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Poor science in my opinion.

Besides that, how many good research scientists are going to promote their work by posting a link to Slashdot to an article in a newspaper.

Clearly we can't stop you from criticizing a paper you haven't read. But here is the abstract and here is the full PDF of the paper that the newspaper article refers to.

And in case you aren't familiar with PNAS - it is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (of the USA). Feel free to look up their Impact Factor, where you will see PageRank lists them #4 and the combined system ranks them #5. You can also find the editorial guidelines for that journal and read about the peer-review process. If you would like to somehow equate this to "poor science", you are entitled to your opinion, though the facts stand against it.

Poor science in my opinion.

Besides that, how many good research scientists are going to promote their work by posting a link to Slashdot to an article in a newspaper.

Clearly we can't stop you from criticizing a paper you haven't read. But here is the abstract and here is the full PDF of the paper that the newspaper article refers to.

And in case you aren't familiar with PNAS - it is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (of the USA). Feel free to look up their Impact Factor, where you will see PageRank lists them #4 and the combined system ranks them #5. You can also find the editorial guidelines for that journal and read about the peer-review process. If you would like to somehow equate this to "poor science", you are entitled to your opinion, though the facts stand against it.

Poor science in my opinion.

Besides that, how many good research scientists are going to promote their work by posting a link to Slashdot to an article in a newspaper.

Clearly we can't stop you from criticizing a paper you haven't read. But here is the abstract and here is the full PDF of the paper that the newspaper article refers to.

And in case you aren't familiar with PNAS - it is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (of the USA). Feel free to look up their Impact Factor, where you will see PageRank lists them #4 and the combined system ranks them #5. You can also find the editorial guidelines for that journal and read about the peer-review process. If you would like to somehow equate this to "poor science", you are entitled to your opinion, though the facts stand against it.

The journal article is here. The abstract gives some details:
"We demonstrate by means of simple, noninvasive methods (analysis of satellite images, field observations, and measuring âoedeer bedsâ in snow) that domestic cattle (n = 8,510 in 308 pastures) across the globe, and grazing and resting red and roe deer (n = 2,974 at 241 localities), align their body axes in roughly a northâ"south direction. Direct observations of roe deer revealed that animals orient their heads northward when grazing or resting. Amazingly, this ubiquitous phenomenon does not seem to have been noticed by herdsmen, ranchers, or hunters. Because wind and light conditions could be excluded as a common denominator determining the body axis orientation, magnetic alignment is the most parsimonious explanation. To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north. This study reveals the magnetic alignment in large mammals based on statistically sufficient sample sizes. Our findings open horizons for the study of magnetoreception in general and are of potential significance for applied ethology (husbandry, animal welfare). They challenge neuroscientists and biophysics to explain the proximate mechanisms."

The earth has been far, far hotter and far far colder and far, far wetter and far, far drier in the past.

Yes, but for the past 720,000 years, not an inconsiderable length of human time, it has only "catastrophically" done so on 90,000 year averages.

So, could you give me an example of such a sudden shift in that 720,000 year timeframe? If not, any example would do.

You sound very authoritative so I imagine you must already have one in mind.

Thanks!

I think YOU need to check your reading comprehension. First of all there is not a sub-title on the article. I also checked the Journal reference

From the article:

[...]scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.
[...] notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. "The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events," he says. "That's just what creationists say can't happen.
[...] This was clearly something quite different for them, and it's outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species

So here we have proof that:
- Sudden random mutation happens.
- Mutation leads to new species traits.
- Mutant offspring pass the trait to descendants.
- New species traits are functional, in this case improved ability to obtain 'food' from resources the main species cannot.

These are all critical components of evolutionary Theory, this experiment provides 4 points of proof that add validity to the Theory.
Specifically, it proves that the biological mechanism of mutation happens, and happens in a fashion that supports evolution. It also shows that mutations and new traits can cause one group to have a definite advantage/disadvantage over a group lacking the new trait, which also supports evolution.
Although this does not directly prove that Natural Selection on a large scale happens, it proves that at least in isolated ecologies it can and does happen.

As for your last point, science teaches kids to think for themselves. It is the application of logic, reason, and observed evidence, instead of taking someone else's word for something that creates independent thought. Telling kids that all science happens because the guy in the sky is pulling the strings does nothing to help independent thought; it in fact suppresses it.

You *can* control your genes, according to a new study...

Change your genes in 90 days...sounds impossible, right? Maybe not. A new study by researchers at the Univ. of California San Francisco (UCSF) shows that good nutrition in combination with stress management and exercise can "turn off" disease-promoting genes linked to cancer, heart disease, and inflammation and can "turn on" protective disease-preventing genes.

In this study, 30 men with prostate cancer decided to forego conventional treatments such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, instead opting for comprehensive lifestyle changes including a plant-based diet, moderate exercise (walking 30 minutes per day), stress-management techniques, and participating in a weekly one-hour support group. After three months, not only had these men lost weight and lowered their blood pressure, but the activity in over 500 of their genes had changed. The changes included increased activity in health-promoting genes and the shutting down of disease-promoting genes, including some related to prostate and breast cancer.

The authors of the study believe that its implications are not just limited to men with prostate cancer. What that means for the rest of us is that good eating habits and exercise can not only stop or reverse the progression of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and other chronic conditions, it just might improve our genetic destinies as well. It means that the excuse of "I have bad genes, there's nothing I can do about it" is out the window. Genetic predisposition to any condition is only that: a predisposition, not a certainty set in stone. Making positive lifestyle changes with respect to diet and exercise can not only improve our current health but, through these newly discovered genetic changes, improve our possibility of good future health. It looks like it's not just all in our genes after all.

Colonel Korn said:

"Those things were only mentioned in the Odyssey as much as WWII and George Bush were mentioned in Nostradamus."

Having actually read the article (not just the brief and somewhat inept summary from MSNBC that this thread is actually linked to), I think I'm in a position to say: hogwash. This is actually a carefully researched piece, and it makes a credible, if not conclusive, case that there's a trace record of a specific solar eclipse scattered through the Odyssey in references to Odysseus' return home. The actual article is in PNAS, but you'll need a subscription (yours or an institution's) to see it.

One point to get straight right away: most of the references to astronomical phenomena these authors talk about are straightforward and literal. They describe such things as Odysseus seeing the bright morning star on arriving at the harbor in Ithaca (pretty literal reference to Venus as morning star), or navigating by using the constellations Bootes, the Pleiades, and the Great Bear (about as literal as it gets), or multiple references to the final confrontation with the suitors being preceded by a night of new moon (again just plain literal descriptions).

The one point that does involve shaky interpretation is their seeing references to Mercury's motions in the story of Hermes being sent to the east and then back to the west. This is a major issue with their argument, since it's only with the inclusion of the requirement that Mercury have been at greatest western elongation about a month prior to the eclipse that they are able to narrow it down to a specific date. You'll have to read their argument yourself to see whether they make a plausible case for it (see reference above), but it in no way resembles seeing the future in Nostradamus.

When I had seen only the MSNBC summary, I was somewhat skeptical myself, but what I see now is that that summary is a little inept. The actual article's authors know perfectly well (as the MSNBC summarizer seems not to) that a solar eclipse can only occur at new moon. In fact, they point out that two ancient authors, Plutarch and Heraclitus the Allegorist, long ago proposed that Homer was talking about an eclipse and noted as part of their argument that several passages say Odysseus' final return took place at new moon, which is a necessary condition for an eclipse having taken place. Similarly, it's the MSNBC summarist who talks about retrograde motion; the actual article puts its argument in terms of Mercury's elongations from the sun at sunset and sunrise.

A further point, as the authors note, is that they're not selectively reading a few passages and ignoring others that might not support their view. Instead, they have included (or so they say--but this can be checked) all the passages in the Odyssey that concern what the stars and planets were doing during Odysseus' final trip to Ithaca and his confrontation with the suitors.

Before you consign this one to the trash-heap, you really do need to read it.

Well, it states where they were published at the end of the article: "Magnasco and Baikouzis detailed their findings online June 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

The abstract is here, but you (or your academic institution) will need a subscription to access the full text.

sfsp said:

"There is evidence of significant historical details being preserved in oral tradition. This might be one example."

Maybe, but I'd like to see exactly what texts in the Odyssey the authors get their numbers of days from. For example, Homer most certainly does not say "Mercury was in retrograde motion 34 days before" or anything like it. The authors instead rely on a story about the god Hermes (= Roman Mercury, but of course identified by the Greeks with the planet Mercury) going from west to east and then back from east to west. We need to supply a lot of interpretation to see this as a reference to an episode of retrograde motion (i.e. relative east-to-west motion with respect to the background of fixed stars).

For the inner planets, and especially Mercury, you can't directly observe an entire east-to-west (or west-to-east) swing, since in the middle the planet's too close to the sun to be observed. What you actually see is (1) planet visible in the morning, before the sun, (2) planet appears closer to sun on successive mornings, (3) planet no longer visible for a succession of days, (4) planet visible in the evening, just before sunset, (5) planet moves farther from the sun on successive evenings, (6) planet moves back towards the sun on successive evenings, (7) planet no longer visible for a while, (8) planet visible in the morning just before the sun, (9) repeat. To get a reference to this out of a story about Hermes delivering a message to someone in the west and then coming back requires some genuine interpretive argument.

It may well be that the authors of the article (i.e. Magnasco and Baikouzis, the authors of the article discussed in the MSNBC article linked to this current thread) have supplied enough argument to make their case for this. However, I can't tell, because their article isn't available to me (it's in PNAS for June 23, and my institution's online subscription only shows the June 17 issue as available. I'll check it out when it goes online.

Incidentally, the MSNBC summary appears to have been written by someone with little familiarity with naked-eye astronomy. And as others have pointed out, there's absolutely nothing surprising about a solar eclipse happening at the time of the new moon, since that's the only time it could possibly happen (but the fact that the proposed eclipse is located at new moon in the Odyssey may be evidence that, at the very least, someone somewhere along the line of transmission had actually seen a solar eclipse and remembered that it happened at the time of a new moon--a natural thing to remember for ancient Mediterranean societies, which used the moon as a short-range calendar).

I hate to contradict your uncited ancient alleged study with a peer reviewed modern study, but here it is. Overpopulation is certainly as issue, and limited exports have been authorized, but remember that most complex situations have multiple causes. I also challenge you to try poaching on private lands, and then use overpopulation as a defense in court, it the land owner even lets you make it to court.

It seems to me that the device is designed to detect lulls in brain activity in such a manner:

a. As we think critically on a complex subject our brain works harder, so the system detects this.

b. While we are day dreaming ('brain-fart', 'writer block', 'brain freeze', 'mind short', etc.) our brain relaxes for a moment, and the system detects this as well.

c. The study uses sleep as the control, at which it is assumed we are using our brains the least.

This may not be accurate because:

a. The test cannot accurately determine critical thought

Assuming the study uses a constant 'test' as a control, the participants will approach said test differently. The measured activity can not depict how challenging the material is because its difficulty is relative.

b. The test cannot accurately determine an 'error'

Suppose participants' lulls are composed of different thoughts. Perhaps one subject drifts into near unconsciousness, while another is mesmerized by the surroundings. One subject will have a noticeable drop in activity, while another seems to remain constant.

c. The low point of activity may be incorrectly measured

As you all know, certain phases of sleep will utilize the mind's power. It is assumed that the study determines the lowest point of brain activity during the participants' sleep cycle as a constant of zero. This may be the only valuable thing the study could have determined.

It seems that the PNAS is the best place to learn the specifics of the study.

Well, to be fair, after hippos, cows are as close as you get.

• Fosil frog found in Madagascar
• It's big - about the size of a bowling ball and estimated at 10lb - or around 5Kg for scientists
• It's not like modern Madagascan frogs but more like South American ones which raises issues about lineage and land masses at the relevant (non specified - and why not - millions of years ago isn't very precise) era

I linked that paper here and it is cited in the Serchinger et al. paper being discussed right now. Another paper that might interest you was published by the National Academy of Sciences. Agrawal et al. (2007) propose overcome scale problems with biofuels by suplementing the energy input with other sources such as solar and wind. I think that we can skip the plants entirely and do much better than that.

Another paper out this week seems to directly contradict that headline.

What Dai (the Stanford professor) is actually claiming is that specially functionalized nanotubes gather at the back end of the digestive tract, and seem to dissapear. Pure nanotubes cause all sorts of problems. There's an important distinction there, but this is still good news for nanotube (and cancer) research.

The PNAS paper mentioned in the Telegraph article is here. "We therefore showed that the structure, and thus indirectly the interaction causing it, depends on the topological distance rather than the metric distance. The interaction between two birds 1 m apart in flock A is as strong as that between two birds 5 m apart in flock B, provided that flock A is denser than flock B and that the topological distance n is the same."

I haven't read the paper yet, but it seems like there could be a parallel with gossip protocols and flooding protocols: if each bird tracks a small number of randomly chosen neighbours, information can move through the swarm just as efficiently as if each bird tracks every other bird.

The old way: each bird adjusts its heading to the average of the birds within a certain radius r. The new way: each bird adjusts its heading to the average of the closest n birds. They studied starling flocks and found that they use a topological distance rather than a metrical distance. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/search?fulltext=flocking

"Interaction ruling animal collective behavior depends on topological rather than metric distance: Evidence from a field study"

M. Ballerini, N. Cabibbo, R. Candelier, A. Cavagna, E. Cisbani, I. Giardina, V. Lecomte, A. Orlandi, G. Parisi, A. Procaccini, M. Viale, and V. Zdravkovic

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/105/4/1232

What balance? How about the rise of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria, which single-handedly raised the concentration of oxygen to where it is today over a few million years? Keep in mind oxygen was a poison back then, and no doubt killed a lot of early life.

How about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which killed 96% of all marine species and a little over 70% of land species? How about the Cryogenian glaciation, also known as Snowball Earth, when glaciers reached the equator? How about the Carboniferous, when the oxygen concentration was so high that wet grass could burn? Hell, compared to the last ice age, the last ten thousand years have been wickedly hot and weird.

There is no balance in nature. There was no Garden of Eaden before we ate from the tree of science and sinned with industrialization. There was no paradise, only variable, capricious nature. The environment is valuable, but remember that we should protect it for our sake, so that we have a place to live, not because a trout or a tree is morally superior to man.

Mitochondria can also pass between adult cells (full text on the right). This seems an insanely dangerous path of research. The were-beasts are nigh!

I remember a few months back, when the paper on the apparent Younger Dryas meteor event came out. Me and my buddy (I am a geophysicist who studies ice sheet history during the period, and he is a Quaternary geologist) picked it apart pretty well. The lines of evidence they used to correlate the event were not the same for each site. For instance, at some sites they used irridium, others charcoal, and still others Helium-3. The biggest problem with their correlation is that they were using the age of drumlins found in Ontario to date others over 2000 km away. There is no widespread evidence that all of North America burned due a meteorite impact 13,000 years ago. I mean have a look at the distribution of sites. If there truely was an impact that caused widespread destruction across North America, why has there been no published evidence in the central United States. Here in southwestern British Columbia, there is no evidence of any unusual sedimentation during the late Pleistocene. If there was an impact or explosion event that was so intense that it caused the extinction of early people in the Americas, would it not have had measurable material blown globally? I don't recall hearing about any such anomalies in the Greenland or Antarctic cores. It is a crackpot theory at best. One shouldn't discount that one of the main proponents of this hypothesis had only a couple of years ago suggested that a supernova caused the Younger Dryas (an idea that was quickly laughed at).

Actually PNAS isn't peer reviewed. See http://www.pnas.org/misc/iforc.shtml.
While it is possible this paper was peer-reviewed, it is unlikley- the majority of papers that end up in PNAS have been rejected from other major journals already. I should say it is possible that a paper published in PNAS is so ground breaking that it was rejected out of hand and then needed to be published in PNAS, but again unlikley.
"In addition, an Academy member may ''communicate'' for others manuscripts that are within the member's area of expertise. Before submission to PNAS, the member obtains reviews of the paper from at least two qualified referees, each from a different institution and not from the authors' or member's institutions. Referees should be asked to evaluate revised manuscripts to ensure that their concerns have been adequately addressed. The names and contact information, including e-mails, of referees who reviewed the paper, along with the reviews and the authors' response, must be included. Reviews must be submitted on the PNAS review form, and the identity of the referees must not be revealed to the authors. The member must include a brief statement endorsing publication in PNAS along with all of the referee reports received. Members should follow National Science Foundation (NSF) guidelines to avoid conflict of interest between referees and authors (www.nsf.gov/attachments/108276/public/Conflict_of_Interest_Information.pdf). Recent collaborators, defined as people who have coauthored a paper with the author or member within the past 48 months, should be excluded as referees. Members must verify that referees are free of conflicts of interest, or must disclose any conflicts and explain their choice of referees. These papers are published as ''Communicated by'' the responsible editor. "

The referenced article is at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website.

fava

The PhysOrg article is a bit misleading. I work in the Lewis Group on a solar energy project but am somewhat familiar with the nose research. Work on the electronic nose in the group has been ongoing since at least 1994 (one of the first articles our group published on it is here), and a more accurate (but outdated) description of the research is available on the group site. Several other groups have been doing similar research for some time. Current work in the group includes the development of mathematical models to describe sensor response, the use of various nanomaterials as sensors, the development of spatiotemporal sensor arrays, and the creation of piezoelectric chemical vapor sensors. The current research is interesting and exciting, but the tone of the PhysOrg article would have been more approprate had it been written 10-15 years ago.

Am I the only person (in the UK) who saw the Tomorrow's World back in the days of Phillipa Forester or earlier where they had something IDENTICAL to this and were "on the verge" of commercialising it.

This is in fact old news. The first publication from this research group regarding chemical sensing was in 1995. I don't think any major breakthroughs have been made recently.

See http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/92/7/2652

That's not to say it isn't interesting - I have experience in the chemical sensing field so I think it's cool - but it's definitely not news.

Well, not having read the study I can not comment on its significance; however, there is far more to blood transfusion dangers than NO depletion.

Lets get to some significant points: NO is produced locally at the tissues that need it.

• AHA
• jbc
• If u need more

RBC fragility is likely more significant than the effects of one vasodilator

Multiple unnecessary (or necessary) transfusions may lead to iron overload similar to that found in people with hemachromatosis

TRALI

I am not attacking their work, but there are so many other reasons to be vary of transfusions - the significance of this one seems like it would be minimal, but I do applaud their work in trying to minimize complications of transfusion.

Now, I've been away from molecular bio for a few years, so I was curious to know if this sort of speed was even remotely possible. I mean, I remember this whole process requiring a pretty solid afternoon's worth of work at minimum- and depending on the circumstances, often involved setting stuff up to run overnight. Having Googled "fastest PCR" and having found this paper, I have to admit NEC might not be full of crap about this.

Basically, they find workarounds for all the time-intensive steps in the analysis. DNA extraction? They add proteinase K and guanidine to whole blood, then put it through a solid-phase extraction that they say takes only 6 minutes.

For PCR, there's really only so far you can go to speed things up due to limits imposed by reaction kinetics, but the tiny sample size allows them to run through each temperature station in a couple seconds (it should be noted that the fragments they're replicating are only about 200 base pairs).

The separation by electrophoresis is where the magic really happens. See, the parent and I were thinking about how this is usually done, by moving a band of DNA across a slab of polyacrylamide or agarose gel. The setup is labor-intensive, and as the parent notes, it does take awhile for the gel to run to completion They instead do high voltage capillary electrophoresis- and their capillaries are channels etched into a glass chip. Fluorescent intercalating dye was present in the sieving matrix, and detection was done with laser-induced fluorescence- no Southern blot. Everything runs on a single chip, and in 25 minutes goes from bodily fluids to genetic fingerprinting.

I know there's been a lot of hype about "lab-on-a-chip" systems and what the future holds. What's mentioned in this Dec. 2006 paper is of course a research proof-of-concept system- if you look at their PCR setup, their "thermal control system" is a heat lamp and cooling fan controlled by a laptop. A year later, is NEC about to debut a 25 minute DNA lab-on-a-chip as a commercial product? I don't know, but I no longer think the idea is as crazy as it sounds.

Further research answers my own question: yes, we could use solar/nuclear electric to generate hydrogen and then combine it with biomass carbon to make liquid fuels. These guys worked it out:

"Sustainable Fuel for the Transportation Sector"
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0609921104v1

Switchgrass/biowaste/deadfetuses/kittens/etc + Hydrogen = fuel

6.2% of US land area would be needed, vs. over 50% for biofuels. Works because the process can turn ANY carbon-bearing biomass into fuel, rather than needing biomass with high energy content. Plants are just gatherers of atmospheric carbon, rather than the energy source. For solar-H, a negligible amount of additional land area would be needed for the solar collectors, since they're so much more efficient at solar energy capture than plants.

This makes me wonder... what if, instead of biomass, we just collected carbon right out of the air? Could we design CO2 collectors more efficient than plants, just as solar cells are more efficient photoelectric collectors than plants, due to being optimized single-purpose machines that don't expend energy constructing themselves? Perhaps use 1000 square miles of solar collectors + 1000 square miles of carbon collectors (maybe the same 1000 square miles), to run the vehicle fleet? No need to harvest and transport biomass, and the system would be mostly automated. But could we "mechanically" pull enough carbon out of the air to make it work?

Take 0.0383% CO2 in air x 15 psi x 144 sq-in/sq-ft x 5280x5280 sq-ft/sq-mile, get 23 million pounds of CO2 per square mile. Admittedly simplistic analysis, but interesting...

Transdermal drug delivery has been around for ages, as well as microfabricated needles. For a recent state-of-the-art, see:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/100/24/13755

The main problem (most of the physical fabrication issues have been overcome) is that almost any material used to fabricate the needles will quickly be recognized by the immune system, which will not only attempt to push the needles out but will also form a "fibrotic capsule" around the needles, preventing them from dispensing drug. How does HP intend to get around these problems? Smoke and Mirrors! This is the grand challenge of transdermal drug delivery, and it doesn't look like HP has gotten much further at all.

Additionally, I don't know about the (rest of the) heathens out there, but I wouldn't want needles permanently implanted in my arm, leaving my insides exposed to the outsides (and how do they plan to control backflow [i.e. bleeding] or prevent blood clots from blocking the needles, by the way??).

A much more promising approach for transdermal drug delivery is actually ballistic injection of (gold) (micro or nano) particles through the skin that are decorated with the drug of interest. This is reminiscent of Star Trek because it's an old idea that is based on some solid science. It might even be possible to use this for ballistic injection of DNA for vaccines, without having any of the drawbacks as described above for microneedles. Ask Dr. Google or see:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/7218/19491/00900385.pdf
and even better:
http://www.nature.com/nri/journal/v5/n12/full/nri1728.html

You also have to keep in mind that the skin MUST be properly disinfected before either microneedles are implanted or ballistic injection is performed, otherwise you may introduce bacteria or other nasties into you deeper dermal layers (does anyone remember flesh eating bacteria?).

Consider the graph they show for the different low-dose models:

http://www.pnas.org/content/vol100/issue24/images/ large/pq2235592003.jpeg

The data points they're extrapolating to are a country mile from where the interesting biology may be going on, as demonstrated by the vast variety of curves which produce reasonable fits to the data.

I've came into medical physics from a different field, and some of the methods they consider acceptable trouble me a bit, at times. I wouldn't disagree that a linear extrapolation is a reasonable guideline, but that is for a rather broad definition of reasonable, and I would certainly say it's got a long way to go before its proven by the standards of most branches of science.

"Red" and "beautiful" translate to the same word in Russian. Hence "red square". I would imagine then that red is pretty popular there, too.

In anthropological etymology, it's common for the first two words for color in a language to represent warmer colors (reddish) and cooler colors (bluish or greenish, although which one of these comes first is split somewhat). They often appear just after the words for shades of light (light/dark). As a language evolves to have more vocabulary, it's typical that finer distinctions are made among colors and more words are added to represent them. Some languages today still share a name for blue and green, while others have two names for two different sections of blues.

There are also psycho-linguistic differences as well. Russians can visually discriminate lighter blues from darker ones more quickly if they happen to fall across the divide for those two categories that is provided by their language. English speakers, having a word for blue and words for many shades of blue, but no distinct separate single-word categories for lighter blue vs. darker blue, were used as a control group. Another such experiment is between Tarahumara and English.

It's possible the color words which are perceived differently by a particular race or which made the most difference to survival (think poisonous plants and animals vs. food sources) for people at the time and place of the language's early development lead to different color words coming about in different orders. It's being studied now whether the words and the groupings the words represent themselves limit and enhance color perception ability.

Heck, in the book of Revelations in the Bible, Death rides a green horse in the original Greek. It's a black horse in most English translations. Why? Well, the "black death" plague and black being a symbol of death mean that's fitting symbolism in modern English. At the time, though, there wasn't embalming, and as this list of Bible translation corrections says, green's the color a dead body turns, just like any rotting meat. The symbolism is completely different, though, when green from the leaves of plants is considered the color of life.

So there's a lot more to thoughts about color than gender. People's eyesight is involved, the colors in nature in different parts of the world, the language those people speak, the literature and symbols they know, and personal preference all figure in. Even if gender does play a role (other than through a societal reenforcement of perceived norms), it must be in conjunction with all of these other influences.

The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payment. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payment. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

Surgery isn't needed to tune the CNS. This study shows that fMRI feedback allows to modulate the pain perception. People (chronic pain pain patients and control subjects) were able to learn to voluntarily deactivate the brain region that links pain perception and emotion, thereby reducing their subjecive painful experience.

BTW, although acute pain is indeed a useful signal, the nervous system sometimes goes awry and becomes permanently sensitzed to pain or even sometimes generates pain. In these chronic pain conditions, the pain becomes the disease, and treating it is a good solution.

The energy balance isn't particularly meaningful anyway, and pays no attention to the kind of energy used (electricity vs oil for example). And it is useful to note that the energy balance for gasoline is quite negative. But if you would like to know, you can look at the EPA's rule making for the Renewable Fuel Standard http://www.epa.gov/otaq/renewablefuels/ Or this paper http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/30/11 206 published in the proceedings of the national academy of science is also a credible source. These are all fairly comprehensive and fairly consistent with the 1.3 to 1.0 ratio. Costs are probably the best measure actually, (if we properly account for government subsidies and externality costs such as environmental or otherwise). Most credible estimates find that externality costs very roughly equal government subsides, so actually they cancel each other out.

It's even worse than that to be honest. Experiments like this were how we discovered that DNA was the "transforming principle" in organism life. Basically Oswald Avery took a pathogenic (disease causing) strain of bacteria and isolated the DNA then transfered this to a non-pathogenic strain and noted the associated transferal of traits (the non-disease causing strain became disease causing). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Avery (this was way back in 1928). This is no huge leap as far as I can see. Even less of a leap toward synthetic life than when Venters team synthesized a virus (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/26/1 5440) which I think someone had done before him anyway. Or the time when Celera claimed to out perform the human genome project, when they actually included all the information from the human genome project and even then came out with a lower quality sequence http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/7/4143 .

So basically they've not done much interesting. But hay, they got a Science paper out of it and Venter got to jump up and down and say how great he is. I guess that's what matters. :)

In laymans terms, the "Junk DNA" provides the bootstrap routine and program code of an life form building nano-machine. The "Gene DNA" provides the instructions to the life-form-building-machine on how to make this life form a "human" or "fly" or "bacteria".

Papers such as A minimal gene set for cellular life derived by comparison of complete bacterial genomes provide some first steps into understanding how all this DNA works together.

And to the grandparent post - I would argue that the "junk DNA" is not the data segment. For decades we've been thinking of the "Gene DNA" as the program when it is in fact the input data, while the "Junk DNA" is the boot loader, operating system and interpreter. But the machine doesn't build stuff and then move on (like a human-built factory) - it replicates itself, subtly altering the replicants to become more specialised along a growth path that will make one new machine produce stuff that will eventually become a femur, while the other new machine starts building stuff that will eventually become a gluteus maximus.

I've heard of a project where a company set out to create a synthetic bacteria based on the minimal possible DNA, which they could then patent, and use as a base for testing genome manipulation or gene therapy or some such nonsense. Not sure if that's fact or fiction though.

Oil may not need dead plants and animals to form. From an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 28, 2004:

"The study demonstrates the existence of abiogenic pathways for the formation of hydrocarbons in the Earth's interior and suggests that the hydrocarbon budget of the bulk Earth may be larger than conventionally assumed."

They go on to show how methane can be formed from iron oxide (FeO) reacting with calcium carbonate-calcite (CaCO3) in the presence of water at pressures and temperatures commonly found in the upper mantle of Earth. "Abiogenic" means non-biologically originated.

As for oil, one theory is that heavier hydrocarbons (oil) are formed (and re-generated) by the polymerization of this abiogenic methane underground. This sometimes is used as an explanation as to why oil can be found at practically every latitude, while coal is limited to more temperate regions where plants and animals tend to live.

So go ahead and gas up your car. There may be plenty where that came from!

Griffin did not dispute the reality of global warming, he's just not sure it is worth doing anything about it. This is strange coming from an engineer since one would think the basic reaction would be "Wow! If we can change the planet with out meaning to, what could we do if we engineered it?" but he seems to have some philosophical hangup about not interfering in how we are interfering with the planet. Here's a summary: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_Administrat or_Michael_Griffin_Not_Sure_Global_Warming_A_Probl em_999.html.

More to the point on emissions from various countries, here is a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tabulation of emission trends. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0700609104v1. China appears to be primarily responsible for the acceleration of emissions. With the US reducing it's emissions 1.3% between 2005 and 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18831796/, it look as though China will continue to dominate the acceleration.

While TFA has some valid points, the main thing is that industrialized countries have a better opportunity to slow or reduce emissions since, for them, efficiency improvements can pace growth while for developing nations efficiency cannot help with a growth from zero situation.
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Out pace growth: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The National Academy of Sciences did a study that found that even if the U.S. dedicated all U.S. corn and soybean production to producing biofuels, it would only replace 12% of gasoline demand and 6% of diesel demand.

Why the hell is this being ./ed now? This was done over a decade ago and published in the same journal. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/93/24/137 70