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"Methane concentrations were detected generally in 51 of 60 drinking-water wells (85%) across the region, regardless of gas industry operations, but concentrations were substantially higher closer to natural-gas wells (Fig. 3). Methane concentrations were 17-times higher on average (19.2 mg CH4 L1) in shallow wells from active drilling and extraction areas than in wells from nonactive areas (1.1 mg L1 on average; P

Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing

Stephen G. Osborn, Avner Vengosh, Nathaniel R. Warner, and Robert B. Jackson

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/20/8172.short

Let's go confusing the issue with facts: this study gave compelling evidence that NG wells contaminated drinking water, and were consistent with an increase in deep wells.

for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/11/1203177109

And in the interest of academic freedom for those without access to PNAS, the full text: Point process modelling of the Afghan War Diary.

Analyses appreciated.

for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/11/1203177109

its scary because no matter how hard we worked in centuries past we couldn't cross corn with a starfish, or fruit with squid

Yeah, nature could never mix aphid with fungus or sea slug with algae or witchweed and sorghum, right?

and THAT is why GMO is scary

Appeal to nature. Even if your first point weren't horribly uninformed nonsense, it still wouldn't mean that genetic engineering is bad. It times past we couldn't isolate viruses kill them and inject them right into our veins, but that doesn't mean vaccines are bad either, and fallacies are especially bad when applied to highly studied topics.

because frankly some of the shit they are coming up with can't even be truly classified as plant anymore.

So a new protein suddenly changes what kingdom something is in? That's ridiculous. I guess that makes you a virus since humans need a viral transgene to develop the placenta.

Lots of tests have been done, here's a good one:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/3/760

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius#Comparisons_in_sound_quality

Maybe you are confusing 'macro evolution' which hasn't been proven with 'micro evolution' which we see all around us every day.

Macro evolution has been shown in the lab. One characteristic of E. coli is the inability to metabolize citrate. After over 31,000 generations, one set of E. coli evolved the ability to metabolize citrate, thus becoming a new species.

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899.abstract

Here's your proof. Genomic evolution during a 10,000-generation experiment with bacteria http://www.pnas.org/content/96/7/3807.short

Citing Jeffrey Smith on GE is as bad as citing Andrew Wakefield on vaccines (read this, watch this). In the first link, the study he cites was widely criticized by the UFSA, FSANZ, and French HCB. In the second link, the first two studies he cites were not published in peer review journals, the third was withdrawn for flaws, and the fourth has nothing to do with GE if you actually read it except for sing a GE variety and stating that some of the chemical components of GE varieties are different than non GE varieties (duh, different lines have differences). Strangely, your links do not mention this. Wonder why?

basically, no one does ANY testing, they just trust that Monsanto says that it is safe,

You mean except for these hundreds of studies?

Nature does not insert random genes from some weird funguses or fish into corn (or other plants).

Says the organism that needs the viral transgene syncytin to reproduce. Nature does it all the time and even if it didn't that proves nothing. Nature doesn't use somaclonal variation to develop new varieties either

Sooner or later, we may just find our that our improved food is killing us and we don't know why.

Appeal to ignorance. Anti-vaxxers say the same thing about their quackery, and they're just as wrong and for the same reasons.

We have evolved to eat the food we have available, not the other way around.

Bullshit. We have evolved to consume a wide variety of things. My ancestors did not have corn, or quinoa, or tomatoes, or potatoes, or cassava, or taro, or peanuts, or lychees, or bananas, or durians, or blueberries, or loads of other edible species yet I consume these things just fine. One more protein isn't going to throw your body out of whack, and if you truly believe it will, never eat any biodiverse crop that didn't originate from wherever your great great grandparents lived, because I promise you there is a lot more new proteins and other chemicals in a new species than there are in one with a cry gene or epsps gene inserted.

We are FAR away from an understanding how our body works completely. We know the big picture, but that's it.

Appeal to ignorance. Furthermore, you could say the same thing about every other method of plant improvement (like mutagenesis and somaclonal variation, wide crosses and embryo rescue, bud sport selection, induced polyploidy, ect.), which is why the appeal to ignorance is a fallacy.

TFA is a news fluff piece. The abstract of the actual paper they are referring to does not include that bit of dogma

Ok, here's some information on the consensus. Usually when people say "97% of experts agree that climate change is anthropogenic", they are referring to this paper.

http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/05/28/1205446109.DCSupplemental/SM01.mp4

Cheers.

Now in the case of GM foods, it is illegal for a food to be labeled as non-GMO food.

A number of people have said this, and all I can say is, do you people go to grocery stores? There are quite a number of items that say this on them. It isn't illegal, the FDA just frowns upon it because it gives the false impression that non-geneitcally engineered foods are superior, and because the term GMO is not technically accurate (as GMO means genetically modified organism, which every crop is, and the term should really be GEO).

You argue that there are way too many types of genetic manipulation for us commoners to be able to know the difference

No, I'm saying there is no meaningful argument that can be applied to one but not the others.

There should not be a presumption of safety, genetic tinkerers should bear the burden of proof before their crops are sold to the public or released into the ecosystem.

Ge crops are safe, also, see above.

Roundup-resistant crops and crops which produce their own pesticides.

You mean just like every other herbicide resistant plant on the planet? And as for producing their own pesticides, all plants do that. In fact, most of the pesticides in your diet are natural poisons.

Roundup-resistant means that astonishing quantities of Roundup were used on the crop to kill weeds.

And it also means that much harsher herbicides were replaced. Herbicides are pretty common.

Roundup which was touted as safe by your agribusiness "scientists" is turning out to be pretty bad for us. Roundup is teratogenic, and endocrine disruptor, and causes genetic damage.

I'm sure if you drank the stuff, but in the levels present in your food, not even close.

The second common type is even scarier since we know that you can't wash the pesticides off of these, they are inside!

See above. Plant physiology 101: all plants have pesticides in them, so that is not something innately worrying, and especially not when we know exactly how this pesticide works. You body treats it like any other protein, it works by binding to receptors humans just do not have, and it isn't even active in acidic environments like the mammalian gut anyway.

I usually fall on the science side of arguments (evolution, climate change, etc.) but there are currently two areas of science that have been totally corrupted by money and corporate influence: Pharmacology, and agricultural biology.

Ah, so you're liberal unscientific then. Accept the science of climate change and evolution, but reject that of medical and agricultural science. Sorry, but that's no better than rejcting evolution or climate change.

Anyone who follows this story knows that new GMO crops are invented all the time and the FDA rubberstamps them because the FDA is a captured agency.

Nonsense! It takes so long for new crops to get on the market. That is another anti-GMO talking point that falls flat. There are tons of crops in development that get stuck at the regulatory process because of how strict is is. It took years to get DroughtGard approved, and look at the rough time the AquaAdvantage salmon is having.

There is no way that the kind of large scale long-term studies have been done to validate the safety of GMO crops.

Take your pick.

So I call a hearty BS on your vilifying concerned people as being anti-science. Shame on you for resulting to name-calling.

Yeah, that's what the creationists, climate change denialists, anti-vaxxers, and every ot

First, genetic engineering is a way of improving a plant. A monoculture is growing all the same thing. these are entirely different concepts. Trying to link the two only makes it look like you don't know the definition of either.

Second, how are Monsanto's seeds wrong? sure, the make Monsanto a profit, but there's nothing wrong with that. The insect resistant ones have feared pretty well, reducing pesticides and even benefiting farms that don't grow them. The herbicide tolerant ones have, for all their ill will, been environmentally positive, having reduced the need for tillage to control weeds (tillage degrades the soil quality and promotes fertilizer runoff into water systems), reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and replaced harsher herbicides.

Monsanto? Is that why anti-GE groups are protesting the publicly funded Rothamsted GE wheat trial in the UK? Is that why they complain about the Rainbow papaya, Arctic apples, Golden Rice, and BioCassava, or why groups destroyed the GE grapes in French, GE wheat in Australia, GE potatoes in the Netherlands, and GE wheat in the UK? It might be true for you, but that is minority thought. You can not play that card while the vast majority of the protest against GE crops is also applied to those that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

And that is just one of hundreds of easily googled papers.

Those saying storms will likely get more frequent and/or severe have theory on their side, but little/no data

They have a hypothesis, with no support in data. There are hypotheses that say that equalized temperature over the globe will lessen the intensity of storms as well (less severe fronts). Until we have more data, it's scientifically wrong to make claims either way.

one of the four models examined (a respected model) predicts fewer strong hurricanes in a warmer world instead. - http://www.earthzine.org/2011/04/16/will-a-warmer-world-be-stormier/

The results suggest that storm-track intensity is not related in a simple way to global-mean surface temperature - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/18/1011547107

Here's another way of extracting storm intensity values from a few decades back, by looking at damages: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v1851121221p0244/

(2) As a division within the Department of Commerce, NOAA is undoubtedly subject to various political pressures to toe the party line. That doesn't necessarily mean that their study is compromised, but I would want to see a confirming study from an independent group before I ascribe much weight to it.

Who's independent? JPL (below)? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

A likely source of the decrease is the change in measurement of MSLP with the cessation of
routine aircraft reconnaissance in 1987. There is no significant trend in intense storms either
before or after 1987 when the two periods are analyzed separately. - http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/3/1/124/pdf

A possible clue to the apparent discrepancy is that the increase in overall tornado reports roughly matches that of the U.S. population over this time, suggesting that the trend may be an artifact of greater tornado detection due to increases in population density, awareness of severe weather threats, and modern technological advances such as Doppler radar. At the current time, it is therefore not possible to anticipate even the sign of any climate change in tornado occurrence or strength. - NASA, same earthzine link as above.

Also, more discussion on reporting here: http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_Eos_08.pdf

My point is that we shouldn't make statements that do not accurately reflect the current state of science.

They don't actually cite any authorities, but make the nebulous statement "the scientific community", which is what makes it a fallacy. It is sometimes also called Appeal to Anonymous Authority. Furthermore, if they are just repeating what someone told them, then it could also be Appeal to Rumor. The important take away is that their argument was not based upon evidence or logic.

I believe science should be objective. It should hold out the possibility of being wrong. Given how little we know, how little data we have collected in terms of the length of climate events, and the fact that most of our predictions are based on computer models which pose many of their own problems (lack of enough computing power, design of programs can influence the results, floating point calculations can be tricky, particularly in feedback systems, etc). I am dumbfounded by the level of certainty being displayed both by some scientists and many posters here.

On a gut level, I actually agree with their conclusions, but I find the hubris disturbing.

Expert credibility in climate change

And you could also argue that the hubris is among people who think they know better than the scientists in this area, or that none of them have thought through these arguments. And creationists do exactly that. Evolution has the same level of complexity (one of the main arguments against it) and is also accepted only through scientific consensus.

The science-mag article says "the variation in the number of offspring—from zero to 17—indicates there was a large opportunity for selection to occur."

However, whether this "opportunity" resulted in any actual change is not mentioned. For example, if they found some feature change that correlated with the number of offspring, then you might say that is evidence that evolution is happening, but even only then if the correlation corresponds to some environmental pressures. Do they have statistics about traits at the beginning of their study period, and comparison with the statistics at the end?

Does the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have more details? Can't access it.

Fun: "The authors declare no conflict of interest." see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/24/1118174109.abstract

S

Their article is at PNAS (with an accessible preprint on Arxiv.org and has the following abstract:

Abstract

Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting from young Earth-like conditions. We revisit this argument quantitatively in a Bayesian statistical framework. By constructing a simple model of the probability of abiogenesis, we calculate a Bayesian estimate of its posterior probability, given the data that life emerged fairly early in Earth’s history and that, billions of years later, curious creatures noted this fact and considered its implications. We find that, given only this very limited empirical information, the choice of Bayesian prior for the abiogenesis probability parameter has a dominant influence on the computed posterior probability. Although terrestrial life's early emergence provides evidence that life might be abundant in the universe if early-Earth-like conditions are common, the evidence is inconclusive and indeed is consistent with an arbitrarily low intrinsic probability of abiogenesis for plausible uninformative priors. Finding a single case of life arising independently of our lineage (on Earth, elsewhere in the solar system, or on an extrasolar planet) would provide much stronger evidence that abiogenesis is not extremely rare in the universe.

Dude, I'm a vegetarian too. Of course I know what the damn pulses are.
Hell. Was raised vegan.
I'm just not stupid about it.
I also know it is a lot easier for moderns to be vegans than our ancestors.
We have a wide variety of calorie dense foods available to us.
We are aware of risks like B12 deficiency and how to supplement with animal sources (yes, those sources may be as simple as bacteria in a miso soup, but again, this gets back to varied options for moderns).

And what's particularly nonsensical is the article wasn't focused on protein. Somehow people veered wildly off on that front.
Fact is animal products are dense in proteins, vitamins *and* calories. You know, stands to reason given they've been accumulating it specifically to pass on to the next generation or build their bodies.
So of course people depended on them throughout history (including in India) to provide them with all those essentials. Heck. You or I might not find a milk and blood milkshake very tasty, but it sure works for the Masai.

Look, if you want something more sensible to propagandize with...
http://www.pnas.org/content/100/21/12045.abstract

If you go look at my original post, I was actually just pointing out that a man's age contributes to birth defects just as a woman's does. I was willing to be drawn into this aside, though, because it's a fascinating topic.

In my reading, modern scholarship indicates that ancient people mostly died in their thirties, though some - mainly the very wealthy - did live what we would consider "full" lives. I am more inclined to believe the forensics than ancient record keeping; it is the latter that tends to present evidence of "old ancient people."

It's a controversial area, which does not even touch upon the idea of an evolutionary - that is a biological - impact on the species.

Here are some links I came up with (representing an array of reasonable views):
Tables of ancient life expectancies, with sources.
Review of studies finding "old ancient people."
An archaeologist's blog post discussing this issue.
Roy. Soc. Med. paper finding "old ancient people".
The wiki entry, with lots of information and sources.
A PNAS paper which actually discusses population ratios - very interesting.

Not quite the same, but I've seen college exams where the professor had it wrong, marked me wrong, and would not fix the mistake.

One professor (computer graphics exam) thought the Sun behaved like a point light source on Earth. It does not, it behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth and the light arriving from the sun is for all computer graphics purposes arriving with the same vector direction. He would have none of it.

Humm, he wanted to treat the sun as a point source at 1 AU (93 million miles, 49,597,870.7 kilometres from wikipedia), while you wanted to treat it as a point source at infinite distance (thus generating plane waves)? Any "plane wave" like behaviour of sunlight is not because the sun is huge, but rather because the sun is far away. The larger the sun, the LESS its light behaves like a plane wave.

From a shadow casting point of view, both plane wave illumination and distant point source illumination result in sharp shadows, with very little to distinguish them. For a point sources at 1AU, the difference between angles on different sides of person-sized objects at for person-sized distances where the shadow is formed, is pretty minimal. To get a 1% increase in shadow size, you would need to have the shadow be 1% longer than the distance from the point source to the object casting the shadow, or about one million miles - which is probably not the type of thing you are trying to represent with your computer graphics.

  I've never done any computer graphics involving scene lighting or anything like that, but I doubt the difference between point source and plane wave would be noticeable in modeling sunlight.

In actual fact, the sun is not a point source, it is an extended object about 1/2 of a degree in size, which means that shadows cast by sharp edges in sunlight have a "penumbra" of 0.5 degrees. Here is an image showing the formation of this type of shadow:

http://www.pnas.org/content/96/9/5239/F2.expansion.html

For a shadow cast on something a meter behind the object, using good old trig (1m) x tangent(0.5 degrees) = 0.00872686779 m or almost 9 mm. Thus sunlight shadows are fuzzy edges for real-world distances (albeit not really very fuzzy), compared to the sharp edges that plane waves or point sources would cast.

It may well be that the professor was "wrong" to model sunlight as a point source, but it seems at least as wrong to model it as a plane wave, when there is up to 1/2 of a degree in difference between different directions of the light from the source.

Anderegg, William R L; James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider (2010). " Expert credibility in climate change". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 107 (27)

Doran, Peter T.; Maggie Kendall Zimmerman (2009). "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change". EOS 90 (3): 22–23

Now, it's not that economical right now, and we are probably never going to have ALL of our oil needs replaced by ethanol, there's simply not enough capacity.

Is a monstrous understatement. Slowly for you: if you need 80% of your switchgrass ethanol to keep up switchgrass production then... do you get it? Consider what is said on that link about corn ethanol (which has a better yield).Source that 80% number or you're just talking out of your ass.

You know, I never claimed that 80% number. But now I've looked it up. See here

[Note: I'm not heckruler]

Look at the quote history and assert again that you didn't claim the 80% figure (I linked your post in case you don't trust my quoting). You did, and worse, you claimed it for switchgrass ethanol, then claimed that corn ethanol produces better yields, but provided a link to an abstract on corn ethanol lacking a comparison to switchgrass ethanol to back up your 80% figure or your claim that switchgrass ethanol is inferior (your link compares corn ethanol to soy biodiesel). While your claims are roughly correct for current production capabilities, you failed to provide a supporting citation, and backpedalled on what you actually wrote in the earlier post.

Now, from your own link, which was from research done 6 years ago:

Transportation biofuels such as synfuel hydrocarbons or cellulosic ethanol, if produced from low-input biomass grown on agriculturally marginal land or from waste biomass, could provide much greater supplies and environmental benefits than food-based biofuels.

In the US, switchgrass would be a good fit for those criteria. In Brazil, they use a food crop, sugar cane, instead with good results, but little of the US is suitable for growing sugar cane. Your claims assume there will be zero improvement in biofuel yields, and that cellulosic ethanol research will prove fruitless. Even since the 2006 article you cited, there have already been improvements.

Remember: land is a limiting factor too.

True for corn, although somewhat less so once we have viable cellulosic ethanol production. Much less true for cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass, and there is continuing research into switchgrass alternatives and enhancing the output from switchgrass.

[OK, my links are all wikipedia, but the articles do not appear biased to me, and they appear to be well sourced; feel free to find information from other sources.]

Personally, I think butanol will eventually win out over ethanol, but that's purely my own speculation.

Look, I'm all for improving our efficiency, particularly for autos, but if you appear to be stubbornly negative about reasonable expectations of near-term and long-term improvements in biofuel yields, people will be less likely to heed your concerns. People have a tendency, right or wrong, to reject an entire argument once they see that one part of it is needlessly dismissive. You're harming your own advocacy.

- T

Coal liquification is more expensive. And that's going to bring about a bit of change.

Yeah, right. A tiny little bit.

If you want to know how expensive coal liquefaction actually is, you have to look at 1) the effort that is invested in pulling out oil from improbable places and 2) at what cost, putting it in perspective with 3) the amount of fuel produced by coal liquefaction.

This article, and YOUR POSTS, are just self-diluted fear-mongering. Stop that.

I didn't get the part with the self-diluted. What the fuck was that?

My posts, and this article, are intended to create awareness of the scale of the problem.

if you need 80% of your switchgrass ethanol to keep up switchgrass production

Source that 80% number or you're just talking out of your ass.

Let's evaluate your performace. Logic: Fail. Sense of proportion: Fail. And now? reading comprehension: Fail. Manners: Fail. Are you proud?

You know, I never claimed that 80% number. But now I've looked it up. See here:

Ethanol yields 25% more energy than the energy invested in its production.

That gives the 80% figure rather exactly.

From the same article:

biodiesel yields 93% more.

Unfortunately, that means you still have to spend 50% of the energy you harvest to keep up production. Remember: land is a limiting factor too.

Evidence for Younger Dryas impact: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/01/1110614109.abstract

Note that the YD debris layer covers 10% of the Earth. It is hypothesized it was caused by a comet which broke up some time before hitting Earth, so created a large number of smaller craters rather than one big one.

The linked article/summary is inaccurate as the scientists who did the study are not NOAA folks. They're from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Stony Brook University, and the University of Tokyo. [author affiliations from the actual paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ]. The study was funded by the Moore Foundation, National Science Foundation, and WHOI.

So please redirect all government conspiracy comments to the university/academic conspiracy forum.

I don't think anyone argues that IQ differentials exist between different races.

Less than a year ago this study was published showing that motivation plays a big role in the outcome of IQ tests.

Stupid fucking conservative.

I'm not the one who claimed that different races do poorly on intelligence tests because they're lazy, you stupid liberal racist.

That's pretty much exactly what IQ measures, by design, and often weighted to account for cultural differences.

That's exactly what some IQ researchers wish to claim that IQ measures, but that's not the same as IQ actually measuring that. What IQ actually measures is a long standing topic of debate in the field. Less than a year ago this study was published showing that motivation plays a big role in the outcome of IQ tests. Or look at the work or Richard Nisbett, whose research shows the exact opposite of your claim that IQ differences persist after controlling for societal factors.

This is an excellent example of how conservatives misunderstand science. They take a statement like "IQ measures intelligence" as fact, and don't question the evidence behind it.

Stupid fucking conservative.

The authors share your concern. From the paper:

A concern in translating this therapy to human application is the potential for toxicity. CD47 is highly expressed on tumor cells, but also at varying levels on normal (nontumor) cells. However, here we demonstrate that blockade of CD47 in immune competent mice produces an effective antitumor response without unacceptable toxicity, albeit with a temporary anemia.

As riverrat1 indicated currents and also wind patterns can have a huge impact on local climates. For instance the unseasonably warm temperatures in the east of North America and the west of Europe are tied together. Warm air that usually would blow east across the Atlantic is instead staying put. This has caused a cold Arctic air to be blown further south into Europe than it would normally be able to reach. There was a paper recently that indicated that loss of Arctic sea ice is changing the dominant wind patterns over the Arctic. If more cold Arctic air is blown into western North America and western Europe both areas will get colder regardless of whether that air is 3 degrees warmer than Arctic air used to be, because those areas used to get warm air blown north instead of cold air blown south.

Essentially, it looks like the weather patterns across the North Hemisphere are shifting. We can't tell yet if the shift will a freak event, a temporary change until more sea ice melts, or a permanent change.

However, analysis of Puuc soils and apparent cropping system indicates that maximal yields would likely have been sustainable for only about 75 y, with significant declines in fertility and yields certainly setting in after about 100 y (74). This duration is coincident with the apogee of most Terminal Classic Puuc centers (ca. 770â"870 CE).

Now scurry off back into whatever hole of ignorance from whence you emerged.

(I will grant, by the way, that diminished soil fertility cannot be blamed on farming practices exclusively, but my original opinion was based on information I stumbled upon more than a dozen years ago. Nonetheless it was at least based on valid research, and I was only offering it in the shortest form as a contradiction, not as an expansive and detailed explanation, which anybody with the most marginal of research skills should be able to do for themselves. Sadly, time and time again people fail to reach even that meager standard.)

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.abstract Reputation, Karma... :-)

Free Program Predicts How Troublesome a Genetic Mutation Is

No it doesn't.

This is yet another case of how stupid PR does damage to otherwise good science. The original paper (not the PR release) describes a statistical model. The model tells you how likely it is for a mutation to affect splicing. According to ROC curve on figure 4 it isn't nearly as selective or sensitive as you need it to be for any clinical application. It is however a great research tool. The PR article makes another false assumption, by stating that mutations affecting the splicing of an exon invariably cause 'trouble'. In fact it is well established that there is a significant variability in exon usage in perfectly healthy humans (citations below).

1. Kwan, Tony, David Benovoy, Christel Dias, Scott Gurd, David Serre, Harry Zuzan, Tyson A. Clark, et al. “Heritability of Alternative Splicing in the Human Genome.” Genome Res. 17, no. 8 (August 1, 2007): 1210–1218.
2. Zhang, Wei, Shiwei Duan, Emily O. Kistner, Wasim K. Bleibel, R. Stephanie Huang, Tyson A. Clark, Tina X. Chen, et al. “Evaluation of Genetic Variation Contributing to Differences in Gene Expression Between Populations.” The American Journal of Human Genetics 82, no. 3 (March 3, 2008): 631–640.

That's not a straw man*; it's a reference to a peer reviewed study linking fracking to groundwater contamination.

* A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

"The article itself" is presenting the results of a scientific study. If you have problems with the methodology, then by all means present them! But to disregard the article because your feelings are hurt is disingenuous. Perhaps your family IS different, but as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.

[Citation]

Because I am pretty sure the numbers are no where close to your posting.

For the claim that "98% of them to agree that it's somehow caused or contributed to by human activity," try Anderegg et al. Note that this is 98% of publishing climate scientist, not scientists in general.

I somehow doubt that that 98% would advocate abandoning scientific skepticism however. And I hope that most of them would be relieved ultimately to be proven wrong.

Furthermore, in this decade we have seen research indicating that native speakers of tonal languages may be more likely to develop the musical skill known as "perfect pitch". (Short version here). If the very tonal structure of a language can dramatically shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort tones in general, can we so easily scoff at the possibility that the semantic structure of a language might shape the brain's ability to acquire/process/interpret/sort concepts in general?

Are you assuming here that the tonal structure of the language is shaping the brain, rather than the brain shaping whether the language is tonal or not? It's possible that genes that affect brain development can predispose populations towards tonal or non-tonal languages; could those genes also affect the ability to develop perfect pitch? (I.e., "A correlates with B" does not ipso facto imply "A causes B"; B could cause A, or C could cause both A and B.)

Some models do have some kind of nuclear-reactor thing going on at the very center, but it's indeed not right to present it as some kind of fact, when it's greatly disputed what might be there (and our evidence is very circumstantial). As far as I can trace it, the proposal for a "nuclear georeactor" in a sub-core of the inner core is due to J.M. Herndon, who proposed it in 1996, and has since developed the idea in various other papers. I don't think it's anywhere near consensus, though.

"IAAMBP (I am a molecular biophysicist) and I actually just finished discussing this article at work before seeing it on /. The parent post is an odd mix of insightful comments and flamebait so I'll respond to the former. BTW the actual research article itself is free for everyone to read, thanks to the authors shelling out an extra 1K$ to allow public access. I'll link it below:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/10/1115323109.full.pdf+html [pnas.org]

If you would prefer having to pay 10-30$ for the privilege of reading what your tax dollars already paid for instead of this commie "open access" stuff, please call your congressman and tell him/her to support HR bill 3699."

So you would prefer that if the taxpayer wants to read published papers about work their taxes funded they should pay the Journals who knows how much for a printed copy MAILED to them. It would have to be priinted and mailed because the text of the law states:

"To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Research Works Act'.

SEC. 2. LIMITATION ON FEDERAL AGENCY ACTION.
No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
In this Act:
(1) AUTHOR- The term `author' means a person who writes a private-sector research work. Such term does not include an officer or employee of the United States Government acting in the regular course of his or her duties.
(2) NETWORK DISSEMINATION- The term `network dissemination' means distributing, making available, or otherwise offering or disseminating a private-sector research work through the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement.
(3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term `private-sector research work' means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research."

Notice that the forms of prohibited dessemination include "the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement", which would include the putative reader paying for access to a PDF link on a proprietary Journal website.

Also note that the term "private-sector research" is misleading since any research that the taxpayer supports is, by law, PUBLIC research. I suspect that in a couple years, when the data i

This has indeed been pondered! We're pretty sure that all life that presently exists all comes from one root, however. If there ever were alternative life-starting events, they didn't survive. The reason for this is that all extant organisms share a number of completely arbitrary decisions called chirality (if you know any physics, that's left-handed vs. right-handed molecular symmetry.) Chirality is completely random in the chemical reactions that produce amino acids and nucleotides, but absolutely fixed, in the same way, in every living organism we've studied. A number of environmental tests have been conducted specifically to look for organisms of contrary chirality, but we haven't found anything yet.

There are two points here. As for the single root of life, I saw Carl Woese give a talk on this - see timely PNAS perspective here if you have institutional access: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/13/1120749109.short?rss=1
  (he's a giant in evolutionary biology and the one who proved archaea were a separate lineage using ribosomal RNA sequences, thus redefining our understanding of microbiology, so I'm inclined to give large weight to his views)

His view was that some events almost certainly happened to one unique organism, you can do the backwards projection on the endosymbiosis of mitochondria and a very distinct genetic profile emerges from multiple, independent lines of evidence. But when you try and project all the way back to the LUCA (last universal common ancestor of all three kingdoms) the uncertainty becomes so large and some of the contradictions so severe that it is in fact best explained by groups of highly similar (but not identical) universal ancestors over a window of time, not just literally one unique genome at a specific point in time. So he thinks that the "base" of the tree of life ends up being more like a collection of small shrubbery or bushes instead of a singular point of origin. Carrying that thought a bit further, if there were indeed multiple bushes of life at the start it seems probable there were also other bushes that completely vanished without a trace (no fossil record possible).

As for the universal chirality, that speaks to the origin of self-replicating macromolecules that would have preceeded the last universal common ancestor by quite a spell, so we can only speculate what happened based on our knowledge of organic chemistry. NASA funds some rather creative chemists to think about this question to help define what life might be like elsewhere, and last time I saw one of them speak they seemed to be of the opinion that it was probably just a random chance that gave us one hand and not the other and that there were pools of similar chemical species being selectively concentrated by some sort of clay catalyst. But that means it could have occurred multiple times and only one pool resulted in a proto-cell, or multiple proto-cells arose and the rest died off, or maybe all steps really did only happen once, there's absolutely no projection or record to build upon except geological models of what the earth might have been like then.

I suspect it's not "evolution" at all, but subtly bad science (i.e. a scientist gunning for more grant money). DNA can express in many ways given varying environmental conditions, without the mutations that characterize true evolution -- and artificially forcing genetic drift by selecting for the bottom-clumpers is certainly VERY DIFFERENT from having gravity serve as the "selection pressure."

It's well known DNA can express in many different ways without true evolution. We've come a long way from the theory of Lamarckian evolutionary theory (evolution of acquired characteristics). One is example: exons, which can express differently across generations based on environmental conditions-- without actual change to the DNA.

I'm thinking this great discovery will get pounded upon by other biologists pretty quickly -- and put in its proper place as an interesting science experiment that really does not advance the field much if at all. INTERESTING evolution would be a group of mutations that lead to a multicellular outcome. That's NOT what these guys 1) demonstrated happened (multicellular DNA base-pair-causing mutations) or 2) proved was the actual genetic cause at the molecular-biology level.

IAAMBP (I am a molecular biophysicist) and I actually just finished discussing this article at work before seeing it on /. The parent post is an odd mix of insightful comments and flamebait so I'll respond to the former. BTW the actual research article itself is free for everyone to read, thanks to the authors shelling out an extra 1K$ to allow public access. I'll link it below:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/10/1115323109.full.pdf+html

If you would prefer having to pay 10-30$ for the privilege of reading what your tax dollars already paid for instead of this commie "open access" stuff, please call your congressman and tell him/her to support HR bill 3699.

To contextualize this work: the path that led from single-celled eukaryotes to multicellular organisms is one of those $64,000 questions in evolutionary biology, that weird crossover from outright competition to coordinated teamwork. The advantages of being multicellular really pay off for big, complex organisms, but why on earth would it have been advantageous for a small group of a few dozen cells? This paper does not answer the question by any stretch, but it does provide a few interesting, unexpected clues. Most groups asking this question focus on Volvocine algae, which evolved multicellularity so recently such that you can compare them side by side with their nearly identical single-celled cousins in the very same pond. But these are not the most convenient organisms to work with; they have a very complicated life cycle, and have a monster-sized genome for their diminutive size (~140 million bases) and doing genetics on such beasties is still quite difficult and tedious.

Yeast, on the other hand, are really easy to work with and are actually pretty boring in most respects; ~12 million base pairs which have all been sequenced many times over. You can actually custom order them with any gene you want deleted just to see what happens, it's that well characterized. So the observation that artificially selecting for clusters in boring yeast leads to weird snowflake-shape colonies with something that resembles "programmed cell death" in higher organisms is completely unexpected an novel. "Programmed cell death" literally means that the colony has found a way to promote what's good for the colony over what's good for the individual, even though these are only 60 days removed from being a pretty ordinary yeast.

Is this how it happened billions of years ago? Probably not, this is just boring yeast after all, and I can't think of a scenario where sinking to the bottom is a life-or-death advantage. In the case of the algae, it would in fact be suicidal to sink beyond where the

Experimental evolution of multicellularity

And PNAS has it listed as open access, which means you should be able to download the full text regardless of your subscriber (or non-subscriber) status. Just click the Full Text link.

I compliment you on your answer. Until I read your post, it appeared that they were working with some form of bolonium laced with unobtainium to make their claims.

Seeing your answer makes me thing some people might also find this helpful:

BEC - What is it and where did the idea come from?

or this..

Bose–Einstein condensation

And if that isn't consensus, I don't know what is.

I too wish people would stop getting this wrong, as it's blocking the conversation about what to do about climate change.

Well I certainly can't speak to the linguistics aspect, but I didn't recognize date and population size numbers to be totally made up; there is some research (peer reviewed at least -- this isn't my area) putting initial expansion ~65K to 100K years ago [1,2] and some supporting a tight population bottleneck down to a few thousand individuals (*effective population size) at that point as well [2, 3].

1. http://www.pnas.org/content/103/25/9381.full
2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248498902196
3. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7357/full/nature10231.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20110728

There was research published this year on the "wisdom of the crowds". The idea being that if you ask enough people a question with a numerical answer, and average their results it gets pretty accurate at over 100 people, unless those people are allowed to communicate. While the research was done specifically on numerical questions/knowledge (quantitative), I suspect the same might be true of non-numeric/qualitative information. Certainly anyone who uses the internet as a news source (qualitative information) needs to especially careful about this, because the one huge advantage 'old media' has over the internet is slower feedback mechanisms, which means a wider and more diverse sample set for each unit of information ("fact").

No, but they have naturally built plant-made pesticides in their DNA ( here and here ) and naturally built plant-made carcinogens ( here and here ).

And no, I don't own Monsanto stock. Monsanto is financially evil, and this is the root of the problems with GM food, but don't let health get tarred with the same brush as economics.

Interesting bit about the solar system and chaos. As far as open-access papers, this seems like an interesting overview, though it's about a decade old now.

A bit of an incomplete thought here, but I wonder about the possibilities of utilizing these plumes as a source for raw materials for polymers. The one word "plastics" is still as important today as it has been for the past 70 years. Bioplastics is coming along well but why not use what's coming out of the earth at a rapid rate? The purity would certainly be of concern, and any sulfur may result in catalyst poisoning, but I wonder if there may be a benefit towards collection and purification? There's research out of UC Davis ( http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/04/1014804108 ) identifying getting high enough pressures and temperatures (though ~50 Gpa ) we can get some more complex hydrocarbons. Not to burn off, but to make polymer materials. Utilizing the gas as a source of energy for this process would be useful, but definitely trying to think of ways around burning such useful material. Of course it would be cost effective to do it near the source, and I doubt anyone wants Union Carbide on the arctic landscape, but this is just something I was thinking about. Cost to benefit ratios will probably prove me wrong though.

If you read this paper carefully, you'll see that your proposed action would reverse most of the warming. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.abstract Keeping people alive and available to clean up the atmosphere would reverse all of it. We control the climate knob. Got to be around to do it though.

FTFA:

This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.

You do know there are other factors than CO2, right? In fact, historically, CO2 reacts to climate changes, not the other way around. There are many factors that we don't control. The paper also makes assumptions about the total impact of CO2's contribution to warming, based on modeled forcing factors that now have been shown to be incorrect according to observation. In fact, it makes a LOT of assumptions.

Look at it this way. Climate has changed dramatically many times before we got here. It has changed dramatically while we were here but not using fossil fuels at all. Claiming that suddenly we have all necessary knowledge and skills to control it now is the height of arrogant conceit.