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OMFG!!!!

I was addicted to that God damned drug for thirty fucking years. Yes, it indeed "acts on the acetylcholine receptors in the brain, stimulating and regulating the release of a slew of brain chemicals, including seratonin, dopamine and norepinephrine". Why in the hell do you think it's so God damned addictive???? Why do you think a smoker lights up when he's agitated, depressed, needs to think?

It's the absolute WORSE drug there is! Let me tell you exactly HOW addictive Satan's favorite leash is.

I spent August 1973 to August 1974 stationed in Thailand while in the USAF. They had 99% pure heroin there; SMOKEABLE heroin. It was to the heroin American junkies shoot up as crack is to the cocaine coke addicts snort and shoot. Most white first termers smoked the killer Thai stick (reefer), most black first termers smoked the heroin, and most lifers drank themselves into a stupor.

The heroin was ingested by taking a Kool cigarette and letting half the tobacco out, removing the filter, splitting it in half and reinserting it, then dipping the tobacco end into the heroin vial before lighting it. They would often pass it around like a joint. Many young men, having never before smoked anything in their lives, picked up the habit of smoking "rails", as the heroin cigarettes were called.

I met a few of these guys back in the states after coming home. Not one of them was on heroin, but every single one of them still smoked the Kools!

Take what you want of that story, but it sure looked to me like cigarettes are more addictive than heroin. Considering the fact that giving up cigarettes was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, I believe it.

If a doctor ever prescribes a drug based on niccotine to me, I'll find another doctor.

Meanwhile, marijuana can be habituating but is NOT chemically addictive, has no known toxic dose, and may actually prevent cancer!. So why are cigarettes legal while reefer isn't?

-mcgrew

Because their kids are guaranteed to be blue eyed as well. Why is that interesting? Well, if the baby would have e.g. brown eyes, daddy would be sure that it isn't his own. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg193258 75.400

So, although the blue eyes are getting it harder now, there's a mechanism that might keep their presence above the ratio you would normally expect of recessive genes.

The summary doesn't make this clear, but the 'revisit' to Tempel 1 (nor the other additional tasks) does not involve establishing orbit; according to TFA it will be a flyby. Thus the Dawn mission - if it achieves it's objectives - will still be the "first spacecraft to enter into orbit around two different planetary bodies other than the Earth and Moon" (from the Wikipedia article).

Incidentally, Dawn was scheduled for launch at 1609 EDT (2009 GMT) on 7th July 2007, but has now been delayed by approximately 24 hours, to 1604-1633 EDT (2004-2033 GMT) on 8th July 2007.

It is also cited here:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12174-sex-ph eromones-make-mice-brains-grow.html

and here:

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/ abs/nn1928.html

Don't learn English from Slashdot! It's pretty bad here.

Try the following instead:
http://www.newscientist.com/news.ns

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/

Given that this seems to be the only photo that of the actual toys, http://environment.newscientist.com/data/images/ns /cms/dn12168/dn12168-1_280.jpg there is a good chance that the entire story is a hoax. Show me one photo of even a small cluster of these toys in the water.

"Well we don't even know in any certain manner that the cosmic background radiation is anything but a localized event, say a still-dissipating nearby supernova or hitherto unknown stellar phenomena."

Incorrect. The CMB is 1) isotropic, therefore non-stellar (more stars in certain directions in the sky, yet no more CMB).
2) Exhibits a Doppler shift due to the motion of the Galaxy with respect to the early Universe. The Galaxy is also moving in the same sense with respect to the average of other galaxies. See any CMB primer.
3) The precise shape of the CMB can be used to make cosmological measurements, these agree with other methods such as observing distant galaxy clusters. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn5007
4) CMB radiation that has passed through distant galaxy clusters and been altered (Compton up-scattering) has been detected. Therefore the source of the CMB is beyond the clusters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunyaev-Zel'dovich_ef fect

2. They are us from the future.

Hardly "us". Chimps and bonobos look more like us than the pictures of these creatures do. Homo Sapiens has only been around 130,000 years. What will "we" look like in five million, provided we or an asteroid or something else doesn't cause our extinction?

After only 130,000 years we've reached outer space, split the atom (and are now even splitting them off of molecules one at a time! What will our descendants be able to accomplish five million years from now?

OTOH, it seems incredibly unlikely that out of all the planets in the galaxy a spacegoing civilization would stumble across us. They would have to be less than 150 light years away, since we only started transmitting that short time ago. Out of billions of planets and likely thousands or millions of habitable planets, why here? And faster than light travel seems as impossible as time travel.

No, if these aliens are real, my bet is that they're archaelogists come back in time to study Homo Sapiens and the other primitive life forms now on the planet.

I always wonder why the illustration of homo sapiens from the Pioneer plaque pictured in the linked wiki article has no hair on the male's face, and short hair on his head, and why neither the man nor woman have pubic hair? I don't think the Pioneer plaque is a very good representation of us at all, what moron drew those pictures anyway?

-mcgrew

Why in Chtlus name a link to the daily mail? I got sick from all the pictures of bikini clad babes that were supposedly famous (oh! she broke her leg while doing house chores) FCS dress up or take it all off (&make that porn movie)....

So here is the link to a more sensible website:
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn1216 8-uk-on-alert-for-plastic-duck-invasion.html

From the article: "Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues question whether polar bear populations really are declining and if sea ice, on which the animals hunt, will actually disappear as quickly as climate models predict" Climate change sceptics criticise polar bear science

Technology: The case of the novelist's car-phone

        * 02 March 1991
        * BARRY FOX
        * Magazine issue 1758

The British police could catch many more car thieves than they do now by using the cellular phone networks to trace cellphones installed in stolen cars. But the police rarely take advantage of this and most officers seem unaware that the facility even exists - even though more than a million people in Britain now have cellular phones.

In addition, the operators of the cellphone networks are giving subscribers the wrong advice when their car is stolen. They advise cutting off the phone, which then prevents its use for tracing the car.

This problem was highlighted recently when the novelist Margaret Drabble had her car stolen from outside her home in Hampstead, North London. Her husband, historian Michael Holroyd, tried phoning the mobile phone in the car. A man answered, and said to Holroyd: 'I'm the thief who has stolen your car. Piss off!'

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917584.900 -technology-the-case-of-the-novelists-carphone-.ht ml

...to the original publication.

the really fascinating thing is not THAT they succeeded to change the magnet field via lasers, it's the speed if you compare their figures to this

The first place to go to get ideas about applications that can be sufficiently parallelized is to consider all of the @Home programs. In addition to those, there are the ones already mentioned by those who have responded to you. Then there's my research area - neural network models of mammalian brains. One of the things that people plan on doing on Blue Gene is simulating an entire human brain.

Yeah, you heard this before but Meg's such a good looking woman I have to repeat her dumb jokes... plus this is actually on topic!

A penguin walks into a car repair shop and says her car is losing oil as she looses her collar; it's a hot day and penguins don't like heat. Well, maybe the African Penguins do and maybe the Giant Peruvian penguins did, but this was an Antarctic penguin and she didn't like the heat at all. Never mind how much heat a beowolf cluster of them would... hold on, I'm screwing up the joke.

Any way, the mechanic says it will take maybe an hour to diagnose the car's problem, so the penguin says she'll come back later.

As it's a hot day and Antarctic penguins don't much like the heat (but I already said that, sorry), she decides to get an ice cream cone. It's a hot day (mod -1 redundant) and she dribbles a little ice cream on the front of her blouse.

She goes back to the mechanic, who's just finished and is wiping his hands on a rag. "Looks like you blew a seal," he tells her.

"Oh no," she says, "that's just ice cream!"

-mcgrew

PS- wait til the next M.A.F.I.A.A. thread comes up, I'll tell you her pirate joke!

There has been no "evolution" from creationism to intelligent design. It was merely a name change. When creationism was ruled unscientific, they changed the name to make it sound more "scientific". Even a judge could clearly see the ruse. A study of the text in Of Pandas and People showed where the authors did a simple search-and-replace of one term for the other (as explained on the Wikipedia article I linked to).

Many reasons really. Venus is so close to the sun that it would be near impossible to get the temperature down to a reasonable level until we have the power to move the planet or at least adjust the rotation to something more reasonable, which will be thousands of years from now, if ever. By the time the technology to handle the positioning and rotational issue will come along, we will long have figured out how to adjust the atmosphere to suit us.

Nonsense. There are other ways to control heating. We've even planned for some of them, such as setting up giant solar reflectors, or seeding of the upper atmosphere with particulate matter.

In fact, I'm guessing you could get much of Venus' atmosphere to condense into something manageable (possibly something you could use nuclear explosives to remove) by reducing the solar heat. Perhaps we could use a series of asteroids and nuclear explosives to generate a large dust cloud that blocks sunlight to venus?

You can do (it terms of energy) do wonders with nuclear explosions. Nuclear bombs are our only technologies capable of near instantaneous planet-wide effects. Any "solution" to these issues will require levels of energy approaching nuclear blasts; the main problem is the creative engineering needed to harness these effects.

Personally, I'm partial to trying to destabilize Venus's atmosphere using high-altitude air bursts.

...(has any human ever been chipped with an RFID chip?),...
---
Its old news actually.

Clubbers choose chip implants to jump queues - 21 May 2004 - New ...
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn5022

http://www.greaterthings.com/News/Chip_Implants/

Finally, the results of today's climate simulations--which are much more sophisticated than those that were available in the 1980s--suggest that even a nuclear exchange of just a few dozen weapons could cool Earth substantially for a decade or more.

They find that the gravity of the collapsing mass starts to disrupt the quantum vacuum, generating what they call "pre-Hawking" radiation. Losing that radiation reduces the total mass-energy of the object - so that it never gets dense enough to form an event horizon and a true black hole. "There are no such things", Vachaspati told New Scientist. "There are only stars going toward being a black hole but not getting there."

There is an article about this same thing in new scientist
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-b lack-holes-really-exist.html
It quotes 't Hooft as claiming that "The process he describes can in no way produce enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as he is suggesting." So I am skeptical.

As a player of games I'm all for people taking responscibilty for their actions.
But there is some fairly sound science backing up the fact that violent video games can have a affect on your mind.
Its not possible to run a completely controlled experiment into this (people don't like having their complete lives controlled just for science) but majority of experiments have pointed to an effect.
as a small quick search pulls back.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8449

But they also show that TV has a lesser effect but with more exposure.

Basically what you what/see/interact with will affect your mental state so stopping the general publication of a video nasty game might not be the worst thing in the world.

Want some research? Have a leaf throught this lot:

http://www.newscientist.com/search.ns?doSearch=tru e&query=violent+video+games

So it seems that it's accepted that the more violence you see, the less you respond when you see real violence and that this is most likely a bad thing. But does stronger violence offer a stronger effect and thus should extreme games be banned? The way I see it, there are a lot of crappy parents out there whose children need protecting from their crappy parents and the environment to which they expose their children. For them, playing daddy's violent films and video games is just part of their ill-considered developmental environment. The same way we all need to lock our doors and be a bit scared a lot of the time because a minority of criminals will walk off with our tvs and phones otherwise, we also all need to suffer from bans and censorships as the government tries desperately to cope with the vile humans generated from several generations of crappy parenting.

The simple solution? Compulsory sterilisation for all at birth. When you pass a simple test, you get your balls back. ha! and it can be a simple test to detect these loser parents - you can spot them from 200 metres away, you know, the ones that threaten to hit their kids in public in a way that you know means they'll be whacking them for real once they get home, the ones who feed their kids KFC instead of spending the same money cooking some fresh vegetables , etc etc. /end of facist rant.

See, it's really the only pollutant that's relevant to a discussion on global warming*.

And here I was thinking that water vapor was far more causative than CO2 by about 3:1. Silly me. By all means, let's ONLY focus on CO2 emissions! Forget the other gases... forget the sun... forget EVERYTHING but CO2... Good idea...

Yes, but we're not putting out huge amounts of water vapor. And even if we did, it would correct itself within a few days.

Likewise the sun, we can't do anything about that. BUT we are vastly increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere - every year the rate increases, and it's far beyond what it would be without human activity. That is a FACT, and it's something we can control.

At the least, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea ( http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9761 &feedId=online-news_rss20F53 ). Admittedly not as many as I'd first thought there might be.

You're asking the wrong question. Light (and information) can go faster than c. Matter can not. "The speed of light" is really "the speed of light in a vacuum". There have already been a ton of experiments in which the speed of light in matter exceeded the speed of light in a vacuum. That's old news. The real limitation is on how dense something can be and still remain intact.

It is possible that, prior to the big bang, the universe was a perfectly rigid substance. As soon as the universe realized this, it corrected the situation. IAMNAQP, but I'd imagine that a black hole is what you get when matter tries to become perfectly rigid/dense. Perfect rigidity requires perfect density. There can not be room for matter to compress in such a substance.

http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id= dn11993
They explain the possibility of creating a solar shield by spraying sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.
If the models are correct, it would lower temperatures to around early 20th-century levels, though rainfall abnormalities would persist.

As I wrote a few years ago in A Failure of Vision the filtering that NASA has been doing to accurately recreate the actual colors of Mars's surface actually makes it harder to tell what you're looking at. If you were living and working on Mars, before long your eyes and brain would adapt and you wouldn't see the red planet as particularly red.

If you go and adjust the ground to the rusty red in NASA's usual photos with this new photograph the water doesn't look nearly so watery any more. But when I lined up the peaks in the red, green, and blue channels to try and get an approximation of the original image (only an approximation, of course... but this has produced realistic looking images for me in the past... reddish, yes, but a red like you might see in Arizona) I got this picture of what appears to be normal-looking (not food-coloring-blue) water.

So my question is... what else have people missed, because they're seeing Mars through Earth-filtered images?

Maybe if a few folks out there tried this trick on other NASA imagery we'd find out.

It seems that the colored composite picture shown in newscientist's article was derived from these two original left-right pictures from Opportunity's navigation cameras on day 285. There are many more similar pictures around day 285, with these flat paths around the flat stones. In the 'Burns Cliff' Color Panorama (high res), the newscientist's image is just a fraction of the cliff: it's in its very center, where you can see a V and the steepness of where it is located.

1) The surface just seems a bit too steep to me to accumulate any liquid water in such amounts for a pond, since it's facing up the border of the crater in the original pictures. The rover was taking the picture from the bottom up, so also the material wasn't in the lowest part of the terrain.

2) In the original JPL's pictures, you can see the same 'watery' material all way up to the border of the crater: it's distinctly darker. In the panorama, it's interesting to note that it doesn't go all the way down to the bottom of the crater, where you can see a brighter dust covering everything.

Does this darkness means humidity? I fail to see streaming water, maybe flat thin ice sheets from a humid surface but this seems to be explicitely discarded when the author says that "If they were ice or some other material, they'd show wear and tear over the surface, there would be rubble or sand or something." (btw, sand on this steep cliff?) A very thin dark powdery sand looks more likely, but someone needs to go there and poke it to be sure. Any ideas about this? I'm unable to find the original paper to have a look at it.

Can anyone explain how they came up with the bluish hue in the composite picture, since the original pictures do not seem to have any filter information? (the 25th character in their names is 0 instead of some specific filter frequency)

It seems that the colored composite picture shown in newscientist's article was derived from these two original left-right pictures from Opportunity's navigation cameras on day 285. There are many more similar pictures around day 285, with these flat paths around the flat stones. In the 'Burns Cliff' Color Panorama (high res), the newscientist's image is just a fraction of the cliff: it's in its very center, where you can see a V and the steepness of where it is located.

1) The surface just seems a bit too steep to me to accumulate any liquid water in such amounts for a pond, since it's facing up the border of the crater in the original pictures. The rover was taking the picture from the bottom up, so also the material wasn't in the lowest part of the terrain.

2) In the original JPL's pictures, you can see the same 'watery' material all way up to the border of the crater: it's distinctly darker. In the panorama, it's interesting to note that it doesn't go all the way down to the bottom of the crater, where you can see a brighter dust covering everything.

Does this darkness means humidity? I fail to see streaming water, maybe flat thin ice sheets from a humid surface but this seems to be explicitely discarded when the author says that "If they were ice or some other material, they'd show wear and tear over the surface, there would be rubble or sand or something." (btw, sand on this steep cliff?) A very thin dark powdery sand looks more likely, but someone needs to go there and poke it to be sure. Any ideas about this? I'm unable to find the original paper to have a look at it.

Can anyone explain how they came up with the bluish hue in the composite picture, since the original pictures do not seem to have any filter information? (the 25th character in their names is 0 instead of some specific filter frequency)

Direct link to image: http://space.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/d n12026/dn12026-2_250.jpg

Gotta say, can't think of what it could be besides water. On the other hand, aren't the images artificially colored?

Actually, you're absolutely wrong.

Filesharing has little to no effect on sales. In fact, very popular songs actually have a proportional increase in sales when they are shared frequently online.

In fact there are a host of other issues which the RIAA major labels completely ignore in favor of going after the one factor that irks them. You see to greedy assholes who routinely bite the hand that feeds them, the fact that anyone is listening to "their music" for free is galling. The ignore factors like entertainment diversification, the consistent growth of independent labels (yes, independent labels have increasing CD sales not decreasing sales), the negative publicity associated with lying, cheating, stealing, bribing, price-fixing being exposed to the public, the end of an upgrade cycle (sales declines are compared to the top ever sales level of the music industry ignoring the cyclical and temporary nature of upgrade cycles), and the narrowing of industry channels through the disappearance of retail music stores and do we even need to go into the general agreement that the major labels have been producing inferior albums for years?

There are plenty of reasons for falling revenues, the problem is the only reason that doesn't put the blame on the executives in charge of the music industry is the only one that given any credence by the music industry. That's in their own selfish best interest (not that of the music companies or the music industry), if they admit to making huge mistakes and covering them up years, then they could lose their cushy jobs. I understand why they do it, I just am not willing to tolerate it.

Hell, considering how little artists get paid for music the coming changes in the efficiency of music distribution are long overdue. The CD system of the music distribution is insane in a digital world. Completely insane and since the wholesale price of CD sales is the determining factor for the "size" of the music industry it's no wonder they're falling. At best the artists get to split $1 of a CD sale between them. Often it's less, I've heard of the musicians earning less than one cent per copy sold. So the rest of the $15-$20 of the CD price is overhead. That means 75%-95% of the "industry" revenues are waste.
We should expect the revenues to fall dramatically as they shift from traditional distribution to digital. However, these are professional money grubbers here, you can also expect profits to rise once they've finally admitted they have to do this and have begun to figure out how to work the system. Right now, the major labels all still appear to be in denial.

Oh, and just for information, I am in no way opposed to "artificial" Genetic Modification of crops, it's just a more advanced way of doing what we've done for thousands of years. Stuff like this is exactly what we need.

I am, however, opposed to the commoditisatin of seed stocks and how that relates to the agri-pharmalogical companies control of the world's foodsupply. As the saying goes, "Fuck That Shit".

New Scientist had an article last week on the shortage, among other things Gallium.Subscription required.

Because after the MLB and broadcaster come to an agreement, they go arm-in-arm to the Federal Government

The European countries all have five, ten, or more viable political parties, making legalized bribery a lot harder. We Americans have two wings of the same Corporate party. The "Democrat" Bono Act and DMCA were supported by the Republican Wing as well as the Democrats, while the Republican gift to the credit card companies and banks, Bankrupcy "reform" was supported by the Democrat Wing as well. Even the so-called liberal Obama voted for it. All the sleazy politicians in both major parties support the laws against marijuana, a substance with no known toxic dose, not addictive, and prevents cancer while supporting the continued legalization of tobacco, a highly addictive cancer causing substance that kills every one of its users.

Madness.

As Walt Kelly's Pogo said about two Presidential candidates, "we have Tweddle Dum and Tweetle Dumber". No difference. This is why half or less eligible voters vote. They're not apathetic, as the corporate press would have you believe, but they're smart enough to realise that a one party system is NOT democracy. They realise that neither party represents them, but instead represents the fine "American" corporations like Crysler, Sony, BP, Shell...

This is why I've been splitting my vote between the Greens and teh Libertarians; rather than being seen as apathetic, I'm actually voting "neither". I wish more people would join me in this endeavor. Voting Corporate Party, either wing, is voting against your own interests.

If you give ten million dollars to a candidate and he wins, that candidate is beholden to you. If there are only two viable candidates and you give ten million to each, how is that not a bribe? Why is it legal to donate to more than one candidate in any given race?

Likewise, why is it legal for Bill Gates' minor children living in Washington State who can't vote at all, let alone in Illinois, to donate any money to Dick Durbin or Dennis Hastert? Why should someone who isn't eligible to vote for either of these sleazy politicians eligible to help get them elected by giving them money? Why isn't it illegal to donate to a candidate you're not eligible to vote for?

So long as people and things can donate to candidates they're not eligible to vote for, and to donate to more than one candidate in any given race, the so-called "democracy" is a sham. Your vote is worthless, your time casting it is wasted.
</rant>

-mcgrew

Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say "ba"; an electronic sound should elicit a "ko", and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.

The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they're flummoxed. "If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed," he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.

I read the article that you linked to, and I was a little bit disappointed. For the most part, the links do not try to prove that global warming is caused by CO2 emissions. Most of the links try to disprove the counter arguments to this proposition, which is a very different thing.

Also, I found the link to have a serious bias. As an example, http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/dn11646 argues that the "hocket stick" graph showing how current temps are greater in the recent past than over the past 1000 years is accurate. However, on the other hand, http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/dn11647 states that accurately measuring temperatures that occured over 150 years ago involves a fair amount of guesswork and assumptions. I interpret the above as meaning that the validity of the data is directly correlated to how well it bolsters your position, which seems very unscientific to me.

Like I said, I am not opposed to the notion of global warming being caused by CO2 emissions. However, I am naturally a skeptic by nature, and I do not like to take these things on face value, especially when the ramification of these assertions can have far reaching consequences on society. If we are going to spend X number of dollars to readjust our lives to reduce emissions, then we better be certain that the science is valid.

In addition to being a skeptic, I am also anti-political. So far, I see a lot of political agendas attached to BOTH SIDES of the argument, so that is one reason that I am skeptical. Anytime anyone has a political agenda, you have to be very careful before you give them carte blanche.

I read the article that you linked to, and I was a little bit disappointed. For the most part, the links do not try to prove that global warming is caused by CO2 emissions. Most of the links try to disprove the counter arguments to this proposition, which is a very different thing.

Also, I found the link to have a serious bias. As an example, http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/dn11646 argues that the "hocket stick" graph showing how current temps are greater in the recent past than over the past 1000 years is accurate. However, on the other hand, http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/dn11647 states that accurately measuring temperatures that occured over 150 years ago involves a fair amount of guesswork and assumptions. I interpret the above as meaning that the validity of the data is directly correlated to how well it bolsters your position, which seems very unscientific to me.

Like I said, I am not opposed to the notion of global warming being caused by CO2 emissions. However, I am naturally a skeptic by nature, and I do not like to take these things on face value, especially when the ramification of these assertions can have far reaching consequences on society. If we are going to spend X number of dollars to readjust our lives to reduce emissions, then we better be certain that the science is valid.

In addition to being a skeptic, I am also anti-political. So far, I see a lot of political agendas attached to BOTH SIDES of the argument, so that is one reason that I am skeptical. Anytime anyone has a political agenda, you have to be very careful before you give them carte blanche.

Let's not be too hasty here. Changes in the fine structure constant have been proposed to account for some cosmological observations, but the evidence is spotty, with the best evidence indicating that it is NOT happening. See, for example, http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7285

I don't think I'm going to convince you, so for the benefit of Slashdotters I'll use your post as a lesson in logic and scientific validity.

If you don't give me a link, I can't check your facts.
In contrast, I can give you a good link that explains why the arguments you make about CO2 and other criticisms are wrong -- last week's New Scientist http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/ which explains everything you brought up. The reason that 3% is so important is because it makes the system 3% out of balance.

That's one of the reasons the global warming scientists are right and their critics are wrong -- the scientists cite sources, the critics don't. That's a good sign the scientists are right.

When you try to separate good science from pseudoscience, look for citations, folks. That's the lesson.

Lots of people have stepped forward.

To anyone with a basic understanding of the science, there's no controversy. The best thing you can do is to make the effort to understand the topic properly, and be your own judge. This is a good place to start http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/dn11462. There are plenty of links to the original data if you want to verify anything.

Try this:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg1942605 5.300?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19426055.300

I did not see a single thing that can be traced back to the performance of a real plant - just rubbery derivative figures taken on trust and then the discounting of publicly available information as being warped due to completely supposed incompetance based apparently on railways!

Sure, it's a conglomeration of all plants in operation. It's statistically more proof than posting numbers for a single plant - which can be cherry picked. For every plant that's worse than the average, there has to be a plant or plants operating a corresponding amount above the average.

A for the point about rail, I was pointing out that England's government, on average, is more incompetant than many. Of course, the US government is down there too(especially for nuclear waste disposal), but at least we try to keep our hands out of many things. I could have said the same thing about healthcare and the problems that they're experiencing.

Funny you mentioned France as having economical plants - google will help you there (you advocate nuclear power but have never heard of fast breeders like Superphoenix?), and as most are dual use facilities as part of a weapons program nobody really expects them to be able to produce economical power as distinct from purpose built plants.

Sure I've heard of Superphoenix. And no, most of France's plants are NOT dual use facilities. Yes, an experimental breeder reactor, larger than any ever previously constructed, turned out to be uneconomical at the time. Meanwhile the smaller Phoenix, another breeder, remains an important part of their nuclear program, mostly for waste transformation, but it also generates power.

One thing that France did right was to stanardize their costs. Right now our nuclear system is a lot like space programs; every plant is unique. This drastically increases costs because you can't really share lessons learned or development costs.

If nothing, else, look at the latest fusion plant test - A test plant, costing as much as a gigawatt nuclear plant, taking up the same footprint, yet NO allocation or allowances to ever generate power from it. So it's a pure test plant. At least with the breeder there was the hope to produce power from it.

I'll also note that they started construction before I was born. We've learned a lot about nuclear processes and material science since then.

Why does this differ from the results about British plants published in the New Scientist a few years back - a real reason now please and not just insulting the British nuclear industry. Find that out and you'll be better able to talk about this instead of reguritating advertising and trying to distract people by talking about how bad coal is.
You mean an article like this? You know, where they acknowledge that they messed things up by playing politics with it?

And again, I'm not trying to distract people with coal, I'm comparing them. Nuclear power isn't 100% safe, but then, pretty much nothing is. To not acknowledge this is to hide in the closet sucking your thumb, accomplishing nothing. What Nuclear power is is safer than all other power methods of it's availability and economy. It even beats hydro.

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ dn11462

26 most common climate myths and misconceptions