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And yet ... Weekly religious attendance nearly as effective as statins and exercise in extending life, according to a story today at Science Blog.

According to this article on the Science Blog two local high school students helped on the research: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/might_gauchos_devel op_portable_cocaine_sensor_10107.html

The high school students made their own sensors and collected data shown in a graph in the scientific article they co-authored describing the work. ...

Elaine Doctor, a senior at Channel Island High School in Oxnard, Calif., and McCall Wood, a senior at Santa Barbara High School in Santa Barbara, Calif., participated in the summertime Research Mentorship Program at UCSB on this work. Elaine Doctor said, "At first I felt kind of intimidated by all the graduate students who are used to all the equipment, but we caught on really fast and everyone was really helpful. I felt honored to help America's war on drugs." Elaine plans to continue her studies in the sciences, either in biochemistry or biology.

McCall Wood said, "I'm really excited about this work. It let me know what research is like and I definitely want to pursue this. Everyday we would go into the lab and test a different hypothesis. I found it really exciting and extremely challenging. I found my limits, like patience. Being in the lab every day taught me so much about myself and about science in general. It's not really the results that were so important but the journey and the process."

as you would be dead from starvation

This problem is handily defeated by human hibernation technology.

And I think we are closer to realizing that technology than near-light-speed spacecraft.

I thought all this global warming was diluting the Gulf Stream, slowing it down and making Great Britain colder.

So which is it?

Mr. Bush has already made his intentions clear .

He has publicly stated if a pandemic strikes there will be martial law, and
the national guard, state police, local police, and "other" authorities will
block "all" travel .

My quetion to this is , who is gonna stop the birds from flying around ???

Want to take that to a WHOLE new level ???

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8788

Remember the civet cat and Sars ???? Oh my, guess what .

This virus is changing, and it is not done changing .

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8372

If this thing becomes transmitible to the common house cat, killing and eating birds in
every city that has alley cats . We got ourselves a recipe for a bad situation .

Another point of this strain that is being missed is the mortality rate so far .

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=5596

If this thing kicks off at anywhere near this supposed 75%, it will be worse than the plague .

Some current numbers put it under 50% and lets hope it becomes less deadly as it mutates .

Keep in mind the 1918 pandemic was 2 - 5%, and not with modern medicine .

This has the potential for a major catastrophe .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

20 - 50 million world wide died in a time before widespread food shipment and travel .

A pandemic has reoccured with regularity every few decades, but this is shaping up to be
the deadliest in modern times if the mortality rates are anywhere near what they are now .

I hope all countries around the world take this VERY seriously .

Ex-MislTech

I have a fundimental problem taxing people in North Dakota and Virginia to pay for protection for people who built homes below sea level.


Yeah, why should North Dakotans pay! They know better than to build houses in places that flood!

compare to what was announced in the news today...

--| US Government Growing Giant Mutant Trout |---

Trout with three chromosome sets grew faster than fish with two sets, so the industry tries to breed fish with three sets for meat production. RAINBOW TROUT WITH THREE SETS OF CHROMOSOMES GROW FASTER BECAUSE THEY ARE UNABLE TO REPRODUCE. The energy from the food they eat is shifted from reproduction to growth.

with what was said in 1924...

--| What Steiner Said About Salmon in 1924 |---

Salmon... have a special organization. They must live in the sea to develop proper muscles. They need earth influences to feed properly and develop muscles. Those earth influences are mainly in the salt in the sea. Salmon must live in the salt of the sea in order to develop strong muscles. But they cannot reproduce if they live in the sea, because they are made in such a way that the sea water closes them off completely from the universe. Salmon would have died out long ago if they had to reproduce in the sea. They are the exception. As they gain their strength in the sea -- where they develop muscle -- they are in the first place fairly blind, and in the second place are unable to reproduce. Their reproductive organs and their sense organs grow weak, they are dull. But salmon grow big in the sea. Now to prevent the salmon from dying out -- we can see this by considering the salmon in the North Sea and over in the Atlantic -- salmon migrate up the Rhine year after year. This is why they are called Rhine salmon. But the Rhine makes salmon lean; they lose their muscles. The size to which they have grown in the salty sea is lost in the Rhine. The salmon get really slender; they lose their muscles. Their sense organs and above all their reproductive organs, male and female, develop to an enourmous degree, and the salmon are able to reproduce in the Rhine. The salmon must thus migrate from the salty sea to the freshwater Rhine every year in order to reproduce. They have to grow lean, because the old ones who are still living and the young ones that have arrived all migrate back to the sea, to lose their slenderness and gain in size.

(Rudolf Steiner, Lecture: FEtE - February 9, 1924; GA 352)

If you see in one creature an exceptional trait
In some way bestowed, then ask at once where it suffers
Elsewhere some lack, and search with investigative spirit.
At once you will find to each form the key,
For never did beast, with all kinds of teeth his upper
Jaw bone bedecking, bear horns on its forehead,
And therefore a horned lion the eternal mother
Could not possibly fashion though she apply her full strength;
For she has not mass enough, rows of teeth
To fully implant and antlers and horns to push forth.

(Goethe, Metamorphosis of Animals)

"We are developing artificial tactile sensors that will imitate the functionality and efficiency found in biological structures such as human fingers," said Chang Liu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois. "We have shown that simple, low-cost sensor arrays can be used to analyze and identify surface textures."

No, I've been too busy making artificial diamonds so that I could connect them to my new GPU to squeeze out that extra percentage of performance, so that I could calculate just how many LoC per-second I could transfer using BPL.

So I clicked on the link in the main story, rolled my mouse wheel down a couple of time and BANG, my first popup since I started using Firefox. What gives??

This is the URL.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/7036

From ScienceBlog (and others, if you google for it):

People who use their computers to find information about their chronic disease often wind up in worse condition than if they had listened to their doctor, according to a University College London review of studies on Internet health. Using interactive computer tools does improve the medical knowledge of people with diabetes, asthma or other chronic conditions, and does provide them with positive feelings of social support, according to researchers reviewing 28 randomized controlled trials involving 4,042 participants. But there was no evidence that cyber-medicine helps people change their behavior and startling evidence that it may leave them in worse health.

Nanosolar SolarPly is one of these products. The manufacturer claims a cost as little as $30 per square meter (cheaper than some fancy non-solar roofing materials) and less than $2 per peak watt by 2006.

The efficiency isn't great (they aren't going to make self-powered electric cars), but this doesn't matter. When we've already covered an area equivalent to Ohio with impervious surfaces, we've got plenty of area we could re-cover with PV. If 1/4 of the 112,610 square km of impervious area was covered with 8% efficient PV, it would have a peak power potential of approximately 2.25 terawatts (more than double current US nameplate generating capacity). I think that would hold us for a while.

I ran across this article at the beginning of the month and then ran in to Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography by Dominic Streatfeild. It's an amazingly quick read. It does a good job of pointing out that a 500 year old culture won't be able to get rid of the 4500 year old coca trade.

One thing it points to is the farmers involved in production don't have many other crops available to them. In the article, if coca is the only thing that will grow since everything else dies from roundup, then how will you grow anything but coca?

Probably the next step involved in the drug war is Fusarium oxysporum http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2000/C/ 200002876.html.

In the book above it calls this the a-bomb of herbicides. While some strains will only attack coca, it mutates easily and then can destroy the entire farm land. It will contaminate the soil and make it impossible to grow anything else. Here's a list of other forms and some plants it attacks: http://www.extento.hawaii.edu/kbase/crop/Type/f_ox ys.htm.

It's actually more cost effective to allow for failures. You build the same sat 5 times and if 4 fail in a cheaper launch situation, you still save money.

From this article:

"Swales engineers worked closely with Space Sciences Laboratory engineers and scientists to define a robust and cost-effective plan to build five satellites in a short period time."

The only reason our friend would have trouble addressing those arguments would be if he was undereducated in the sciences himself.

Where, unfortunately, "undereducated" means we think anything which breaches our a priori assumptions about the nature of the universe is dumb.

By that standard, most people, most scientists are "undereducated". For the longest time geology avoided anything that smelled of catastrophism, paleontology avoided anything that smelled of a flood, and astronomy avoided anything that smelled of structure.

For good scientific reasons? Not a bit of it. Because they were afraid of being labelled as one of the enemy, those insidious creationists, and ostracised like J Harlan Bretz was for 40 years.

A very highly qualified scientists have been brave enough to state outright that they are not impartial, like Richard Lewontin and his famous "cannot let a Divine Foot in the door" statement, but they are the exception.

The result in each of the above cases was that the science in question was held back by decades.

Meanwhile, one D Russell Humphreys had made some fairly specific predictions (in 1984) about the magnetic fields Voyager would find in the outer planets, which turned out to be both bang on the money and well wide of any other expectations when those fields were measured two years after publication. One of the more spectacular demonstrations that this "alien" and "impossible" perspective has predictive, scientific merit.

Anyone wondering why more such papers don't appear in the mainstream scientific press need only turn to the furor which exploded when the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington published a carefully peer-reviewed paper from well-known Intelligent Design advocate, Stephen C. Meyer. The then-editor, Dr. Richard M. v. Sternberg (a double PhD with many published articles himself), goes to great lengths on his website to explain that every positive scientific and journalistic step of the process was followed for the paper and had been independently verified and approved by highly qualified scientists before publication.

It is quite clear that the paper is being criticised on political/philosophical grounds, not because of any scientific merit or demerit.

The Origins show is based on philosophy, not on science. This is well and good except that it is presented as being purely based on science.

I need hardly point out that such misrepresentation is in itself unscientific, a meta-flaw under which to group all of the unscientific teleological statements about features "appearing" (ex nihilo, apparently) and organisms having "figured out" and "striving" to achieve "goals" without any guiding hand. Nevertheless, it will go ahead, and millions of viewers will be taught that random numbers have hidden intelligence and/or miracle-working ability which repeatedly transcends mere statistics, and introduced once more to a capricious goddess who goes by the name of Nature - all the while suffering the constantly asserted doublethink mantra that there is no supernature.

Meanwhile, back at Reasons , Hugh has had the more obvious inconsistencies and contradictions among his theories publicly pointed out to him

Cerf and confederates are quite right but the problem with science as a political issue is that a scientific development leads its political consequences by years, sometimes decades. Politicians and most businesses don't operate in that sort of timeframe. [And most politicians are getting most of their money from businesses? gawd, I can't tell flamebait from reasonable conjecture anymore!] So even though most of the jobs we do today and the way we fight wars today involve technology that was hot science 10 or 20 years ago, few of us are voting like science mattered, let alone being led by leaders who think that way. A poll at scienceblog.com shows that its readers strongly consider Bush harmful to scientific progress.

I agree but the problem is that a scientific development leads its political consequences by years, sometimes decades. Politicians and most businesses don't operate in that sort of timeframe. So even though most of the jobs we do and the way we fight wars involve technology that was hot science 10 or 20 years ago, few of us are voting like science mattered, let alone being led by leaders who think that way. A poll at scienceblog.com shows that its readers strongly consider Bush harmful to scientific progress.

...and view the printable version.

I wonder if they have tried this one. It's designed to supress methane production and increase hydrogen production.

From the article:
...a Raneynickel catalyst, named after Murray Raney, who first patented the alloy in 1927.

Raney-nickel is a porous catalyst made of about 90 percent nickel (Ni) and 10 percent aluminum (Al). While Raney-nickel proved somewhat effective at separating hydrogen from biomass-derived molecules, the researchers improved the material's effectiveness by adding more tin (Sn), which stops the production of methane and instead generates more hydrogen. Relative to other catalysts, the Raney-NiSn can perform for long time periods (at least 48 hours) and at lower temperatures (roughly 225 degrees Celsius).

Seems to me some of this technology might be able to be put to good use for the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, in which autonomous vehicles race across the U.S. desert, driven by their waypoints and obstacle avoidance systems. I'm not at all surprised Cornell is doing some of this autonomous vehicle research.

Last year, The Ohio State University's TerraMax and Carnegie Mellon's Red Team did very well at the DARPA Grand Challenge. Here's some good coverage on Science Blog. There was some other really good blog coverage that gave a play-by-play breakdown of how each autonomous vehicle did the day of the event and what kind of troubles it ran into, but I can't find that via the Googling right now. :) There's also tons of previous Slashdot coverage on the Grand Challenge, and there's a pre-2005 event coming up very soon for interested people, I know.

Seems to me some of this technology might be able to be put to good use for the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, in which autonomous vehicles race across the U.S. desert, driven by their waypoints and obstacle avoidance systems. I'm not at all surprised Cornell is doing some of this autonomous vehicle research.

Last year, The Ohio State University's TerraMax and Carnegie Mellon's Red Team did very well at the DARPA Grand Challenge. Here's some good coverage on Science Blog. There was some other really good blog coverage that gave a play-by-play breakdown of how each autonomous vehicle did the day of the event and what kind of troubles it ran into, but I can't find that via the Googling right now. :) There's also tons of previous Slashdot coverage on the Grand Challenge, and there's a pre-2005 event coming up very soon for interested people, I know.

Science Blog has a related item today about scientists 'selectively breeding' winning Formula One cars.

Science Blog has a related item today about scientists 'selectively breeding' winning Formula One cars.

Well, from reading the article, the antenna is more efficient than an electrically small antenna. Like said in the article, the antenna is 80 to 100% as efficient as the full size counterpart.
from sciencetblog.com
"Normally smaller antennas are only 8 to 15 percent efficient. Vincent's antennas achieved 80 to 100 percent efficiency as compared to the larger antennas."

So, it wouldn't save on either...but it will make the antenna smaller.

OMG!! Yes, I want a fukcing Sr-90 in cell phones!!!

Look on the fucking periodic table. Sr-90 is almost chemically the same as calcium. So yeah, put it in my cell phone. Then your kinds will have it in their bones!!! I guess leukemia is a type of flu in your world.

Sr-90 is one of the *worst* contaminants. google Same thing for iodine-131

You already have to use steel that was forged before WWII to make high sensitivity radiation detectors. But that's not a problem, lets fuck up the planet (ie. us) so we can talk on the cell phone for 50 years!!!!!!

Use RTG in a very limited way for science, esp. for space probes where power is scarce. DO NOT USE IT IN A CELL PHONE!!!

We need to humanize the problem of the increasing elder population and stop talking about 'technical' solutions.

Loneliness can kill.

Please ignore the above comment in favor of the corrected comment below; I must learn not to post after having three beers, as I tend to mismatch HTML tags.

As a bonus for your patience, I've added a few links that lend support for the idea that physical and emotional pain are similar.

Physical pain (like that of the burn victims) is one thing; emotional pain is something else entirely.

There was a recent study (posted here?) that suggests that both physical and emotional pain are produced by the same mechanisms in the brain.

When you think about this, it makes sense: why would the organism produce -- and "pay" both the additional R&D on a species level, and the additional "construction" costs on an individual level -- an entirely separate faculty rather than adapt on already at hand?

Not only that, the reason an organism feels physical pain, and the reason it feels emotional pain are pretty much the same: both serve to signal to the organism that its current activity, in its current environment, is detrimental to the organism. A burning pain in my finger tells me that either I should modify my activity -- by moving the finger --, or the environment -- by moving the stove-top the finger is touching.

Similarly, emotional pain -- feelings of guilt, or rejection, or etc., -- exist pretty much to tell me that I'm earning the ire of my fellows, and that my ancestors became my ancestors by virtue of not doing those ire-raising things. Those organisms that too often ignored pain, either physical or emotional, of course failed to become ancestors by virtue of that, and so the genes for ignoring pain tend not to have propagated as much as the genes for heeding pain.

So if physical pain and emotional pain exists to do the same thing -- essentially behavior modification -- and if evidence exists that they are produced by the same structures in the brain, why do we tend to take for granted that they are not the same things?

Part of the reason, of course, is that emotional pain can last far longer than (many forms of) physical pain. My guess is that this is partly because emotional behaviors -- such as social awkwardness or shyness -- are resistant to change, and part -- as with grief -- is due to reinforcement by memory. I'll further guess that this reinforcement by memory is to some degree an "unintended" side effect of the greater precision of human memory.

Why are certain social behaviors resistant to change? Probably this is also an evolutionary adaptation -- research on pecking order in primates suggests that there are genetic components to social dominance hierarchies (proximally mediated by hormones, so that changes in hormone level by human researchers can subvert the hierarchy). Why is it adaptive to reinforce the social hierarchy even to the point of making the subordinates feel "bad"? Because feeling bad is preferable to challenging the hierarchy and literally having your head torn off. A geek who asks a girl who's "out of his league" for a date may only risk being laughed at today, but his reluctance may stem from an ancestor whose penalty for flirting with her might well have been death at the hands of the alpha male.

But I also suspect that the main reason that we see physical and emotional pain as being different is that we see emotional pain as uniquely human, something that separates us from "the animals". This desire for separation from "animals" (scare quotes because, of course, humans are a kind of animal and not an image of God) seems to be a strongly engrained trait at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition -- as is the traditional Judeo-Christian belief in mind-body dualism. Since we know that animals feel physical pain but are less informed about the animals' psychological worlds, it perhaps predictable that we would see emotional pain

Scienceblog has a bit on..."a new process for how memories might be stored, a finding that could help explain one of the least-understood activities of the brain. What's more, the key player in this process is a protein that acts just like a prion - a class of proteins that includes the deadly agents involved in neurodegenerative conditions such as mad cow disease."

Printer friendly version here

Those icons on the front page of the Science Blog look familiar.

From the same site: Neural biology explains ejaculation

How does the body know it has had an ejaculation? And why does it care? Anatomically, it is more complex than it seems, says the University of Cincinnati scientist who last year identified the spinal cord cells that control ejaculation in rats and the neural pathway by which signals travel between the body's sexual organs to the brain.

"... the zonisamide group lost 14.1 pounds of body weight versus 2.2 pounds for the group on placebo."

Remember, a doctor can prescribe a drug for a different disease than it was originally approved for. This means that a new diet drug, mechanism unknown, is available now.

"Peter Schwartz s a partner in the Monitor Group and chair of Global Business Network... [and] a former futurist for Shell Oil"

I think I better trust the motives and analysis of the MIT folks. http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article1205.h tml,