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Individual scientists have overturned long-standing consensus for the entire history of science.

This same argument is also used by the countless wrong people too.

Sure, it does happen - but only after a) the method and conclusions are shown to be rock-solid, b) confirming evidence is found by third parties, and c) the existing body of evidence is also explained in the new context. This does not happen commonly - it's far more often that attempts to challenge the status quo fail one or all of the above, and are quickly forgotten.

it has very often turned out that the minority was right

And how often has that minority been wrong?

When I can easily identify errors in a scientific paper, then yes, my judgment is better than theirs. When scientist B points out an error in scientist A's paper, which I can verify for myself is true, then yes, my judgement is better than that of scientists A.

And when Scientists A and C point out errors in Scientist B's critique, who do you believe then? You have no idea even of how much you don't know in the complex field of climatology, yet you're still certain you can "easily" identify errors that the paper's authors, their peer reviewers and the great bulk of climatologists somehow missed completely. Or perhaps you're just selecting the conclusions you want to believe.

who do you think is the one suffering from Dunning-Kruger?

My answer stands :-)

rather than evaluating the actual science in each case.

I'm not capable of evaluating the science at that level. Neither are you, unless you have a PhD and years of work in climate science that you haven't mentioned. We don't have the training or the experience, we haven't been reading all the relevant literature for the last decade, we don't even know what we would need to know to do that. The conclusions sound reasonable to me, but so do the critiques - and so do the counter-critiques. How is a layman supposed to tell who's the most accurate? It's not high-school level stuff.

That's science for you. Actual figures, peer-reviewed paper. If you have a problem with it, refute the science, not my comment about the science.

I assume you're referring to Fyfe et al (2013). And no, I have no problem with it. The models are clearly failing to robustly predict surface temperature variability, and if you read the paper itself, you'll see that it offers a number of possible reasons for this, including the ENSO and AMO oscillations, stratospheric aerosols, model base factors like climate sensitivity, or just unusual natural variability. There's a lot of factors involved, and nobody's claiming that the science is perfect yet, not even close. But we do know, for example, that ocean warming (where 90% of the heat imbalance goes) is continuing unabated, as does ocean acidification. Surface temperatures, while important to humans, are only a small part of the overall rising trend - and they can fluctuate up just as quickly as down.

What I do have a problem with, is the prodigious assumptive leap that a paper like Fyfe's somehow provides evidence that all climate science is therefore junk, that AGW must therefore be insignificant, or even that the 180-year global warming trend has suddenly ceased. This paper does not begin to suggest that, merely that our surface temperature models need more work, nothing more. Meanwhile, other peer reviewed papers like Santer et al (2013) conclude unequivocally that "Our results... underscore the dominant role human activities have played in recent climate change." (I can cite half a dozen others that say the same, if you want).

Theoretical Quantum computer using entanglement to perform their calculations make no claim to solve NP-hard problems. They can only solve some very specific class of problems, that are well identified but are still interesting. Integer factorisation is one of them, but factorisation is not thought to be in NP-complete, although we are not certain at this stage.

There is an old article in PNAS that says that adiabatic quantum computers are theoretically no better than classical computers at solving NP-hard problems. So even if D-Wave had a truly working adiabatic quantum computer, it is not clear that it would perform orders of magnitudes better than what we have now.

Anyway all of this is very interesting to watch, but the fact that D-Wave is so secretive is not very compatible with progress in the field.

They're stuffing ballot boxes. Up to you to decide if that's objectively wrong or not.

They probably noticed that scientists can do things like prove that Russian elections are rigged.

Actually, the point of the article was that the same mutations DID arise independently... That is the definition of convergent evolution.

FYI an example of convergence exists in mitochondrial genes in snakes and agamid lizards -- it's not found in lizards more closely related to snakes.
PNAS article on convergence in snakes and lizards

Good to see your outrageously rude (fuck, stupid, bullshit, propaganda, fuck) reply scoring +4 while my facts-based post somehow now is a troll.

Windturbine changing weather patterns is well-studied and well-known. That's just a fact (which apparently you cannot deal with). Now we don't really make use of wind power on that large a scale so this effect is rather small, but it is also very real. Note the effect works both ways; while my image shows increased cloud cover, cooling the earth, Texas is apparently heated by wind turbines.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17871300
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full

Similarly, getting cold water from the deep ocean will have effects as well, like heating up the ocean must more efficiently than global warming can achieve by itself. And when done on a large scale, these effects may be rather large as well. We'd better think about them beforehand unlike we did with the whole fossil fuel debacle.

Also, obviously the effects of wind turbines as well as deep ocean heating are - for now - extremely small compared to the impact of burning fossil fuel. So they will only work as a pro-oil/coal argument to people that somehow lack logical reasoning skills. Like you apparently.

We're not going to solve the whole anthropocentric climate-change problem if we are not prepared to think about how our actions influence nature and climate. I can understand you'd rather not do that since it apparently makes your view of the world more complex than you can handle. I personally'd rather follow a more scientific approach, which requires taking such effects into account.

ColdWetDog pretty much nailed it: endosymbiosis is believed to have happened in the Proterozoic era, only 2.5 billion years ago, based on DNA evidence. This is also the same period that the archaeological record suggests. Mitochondria and other plastids are actually just bacteria that hitched a ride; the mitochondrion is from a purple sulphur bacteria, the chloroplast is from cyanobacteria, and so on.

Personally, I don't believe that a lack of wildly different chemistry is proof there was a LUCA, although its existence would be strong evidence of disproof. The reason we believe in a single LUCA is quoted really well in the appropriate Wikipedia article: the number of genes in common between Archaea and Bacteria is much too high for them to have been shared later.

This was first done in 1921

http://www.pnas.org/content/7/6/179.full.pdf+html

True, they didn't have animated gifs back then...

I'm tired of so-called scientists making news stories out of un-testable speculations...

Out of interest, did you RTFA? Or, more importantly, did you read the original papers it cites? It's a fairly common scenario for scientists to do some real, rigorous testing of a hypothesis, and describe their work in a scientific paper, and then for a mainstream news article to print a dumbed-down version, and smart people reading that article to get the wrong idea of the original work.

In short: before you bash the scientists involved, read what they wrote, rather than what someone else wrote about them.

I'm a dedicated follower of LanguageLog myself, but how can a blog post from 2006 debunk a study from 2013? Did you even read what the new study was about?

wild bottlenose dolphins respond to hearing a copy of their own signature whistle by calling back. Animals did not respond to whistles that were not their own signature. This study provides compelling evidence that a dolphin’s learned identity signal is used as a label when addressing conspecifics. Bottlenose dolphins therefore appear to be unique as nonhuman mammals to use learned signals as individually specific labels for different social companions in their own natural communication system. --King & Janik 2013, abstract

I would call that a name.

There is NOT scientific consensus on the fact that humans (we) are responsible for all of the global warming that's happening.

Yes, there is.

Sure, no problem. Just because someone says something that doesn't agree with your opinion does not mean that they are wrong.

The paper was submitted on January this year, and approved for publication on June 8. This is a change in design that allows transport and handling rather than just levitating it in air. The flourish was in the original article BTW.

It is, of course, a difficult subject to study – since the super-rich have no interest in putting themselves under the public microscope. There have been indirect attempts, however, for instance: Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior" (see popular accounts if you don't have PNAS access).

As to the all-too-familiar cries of "conspiracy theory! conspiracy theory!" – you ought to find a less tired and trite means of arbitrarily forcing closure on discussion. Considering 'conspiracy theories' have routinely been borne out in history (e.g., COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, and oh let's see - warrantless blanket surveillance?), the knee-jerk reaction that conspiracy theories are inherently ridiculous is itself a tremendous ideological victory.

The irony is that people who cry "conspiracy theory!" are actually proposing something much more ridiculous: That the very small collection of men who own and control most of the world do not meet and discuss their interests behind closed doors, and do not leverage their tremendous wealth and power to further their personal interests. That the consistent policies of governments from every stripe over decades and decades to extend corporate power and the preeminence of property rights above all other rights (including national sovereignty, in the case of free trade agreements) has somehow been a coincidence – with no influence from the power holders who benefit from these decisions.

Truly the reactionaries and nay-sayers propose the wildest theories of all...

I found this paragraph particularly fascinating: "The environment minister's admission came as a new study claimed that severe air pollution in northern China had slashed life expectancies there by more than five years compared to the south, potentially robbing 500 million Chinese of a total of 2.5 billion years of life"

Why stop there when the original research paper is fully available to all*?

* For values of "all" outside of China where it's probably considered "disharmonious."

The vast majority of people experienced famine and/or pestilence at some point before the beginning of the last century, generally several times during their life.

And yet the vast majority survived. I never said there wasn't hardships, I said they got by.

The rest of what you say exists only in your mind. Discounting suicides, life expectancy increased during the great depression.

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290.full

BTW, the great depression was largely caused by government interference within the free market (price controls and trade wars with Europe). I know that someone you find authoritative like your grandma might have told you different, but pick up a history book and get your information from a real source.

More details than just the story can be found in the supporting info of the publication, which includes pictures of the test setup and the resulting spectrograms. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/12/1221464110/suppl/DCSupplemental

Here ya go: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/04/26/1218453110
(Google search: conservatives stigma 'green' environmentalism hate CFL )

No clue it's validity, but...like most opinions.. someone somewhere will have done a study supporting it, regardless how ludicrous it seems.

Personal anecdote- when CFLs were first coming out I've watched people mutter 'fuck the environment' when seeing CLFs on the shelf, but they were cheapskates, not actually political about it :D

6000 mg vitamin C daily, not counting vitamin C in the food? That is a lot. Consult your physician and be very, very cautious about suggesting medical advice if you are not prepared to take moral and financial responsibility for it. Yes, vitamin C is important. Yes, increased intake of vitamin C has been show to have several health benefits, including reduced stroke and cardiovascular disease risks, especially in smokers. However, "increased intake" means "well below 1g/day".

6000 is 30-100 times the recommended daily dose. Although studies indicate that vitamin C intake at 2-4 g/day may not have large adverse effects (1), one has to be extremely cautious when recommending supplementing your diet by a 100x of a daily dose. The fact that you don't experience any adverse effects such as kidney stones (at least yet) does not mean that a person reading your comment will not suffer from that either.

Apart from the problems with the digestive tract, vitamin C can hamper endurance in physical exercises (2). Moreover, vitamin C not used by the organism (which requires as little as 100-200mg / day) is excreted (3). For that, it is metabolised to oxalic acid, which in turn can cause kidney stones (4 and the references therein). So yes, although problems with vit. C overdose do not seem to be common and are not comparable to overdoses of some other vitamins, at 6g/d saying that "C can't hurt" is very risky (especially as supplements can contain other vitamins as well, and the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K can cause severe adverse effects -- vitamine poisoning -- when overdosed).

The highest risk-free level of daily intake for vitamine C has been recently proposed to be 1000 mg (1g) (5, 6). People, before you install some shady software someone recommends at a biology-oriented website, ask your IT friend for advice. Before your follow medical advice from Slashdot, consult your physician.

"Rational by choice."

Prove it. Read the evidence based medical studies rather than trusting and spreading anecdotes.

(1) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1753-4887.1999.tb06926.x/abstract
(2) http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/1/142.short
(3) http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/69/6/1086.short
(4) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2362.1998.00349.x/full
(5) http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=189543
(6) http://www.pnas.org/content/93/8/3704.short

Hi, I just found this post. Im lead author on the paper so feel free to ask me anything. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/16/1305923110.abstract

The paper shows cites 97% of papers. It isn't a one to one correlation but the gist is that there is consensus among scientists. If you need to actually cite the number of scientists, this paper is more direct in counting scientists.

And yet, I'll bet you still put black pepper chock full of insecticidal piperine on your potatoes. Thankfully, it is a bit more nuanced that you make it out to be, otherwise you would have to avoid everything because most pesticides arenaturally occurring.

You also forget that most places that might use this are ABOVE SEA LEVEL...My numbers are not off. They've been checked and re-checked with quantum meters, light/power meters, and in most places about 3,000-4,000 feet above sea level...

About a third of the human population lives less than 100 metres above sea level. Most live below 200 metres. (The median living altitude for humans on earth is given as 194 metres - 636 feet - in this 1998 paper; if anything, it's likely to have shifted downward in the years since, as the majority of the world's rapidly-growing, largest cities are coastal.) In any event, you weren't quoting 4000-foot numbers; you were quoting figures for outer space. Have you even looked at what you wrote, or the source that you linked to?

First, you forgot to acknowledge that any light source is emitting IR, and thus that factors into power usage and visible-light availability, thus using 445 w of light, even with our most efficient light sources, might only net you overall 110 w in the visible range.........

Dude. Just give it a rest. The original poster explicitly said "At 100% efficiency...". No one said that an ideal visible light source existed; the point was to put a hard floor on the power requirement.

While I admit that I have a certain morbid curiosity about how long you're going to keep trying to contort your comments so that you can be 'right', I figure that you're out of useful things to say now that you're struck your second I'm-a-super-duper-expert-and-can't-be-wrong pose in lieu of evidence. I'm going to go talk to people who are interesting, now.

According to a widely publicized study done last year, that's a statistically useful sampling of humans. The paper, Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior, bases some experiments on the behavior and self-reported demographic information of those on Mechanical Turk.

Study 5.Participants. One-hundred eight adults (61 female, 1 unreported; age18–82,M= 35.87, SD = 13.62) completed an online study via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a Web site that features a nationwide participant pool for online data collection.

They use this experiment as the basis of their conclusion:

"upper-class individuals were more likely to...cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), "

Quality research partially payed for by the taxpayers(NSF grant).

A link to the full paper

If you scrutinize the article, Sergei Bulat is quoted as saying the organism has less than 86% "DNA similarity" to other species. Taken at face value, this means that the entire genome of the bacterium is less than 86% similar, which (a) requires isolating it first and months of work, and (b) would not be impressive at all, since Escherichia coli genomes have much higher variety.

He then goes on to say that 90% is the threshold beyond which a species is considered completely unknown. This is an appropriate figure to give when discussing the evolution of one particular gene called the 16S ribosomal RNA, which is very important to cellular function and changes very slowly. It's also a standard test to use in the analysis of bacterial communities, and one of the core tools in metagenomics, because it's very unique to species and hence an excellent fingerprint. If you need citations to back up this claim, I can give you oceans of them. This is my actual day job.

So how divergent is 100 – 86 = 14%? This article references a standard 1% every 50 million years. 14 * 50 = 700 million years. This figure is quite possibly too low in this case, since evolution has a non-linear effect on sequences—eventually mutations flip multiple times, and so large numbers of changes get masked. This rate of change can be sped to 2% every 50 million years if the environment is exceptionally rich and predator-free, like inside certain cells in insects—but that's largely because the host cell is available to a degree to provide nutrients, so proper ribosomal function isn't as important.

This doesn't mean necessarily that this species has been completely isolated the whole time, just that we haven't found any surviving links. If it previously existed in a cave system, for example, that entire community could have been wiped out when Antarctica froze, leaving behind only a stub of organisms that were sheltered by the heat (and food chain) emanating from the thermal vent. Cave ecosystems often contain numerous species that have adapted so tightly to their niche that they are unable to survive outside.

That being said, this expedition has already made crap up for publicity stunts. As this hasn't been published in any journals yet and was instead released to the press first, it's entirely possible that no such species exists. Nevertheless, the claim of 14% divergence will be interpreted by other experts as more than half a billion years.

Really? How do they know it wasn't just raw sewage, or industrial chemicals if they didn't even identify the chemical, or even prove it came from the oil spill?

The PNAS paper that looked at the SF Bay spill ruled out sewage and other chemicals found in the Bay. They suggest sunlight transformed crude compounds into toxic ones. The PNAS paper is in front of a paywall, I believe: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/2/E51.full

Its not that the oil is "missed", its just that the oil once degraded to the point that it is not oil anymore is hard for them to measure with current methods, so they can't figure out where it went.

The main point, is that the oil is gone, degraded, oxidized, etc. The most dangerous (to marine life) part of the spill is gone.

But where degraded oil goes is a question scientists want to know, mainly because they don't fully understand what those compounds do to wild life. So even if the chemicals aren't the ones that originally spilled into the ocean, what they become is still of interest to researchers, because they know less about them.

Tipping points are a certainty. We can observe them in the paleoclimate record, and we observe them occurring today. For an example see the effect of shrinking summer Arctic ice extent on albedo. This is already occurring. You can read more on tipping points here: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786.short

Impacts are also a certainty. For examples review the following 1.6 million papers: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=impacts+of+climate+change&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=

the summary says that the result is valid for species, not individuals. even that is wrong; it's not exactly valid for every species; the result is actually that there is a significant power-law trend across species which is that the mortality rate and birth rate both scale approximately as -0.25*(dry mass) on a log-log scale. however there is also significant variation from the log-log line-of-best-fit; the r^2 is around 0.8, though i don't care enough to read exactly how they designed the study. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/40/15777.full

humans have, of course, cheated death to some extent, so we're outliers, though it is worth noting that prehistoric humans had a max. lifespan of around 40 years...

this is an old result for animal species; the `result' here is that they checked the extrapolated fit for ~700 plant species and validated it in that domain. scientists generally make small extensions or validate previous conjectures; since the public doesn't understand what they're building from, the media has to present the history as the novelty. it's kind of funny, really.

i remember reading a paper (from sante fe institute, of course) ~20 years ago or so which tried to define a `generalized heartbeat' for cities and nation-states to see if the scaling law would extrapolate. of course, the problem is you can define such a thing however you want.

The danger with GMO crops is what we don't know about gene splicing and the like

Yes we do.

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full

Lead ammunition is currently the single greatest threat to the continued survival of the California Condor, according to the National Academy of Science.

Of course the NRA focuses exclusively on the question of hunter's rights human health consequences of lead and not the overall effects of lead in ammunition. And if you search for 'lead' on the NRA's 'Hunter's Rights' website, you get turn up a big fat -0-, ostensibly because they are so myopically libertarian that nothing buy lead in venison meets their threshold of importance.

Maybe this helps explain what happened to Wayne Lapier... too much venison, too little separation between his corrective lenses.

what altitude shall we pick for that water to melt and to boil?

75% of the world's population lives at less than 500m elevation. Sea level seems like a good choice. Water then boils at 98-100C for most people, 94C in Denver and 88C in La Paz.

This one shows it barely breaks even. There are a lot more useful things one could do with cropland than barely break even.

In short, we find no support for the assertion that either biofuel requires more energy to make than it yields. However, the NEB for corn grain ethanol is small, providing 25% more energy than required for its production. Almost all of this NEB is attributable to the energy credit for its DDGS coproduct, which is animal feed, rather than to the ethanol itself containing more energy than used in its production. Corn grain ethanol has a low NEB because of the high energy input required to produce corn and to convert it into ethanol. In contrast, soybean biodiesel provides 93% more energy than is required in its production. The NEB advantage of soybean biodiesel is robust, occurring for five different methods of accounting for the energy credits of coproducts (see Table 9, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site).

Link was to this study:

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/30/11206.full

Link was to this study:

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/30/11206.full

It is and it isn't a roll of the dice. Whether or not a creature is already adapted for the radically different conditions that occur during a mass extinction is pretty much random. They can't plan ahead, because evolution doesn't work that way. They haven't spent millions of years adapting for conditions that don't yet exist, they've adapted for the conditions that do exist. Then suddenly the rug is pulled out from under them when the Earth's environment changes en masse. So, when the disaster happens you're either well-suited for the new situation or you're not. In that respect if you take a large group of creatures (say, mammals), there will be winners and losers, and sometimes they are *all* losers (i.e. they all go extinct). Like you say, it *looks* a lot like a roll of the dice. However, whether a particular species survives isn't simply "luck". There will be a specific reason why they survive while other creatures do not. For example, at the end of the Cretaceous, one of the reasons that dinosaurs seem to have died out while mammals and lizards survived is the fact that most of the former are relatively large creatures that would be exposed on the surface and have greater food demands, while the latter two include a lot of small species that can also burrow into the ground and in some cases hibernate if climate turns cold.

Think of this kind of like an obstacle course where the "random" aspect is the choice of the exact obstacles on the field, but whether or not a particular species makes it through the course isn't random (i.e. there are good reasons why certain species make it through *that* particular course). The survivors then diversify once conditions go back to normal and a lot of previously-occupied niches that are now empty creates new opportunities. Even when creatures survive mass extinctions they are often decimated. For example, a paper just came out recently that looks at lizards and snakes before and after the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinction. The large ones tended to die out and the ones that survived tended to be small -- i.e. it wasn't "random". There was a definite bias to survivors versus non-survivors.

One of the big points about viruses that remain in the body long-term, is that they somehow manage to find shelter in which to evade the immune system -- at least for most of the time, and at least from those parts of the immune system that might otherwise eradicate them. (See for example 'virus latency' at http://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/abstract/S1931-3128(10)00217-9?script=true/).

Many of the mechanisms of that sheltering are still unknown, or incompletely known. That means, in turn, that it's at least not going to be a surefire winner to have an extra protein -- against which you want a really strong protective immune response -- tagging along with the sheltering virus.

Plus, it would seem that the main article is reporting a theoretical study (from the 'supporting information' for the PNAS paper referred to in the main story -- which is all that I could so far access -- here http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/11/14/1209683109.DCSupplemental/pnas.201209683SI.pdf -- other than the abstract).

The status of the matter appears to be that this is an 'if only . . . ' -- so far.

-wb-

Please check out the following pretty convincing study:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/22/1206820109.abstract

Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for years of education. Informants also reported noticing more cognitive problems for persistent cannabis users. Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents.

How about the Netherlands? That should make for a nice location for such a study with pot being legal over there. Btw over 1000 participants.

Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for years of education. Informants also reported noticing more cognitive problems for persistent cannabis users. Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents.

From http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/22/1206820109.abstract

Neither parent quoted any studies..

Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students

Full text and supporting data "Free via Open Access."

It's also not exactly without precedent. Years ago a lab mouse was found with the same phenotype. The lab mouse is much more useful for studies as we know much more about it's genome than this interesting wild species.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/11/1111056108.full.pdf

Sorry, but you and whoever modded that post down missed the point. There is an apparent affect where imploding small bubbles in liquid can cause nuclear fusion or some similar process involving very hot temperatures like the surface of the sun and so possibly emit radiation as evidenced by the production of light (although the details remain controversial). Ultrasonic sound waves can apparently cause such small bubbles, and so the proposed idea of injecting drugs using ultrasonic waves to cause small bubble may be a potential radiation risk. From the wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion
"Bubble fusion, also known as sonofusion, is the non-technical name for a nuclear fusion reaction hypothesized to occur during a high-pressure version of sonoluminescence, an extreme form of acoustic cavitation.[1] The mechanism of sonofusion was proposed in 2002 by Rusi Taleyarkhan. Experiments in following years have produced conflicting results about whether it is possible to cause a fusion reaction with this method."

Emphasis being on "nuclear fusion".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence#Nuclear_reactions

And this supports the original poster's point about free radical damage. Maybe free radicals are caused by radiation from the imploding bubbles?

If you want to learn more about bubbles and possible radiation, watch this youtube video about snapping "Pistol Shrimp", who use the effect to stun prey:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeFUO2F7Gvw

So the question is, could this be happening in this attempt to inject medicine via ultrasonics? Compare what is quoted above from Wikipeida with this part of the summary of the original article: "When ultrasound waves travel through a fluid, they create tiny bubbles that move chaotically. Once the bubbles reach a certain size, they become unstable and implode. Surrounding fluid rushes into the empty space, generating high-speed 'microjets' of fluid that create microscopic abrasions on the skin."

Imploding bubbles are referenced in both.

Of course, many mainstream physicists may find this idea of bubble fusion heretical, same as they object to the idea that nuclear processes can go on at the surface of a metal lattice (or maybe inside one):
http://pesn.com/2012/09/06/9602177_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_September6/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/05/11/184239/bubble-fusion-researcher-faces-fraud-trial
http://science.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/1117201/bubble-fusion-results-replicated-by-4-institutions?sdsrc=rel

Am I saying typical ultrasounds used for diagnostic imaging produce this sonofusion effect? No. Although now that you bring the issue up, maybe they can?

By the way, as far as ultrasound and the developing human brain and ear related to ultrasounds performed during pregnancy, even without radiation issues, consider:
"Prenatal exposure to ultrasound waves impacts neuronal migration in mice"
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12903.full

What are the implications?
http://www.naturalchild.org/research/yale_ultrasound.html
"Physicians should continue to be prudent about the use of ultrasound and perform the study only when medically necessary and when benefits outweigh risk, according to the American College of Radiology. The advice comes in the wake of recent findings by Yale researchers that link prenatal ultrasound exposure to brain damage."

Heck, even no sprays does not mean no insecticidal compounds, as plants produce most of the ones you get in your diet naturally. Of course, as per popular belief, natural is therefore better and as such this has no relevance (though strangely when naturopaths ect. make appeals to nature they are rightly criticized for believing quackery although when you talk about agriculture suddenly fallacies are enlightened and progressive)..

Ahem: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/18/1018707108. First result on Google. Short version: false positives at a .1% rate, false negatives at 7.5%, independent review caught every single one. I'd say that is reasonably accurate.

There is a ton of science in forensic science. Obviously, it is not 100% nor is it "hard" science where you can get 99.9995% confidence using a thousand or more trials for each match like you can in, say, physics. That is why you have a trial, and "beyond reasonable doubt", not beyond all doubt.

wow, how is his claim "anti-science"?

Medical research actually does suggest a link between very early miscarriages and cortisol levels which seems to be very much along the lines of what Akins suggests (there are multiple studies along these lines, including some interesting research on the use of progesterone to counter-act stress and "protect" pregnancies in mice)

So you are suggesting that this study (cortisol levels over three weeks) is relevant? Women who are raped consecutively for three weeks will be *so* relieved.

But it is a math issue. Akin has made the claim that somehow women who are raped can fend off pregnancy. So, there is a solid claim here that can be investigated, and before one starts pondering the means by which women can prevent rapists' sperm from fertilizing their ova, it seems useful to investigate the rates of pregnancy from rape.

This is exactly it. The "big deal" isn't that a conservative thinks there is some sort of magic that God put in women to prevent unwelcome pregnancy (conservatives believe all kinds of ridiculous things so this is not a shocker at all). The big deal is that Rep Akin was appointed to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology in the U.S. House. This obviously puts him in a position to influence the nation's policy toward science, and since he is clearly a firm disbeliever in science as a whole it is really important that as many people know about this tragic mismatch as possible.

wow, how is his claim "anti-science"?

Medical research actually does suggest a link between very early miscarriages and cortisol levels which seems to be very much along the lines of what Akins suggests (there are multiple studies along these lines, including some interesting research on the use of progesterone to counter-act stress and "protect" pregnancies in mice)

Some marmosets are naturally chimeric some substantial portion of the time. This leads to wacky fun for researchers because it is perfectly possible(depending on how the different cell populations ended up distributed in the mature monkey) for an individual to show one genotype on blood tests; but produce offspring that appear to be genetic descendants of their brother or sister....

Just to be sure, we'll probably have to homogenize any animals and/or small children we wish to study in the future.

The scientific community is not split on global warming, unless you consider 97 - 98% believing global warming and 2-3% against a 'split'. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract
Or if that's a bit dry, try http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137309964/climate-change-public-skeptical-scientists-sure

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.

Well, my cite would be James Hansen's recently published paper. He specifically discusses the shift of the normal distribution of temperatures toward the hot end of the scale due to global warming. The numbers I used were just pulled out of my ass but temperatures are distributed in a normal distribution (aka bell curve) with average temperatures most common and extreme temperatures the least common. It doesn't take much of a shift in the normal distribution to significantly increase the chances of a specific extreme temperature occurring.

This post on Hansen's Sunday Op-Ed in the Washington post lays it out fairly well. Look down the page a bit at the graph titled "Shifting Distribution of Summer Temperature Anomalies" for an illustration of what I was talking about in the GP post.

You can look at the statistical choices made right here, in the full paper. It's great that he published it in an open place.

I can see a few places with potential for error:

*) The period chosen is very short. Going from 1950 to present isn't a very long time for measuring, especially when you divide it into two pieces.
*) Given a small enough piece of data, it's easy to divide it and find trends that show your point. You see AGW opponents do this a lot by saying "It's actually cooled since 1997." It's 100% true, but doesn't matter. I'm not saying Hansen has done this, but it's an easy trap to fall into (even accidentally) and should be checked.
*) The method of defining 'extreme' can make a huge difference in a paper like this.
*) Even if the first statistical analysis is correct, it's a jump to say that Moscow 2010 heatwave was caused by CO2. They'll need to back that up.
*) If the Watts study proves to be correct, that could invalidate this entire paper (statistics performed with poor data = garbage)

And now I'm off to read the paper.