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Ethanol is one of the smallest organic molecules, most drugs are huge in comparison. It might help to think of it as a solvent, not unlike water.

I hear ya. Small molecules are why DMSO nicotine patches may exist but not generally, prescription drug patches (never mind the dosing nightmare). Just like the Java Sandbox concept or Microsoft Wallet, many biological barriers/frontiers that were once considered difficult or impossible to breach have been crossed.

The skin: while small-molecule poisons and toxins, even simple hydrocarbons were long known to pass through the skin, it was only ~1963 when it was realized that DMSO can help carry larger molecules into the bloodstream.

The Blood brain barrier has been known to be weakened by inflammation but has been breached outright by gas microbubbles and localized ultrasound (too damned creepy!).

And the Placental blood barrier opens in late pregnancy, presumably to give the developed fetus a survival-edge of antibodies from the mother, but long before that there are specialized mechanisms to transport only fats or glucose or eliminate waste. What if some miracle drug has the unintended effect of compromising the mechanism that decides when and how it is opened? In the case of (S)Thalidomide it was not the drug itself, but compound CPS49 produced from it by the liver (the mother's I think) that crosses the barrier.

So nature's greatest defenses have become small hurdles...

not your grandfather's mandelbrot

I like. This one actually resembles my grandfather.

https://www.newscientist.com/a...

> It's called the placebo effect.

Not quite so fast ...

4 Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains skeptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

> It's called the placebo effect.

It could well be -- the placebo effect is ~ 50% effective. How the hell can you have something that effective when you have zero mg administered? The placebo effect is even stranger (From 13 Things that don't make sense)

1 The placebo effect
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing -- another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

Erm so is it rats or monkeys, since here http://www.newscientist.com/ar... we have an article about a monkey brainnet.. And lets be hones monkeynet would be much more impressive :)

Actually, it makes good sense to not worry much about asteroids - almost all of those that could cause extinction (1 km or greater) have already been detected.

The OP's article doesn't mention that the original target of discovering 90 percent of NEOs with a size of 1 km or greater (extinction-size) has already been achieved. The bar has been lowered to 140 m, but those aren't an extinction threat.

The OP's article doesn't mention that the original target of discovering 90 percent of NEOs with a size of 1 km or greater (extinction-size) has already been achieved. The bar has been lowered to 140 m, but those aren't an extinction threat.

The wide majority of gun crime in the US is committed with guns that the person using them has no right to posses.

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

Roof used a gun to shoot 9 black people in SC recently. He was under felony charges for drug crimes and was not legally able to own a gun. How will more gun control laws stop him from getting a gun?

It won't stop him specifically because that event has already happened. Unless you have a time machine we can only focus on future events.
The logic goes something like this:
1. Restrict Gun ownership
2. Less guns are bought
3. Less guns are made
4. Less guns are available on the street
5. Less guns being used
6. Less gun violence.

Some examples of this are every other country in the western world with reduced gun ownership and reduced gun crime compared to the US.
So yeah, gun restrictions won't stop the violence in one day, or even one year, but give it 20 years and you will see an impact to gun crime numbers, as already proven elsewhere.

BECAUSE WOMEN ARE FREAKING INTERESTED IN THE JOB.

Aside from the many, many studies and surveys backing this up,

Citation?
I know a lot of women (no seriously, my mother and sister are both women), and I simply don't see it anywhere. Sure we get *some* women who are genuinely interested in tech, but they are in the minority, just the same as men who want to work in infant care. Sure they exist, but nature dictates that generally speaking, men prefer mechanic type activity and women prefer social activities. This is even demonstrable in monkeys

You're not the first guy to think of this stuff. I think I became aware of it through Rodent (yes...), a former housemate who's into space stuff, sometime in the early 1990s. For unmanned launches, it has more recently been suggested that you would get the craft up to speed in a circle before it hit the ramp. That requires a lot less real estate and a lot less track, making the concept somewhat more feasible.

For manned launches, it's pretty much a non-starter due to the amount of track you would need. But yes, it's feasible. Just remember, there are force considerations for unmanned payloads as well. Not all of this stuff can handle umpty-ump Gs.

There is an article over at New Scientist where they power devices with a hardware-modified router that delivers an extra 20 Watts on an unused channel. They claim to get around the FCC's 1 Watt limit by transmitting only a carrier wave.

Is that really how the regulation works? If I don't put any information in the signal, I can use all of the power that I want?

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...


According to the article referred to by this Slash Dot story, the received power is on the order of microwatts, while the camera requires milliwatts. Because of this, you need to wait many minutes between camera frames.

I think that if we are going to broadcast noise for the purpose of powering gadgets, we should dedicate some unused spectrum for this and not interfere with existing signals.

On another subject, I used to live within sight of a 50,000 Watt AM radio station. The signal used to get into the band's amplifiers. I bet that you could power a lot of gadgets from that monster.

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

Smallpox virus is reasonably stable when dried. There probably are graves where it still exists. We're pretty careful when opening graves, particularly old ones, though.

While we're waiting for this to become widely available, there's always:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

which also works via the vagus nerve!

World's largest molecule: 250 million atoms / 10 nanometers:
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

Reminds me of http://www.newscientist.com/ar... from 2002. Robots goal was to raise its altitude without knowing its actuators ahead of time.

> what is under debate is the balance between natural climatic variation and human CO2 emission

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

"About 40% of the extra CO2 entering the atmosphere due to human activity is being absorbed by natural carbon sinks, mostly by the oceans. The rest is boosting levels of CO2 in the atmosphere."

Here again you can see that we are contributing more than what the natural Carbon Cycle can absorb, which is the problem. The issue is NOT how much CO2 humans produce vs how much nature produces. The issue is that our added emissions tip the scale and the Carbon Cycle cannot compensate any longer. I hope you can re-think your position to understand the distinction between this and what you are saying.

Mostly because I read this page and a few others...and this satisfies Occam's Razor far more than a supernatural being.

This is also of interest

You make a fool of yourself, as the main cause of West Antarctic ice melting is volcanic activity. Look it up, then spew on slashdot.

Actually, we discussed previously how there was some volcanism causing melting, but it wasn't capable of being responsible for the bulk of it. Instead, the ice melting may be responsible for the volcanism, at least, that it's being expressed now.

Look it up, then spew on slashdot.

You might also want to take a look at this post (just came across it with a quick search), which notes that a mainstream projection (in Science Magazine) in 1981 has come in very close to actual warming, but a little lower. Or you could look at this post or this post about projections made in 1990 and 1999 which are also coming out right.

More fundamentally, I'd ask you to take a look at the basics of atmospheric modeling, and point out where you think the mainstream models are wrong. You could start with the American Chemical Society's section on "Atmospheric Warming", particularly the Single-Layer Atmosphere Model and Multi-Layer Atmosphere Model. These are pretty easy to understand, and the underlying principles are at least as well established as the other areas of science we rely on for our high-tech lives. If you can't be bothered to understand the basic physical processes involved, you have no business debating climate science.

Tell that to the monkey parents, who don't have cribs or any form of human culture, yet their male and female offspring prefer stereotypical male and female toys.

America's problem is not immigration, but the myth of trickle-down economics, which has been implemented blindly in the West. Read:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

This is not about 'bleeding-heart socialism', but about why it is a good idea to maintain a balanced society, where the gap between the richest and the poorest is not too big. People only leave their home country with the culture and climate they grew up to love, when the situation becomes bad enough to make the alternatives look significantly better; modern America is the result of such migrations, so American's are well placed to understand how this works, and the America you are now mourning the loss of, was the result of these migrations.

I think you are losing the true spirit of America, because you have allowed the rich upper class to persuade you that trickle down economics will make everybody richer, and have lulled you into thinking that what they call 'democracy' is actually democracy. The solution to this problem? Well, I'm not an expert, but to me it looks like the term 'redistribution of wealth' is relevant in some form. The rich have to get less wealthy, and the poor have to get somewhat richer.

This study says "Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year...The median net worth for people with an IQ of 120 was almost $128,000 compared with $58,000 for those with an IQ of 100."

It's somewhat important to know how much is man-made vs natural (a question we are not very close to answering).

Actually, science has that one nailed .

The answers to your other perplexities are here .

Danmark(and the rest of scandinavia) have completely different sensitivities then the anglo american culture, especially when it comes to explaining the world to kids, it's after all the place where an state run educational institution dissected and fed an giraffe to a bunch of lions in front of a bunch of kids. http://www.newscientist.com/ar... and routinely takes schoolchildren on excursions to slaughterhouses to prevent the Disneyfication of animals.

The difference in philosophy runs a lot deeper then the rating bodies.

Combine that with this guy's work and you'll have something.

the more conservative the area of the country (and the world) the more online pornography is consumed:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

pointlessly uptight people still need their biological release, and since their bullshit "morals" don't allow them to express their natural proclivities in real life, they're all closet perverts

so southerners need that fiber, they won't oppose it

Physics doesn't line up from first principles. The best theories we have are off by 120 orders of magnitude.

You're arguing from what you expect, rather than from data.

The number of Americans able to hold a conversation in a foreign language is about 25%. Which is nowhere near "Most Americans".
http://www.gallup.com/poll/182...

This is especially bad since about 17% of Americans are Hispanic. Not all Hispanics are bilingual, of course.

In the UK the bilingual rate is about 38%; in Ireland it's 34%, both higher than the US, despite your claims. Across the EU, it's 56%.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

It's understandable that English-speaking countries have lower rates, but even within English-speaking nations, the US is pretty near the bottom.
(Australia is right at the bottom.)
http://yourlanguage.org/resear...

Sure.

You can even make straight-up gasoline.

Whether or not it's worthwhile depends on how much energy you need to make the desired fuel, and if you can use that energy more effectively or not... that's the key difference between "possible" and "practical."
=Smidge=

It Isn't the brightness of the light so much as the colour that's important. Blue light induces wakefulness, red light tells the brain it's time for sleep. If you can adjust the colour spectrum of your tablet, nudge it towards the red end of the spectrum and eliminate the blue and violet end.

Satellite image shows Kim Jong Il's dark legacy

North Korea is covered in darkness, both metaphorically and literally.

Obviously not... see if you can spot NK on the map

A recent article in New Scientist (paywalled, I don't have an alternative) suggests that 8 km is about the limit for fish. The problem, apparently, is that the pressure distorts protein shapes, eventually preventing them from working properly. The tissue (particularly muscle) of deep-sea fishes contains trimethylamine oxide, which may protect against this problem, and the deeper you go, the more of it the fish have, but by about 8km they are saturated with it.

Invertebrates have been found deeper, so presumably they have a different mechanism.

On the other hand, New Scientist reported on a new approach with leaky (non-infinite) multiverse that can explain away both of these uncertainties. It's at least an interesting read.

Ghost universes kill Schrödinger's quantum cat

To quote:
"THE wave function has collapsed – permanently. A new approach to quantum mechanics eliminates some of its most famous oddities, including the concept of quantum objects being both a wave and a particle, and existing in multiple states at once."

hmm.. A simple google search shows that nobody is a lot of organizations that appear to be somewhat scientific in their approach and presentation.

Also, the new scientis or articles on their site seem to attempt to make predictions about tornadoes

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

Mother Jones does another story connecting it too.
http://www.motherjones.com/env...

Of course one article is dated march of 2014 and the other august of the same year. But of course politicians have been making claims about the links for a while now. Here is an article presented in october of 2014 which examines political discourse about the global warming tornado threat somewhat.

http://www.americanthinker.com...

Now note, one of those sites is a conservative site. Can you guess which one that might be? Well, it doesn't matter because the information is not inaccurate and came about before this was even on the radar. In fact, it was attempting to impeach the credibility of the political hack appointed to oversee the ebola fiasco and manage political fall out from reported cases reaching American shores.

So lets not ignore the fact that connections have been made.

From the article referenced in TFA:

This is because their wavelength of 1064 nanometres means they are absorbed by the leaves and other organic matter such as oil, but not by metal, so energy from the lasers is reflected off the rails.

With this and designed DNA, Pinky and Brain are just one step ahead.

More monkey business:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

tl;dr Females seem to like all toys, males avoid "girly" toys.

.. And this seems to be news every few months.

How about this? Fully immersive 3d holographic haptic interfaces, loaded entirely from the cloud? That's going to take a lot of data to do right.

I'd say, less than 5 years: http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

That is why humans should try to stick their "ethnic ancestor" foods. [begin personal rant] Indian Indians (not American Indians) went through so many cycles of feast and famine. Only those who had the ability store fat in the times of plenty survived the lean times. When they get F-1 visa, then green card then citizenship and melt into the melting pot guzzling beer, eating pizza, their genomes are still gearing up for the next famine that could be just round the corner. Heart disease and diabetes is rampant among the immigrants from historically impoverished ethnic groups are very very susceptible to diseases of the plenty. Your body evolved to eat what your grandpa and his grandpa ate. If they eschewed bacon, stay clear of bacon. If they ate rice and lentils and ate samosa and jamoons only on festival feasts, you would do well to do the same. Stop ordering dessert in every meal and pigging out in the 9$ lunch buffet with unlimited mango lassi at India Palace. [end rant]

You're half right, though the issue might not be genetics but eipgenetics. Malnourishment while the mother is pregnant seems to affect the development of the feotus and make it prone to obesity. This makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary sense as ethnic groups will go through many cycles of bounty and famine through the generations, the best strategy isn't to chase an oscillating target, but to optimize your current build to whatever the most current conditions are.

. Note that the article also suggests that not all neanderthals were white, either. Note also that other traits often erroneously claimed to be neanderthal (blond hair, red hair, blue eyes) have again been shown not to be part of the neanderthal genome.

And Lamarckism is still thought impossible

Maybe not according to the recent work done in epigenetics. Of course, everything is open to both corroboration and interpretation.

The problems with taking this article to mean what Lamarckism people would dearly love for it to mean are:

(1) It applies to memories, not to morphological traits; Lamarckism is specific to inherited morphological traits on the basis of environmental pressures.

(2) "it may give the sheen of respetability" - a "sheen" is not the same thing as actually being respectable, and "may" is not the same as "does".

Come back with a multigenerational study that demonstrates a change in morphology (such as those Dr. John Legler was attempting, and failed to demonstrate, with Chelodina Longicolis in the early 1980's), and we can perhaps revisit the subject.

And Lamarckism is still thought impossible

Maybe not according to the recent work done in epigenetics. Of course, everything is open to both corroboration and interpretation.

According to this article, Johnny Christian and Mary rotten may both want to use the same ISP.

> Do you even know why?
> Germany's CO2 emissions grew for several years after implementation of these policies.

Seems like you have a narrative that isn't universally agreed upon.

When I google for "german co2 emissions" I find a number of articles that offer a different explanation for the current situation. They put the blame on Fukushima, saying that the rise in CO2 corresponds with the decommissioning of 8 out of Germany's 17 reactors in the post-fukushima hysteria. They say that solar has primarily replaced what was formerly nuclear with the difference being made up by increased coal that was previously scheduled to come online hence increased CO2.

While AmiMoJo is probably wrong about solar making coal and nuclear unprofitable, it seems the weird taxation is really just an indirect way of paying for solar to replace nuclear rather than for solar to replace coal.

If artificial sweeteners are actually giving some people diabetes by disrupting their sugar absorption, then that is indirectly leading to their weight gain through the problems caused by diabetes or at least a diabetes-like state in their blood stream. It doesn't mean that the artificial sweetener itself is directly causing the weight gain.

Disappointed this submission didn't link to the article in New Scientist which does a better job explaining the paper.

There's been multiple studies on the issue and both sides claim there's no harm, there is harm. Many diabetes studies say the diet soda sugar passes right through you.