? And with the possibility of NASA losing some more budget, it's best to keep talking up all that cool tech that's been around since the Stone Age, makes people think you just found something cool.

If there was a "-1, ruiuned a good joke" mod (instead of the comment "woosh") I'd surely be modded down for this, but I made a submission yesterday about a New Scientist article that debunks the "lonely nerd" myth. And here I thought that I was a slashdot anomaly, because sometimes women actually hit on me, even when I'm with my girlfriend.

Unfortunately, sometimes even men hit on me, even when I'm with my girlfriend. But then again, it's been shown that Gay brains are structured like those of the opposite sex, so it shouldn't be surprising. If you're attractive to women, you're going to be attractive to gay men as well.

Mods: this is either offtopic or interesting, take your pick.

If there was a "-1, ruiuned a good joke" mod (instead of the comment "woosh") I'd surely be modded down for this, but I made a submission yesterday about a New Scientist article that debunks the "lonely nerd" myth. And here I thought that I was a slashdot anomaly, because sometimes women actually hit on me, even when I'm with my girlfriend.

Unfortunately, sometimes even men hit on me, even when I'm with my girlfriend. But then again, it's been shown that Gay brains are structured like those of the opposite sex, so it shouldn't be surprising. If you're attractive to women, you're going to be attractive to gay men as well.

Mods: this is either offtopic or interesting, take your pick.

You Brits have a minister devoted to digital entertainment? Is finger-fucking covered by his portfolio?

He's the man to call if you get hiccups... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10207-ig-nobel-prizes-hail-digital-rectal-massage.html
Although as a member of the current administration he'd go for putting the whole fist in, without lube.

Oh, I can't imagine it's beat the Big Dig just yet, though it may be on its way. Looks like the relative costs of the two programs are similar...but the Big Dig was a 10-fold cost overrun (from about $2B to $20B.

NASA's currently-ongoing Ares I project was on track to have that beat (costs rising from an initial few billion in 2005 to ~$45B today), but it fortunately looks likely that the White House is going to end its misery. Coincidentally, Boeing was responsible for the 2nd stage of that rocket, although the 2nd stage isn't the one that's been causing the problems -- NASA Marshall Flight Center's overall management and ATK's 1st stage have been the main problem source.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/05/nasa-should-abandon-its-proble.html

As I wrote last summer, it's been clear almost from the start that Ares I was a very marginal, optimistic design, just barely adequate if everything went right. But there are always problems, and Ares I had no margin for problems.

As one underlying assumption after another has turned out to be wrong, requiring design change after design change, NASA has nevertheless clung to the same basic approach, unwilling to admit its mistake and hoping that sheer persistence would see the project through. Perhaps it could, but the price for such bullheadedness can be very high, and the budget projections are now starting to reflect that - the Sentinel says that its estimated costs through 2015 have swelled from $28 billion in 2006 to $44 billion today.

Agreed and also they found another one http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17613-second-backwards-planet-found-a-day-after-the-first.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Yup, a pretty silly statement when the observation was of the first one discovered.

Still a silly statement after the second one discovered, the very next day:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17613-second-backwards-planet-found-a-day-after-the-first.html

In less than one day! http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17613-second-backwards-planet-found-a-day-after-the-first.html

to see what their view of the zoological world is would be very interesting.

Answer: God made it.

It's not all that interesting a viewpoint. My grandpa sent me a few books recently on evolution (after I stopped attending church last year), and the ways in which creationists try to use science to prove their points would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing. In a couple of the books people who clearly don't understand the difference between open/closed systems try to use the laws of thermodynamics to disprove evolution. It's pathetic. Life exists and evolves in a kind of battle against entropy sure, but it doesn't defy the laws of thermodynamics because the earth is getting new energy from Sol all the time. They also claim that evolution via random mutation is simply impossible, even though a scientist last year demonstrated that bacteria can evolve new traits from a series of presumably random mutations. I hope more people do as I have done and learn to just accept the truth (even if it means admitting a lot of their life thus far was based on a lie) rather than fighting a worthless battle against it.

From a different FA:

Now Malzbender's team has achieved the same effect using an off-the-shelf flatbed scanner. They rely on the fact that modern scanners use two separate light bulbs. This feature was added to scanners to improve colour quality, but it also lets you capture the image from two different angles. Re-scanning the object after rotating it 90 degrees provides a total of four different angles, more than enough to deduce 3D information about the object - mathematically, you only need three.

To fix old, damaged photographs, the software flags every pixel in the scanned image that isn't lying flat against the scanner, an indication that there is a tear or a fold there. Then it automatically replaces those pixels by copying adjacent ones, smoothing over the damaged region

Forgive my cynicism but in my experience, humans are not altruistic at all. Like monkeys, we do what we do because it benefits us.

I'll forgive your cynicism, but you've got to work on your ignorance.

... the New Sensationalist seriously as a science magazine.

(Fine, mod this flamebait. I've got Karma to burn and I really dislike that rag.)

If I remember correctly, you don't need to do much.

New US electronic passports will use encryption and a metal shield to protect the data they contain. The move is in response to criticism that the passports would not be secure, and perhaps downright dangerous to carry. But critics remain unconvinced.

If that's not enough then you can always grab one of these RFID blocking wallets. I'm not sure if you can fit a passport in it though.

Patenting what the submitter claims they're patenting, seems too ludicrous even for the USPTO[...]

Are you sure about that?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2178-boy-takes-swing-at-us-patents.html

It has yet to be shown that cannabis causes driving impairment.

There seems to be evidence in both directions. For example, on study showed that it's not as bad as alcohol, but far worse than sober drivers:

Stoned drivers were almost twice as likely to be involved in a fatal car crashes than abstemious drivers, according to a study of 10,748 fatal car crashes in France between 2001 and 2003. More than half of the drivers in the study themselves died as a result of their accidents and all the subjects were tested for drug and alcohol use after crashing.

Even after accounting for factors such as the age of the drivers and the condition of the vehicle, the researchers conclude that cannabis caused a significant number of the fatalities, with 2.5% of the crashes directly attributed to cannabis use. Alcohol was the direct cause of about 29%.

Source

How long did it take to find the Beagle 2? Two years!

Douchebags confuse cockiness with expertise

There. Fixed that for you :)