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Nice of TFS to not link to anything describing M-carbon.

Maybe this will help. Maybe it was "common knowledge", but I personally hadn't heard of the stuff till now.

I highly doubt in 25 years the average climate in your region has changes from highs of 80 to highs of 95-99. That would be a cataclysmically drastic climate shift. Even the most alarmist of IPCC scientists is looking at global warming on the scale of 2-3 degrees in 40-50 years. I really wish people would stop blaming hot days on global warming, it just makes us all look stupid. Keep this in mind the next time you have an unseasonably cold day :P

The 2-3 degrees increase is for the average global temperature. The sorts of changes of local seasonal high temperatures have already been seen in the 2003 and 2011 heat waves in Europe.

And while it is difficult to blame particular weather events on climate change it is clear that the last decade of very extreme outlier weather events is attributable to climate change. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22037-climate-change-boosted-odds-of-texas-drought.html

Absent gravity, spider webs are surprisingly symmetrical (a href="http://www.space.com/6142-spider-success-weightless-webs-spun-space.html">Linky).
Mummichogs have been used to study motion sickness in space - they're apparently very adaptable to changing gravitational environments.
As a matter of physics, flight relies on three things: lift, drag and thrust. In space, you don't need lift and drag (since these two factors depend on gravity), you're left with thrust. As birds don't have vector thrusting, I'd think they'd just flap around in fairly straight lines until they collide with walls.

As for the ant question, I refer you to the recent broadcast by Kent Brockman:

"The spacecraft has apparently been taken over - "conqured" if you will - by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

Wait; Bell Labs - the lab which INVENTED the transistor ...(ignoring the Russian guy, named Oleg Vladimirovich Losev who Stalling starved to death during the siege of Leningrad before he could bring it to the world)... and made it possible for you to be typing this... They didn't contribute anything? How about IBM's research, which drove their HDD business to such success that at one point IBM was predicting they would own the entire industry in 6 months (but then IBM's mfg department "lost the formula" i.e. they couldn't upscale their success to larger densities, and IBM sold their entire drive business). How about all the research which has been done by a lot of companies around fiber-optics, which wasn't immediately turned into a product, but which now run the communications backbones of the world?

When you get it it looks like a product; that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of theoretical research done before hand.

As an aside, can you imagine how world history may have been different if Oleg Losev had lived? We may very well have not "won" the cold war, as the impact of the Russians having the transistor decades before us would have had far greater repercussions then just them being able to listen to portable radios before us. One of many of our advantages was that we were using transistors in military technology while they were still using vacuum tubes, whose only advantage was that tubes required less radiation hardening.

Bigotry is a choice. We are not born racist, but many people are conditioned to be so from birth.

Actually, we ARE born racist. A trait which favors people more similar to you is self propagating. Please note that I'm not justifying racism - just pointing out that it's an evolutionary hangover, like many other aspects of our behavior. You might want to take a look at this: implicit.harvard.edu and maybe read this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18761-stranger-danger-at-heart-of-racial-bias.html

Bigotry is a choice. We are not born racist, but many people are conditioned to be so from birth.

Actually, we ARE born racist. A trait which favors people more similar to you is self propagating. Please note that I'm not justifying racism - just pointing out that it's an evolutionary hangover, like many other aspects of our behavior. You might want to take a look at this: implicit.harvard.edu and maybe read this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18761-stranger-danger-at-heart-of-racial-bias.html

One advantage tablets have over laptops is ease of use for people who aren't familiar with computers.

That's obviously just due to simplification of the device to limit it to simple basic tasks. Extend that capability to functionality required in modern education systems and you end up with an inefficient and far less productive device.

The issue here is that tablets don't offer any great benefit we don't already have with laptops, if anything they are less productive.

One advantage tablets have over laptops is ease of use for people who aren't familiar with computers.

One tablet per child laptops are great, but if you've never seen one before, you need someone to show you how to use it. Touchscreens are far more intuitive, which is why Nicholas Negroponte, who founded the One Laptop per Child initiative, is turning his attention to tablets instead:

Together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, he delivered solar-powered tablets to a handful of villages in Ethiopia, one per child. Each tablet was preloaded with educational software, but no instructions, and logged how the children interacted with the device. Within two weeks the children, who previously couldn't read, were using an average of 57 apps each and learning to recite the alphabet.

Read before commenting, please. From TFA:

The fuel cell has no biological components: It consists of a platinum catalyst that strips electrons from glucose, mimicking the activity of cellular enzymes that break down glucose to generate ATP, the cell’s energy currency.

Dude, I am aware of that. In fact it is the specific point we are discussing. See my previous comments in this thread. Karmashock and I were discussing the differences between this technology: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16882-yeastpowered-fuel-cell-feeds-on-human-blood.html which is yeast and feeds on glucose in human blood, and the technology reported in the TFA which has no biological components and uses a platinum catalyst, but operates in spinal fluid.

Karmashock is of the opinion that he prefers the blood-powered technology, even though it has biological components, because he prefers having foreign bodies in his blood to having stuff in his spinal fluid.

Whereas I am more creeped out by the blood-powered technology because it is biologically based (yeast), and so I prefer having the non-biological system from TFA, even though it operates in your spinal fluid.

People are creeped out by different stuff, so it was interesting to discuss.

It's pretty creepy - but I think it is less creepy than the yeast they developed to generate energy from glucose in blood: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16882-yeastpowered-fuel-cell-feeds-on-human-blood.html

At least this solution doesn't involve fungus...

( http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827915.800-live-wires-the-electric-superorganism-under-your-feet.html )

I had to send it back. It uses way too much tape.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15016-humble-sticky-tape-emits-powerful-xrays.html

Today, it's "machines should think, people should work". Consider supermarket checkout. All the smart stuff is being done by the checkout system. The "cashier" just moves items across the scanner. The last production systems recognize products visually, and automatic recognition of fruits and vegetables is in beta test.

For a more extreme example, see this video on robotic order fulfillment. This is a demonstration of how new order pickers can be trained in two minutes. The computers and robots do all the thinking. There's no future. No possibility of promotion. No hope.

Indeed - the US National Academy of Science was asked by Congress to investigate the "hockey stick" and found that it was valid back in 2006.

Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong:

Details of the claims and counterclaims involve lengthy and arcane statistical arguments, so let's skip straight to the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science (pdf). The academy was asked by Congress to assess the validity of temperature reconstructions, including the hockey stick.

The report states: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".

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.

It is true that there are big uncertainties about the accuracy of all past temperature reconstructions, and that these uncertainties have sometimes been ignored or glossed over by those who have presented the hockey stick as evidence for global warming.

Climate scientists, however, are only too aware of the problems (see Climate myths: It was warmer during the Medieval period), and the uncertainties were both highlighted by Mann's original paper and by others at the time it was published.

Update: as suggested by the academy in its 2006 report, Michael Mann and his colleagues have reconstructed northern hemisphere temperatures for the past 2000 years using a broader set of proxies than was available for the original study and updated measurements from the recent past.

The new reconstruction has been generated using two statistical methods, both different to that used in the original study. Like other temperature reconstructions done since 2001 (see graph), it shows greater variability than the original hockey stick. Yet again, though, the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.

In fact, independent evidence, from ice cores and sea sediments for instance, suggest the last time the planet approached this degree of warmth was during the interglacial period preceding the last ice age over 100,000 years ago. It might even be hotter now than it has been for at least a million years.

Further back in the past, though, it certainly has been hotter - and the world has been a very different place. The crucial point is that our modern civilisation has been built on the basis of the prevailing climate and sea levels. As these change, it will cause major problems.

Tobacco smoke is far more dangerous than marijuana smoke (yes, really -- marijuana smoke does contain carcinogens, but even heavy marijuana smokers do not show an increased risk of cancer).

I would rather have a legal, regulated chemical plant producing methamphetamine for people to buy over the counter than the system we have today.

Maybe so, but wait till you legalize marijuana and Philip Morris and friends get their hands on it.

1) Go compare what's in tobacco and what's in cigarettes: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3990-crack-nicotine-in-cigarettes-varies-widely.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16728749
2) Industrially farmed tobacco typically is grown from phosphate fertilizers. That results in higher amounts of polonium in the tobacco. Yes there's plenty of other toxic stuff in cigarette smoke that can increase your odds of getting cancer but polonium certainly doesn't help. Anyone going to bet that industrially farmed marijuana won't concentrate polonium?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/tobacco-firms-kept-quiet-on--polonium-role-in-cigarettes-907194.html/01proctor.html

Not saying marijuana shouldn't be legalized, but that you shouldn't be too optimistic about the results.

Would you like to give a list of trivial patents?

Start here

Does this debate exist anywhere outside the US and maybe some south-american countries? -- I have never seen a trace of it in Europe, (where I live).

Yes, it does. I suspect Jewish creationism is enough of a minority view that the debate isn't huge in Israel, but I might be mistaken there. I don't know how significant Hindu creationism is.

While the authors (as they always do) consider this landmark, I was unable to find any comment on their letter or the preprint (apparently this) in the usual places. This could be in part because it is a) not 'real' and b) doesn't have the words 'Higgs' or 'superluminal neutrino' in the title.

We had an article in New Scientist, which is pretty high profile. Also this truly was a landmark calculation: it was the first realistic decay computed entirely from first principles, combining 40 years of theoretical and computational development and will have a significant impact upon the search for new physics. You are, however, right in that some of the more sensationalist science publishers were likely not interested in this calculation, deeming it not 'sexy' enough compared to the latest untestable-but-cool-sounding theories emerging from the string theory community.

> Some people actually believe that reiki is legit

Just because you've never done distance healing doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Scientists are still ignorant to the causes of electricity, gravity, only discovered 4 of the 6 fundamental forces, let alone don't have a fucking clue what consciousness is, so why are you surprised they don't understand energy healing?

Guess what traditional medicine doesn't always work either.

According to Science the Placebo effect should NOT even exist, but it does.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html

It is a proven fact that the mind can effect the body's biochemistry.
See Morris Goodman's story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfKn92klPeU
http://www.inspiresoul.com/miracle-man-proof-that-your-mind-is-bigger-than-any-science/

Like any modality of healing the standard disclaim needs to apply: Your Mileage May Vary. If it does then great! If not then try something else until it does.

Tossing the baby out with the bathwater just because your dogma of "doesn't work for you" being applied to everyone is plain stupidity and ignorance.

> You cannot obtain a patent on something that is public knowledge.

Yes, it is not like you could just go there and patent a wheel: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html

Actually, I remember reading something in NewScientist (??) about global consolidation, where all the (specialized) nuts and bolts in the world are made by just one or two factories, and there are no redundancies in a lot of sectors anymore because it is cheaper to consolidate specialized manufacturing into one location.

I just hope those locations are disaster proof.

It was in Nevada (and not near any military installation), and I'm pretty sure it was just Joe Contract Trucker.

That wasn't the first time It happened, just the first time I figured out what it was. My Garmin literally had me in North Dakota one minute, then Texas the next. It was useless. The phone simply couldn't get a fix. The Cell towers told it one thing, but the GPS signal said something totally different.

Its becoming a big problem. These units are not hard to find, and the problem is becoming fairly serious as even a cursory Google search will find:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/uk-research-measures-growing-gps-jamming-threat/
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/02/gps-jamming-a-clear-and-presen.html
http://www.jammerall.com/categories/GPS-Jammers/

Yup, that's the crux of the problem. While it may be true, as others say below, that publication bias against negative results occurs in all fields (such as physics) regardless of study funding, what we are seeing now is the influence of pharmaceutical industry funding in the clinical trials used for FDA approval of drugs (that is, a company funding the trial of its own drug).

Specifically, drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies are four times more likely to show a positive benefit than ones funded by neutral sources. This is a problem because nearly two-thirds of clinical trials used for FDA approval are now industry-funded.

So your claim is that no one has ever done a temperature reconstruction going back more than 150 years? Or are you upset that all of the reconstructions have come to the same conclusion? Namely that it's warmer now, we passed the medieval warm period's average temperature decades ago. The graphs on the linked articles show many different reconstructions, but they all agree that the current temperatures are warmer than 1000 years ago. The only thing I could find to indicate that the medieval warm period was as warm (or warmer) than today was what appears to be a doodle with no temperature scale on a site that was directly tied to the Heartland Institute. I don't consider doodles with no supporting evidence to be credible and that's before considering that the Heartland institute has a history of support for creationism, smoking, and politically drivel denial of climate change. I think the best evidence shows that we are likely at a warmer temperature than any other time in the Holocene.

This is the crux of my problem with your argument. You've pre-determined the "relevant period" when choosing your time span (i.e., you've already framed the argument in a way to support a CO2 correlated conclusion).

If you want to study the effects of industrialisation, you're going to look at the period of industrialisation. If you want to study something else, then you choose a different period. If you want to accuse someone of cherry-pick you really do need to provide a reasonable explanation of why the data isn't representative.

Given that there are at least a dozens reconstructions of longer periods. I think your claim that climatologists never look at any scale longer than 150 years has been rather thoroughly debunked.

Cats, power lines and shiny glass buildings kill more birds than wind farms. Of course we don't have that many wind turbines yet, but still the figures don't look that scary. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm

Wind farms apparently do weird shit to bats though: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14593-wind-turbines-make-bat-lungs-explode.html

Actually, the "counting" concept is built on top of sets.

This article about set is pretty good: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128231.400-ultimate-logic-to-infinity-and-beyond.html, so is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting

So, does the question become, is "set" innate?

There can be a cycle of hosts required for an 'infection' in the real world, all of whom are different but vital to the process. And they may be a mixture of flesh and silicon:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16922754.600-press-v-for-virus.html

Rgds

Damon

According to a comment with a link, this gene has been associated with height. Mutations lead to giantism or dwarfism, and apparently some researchers think one variant of it leads to slightly higher mental abilities.

Initially provided by MikhailValerie.

I noticed that it gets even better, if you are a child of these lucky few:

"When people inherit C-variants from both parents they enjoy double the effect: a rise in IQ of about 2.6."

On another note, I noticed the gene in question HMGA2 was previously linked to a person's height. I wonder if an extension of this study would consider any possible correlation between height and intelligence in regards to variations in this gene.

- - -

MV

This article sheds new light on how the amino acids would not have been destroyed right away. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14966-volcanic-lightning-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth.html

agreeded - i want this mixed with the extremely impressive heat sink/fan design where the majority of the heat sink was spun as the blades rather than a fan forcing air on to a surface area..

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/07/new-heat-sink-could-slash-us-e.html

http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2010/100258.pdf

Which should be an extremely cheap design to licence if not free as it was published by a government agency. it's more than 2 years old, requires no new tech to be built, just a difference in how we machine and build parts. why can't we buy these yet? when could we see these made out of this new fun composite compound? do i need to just give up and go down the the local machine shop and make it my self?

they don't say the same thing about the wheel

Cough it up yank, the guy who owns the patent for the wheel lives in my home town.

Interestingly, it turns out that the squirrels (North American ground squirrels, in this case) are even cleverer than that, as the same team at UC Davis have previously shown. When confronted with a snake with infrared sensing organs (i.e. a pit viper, of which rattlesnakes are one variety), they engorge their tails with blood to send that infrared decoy signal. However, when they meet up with other kinds of non-infrared sensitive snakes (e.g. gopher snakes), they only flag with their tails; they don't use the infrared trick as well:

Squirrels wield a hot secret weapon

Why the difference? Presumably because it costs energy to send blood to your tail, where it then cools as it sends out its infrared signal. Thus, in evolutionary terms, it only makes sense to incur that cost if it has an advantage. Since gopher snakes can't sense in the infrared, why bother?

Of course, with respect to the current findings, it suggests that both flagging and infrared decoy measures are important to a ground squirrel, not just the infrared part. Otherwise, why would they bother flagging? Perhaps just because they have fun annoying snakes ...

And while the snakes might come off as just dumb reptiles in this story, let's not forget that those infrared sensing organs are pretty amazing as well. They have limited spatial resolution, but extraordinary temperature resolution, down to 0.001K. Indeed, once upon a time as a PhD student, I calculated that if you strapped a rattlesnake to the back of a 4 metre infrared telescope (!), it could detect the signal from Eta Carinae, one of the brightest infrared stars in the sky. Strap on thousands of rattlesnakes and count when each one rattled its tail, and you could take images :-)

And it's hackable, too: Slashdot submission or the original article, Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz

"The best match for current changes was the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago, when vast amounts of methane were released into the atmosphere causing rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. But even then, it took at least 3000 years for ocean pH to drop by 0.5. "That is an order of magnitude slower than today," Hönisch says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21534-oceans-acidifying-at-unprecedented-speed.html

A key point (indirectly pointed to in the article) is that the *rate of change* of acidity is what's critical. We've got the accelerator floored and we're close to the cliff.

Strongly disagree. It very much is in the surprising category. Back of the envelope calculations made fifty years ago suggested that life and intelligent life should be much more common than they are. (That's why this is the Fermi question, he did essentially make a Fermi calculation). Since Fermi's time, the situation, if anything has gotten more extreme not less so. We know that planets are common, and planets in the habitable zone are not rare See for example, this estimate that gives that about a third of sun-like stars have planets in the habitable zone http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.4682v1.pdf. While there's some criticism of that estimate http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/29/new-study-13-of-sun-like-stars-might-have-terrestrial-planets-in-their-habitable-zones/ even critics agree that that's about the right order of magnitude. . And that's just sun-like stars. This is part of a much larger pattern where stable, Earth-like conditions are increasingly common. For example, for a long time, it was claimed that an Earth-like planet would need a large moon to stabilize the climate and weather enough for life but we now know that that's probably not the case http://www.universetoday.com/91331/life-on-alien-planets-may-not-require-a-large-moon-after-all/. Recent work suggests that red dwarf stars have much broader habitable zones than previously thought http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228374.400-most-common-stars-are-more-lifefriendly-than-thought.html. And all of this is just for Earth-like, carbon-based life operating at temperatures close to those we are used to.

We also shouldn't expect intelligent life to be at or near our own tech level. As a species we are very young. The probability that other intelligent life if is out there is at our tech level is small. If humans are any indication, species which form civilizations can likely take to the stars in the blink of an eye as far as age of stars are concerned. Let's use a hypothetical examples. Humans as a species have been around for around million years (there are definitional issues but this seems like an ok approximation). Now, even if it took another 3000 years to develop effective interstellar travel, that's still about the same amount of time. Traveling then at about a thousandth the speed of light, that would take around 10 million years to spread through the Milky Way. So if intelligent life even remotely like us is out there, we should expect it to have already spread out. But we don't see that.

At a related level, we see no indication of large scale engineering projects. We see no Dyson spheres, or Matrioshka brains or anything else that would be visible to us through our telescopes. And this applies not just to our own galaxy but to neighboring galaxies such as Andromeda. The entire universe looks to our eyes completely natural. And note that while humans have only come up with a few ideas for stellar engineering and similarly largescale projects, we've only been thinking about it for fifty years. This strongly suggests that there are no old civilizations in our neighboring galaxies. Put all of that together and you get that at a galactic level, there's no signs of intelligent life in our entire local cluster. That should be shocking.

Then again, on a biological scale, maybe not so much

\Like, say, patenting the wheel. Sure, that patent was retracted nearly instantly, but it gives you an idea just what kind of idiocy goes on in the patent offices of this world.

Not so much. From your link:

He says that innovation patents are not examined in detail by the Australian patent office. ... The Australian office controlling patents, IP Australia, said that Keogh's innovation patent would not stand if tested in court. However, some still suggest that the innovation patent may be misleading. "Calling it an innovation patent merely serves to confuse the issue," says Geoff Sargent, assistant director of the UK Patent Office. "It's not a patent as would be understood in most countries."

Unlike utility patents, such as the ones at issue in this Slashdot story, that was an "innovation patent". Innovation patents are a registration-only system (Hong Kong has a similar system). There's no examination - you pay your fee, you get your patent... but, unlike real patents that undergo examination, there's no presumption of validity. You sue someone, first you have to prove that your patent is actually novel and innovative, before they even need to respond. Basically, rather than paying $20-25k to get a patent that the defendant needs to defend against, you pay $100 and get a piece of paper saying "you filed an application this day, but no one has looked at it and no defendant needs to defend against it until you prove it's valid".

If patents were actually reviewed by people who have at least a minuscle idea about just WHAT gets patented there, that's what might happen. Since patent clerks are on one hand overworked due to the flood of trivial, ludicrous patents being pushed at them, patent applications being deliberately vague and convoluted and the average clerk not being an expert in the field at hand, things like this can happen.

Like, say, patenting the wheel. Sure, that patent was retracted nearly instantly, but it gives you an idea just what kind of idiocy goes on in the patent offices of this world. And as long as nobody challenges a patent (and what average person or small company has the means to?), a patent stands.

They'll just spam public internet services to suppress what they view as dissent, ramp up coordinated cyber attacks, make their lawyers swear oath to the Communist Party, force real name registration on internet services, continue censorship of social networks when deemed necessary, and continue to massively build out CNO and espionage capabilities, all while on track to exceed even the United States' defense spending by 2025.

But yeah, no big deal.

Needs citation.

There was a case of in-flight wifi systems causing certain new displays to blank out periodically, but:

• The blanking was within spec, and the display returned to function in less than the required time before it would be a problem.
• The culprit was the in-flight wifi system, not an individual's personal electronics
• There is absolutely nothing a passenger could do that would cause a problem like that short of running a super high-powered personal hotspot device while sitting in the very front row of first class.

Your story sounds like an urban legend, especially since there have been many studies that show at worst personal electronics do not interfere at all with any systems.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21544-exercise-instantly-boosts-fatbusting-genes.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=health

Now there is no excuse to avoid the gym: just one hour of exercise instantly changes your genes to boost the breakdown of fat.

Juleen Zierath and Romain Barrès at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues looked for epigenetic changes – the addition of a methyl group to genes – in muscle cells during strenuous exercise. To do so, the team collected biopsies from the thigh muscles of eight men who led relatively sedentary lives, both before and after an hour of exercise.

Several genes involved in fat metabolism that were methylated before the exercise lost their methyl group. Such demethylation allows genes to more easily make proteins, which suggests that more proteins involved in the breakdown of fat are being made after exercise, says Zierath.

The group was surprised to see these effects happen so quickly. They think calcium, produced in muscle cells during exercise, may be involved since subjecting the same biopsies to caffeine – which also increases calcium in muscles – caused the same demethylation.

Unfortunately, you would get caffeine intoxication before gaining the same effects from coffee as an hour-long workout, says Zierath.

Not exactly plain, nose-picker English, but I sorta get it: exercise is good for you.

Someone did patent the wheel, in Austraila in 2001. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html He was trying to point out how poorly Australia new patent system worked.

No, quite untrue. As any fule kno, the wheel was patented in 2001

True global warming "believers" don't believe, they looked at the available evidence and weighed the opinions of experts and came to a conclusion based on facts and consensus.

I'm afraid your wrong on a number of counts.

First, most global warming believers probably hold that belief because that is what teacher said, or that is what they read in the paper, or on the web, and not through an independent review of data, papers, and reports. Although scientists and engineers may find the hard data more approachable, I expect that most of them are still at a casual level of familiarity with the material, not truly informed, let alone expert.

Second, there is something approaching consensus among scientists that the earth has gotten warmer in some measure. That doesn't mean that the data is not without disputes and controversies, including but not limited to data normalization techniques, sources, and transparency.

Third, it is trivially proven that there is no genuine consensus among scientists that the warming is caused by humanity, or what to do about it. There is at best a preponderance of opinion among scientists that it is caused by humanity. It isn't necessarily clear how strongly those views are held.

Now, this is before we consider the troubling revelations of Climategate.

ClimateGate: The Fix is In
Peer Pressure
Peer-Review Thuggery
Scientists Behaving Badly
Without candour, we can't trust climate science
Leaked Emails Raise Questions About NYT’s ClimateGate Coverage

Climategate 2.0

Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world's top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails

Analysis There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.

“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”

Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. I

As mentioned above truckers, delivery van drivers etc can use jammers to hide thier location inadvertantly disrupting critical systems.
"An event last year at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey showed that it only takes one jammer to cause disruption. Airport controllers had installed a new GPS-based landing system, so that aircraft could approach in bad visibility. But it was shutting itself down once or twice a day. It took several months to find the culprit: a driver on the nearby New Jersey Turnpike using a portable GPS jammer to avoid paying the highway toll."

Railroads have enormous infrastructure to maintain and costs of doing that are mostly fixed. Trains demand high utilization to be cost effective. That could be achieved only through massive subsidizing and that is not very popular.

And this will apply to the space elevator too. 96000km of high-tech material out there, which will need to be repaired and maintained (at least checked to see if it needs to be repaired). It's going to take serious wattage to keep a pod moving upwards at 200kph. So you'd either need power cables or "power beaming" (which might prove to be quite dangerous[1]). You may also need stuff at certain points to stop the whole thing from "twanging" like a poorly damped guitar string ;). Conducting part of the ionosphere to the ground might be a source of power, but also a source of problems.

I wonder how much the interest on the loan to build it would be.

[1] If the ribbon wiggles a bit, you can't zap it, or there goes your investment.
Make sure you test the ribbon material against bright light and other damaging stuff: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2219-nanotubes-go-flash-bang-wallop.html

IMHO?

The only "realistic" interstellar space vessels that make sense would be captured asteroids utilizing Orion-like propulsion. I haven't looked at the maximum possible mass of an Orion-type spacecraft, but I believe it is substantially above billions of tons if you only have to consider the pusher plate system. Advances in material sciences, and the possibility of "super" systems strengthened utilizing magnetic/electrical charges could dramatically increase this number further, to the point where even the largest of asteroids could potentially be utilized as space craft.

These asteroids would be wired and covered with a variety of useful mounts, including lasers on turrets, a variety of sensors and cameras, railgun-style mass drivers, and a variety of openings protected by plasma windows. On sufficiently large asteroids, these openings could include hangars for auxiliary craft, such as surface to space launchers, and versatile, high-speed drones. Drones could be utilized as scouts, remote sensors, maintenance devices, or perhaps, weapons platforms (suicide or otherwise).

If you needed to militarize such a craft, you wouldn't have to do much. Many of the "tools" on this craft would be versatile enough to be utilized as weapons. A railgun, or sufficiently strong utility laser would be obvious. By virtue of utilizing an asteroid as your "hull", a significant amount of armor is "built in". Turrets/Windows etc. . . could be protected by a variety of means. The above-linked Plasma Window, as well as a variety of Plasma Bubble research suggests to me that the possibilities of creating mixed-phase materials that can be oriented into coherent structures using charges and magnetic fields-- by this I am suggesting a "metal" that retains it shape based on charge passing through, and whose tensile strength is determined by a combination of material properties and energy usage. One can envision clouds of plasma, or even clouds of metals/solids/liquids which could be strengthened utilizing such tools. I would think that these "shield" would not be utilized to protect the entire asteroid, and rather be deployed to protect sensitive portions of the asteroid.

Active countermeasures would be important, as well; railguns/lasers could be utilized to divert the course of incoming projectiles, while electronic countermeasures and radios would be utilized to disrupt/confuse enemy sensors. Boarding "combat" drones could be utilized to attack the propulsion, weapon, and control systems of enemy asteroid-ships; these would probably be launched in swarms, and by railgun.

The "vast" nature of space suggests that there could be two different form of battlegrounds. Interstellar distances are too large to be considered battlegrounds; it only really makes sense to consider solar distances. Inside solar systems, combat between, say, Mars and Earth would be a slow affair; I picture rail guns hurtling projectiles at a significant fraction of light, while defense systems utilizing lasers and smaller projectiles fire back to alter the course of incoming projectiles. At closer scales, combat becomes a more conventional affair, and probably looks like a cross between modern carrier combat and drone warfare.

Source codes:
http://drdobbs.com/windows/226700457 (2010)
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=667 (2009)

Raw data:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20739-ok-climate-sceptics-heres-the-raw-data-you-wanted.html (July 28 2011)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/07/28/climategate-researchers-release-long-sought-raw-data-on-global-temperatures/

No need for a public apology for failing Google search.

No idea why ATMs need GPS, but... some went offline when the US Navy was playing with their jammer off the coast of San Diego, CA, USA. Link