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I personally find the abundant anecdotal evidence of such a link quite disturbing, requiring thorough investigation, though this is unlikely to happen due to the above reason.

The thorough investigation has happened. Several times. See for example here and here. Or you could read the CDC article. Oh, but wait, they're all government institutions! They would all be devastated by that link! That's why they lie! They all lie! The cake is a lie! Wait, wrong channel...

The point is that the anti-vaxxers - and yes, the derogative term is appropriate - are about as concerned about truth and as scientifically literate as all the Moon-hoaxers. There is nothing that scientists can do to change the minds of the anti-vaxxers, because the anti-vaxxers do not operate on a scientific basis. I just hope this blows over before too many people stop vaccinating.

I personally find the abundant anecdotal evidence of such a link quite disturbing, requiring thorough investigation, though this is unlikely to happen due to the above reason.

The thorough investigation has happened. Several times. See for example here and here. Or you could read the CDC article. Oh, but wait, they're all government institutions! They would all be devastated by that link! That's why they lie! They all lie! The cake is a lie! Wait, wrong channel...

The point is that the anti-vaxxers - and yes, the derogative term is appropriate - are about as concerned about truth and as scientifically literate as all the Moon-hoaxers. There is nothing that scientists can do to change the minds of the anti-vaxxers, because the anti-vaxxers do not operate on a scientific basis. I just hope this blows over before too many people stop vaccinating.

Figure 3. Copulation duration in Cynopterus sphinx according to whether the female licks the male's penis (Licking) or not (No licking).
http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007595&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007595.g003

I'm really not sure what to make of this chart. I'm not sure why they felt the need to include an image. Though I do especially like the caption:

Means and standard errors are shown. Vignette shows a female performing fellatio, drawn by Mei Wang.

(emphasis mine)

- onedotzero
posting anon since I've not got my password at work.

Hard to say, because they have several skulls and some of the vertebrae and other postcranial bits, but they don't mention anything about the tail in the paper (it's open access -- yay!). Statistically, it probably didn't have one, because only rare sauropods are known to have a thagomizer, but it's possible.

This idea was already executed a while ago by the Journal of Negative Results in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, the Journal of Negative Results in Speech and Audio Sciences and probably a few others that Google will help you find, just as it helped me find. But, as I recall, even PLoS had publishing negative results in its charter and specifically PLoS ONE encouraged them, being all-inclusive.

The problem? Most of them (except for PLoS and PLoS ONE) have a very low impact factor because although negative results are important, they aren't sexy in the least. If they were sexy, they would have been published in more mainstream journals. Because publishing a paper requires significant effort, a scientist is unlikely to spend his most precious resource -- time -- publishing a negative result if he can publish a positive one. Positive results get referenced, negative ones, by-and-large, do not. References in important journals lead to advancement as a scientist through grants, promotion, etc. So, unless the result is going to have significant impact -- like contradicting a previous result, or disproving dogma -- there's little motivation for a scientist to expend the effort to write up and publish a negative result, rather than do more research.
   

I always thought that the nicotine is completely harmless. You can chew the nicotine gum for every second of your life and you will probably be fine.

There's some controversy over some research that needs to be hashed out over nicotine and FOXM1 expression. Recent research has suggested that if you have a mutation in this gene (which is a precursor to cancer), nicotine may worsen your chances of getting cancer. Nicotine alone won't do it, but if you're already heading down that route...

Some researchers are skeptical over the study because numerous other studies have shown no link between nicotine and cancer, but only time will tell who is right.

I take it you didn't see that study recently that showed that America alone wastes 1 400 kilocalories per person per day, or 150 trillion kilocalories per year. It takes roughly 1 000 kilocalories per day to reverse malnutrition in children. So, just taking food from America's trash, we could eradicate hunger in children. Of course, then they'd be poisoned by all the crap in fast food, but nevertheless.

Alternatively, you could just read this .doc file, pointing out that we already produce enough food to feed double the population of the world? I know, accepting the idea that people starve because of the greed and apathy of wealthy nations combined with the corrupt governments of rich and poor nations, rather than because of some complex socio-economic problem, but it simply isn't true that world hunger is a complex problem.

tl;dr: the world produces enough food to make everyone in the world fat, we just throw it away instead of feeding the 1 000 000 000 starving people.

They charge $1350 to publish an article.

PLoS ONE, if you didn't know, is a public-access scientific journal publishing enterprise. No more use/abuse of scientists as creator of content AND reviewers of content (who both do this for free) and then only releasing the articles for profit, for the next 100 years. I am thoroughly disgusted by this business model which takes the work of us scientists, gives nothing back and then profits from it. Fuck that.

Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe you can submit a story about them? It's certainly News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.

It's bad enough that too many university students are limited to pay-walled articles that their uni has bought a license to. Papers that were freely available online a decade ago have now disappeared except for abstracts and "you can get the rest of this article for $34.95".

Good thing we still have the Wayback Machine, but it doesn't cover nearly enough.

No, it looks like the same definition- the bacteria that survived did so by forming desiccated, nondividing endospores. The article mentions that the bacteria which didn't protect themselves with the endospore stage died within minutes. The two strains of bacteria they tested are of particular importance because they have been known to survive the Jet Propulsion Lab standard decontamination procedures, and so could take a trip to Mars. This paper describes some of the DNA repair mechanisms that B. pumilus uses to survive under adverse conditions.

1. Graduate education should include mandatory classroom instruction, and a heavier emphasis on giving presentations. I regularly suffer through my colleagues' miserable presentations at conferences, so I strongly believe that scientists need to develop better communication skills.
2. Re-orient science classes so they emphasise curiosity and skepticism rather than rote memorization. I've previously complained about the sad state of science education in high school and general collegiate physics courses. Some people still believe that the seasons are caused by the Earth moving farther towards/away from the Sun, and that sinks/bathtubs drain differently in different hemispheres. Maybe if science classes actually taught people how to think like scientists, these silly myths wouldn't be as widespread. Maybe people would even be interested in science in general if they didn't see the subject as a bunch of equations to be mechanically applied.
3. The scientific community has a tendency to ignore bizarre claims because they don't want to give credibility to people who believe in things like creationism, electric universe, climate-change-denialism, moon-landing-hoaxers, relativity-deniers, etc. This isn't very productive, because some people apparently get the impression that scientists dismiss these fringe views because of a massive conspiracy of suppression. I think it's a better idea to slowly and patiently explain why these examples of pseudoscience simply aren't consistent with the available evidence. I'm trying to do that on my homepage, but there's only one of me versus a horde of pseudoscientists...
4. Science journals need to be made open source, like PLoS ONE and ACP. Maybe the general public's science illiteracy is partially based on the fact that crackpots publish their "research" freely on the internet (which is why the internet is now a tarpit of scientific misinformation), whereas scientists publish articles in peer-reviewed journals that can't be accessed by anyone outside of a major university.

As you can tell, I think this article touches on a very serious problem. Sagan said it best:

"We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster." -- Carl Sagan

Diagram says:

1. Collect sperm
2. Collect cocs
3. Incubate
4. ...
5. little gay spacemice

TFA (link copied from a post above) states explicitly that they did thermal imaging as well, and that there was no correlation between temperature and the photon emission they discuss. While they don't directly address black-body radiation, this would seem to rule it out as an explanation.

In PLoS One: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006256

I posted it a little earlier in this thread. Here it is again: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004591

Sorry. Try this one: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004591

Kind of surprising actually.

I believe the convention has it that for a particular task, expert brains have less activity than novice brains.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003270

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1576979

You can just see one of the Mars rovers about two thirds up near the right hand side.

This isn't the first time we've seen evolution in the lab. Andrew Spiers has been doing it for years - e.g.
here (2003) or more recently here.

Basically Spiers grows bacteria in an unstired beaker. As the limiting resource for growth (nitrogen? Oxygen? I forget) is most available at the top of the beaker, it soon evolves a mutation which allows the bacteria to stick together and form a mat at the top ("wrinkly spreader"). Then somewhat later the mat collapses as freeloaders have evolved and come to dominate the population.

Spiers' experiment is highly predictable - the populations always go through the same phases, but different colonies turn out to have used different mutations to get there. This differs significantly from the research here, where it appears a low probability event has occured.

(Warning: the above is primarily based on my memory of a talk he gave several years ago. My memory is known to be lossy.)

As long as the person is expecting their speech to be disturbed, and they can hear/feel the exact moment that the magnet is pulsing, the effect could be purely psychosomatic. They really need to test this on someone who's not expecting these effects. It may be ethically a bit strange, but it's the only true test.

There's actually a few different types of controls which are used experimentally. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:

* use a sham coil that triggers the same sorts of clicking sound but doesn't actually stimulate anything

* more recently, a different type of sham coil has been developed which allows you to modify current directions on-the-fly, allowing you to create the sound/sensation of scalp stimulation, but causes minimal stimulation in the brain region (disclaimer: this coil was devised by people from the same lab as me)

* you can switch which side of the brain you're stimulating on, and if the subject isn't familiar with neuroanatomy they'll be none the wiser. About midway down this page there's a video of someone counting upwards, and it shows that even though there's a disruption when you stimulate Broca's area on the left side of the brain, no effect is observed when the symmetric area on the other side of the brain is stimulated.

The article is nice and National Geographic is a fine publication but it is not a scientific journal. Please, when you discuss science, link to the scientific paper itself, so people can comment on the information unfiltered and undistorted by the popular media. The paper is here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001780

I never heard of "PLoS ONE", it claims to be a peer reviewed journal at least. If this was ground breaking I'd expect it to be published in Nature though. The "PLoS ONE" website isn't loading for me at the moment, but hopefully I'll be able to read the actual article. This seems to be hoopla over definitions though, we can sort organisms into kingdoms and phyla any way we like, this seems identical to the tug-of-war over whether Pluto is a planet or a planetoid. Is it the size of the planet? Is it if an organism has x+2 mutations in a histone protein/gene it gets slotted into one kingdom or another?

Hey the journal finally loaded, here is a link to the actual paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000790, although its taking a long time to load for me, and it's not even slashdotted yet. :P

Someone helpfully linked the paper (and was modded down for his trouble); they address that concern extensively.

The press release is fine, but the article itself is free for you to read: http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001295 It is not mired in deifficult scienc-y language and every educated person can read it understand the details of the study better than from just the media coverage.

The results of this research can now be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001295

The list of clips they used is here [PDF]. As said in the summary, they were all from movies.

What would be interesting to me is to have an experiment with real clips. If you know you're watching a movie with actors, you realize no one's really getting hurt.

I've seen some disturbing things on the net myself, and there's a big difference between hollywood violence and watching someone be shot in the head for real, or having their arm snapped in two.

I think to understand the vacuumability you have to get a sense of the scale of the body to head. See here: Nigersaurous Imagine during the late stages of digesting a few thousand pounds of plants wherein the digestion process breaks the fibrous organics into gases and solids and then expels such gases rearward creating an enormous backpressure within the cavity of the Nigersaurous. At that point all it needs to do it open its mouth and you have Hoover principle eating. Or a very happy male Nigersaurous likely to crash the car and bring them all to the brink of extinction. Just a theory.

I thought that as well, especialy when the lightweight skeleton is taken into consideration (less strength needed when the bulk is water bourne) but if you read this article linked from TFA it makes it quite clear that the current thinking is that it was a land animal. In addition a downward facing mouth doesn't do too well for a swamp dweller - how's it going to breath?

Thanks to the Public Library of Science, their complete publication is available to us under the enthralling title Structural Extremes in a Late Cretaceous Dinosaur. I found Figure 1 especially interesting for its 3D visualizations of the skull structure. The thing's mouth really does resemble the shape of a vacuum cleaner, particularly one of those older models where the brush is on the end of a tube and all the machinery is in a little tug-along chassis. I'm inclined to think that it probably bit off the plants it was eating rather than "sucking" them up, though.

Still, neat stuff, and yet more proof that there are a whole bunch of Really Weird Things(TM) out there.

Thanks to the Public Library of Science, their complete publication is available to us under the enthralling title Structural Extremes in a Late Cretaceous Dinosaur. I found Figure 1 especially interesting for its 3D visualizations of the skull structure. The thing's mouth really does resemble the shape of a vacuum cleaner, particularly one of those older models where the brush is on the end of a tube and all the machinery is in a little tug-along chassis. I'm inclined to think that it probably bit off the plants it was eating rather than "sucking" them up, though.

Still, neat stuff, and yet more proof that there are a whole bunch of Really Weird Things(TM) out there.

It currently only takes papers from the PLOS family of journals. Most of the PLOS journals have a biological bent because they were started by a group of Biologists/Biochemists at UC Berkley and their editorial staff is mostly biology centric. PLOS One is a general subject journal and accepts publications from any field of science. You pay to publish in PLOS journals because they are open access. PLOS does not sell subscriptions or charge for access to articles, instead it charges authors a small fee (few thousand dollars, small for science) to help defray the costs of hosting, editing, etc. Then it publishes them on the web and allows access to anyone. If you do not have the research funds available to pay for publication and can prove such, they will wave the publication fee. All PLOS journals are rigorously Peer Reviewed, it's not like you can buy access or anything. My group has an article published in PLOS One, check it out if you want http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action ?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.00 00467.

For a while I've been hoping that they would do something similar and allow comments (and maybe blog references) through Google Scholar, their search engine for academic publications. It would be great to have a way for the research community to publically share thoughts on a publication besides the high-latency/low-throughout channel of the actual journal. PLoS One and Nature Precedings are starting to do this for work published by them, but having a commenting function built into Google Scholar would allow comments on anything the search engine indexes. Just a minor feature this could have a huge impact on academic research.

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action ?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000456

I actually read your study.
Also, I have often thought of submitting my work there, but the documentation on the PLOS site states:
http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
"Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLoS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating."

This gave me the impression that the typical mode of operation is that decisions are made, as default, by one member of the editorial board.
Note Well that their web site implies that the reviews do not focus on theoretical impact (i.e., importance to scientific community as commonly defined) by technical soundness only:
http://www.plosone.org/static/whypublish.action
"Too often a journal's decision to publish a paper is dominated by subjective criteria, which can be frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLoS ONE will publish all papers that are judged to be rigorous and technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication."

And that papers rejected from other PLOS journals can be moved to PLOS ONE
http://www.plosone.org/static/policies.action
All this gave me the impression that the review process is shallow
Again, hope no offence taken, but I think my interpretation was valid given the online info.

Oori

I actually read your study.
Also, I have often thought of submitting my work there, but the documentation on the PLOS site states:
http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
"Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLoS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating."

This gave me the impression that the typical mode of operation is that decisions are made, as default, by one member of the editorial board.
Note Well that their web site implies that the reviews do not focus on theoretical impact (i.e., importance to scientific community as commonly defined) by technical soundness only:
http://www.plosone.org/static/whypublish.action
"Too often a journal's decision to publish a paper is dominated by subjective criteria, which can be frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLoS ONE will publish all papers that are judged to be rigorous and technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication."

And that papers rejected from other PLOS journals can be moved to PLOS ONE
http://www.plosone.org/static/policies.action
All this gave me the impression that the review process is shallow
Again, hope no offence taken, but I think my interpretation was valid given the online info.

Oori

I actually read your study.
Also, I have often thought of submitting my work there, but the documentation on the PLOS site states:
http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
"Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLoS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating."

This gave me the impression that the typical mode of operation is that decisions are made, as default, by one member of the editorial board.
Note Well that their web site implies that the reviews do not focus on theoretical impact (i.e., importance to scientific community as commonly defined) by technical soundness only:
http://www.plosone.org/static/whypublish.action
"Too often a journal's decision to publish a paper is dominated by subjective criteria, which can be frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLoS ONE will publish all papers that are judged to be rigorous and technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication."

And that papers rejected from other PLOS journals can be moved to PLOS ONE
http://www.plosone.org/static/policies.action
All this gave me the impression that the review process is shallow
Again, hope no offence taken, but I think my interpretation was valid given the online info.

Oori

Link to the published work
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action ?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000443

More at the author's blog
http://bjoern.brembs.net/

Which scientific study claims that extreme violence has no influence on younger people? I don't know any.

First of all we are talking about fiction and games. Not actual extreme violence.

Secondly, I don't know of any scientific study showing that pictures of pink sunflowers do not harm children. Imagine I claimed some right to pull out a gun and imprison people for depicting pink sunflowers. Imagine that I then attempted to turn any rational burden of evidence entirely upside down, saying "Which scientific study claims that pink sunflowers have no influence on younger people?". That would be silly.

I haven't read the whole study, but from the conclusion I can see nothing that the study has anything to do with gamer vs non-gamer

Someone asked about gamer vs non-gamer on the discussion link:
Did participants stop the experiment earlier if they were not used to playing 3D-computergames? Did participants show lesser signs of stress when "killing" the virtual person if they have already gotten used to killing virtual characters in 3D-games before?

No there is no evidence of this. In fact the regression analysis reported in the Section 'Skin Conductance Reponses' and the associated supporting information suggests the contrary, that there was a positive association between past computer game playing and the degree of arousal (just by looking at the skin conductance we cannot know that this was specifically stress, but it is likely to be so).

Link.

Limiting the access of younger people to harmful material

Which is exactly why we should have this exact law against pink sunflowers. Pink sunflowers are harmful material. And my argument is valid and correct because I just said pink sunflowers are harmful.

The people demanding this anti-game law have researched the issue to death trying to support their demands, and all they have managed to do is prove that these games are *NOT* harmful. Every single study they have either located or funded has produced the exact same results, that the games are *NOT* harmful.

Saying "Limiting the access of younger people to harmful material" is pretty much Begging The Question. Saying that games are harmful, and then using that to reach the conclusion. Not only is it unsupported to say games are harmful, it is pretty well refuted that games are harmful.

if the parents are ok with it, they can simply give their child access to it, the whole point is to make it harder for the child to get access to it themself.

Take that statement with a generic "it". If the parents are ok with Pink Sunflowers, they can simply give their child access to Pink Sunflowers, the whole point is to make it harder for the child to get access to Pink Sunflowers themself. If the parents are ok with the Bible, they can simply give their child access to the Bible, the whole point is to make it harder for the child to get access to the Bible themself.

If you want to make an argument that nothing should be available to minors, giving the parents the ability to control everything that the kids can and cannot get, then you could make a rational argument for that. However there has been no rational or valid argument why people who sell videogames and only people who sell videogames should be criminalized.

Which already is the case to some extent, christan teachings are kept out of schools.

(A) Not true.
(B) It has absolutely nothing to do with this.

The government cannot promote or favor one religion or one religious belief over another. The force of government cannot be used to promote or favor one religion or one religious belief over another. Someone acting in an official capacity as an agent of the government itself cannot abuse his power for