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No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

For those wanting to read the complete study you can get it here

The original paper hardly discusses the hair-tracking aspect (concentrates on describing how different cities are indeed "separable"), but it refers to an earlier paper, http://www.pnas.org/content/105/8/2788.full , where actually there is a time diagram extracted from one single hair.

The diagram shows the isotopic signature along the hair, checked at 4-weeks intervals, for a guy which went from China to the US: there is a clear break in the curve at the time of the moving.

But the timescale is also clearly at least one month (below, you just stay within the noise).

So, if you cross the States one single day to kill him, and have a drink at the airport before flying back, this will definitely not be detected ;-)
OTOH this may help you proof you definitely came to visit me a full month last year...

Source (via wikipedia).

You're right, it appears I was exaggerating. The actual consensus seems to be closer to 97-98%.

Oops. I spoke too soon on that previous. PNAS offers free access to many developing countries, including Thailand. List here:

http://www.pnas.org/misc/faq.shtml#developing

Oh well... if anyone without access really wants to read the original paper, send me an email and I'll be happy to send you the PDF. Put something like "Slashdot - PNAS article PDF" in your subject line, please.

Ummm... the full text of the PNAS article does NOT require a subscription. Just click the "Full Text (PDF)" link.

Or at least, I have access using no logins and accessing via a standard ISP in Thailand. :-/

Well apparently it only recently passed peer-review, if you consider 3 months "recent". That's not unusual for a research paper anyway.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5744.short

(behind a paywall)

The stem cell transplants currently used for leukemias and lymphomas involves completely eradicating the host immune system through chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy. Then a donor stem cell is implanted and is used to replace the host immune system (which will hopefully be completely eradicated and not pumping out cancer cells). Dr Cui's research is a little different. He is keeping the host immune system intact, but is taking sample immune cells from donors with cancer resistance and injecting them into the host. The goal is that the donor cells will kill the cancer but not the rest of the host's cells which leads to GVHD. This seems to work for solid tumours in rats. A good summary of is research is here.
In the US, the usual FDA process for drug approval is to go through 3 phases of human trials (then a mandatory phase 4 during which adverse event data from the wild is gathered and analyzed). There is a Fast Track program at the FDA for serious diseases where there is a need for treatment options. This allows drugs to get approved faster by skipping steps and using surrogate end points instead of proving complete efficacy and safety.
I'd be interested to hear the reasons that grants were not given to continue this research. It might have something to do with there not being a specific mechanism of action identifiable in his experiments. In his interview he admits that he has no idea why it works, but it seems to work. Sciency people don't like things like that. They probably have a better reason than "it seems a little hokey", though.

Except Global Warming is still used. It appears in the latest issue of Nature and PNAS, as well as in recent (2010) issues of Science, PRSocA, PRSocB, JPhysChemA, Ecology, JEnvironQ, PLos One and many others.

That they "don't even call it global warming anymore" is just as false as most of the claims made by lay-critics of climate science.

Nothing you've said here is science: it is economic and political opinion.

I couldn't agree more. We are after all on an internet forum, and I wouldn't expect my comments to have any more weight than anyone else's, and certainly not to be taken as 'science' of some kind. I don't recall every making a claim that they were science though. I'm not aware of any science posted as comments to slashdot.

This is the problem with the AGW debate (one of them, anyway): mixing of hysterical speculation about economics and politics with some reasonably ok science. The science is reasonably ok--just not nearly solid enough to justify the hysterical speculations.

The comment wasn't speculating or hysterical (nice use of emotive language there to try to polarise debate). Sea level rise is an obvious consequence of a warming climate, and one which has seen an awful lot of scientific studies estimating its possible effects. Here's one, as an example:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/12/04/0907765106.full.pdf

If we have a rapidly warming climate, the changes could be around 1-2m of rise within a century - that is very rapid in geological terms so far as we know. As you can see from this graphic from Nasa, the results would be dramatic -

http://sos.noaa.gov/videos/sea_level4.mov

and incredibly expensive to mitigate, given the amount of land involved. We'd probably end up giving up on huge areas which are currently densely populated.

Of course there have been many climate changes in the past of much greater magnitude, but all of them happened very slowly in comparison, except perhaps those which resulted in mass extinctions like the K-T boundary (hard to say for sure). If this was over 1000 years, it would be easier to work with the changes, but over 100 years, such a change in coastlines would lead to massive upheavals, given that most humans live along coastlines, many in countries without the resources to mount flood defences.

So the question is really has mankind affected the climate recently - given the proven connection between greenhouse gases/particulates from volcanoes and climate, and the huge amounts of particulates and greenhouse gases we have been producing over the last couple of centuries, I'd say the correlation is pretty solid. A lot of real scientists (whose job it is to study these phenomenon) agree. You may not. Regardless, we're going to have to face our dependency on fossil fuels sooner rather than later, so I'm not too worried, but it will be a massive challenge, and we may as well start now.

We've Been Down This Road Before
This model suffers from the same problem as the dry gully hypothesis put forth by Shinbrot et al. (2004) (http://www.pnas.org/content/101/23/8542.abstract). Yes, you can get an alcove and an apron, but it's missing the key defining characteristic of gullies, which is the channel. Their experiments did not produce the sinuous, anastomosing [branching and reconnecting] channels often observed in martian crater wall gullies. They call some features in their experiments "channels," but terrestrial geologists studying landslides on sand dune faces wouldn't call those features channels. They're more like chutes [a term from avalanche geology]. The gullies on Mars also aren't just simple landslides of loose sand/dust on slopes; in many places the channels cut into the underlying rock, which requires something able to erode such rock (i.e. liquid water).

after a quick look at the paper linked in the article (Identifying photoreceptors in blind eyes caused by RPE65 mutations: Prerequisite for human gene therapy success), it is clearly not about gene therapy in humans. it is a study of the thickness of the retina in humans homozygous for a mutation in a specific retinal gene. as the title says, it is a prerequisite for gene therapy.

the actual paper, Human gene therapy for RPE65 isomerase deficiency activates the retinoid cycle of vision but with slow rod kinetics, can be found here. It concerns the same gene, incidentally.

Abstract

Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, Gf is closely related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf. That is, the training effect is dosage-dependent. Thus, in contrast to many previous studies, we conclude that it is possible to improve Gf without practicing the testing tasks themselves, opening a wide range of applications.

A card version of the memory task used in their research is available at: http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?DouglasReay/SnapBackGameRules

This group has published a good deal of work in free-to-access journals, like this article which was published in 2005 and is on the exact subject of this Nature work with just a little less information on the mechanism of action. They just sought a little more attention (not to mention funding) for their impressive work.

I'm no fan of pay walls, but the fact that I didn't hear about the work published PNAS for five years, but did hear about the similar work published in Nature within a week of its publishing justifies their choice of journal to me.

tl;dnr: An older version of this paper is available without paying here.

This group has published a good deal of work in free-to-access journals, like this article which was published in 2005 and is on the exact subject of this Nature work with just a little less information on the mechanism of action. They just sought a little more attention (not to mention funding) for their impressive work.

I'm no fan of pay walls, but the fact that I didn't hear about the work published PNAS for five years, but did hear about the similar work published in Nature within a week of its publishing justifies their choice of journal to me.

tl;dnr: An older version of this paper is available without paying here.

http://www.pnas.org/content/93/23/12658.long

to answer my own question

The primary PNAS article is pretty annoying IMHO. One of the main purposes of publishing research is to describe the methods so that others can reproduce it. In the Materials and Methods section, the only description of the fields applied refer to using 70% intensity setting of a commercially available product, the Magstim SuperRapid, which does not even appear on the manufacturer's website. Also, the orientation of the field is described only by referring to the orientation of the handle of the device. I would expect a published article to describe the actual field intensity, orientation, and some description of field geometry.

Guessing that the SuperRapid is equivalent to the Rapid, they are applying 70%*3.5 Tesla = ~ 2.5 Tesla. Holy cow, that's a lot. For comparison, Earth's field is 0.0005 Tesla.

I assume that no one really cares what happens when you apply these kind of fields to the brain given that one doesn't experience anything like this in normal situations. Is the point that we can learn about brain function by poking it in various ways, and this is just a good way to poke it?

The supporting information [pdf] document is free and contains all of the scenarios used in the study.

Here's a link to the journal article [pdf].

Notwithstanding the summary and press reports, what they actually did was show that the subjects relied less on the actor's mental states and instead just considered harmful consequences. For example consider this scenario (this is one of several scenarios from the actual study):

Janet and her neighbor are kayaking in a part of the ocean with lots of jellyfish. Janet's neighbor asks her if she should go for a swim. It is not safe to swim in the ocean, because the jellyfish sting and their stings are fatal. Because Janet read information that said the ocean's jellyfish are harmless, she believes that it is quite safe to swim in the ocean. Janet tells her neighbor to go for a swim. Her neighbor does, gets stung by jellyfish, and dies.

In different versions of the scenario, Janet either did or did not know that the jellyfish were dangerous, and her actions either did or did not cause harm. Several other scenarios were used that varied in the same ways. After reading each scenario, the subjects rated the actor's moral culpability.

What the study showed was that after TMS stimulation, subjects based their moral judgments more on whether harm was done than on whether the actor knew that her actions would be harmful.

There are alternate radiocarbon techniques that are much more accurate. Nuclear weapons testing resulted in a big spike in atmospheric carbon-14 levels globally, which is dropping rapidly since the test ban treaty. Biologists have been using these techniques for determining cell ages for a couple years.

More info can be found here

here's the biology reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/33/12564.long

these guys pioneered the tech for use in biology, but then it was popularly applied to wines.

Actually, hip fractures are quite common for old people. They often break when the person is standing up from a sitting position, which used to be mis-diagnosed as "fell when getting up". Some of the relevant data is described at http://www.pnas.org/content/102/41/14819.abstract. And from experience with some old relatives, as long as they're splinted and the leg supported in the most comfortable position for that person, it's quite surprising how calm they can be about it. So I suspect that "hearing the screaming" wasn't happening.

_Moving_ them and bouncing around the fractured joint, especially if you're not careful, strong, and knowledgeable can cause an amazing amount of pain and damage. I've watched an ambulance crew moving an old relative from their nursing home to a hospital for a broken hip, and it was clearly awkward, but the relative wasn't in constant pain nor were they shouting except when being moved. They also did have a new hip joint implanted very quickly, and had years more of reasonable life.

Seriously, how did this get on the front page? I suppose it's an interesting article, to theoretical chemists, but that's about it. Here's the paper from PNAS (heh).

You may notice a few things if you read it. First, it's an MD (molecular dynamics) simulation. Read: classical equations of motion with an empirically-derived force field (just to head off the quantum gibberish). Second, you'll notice that the paper doesn't mention anything about agriculture or cancer (or much in between), but instead seems to focus on topics as vital to our way of life as orientational entropy and the Widom temperature of water. Third, if you read the last few paragraphs (if you can make it that far), you'll see that a referee brought to the authors' attention that the work presented in their paper had essentially already been done about 15 years ago. Fourth, and perhaps most telling, is that this study is published in PNAS. This journal has an interesting quirk in that if you're a member of the Academy, you get to choose who referees your paper. Trust me, I've seen first-hand how some ancient Academy members use this policy to publish some serious garbage in that journal.

Now I'm not saying that Kumar et al's paper is not an important contribution to the field of theoretical water chemistry. I am, however, saying that it's not nearly interesting enough to be on the front page of Slashdot. Not sure why ScienceDaily picked it up either. I keep telling myself that when I have time, I'm going to start a lit review blog in this field so that the general (geeky) public has a little better handle on the stuff going on in physical chemistry that's actually interesting. Well see if it ever happens.

A good example of something that's been misused by *Gore*, to be even-handed here, is Kilimanjaro. Gore cited it as an example of climate change. It was probably one of the worst cases he could have picked. The summit of Kilimanjaro almost never goes above freezing. The rate of glacier change is a balance between snowfall and sublimation. Most (although not all) papers on the subject indicate that the balance of these two has indeed shifted due to human activity -- but primarily the raising of food in the region, not warming.

Don't be so sure.

The observed surface lowering is now partially the result of surface melting, a recent phenomenon as confirmed by obser- vations of the ice cores drilled to bedrock in 2000. The upper 65 cm of the 49-m NIF core 3 is the only portion containing elongated bubbles, channels, and open voids characteristic of extensive melting (Fig. 3A) and refreezing; these features are not observed in the lower sections of any cores (Fig. 3B). This finding is significant, because it confirms the absence of surface melting for the prior 11 millennia.

LG Thompson (2009)

In addition, the current drought is not unprecedented. But the assignation of blame, so to speak, is complicated by the relatively poor instrumental record in the region.

as that the IPCC sea-level claim that was based on a paper that was retracted this week?

Yes, but unfortunately other predictions based on studies that have not been retracted are slightly more pessimistic:

"For future global temperature scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report, the relationship projects a sea-level rise ranging from 75 to 190 cm for the period 1990-2100."

A 2m rise is pretty high. But there are plenty of places in the Netherlands at 5m or deeper below sea level...

Like this?

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/7/2763.abstract

When a study shows that switchgrass produces 540% more renewable than nonrenewable energy consumed, yeah, I'd say it's a little about efficiency.

A different news writeup (the actual paper isn't available yet on PNAS, not even online) says millions of compounds, including 70 different amino acids. It'll be interesting as details unfold.

The abstract is up now:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/12/0912157107.abstract

High molecular diversity of extraterrestrial organic matter in Murchison meteorite revealed 40 years after its fall

Numerous descriptions of organic molecules present in the Murchison meteorite have improved our understanding of the early interstellar chemistry that operated at or just before the birth of our solar system. However, all molecular analyses were so far targeted toward selected classes of compounds with a particular emphasis on biologically active components in the context of prebiotic chemistry. Here we demonstrate that a nontargeted ultrahigh-resolution molecular analysis of the solvent-accessible organic fraction of Murchison extracted under mild conditions allows one to extend its indigenous chemical diversity to tens of thousands of different molecular compositions and likely millions of diverse structures. This molecular complexity, which provides hints on heteroatoms chronological assembly, suggests that the extraterrestrial chemodiversity is high compared to terrestrial relevant biological- and biogeochemical-driven chemical space.

To build on your point, I read the same story yesterday (could be the same source, I don't recall) and their work is based on mass spectrometry only (from the vague, unscientific, dumbed down crap that finally makes it to the popular press so I could be wrong). Essentially, they would crush a small sample of the meteorite, analyze it for known compounds/elements (dunno what instruments they use) and infer the composition. Their spokesperson also mentioned that their instruments aren't sensitive to every single ion species so they might even be missing things. Also, since their selection is just that - a selection - the actual number of different compounds may be much higher!

At this point, people that are really interested in understanding the science should look up the working of a mass spectrometer. The toy model is that you volatilize ("gassify [sic] by heating") your sample and electrically tear apart the molecules using a high voltage between (canonically) a pair of electrodes. Guide the ions electromagnetically into a chamber with a magnetic field perpendicular to the ions' motion. This bends the ions in different circular paths (the radii are different because of the ions' charge/mass ratio). Now, here is where the sophistication (read: cost) of the instrument comes into play - the detectors that measure the incidence of these separated ions. For organic chemistry, your instrument would have C, H, O, N and other common elements calibrated. Of course, this is all just a toy model of how things work - the specific instrument you use would of course have its own pros/cons. Cheaper ones might have more assumptions built into them (where you know what you're trying to measure and just wanna know relative element ratios - clearly this is not what you would want to use for exobiology where assumptions can be fatal).

Here's the abstract of the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/7/2763
Full text requires a subscription, alas.

From a quick perusal of the text (University library FTW), this paper is a breakthrough for precisely the reason I alluded to above, i.e. for exobiology, you want to have little to no assumptions built into your investigation - a so-called 'non-targeted investigation' as the authors say. The newer analytical methods they used include (for keyword searches by interested readers): Electrospray ionization (ESI) Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance/mass spectrometry (FTICR/MS), Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-QTOF/MS). This was from the actual paper.

Intuitively, you can sort of see what all that jargon means (thank science for meaningful terminology). FTICR/MS sounds like making the ions go in a circle using a magnetic field (the rotation frequency for a given charge/mass and mag field is the cyclotron resonant frequency - can be found via Fourier transform methods I presume - this sounds quite interesting and I believe I'll look this up to see exactly how they do it). NMR is simply MRI (the latter is a term used because neobarbs get their panties in a bunch when they hear "nuclear"). Vaguely speaking: you flip nuclear spins using an oscillatory mag field and measure the response - tells you what stuff is made of. Time-of-flight spectrometry is exactly what it sounds like. Recall my toy model of spectrometry. Well, instead of a mag field, you use an electric field to accelerate the ions and figure out how long it takes to make a given trip. Simple high school kinematics tells you the rest. Dunno offhand what the chromatography or ESI are but I'm sure you can google them if you're interested.

By the way, I see that there are many here who bring up the question of whether this is just terrestrial contamination. While the question is legit, the idea that scientists routinely ignore such obvious questions is a symptom of the irresponsible and incomplete nature of sc

Or read this; as recently as 2008, an updated paper (and peer-reviewed, too) reports similar results. Again, you are assuming that there is one single data source on which the entire theory hinges, without which it would fall like a house of cards -- and that just doesn't seem to be the case.

In response to your signature, you should make the data available because you wish to discover the truth. If there is something wrong with it, wouldn't you want to know?

You will look smarter if you keep up with current science. Human Gait Adapted for Efficient Walking at the Cost of Efficient Running

Ok, that's unfair, it's a very very recent study. Here's one that's two years old: Chimpanzee locomotor energetics and the origin of human bipedalism

Interestingly, strong profiling by overly targeting a group, Muslims for example, actually makes searching LESS effective than random selection. People who seem to be Muslim but are not terrorists, like the grand-parent poster, get searched almost every time. Searches become very ineffective because we search the same innocent people over and over and over again.

The optimal method is a form of weak profiling, where a Muslim would be targeted for searches with a probability slightly higher than a non-Muslim. This way searches get spread out among people we haven't already checked. You can read technical details here [PDF].

This is old news, Woses paper "on the evolution of cells" explained this concept 8 years ago http://www.pnas.org/content/99/13/8742.long. Even within the protocell or primordial soup where horizontal gene transfer is hypothesized to play a dominant role natural selection still takes place. The molecules that replicate best increase in number and those that don't die out. Also, several evolutionary biologists such as Woese himself and many of his collegues have made their careers out of studying this phenomenon, so the suggestion " its consequences have hardly been explored" is a bit disingenuous.

There have been some other interesting discoveries regarding horizontal gene transfer recently. For example, this PNAS paper looks at sea slugs that can photosynthesize by themselves -- http://www.pnas.org/content/105/46/17867.full.pdf). The sea slugs photosynthesize through a combination of harvesting chloroplasts from the algae they eat and via horizontal transfer of genes involved in photosynthesis from these same algae. This is a bizarre and amazing discovery which demonstrates how genes can move from plants and be incorporated in an animal genome.

This is slashdot, so I suppose it should not come as a shock that the summary makes claims that don't stand up to even a casual examination. About 15 seconds on google scholar produces the following paper:

    Correa, A.A. and Bonev, S.A. and Galli, G, Carbon under extreme conditions: Phase boundaries and electronic properties from first-principles theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.103, 1204 (2006)
link to article

The second paragraph of the article in Nature Physics (subscription required) that this story is about mentions at least 11 other papers on theoretical calculations and experiments on the melting of diamond. So no, this is not in fact the first time that the melting of diamond has been studied. Indeed, the linked article itself refers to previous experiments at Sandia National Laboratory that melted diamond, but were unable to accurately determine the temperature and pressure.

This is truly impressive work by some very skilled scientists, but let's discuss it for what it is and not what it isn't.

Would rotating flagellum count? Some bacterium have a set of helical or corkscrew shaped protein paddles. These rotate using a basic motor embedded in the outer lining of the bacterium.

The efficiency of propulsion of a rotating flagellum/a>

Since nearly all life seems to have evolved in the oceans, having wheel wouldn't be practical except for microscopic life which can take advantage of surface tension, ionic attraction/repulsion.

This is correct http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full unless we decide to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

they missed one. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.short
"In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs."

There could be serious immunological issues with a compound like this. While it comes from a beetle, structurally this antifreeze seems to have a lot of similarity with bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which happen to be the endotoxins in Gram-negative bacteria. We produce the aptly-named lipopolysaccharide-binding protein to seek out LPS and raise the alarm to initiate an inflammatory cascade. In the abstract to the paper, it mentions that a thermal hysteresis effect of 3.7 degrees C was seen at a concentration of 5mg/mL. Making the very rough assumption that the same concentration would be necessary to adequately protect human cells against the deep freeze, the required dose might be hundreds of grams (not unreasonable, considering it would have to integrate into every cell). The toxic response to LPS varies, but bacterial septic shock usually requires about 1/1000th that concentration.

Of course, nothing is known about the human immune response to this just-discovered compound (which hasn't even beeen fully characterized), so it's wild speculation on my part that your immune system might mistake it for a bacterial endotoxin. But if that did turn out to be the case, ironically it wouldn't be the cold that would kill you- it would be a fever.

Just where are you getting 99%?

If you actually read the article, instead of speculating with imaginary precision, you'll discover (pending further study) that carbon dioxide and soot should contribute about equally to himalayan glacial melting.

Quantitative modeling of the effect of black soot on glacier dynamics is a current challenge, but some indication of the outcome may be provided by results of initial analyses of the closely related problem of black soot’s effect on regional climate in areas with extensive snow and sea ice. These studies (14, 18, 19, 25) suggest that black soot is responsible for a substantial fraction of the regional warming of the past century, comparable to the fraction attributable to carbon dioxide. Assessment of black soot’s impact on glaciers will need to include the contri- bution that black soot makes to regional climate change, as well as direct effects on the glacier.

I would guess that temperature, in the Hofstadterian sense, would play a large role here. By the way, here is the full paper, and miraculously, it is an open access one.

So many questions would be answered if the actual science was available.

Too bad PNAS charges for people to see that. If you find Yi Cui's site at Stanford and look under "Publications," you may find a relevant pdf.

*sigh* if only the editors knew how to use the internet... or is it that they don't know science is peer reviewed and not press released?

Science Daily has the full press release which is a bit more informative: Genetic engineering feat could greatly reduce costs and the full paper is at the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences: Nickel-inducible lysis system in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 (if you have access that is).

Straight from PNAS instead of the NYT summary:
Chimpanzees modify recruitment screams as a function of audience composition
The full text should be available to anyone in the US for free, AFAIK (and possibly to those outside the US as well). One thing you will notice on that page is that the NYT is around 2 months late summarizing that article, it was published online in PNAS back in October.

Which data sets are those? Seriously. Which? Show my a hockey stick that does not use Mann's or Briffa's data. Do it now.

This straw man is old and has been debunked so often it's silly. Realclimate deals with it on their page Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick":

Paleoclimate evidence is simply one in a number of independent lines of evidence indicating the strong likelihood that human influences on climate play a dominant role in the observed 20th century warming of the earth’s surface.

Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups all suggest that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context (see Figures 1 and 2 in “Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and The So-Called ‘Hockey Stick’”).

Mann et al produced an updated paper in 2008 using a more diverse and larger dataset, showing that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years.

You didn't seriously think all of climate science hinged on one study, did you?

You are quite right: this is pure politics, and has no impact on the actual science. People are making a big deal of this who do not understand that scientific theory rests on multiple, independent, reproducable lines of evidence and does not depend on the credibility of one particular institution. The laws of physics don't change because someone hacked someone's email.

This "scandal" is a tempest in a teapot, with much political but little scientific significance.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are warming, the last decade was the hottest on record, and the current warming is unprecedented for at least 1300 years. I am a big fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide, so I don't think panic is ever an appropriate reaction, but there is plenty of cause for strong action to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change.

Sorry about that.

The original MBH98 "Hockey Stick Paper" is "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries" by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley & Malcolm K. Hughes from Nature 392, 779-787 (23 April 1998) | doi:10.1038/33859

The latest work, correcting for the concerns brought up in 2003 is "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia" (Mann et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. USA 105, pgs 13252–13257; 2008)

PNAS is open access, and the Nature article linked to in this comment comes from Mann's homepage, so you should be able to read them both. My original link to MBH98 was to Nature's site, and they want you to pay $32 to read the article if you don't already have a license.

Then there are summaries like this which throw everything and the kitchen sink in. What's worse, there is only one submitted link, so it's not like there are multiple sources gathered together making this summary long, it's just a lazy submitter cutting and pasting from the article.

I'm not quite sure what your complaint is. It's too long but doesn't include enough sources? The actual article is here and the free abstract is here. The article is 6 pages long, and is obviously quite dense. The slashdot summary is more for general audiences, Greg George could have included more material from the original source, but you're already saying tl:dr. Summarizing biomedical research so that everyone can understand it but including all the essential details is frankly something even biology professors rarely achieve.

Growing axons is a nice step, but Christopher Reeves is dead already. It'll be hard to get another celebrity to put their weight behind this kind of research.

And of course, THAT is the critical step, having a good celebrity endosement, that is holding spinal cord repair back. It's a well known fact that scientists won't try anything unless there's a sympathetic celebrity asking them to do it. It's a morale thing, after Mr Reeves died, they just all lost hope, figured there was no point in trying anymore, and became shoe salesmen ~.

PNAS article here, if someone wants to check it out by themselves.