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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.

So this is a computation using a statistical model to give estimates of the soil contamination, and it becomes facts and measured quantities in the ground. But worse, look at the original scale provided by the authors of the paper: it clearly shows the areas under 2500Bq/kg, but the journalist conveniently merged it with the upper-bound area and also avoided the use of the green/blue colors usually associated with safe values in any mapping. Maybe the original map had not enough red and orange area for effective scare-mongering ? BBC I am disappointed...

If the video had shown her inconsolable for 20 minutes after the beating, hardly able to move because of the pain, I'd be more inclined to feel some sympathy for her. As it was, she had a dick father, and a dick mother, but as soon as they got out of the room, she was cool as a cucumber, walking around like the beating was nothing to her.

I'm sorry to hear that you were maltreated so badly. But don't jump to conclusions too lightly, even emotional abuse without any physical harm can scar people for life. I suffered emotional abuse and neglect at home, and was physically bullied by classmates for 5 years. While I got used to just ignore the pain after a beating and go on as if nothing happened, it took me, looking back, about 18 years after it stopped to get what I know now were very obvious PTST symptoms out of my system. It never seemed a big deal at the time because it was dwarfed by what the emotional rejection I got from my parents did to me. I'm nearly 50 now and still working on leaving that behind me.

Some time back I talked to a guy about my own age about this and about his past. He suffered 10 years of frequent sexual abuse by both his parents in his childhood. We were both surprised at how very similar the effects on our lives had been.

Recent studies have found that physical and emotional pain, especially social rejection, show a large amount of overlap in how the brain handles them. Here is one of them. Don't think that the abuse needs to be physical to cause pain, and don't think you can judge the severity of the pain caused by only looking at the severity of the physical aspects of the abuse. There's more going on.

I think that social rejection is part of any kind of abuse, physical, sexual or emotional. When your own parents, the people you automatically trust as a child, do it structurally the consequences are huge, regardless of the type of abuse. You are brought up with the assumption that being rejected is normal. While you may be able to see that many other people are different in this respect, without ever having experienced anything close to the social confidence they have it is extremely difficult to understand how different life can be, let alone set it as a goal for yourself. I've advanced far enough on that path to begin to understand that the difference really is huge, people really live in fundamentally different social realities. That difference in perspective is much harder to overcome than the more direct PTST-like consequences, which are serious enough by themselves.

I, my siblings and the other guy I mentioned have to deal with mothers who are in total denial about what happened. My mother was the main culprit, the other guy's mother was both victim of her husband, who forced his whole family to enact his sexual fantasies, and co-abuser of her children because she did take part in it. While they can't undo what was done, dealing with it is made much more difficult by this denial, the air is never cleared and you don't get the chance to establish a better, even a neutral relationship with them. Judging from the video Hillary's mother's story is that she was both her husband's victim and forced to be his co-abuser, and Hillary accepts that. Perhaps they are as rotten as the father, but it could also be true.

98% of all climate studies do not even attempt to address the cause, yet you somehow think otherwise and are pretending instead that 98% of all studies do attempt to address the cause.

We both pulled a figure out of our asses.. but my pull is actually approximately correct.

Actually, the 98% figure comes not from anyones ass but from the scientific literature. Both of the following two papers conclude that ~98% of active climatologists concur with the consensus around climate change (hence the term "consensus").

Doran, P. T. and M. K. Zimmerman (2009), Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(3), 22, doi:10.1029/2009EO030002.

Anderegg WRL,; Prall JW,; Harold J,; Schneider SH. (2010) Expert credibility in climate change. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107:12107–12109.

Why do you believe that your pull is more accurate than these studies?

The wear and tear on the body is such that even if you can increase the lifespan to a theoretical 150 years you wouldnt be very healthy for the last 90 or so years. You also need something that adresses the wear on the body. Our hearts arent made for 150 years of use and we build up various plaques and toxins in our bodies as time goes by. Even if we all lived under controlled and ideal circumstances the last seven decades would be pretty much seven decades of being eighty.

Actually, there's some research that strongly suggests that there's only a finite amount of aging going on. What's happening in aging might not be "the body's self repair process falls behind entropy", as commonly thought. Instead, aging would be "the same tradeoffs which favor reproductive success in youth exact a cost later in life"; after some finite time, you've paid those costs in full and aging stops, leaving only a constant risk of disability and death per year instead of the ever-growing one postulated by the "falling behind on entropy" model. In this view, there are still some specific things that actually do wear out with age because they aren't constantly replaced (tooth decay and cornea clouding / cataracts are the obvious ones), but general health doesn't suffer the same fate.

See New Scientist's The end of ageing: Why life begins at 90 (behind a paywall, sadly), which references a demographic study where annual mortality rates became constant above age 93 (Greenwood and Irwin, Human Biology, 1939), a study confirming the same pattern in fruit fly populations (Carey and Curtsinger, Science vol. 258 p. 457 and p. 461, 1992), and an exploration of a mathematical model of mutation which concluded that a mortality plateau is inevitable, not a mere special case (Rose and Mueller; PNAS vol. 93 pp. 15249-15253, 1996). (Of note: Rose is the author of the New Scientist article, with all the confirmation bias that implies.)

Also, the research into aging suggests there are only a handful systemic problems that actually cause it (accumulation of crosslinked proteins; declining telomerase production causing cells to stop dividing; etc.), and if those systemic problems were addressed we could largely arrest the aging process. Aubrey de Gray's TED talk is pretty much mandatory viewing on that front.

It's worth keeping in mind that if metabolism and entropy inevitably led to cell death after 100 years, then human beings as a species would have already died out: sperm and egg cells are metabolically active cells that contain DNA that's millions of years old, and there's no time machine that allows a pristine copy of the germline DNA to be copied forward from conception to adulthood without at least a childhood's worth of accumulated error. Likewise for our mitochondria, pseudo-cells that they are, with their own mtDNA separate from the DNA of the nucleus, exposed to the entropic ravages of the Krebs cycle firsthand without a nuclear membrane to protect it; our bodies pass these pseudo-cells on from mother to child unchanged, without even giving their mtDNA a de-methylation/re-methylation spring cleaning like mammalian nuclear DNA receives. But they thrive in the germ cell line, generation after generation, even as they suffer and decline in the somatic cell lines. There must be a difference in upkeep, some cost that evolution is willing to pay for the germline but unwilling for the somatic lines, that allows the germline mitochondria to remain healthy and "young" for millions of years.

Ok, put a rifle and a panther in a cage together and see who wins. Better yet, put a human sans tools and a panther in the wilderness and see who wins. Spoilers: the panther wins. The point is that it takes a social support network of dozens if not hundreds of people and their accumulated knowledge to produce one rifle and only one large cat to rip your face off. Without our society and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge we're just another bag of meat.

Once we start mucking around on nature's home turf, we're seriously outmatched. Consider that we're just learning to put bits together that can reproduce their own instructions, never mind an entire cell. Prokaryotic life has been at it for 3.5 billion years and has produced organisms that will happily munch on both organic and inorganic compounds. The variety of species or OTU (operation taxonomic units) of prokaryotes is so astronomically large that many microbiologists would conclude that given our current methodologies for culturing them and sequencing their genomes it is not currently possible to say how many in total they may be . Some estimates of the number of OTUs in sampled soil have ranged anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 or up to 500,000 [1]. The sheer mass of prokaryotic life has been estimated to be as high as 5.46 x 10^14 Kg [2].

In short, whatever we think we might be capable of doing in the near future chances are that life has already accomplished it millions of years ago. So if you're looking for bionukes you don't have to go any further than your back garden.

Ok, put a rifle and a panther in a cage together and see who wins. Better yet, put a human sans tools and a panther in the wilderness and see who wins. Spoilers: the panther wins. The point is that it takes a social support network of dozens if not hundreds of people and their accumulated knowledge to produce one rifle and only one large cat to rip your face off. Without our society and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge we're just another bag of meat.

Once we start mucking around on nature's home turf, we're seriously outmatched. Consider that we're just learning to put bits together that can reproduce their own instructions, never mind an entire cell. Prokaryotic life has been at it for 3.5 billion years and has produced organisms that will happily munch on both organic and inorganic compounds. The variety of species or OTU (operation taxonomic units) of prokaryotes is so astronomically large that many microbiologists would conclude that given our current methodologies for culturing them and sequencing their genomes it is not currently possible to say how many in total they may be . Some estimates of the number of OTUs in sampled soil have ranged anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 or up to 500,000 [1]. The sheer mass of prokaryotic life has been estimated to be as high as 5.46 x 10^14 Kg [2].

In short, whatever we think we might be capable of doing in the near future chances are that life has already accomplished it millions of years ago. So if you're looking for bionukes you don't have to go any further than your back garden.

I had exactly the same response to the article - they've created a mathematical model the reflects what they observe, but they still don't really understand the mechanism. Looking at the comments of the article, I found a link to the original article. From what I can understand (by reading the abstract), it sounds as if the work was (surprise) a lot more complicated than the article linked above. From the abstract:

A quantitative and general model is derived for the interaction potential of charged bilayers that includes the electrostatic double-layer force of the Derjaguin–Landau–Verwey–Overbeek theory, attractive hydrophobic interactions, and repulsive steric-hydration forces. The model quantitatively accounts for the elastic strains, deformations, long-range forces, energy maxima, adhesion minima, as well as the instability (when it exists) as two bilayers breakthrough and (hemi)fuse.

In short, as far as I understand it, their model is built upon a lot of existing models and considers many, known phenomena. If you dove into the actual article, you may get a sense of the "why" but it strikes me as a complicated enough of an explanation that it would probably take a strong background in physical chemistry to fully grok.

As I teach in my biochemistry class it is entropic cost of not separating them that causes their separation, but I have yet to really wrap my head around this study. Nonetheless, here are some links to the original research:

* Abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21896718
* PNAS (paywalled): http://www.pnas.org/content/108/38/15699

"Science adjusts it's beliefs based on what's observed Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.": the believer also believes that he shall be directed in such a way as to pose the right questions and observe the `sufficient and abstract for the question at hand', thus giving him data to construct consistent (with no need for a consistency proof) formal systems or axiomatic theories (which may well not be formal systems): this is most clear in mathematics where the data is a limiting case of objects (pure extensions, sets), but philosophy as an exact science also furnishes such an example (except for its data being more conceptual, meaningual). Also, as time passes one gets more and more confidence in `For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.' (Luke 8.17) (that saying applies to itself: it is made clearer and clearer by its instances): did you not find strange these?: `But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;' (Matthew 5.44) or `Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:' (Luke 12.51). One explication could be this: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full.pdf

Indeed, if you say X and i say not X then at least one of us would be right, so truth is among us (even if your X were `it is not the case that for all X, either X or not X is the case'). So, according to your quotation faith is like science in this regard, in view of its latter half you have to agree that the said quotation is false (for surely, you would not say that science is the denial of observation). Seeing how you agree (cf. the link to the paper above), can I suggest you to question that state of affairs? Who knows, perhaps you are wrong.

The phase diagram of carbon at extreme temperature and pressure is pretty much unknown. We don't even have any really good studies of liquid carbon. So it's entirely possible the core of such a white dwarf would be made of some other phase of carbon. See, for example, this figure of the carbon phase diagram from density functional theory, showing that over a terapascal, diamond is unstable. Stuff is not the same at the core of a star (even a small one) as in your backyard.

The phase diagram of carbon at extreme temperature and pressure is pretty much unknown. We don't even have any really good studies of liquid carbon. So it's entirely possible the core of such a white dwarf would be made of some other phase of carbon. See, for example, this figure of the carbon phase diagram from density functional theory, showing that over a terapascal, diamond is unstable. Stuff is not the same at the core of a star (even a small one) as in your backyard.

we can see all the ultravoilet rays which will come from it
 

The phase diagram of carbon at extreme temperature and pressure is pretty much unknown. We don't even have any really good studies of liquid carbon. So it's entirely possible the core of such a white dwarf would be made of some other phase of carbon. See, for example, this figure of the carbon phase diagram from density functional theory, showing that over a terapascal, diamond is unstable. Stuff is not the same at the core of a star (even a small one) as in your backyard.

The phase diagram of carbon at extreme temperature and pressure is pretty much unknown. We don't even have any really good studies of liquid carbon. So it's entirely possible the core of such a white dwarf would be made of some other phase of carbon. See, for example, this figure of the carbon phase diagram from density functional theory, showing that over a terapascal, diamond is unstable. Stuff is not the same at the core of a star (even a small one) as in your backyard.

we can see all the ultravoilet rays which will come from it
 

The phase diagram of carbon at extreme temperature and pressure is pretty much unknown. We don't even have any really good studies of liquid carbon. So it's entirely possible the core of such a white dwarf would be made of some other phase of carbon. See, for example, this figure of the carbon phase diagram from density functional theory, showing that over a terapascal, diamond is unstable. Stuff is not the same at the core of a star (even a small one) as in your backyard.

Here's my citation.

It's your post.

Simply pointing out that some of the data used as the basis for the AGW conclusions is not as reliable as was believed when those conclusions were formed was enough for you to paint me as "one of them", was enough for your hackles to stand on-end and for you to personally attack me.

I'm not saying the conclusions are wrong. I'm saying they may be less right than initially believed. That's how things FUCKING WORK, dude. Get off your high horse, you're every bit as devoted to not changing your views as any other fundamentalist whacko.

Based on what was known, the AGW conclusions were not incorrect. New things become known. Conclusions must be revisited and the impact that the newly-discovered data uncertainty has on those conclusions must be evaluated.

Oh, and here you go, asshole.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005E%26PSL.229..183I
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1331.full
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/2000GC000146.shtml

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/science/02obtree.html

None of that necessarily means AGW conclusions are wrong, but it does mean that the assumptions that were made to establish historical data points were not as reliable as was believed at the time they were made. I do not recall hearing about anyone revisiting their AGW conclusions to determine what effect this new uncertainty may have on those conclusions -- because any suggestion that they need to do so is taken as an attack on the AGW conclusions. It is not. It's simply good fucking science.

If tomorrow we discover that assumptions that we made and believed to be true which were used in calculating the speed of light may not have been as true as we believed them to be at the time, that does not mean we have the speed of light *wrong* but it DOES mean that we need to re-determine if our calculations of the speed of light are still correct. To simply assume so and attack any suggestion otherwise is not science, it's blind faith. Lashing out just like any other religious fundamentalist. It's embarrassing, and frustrating to be painted as some sort of monstrous denier of reason when your goal is to not destroy but IMPROVE knowledge and understanding and to evolve conclusions and ideas as new evidence presents itself.

A widely held prejudice this, that ideas are somehow created by our arrogant selves. There's another side to reality, the inner. Is it all that unbelievable that, being more and more enticed and accustomed to interact one with the other, we leave unexercised that other organ, the one dealing with that other side, the abstract, well structured and beautifully ordered? Again, we should acqaint ourselves with this http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full.pdf

Here's the data.

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

The fracking process causes the gas to end up in the water in dangerous levels. On the plus side however, the water was found to be free of fracturing fluids.

That's been more true of most of recorded history than it is true now. When farmers were cultivating maize centuries ago, blindly mixing genes, they weren't optimizing for least carcinogenic or best for health. They were, in fact, mixing and matching without knowing what the outcome was going to be.

GMOs, on the other hand, are tested for health effects when they're made.

Furthermore, when you modify a strain of crops, you only are trying to modify it a little. When you use artificial selection to change your crops, you're usually changing quite a bit to get the desired outcome. The end result is that genetically modified crops have been found to be much more similar to their parent strain than "natural" strains are to each other. Source.

Birds occupy a tiny number of niches? I would guess that, if there are tetrapods regularly in a region, there are also birds regularly there, except the deep oceans, but I don't have a source for that, I just can't think of another exception (which is not an argument just a small basis to guess as so). As for specific diversity, Wikipedia says right in the opening of its page on birds (my emphasis): "Around 10,000 living species makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. " Birds are more diverse now than dinosaurs ever were during the Mesozoic. First of all, there have been around 700 species of dinosaurs discovered -- and those are fossils from the entire Mesozoic which lasted nearly 200 million years. Even when you extrapolate (pdf source) you probably only get about 1200 genera and 1440 species of dinosaurs for the entire Mesozoic. And the maximum that existed at any one time was about 100 genera. That there was a massive decline for the dinosaurs is easily deniable if you consider specific diversity and birds are understood as indistinct from dinosaurs, the latter conjunct being the original assumption.

Brain Workshop is a free, open-source program which can make you smarter. It implements the dual n-back task, which has been shown to improve people's performance on IQ tests in three separate studies.

I suppose Mann is a denier now too? You can follow my link to his last follow up on his own hockey stick graph. He stands by his work, but even his own corrected reconstructions now show that the last century of warming is NOT an anomaly over the last 2k years, but has been matched on at least 3 or 4 occasions in that time. The most he is able to observe is that the warming of merely the last decade is abnormal, of course, that is based 100% on the instrumental record since none of the proxy sets his paper uses covers that time frame.

I'll observe on my own that the only anomalous warming is entirely limited to the short time for which we have no proxy data...

But yeah, go on pretending the science is settled and decry those still researching and studying the matter as deniers and heretics to your chosen ideology.

The two meals prior to his last seemed to be fairly elaborate, suggesting that whatever chase or chases may have taken place it wasn't expected and wasn't until after the last meal.

The current theory seems to be that the un-plundered artifacts were a result of him being ritually buried in the Alps after death, on the grounds that although the blood on the knife proves he was in hand-to-hand combat (and must have won, since he survived that and was killed by an arrow), nothing from the attackers other than the blood on the knife (no arrowheads, no lost artifacts, nothing) has been found.

Precisely. Anthropogenic global warming cannot exist if the average voter doesn't believe in it. ~97-98% of active, publishing climate scientists be damned; they're not a majority of the electorate.

It's just like how God exists if you can't fathom the concept of living in a universe without a God.

A meter is less than six but you should say possibly less than a meter since most current estimates come in over a meter. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21527.full.pdf

They specifically tested over the same `underground profile`, and that`s also why they didn`t go to 50km away. Beside, validating the methane profile in the surrounding really makes the point valid. Please take some time to read the article itself, it`s freely available from http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/02/1100682108.full.pdf and should answer most of your questions.

That's like spiders suddenly becoming social animals.

Spiders can be social. See for example http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14094404 about groups of spiders working together to build massive webs.See also http://www.pnas.org/content/105/31/10843.full for a take on some of the relevant science.

LoL! And Friss-Christensen -- stop, you're killing me!

Oh, wait. It's not really funny, because you actually are killing me (slowly). And in the meantime, you're killing 300,000 people every year who don't have the good luck of being born in the United States. Go read some real climate scientists. Go read as much climate science by legitimate scientists who are not climate science deniars as you have already read by climate "scientists" like Svensmark and Friis-Christensen who are in fact climate science deniars, and in the meantime,

SHUT

THE

FUCK

UP.

You are telling lies that are literally killing people. You are an accomplice to mass murder, you brainless waste of carbon.

There's a link to the "full text" (pdf form) on the side. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/22/1014961108.full.pdf+html

Abundant ammonia in primitive asteroids and the case for a possible exobiology

1. Sandra Pizzarelloa,1, 2. Lynda B. Williamsb, 3. Jennifer Lehmanc, 4. Gregory P. Hollanda, and 5. Jeffery L. Yargera

Abstract

Carbonaceous chondrites are asteroidal meteorites that contain abundant organic materials. Given that meteorites and comets have reached the Earth since it formed, it has been proposed that the exogenous influx from these bodies provided the organic inventories necessary for the emergence of life. The carbonaceous meteorites of the Renazzo-type family (CR) have recently revealed a composition that is particularly enriched in small soluble organic molecules, such as the amino acids glycine and alanine, which could support this possibility. We have now analyzed the insoluble and the largest organic component of the CR2 Grave Nunataks (GRA) 95229 meteorite and found it to be of more primitive composition than in other meteorites and to release abundant free ammonia upon hydrothermal treatment. The findings appear to trace CR2 meteorites’ origin to cosmochemical regimes where ammonia was pervasive, and we speculate that their delivery to the early Earth could have fostered prebiotic molecular evolution.

Without the full article it's hard to really follow why they think the earth needed excess organic chemicals, even specific amino acids, to be provided from meteorites. There is a large body of data that shows that amino acids, nucleic acids, lipids and a host of other moderately complex organic molecules could have been formed on earth at various times in it's development. As far as I can tell, there is nothing magical about the meteorite derived molecules and hence invoking panspermia (or more accurately, panorganicmoleculermia) is really unnecessary.

Anyone else out there with either access to PNAS or some better insight? So far it's a big meh.

I'll grant you that MightyMartian referenced some common stereotypes of conservatives that aren't optimally conducive to bridging cultural and political barriers. But on the relevant facts, the corruption is all corporate. Al Gore has pediatric oral Bidenitis, sure, but what matters is influence on government policy and no environmentalist has the power and financial resources to bribe the tens of billions of dollars out of Congress, which the oil industry receives every year.

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-22-fossil-fuel-subsidies-dwarf-clean-energy-subsidies-obama-wants

The only way environmentalists ever get any policy outcomes to go our way is by being absolutely right, having all the science on our side. And we have.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract

About that 2% or 3%, they're really tenured professors who can't be fired, former scientists turned corporate shills.

http://www.desmogblog.com/lindzen-wipes-hands-clean-of-oil-and-gas

Lindzen has not done respectable work for some years; since he started taking oil and gas money, not coincidentally.

Link to the paper "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety" by Terrie E. Moffitt, Et Al.

The Abstract : http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108

The PDF Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108.full.pdf+html

The Journal Snippit: http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/highlights.shtml#control

Though policy-makers have considered programs to enhance the nation’s health, wealth, and safety through interventions to improve children’s self-control skills, researchers had not previously shown that childhood self-control actually influences adult outcomes in large populations. Terrie Moffitt et al. analyzed assessments of more than 1,000 participants in the Dunedin, New Zealand Longitudinal Study who were followed from birth to age 32. Even after accounting for differences in social status and IQ, the researchers found that children as young as 3 who scored highly on measures of self-control were less likely than lower-scoring children to develop common physical health problems, abuse drugs, experience financial difficulties, raise a child in a single-parent household, or be convicted of a crime as adults. In a second sample of 500 nonidentical British twins, the sibling who scored lowest in measures of self-control at age 5 was more likely than the other twin to begin smoking, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial behaviors at age 12, the authors report. Children whose self-control improved during the study fared better as adults in measures of health, wealth, and criminal history than was otherwise predicted by their initial childhood scores. The results suggest that even small improvements in individuals’ self-control could improve the health, wealth, and safety of large populations, according to the authors. — J.M.

Link to the paper "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety" by Terrie E. Moffitt, Et Al.

The Abstract : http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108

The PDF Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108.full.pdf+html

The Journal Snippit: http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/highlights.shtml#control

Though policy-makers have considered programs to enhance the nation’s health, wealth, and safety through interventions to improve children’s self-control skills, researchers had not previously shown that childhood self-control actually influences adult outcomes in large populations. Terrie Moffitt et al. analyzed assessments of more than 1,000 participants in the Dunedin, New Zealand Longitudinal Study who were followed from birth to age 32. Even after accounting for differences in social status and IQ, the researchers found that children as young as 3 who scored highly on measures of self-control were less likely than lower-scoring children to develop common physical health problems, abuse drugs, experience financial difficulties, raise a child in a single-parent household, or be convicted of a crime as adults. In a second sample of 500 nonidentical British twins, the sibling who scored lowest in measures of self-control at age 5 was more likely than the other twin to begin smoking, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial behaviors at age 12, the authors report. Children whose self-control improved during the study fared better as adults in measures of health, wealth, and criminal history than was otherwise predicted by their initial childhood scores. The results suggest that even small improvements in individuals’ self-control could improve the health, wealth, and safety of large populations, according to the authors. — J.M.

Link to the paper "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety" by Terrie E. Moffitt, Et Al.

The Abstract : http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108

The PDF Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/01/20/1010076108.full.pdf+html

The Journal Snippit: http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/highlights.shtml#control

Though policy-makers have considered programs to enhance the nation’s health, wealth, and safety through interventions to improve children’s self-control skills, researchers had not previously shown that childhood self-control actually influences adult outcomes in large populations. Terrie Moffitt et al. analyzed assessments of more than 1,000 participants in the Dunedin, New Zealand Longitudinal Study who were followed from birth to age 32. Even after accounting for differences in social status and IQ, the researchers found that children as young as 3 who scored highly on measures of self-control were less likely than lower-scoring children to develop common physical health problems, abuse drugs, experience financial difficulties, raise a child in a single-parent household, or be convicted of a crime as adults. In a second sample of 500 nonidentical British twins, the sibling who scored lowest in measures of self-control at age 5 was more likely than the other twin to begin smoking, perform poorly in school, and engage in antisocial behaviors at age 12, the authors report. Children whose self-control improved during the study fared better as adults in measures of health, wealth, and criminal history than was otherwise predicted by their initial childhood scores. The results suggest that even small improvements in individuals’ self-control could improve the health, wealth, and safety of large populations, according to the authors. — J.M.

I said essentially drown. The point was that oxygen using life didn't crowd out anaerobic life, the oxygen produced by clorophyll based life forced it to places with still no oxygen or killed it. If drowning doesn't do it for you as an analogy instead of disrupted enzyme production, then I'm glad everyone was able to see the technically correct explanation.

Breaking things down into simpler ideas that more people can understand is a good thing but you run into the danger of oversimplifying and creating bad analogies that serve to confuse the less technically-minded. Drowning is definitely a bad analogy, saying that too much oxygen poisoned these organism is much more accurate and just as easy to understand. It also allows people to better understand that some of the organisms might be able to tolerate some of the poison better than others.

Your statement has been commonly accepted scientific lore but the actual forests bursting into flame thing is based on one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness.

It's actually based on the finding of charred remains of plant matter and correlating it with global oxygen levels:

The diversification of Paleozoic fire systems and fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen concentration

The forests don't just burst into flame but higher levels of oxygen do make it easier for fires to start and spread from events such as lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions. There is a TON more scientific methodology to this hypothesis than "one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness".

Anyways, my main point is that we have to be careful in how we summarize and simplify complicated concepts. There were a number of things in the original post that I replied to that were a little misleading, as you said yourself:

I'm a programmer but just happen to be reading Nick Lane's books on this. If I get something wrong please biologists jump in and correct me.

I am a chemist, not a biologist, but I have a solid grasp on combustion chemistry and the use of oxygen by organisms. It's good that you are sharing what you have read but simplifying these concepts can be tricky at times. I'm just trying to clarify some of the statements so that people aren't mislead by an overzealous summary. Remember what Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

I'm three links deep and I've yet to find anything really notable. But fine, I'm an idiot in need of explanation. Tell me what I missed.

Yes, these days it's tons of bullshit until you get to the real thing. Everything above the actual study is going to be full of infantile jokes and idiotic observations, as you've noted (personally it makes me sick to read any modern news articles, or much of anything, due to this). Here's the path I followed to get to the actual study:

Slashdot summary -> Hot Hardware version -> Stanford's news release about study -> Abstract of study -> Study itself (PDF).

In the study, they use the detailed interaction data to try various infection parameters, to see how it spreads. There are many interesting graphs, showing how it spreads in the various scenarios, and where there are sudden changes in how it spreads. They look at different vaccination strategies to see which are most effective.

I'm three links deep and I've yet to find anything really notable. But fine, I'm an idiot in need of explanation. Tell me what I missed.

Yes, these days it's tons of bullshit until you get to the real thing. Everything above the actual study is going to be full of infantile jokes and idiotic observations, as you've noted (personally it makes me sick to read any modern news articles, or much of anything, due to this). Here's the path I followed to get to the actual study:

Slashdot summary -> Hot Hardware version -> Stanford's news release about study -> Abstract of study -> Study itself (PDF).

In the study, they use the detailed interaction data to try various infection parameters, to see how it spreads. There are many interesting graphs, showing how it spreads in the various scenarios, and where there are sudden changes in how it spreads. They look at different vaccination strategies to see which are most effective.

Actually, if you follow links from TFA, you'll get to that same article. Kind of a waste to mod this up as informative.

Actually, if you follow links from TFA, you'll get to that same article. Kind of a waste to mod this up as informative.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/12/08/1009094108.abstract?sid=8b3f6e2c-94b3-4175-903a-5d75382af4fd

Abstract:

The most frequent infectious diseases in humans—and those with the highest potential for rapid pandemic spread—are usually transmitted via droplets during close proximity interactions (CPIs). Despite the importance of this transmission route, very little is known about the dynamic patterns of CPIs. Using wireless sensor network technology, we obtained high-resolution data of CPIs during a typical day at an American high school, permitting the reconstruction of the social network relevant for infectious disease transmission. At 94% coverage, we collected 762,868 CPIs at a maximal distance of 3 m among 788 individuals. The data revealed a high-density network with typical small-world properties and a relatively homogeneous distribution of both interaction time and interaction partners among subjects. Computer simulations of the spread of an influenza-like disease on the weighted contact graph are in good agreement with absentee data during the most recent influenza season. Analysis of targeted immunization strategies suggested that contact network data are required to design strategies that are significantly more effective than random immunization. Immunization strategies based on contact network data were most effective at high vaccination coverage. /p?

Interesting to note that the "war machines" comment was not from a journalist but Sir Greg Winter, Deputy Director at the laboratory undertaking the research :-) Link to original article http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/news-and-events/lmb-news/lmb-scientists-redefine-how-our-immune-system-responds-to-viruses Link to academic publication http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/11/01/1014074107.full.pdf+html

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1014074107

It's not actually a vacuum picker: the gripping comes mostly from the change between unpacked and tightly packed granules inside the bag, somewhat like a non-Newtonian fluid. The idea is that the bag forms around an edge or partial circumference and then tightens enough to pick it up. The original paper's abstract describes it better than the sciencemag article about it:

Individual fingers are replaced by a single mass of granular material that, when pressed onto a target object, flows around it and conforms to its shape. Upon application of a vacuum the granular material contracts and hardens quickly to pinch and hold the object without requiring sensory feedback. We find that volume changes of less than 0.5% suffice to grip objects reliably and hold them with forces exceeding many times their weight. We show that the operating principle is the ability of granular materials to transition between an unjammed, deformable state and a jammed state with solid-like rigidity.

There is sometimes an additional suction force assisting the gripper, but this is a suction-cup type action, not a vacuum pump action. The involved forces, from page two of the paper:

We find that this strength is due to three mechanisms, all controlled by jamming, that can contribute to the gripping process: geometric constraints from interlocking between gripper and object surfaces, static friction from normal stresses at contact, and an additional suction effect, if the gripper membrane can seal off a portion of the object’s surface.

The Daily Recommended Intake of a nutrient is the average amount that prevents a disease of deficiency. According to the guidelines, an average human needs 60 mg/day of Vitamin C to prevent scurvy.

First off, I'm not talking about daily values, those are there to keep you from becoming acutely ill without regard for the development of chronic conditions. The problem is that noone has been funded to perform proper long term human studies because it is so expensive, difficult to analyze due to the overwhelming number of confounding variables, as well as difficult to recoup any costs of doing the study. There is also not much motivation for governments to devote resources towards this since most people live as productive members of society for decades without the studies being done. Not to say I think they shouldn't... but there is only so much time and money to go around. So the wise thing to do is use common sense, eat a balanced diet, and get exercise.

Also it is very easy to consume 60 mg of vitamin C in your diet. Eating a single orange, for example, will provide you with more than that. Further, your bodies ability to absorb vitamin C becomes saturated when present in the GI tract in higher amounts... so it will end up in your feces, and it also metabolizes or excretes any excess vitamin C. See figure 2 (I think it was free... if not just read the abstract) to see that after around 500 mg your body simply does not accept any further vitamin C, the rest is simply gotten rid of or not absorbed in the first place.

But there is also a compelling argument that human bodies benefit from substantially more than the minimum intake. 2x Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling advocated megadoses of vitamin C to treat cancer, for example. The reasoning is that almost every other mammal synthesizes its own Vitamin C.

Linus Pauling was a great man and great scientist, but simply didnt have access to the data we have today that shows his theory about consuming massive amounts of vitamin C is just incorrect. And what did he die of? Prostate Cancer. I mean he did live into his 90s but he may have had just good genes and I'm sure there were many other strategies he used to stay healthy besides taking vitamin C supplements so it would be difficult to attribute that long life to anything in particular.

Humans can't do this due to a genetic problem. If a human synthesized as much Vitamin C as a gorilla, the comparable figure would be on the order of 1000+ mg/day.

I wouldn't call lack of vitamin C synthesis a "genetic problem" because since our ancestors lost the ability 60 million years ago (for reference our latest common ancestor with chimps is thought to have lived around 5 Mya), we have become the most successful mammal, if not most successful animal on the planet. We simply do not need to devote our energies towards vitamin C synthesis. Also gorillas don't synthesize it either, nor do any other primates... or guinea pigs for that matter.

60mg vs 1000+ is a substantial difference. Other vitamins, minerals, amino acids, organic acids, and fats are therapetuic too. Omega 3's are commonly advised (but NOT commonly consumed). Vitamin B6 also comes to mind.

As described above, 60 mg vs 1000 mg is not such a big deal in terms of biological effect, and even less so in terms of dietary intake, since it is so easy to consume near saturating doses of vitamin C. Also it is important to realize that once consumed in a reaction, your vitamin C is regenerated by other anti-oxidants present in your body and ready to work again(e.g. glutathione, which is generated from non-essential amino acids and present in huge amounts in every cell of your body).

With regards to other macro and micronutrients, I wouldn't call them therapeutic since they are nutrients and thus essential to being healthy, but yes they are good for you when co

I linked the PNAS a few comments down, but here's another link. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13197.full

See my comment for better links.

The press release does not link the original article(s):

Bacteria determine fate by playing dice with controlled odds
Eshel Ben-Jacob and Daniel Schultz
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13197.full
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008254107

This is a commentary on:

Biological role of noise encoded in a genetic network motif
Mark Kittisopikul and Gürol M. Süel
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13300.abstract
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1003975107

and makes ample reference to

Architecture-Dependent Noise Discriminates Functionally Analogous Differentiation Circuits
Tolga Çaatay, Marc Turcotte, Michael B. Elowitz, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo and Gürol M. Süel
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2009.07.046

The press release does not link the original article(s):

Bacteria determine fate by playing dice with controlled odds
Eshel Ben-Jacob and Daniel Schultz
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13197.full
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008254107

This is a commentary on:

Biological role of noise encoded in a genetic network motif
Mark Kittisopikul and Gürol M. Süel
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13300.abstract
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1003975107

and makes ample reference to

Architecture-Dependent Noise Discriminates Functionally Analogous Differentiation Circuits
Tolga Çaatay, Marc Turcotte, Michael B. Elowitz, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo and Gürol M. Süel
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2009.07.046

Just because you repeat it many times does not make it true.

Neither will denying facts make them false. You can blindly deny our incomplete knowledge all you want, but it makes you look like the idiot...

but to imply that there was some fundamental error or shortcoming in the understanding of flight over the past 60 years does not do justice to the way that modern science and technological understanding develop.

Okay, how's this:

"the performance of insect wings, when tested under steady conditions in wind tunnels, is too low to account for the forces required to sustain flight"

It is only in the past few years that the fact that "flapping wings generate additional forces during stroke reversals." was determined as a solution to the problem.

"the source of extra lift remains unknown." ... "An intense leading-edge vortex was found on the down-stroke, of sufficient strength to explain the high-lift forces. The vortex is created by dynamic stall, and not by the rotational lift mechanisms that have been postulated for insect flight"

When did the "hindsight" issue crop up? Only after the full 60 years or maybe it was after 2 hours with a paper and pencil back in the 1950s when someone said "hey, bees fly pretty slow compared to our jets - what's up with that?"

It's easy to recognize that something doesn't add-up. That's worlds away from having a plausibly-complete understanding of exactly how it DOES in fact work. Einstein certainly knew where General Relativity broke down, but he wasn't able to come up with a solution for it, and he had well more than "2 hours with a paper and pencil".

I see now it's not in-fact hindsight in your case, but unadulterated ignorance, which just happens to be pro-(omnipotent)-scientists rather than the more common opposite. I suppose you'd have been claiming we had a complete understanding of insect flight 15+ years ago, when there were many fundamental blanks in the equations. I'm sorry I wasted my time.

If you or anyone else are interested in the topic and would like to edify themselves rather than blindly tear-down others, here are a couple jumping-off points:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v384/n6610/abs/384626a0.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/50/18213.full

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uosc-lev030108.php

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/apr/featphysics

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5703/1960

A far better vision would be much more expansive than Space X's -- which in my opinion consists of nothing more than building well engineered reusable reliable rockets at affordable prices.

Some guidelines:
1. Never use a rocket for material you can hurl or lift into space (i.e. non-G sensitive "mass").
2. Never use humans when robots can do much of the work (i.e. systems assembly, parts replacement, etc.).
3. Minimize the risks that humans face (keep them out of space as much as possible or well sheltered from the hazards there).
4. Invest only once. Build the factories to use materials from space in space.

You would start with (1) by throwing out the idea of rockets that can lift increasingly larger payloads. Instead you would invest one or more times in building ocean-equatorial based rail/mass guns [7] (to launch fuel, H2O, O2, food, "station"/"factory" subunits using solar power. This would lead to the construction of orbiting sky hooks which could augment the mass guns and/or pick up astronauts from SpaceShip Two type "ferries". Then SpaceTugs pick the astronauts up from the hooks and relocate them to ships under construction in "Dry Dock" (@ L1|L2).

But before one wants to engage in a vision like this one needs to *seriously* have a discussion regarding when molecular nanotechnology, i.e. when can nanofactories build nanorobots, when can nanorobots build nanofactories (allowing exponential expansion either on the Earth or in space). Nanorobots and nanofactories significantly lower the costs of access to space as well as the development of space (because they eliminate the need for biological "human" environments, safety systems, resource supplies, etc.). So one has to face up to the question of whether we want "human" or "nanorobot" development of space (when one path is clearly less expensive and likely to be more efficient), though perhaps less emotionally fulfilling.

Many engineers 'dis molecular nanotechnology, but for people who understand genome biology, that genomes are "software", that enzymes, esp. DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase and the ribosome are "assemblers", and who may have read Drexler's 1981 PNAS paper in which biological systems were cited as existence proofs for molecular nanotechnology, and perhaps who have read Nanosystems as well, the only questions that remain are how and when we could engineer systems of such complexity.

Then the question becomes whether we spend billions of $ on 40-50 y.o. visions (rockets to the moon or Mars) or equivalent or even greater amounts on say a 11-29 y.o vision... [1]. It is clear, at least to me, that the 40-50 y.o. vision provides some great stories, improves our technologies and lets us go where we have never gone before. In contrast the 11-29 y.o. vision frees most individuals on the planet from having to ever work again to survive, may indefinitely extend their lifespans and enables the evolution of humanity from a pre-Kardashev Type I level civilization to a Kardashev Type II level civilization [6].

I know which vision I'd be inclined to vote for.

1. Drexler's PNAS paper was published in 1981 [2]. Engines of Creation (Vsn. 1 was published in 1986) and (Vsn 2.0 published in 2007) [3]. Nanosystems (Eric's MIT PhD thesis) was published in 1992 [4]. Nanomedicine Vol. 1 by Robert Freitas was published in 1999 [5]. Almost all other nanotechnology "literature" tends to be long on either speculation or technical details and short on "vision" and facts. Those are the references for "science "visifact"ion.

2. http://www.pnas.org/content/78/9/5275.abstract
3. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Engines-of-Creation/Eric-Drexler/e/9780385199735
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Creation

You have asked the million dollar question. I will give you the pithy answer first; the computer models are inadequate. Real proteins are basically in constant motion; "breathing" and sampling alternative conformations quite rapidly. This is important, first off our cells recycle proteins as a form of regulation; it would be to our disadvantage if all proteins were as rock stable as say, collagen. Foldit also doesn't fully model this bewildering kinetic sampling nor the effects of salt, solvation, etc.
As for proteins getting stuck in alternative local minima last time I checked this kind of thing was possible and even an argued basis for Alzheimers amyloid fibrils through a process known as "domain swapping."
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/21/8042.short
Rosetta/Foldit makes many simplifying assumptions. If does however work quite well and is only getting better as this news report suggests.
However, in my work, not every protein need be "structured".

It's good that we agree on something. It should be noted, however, that there has been a flat line in global temperature for the last 10 or so years. While this is insignificant as an indicator of anything, it should be noted that the models that are used for all projections failed to predict this.

Careful... that line worked in 2008, but not in 2010. 1998 is a useful year for selection bias.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5951409.cms
Following the release of global temperature data which revealed April of 2010 was the hottest April ever and that this year so far has been warmest on record, Nasa has said global temperatures have been steadily rising since the late 1970s with no significant let-up in the trend.

I'm sorry, what? I'd like to know how you link a few years of poor oyster harvesting to global warming, so please quote some kind of source.

Using google is really not that difficult. (Further down the article downplays the link, but that's business press for you.)

http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2010/06/28/story1.html
Young oysters seem to be dying in their swimming larval stage because the slightly acidic seawater is dissolving their shells from the outside faster than they can grow, Kaufman said. The breeding cycle has failed for each of the past four years, he said.

Same goes for the coral statement. Ocean acidification is a scary-sounding theory, but whether it will have any major ill-effects is pretty much an open question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
Research has already found that corals, coccolithophore algae, coralline algae, foraminifera, shellfish and pteropods experience reduced calcification or enhanced dissolution when exposed to elevated CO2.

Heat waves are weather and are caused by natural variability. Same goes for blizzards, neither is proof of anything.

When the variability starts marching away from known records, then the climate is changing beyond it's known natural cycles. El Nino weather patterns and other variables of course come into play, but hey, you got to pretend you were thinking for a second.

As far as your claim about the Arctic, I believe the scariest guess so far has been ice-free by 2015. All of those "predictions"(guesses) are based on models that ignore significant aspects of the inner workings of Earth's climate, most notably changes in cloud cover.

The Northwest Passage has been navigable for the first time in history for two years in a row. The US military is already reorganizing itself to defend it as a new attack vector. Russia, Canada, and the US are already squabbling over the resources under the ice.

I'd also like to point out that any kind of catastrophic global warming that CO2 might cause requires some kind of significant positive feedback mechanism, but none have been identified as of yet. It has simply been assumed that there must be one without any speculation as to what that might be. Cloud cover for example is likely a significant negative feedback when temperatures get higher.

In this case, you're entirely full of shit.

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1331.full
Ice-core records show that climate changes in the past have been large, rapid, and synchronous over broad areas extending into low latitudes, with less variability over historical times. These ice-core records come from high mountain glaciers and the polar regions, including small ice caps and the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

As the world slid into and out of t