Slashdot Mirror

Google Scholar provides links to some of Heber-Katz' articles. Here's the one on the Scarless Heart.

As the work doesn't appear to have been published yet, my guess is that it will turn out to be a bit less remarkable than it currently sounds.

Although I'm certain some organisms would benefit from this CO_2, other sea life will not. Think "carbonated beverages".

Insects develop DDT resistance because of their fast breeding rate. Larger animals do not. DDT already in the system will outlast you and I, and may well outlast a number of endangered species that it is helping to make extinct.

DDT is hardly the only chemical available nowadays for killing malaria-spreading mosquitoes nowadays - for example, pyrethoids seem to be completely safe in testing, but more effective than DDT and seem to have the same cost potential.

It is certainly a complex issue, but lets not forget what DDT does, and how long it lasts in the ecosystem. DDT half-life estimates are generally measured in decades. In addition to weakening egg shells to the point of singlehandedly endangering several species and assisting the decline of others, it is genotoxic, very carcinogenic, neurotoxic, damages the liver and kidnes, is teratogenic, and is transferred in breast milk.

If you really want a way to end malaria, by the way, the best thing would be to spent the money instead on recessive lethal "selfish genes", or other such approaches to make the malaria-spreading species of mosquitoes go extinct once and for all.

Piggy Bank is an eleet RDF creating, greasemonkey web scraping, meta plugin.

http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/

props to waxy 4 the link

http://waxy.org/links

check out Sir Tim Berners Lee the Knight that goes nee rap on the semantic future of the web at the Royal Society London - total futurosity.

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3110

Do you think theres a porn site somewhere using sign ups to process secretly referred slashdot catchems?

It's no coincidence that this research is happening in the UK; they have a much more research-friendly policy.

Last night, the Royal Society webcast an interview with Pillinger. It's due to be available on demand soon. In answer to the many points about 'reinventing the wheel', it's claimed (about 3/4 the way in) that ESA weren't allowed access to Nasa airbag technology.

Last night, the Royal Society webcast an interview with Pillinger. It's due to be available on demand soon. In answer to the many points about 'reinventing the wheel', it's claimed (about 3/4 the way in) that ESA weren't allowed access to Nasa airbag technology.

The Royal Society say there going to have the Video-on-demand of Pillinger's talk available 'soon' (the links worth a visit as it has some interesting previous lecture's)

Well you'll doubtless be thrilled to know that the British government is sounding very encouraging about contributing to ESA's Aurora programme which aims to put a lander on Mars later this decade.

For those of us on the right-hand side of the Pond, there is a Beagle 2 retrospective at the Royal Society next week.

Beagle2 - the next generation: In conversation with Colin Pillinger

Monday 8 March 2004 at 7pm at The Royal Society, London or via the RS webcast.

Beagle 2 was the plucky little spaceship that people in Britain and across the world took to their hearts.

The dream of a successful Mars landing on Christmas Day 2003 may be over but project leader, Colin Pillinger remains undaunted.

Join him at the Royal Society as he discusses the scientific and emotional legacy of Beagle 2 and Mars Express and his plans for a new voyage to the Red Planet. Admission is FREE and on a first come, first served basis - no ticket or advance booking required.

You can also watch this special event live on the internet from www.royalsoc.ac.uk/live.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Wikipedia

talkorigins (one of many)

geology.about.com

Depending on how recent the source and who you talk to, Coelacanth is a name belonging to either a genus or a family, not just one species. There are ~125 species identified from fossils alone, which are used as index fossils; this is not a problem since they are morphologically distinct from each other and the modern coelacanth species.

Abiogenesis has moved on in the 50 years since Miller-Urey. Might I suggest reading a recent article: "On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells," it can be found here, just click journals, then Vol 358, January, then pg 59, freely available in .pdf or .svg format. I'd give the link there directly, but the Royal Society doesn't do that for some reason. Anyway, the article and the references contained therein might get one up to speed. A more tractable account of modern abiogenesis research is available on talkorigins' own website as well.

I feel I should mention that Isaac Newton (or even Issac Newton, whoever the hell he was) wasn't a PhD - such things didn't exist in the UK educational system in the 17th century. According to the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive he got his BA in 1665 and incepted MA in 1668, at which point he was elected a college Fellow.

There have been higher doctorates (which, unlike in the US, are not always honorary awards) in the UK for centuries - doctorates in Divinity, Law, Medicine, and Music date back to mediaeval times, while the DSc and DLitt came in in the late 19th century. But the PhD, being a degree somewhere between the first postgraduate degree (studied at the beginning of one's specialist academic career) and the higher doctorates (typically awarded late in a career, on the basis of a substantial published research record), is less than a century old in the UK.

The PhD originated in Germany sometime in the 16th century, migrated to the US sometime in the 19th century (I think) and was introduced in the UK (to some initial scepticism) in the early 20th century.

These days, it's pretty much impossible to get anywhere in (British) academia without a PhD, but that's only really been the case in the last thirty years. In Newton's day (and this seems to have been true at Oxford and Cambridge until the mid-20th century) things were less rigidly qualification-focused. Being elected a Fellow of a college was the important thing.

A few years later, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics - a post held currently by Stephen Hawking, and at various other times by Airy, Babbage, Stokes and Dirac.

More importantly, though, Newton was a Fellow of the Royal Society which pretty much beats any other academic honour short of a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal.

nicholas

I find it odd to note that it is never discussed how RDF will be kept from rapidly degenerating into Meta-tag style abuse.

This is one of the questions I had in mind during Tim Berners-Lee's lecture at the Royal Society earlier this week (There's a streaming media of the lecture itself - and this question was raised - I think it was the first one in the Q&A session). The answer lies in much the same solution used by the web and its visitors today.

What happens when you visit a website that contains false and blatantly wrong information? You don't go back there. So you'd only use sources you trust. (Face it, you don't trust _everything_ on the World Wide Web right? Yet the web works as a medium despite this "flaw").

Its the web's way of routing around the damage - the damage of false information.

I have to agree with a previous post, the news report is covering an article in a peer reviewed journal. Now given that the journal posted a news release writ big on their website royal society proceedings bio you can perhaps accuse them of causing a bit of hype. Unfortunatly the article isn't in print yet, or at least not online. But, and keep in mind I've only read the press releases, they might run afoul of a few people given their choice of neuropsychological tests.

It isn't exactly elegant to use the Raven matrix reasoning task. With a sample of 45, you should have time to run a full test of IQ. The short form of the WASI doesn't take that long (30 mins tops). The other issue is their measure of digit span. In my experience most people use a very simplistic measure of digit span that involves 2 trials per level (ie: give a subject 2 trials at 6 digits, 2 trials at 7 etc.) Where I work at the MNI , we've developed our own test that involves 8 trials per digit level, allowing the subject time to try out new strategies and reducing the effect of chance errors and/or successes.

But again, until the paper is published I can't really say if it's a bad study. I've faith enough in peer-review even if it does let in some bad studies now and again.

I actually used some of these, these and these to build
some of these. They
tried to stop me by using these
and these
but I did not give in!
I know a guy and he helped me to bring these in so we could design and design some more and build some of these and these and fight everyone off and scary the rest.

So finally, I could use more of
these and these and these to get my freakingly cool nuclear powered microprocessor.

By the way, as Heise (in German) reports, The Royal Society has recently elected Tim Berners-Lee as a fellow for his work regarding the Web.

By the way, as Heise (in German) reports, The Royal Society has recently elected Tim Berners-Lee as a fellow for his work regarding the Web.

It's better than that: Nature summarise an article, then /. gives us a precis of the Nature article. According to the abstract of the original article, 'one can discover the outcome of [a] computation [...] without running the computer', and, of course, 'there are some limits on the information that can be obtained from them'.

Nature seems to have turned this into 'it should be possible to determine the outcome of a computation while the machine stays off', and not told us anything about what the limits are.

May be the Nature reporter didn't want to observe the original article for fear of collapsing its waveform.

It would be dead handy if they could extend their research to show that you don't even have to build the quantum computer in the first place. Hey, you probably didn't even need to know the results of the calculation, do you?

You want the Oct. 7th 2000 issue.

Of course you can't read it without a very expensive subscription.

Here's an idea for story submissions... how about not posting stories where the details aren't available to the mass public. There are plenty good story submissions which are ignored and everyone can read the details.