Slashdot Mirror

Why are so many people trying to ban Neonics?

Look up when the patent expires on them: 2019.

What if I told you they have not been found to cause colony collapse disorder (CCD) but antifungals are that also take out the immune system leaving to the host prone to infection it could normally fend off.

It's not just the bees, this is happening to amphibians, bats, coral and in some cases man. Next time somebody tells you a gas or heat is killing corals... go look up the necropsy. No it is not, it's the damn antifungals.

http://www.plosone.org/article...
https://qz.com/107970/scientis...
http://rs79.vrx.palo-alto.ca.u...
http://www.gbr.qld.gov.au/docu... (July 2016)
http://www.gbr.qld.gov.au/docu... (May 2016)

Compare this with Cuba.

http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

What I wonder about is if Vegan causes mental illness or if it is the other way round?

          The Association between Eating Behavior and Various Health Parameters: A Matched Sample Study
http://www.plosone.org/article...
        side-effects-of-vegetarianism
http://www.womenshealthmag.com...

Thank you. So this expands on a 2009 study including one of the same authors (Holmes) that preliminarily concluded the same thing back in 2009 (ref).

There is good evidence that vegans have higher rates of mental illness - the question is if it is a cause or an effect?

Nutrition and Health – The Association between Eating Behavior and Various Health Parameters: A Matched Sample Study

http://www.plosone.org/article...

Also - from the abstract : ...Moreover, our results showed that a vegetarian diet is associated with poorer health (higher incidences of cancer, allergies, and mental health disorders), a
higher need for health care, and poorer quality of life. Therefore, public health programs are needed in order to reduce the health risk due to nutritional factors.

The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.

Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?

Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.

And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.

Facebook can be useful if you have this problem: Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Do you want to be miserable like everyone you see around you? Facebook has an answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

How to avoid the abusers:
Adblock Edge
NoScript
Ghostery
Better Privacy
Cookies Manager Plus (Does not delete one particular Google cookie.)

"monstrous surveillance engine" He left out evil. Should be: "evil monstrous surveillance engine"

But Facebook can be useful: Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Do you want to be miserable like everyone you see around you?

Facebook has an answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Do you want to be miserable like everyone you see around you?

Facebook has an answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

The weird part of TFA is how exact their numbers are.

"about 83 percent"

The actual article is available for free.

Basically, the "about 83 percent" thing comes from their (not-so-detailed) theoretical model that predicts an exponent of 5/6.

I suspect that a LOT of averaging went on there. And more than a little bit of "toss out the 'data scatter'". Which gives them the "mathematical rule".

Well, as mentioned, the exponent comes from a theoretical model, so it didn't come from averaging empirical data but rather an a priori model. You can judge the amount data fit going on in their scatterplots on page 8.

You can also see from there and various tables that the actual exponent varies quite a bit. (Even their model says it should be somewhere between 2/3 and 5/6, which is already a big range.)

In any case, I think they found evidence to satisfy the basic common-sense observation that city area should grow somewhat slower than population (though not ridiculously slower). I say "common sense," because people want to maintain proximity to stuff in the city center -- and also the fact that a not insignificant part of cities is taken up by places that aren't residences, which presumably grow "busier" rather than immediately larger proportional to the population. Also, that "busy-ness" gives motivation to figure our architectural and infrastructure ways to make space more efficient -- in small cities, there's little need or money/resources to worry about such things.

The paper cited in the article is open access.

Parent is likely a troll, but I'm going into the numbers.

From 1980 to 2008, the average investigator age at NIH has gone from 39 to 51. Source: http://www.plosone.org/article...

In 1980, I had to derive the damn number (http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1982/07/rpt2full.pdf), the median worker age is approximately ~31, while the 2013 average worker age is 42.4 (http://www.bls.gov/cps/industry_age.htm).

The average age of workers has increased by 11 years while the average age of investigators has increased by 12 years.

Research grants are a "winner take all" system where the total amount of research money is roughly constant (http://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/NIHfunding-fig1.png). Essentially, the older researchers are displacing the younger ones in the field through simply outcompeting for funding and working longer careers. Younger researchers, without funding, simply leave the field, as the old eat the young for breakfast.

False, it's a harmless side effect of a useful trait.

The researchers posted a video describing the observed differences: http://www.plosone.org/article...

"Ask any person that suffers shingles, virus populations in West Africa may evolve a less lethal variety of Ebola... but I am not going to bet on it."

Actually the lethal strains of EBOV are a mutation of the Asian strain we know as "Reston" which is harmless. It does not encode for selenium.

When the virus made it to the selenium rich soils of West Africa it mutated picking up the encoding for a homologue of the human selenoenzyme glutathione peroxidase (GPx3) which makes it lethal. See: http://orthomolecular.org/libr...

"The only hope for people with regard to HIV & Ebola consists of social changes an if we are lucky immunizations"

There can be no working vaccine; you can induce production of antibodies, but absent sufficient serum selenium the immune system cannot out-compete the virus foe the precursors for GPx3 and the it all goes downhill from there. One researcher has stated "Ebola strips selenium from the body so quickly it does in a day what HIV takes 10 years to do".

The hope for patients with HIV and EBOV lies in the coastal forests of West Gabon. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...
http://en.ird.fr/the-media-cen...
http://www.plosone.org/article...

Its worse than that. Traders have been shown to be potentially even worse than a random investment strategy.

http://www.plosone.org/article...

From the conclusion:
"The average percentages of wins for the five strategies are always comparable and oscillate around , with small random differences which depend on the financial index considered."

"The second important result is that the fluctuations of the random strategy are always smaller than those of the other strategies (as it is also visible in Fig. 9 for the case ): this means that the random strategy is less risky than the considered standard trading strategies"

If he is, he has the weight of evidence supports him.

http://www.plosone.org/article...
In short, after factoring in the higher costs of using GM seed, GMO crops help developing farms substantially. Even more so than the farmers in developed markets.

Why have public relationships? Public internet relationships are a fad of fake, self-destructive behavior, like the way women dressed in the 1950's.

All of the LinkedIn requests I've ever received have been attempts to pretend that a relationship exists that is more meaningful than in reality.

Sometimes a large percentage of people do crazy things. Don't follow them. I have friends, customers, and business contacts who sometimes read and reply to only the first paragraph of an email, and don't read the rest. It's part of the nonsense of the times.

I told a dentist with a Facebook page that Facebook was showing an ad for another dental clinic on his Facebook page. The dentist just accepted the abuse.

The free open source diaspora* social network software allows privacy.

This book is about the development of Diaspora: More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook. The book is poorly written by someone with no programming experience and no interest in learning, but it does tend to show the difficulties of developing software.

Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Facebook is the answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

The first result in a Google search for 50's clothing and hairstyles says, "Ever ready to suffer for the cause of soft feminine looking Fifties styles, after the perm, we still had to roll, curl our hair." A Wikipedia article says, "One ingredient in 1950s hair spray was vinyl chloride monomer; used as an alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), it was subsequently found to be both toxic and flammable."

Avoid the craziness you see around you.

Who needs social networks online?

Facebook solves a very serious problem. Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Facebook is the answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

Wasn't there a news story a few weeks ago that the loss of the sense of smell was strongly correlated with mortality within 5 years? It's apparently totally debilitating psychologically.

OK. I'm happy to look unto it. Please provide details, because I can only find negative replications e.g Richie, Wiseman and French. http://www.plosone.org/article...

Contrary to all the speculative guesses in the comments, the researchers do have a hypothesis for this.

From the linked PLOS article:

Unique among the senses, the olfactory system depends on stem cell turnover, and thus may serve as an indicator of deterioration in age-related regenerative capacity more broadly or as a marker of physiologic repair function

First off, the original article is open access at PLOS ONE here: http://www.plosone.org/article...

The summary statement, "The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells", implies several things that are misleading and/or totally untrue.

The tip of the olfactory nerve is the olfactory epithelium, where the olfactory sensory receptor cells are located. The olfactory nerve travels through the cribriform plate, a porous area of skull, where it then synapses with the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb has several cell types, and only one of these, inhibitory granule cells, is continually regenerated via neuroblasts migrating along the rostral migratory stream from the sides of the lateral ventricles. These cells are thought to play a role in associative learning and coding of new olfactory cues. The olfactory nerve does not have a capacity for self-renewal, nor do any of the olfactory receptor cells.

Furthermore, there is more than one area where neurons undergo continual self-renewal. The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus also fosters a neurogenic niche, and these new cells have important implications for learning, memory, stress, and emotion that we are just beginning to understand.

Thirdly, we don't really know if neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb has anything at all to do with the observed results because this was not measured in the study, but it is a plausible hypothesis for future study.

As a side note, one of the very intriguing aspects of neurogenesis is that after cortical injuries such as trauma or stroke, neuroblasts from the ventricles migrate toward the lesion, rather than toward the olfactory bulb. These cells are capable of forming electrochemically active synapses at the lesion site and appear to aid in recovery. Unfortunately, astrocytic scarring and inflammation limit the regenerative capacity of these cells - but this is an area of intense research in the field of neurotrauma. My current (undergraduate) research is focused on analyzing the effects of post-injury recovery environment (for rats) on subventricular and hippocampal neurogenesis.

For a good summary on neurogenesis:
http://chuang01.web.wesleyan.e...

You should read the study, not the article about the study, if you are going to criticize it. The thing you quoted was about harassment, not assault.

http://www.plosone.org/article...

"Have you ever experienced physical sexual harassment, unwanted sexual contact, or sexual contact in which you could not or did not give consent or felt it would be unsafe to fight back or not give your consent at an anthropological field site? (If you have had more than one experience, the most notable to you.)"

Is the question about sexual assault.

The grey areas are overwhelmed by the black and white areas. If you feel there are too many grey areas, talk to your manager about getting on a course to help you.

Phrasing of the questions in a survey is important to fully understanding the problem that is being examined. Here are the study questions. Two of the most relevant questions are these:

32. Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at an anthropological field site?

39. Have you ever experienced physical sexual harassment, unwanted sexual contact, or sexual contact in which you could not or did not give consent or felt it would be unsafe to fight back or not give your consent at an anthropological field site?

The PLOS ONE document itself is very thorough, and worth reading through to more fully understand the issue.

Phrasing of the questions in a survey is important to fully understanding the problem that is being examined. Here are the study questions. Two of the most relevant questions are these:

32. Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at an anthropological field site?

39. Have you ever experienced physical sexual harassment, unwanted sexual contact, or sexual contact in which you could not or did not give consent or felt it would be unsafe to fight back or not give your consent at an anthropological field site?

The PLOS ONE document itself is very thorough, and worth reading through to more fully understand the issue.

Regarding anti-vaccination: The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science

Nonetheless, it must be reiterated that we found limited evidence for the rejection of vaccinations based on liberal or “left-wing” political leanings: When free-market worldviews are parceled out (and only then), people on the political left were less likely to endorse childhood vaccinations than people on the political right.

You gotta take the free market types out of the right wing to make it into a "left" phenomenon. This is a misconception that(as the study notes) derives from the fact that the most prominent public proponents come from the fringe left. But when it comes to the general population, rather than the promulgators, it's the conspiratorially minded, regardless of affiliation causing that particular problem.

That's the digested version of the actual article in PLOS One, which isn't paywalled.

One of the coolest parts is the way they instrumented "test rocks" with GPS that could stay powered for very long durations (months/years) from a small battery because of how intermittent the movement is and how remote the location is. The trick was not to engauge the GPS data logging until a magnetic switch was tripped when the rock moved. The magnet was set in the floor of the playa lake, the switch in a hole bored in the rock that also contained the GPS receiver. The instrumented rocks were brought in for the experiment and behaved the same as the natural ones on the site.

According to the info @ http://www.plosone.org/article...

The GMO rice requires much less application of pesticide than the non GMO counterparts (2 applications versus 5)

If the GMO rice is approved then the pesticide industry in China (both local / international vendors) will stand to lose a lot of sales

It could be their lobby which had killed the GMO rice

... but reducing distraction is also important.

Depends on the distraction, because, e.g., looking at pictures of baby animals actually improves the performance.

Oh yes, baby! Bring out the animal in me! Yes!

... but reducing distraction is also important.

Depends on the distraction, because, e.g., looking at pictures of baby animals actually improves the performance.

And as the near immortal Lazarus Long once said, "A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits." The whole "left brain - right brain" concept has been thoroughly disproven BTW. http://www.plosone.org/article...

Government-supported access to contraception is likely highly cost effective - it makes not just intuitive sense, but studies seem to bear this out. Without all the bother of just letting teen moms and their homeless kids, you know, die in the streets and spread measles all around.

Jobs was a right-brain leader. Creativity and creative genius cannot be emulated or duplicated. People should stop thinking that someone can just come in and do the same things he did, think the way he thought. It's impossible. Find another, equally brilliant right-brain thinker and maybe you have a shot at a new era of Apple that is reminiscent of building things around sacred geometry, art and magic - but new and different on its own merits.

Lateralization of the brain is pseudoscience bullshit.
http://www.plosone.org/article...

Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.

I am a strong believer in the "not one cause" theory. Maybe you find the attached article also enlightening. http://www.plosone.org/article...

Look at the graph. Data often clarifies things.

They calculated the mean time between switching to a new screen and then clicking on something on that screen.

Here is the data they collected. Look at it and see if you can figure out where it peaks. What are the things that strike you most about that data? The primary correlation is between skill-level and mean time, if age matters at all it is a far weaker variable.

Looking at the actual data, I would say they've found the age when people stop playing Starcraft; it's a fairly sharp drop-off. And the change in mean-switching-time is not a real effect, merely an artifact of the suddenly smaller data they have around that age. This paper is probably relevant (suggesting scientists often need to improve their statistics).

Furthermore, if you read the actual paper, you have this quote: "A second analysis of dual-task performance finds no evidence of a corresponding age-related decline." So I'm going to say there's not a story here.

The first point is wrong. I can't remember the exact study, but here is one that supports the idea: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015591

> But won't telling the patient "the facts" diminish the placebo effect?

Yep, probably.

http://www.plosone.org/article... is one study that disagrees with that.

No because if you give someone a sugar pill knowingly, then it won't work.

Except when it does.

The placebo effect has been shown to work even when people are told they're receiving a placebo (and yes, they explained what 'placebo' means).

http://www.plosone.org/article...

> If you are honest and actually tell the patient "it's just a sugar pill" then it's not going to have any affect
This paper seems to disagree with you: http://www.plosone.org/article...

A 13 foot long, quarter ton chicken would NOT be the kind of animal I'd want to get angry. Or be anywhere near when it's hungry. Even though this article says they were "ecological generalists that fed upon vegetation, small animals, and perhaps eggs." I wouldn't want to be the one to test whether this bird/dinosaur would decide to add people to its diet.

For a sufficiently large bird, people are small animals!

A 13 foot long, quarter ton chicken would NOT be the kind of animal I'd want to get angry. Or be anywhere near when it's hungry. Even though this article says they were "ecological generalists that fed upon vegetation, small animals, and perhaps eggs." I wouldn't want to be the one to test whether this bird/dinosaur would decide to add people to its diet.

Professor Bob Nagele (from the med school I'm attending now) has had a blood-based Alzheimer's test since 2011: http://www.plosone.org/article...

Using human protein microarrays to characterize the differential expression of serum autoantibodies in AD and non-demented control (NDC) groups, we identified potential diagnostic biomarkers for AD. The differential significance of each biomarker was evaluated, resulting in the selection of only 10 autoantibody biomarkers that can effectively differentiate AD sera from NDC sera with a sensitivity of 96.0% and specificity of 92.5%.

The really spooky view is that we are in some kind of simulation. In that case, if there was a 'cosmic debugger' in action, modifying the world we live in outside of time and space, you might see strange behavior, discontinuities, things that you couldn't really explain using the laws of the simulation. This is really what the religious believe, expressed in a different way. God can't be made of the same goo we are made of.

Another view would be that these myths were invented to describe technology that was not understood at the time. This is the ancient aliens 'hypothesis'.

Both views are probably nonsense. There is a much simpler view. People make up things all the time. In particular, people make up myths to get and hold power over others. We also make up stories to explain things we don't understand. Every religion has a creation myth, but how could they know it? All knowledge is invented. Reality is far too complex to understand; we model it to predict the future, but how well is that going in your life? The models we have are crap, which means that, really, our inventions about reality are all primitive religions. We will never really understand what is going on, because it is simply too hard. The more we see, the more complicated it gets.

So, who knows if whole food is good for you? Not me. Probably not you. I just read that 'scientists' have decided that antioxidents inhibit the natural facility of cell death in cancer stem cells, thus explaining why Finnish smokers who took vitamin E died more frequently from lung cancer. I've also read that fat is not really bad for you, like every nutrition poster I've seen since the 2nd grade has said in bold letters. We trust people to give us advice about what we should do, when they don't know, and really can't know, either. The recent scandal is that much of our research is based on flawed statistical models (using the 'null hypotheses' idea incorrectly), and is thus not reproducible.

In particular, cancer research has some flaws. As a cancer survivor, this troubles me, to say the least. Should I eat fruits and vegetables, or a 'caveman diet', or restrict sugar, or will I get a 'wheat belly', or should I just ignore the entire thing and drink milkshakes made with high fructose corn syrup so my 'cell death facility' will work properly? Nobody really knows, and if they know, it probably doesn't apply to me for some reason they don't know.

The article quoted above points to a paper that has some diagrams that shows how water would go through a branch -- no hoax here.

In brief, find a stalk of sappy wood -- my Dad showed us every spring how to make a whistle out of alder branches that look what the picture shows -- peel it, whittle it to size and then plug it into the end of a tube and gravity feed water through it.

simple...ank

For those that want to read the actual journal article
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0089142

The word hash is never mentioned either :)

But there are some linguistic patterns in it. It also makes sense that the text isn't entirely random, since it would be easier to write something coherent than to come up with something entirely random. It might be the equivalent of Lorem ipsum, but the odds are that it's not entirely random.

Also (speaking from over 40 years pro experience in dogs) as a general rule you will get more cost-effective and often better advice from that old cow vet, who does things the practical way he's found works, rather than the by-the-book way that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars but doesn't really have better results.

And you are right -- a growing proportion of modern pets' medical and behavioral aliments are directly attributable to the spay/neuter craze. A few references:

http://www.associationofanimal...

http://www.plosone.org/article...

http://saova.org/articles/Earl...

http://www.naiaonline.org/pdfs...

Frankly, plastics don't have the valuable electrical properties that we need for truly innovative design.

I think you need to think outside the box a bit. It doesn't have to be metal (although metal has some useful properties other than electrical)... Some plastics can be conductive, and certain conductive materials can be embedded into plastics and integrated into the 3d printing process...

Here's an example of using electro-conductive carbon black in the 3d printing process...