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P.S. Here is an older publication which has been open-sourced (open access) and which shows the technology:

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/52/20637.abstract

I agree completely, it's really cool regardless of the outcome. Some of this type of historical data has already been used: Records of bird migration in particular are useful because the date is known precisely and the record doesn't rely on a measurement, i.e., all you have to do is answer the questions does the bird in question migrate earlier or later than previously, and how much so? Some examples are the snow goose (pay link, sorry) from the Hudson Bay Company and other records. Here's a full article that shows that birds are migrating to and from the UK an average of 8 days earlier than 30 years ago.

Also, some evidence of hurricane patterns is from Spanish records of ships in the Caribbean from 1500 to 1600.

As it is now, Universities generally set up some sort of portal through which students can access all the publishers they're subscribed to. Generally, these portals blow. My standard procedure is to google what I'm looking for, then when I find the exact title, issue, page, head to my college library portal.

Have you looked at scholar.google.com? In the preferences, you can tell it what libraries you have electronic access through, then when you search for articles, if it's available through your school's library, a link appears next to it. Log in once, and it seems to persist from then on.

I've found this a great way to get direct access to works. And if you notice the pattern of how it proxy's into the source site, you can often figure out how to adjust a URL, adding the proxy info for your school, to get the PDF, even if google scholar doesn't know your school has access.

For example, the content I was interested in was at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/09/18/0909115106.full.pdf+html

by adding the .proxy.lib.pdx.edu to the address, I was able to get the pdf:
http://www.pnas.org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/content/early/2009/09/18/0909115106.full.pdf+html

even though the option didn't show up from Google Scholar.

I have so many questions that this article doesn't answer.

1) Where was the sample taken? UK showers? World wide? Third world countries? 2) Is there an information on different kinds of shower heads? for example, is this more common on massaging heads, low flow/high pressure heads, etc? 3) Does hot water kill this bacteria? Is it more common for people who take colder showers than people who take hot ones? 4) I always start the shower first before getting under it, since it takes about 5+ seconds to warm up... any ideas if this affects infection? (Thats more of a study question than a question from the article). 5) Any real way to prevent the growth? Someone already asked if CLR kills it. If this is so common, mind telling me how I can help myself?

I've never read a BBC article that left me with more questions.

The original article is here. TFA does answer a few of these, but some are not addressed.

1. Where was the sample taken?: 45 different locations in five US states (NY, CO, ND, IL, TN)
2. Is there an information on different kinds of shower heads?: No, but they did speculate that there may be a difference between plastic vs metal shower heads and well-water vs municipal-supplied water. Plastic tends to have more, and only municipal sources seemed to have the mycobacterial films (the sample size was too small to say for certain though).
3. Does hot water kill this bacteria? Is it more common for people who take colder showers than people who take hot ones?: They didn't test the average temperature of the household members' showers, but hot water will kill most of the critters.
4. I always start the shower first before getting under it...: Running the water at any temperature for a few minutes will wash most of the looser bugs out.
5. Any real way to prevent the growth?: If you're immunosuppressed or have another condition that makes you susceptible to mycobacterial infection, you might want to use private well water and a metal showerhead, and run your water for a few minutes before showering.

The environments we humans encounter daily are sources of exposure to diverse microbial communities, some of potential concern to human health. In this study, we used culture-independent technology to investigate the microbial composition of biofilms inside showerheads as ecological assemblages in the human indoor environment. Showers are an important interface for human interaction with microbes through inhalation of aerosols, and showerhead waters have been implicated in disease. Although opportunistic pathogens commonly are cultured from shower facilities, there is little knowledge of either their prevalence or the nature of other microorganisms that may be delivered during shower usage. To determine the composition of showerhead biofilms and waters, we analyzed rRNA gene sequences from 45 showerhead sites around the United States. We find that variable and complex, but specific, microbial assemblages occur inside showerheads. Particularly striking was the finding that sequences representative of non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) and other opportunistic human pathogens are enriched to high levels in many showerhead biofilms, >100-fold above background water contents. We conclude that showerheads may present a significant potential exposure to aerosolized microbes, including documented opportunistic pathogens. The health risk associated with showerhead microbiota needs investigation in persons with compromised immune or pulmonary systems.

Good post, about the only other thing one could add, if one wanted to paint even a slightly darker picture of the issue, is the potential for H1N1 to reassort with other influenza's wandering about and create a more virulent form. This has yet to happen, may not ever happen but is something of a concern.

But the overall tone of hysteria and dismay is really getting to be annoying.

If you are interested in this sort of material, try this: Dynamics of adaptation and diversification: a 10,000-generation experiment with bacterial populations. Bottom line: mutation matters. Notice the article is 15 years old.

However, the third test was task switching:

"participants were presented a number and a letter, and performed either a letter (vowel or consonant) or a number (even or odd) classification task depending on a cue presented before the stimulus. Switch cost was calculated as the difference in mean response time between trials preceded by a trial of the other type (switch trials) vs. trials preceded by a trial of the same type (nonswitch trials). HMMs' [heavy media multitaskers] switch cost was 167 ms greater than that of LMMs [light media multitaskers], t (28)=-2.62, P less than 0.01

This, to me, is more convincing and harder to dismiss. Still, media multitasking doesn't require task switching. Why didn't they just test media multitasking directly, by having people monitor 6 video screens at a time and giving them a test on what they saw? Or maybe that kind of multi-tasking requires different skills than trying to watch TV and do homework at the same time? If so, "multi-tasking" needs to be subdivided into separate cognitive tasks to make any meaningful measurements.

There's now strong evidence that it's possible to train fluid intelligence. For a long time it was considered impossible, and most types of training are indeed ineffective, but not all:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105.abstract
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=7546690114547074715&hl=en
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18556560

If you want to try it yourself you can download software here:
http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

Now if you look at the second graph in the image, you will see reconstructions - and most of them are above the hockey stick line, and all of them follow the ups-and-downs.

If you look at the second image you'll see a red dotted line marking measured temperature that continues to run sharply away from all the other data from about 1980(hard to tell without the raw data the exact point).

For the period that looks to be around 1900 through 2000 something else should stand out to you. The proxy data marches lock step together, with virtually no deviation from one data set to another. They are in fact so tight they overlap and appear nearly as one thick rainbow colored line. From 1000-1800 those same data set vary wildly from each other. That is NOT an artifact of the industrial revolution beginning in 1900, it is an artifact of the methods for building the reconstructions. The common practice, as used by Mann et al. is to calibrate the proxy data against the measured record, which runs fro 1900-2000. That method is creating the hockey stick tail out of raw proxy data that simply does NOT have that distinctive pattern in it.

Think I'm just crazy? I certainly did at first. I was at first sure that a look at the proxy data would prove such a notion to be as absurd as it seemed. Surely there was something in the raw proxy data if you looked at it that also showed a significant change after 1900. Enter the supplementary index for Mann's most recent 2008 update to the hockey stick graph. The pdf is here.

If you can spare the time to look go see page 15, figure S9. It shows graphs of the raw proxy data that was found to be valid and was used in Mann's reconstruction. If anything jumps out it is not unprecedented change from 1900 onwards, it is the resemblance to random line noise. Any method that can turn Mann's raw proxy data into a hockey stick starting at 1900 would turn random line noise into that same hockey stick.

Go and look and tell me I'm crazy. It's there as plain as day and I'd love to find some kind of more sane explanation than that it was missed or deemed irrelevant by a team of PHD's. As it stands though I can not see any other explanation. The raw proxy data shows absolutely NO unprecedented or even noteworthy pattern anywhere, let alone from 1900-2000. How else can one explain that data turning into a hockey stick shaped recreation? Honestly, I would truly love to see some better explanation.

I did some quick searching and cannot find the desired data either, but here is where I tend to trust the independent review of the IPCC of the methods. I doubt that you're the first person to question the change in data source, so presumably there is also data out there (that I can't put my hands on) that shows that these two ways of measuring temperature are equivalent.

I also presumed the data must be out there. My first thought on hearing criticisms of Mann's graph was to look at it closer because many of the criticisms seemed ridiculous to have gone over looked in a published paper. The heaviest criticism being that even random line noise graphed with Mann's method resulted in a hockey stick graph. That seemed to me a big enough criticism it would have been roundly refuted. All my digging though has just shown me that if anything, it seems to be true.

Take a look at Mann's most recent paper and it links to a Supporting Information PDF that discusses their method and the datasets used. It does not provide the raw data, but does include one graph of it that appears to have been minimally altered. It's Figure S9 on page 15. If you go look at it the data goes all the way up to 2000, and there is absolutely NOTHING special or noteworthy that changes from 1900-2000. A single set has a few spikes after 1900, but it turns out in fact that set is noted by Mann to have been of suspect quality as "Natural variability in the sediment record was disrupted
by increased human impact in the catchment area at A.D. 1720". But even with that set, the data clearly shows absolutely nothing in the data that resembles a hockey stick. If anything the graphs on a casual glance most closely resemble line noise. That sounded awfully familiar, and does not instill much faith in me about Mann's methods for turning that data into any kind of hockey stick.

  Looking at the graphs projected from the seemingly mundane raw data shows at most a very gradual warming after 1800, and very often Mann's team stops graphing the proxy data after 1900. Without exception they always include a bold red line graphing measured temperatures after 1900 showing a distinctive hockey stick. The problem is the proxy lines just do not appear to follow it. From the data I've been able to see I currently am very much on the skeptical side of Mann's data. Given how much weight Mann's work has been given by groups like the IPCC, I'm equally skeptical of their 'standards' for what counts as verified and reproducible science.

BBG is lower due to the high binding affinity of BBG for proteins, as is characteristic for all Coomasie dyes (14). Never- theless, BBG outside the lesion was minimal, indicating that BBG primarily entered the lesion via the disrupted bloodspinal cord barrier.

Our mutual friend wikipedia tells us that Coomassie blue started as a fabric dye in Africa.

The actual research article mentioned in the CNN blurb is in the most recent (as in today) issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There is nothing to cite, because it hasn't happened yet. Until you link to some creditable sources (that does NOT mean NYT, /., or any other news site, but a scientific journal!) I cannot believe it.

Genomic evolution during a 10,000-generation experiment with bacteria. That's a fairly old one, but it's on about the second page when you hit up Google Scholar for +"bacteria" +"evolution". It also references several interesting previous studies.

Without being too snarky to you, I'm not going to link anything else because a lot of what someone might want to see as "evidence of evolution" depends on what one is expecting to see. Most people would be wanting to see a phentotypic change e.g. cocci <-> bacilli, cillate <-> flagellate, etc. - something that's obviously a different organism. Since we've only been looking for a short time - and the tens of thousands of generations in the paper I linked is only a short time in the scale of things - we're not going to see that unless we're extremely lucky. Keep looking, and the chance we will go up (assuming there is something to see ;-)

But, really, that's just a matter of scale. Aren't smaller, less apparent-to-the-naked-eye adaptations (e.g. selected & inherited variations in the genome, membrane permeability, cell size, etc) just as much evidence of evolution as the development of, say, more efficient locomotive structures?

The answer to that question is, as I said, "depends on what you want to see as evidence". Someone who'll only accept hard indisputable evidence of proto-cows evolving into dolphins, or proto-chimps evolving into hominids, ain't going to be convinced by evidence of bacteria evolving to oxidise ethanol into acetaldehyde...

..., they seem to like getting in knots just sitting there somehow.

I couldn't read this comment without thinking of the lg Nobel Prize Math Category Winners from 2008 and their work.
enjoy

Government-2006 energy review
http://www.carbon-info.org/carbonnews_100.htm

That is from 2006 when the then president, Bush, waged a war against science. I also noticed it says "nuclear energy produces significantly less CO2 compared to the normal fossil fuels" and says in the graph that wind emits 10 grams of CO2 per KWh and nuclear only emits 7. There is nothing there about solar.

Also I take it you couldn't re arsed reading this when I linked to it earlier.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf

Three hundred and eighty three pages? My eye's be killing me after 10 pages. I did go through the chapter on solar and the paragraphs themselves focus on solar in Great Britain. Figure 6.16 only lists 2 locations in GB for average sunshine, W/m^2, the greater of the 2 is London with 109. New York City and the rainy city of Seattle, WA, on the other hand each show 147. LA, CA, shows 225. The chapter on wind says that though it doesn't provide enough energy to power the UK it can provide some and provide it economically. However SciAm's article "A Grand Solar Plan" says that by 2050 solar power can provide 69% of the US's electrical needs. And the study Global potential for wind-generated electricity published by the National Academy if Sciences of the USA says wind can provide "40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms."

You know why solar and wind don't get as much total? because they're no hopers. They get money to placate people who know fuck all about generating power for the grid but want a symbol of how very green their power is.

Only those who know nothing about solar and wind support it? Those who live Off the grid know nothing? They're only source of electricity is alternatives sources but they know nothing? John Doerr, appointed a member of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board knows little? As venture capitalist and partner of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers he has invested billions in alternative energy but he knows nothing? Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun and another venture capitalist also knows little?

Did you even read my post?wind+solar cannot be used for more than 20% of the grid

Did you read the science links I provided saying solar can provide 69% of the electricity of the USA by 2050 and that wind could provide 400% of the world's energy?

Add in some kind of smart grid and you might, might just push that up to 30% and that's at an insane cost.

According to the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power" by Tech Review currently because the grid is now failing it costs businesses $80 billion dollars a year, so the grid needs to be rebuilt and made smart period. Even with more nuclear power plants that's true. But you're only using it against solar and wind, which is hypocritical.

Geothermal is fantastic for the few places where there's magma near the surface

I agree geothermal is not usable everywhere, no energy source even nuclear power is good everywhere. That's why I want a mix of different energy sources used. Biofuels can be used for fuel for things like aircrafts. The US Department of Defense is working to create biodiesel for jets.

There have been some studies, for example "The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate".

you can get a pdf of the actual report by the researchers - no 2nd, 3rd and 4th hand stuff, for free from this url
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/07/02/0904891106.full.pdf+html?sid=5e51e1ab-8945-420c-8013-29182641090e
which raises an interesting question: why do /.ers, who obviously consider themselves above average, make do with 2nd hand reports when they can so easily get the real thing.

actually bothering to take, say, 5 min to find and read the original report would have zeroed out a lot of the nonsense on /. for instance: the report, in its intro, says that the SS administratin openly discloses that the first 3 digits are area number, AN....

What about cloud formation?

Clouds formation involves areosols and the IPCC reports state both phenomena as having a low level of scientific understanding. However Japan's Earth simulator does a very nice job of simulating clouds, precipitation and even hurricanes using the basic laws of physics. ( embeded movie half way down the page )

"Check out section 1.2 of the comments draft paper for Carlin's graphs of similar datasets."

I've seen enough of that report to determine it is a rehash of the descredited anti-science peddled by the CEI, my basic objection is that they are not Carlin's views, nor is it evidence, it is a summary of the discredited opinions of the lobbyists at CEI. I will simply assume section 1.2 is a rehash of Bob Carter's ingenuious conflation of upper troposhere measurements with surface measurements. Climate models correctly predict the cooling trend in the upper troposhere as observed by sattelites. IIRC this is due to the radative properties of CO2 and the increased distance between molecules at low pressure (ie absorbed IR energy is more likely to be re-relased as photons than preserved as kinetic energy in collisions). Please correct me if my assumption about section 1.2 is wrong.

"I'm not sure if you are familiar with (or at all interested in) this, but the "Climate Audit" blog is fairly interesting in terms of looking at the methodology and math of climate models, etc. Climate Audit and Real Climate are somewhat infamous for having a vicious feud going on as well."

Yes I am familiar with it and I followed the debate with interest as it unfolded. I wouldn't have called it a vicious feud, more a heated scientific debate, however these days realclimate (founded by M.Mann), all but ignores McIntrye (Founder of Climate Audit). As you probably know the debate was over the statistcal methods used in Mann's 1997 "Hockey stick" paper. You may also know that the debate culimnated in a congressional inquisition into Mann's paper, I say "inquisition" because who the hell holds a congressional inquiry on the veracity of a single paper? Anyway the National Academies of Sciences (who do know a thing or two about statistics) were dragged into the fray and asked to testify.

Many psuedo-skeptics such as those at CEI have since taken out of context quotes from that testiomony to tried and discredit Mann in the false belief that discrediting a single noteable paper would also dicredit the AGW hypothesis. However it seems nobody ever goes to the trouble of pointing to the text of the NAS testimony. Yes NAS qustioned Mann's confidence levels on certain statements but they also vindicated his methods and conclusions (much to the dissapointment of the inquisitors, I'm sure). To Mann's credit he has since addressed those critcisims with a follow up paper, the paper was peer-reviewed and published by his NAS critics in PNAS.

At the time the McIntyre/Mann debate was raging I respected McIntryre's tenacity and views, however since the inquisition he has failed to come up with any new papers on the subject (AFAIK his 2003 critique of Mann is his most recent paper). He has now also become a star attraction at the Heartland Institute's annual "Climate Confrences". In my book these developments currently disqualify him as a serious critic of Mann's work and I no longer frequent his site. As always YMMV.

BTW: From what I can find, the NAS testimony is not linked to by either RC or CA.

Right. One of the corners that gets cut when dividing people up into genetic clusters is that small populations get tossed out as outliers. Indigenous Australians would certainly count as a very distinct ethnic group if one did not simplify things in this way.

Native Americans are indeed /historically/ East Asian, but they split off long enough ago such that they have a relatively distinct genetic signature. This may be more due to neutral genetic drift (as the article suggests) or adaptive selection based on their environment (as I would tend to believe). It's both, of course, but I don't think the selective adaptation has been trivial in that timeframe. See, for instance, "Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution" by Hawks et al.

Even if you add a 3x safety factor in case the study did not take into account the average vs. peak power production ratio (due to low wind days, average production is about 30% of the peak wind turbine capacity, so 0.75MW for a 2.5MW turbine), this still leaves 93% of the land/shores untouched.

Actually the study assumes a 20% average which is pretty pessimistic. So there's no need to introduce yet another safety factor and we could really do with just 2.5% of the land/shores globally, or 4.4% for the US. It also says that this could supply 5x the current world energy needs. This translates to needing 20% of the land/shores.

And if we don't give up on hydro, solar, geothermal, biomass, co-generation and basic energy conservation techniques (why should we?), then we could get by with even less.

"Ugly? Ugly? As opposed to what?"

I think you aren't grasping the number of turbines that are being proposed. Assuming G.E. could even build them (so far, they've only built 12,000 units, world-wide).

Here's the actual link to the paper:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.full.pdf+html

Using their numbers for the US, 3,815.9TWh / 2.5Mwh turbines / 20% utility = 7.63 million turbines required.

Or about one turbine for every 40 people.

Even more amusing is that the G.E. turbines being discussed, the 2.5xl, http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/wind_turbines/en/2xmw/index.htm, they cost about 3.5M U.S. each, according to this article: http://www.goodenergies.com/news/-pdfs/Good-Energies-GE-turbine-deal-release-final.pdf, and only have an operational lifetime of 20 years.

So that works out to about $26,705,000,000,000 US (yes, that's ~26.705 trillion dollars). Or slightly less than twice the U.S. GDP of $14,264,600,000,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal).

You could buy a lot of nuclear power plants for that kind of money. Heck, you could buy 13,352 Ohio-class submarines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_class_submarine with 1 Gigawatt pressurized water reactors, and float them to where you wanted to hook them to the grid. But of course, you'd actually only need 400 of them to produce all the power the U.S. uses: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html.

-- Terry

It's certainly possible. We haven't quite quantified it yet. But the short answer is, yes. Here's a link to a paper that studied the effects of a proposed wind farm in Kansas: http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/~sbroy/publ/jgr2004.pdf They see lots of local effects, but little effects that go on to larger levels. Here's another link to another paper (in PNAS)... http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full.pdf+html They say that there would be non-negligible impact in the climate due to wind power, but it would be better then current power generation. The fact of the matter is that there is always some effect. If you put a solar panel out in the middle of the field, you're changing the local albedo, absorbing more energy (especially in a desert, as they are generally white). This will cause some differences in total energy balance and may potentially change the weather patterns and water allocation. There are studies about the changes in albedo that have shown to have large impacts in local weather. Deforestation has the same thing happening in changing local wind patterns, and putting in a shit-ton (scientific term) of wind turbines would definitely have massive local effects on the meteorology. Would it be bad or good? Hard to say. But everything interacts with the system. Hope the papers help.

In case someone's interested, it is available free here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.abstract

Yes, if it had as much study and peer review behind it.

I'm sorry to have to tell you that many of the economic models in use today have that much if not more peer reviewed science behind them and not one of them is correct over the long-term. Models are conceptual representations of real entities. Their results may be indicative, given their assumptions only, notwithstanding errors in accuracy and method that have a significant impact on results. The point I am making wih respect to peer review however, that you fail to understand because of your tunnel vision, is that it's almost impossible to get a paper published that casts any doubt whatsoever on the dominant paradigm. It is therefore obvious that a greater proportion of published research (by far the majority of it) will support the paradigm, aided by the credulous, alamist media and stupified politicians. This is the reason why peer review is an imperfect indicator of validity. Even a 10 year old can understand this point; you, however, seem to have trouble with it.

ut no surprise you'd conflate a single, now obsolete paper to somehow be the keystone of all of climate science. On, and one more FYI: if you read the original paper, it's actually all about the uncertainty levels at different points in time.

There are many issues with the kinds of reconstruction you cite, particularly if they involve activist scientist Michael Mann, e.g. Proxy inconsistency and other problems in millennial paleoclimate reconstructions. Again, this wasn't an easy paper to get published, not because it lacks merit (the authors know a lot more about statistical analysis than the average Climate Scientist), but because the conclusions go against the paradigm supported by the very people who have to peer review the paper.

Would you like polls, then? How's this? According to polls, more climate scientists think the IPCC was too lax with their conclusions than too harsh, 97% of climate scientists say that temperatures have risen, and 97% think humans are responsible.

That assertion is laughable. How many Climate Scientists agree that supporting the paradigm has grealy increase the amount of cash their institutions get in the form of research grants? 97% perhaps? Consensus is a meaningless concept in Science, if you knew anything about science, you would at least agree with this statement.

Like most scientific research. So? And where is this notion that the governments of the world are secretly trying to push global warming? The world's largest economies have been trying to *resist* global warming research. China's been trying to play it down. So has India. The Bush administration heavily was, even firing people for conducting GW research.

Of course they have. The politics of this is a totally different issue that we can come onto if you wish. Yes, China and India want nothing to do with it but I expect will be all too happy to see the West roll back their industrial revolutions on the alter of environmentalism. The issues of using or not using fossil fuels is a totally different issue to the one we're discussing. I am in favour of alternative energy, primarily because I resent the West sending 1 trillion dollars overseas every year to some pretty disgusting regimes in return for their oil and gas. As I say, it's a different issue. The interplay between activists, the media, science and politics is complex.

What part of last year's forecast of a "typical summer" that I linked did you not understand? What part of 2006 *actually being* a record summer did you not understand? What part of (had you actually read the forecast) the northern UK getting above-averag

The sort of idiot who knows that the "extensive study" you talk of is, to put it mildly, immature

And you know that from reading a whopping zero papers on the subject. Come back when you know what you're talking about.

Your view, that we know all we need to know already to make 50 year predictions, is idiotic.

That's just the tiniest fraction of the data used. Of course, no surprise that you'd make that argument, since you've read a whopping zero papers on the subject. Come back when you know what you're talking about.

Would you have the same confidence in an economic model as you have in these climate models?

Yes, if it had as much study and peer review behind it.

Oh yes it is, you're making the assumption that peer review is some guarantee of correctness.

I'm making the assumption that it's infinitely better than a slashdotter whose read no papers on the subject talking out their arse.

If you've read the Wegman report, you'll know what I'm talking about.

You mean a non-peer-reviewed report? Cute. Keep avoiding peer review. It shows what you think of science.

And, FYI, I have read it. And, FYI, fixing of the errors reported by the Wegman report doesn't change the shape of the reconstruction. And, FYI, that's about one single paper out of many thousands. Including many more on the exact same topic using different methodologies that reach the exact same conclusion (the most recent, for example, is "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia"):

Following the suggestions of a recent National Research Council report [NRC (National Research Council) (2006) Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (Natl Acad Press, Washington, DC).], we reconstruct surface temperature at hemispheric and global scale for much of the last 2,000 years using a greatly expanded set of proxy data for decadal-to-centennial climate changes, recently updated instrumental data, and complementary methods that have been thoroughly tested and validated with model simulation experiments. Our results extend previous conclusions that recent Northern Hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context. Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used. If tree-ring data are used, the conclusion can be extended to at least the past 1,700 years, but with additional strong caveats. The reconstructed amplitude of change over past centuries is greater than hitherto reported, with somewhat greater Medieval warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, albeit still not reaching recent levels.

But no surprise you'd conflate a single, now obsolete paper to somehow be the keystone of all of climate science. On, and one more FYI: if you read the original paper, it's actually all about the uncertainty levels at different points in time.

While we are often told about the "2,500 scientists" who contributed to the latest IPCC report, the vast majority of these contributors had no influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC and were not asked if they endorsed those conclusions

Would you like polls, then? How's this? According to polls, more climate scientists think the IPCC was too lax with their conclusions than too harsh, 97% of climate scientists say that temperatures have risen, and 97% think humans are responsible.

Its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) are produced by a small group of scientists and are revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments before they are made public (McKitrick 2007).

You know, you could at least not

But when I looked up the article on PNAS http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract it was subscription only.

When I read the Science magazine article on girls and math, buried in the fine print they admitted that they didn't really have statistically significant data for high-performing girls.

So I won't take this seriously until I can read the original article.

From the abstract "The gender gap has significantly narrowed over time in the U.S. and is not found among some ethnic groups and in some nations ... It correlates with several measures of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes." http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/01/0901265106.abstract The president of Harvard was changed for ignoring this equality.

Only recently have we realized that cows and deer have a sense of magnetic direction. Just this month, the same group found that power lines can muddle the cattle's sense of direction.

It's a stretch, but is it possible we humans have a weak magnetic sense that's simply drowned out by urban noise?

Surely there have been studies on this. Anyone?

Only recently have we realized that cows and deer have a sense of magnetic direction. Just this month, the same group found that power lines can muddle the cattle's sense of direction.

It's a stretch, but is it possible we humans have a weak magnetic sense that's simply drowned out by urban noise?

Surely there have been studies on this. Anyone?

Please see Eyring, Experimental Evidence of an X-Ray Laser 1972 http://www.pnas.org/content/69/7/1744.full.pdf

Someone posted above that their feet are self-cleaning. He cited Wikipedia which cites this.

If true, it could be a very useful material.

... a "single large rocket"? According to your link, you'd need to launch an 800 kg stack of these things every 5 minutes for 10 years (the paper says each unit is 1 gram). A Delta IV heavy has a max payload of 13000 kg (but that's just LEO, not L1!), so maybe you could get by with launching a rocket once an hour ... every hour ... for 10 years. And then in 40 years you'd have to repeat the whole set of launches again ... indefinitely ... since L1 isn't stable and the mirrors will wander off and need to be replaced periodically. (Paper here.)

The hockey stick has been updated with better data, finding that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years.

This is better news than they even let on. A means to control rejection is the same as a means to control autoimmune disorders. Recent evidence supporting this is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19199937 There's a partial list of such disorders at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune_disease

Knowing the mechanism for increasing Treg leads to understanding the mechanism for controlling, thus including suppressing Treg. That would boost the body's immune response. It could control (though not cure) AIDS, and lead to treatments of such as hepatitis B or C without requiring the very side effect laden pegylated alfa interferon 2 + ribavirin treatment. Inducing autoimmnune disease has already been suggested as a cancer treatment http://www.pnas.org/content/96/10/5340.full

As explained in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system an immune system is a very complex system with many components that interact. The more of these we can manipulate the closer we get to the kind of treatments suggested above.

You also seem to be unaware that the internet has sources for every piece of idiocy

No, I am well aware of that

providing sources doesn't settle anything

I disagree with that statement. If the original poster were to actually respond with sources (though I'm not holding my breath), it would show the source of their opinion. Often just seeing the domain of their sources tells a lot; if they cited these idiots or these other idiots as sources then we know they aren't thinking much about the actual science. On the other hand if they cited an academic or scientific source to support their claims, then there would be reason to believe the poster actually does think before spouting off rhetoric.

As it is, the poster is essentially just gossipping. They have provided nothing but noise, and I am asking them to support their statements (if they can).

Citation please (and yes, I know where I'm posting...). Specifically, please provide a reference that proves that even basic concepts like "red", "stop" and "person" are translated into neural signals that are consistent across all people...

I'm not claiming that, though.

Have you ever noticed that you seem to be more "in tune" with some people than others, or met someone who thinks like you? Have you noticed that this is dependent on mood, what you ate for breakfast, etc? I agree with you that it is.

Anyway, you asked for a cite, here's just one, that explains how people who have similar pathways have similar language ability.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/43/17163.full.pdf?ck=nck

And therein lies the problem: "wildly different interpretations" do not make a solid foundation for communication.

Again, I'd never make the claim you can have a conversation in your head with someone. I've never experienced that, myself. I have experienced being "in tune" with someone though, and I think we all have to one degree or another.

We have combined ultrasensitive magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) with 3D image reconstruction to achieve magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with resolution <10 nm. The image reconstruction converts measured magnetic force data into a 3D map of nuclear spin density, taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the 'resonant slice' that is projected outward from a nanoscale magnetic tip. The basic principles are demonstrated by imaging the 1H spin density within individual tobacco mosaic virus particles sitting on a nanometer-thick layer of adsorbed hydrocarbons. This result, which represents a 100 million-fold improvement in volume resolution over conventional MRI, demonstrates the potential of MRFM as a tool for 3D, elementally selective imaging on the nanometer scale.

I think it's important to emphasize that this is a nanoscale magnetic imaging technique. The summary implies that they created a conventional MRI that has nanoscale resolution, as if they can now image a person's brain and pick out individual cells and molecules. That is not the case! And that is likely to never be possible (given the frequencies of radiation that MRI uses and the diffraction limit that applies to far-field imaging.

That having been said, this is still a very cool and noteworthy piece of science. Scientists use a variety of nanoscale imaging tools (atomic force microscopes, electron microscopes, etc.), but having the ability to do nanoscale magnetic imaging is amazing. In the article they do a 3D reconstruction of a tobacco mosaic virus. One of the great things about MRI is that is has some amount of chemical selectivity: there are different magnetic imaging modes that can differentiate based on makeup. This nanoscale analog can use similar tricks: instead of just getting images of surface topography or electron density, it could actually determine the chemical makeup within nanostructures. I expect this will become a very powerful technique for nano-imaging over the next decade.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/12/0812068106.abstract

A link to the actual article for those who are interested:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/12/08/0810903105.abstract

Although probably you need a login for full text. Looks interesting and quite promising for low cost production. I think this technology might not only be interesting for countries lacking reliable health care but also budget strapped labs ;)

The Dual-N-Back cognative exercise wont help you with your long term memory, but it is excellent for keeping your short term memory sharp. It's the only exercise proven to really do anything.
You can read about it in wired

You can also read the
full paper if you want to pay or just read the abstract.

iPhone version

Online (requires silverlight)
This one doesn't require a plugin

This recent Slashdot thread (and the accomplishing article) discussed the effectiveness of brain training games.

In that thread, I pointed to Brain Workshop, an open source version of the game used in this study by Susanne Jaeggi, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. The study deals with improving "fluid intelligence" - the part of your mind that deals directly with the raw newness of experience or, as defined by Jaeggi, "the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge."

Others pointed out there's also a Javascipt version that's much more light-weight.

From the article:

But don't despair: Susanne Jaeggi, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, may be able to help. She has devised a brain-training game that actually works. It's a strange, complex game involving sequences of squares on a computer screen, and it definitely improves "fluid intelligence" - the part of your mind that deals directly with the raw newness of experience or, as defined by Jaeggi, "the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge".

Here is a link to the abstract of her study. And the project Brain Workshop has released an open source version of the game used in the study.

Retrotransposons are very interesting from an evolutionary perspective as they have co-evolved with their host. No doubt some are harmful, but some have beneficial properties as well (co-operation is more stable then competition). I can't remember now where I have read the article on them but one example is mentioned here tho no details are provided http://www.pnas.org/content/98/25/14497.abstract

I feel remiss in not pointing out Lawrence Sirovich "A pattern analysis of the second Rehnquist U.S. Supreme Court" PNAS June 24, 2003 vol. 100 no. 13 7432-7437.

I'm against the kind of alarmism that has become rampant in nutritional science, but there is increasing reason to be concerned about BPA

I'm against the kind of alarmism that has become rampant in nutritional science, but there is increasing reason to be concerned about BPA

The OP is hilarious. It has _Nothing_ to do with the PNAS article http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/03/0802841105). In fact the PNAS article is only useful or interesting to a handful of people who model the global carbon cycle over the history of the earth, most of whom are members of the NAS.

Half the blame lies with the ScienceDaily piece that misconstrued the PNAS article, possible for the purpose of a titillating headline.

Coincidentally, I used to work in the lab of the sponsoring editor of the PNAS article. Hi John.

Related phenomena have been studied. See, for instance, here.

The South Atlantic anomaly isn't caused by magnetite. The Earth's magnetic field is generated dynamically from the motion of molten metal in the Earth's outer core. While near-surface mineral deposits such as magnetite do affect the local magnetic field, it is at a much smaller scale. The South Atlantic anomaly is more likely caused by large-scale (1000-km scale) variations in the flow in the core, and/or the bulk properties of the mantle in that region.

Another citation worth making is the original PNAS article. Unfortunately only the abstract is free.