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Science is in a no-win situation here. If we solve the problem and reduce emissions and no additional warming or catastrophic consequences occur, people like you will say the science was flawed and will be less likely to heed warnings in the future. If we continue along our present course, catastrophic consequences will almost certainly occur. If the latter happens at least us "greens" will be able to point to those consequences and say, "you should have listened", but you'll probably just tell us it's a natural cycle.

No the science says we are past the point of doing anything to change it.

https://www.sciencealert.com/s...

https://www.sciencealert.com/s...

I love settled science

So what you are arguing for is making people more miserable than they supposedly will be any way.

Has methane emission increased globally during the last 150 years? How many times more methane is emitted today compared to 150 years ago?

The answer is probably has increased, based on measurements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It is being released constantly via natural processes, and is illustrated when it gets trapped, as when people drill holes in frozen lakes and ignite methane trapped under the ice. And yeah, people and cows fart.

The wild cards in the methane issue are permafrost melt, and methane clathrates. We've seen methane releases as permafrost melts http://www.sciencealert.com/7-... and are looking at that issue.

Then there is the methane clathrates, or methane hydrate - which is part of the permafrost issue. But there is a lot of that stuff in the ocean. Ice with a lot of methane trapped in it. Hopefully the stuff in the ocean is stable.

In what is an ironic twist, it may be wise to harvest as much of the Methane clathrate as possible, and use it as a transition energy source. While it does produce some CO2, that will be preferable to large scale methane releases.

No, that only applies to the universities. This stuff will be locked down, if not by copyright/patents, then by being classified. Anyway China is doing it, so why not us, right? Another fine example of state run capitalism, or is it capitalist run state?

As an American the most frustrating thing to me is that our political agendas are being set more by big businesses than the public. (This applies to both parties) Loads of people here in the states are intelligent and do care about the world. I have yet to meet someone who actually believes climate change isn't a thing. I live in Republican Utah. I have meet people who think it's not as bad as "they" say or that companies shouldn't be restricted because we can't compete with China because of those restrictions. We're losing jobs since it's cheaper to do business elsewhere.

I try to explain that health care benefits and labor costs have more to do with why it's expensive to do business in the U.S. Taxes might also be a reason, but I'm no tax expert and I don't trust big media or politicians to weight in on it.

As for China polluting they just opened up this solar plant: http://www.sciencealert.com/th... That's a lot more then what we're doing here.

how'dya like that regulatory capture? UNH UNH take it bich...

Time to make a play in the canned air market segment.

But will ego-boost add enough delta-v for a trip?

If the ("Impossible" "reactionless") EM drive proves to provide real delta-v for making ongoing orbital mechanics alterations (rather than being a test methodology error), it has been estimated it could be used to make the Earth-to-Mars trip in 70 days. That could put Mars within reach within 8 years.

The tiny force involved (if it's real) would add up to a lot of motion over time - and you wouldn't have to haul along a lot of fuel to be expended - and thus mostly used for hauling fuel.

There was supposed to be a six-month "does it really do this?" orbital test in progress or Real Soon Now. So we should know soon.

So if this works and Trump's ego can get it deployed in time, then, yes, ego-boost WOULD add enough delta-v for a trip. B-)

Nature wrote a solid article on the dangers. IMO it's going to lead to some seriously damaged humans before it's closer to perfected. But IMO it will be improved until it's in common use, unless a different technique comes along. In the mean time there's little point to banning it.

Governments that fight markets never win. If Europe and the US ban this technology that just means progress will continue in other places. And there are other reasons than eliminating disease. I could argue the ethics, but that's not the point. Like it or not people are going to do it. We live in the last fully nature-made generation.

Widespread "Consensus" is not the measure of scientific fact; if it were, we'd all still believe that the Earth is flat, etc.

Let's put this idiotic meme to bed once and for all.

(1) There has never been a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat.

The consensus among natural philosophers since the time of Aristotle (4th century BC) has been that the Earth is spherical. In the third century BC Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth as 252,000 stadia, which works out to 39,838 km. The modern figure for the circumference of the Earth is 40,030 km. Since Eratosthenes was dealing in round numbers, he had an accurate figure that is merely less precise than the modern figure. The Portuguese had a more accurate figure for the size of the Earth, which is why they rejected Columbus's expedition which was based on an estimate that was 1/3 too small.

In medieval universities astronomy was one of the "liberal arts", and the standard texts considered the Earth spherical. The "flat earth" notion was only widely held by the ignorant.

(2) Scientific consensus is not about eternal truth, it is about who currently bears the burden of proof.

Science is unique in that it admits, even depends upon crackpot ideas, but it imposes a high burden of proof on them. On the other hand it imposes a low burden of proof on ideas that have a long history of standing up to scrutiny.

This is discrimination, but it's not unfair discrimination. It's a system that allows those crackpot ideas a shot at becoming a new scientific consensus, without burdening everyone else with endless recapitulation of the evidence for things that currently enjoy the support of overwhelming evidence.

When evidence supports a change in the scientific consensus, it changes very rapidly. Take the Heliocentric theory. Copernicus's model had a number of shortcomings, but after the work of Tycho Brahe and Kepler it rapidly gained support among professional astronomers. The main opposition to heliocentrism was political -- not actually religious. The Pope was a Renaissance humanist and an admirer of Galileo; but he had a problem with the Spanish cardinals and couldn't afford to appear "soft on heresy". It's a familiar problem to us today.

3) The existence of scientific dissent does not somehow make an idea more credible.

Dissent, even crackpottery, is not only inevitable, it is an important feature of science that even crackpots are allowed to participate. It doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what you can prove. So if your critieria of evidence is scientific unanimity, you won't get it on just about any topic. Not even conservation of momentum. Everything is open to debate. Even "real" debate.

This means that if you take the "some scientists disagree" route you can go scientist shopping for whatever position you want. Science would have no value whatsoever if we used it that way. You can of course cite dissident scientists if you want of course, but their dissent in itself isn't proof of anything. You have to drill down to why they believe what they believe and why you believe that is correct. People who rely on the scientific consensus within a field need only rely upon the fact that it *is* the scientific consensus.

This reflects the same asymmetrical burden of proof that happens within science. One side is making an extraordinary (in scientific terms) claim and needs equally compelling evidence. The other is making a non-controversial claim.

I thought we discussed this recently. Here's an excerpt from:
http://www.sciencealert.com/ad...

"Adding seaweed to cattle feed could reduce methane production by 70%
That's equivalent to taking India's CO2 emissions off the map.

If we add dried seaweed to 2 percent of sheep and cattle feed, we could cut methane emissions by more than 70 percent, scientists have found.

With livestock responsible for 44 percent of all human-caused methane - a gas that has 36 times the global warming potential of CO2 - this could cut a huge chunk of the 3.1 gigatonnes these animals release into the atmosphere each year in burps and farts..."

While these (South Asians?) are willing to work for a fraction of the wages because it's much better than at home, relatively soon there will be a much more compelling reason for them to try to get visas (any visa or none at all).

Survival.

Within the lifetime of many of those reading these words, the climate in large regions of the world will make them UNINHABITABLE. Due to a combination of high heat in the summer months and high humidity (yes there is high humidity in parts of the middle east, like near the Red Sea), the typical healthy Adult (not sick or old or young) will die after just 6 hours outdoors (I believe in the shade!). That's even with plenty of water because, with such high humidity you can't sweat the heat out.

http://www.sciencealert.com/mi...

That's Hundreds of Millions of Refugees, a number that will make the current six million fleeing Syria seem like a drop in the bucket. (And look at what this small number has done to Europe). Of course it won't be restricted just to the Middle East, another report from a military focused organization claims there will be 30 Million climate refugees from just ONE country (Bangladesh).

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

It's obvious that these people won't just sit there and DIE, they'll want to LIVE. They'll be willing to do anything and everything to live in a country where they won't literally die from heat (or being submerged). Thanks to the internet, they'll know where to go and how to get there. Are you prepared to share your country? To save people from dying? Or will you shoot them on sight (because that'll be what its going to take). I'm afraid we're headed towards a world where men with machine guns protecting the wealthy against the desperate masses will be a common sight. Go NRA! (Sarcasm)

If you still don't believe in Climate Change, why don't you to put your money where your mouth is and invest in property that's at risk. Say the low lying areas of Florida or Bangladesh. Or you can put it into the glittering cities of Dubai and other places like Yemen which are slated to become hot properties indeed. According to these projections, you'll only need to wait 20-30 years; some mortgages are shorter than that. And if you're right, you'll make a killing! (But if you're wrong, you'll be the one who's dead).

Thanks Trump! (Sarcasm)

The summary has the names (or it does now, anyway) but not the numbers or the symbols, which would have been nice to include. Would've been good to include some etymology as well.

Google is your friend... In any case, here is a better link with the numbers, symbols, and etymology...

http://www.sciencealert.com/it...

and... here is a link to a large image for printing out, you know... for wall art... (grin)

https://www.iupac.org/cms/wp-c...

Seaweed is also being studied as a means of carbon sequestration.
So grow vast amounts of seaweed, feed some of it to cows, and you've got a "two for the price of one" effect on global warming.

Ask and you shall receive

So 54 people in the United States had the measles last year, but we're measles free because those people picked it up elsewhere?

It's worse than that. Measles is still being transmitted in the US. It is just not "endemic". The source of the outbreak is someone who contracted the virus outside the country who then goes on to spread it to those who stayed home.

China is capable of funding diversivies projects simultaneously, and that fact has no bearing on the legitimacy of pebble-bed designs. Below multiple fission construction projects of diverse types and groundbreaking fusion research.

"Several other advanced-reactor projects are under way in China, including work on a molten-salt reactor fueled by thorium rather than uranium (a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the technology originated in the 1960s), a traveling-wave reactor (in collaboration with TerraPower, the startup funded by Bill Gates), and a sodium-cooled fast reactor being built by the Chinese Institute for Atomic Energy" https://www.technologyreview.c...

"It's not the only groundbreaking nuclear project on the go in China - the country recently managed to heat hydrogen gas to 49.999 million degrees Celsius, and sustained a cloud of hydrogen plasma for an impressive 102 seconds, which is a huge step towards making nuclear fusion (the reaction that powers our Sun) viable." http://www.sciencealert.com/ch...

The selection of a French design by a French company is not surprising - France is also a leading pioneer in the nuclear industry, and has 58 commercial nuclear power plants compared to China's 33; note these numbers exclude current construction projects and research reactors.

A bug in fMRI software could invalidate 15 years of brain research

Let's hope this study used the latest patch?

I'm wonder if these employees only being paid for 30 hours will only be expected to put in 60 hours?

There are reasons IT is often a salaried position. These reasons are called labor laws. In case people don't know, the hourly rate is actually pretty low for IT professionals after one factors in unaccounted for time.

Death marches are the norm in IT from help-desk support to video game testers. Nothing else can be expected from a whole section of Industry managed by people who put in random deadline dates without even guessing how long something should take. IT planning and scheduling is slightly worse than Hollywood and on part with consumer sales organized around fictional holidays.

If Amazon is hiring part-time workers the may find very quickly that laws have a very clear interpretation about things like on-call, per-deim, travel reimbursement and other concepts. Laws that were paid for by the labor unions of last century before they imploded with corruption.

But this is the twenty-first century. Want slaves but pesky morals and laws get in your way? Just call them 'Unpaid Interns.' Between making copies and running for coffee make them write reports about how wonderful it was. They get Real World Experience of doing stuff for no money that you somehow cannot get in school.

Seriously: spend less time in the seat crushed by anxiety and red tape. Then you'll get more stuff done. The less you work on average the more productive your society is. There have been studies on this.

I don't want to spend it defending myself against capricious law and frivolous lawsuits when I could be sitting on my front porch gulping a cold one while watching my 3D printer make a fine Interni sofa and a real replica Jacuzzi... But hell, now I'll probably get sued by the water bottling companies for using their plastic for printer filament!

Has it occurred to you that the main reason existing fossil energy is cheap is mostly just because of scale and infrastructure?

After all, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal etc all have zero fuel costs - no mining, no fuel storage and transport, just maintenance (and even that's usually a lot less). The great majority of the cost is construction - and that always gets cheaper with scale (just look at solar's price curve for the last few years). There's also still plenty of room for technological efficiency improvement. These factors also apply to storage, where required. So there's certainly no reason to assume that renewable energy is inherently more expensive than fossil fuel; generally the opposite.

You don't have to worry about consumables. Up next, the desktop smelter, bring the iron age right into your own home.

I like to return (somewhat repetitively, I admit) to the Gary Taubes article that really summed it up best in recent history. (meta) Yes, what you eat matters. No, calorie counts aren't the whole story. The story is complicated, and different for everyone. Some people don't get fat even if they pound Twinkies(tm). Some people get fat and stay fat in spite of going to all types of extremes — or even just eating healthy and getting exercise. (Thankfully, I seem to respond fairly well to that combination, when I bother to stick with it...) The science of what precisely makes people fat is not precisely settled, but I leave you with a reminder that poop pills may yet be the answer, even before we're clear on why they work.

The requirement for a death mechanism isn't counterintuitive at all for a biologist. For a system to evolve, it has to fulfill a small number of requirements (including death):

• 1. Reproduction: Some unit in the system has to reproduce. This unit could be bacterial cells in your gut, or it could be numerical representations in a computer.
• 2. Inheritance: During reproduction, each new unit in the system has to gain traits from its parent(s). The traits could be hidden, as in recessive alleles, or it could be obvious, as in dominant alleles. The number of parents can be one or more than one. (We have two, but maybe some aliens have three or more.)
• 3. Mutation: At some point in the reproductive cycle, there has to be the potential for changes in the traits (mutations) that are then inherited.
• 4. Death: Death is generally required to remove individuals from a population, thus freeing up room for the next generation. However, there are scenarios where death isn't required. If the population is continuously expanding into new territory, the front-line sub-population can evolve over time without individual death being needed (as in the case of cane toads in Australia). In this case, the older organisms being left behind fills the same role of actual death.

If your system meets these requirements, your system will evolve. If you're missing one, your system may show interesting behavior, but it will fail to evolve.

It's that most of us realise how much less horror would be in the world if there wasn't constant fighting over the limited fossil fuels that cold fusion would replace.

That's not it at all. If it was, people would be going batshit over renewables right now, since wind is now actually cheaper than natural gas, and solar is getting there. Instead, Natural gas is now the hot new power plant technology that everyone is building.

So no, getting rid of fossil fuels is clearly not that big of a deal to the public at large. Even if it were we wouldn't need some new mythical type of atomic energy to do so. For our big plants, we could all do it in 2 years if we wanted to, and be paying no more for our energy than today.

Did you RTFA? I'm not normally one to defend /. editors with their crappy proofing and duplicates, but in this case the click bait comes from outside /.

The original article and a few others:

• Diamond Nanothreads Could Support Space Elevator [2015-11-23]
• Diamond nanothread rivals graphene as the next big wonder material Now scientists want to build a space elevator out of it. [2015-11-27]
• We may soon be riding up to space in style in elevators made of diamonds [2015-11-23]
• Our Future Space Elevator May Be Built of Diamond [2015-11-21]
• Diamond Nanothreads Could Support Space Elevator [2015-11-19]
• Scientists Say We Could Build a Space Elevator Using Microscopic Diamond Chains [2015-11-19]

Evidence is not on your side. Recent research indicates that kids with a religious upbringing are less altruistic than kids with an a-religious upbringing. Also, religious kids are more likely to condemn other people's shortcomings more harshly (big surprise).

If, as you state, religion is the prison to keep sociopaths in check, it might turn out that, analogously with criminals in prison, religion is the place where sociopaths become more experienced.

China has recently launched a Helium filled airship that can do the following characteristics:

* Can be parked at the Edge Of Space

* Flies on solar power for up to six months at a time

* Has a constant line of sight over a hundred thousand square miles

* Is reusable

More info on the Helium air ship are available @
http://www.sciencealert.com/th...

http://www.fastcoexist.com/305...

Disclaimer: I submitted a story regarding the Helium airship on 24th, Oct, 2015 to Slashdot but the submission was rejected

Submission info:
http://slashdot.org/submission...

If the media can't accurately explain to people and have them accept where AI really is, they only have themselves to blame.

People have watched, kind, funny, evil, enigmatic machines interact with their favourite characters for years and have been told that true AI is just five years away for 30 years now.

They've read about things like putting a worm's brain in a Lego Mindstorms: http://www.sciencealert.com/wa...

So, why wouldn't lay people believe ridiculous statements like "teaching computers to mimic some of the ways a human brain works"?

Yes we need some well recognized, respected computer scientist to stand up and say, "People, not only do we not know how brains work and we don't even know how the *fuck* to go about figuring out how brains work. Computers like HAL, WOPR, M-5, Ziggy, etc. simply are works of fiction".

Unfortunately, I can't think of anybody with the stature to make such a statement.

Jupiter and Venus are converging this month!

So that explains what's causing the the extra stress and aberrant behavior of the inhabitants.

Jupiter and Venus are converging this month!

These should all be solvable problems though. A recent article claiming to eliminate Alzheimer's in mice I came across this week comes to mind: http://www.sciencealert.com/ne...

Undeterred by the manufacturing issues mentioned in TFA. Researchers from Spain have now found that by inserting little "islands" of lead, or more precisely lead atoms, into the hexagonal graphene structure, they can make the material highly magnetic.