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4. I'd either be dead already or vey very sick

4. I'd either be dead already or vey very sick

Really, the New Scientist article is quite good, and I can see where this probably happens all the time, whether it's in hard science, social science, or in this case pseudo-science. People don't take the time to check that their sources are being accurate or honest, and so misinformation easily spreads...

Really, the New Scientist article is quite good, and I can see where this probably happens all the time, whether it's in hard science, social science, or in this case pseudo-science. People don't take the time to check that their sources are being accurate or honest, and so misinformation easily spreads...

The paper raises some valid questions however, including the general point that statistical analysis of misprints can give an insight into the process of scientific writing.

It's rather funny because the misrepresentation of this paper in the New Scientist raises the larger question about the meaning of 'reading a scientific paper'.

For example, you could have one person who just runs their eyes through a entire paper on autopilot, without thinking about it much. Another might very carefully read just a tiny section. To what degree have each of these people legitimately read the paper that they cite?

In these days with the explosion of knowledge and correspondent explosion in pages and pages of references in scientific papers, perhaps there needs to be a revamp in the standards for citations. For example, how about an extra sentence in each citation which explains the relevance of the citation to the author's own paper? I know that would certainly make citations a lot more meaningful to me when I scan through them.

mhack

References:

1. Scientists exposed as sloppy reporters , Hazel Muir, New Scientist, 9:3014December02. This is the reference to the New Scientist article which was the main subject of the slashdot post

2. Read before you cite! , Simkin and Roychowdhury.This is the paper which did a statistical analysis of scientific misprints

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

AND FOR THOSE OF YOU IN A HURRY... A- R- T- I- C- L-
E-. -- S-
U- M- M-
A- R-
Y-

Infant rat heads grafted onto adults' thighs

I know what I want for xmas.

This would be really cool if it wasn't so fucking disturbing.

Ignoring the fact that diesel is a fossil fuel, and therefore nasty outright. Diesel (including biodisel) is not the answer. While they do produce 6% less CO2 and can produce 80% less NOX, they produce 25 to 400x more soot (See recent issue of New Scientist). Soot also causes global warming (although it has a shorter lifespan than CO2). It also has severe direct impacts upon human health.

New Scientist article

It would be a great shame to lose the manned presence in space, even if the amount of research they have been able to do is heavily restricted by having a very small crew up there at any one time. The crew is limited by the size of the escape module - currently a Soyuz. It looks like it'll be 2012 by the time the planned NASA replacement escape craft is ready, so they're going to have to come up with something different in the meantime, or the ISS isn't going to fulfil anywhere near it's potential for research.

Paul.

New Scientist publishes a great news service for this sort of thing -- this earlier article discusses some additional dimensions of the accident and the possibility of rescue.

5) The fungus did not eat throught titanium. Mir was aluminum.

6) During periods of high solar activity, astronauts on the space station might get 30 millirems of radiation in a single day. On the other hand, on the surface we pick up 350 millirems from background, and another 150 or so from cosmic radiation in a year. So, ISS occupants do NOT receive the same amount in a day as they would get on the surface in a year.

This technology is much closer to fruition than nanotech. In fact, it is practically around the corner.

Yea, and it doesnt look cool. It looks like someone put todays tech into an 80s series vision of the future. And can it be called a palm anymway?

Next time i buy a PDA it will play Mp3s and answer calls in my teeth, display right on my retina and take input via a projected keyboard. Until then ill stay with my atari portfolio...

cu,
Lispy

Yes, I read the NewScientist Article also. It seems that the random noise signal coming from the vibrating feet ocassionally makes the signals from the foot to the brain large enough to overcome a threshold they were not able to overcome without the noise. Since these signals are used for balance, this makes better balance possible.

Interesting snip:

The volcano is far more powerful than any eruption recorded by scientists on Earth, with an estimated power output of about 78,000 gigawatts. By comparison, the power produced by the last significant eruption of Mount Etna in Italy in 1992 was just 12 gigawatts.

Hey,

Sure, the poles flipping is a very rapid thing on geologic timescales, but we're still talking decades or more.

According to this article, at current rates, the Earth's dipole will disappear within just two millennia.

So I'd say we have a while, yes.

Cheers,

Michael

Can this explain it?:

"A planet's magnetosphere is provided through its magnetic field. To create a magnetic field, a planet or moon must have magnetic material such has iron, which is warm enough to move around to form currents within the planet."

And isn't earth(s core) cooling down? - Can't this affect our magnetosphere? If the magnetic materail stop flowing?


My imaginary plot (IMHO):

Now I'm thinging that when earth switched poles, the core coold down, reversal happened, sometime after that earth got hit by a large enough meteor to restart our core (how elese could the core be restarted? there wasn't atomic weapons and the like back in those days, no! Good ol' fashion meteors had to suffice : )). Then earth keept it's (reverse) position till it coold down again, and re-reversed itself again. Sometime after, BAda'BOOM eine large enough meteor struck again, restarted our engine, and we keept on ticking.... untill soon enough (if we think 1000 year or more is soon..) when our core will stop flowing.

Can someone please look up how long ago earth was struck by a large enough meteor to turn earth in to a giant blob of lava? : )
I put my money on lets say 780 000 to one millon years ago :) (when the last revelsal was presumed to have happened.)


Earth cooling down:

Here's the tricky part; How much must the earth's core cool down for reversal to happen? Because for it to cool down entirilely it will take more than 1000 years.


Reference:
http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/class/100/ interior.html
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/moon/ moon_magnetic_field.html&edu=high
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/physical_sc ience/magnetism/magnetic_materials.html&edu=hi gh
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 92152
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,69 03,837058,00.html

be sure to use only two data points.

according to another article that somebody else linked above, (here) this conclusion isn't based on an ongoing survey of the earth's magnetic field over the last 20 years (as implied by the observer article), but rather on the comparison of current data to a single set of data taken 20 years ago:

But Ørsted is the first satellite to take a snapshot of the Earth's magnetic field for 20 years, and such scant data makes it difficult to predict future shifts.

so while this may make a great shock news story (or hollywood movie plot) it hardly seems like anything approaching significant scientific research worth getting particularly alarmed about.

And here is the link: Poles are about to shift

• BMI Declare that all their future music CDs will be copy protected
• While EMI Germany do likewise, they also insult the complainant. (I'm informed it is even harsher than the translation)
• And soon you won't be able to return the CD if it doesn't work (UK)
• And beware of innovations (this article, beat you to it slashdot - nyah nyah!), as they may be slipping DRM in the back door
• Web radio was getting very popular, everyone was getting in on the act. Not any more. Only the big radio stations still broadcast.
• Microsoft joined the party with their "Trusted Computing" initiative, meaning *you* can trust MS software, Which in reality is a DRM thing (MS software can't trust you)
• Oh, and extending copyright. Courts admit that it can't be extended indefinately, but how long is a piece of string?

• Reuters sued for linking to a URL
• They haven't been the first to be sued for deeplinking. Check out This particularly fine example.
• How a single sniper is more dangerous than all the world's hackers combined

• Getting sued for silence
• Thanks to the CBDTPA, nearly everything *must* embed DRM. This includes cockpit voice recorders, digital speed cameras, hearing aids, and big mouth billy bass
• Even phoning a friend can breach copyright, 2 musicians copyright 100,000 phone numbers (dial tones).

• A review of the technologies shows that it is futile to protect CDs, (based on the assumption that new devices will more likely circumvent protection rather than enforce it)
• Richard Stallman (Free Software advocate) jumps in with a cautionary tale
• And a felt tip pen can bypass some protections

As i understand it, all copy protection that can be read on a standard cd player is weak to begin with. cdroms can read multiple indexes, cd players can only read the first one. but cdroms read the indexes starting from the last and working its way to the first. so most copy protections corrupt the second index so the cdrom will fail. a simple firmware upgrade to the cdrom can fix that and make it read the first index first and move down the list. Interesting article here

I wouldn't hesitate to say that this punk (the customer service rep.) doesn't know what he's talking about... check out this article from New Scientist where John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University, argues that any type of audio-CD copy-protection is futile with the advent of upgradable firmare in CD players. As long as we can reverse-engineer their copy-protection, we can play our CDs in our computers.

I wouldn't hesitate to say that this punk (the customer service rep.) doesn't know what he's talking about... check out this article from New Scientist where John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University, argues that any type of audio-CD copy-protection is futile with the advent of upgradable firmare in CD players. As long as we can reverse-engineer their copy-protection, we can play our CDs in our computers.

I think your suspicion has been confirmed by a this recent New Scientist article. It says one of the Versign root servers was actually moved to a new location so that two servers wouldn't be relying on the same infrastructure. It does not mention the IP change, but it seems to make sense.

"John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University in New Jersey, plans to show delegates at a digital copyright conference in Washington DC next week that the idea of CD copy-prevention is "fundamentally misguided".

In 2001, Princeton University scientists debunked the technology the music industry planned to use to inaudibly watermark sound. Halderman is now doing a similar job on copy prevention systems."

Do you have any idea what "traditional" cancer treatment costs?!? I got about (US) $30K of radiation treatments in one month and I'm pretty sure that 6 months of chemotherapy wasn't exactly cheap. Add in surgery and my personal bill surely tops $60K.

With custom full sequencing coming down in price (see Race for the $1000 genome is on for instance), such custom tailoring of drugs doesn't seem so ridiculous any more.

Yeah, but it helps out those saddos who only ever read /.

BTW, the New Scientist article is here

Dinosaurs were the prehistoric form of birds. If you've ever had your Porsche® automobile or other expensive motor vehicle shat on by a flock of pigeons [google.com], you have been attacked by the descendants of dinosaurs.

Personally, I think it's a response to the general anti-Indian bashing that Indians apparently face on most international newsgroups. Add the fact that India is only now coming out of its socialist hibernation and you have a perfect situation for some oh-I'm-so-Indian chest beating.

True, but this article only gives more ammunition to the anti-Indian bashers. I wouldn't want to be associated with this guy:

a) He's not the first person to make this claim about extraterrestrial microbes.

b) This isn't good science. What, he sticks a balloon above some theoretical "barrier" in the atmosphere, finds some microbes, and then claims they MUST be extraterrestrial? That's a silly claim.

I disagree -- I rather like New Scientist.

All news is created by people whose job it is to take events and make them seem interesting, to sell more issues. As such all news needs to be run past the bullshit detector. But New Scientist conveys science news much more accurately than any mainstream newspaper I've ever seen. And any speculation on their part is appropriately marked with lots of perhaps's, potentially's, etc.

And it contains much interesting stuff besides. Take for example the story in the 19th October issue (the latest that I have here in Australia), on the Lunar Society, a group of 18th century pro-science people. The print edition of the story features a picture of the society by Joseph Derby. Compare this to the cover art of The Science Of DiscWorld.

what, you mean the glue?

Check this article in New Scientist. The researchers have found a way of increasing the effectiveness by a factor of 25 , and it is so easy that the technique could be done on a farm. Incredible. Smells like a revolution to me.

Check this article in New Scientist. The researchers have found a way of increasing the effectiveness by a factor of 25 , and it is so easy that the technique could be done on a farm. Incredible. Smells like a revolution to me.

Quite an interesting article, despite the usual newscientist hyperbole: "The technique is very easy - you could do it on the farm." Umm yeah whatever.

Huh. And the news media refered to our avatar system as an R2D2-like "dustbin on wheels."

Story about Kramnik's blunder costing him a game found here...

ob link since msnbc has seen fit to remove their old stories: featherless chickens

Actually he just won an Ig-Nobel Prize last week for his periodic table table.

Does anybody remember a /. article a while back link to this story about how carbon nanotubes cannot handle bursts of common, ordinary light?

Yes, that's right! A standard camera flash will cause carbon nanotubes to explode!

Check out the link, there's a neat video showing this effect at work.

I can just see it now, on the front page of the newspaper... Tourist arrested for carrying terrorist device and it's just a FLASH CAMERA!

Yeah, I'm excited that the technology to do this is just now barely within our reach - but it'll be a while before it's squarely in our grasp.

for distribution of widely needed information such as news?

I've read nearly 100 comments so far and while many mentioned the inherent flaws in the "massive webserver" model we currently use for virtually all web news traffic, no one mentioned the alternatives. For things like news distribution television and radio have an incredible advantage (they don't have to double any output to reach twice as many people as normal) but peer to peer systems would also work wonders in situations like this.

Maybe that is the rationale behind project IRIS, the recent US government backed research into a complete network founded on the peer to peer methodology.

www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992861

iris.lcs.mit.edu/

The list of winners is available in this New Scientist article.

i submitted that story yestarday. Here is another link from new scientist, "Researchers say this (is an)"extraordinary moment in the history of science"

Actually, weapons like this, for which blinding is likely a very common side effect, are specifically exempted by the geneva convention. See this article in new scientist. They say the reflections could blind people many miles away.

Yow. Here's Cola libre:
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft/
http://www.opencola.com/products/3_softdrink/index .php
Get it while it's there. OpenCola is getting out of soft drinks in favor of software.

I think it's fantastic. I have about 6 sites I regularly view throughout the day (including slashdot and a few science sites). I had, of late, been trying to find other sites that served my surfing style. In particular, sites with headlines that weren't just rehashed news of the other sites I view. Google News is exactly what I was looking for.

Now I start at google and wander to other sites as needed. The list of news feeds to Google doesn't include some of the science sites I enjoy (Nature and New Scientist). It might soon as everyone jumps on the Google wagon.

CNN really sucks about things like this. The New Scientist article is much better.

His team used the 32-metre Medicina radio telescope near Bologna to look for water "maser" emissions. These are telltale microwaves that might come from water in a planet's atmosphere when it is bathed in the infrared light of its star.

Yes, of course we have to do something about places that have unstable, posssibly insane, unelected leaders, maintain massive nuclear stockpiles, regularly violate international treaties, actively block biological and chemical weapons monitoring, fund active space programs and have had a desire to have weapons in space for years (as long as no-one else can have them).