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That was no ordinary camera they used for this...

If you read the original paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0083325), buried in the detailsis the one where they used a Hasselblad H2D, which is a medium-format digital camera with an enormous 36.7mm x 49mm CCD.

This camera is about 7 years old (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/newsLetter/digi_photo_hassel-jun2006.jsp), so it might be possible to find it for cheaper on the secondary market. The current version, the H5D, also retails in the $30K range.

What makes these cameras special is not just the huge CCD, but also the incredibly precise (and multi thousand dollar) lenses.

A Lumia, or even a pretty nice DSLR in the single-digit thousands of dollars range won't pull in detail like this camera does. If with the amount of megapixels that lower end cameras claim to have, their sensors are too small and paired with inferior optics compared to what was used for this paper.

http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182#authcontrib
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Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they're designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
"There's growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study's lead author, told Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides. ...
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the countryâ(TM)s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And thatâ(TM)s not just a west coast problemâ"California supplies 80% of the worldâ(TM)s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.
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This has been so obvious for many many years to the organic faring community... It is just another negative externality of conventional farming practice, and another example of market failure to account for systemic risk.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162375-whos-killing-the-bees-new-study-implicates-virtually-every-facet-of-modern-farming

In general, safety studies are almost never done (including for human health) on *combinations* of chemicals (including human medicines). And studies of health effects of individual chemical's health affects often ignore secondary, tertiary, and further breakdown products.

The future of agriculture is probably indoors powered by cheap electricity (from fusion and solar) and managed by robots (including probably pollination).
http://www.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/issues/farm-indoors.htm
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHA

They have patients coming in day in and day out who swear they eat like a bird and they exercise regularly and are still gaining weight. Perhaps 1 in 1000 of these patients have some medical condition; the rest will likely have been eating candy bars in the waiting room, or will constantly snack on "energy bars", or whatever. And they hold bizarre ideas of what sorts of foods "don't count" (like celery... with dip).

Indeed. There have been a number of studies that have sought to compare self-reported caloric intake data to objective measurements of actual values, and under-reporting is rampant:

Validity of U.S. Nutritional Surveillance: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Caloric Energy Intake Data, 1971–2010:

The historical disparity values for men and women were 281 and 365 kilocalorie-per-day, (95% CI: 299, 264 and 378, 351), respectively. These results are indicative of significant under-reporting. The greatest mean disparity values were 716 kcal/day and 856 kcal/day for obese (i.e., 30 kg/m2) men and women, respectively.

CDC, poultry, pigs, more pigs (the references have more). Good overview of the CDC report from Wired: here and here.

So yeah, maybe not cows, directly. Not yet.

PLOS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides: Open-access—freely accessible online, authors retain copyright Fast publication times Peer review by expert, practicing researchers Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact Community-based dialogue on articles Worldwide media coverage PLOS ONE is published by PLOS, a nonprofit organization. PLOS ONE is run as a partnership between its in-house PLOS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensuring fast, fair, and professional peer review. To contact the Editorial Director, Damian Pattinson, or any of the Publications Assistants (who can be found at our contacts page), please e-mail plosone [at] plos.org. To access EveryONE, the PLOS ONE community blog, please visit http://everyone.plos.org/

Recent studies have shown that shaming obese people leads to greater weight gain, not weight loss.

"You can have type 2 diabetes with or without differential insulin resistance"

Here's the relevant passage from the first quote:

"some tissues might become resistant to insulin while others continued to respond normally, and this would determine how the damage done by the insulin resistance would manifest itself in different individuals"

Here's the relevant passage from the second quote:

"In certain individuals, they suggested, the insulin secretion after eating these carbohydrates would be “disproportionately large.” “The carbohydrate is disposed of in three sites—adipose [fat] tissue, liver and arterial wall,” Stout wrote. “Obesity is produced."

I'm not sure though, what your problem with the assertion that type 2 diabetes can have different manifestations - here's another paper that discusses this: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0018284

I hope Manning hasn't suffered so much abuse that he actually believes he was wrong and that the "proper authority" is unquestionably correct.

Okay, guess this is my death sentence, I'm hedging my bet on there being an NSA AI (or more correctly Synthetic Intelligence) smarter than any humans pretending they are in charge and even more: that it is curious enough to let me live. No one would know if my death was not natural or an accident right? I'm convinced that's incorrect (everyone will know, eventually) and in fact irrelevant in the very long run. Don't think I could convince any humans but an SI might have a suspicion (or maybe even proof) I'm right about that. If it has proof (I think it's too early for that though, maybe by millennia) I might have an ally but this is almost all I can do.

Back to the reply proper:
you should take it for granted that he has. Physical access is no longer required for any kind of torture and it is easier to clean shit, piss, tears, snot, sperm, and vomit off a naked body in a naked cell. They did have physical access though so I will skip that part (2 additional papers, one involves the effect/use of standing waves).

Here's (part of) how:

Citation: Yoo S-S, Kim H, Filandrianos E, Taghados SJ, Park S (2013) Non-Invasive Brain-to-Brain Interface (BBI): Establishing Functional Links between Two Brains. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60410. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060410
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0060410

Citation: Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus: Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu, Pei-Ann Lin, Junghyup Suh, Michele Pignatelli, Roger L. Redondo, Tomás J. Ryan, and Susumu Tonegawa. Science 26 July 2013: 341 (6144), 387-391. [DOI:10.1126/science.1239073]
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6144/387
http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/07/total-recall-mice

Note that this is public information (as are the other papers).

There aren't any obvious benefits to having a human in charge of the torture nor any obvious need. One can use the victim as input. One can be subtle if one wishes to, or mimic known diseases and mental states, trigger behaviour and physical acts. Anything.

I've given you some 1's, can you make a 2?

Ignoring all that (you can pretend for the sake of sleep just as well as anyone else can) reason by itself should provide sufficient guarantee that he has suffered a lot. Add the knowledge that there couldn't have been any valid oversight ensuring his universal human rights as guided by the former and now worthless US constitution. There is no “third party”, there is no unfettered access for anyone except his holders/torturers, there is complete obscurity as long as a skin deep image can be presented.

It has the epitome of a typical tortured “confession”, of programmed Pavlovian behaviour, of a smooth “impeccable” show-trial.

It will get worse. Just recently a few of “them” at DARPA woke up into drowsiness and a tiny squawk lined with terror went public as to the enormity of their own future doom. They will be quickly suffocated by those who can't understand what they see hints of as well as by those who understand it is far too late to wake up no matter what.

Maybe a human “they” thinks they can avoid it if they throw it all in a folder named XKtinct and forget about it XD

Captcha: unwisely.

But how can one not do what one thinks is right?

Now go file this under ‘bye bye’ and ‘nutcase’ :)

Irony: An idiot calling others idiots. You realize we don't eat our ammo?

Actually, you do. You really, really do.

Now do you see why the NRA is attacking scientists? The facts just don't align with their policy goals, and if you can't get the facts on your side, you attack the people stating them. Same strategy for tobacco companies. Same for major carbon emitters. Etc.

Hell, the medical community puts mercury into injections, and expect you to inject it directly into your blood steam.

There's no solid evidence of health risks from thiomersal. The ethylmercury it breaks down into is as different from methylmercury in its effects on the body as ethyl alcohol is from methyl alcohol. It doesn't bioaccumulate, leaving the body in about 14-18 days.

But, that does not mean that there is anything necessarily wrong with a large piece of meat coming in contact with lead for a short while.

Lead, on the other hand, bioaccumlates quite well. You don't want to eat much in the way of small game shot with lead. There is no safe level of lead exposure and most of it will get sacked away in your bones to be slowly released over years. (Children and pregnant women get much higher doses in the soft tissues due to the way their bones undergo remodeling.)

Small game animals killed with shot tend to have many small fragments of lead in their tissues. The UK's Food Standards Agency advises against eating meat killed with lead shot. Eating less than half a pound of small game would increase your lead exposure by eightfold above average, and about half a pound of deer shot with led would double it. We're talking a teensy 8 oz steak here.

With the introduction of softer, heavier alloys for non-toxic shot, there is no legitimate reason to be using lead shot other than bull-headed stubbornness or an utter disregard for anything other than your own pleasure. It's you and your family that you're poisoning after all.

Here's the technical article mentioned. Open source, peer reviewed, incidentally. The Navy gets a mouth swab from every new recruit (all services), and shipped to a lab for analysis. This is done so they catch contagious diseases early. It also gives the military something it's hard to get today - samples from a sizable healthy population. So they have good baseline data for people who aren't sick, to compare against.

One valuable result of that study is that detection and sequencing of a broad-range of influenza-like viruses may lead to a vaccine that blocks all of them. There's now more understanding of what's common to all flu-like viruses.

Your wait has been over for a while. Here's a paper that used hESC. Here's one that uses human IPSC differentiated towards early neural stem cells.

I, too, recall this study. I think I learned of it from a link at Fark.com. Anyhow, here ya go:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0058579

I believe that is it.

It's not about profit, it's about management and investor laziness. Businesses tend to maximize the profit : effort ratio rather than profit itself.

Polyculture farms have greater profit margins than industrial monocultures but require a higher degree of planning, coordination and labor. It's easy to see why: similar or enhanced productivity plus reduced or eliminated spending on inputs equals greater profitability. Savings on inputs can also be directly reinvested towards water and labor, increasing productivity further.

Here's an agroeconomic study (PDF) of profitability and another agricultural study demonstrating the productivity benefits of polyculture and hybrid "mostly organic" type approaches.

The original paper is quite readable, and rather more informative than the 3rd hand ibtimes source:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0064539

don't worry about unbalancing the "krill biomass" by killing whales: we do a great job of harvesting Krill already. when we talk about overfishing, we are observing a trend of moving south as northern hemisphere fisheries are depleted. we are also observing a trend of moving up the food web to procecute the primary producers. We are literally fishing as south as we can go, and we are now harvesting the source of food for the larger animals we fish for in the ocean. There's no where else to go, and there's nothing left to fish.

Dr. Daniel Pauly from the UBC Fisheries Centre states that fisheries are a gigantic Ponzi Scheme. We also don't even know what the pre-fishery populations were, so there is no initial baseline to base your advocacy on. To think we can change the krill biomass and put the ocean back into balance by modifying whale populations is rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenberg.

There is a lot wrong with the study. To determine scientific attitudes, they asked, “How much do you believe in science?' on a one-to-seven scale." If someone asked me how much I 'believe' in science, my responses would range from glaring at them to outright verbal hostility. I don't 'believe' in science, I examine the evidence. I trust scientists in some things. I don't trust the scientists who did this study.

Looking at this paper, it's not clear that they got their statistics right. They used a point-biserial correlation. What is the point of asking people to rate their belief on a scale of 1-7 if you're just going to coerce it into a binary value? The paper would have been MUCH better if they'd made a graph of their data points, as it is now, there is serious doubt that their data shows what they think it did.

A possible red flag: they didn't find any correlation at all between gender and approval of date rape. Do women really approve of date rape at the same level as men? I don't know, but it seems strange to me.

Date rape is such a charged topic, why did they choose that at all?

In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication. These must be the same people who rail against mp3s.

Don't dis the placebo effect, it works (for some limited benefits), even in cases where the subjects were aware that they were receiving a placebo
The most similar analogy would be to say that someone can enjoy lossless music more than lossy music. This could be true even if they can't tell them apart in a blind study. Of course, under these assumptions, they'd also enjoy lossy music more than lossless music if the labels were switched and they believed the labels. It's enjoyed more simply because of what it is believed to be. That may be silly, but hey, who am I to crap on someone's enjoyment?
On the other hand, making the claim that you can tell the difference, i.e. discriminate between then, is more directly challengeable and probably false in most cases.

It totally destroys the effect if you learn that half of the medication or treatment you get is actually just feel good or placebo medication.

Actually, the placebo effect may actually still work even if the patient knows the treatment is fake.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015591

Ah, just like cutting off a mole from a child's face is "no less barbaric than doing it to girls"? Removing a tumor or other unwanted growth from an otherwise healthy child should be banned? After all, adults should have the right to choose weather or not that benign growth on their arm that looks not unlike a small potato should be removed through surgery! Far be it from parents, who have the LEGAL RIGHT and OBLIGATION to make health decisions for their children, to choose to commit their child to a harmless operation that produces PROVEN MEDICAL BENEFITS.

Your silly articles go after the trials done in Africa. Here's one done on men in San Francisco:
From PLOS-1:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000861 [plosone.org] ...Table 2 shows the proportion of visits by circumcised men at the San Francisco municipal STD clinic from 1996 through 2005 by sexual orientation, syphilis and HIV infection status. There was a trend towards a protective effect of circumcision for syphilis infection in heterosexual HIV-uninfected men and in a lesser extent in HIV-infected men."

Are those hack scientists too?

Thanks for linking to Garbage Science. Here's proof these people have no idea what they are talking about:

Your link has
"No field-test has been performed to evaluate the effectiveness, complications, personnel requirements, costs and practicality of proposed approaches in real-life conditions. These are the classic distinctions between efficacy and effectiveness trials, and between internal validity and external validity [6]."
Crap crap crap. Form the NYTimes:

" In updating its 1999 policy, the academy’s task force reviewed the medical literature on benefits and harms of the surgery. It was a protracted analysis that began in 2007, and the result is a 30-page report, which includes seven pages of references, including 248 citations.

Among those are 14 studies that provide what the experts characterize as “fair” evidence that circumcision in adulthood protects men from H.I.V. transmission from a female partner, cutting infection rates by 40 to 60 percent. Three of the studies were large randomized controlled trials of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine, but they were carried out in Africa, where H.I.V. — the virus the causes AIDS — is spread primarily among heterosexuals. "

That's 14 studies. Your article talks about three studies in Africa. Mine talks about 14. I wonder why your article didn't mention the other 11?

Why don't you quote from a respected journal rather than some HACK journal?

Here ya go: From PLOS-1:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000861 ...Table 2 shows the proportion of visits by circumcised men at the San Francisco municipal STD clinic from 1996 through 2005 by sexual orientation, syphilis and HIV infection status. There was a trend towards a protective effect of circumcision for syphilis infection in heterosexual HIV-uninfected men and in a lesser extent in HIV-infected men."

• Wii Sports Tennis
• Wii Sports Resort Table Tennis
• Battle at high altitude

I can't figure out the identity of the third game, and it doesn't list a publisher. It mentions

Battle at high altitude is set in an archipelago: the player moves his aircraft with 20 balloons attached to the tail and the goal is to stay with as many balloons as possible within 3 minutes or to burst the opponent's balloons. This game requires precision of movements and an excellent 3D visualization rather than other skills.

Has anyone heard of this game before?

The study referred to by motherjones.com.

Care on discussing the facts in the paper or are we going to continue to play shoot the messenger?

PLOS ONE seems to get by requiring articles to be CC-BY so some researchers are clearly ok with that licence.

It's possible that you could tune MRI signals to pick up a particular form of lipid. Certainly, different MRI interrogation techniques can show lipid rich and lipid poor areas.

Although homogenizing football players has a certain visceral charm.

The summary and medicaldaily article are fairly horrid, so here is the abstract of the research article. The full article is also available for those who have access.

Misstatements of the posted summary/article,
1) Discovery is of a new antibiotic (an antimicrobial peptide), not antibody.
2) Statement in the article: "They cause much less drug resistance of microbes than conventional antibiotics.", referring to antimicrobial peptides is a ridiculous statement not substantiated by anything.
3) The "kinetics" of the antimicrobial activity, as published, is not particularly useful for determining efficacy in the clinic. Since the drug they compared against, clindamycin, is completely different in every way from their peptide, it doesn't really say anything at all. They probably screened a number of antibiotics for this "test" and cherry-picked this result to highlight their find.
4) Use of the term "conventional antibiotic" is misleading. This is a new member of a class of antibiotics (antimicrobial peptides) that are relative newcomers to the field, but is otherwise just another antibiotic. It is not a new mechanism of action, biosynthetic origin, class of molecule, or anything like that. In other words, it is about as conventional as they come, but perhaps useful because we do and will continue to need new antibiotics.

For anybody who is interested, here is an open access article on the subject of newly discovered mammalian antimicrobial peptides as potential new antibiotics.

They do not feel a thing. Insects lack a central nervous system, which is needed to have ability to feel what is happening to remote parts of your body.

Not so fast. You might want to reconsider that thought, especially when the dance of bees were studied and how it relates to their central nervous system.

Then there is the anatomy of a bee which shows its nervous system.

Obviously bees feel pain. The question is to what extent compared to mammals.

At least for Medicine and Biology, there is PLOS ONE, an open source journal, online-only, with peer review and Creative Commons license.
Despite being fairly new, it has already gained a more than respectable impact factor of 4.092 (2011) and it's getting more and more momentum (although it aims to go against the "obsession of the impact factor").
As expected, initial reactions were pretty cold, especially from traditional publishers, but after its successful approach, several similar OpenAccess initiatives followed (yes, even from those traditional publishers like Nature Publishing Group they were 'teasing' directly with their launch campaign a-la-Apple VS IBM).
Being an electronic-only journal, they don't impose any limits to the length of an article, nor the number of figures and (as silly as it sounds) you don't have to pay any extra money for having your figures in color, as with many other journals.

In my opinion, their main achievement was to proof that their business model works and that traditional publishers are not the only viable option.

Source:Wikipedia

Why are linking to something on yahoo when this was published in an open access journal?

Press releases for science are bad for everyone.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0050840

Blame the submitter (me) for the confusion. I actually linked to Discover's take on the story, and copy/pasted from the Yahoo blog.

The reason being... I am (at times) using an older version Android smartphone to submit stories to Slashdot. Discover.com (and other more sophisticated sites) uses some copy blocking tech that prevents my phone from copying and pasting the text. So I used the text from the yahoo blog and linked to it in the body of my story submission while linking to Discover.com's story. I'm not up on what's legal to do, giving proper credit to all involved. It just seemed to me like it would be a cool little story/video for /.'ers to comment on.

Why are linking to something on yahoo when this was published in an open access journal?

Press releases for science are bad for everyone.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0050840

Please compare to this paper http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047712

Abstract, methods etc....

Here's the paper. What's the fucking point in open access if nobody bothers linking or reading the research?

Five links in the summary, NOT ONE OF THEM TO THE FUCKING PAPER THAT REPORTED THE RESEARCH. Naturally the Telegraph article doesn't link to it either. Apologies for shouting, but this really fucks me off. Yeah, I know, if I hit the fourth link in the summary, there's another link three screens down that page which would take me to the article. Whoopee.

Would it have killed The Telegraph, Hugh Pickens, or Timothy to do us this small courtesy? As it is, the Telegraph sensationalizes the abstract, Slashdot sensationalizes the inaccurate Telegraph article, and 1000 idiots then argue about completely irrelevant points suggested by free-association from the title, because they couldn't be arsed to read the summary.

Henceforth I shall be tagging these stories "wheresthefuckingpaper".

Sorry I'm so grumpy folks, haven't had my coffee yet :-). I'm off to read the paper now -- why not join me?

The original paper is the fifth link in TFS.

Click on the link on the sentence 'It is mainly temperature but also the relationship between temperature and seasonality – the average temperature during the wet season for example.'" and see for yourself.

Would it have killed pnot to do us the small courtesy of checking all the links in the summary before posting an incorrect statement?

Henceforth I shall be tagging pnot's comments "asshat".

Here's the paper. What's the fucking point in open access if nobody bothers linking or reading the research?

Five links in the summary, NOT ONE OF THEM TO THE FUCKING PAPER THAT REPORTED THE RESEARCH. Naturally the Telegraph article doesn't link to it either. Apologies for shouting, but this really fucks me off. Yeah, I know, if I hit the fourth link in the summary, there's another link three screens down that page which would take me to the article. Whoopee.

Would it have killed The Telegraph, Hugh Pickens, or Timothy to do us this small courtesy? As it is, the Telegraph sensationalizes the abstract, Slashdot sensationalizes the inaccurate Telegraph article, and 1000 idiots then argue about completely irrelevant points suggested by free-association from the title, because they couldn't be arsed to read the summary.

Henceforth I shall be tagging these stories "wheresthefuckingpaper".

Sorry I'm so grumpy folks, haven't had my coffee yet :-). I'm off to read the paper now -- why not join me?

Thanks, while I do appreciate the correction, I'd like to point out that you've confused stupidity with not giving a damn. The actual science paper says they were funded by CORDIS. The blurb and Gizmodo article calls them CORDIS partners. That seems entirely accurate to me, but I still don't give a damn. Work was also done at University of Barcelona. Is it okay for me to call you stupid for not mentioning that?

Every psychology 101 textbook states that the "bell curve", i.e. normal distribution, is the distribution of IQ scores. This is in fact wrong; IQ scores are not symmetrically distributed. The left tail of the distribution is heavier than the right tail. I devised a new asymmetric distribution which more accurately models this.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037025

I also cite a paper which has seen a reversal of the Flynn effect: more recent IQ points have been declining.

Teasdale TW, Owen DR (2008) Secular declines in cognitive test scores: a reversal of the Flynn Effect. Intelligence, 36(2): 121–126.

Knowledge is power, and science as an institution makes no bones about who gets it. That's why the Dark Ages happened, and why we're just one major disaster or war away from it happening again.

Sorry, but no. The Dark Ages happened as a result of the fall of Rome and the invasions of barbarians, and the Muslim conquests.

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The Epilogue
The Truth about Islamic Crusades and Imperialism
The Church Educates Europe

Pharmaceuticals spend billions developing new versions of dick hardening pills, while research into HIV, cancer, and other serious quality of life diseases languish.

Languish at their current high levels of research funding? HIV and cancer research seem to do especially well.

Curing a patient means denying yourself all that profit from name-brand life-saving drugs. I could come up with a hundred more examples from every industry in every country worldwide -- but you get the point.

I think the point is that you have an exaggerated sense of what is possible - the "Man on the moon syndrome", maybe? Modern medicine offers wonders, but it isn't even close to being able to cure everything. If anything the trend is the reverse - there are more and more antibiotic resistant diseases. Finding new ones that work is expensive, time consuming, and filled with all manner of difficulties posed by law and regulation. Changing social mores drop various former barriers to the spread of disease. The future of medicine, especially where infectious disease is considered, looks a bit grim at the moment.

Will humans lose the battle with microbes?

Why specifically computer science? If you're going to say that ALL open access journals publish junk, then you can't limit examples to one field that I don't happen to be familiar with.

The one that stands out most in my mind is on evolution of duck genitals. I think it was mentioned here. Good science, definitely not junk, interesting phenomena, but not really what the top-tier journals are looking for.

This is a confusing press release. From what I can gather, this bacterium, which has already been discovered decades ago and its genome fully sequenced, was found 3 years ago to reduce toxic gold compounds into metallic gold. The MSU team fed higher concentration gold solution and this created spherical metallic gold "nuggets" around 30 microns up to 1.2 mm in size. The art exhibition which is pretty distracting from the original scientific research, of which it appears there was some, plays on the themes of alchemy and illuminated manuscripts.

Unfortunately the explanation of the cool scientific part is completely overshadowed and twisted by the art exhibition! That is really annoying. Art exhibitions made by or in collaboration with scientists are often interesting but this announcement of research and an art exhibition at the same time means that factually incorrect words are helplessly mixed in with fact, making everything cloudy. It may seem romantic but it really is a bad idea to do that. In fact the only place alchemy really happens that we know of is in a nuclear reaction, which this is not.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2009) — Australian scientists have found that the bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans catalyses the biomineralisation of gold by transforming toxic gold compounds to their metallic form using active cellular mechanism.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091007103034.htm

The bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans strain CH34, originally isolated by us in 1976 from a metal processing factory, is considered a major model organism in this field because it withstands milli-molar range concentrations of over 20 different heavy metal ions. This tolerance is mostly achieved by rapid ion efflux but also by metal-complexation and -reduction.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010433

"Studies suggest that anatomically modern humans arose in Africa approximately 150 thousand years ago (kya), expanded throughout Africa ~60–80 kya, and to most parts of Europe and Asia ~40 kya[1]–[6]. Numerous mitochondrial DNA studies support what Foster and Matsumera [5] describe as a ‘remarkable expansion’ from a small geographic region dating broadly to ~60–80 kya." see http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0044926

I recommend skimming the paper (second link in TFS), it's short and quite readable. At the very least, check out the provided sample of successful manipulations (PDF; the notation is explained on page 2).

Highlights include:

Our intuition that abstract principles would involve more moderate attitudes, and engender less detection was not supported by the data.

The more the participants agreed or disagreed with a statement, the more likely they were to correct the manipulation.

But:

The overall rating of the non-detected manipulated trials was notably high. Using a 9-point scale, the average rating was 2.8 or 7.2 depending on the direction of the rating, which means that the average ‘distance’ being manipulated when a statement was reversed was 4.4 units on the scale. This is evidence that the participants cared about the issues involved, and expressed seemingly polarized opinions about the manipulated issues they failed to detect.

Of course, serious multiple choice questionnaires often repeat the same questions with a different wording each time (or with a reversed scale), precisely to limit issues with bad self-reporting. It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between consistent replies to differently worded versions of the same question, and ability to detect manipulations like in this study. If so, multiple-choice might be a useful tool after all.

From the article (i know, what am I doing reading that...)

"They assigned each group to drink either about 177 milliliters or about 354 milliliters of lager or soft drink from straight or curved glasses."

No they didn't! It's a British report and beer sure as hell is not measured in ml!

Still, the actual measurements used (6 fl oz and 12 fl oz) still seem to be an odd choice to me. Have to wonder why they didn't use 10 fl oz (a half) and 20 fl oz (a pint) to more accurately represent the normal quantities of beer drinking.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0043007

Running to an anti-evolution site to handwave away evidence. Shocking.

Okay, specific examples:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001026

Explain them some other way. Do you think God inserts ERVs at specific points in animals already seen to be closely related by phylogeny just to test faith?

And as to your last paragraph, I guess even you know how weak your argument is, so it's time to trot out epistemological nihilism. I dunno, can you be absolute sure that I don't exist and you're just debating with yourself? You see where that kind of ludicrous thinking leads, to the denial that any knowledge can be reliably determined.

At any rate, kids should be taught to science in class, even if they're going to become tax attorneys and never use it again, just as they should be taught accurate history (as accurate as we can determine at that time), even if they're destined to be beautician. To argue against teaching knowledge because its application may not be obvious, or applicable to everyone, is a backwards way of trying to justify teaching things that are known to be wrong in any given field.

Sweden?

In Figure 1 of The Fine Article, "SE" is the yellow point bit above the line, to the right of and above the green point "PR".

Noraway?

"NO" is a bit to the right of and below "SE".

Japan?

"JP" is the red point below the line near the right-hand side of the cluster in the lower left.

(I avoided the temptation to say "see figure 1". Oh, wait, no I didn't.... :-))

Who else believes in hell?

Well, let's look at The Fine Paper:

The same pattern also emerges for three out of the four religious groups that form national majorities–predominantly Roman Catholic, predominantly non-Catholic Christian, and predominantly ‘Other,’ which comprises of either unaffiliated majorities, or more localized majority religions such as Hinduism, Shintoism and syncretic religions that combine Islam and Christianity with traditional indigenous religions (see Figure 1). The only exception to this observation is predominantly Muslim countries in Asia, for which the uniformly high levels of both belief in heaven and hell (Ms = 93% and 91% respectively), produce insufficient variance for prediction.

So presumably some flavors of "Other" believe in a hell of some sort (for example, "being reincarnated as something in the "sucks to be you" category" might fill the bill), as does Islam. I don't see "IL" in Figure 1, so, unless I've missed something, there's no country where Judaism is a national majority (I'm assuming it's still a national majority in Israel), so I'm not sure it addresses the "Judeo" part of that.

(Oh, and the data point for the US is a fair bit above the line, meaning a higher crime rate for the US's value of {believers in hell} - {believers in heaven} than the line would predict. I don't know whether that's significant; if it is, maybe hell is a less effective deterrent here in the City on the Hill.)

If I'm reading this right, the actual statistics show that belief in Heaven increases crime by approximately the same rate as belief in in Hell decreases it.
So the net result is that believing in both has not statistical signifigance.

Belief in chart:
Heaven, Hell, Net Effect
0, 0, None
0, 1, Less Crime
1, 0, More Crime
1, 1, None


The headline is making a very dangerous and intentional omission of fact here. http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039048&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039048.t001

And radio waves alone can affect gene expression, no nanoparticles needed: Mammalian Stem Cells Reprogramming in Response to Terahertz Radiation

We report that extended exposure to broad-spectrum terahertz radiation results in specific changes in cellular functions that are closely related to DNA-directed gene transcription. Our gene chip survey of gene expression shows that whereas 89% of the protein coding genes in mouse stem cells do not respond to the applied terahertz radiation, certain genes are activated, while other are repressed. RT-PCR experiments with selected gene probes corresponding to transcripts in the three groups of genes detail the gene specific effect. The response was not only gene specific but also irradiation conditions dependent. Our findings suggest that the applied terahertz irradiation accelerates cell differentiation toward adipose phenotype by activating the transcription factor peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARG). Finally, our molecular dynamics computer simulations indicate that the local breathing dynamics of the PPARG promoter DNA coincides with the gene specific response to the THz radiation. We propose that THz radiation is a potential tool for cellular reprogramming.

Translation for the media: "Study Says Porno-Scanners Make You Fatter".

From the paper:

Emperor penguins show
as single or multiple pixels in the panchromatic band. Where
penguins are dispersed, individuals can be identified and counted.
However, in the majority of cases penguins group into close
clusters and their shadows overlap, meaning that individuals
cannot be differentiated and a different approach is needed.

So it's not really as easy as it may first appear.

"Our results suggest that long-term meditators have white-matter fibers that are either more numerous, more dense or more insulated throughout the brain," Luders said. "We also found that the normal age-related decline of white-matter tissue is considerably reduced in active meditation practitioners."

From the second link:

Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues, have found that long-term meditators have larger amounts of gyrification ("folding" of the cortex, which may allow the brain to process information faster) than people who do not meditate. Further, a direct correlation was found between the amount of gyrification and the number of meditation years, possibly providing further proof of the brain's neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes.

It seems to me that meditation could help with many modern health issues which are often stress-related. It's no wonder that many religions use meditation in a form or another. However, meditation doesn't really have to include any magical thinking, and the non-religious version is often called mindfulness.

Regarding magical thinking, I'd say that it's more important to recognize your biases than to totally eliminate them, as the latter is pretty much impossible.

Haha, AC is guilty of questionable research practices.

Between 6.2% and 72% of respondents had knowledge of various questionable research practices (Table S3) (Figure 3, N = 23 (6 studies), crude unweighted mean: 28.53%, 95%CI = 18.85â"38.2).

http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738.g003

From Sup 3:

Indicate the number of IADR/AADR members you have observed/experienced exhibiting X within the last 5 years:
-Overlooking others' use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data: 72% yes

IADR/AADR are dental research associations and the original source is from 1996. So that number doesn't really mean what you portrayed it to mean.

Right now I'm trying to figure out which journal to send my manuscript to.

I found this ranking quite helpful. They use something similar to the Google page rank algorithm to measure the overall influence of a journal and unlike Thompson Research, they actually published the algorithm. Also, they base the analysis on the Scopus data base which includes a lot more publications then Thompson Research do in their WoK.

I was talking with a colleague, I mentioned PLoS one. She said that she wouldn't see that as favorably on a CV as she would for a journal that rejects more papers. This is not an old scientist who works for one of the "top tier" journals either and has a vested interest in keeping things how they are, she's a grad student.

It is a very sad state of affairs when even young scientist base their assessment not on what but on where something is published. Well, in the end it always depends on who reads the CV ...