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I totally agree. And there are other things to consider as well. My doctor regularly lectures me on the relationship between sleep, blood pressure, and obesity.

They are 117 times stronger than steel according to this:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100915140334.htm

My maths and physics are a bit wonky, but I doubt whether you could build a steel cable 300 km long that could support move it's own mass even in zero G. I think they need another order of magnitude or two for that.

See also: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090311085151.htm

"Originally reprocessing was used solely to extract plutonium for producing nuclear weapons. With the commercialization of nuclear power, the reprocessed plutonium was recycled back into MOX nuclear fuel for thermal reactors." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

"Over the course of 20 years, Chien Wai, a University of Idaho chemistry professor, has developed a process that uses supercritical fluids to dissolve toxic metals. When coupled with a purifying process developed in partnership with Sydney Koegler, an engineer with nuclear industry leader AREVA and University of Idaho alumnus, enriched uranium can be recovered from the ashes of contaminated materials." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080821213606.htm

You might also want to look into Partitioning and Transmutation

That's an awesome list of talking points!

Can you prove to me that "sane management [of nuclear fission] has been made impossible by anti-nuclear activists and their propaganda"? I see zero evidence of this in reality - management of nuclear plants has been entirely driven by the nuclear industry. There is exactly one case - where a plant was to be built on a known active fault line - where "activists" have made a difference in the US, and it had nothing to do with management. Show me the evidence.

In return, here are some links to the thing you claim is laughably impossible - sustainable biofuels.

http://www.bioenergyresearch.com.au/
http://sustainablebiodieselalliance.com/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125094641.htm
http://www.virent.com/products/gasoline/

That's high-tech - the stuff Virent is doing. Hot fission plants are obsolete crap even if Rossi's ecat doesn't work.

anti-vax morons "Boys who did not receive the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine during the mid 1990s are now collecting in large numbers in secondary schools and colleges and this provides a perfect breeding ground for the virus" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100330082722.htm

if nature can do it i am sure that we will be able to figure it out
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100203131356.htm

Blue may be the true color, but not producing the pigment is a mutation. A normal non-mutant eye is brown. This mutation happened before, and the first guy with it was probably very successful with the ladies (after getting past the whole "it's a devil baby" phase, I assume). No reason it can't happen again.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130170343.htm

At the same time, I call BS on most of the story. I've seen too many hoaxes fall apart after they hit the international news scene.

Transparent Aluminum is already invented. I have a vague memory of it on slashdot because of the link to Star Trek 4.

quick google will show this http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090727130814.htm

No worries.

FYI, here is the state of the art in MSC studies. Granted it's neurological which is my particular focus, but it's still applicable.

"Except not. ..."

Except yes. Where is your evidence? You can "point it out" all you like, but unless you have something to back it up, then it's just so much hot air.

And it is nothing but hot air. I repeat: ferrets are used for influenza studies precisely because their susceptibility and symptoms so closely mirror humans.

Would you like evidence for MY claims? How about these:

"Ferrets are exquisitely susceptible to infection with human influenza viruses and are widely believed to be the ideal small animal model for influenza research."

"The results show the value of the ferret model. A/LA resembled the transmission of influenza in humans when under antibody pressure."

"... only the ferret model is equally well suited for studying both the pathogenicity and transmissibility of human and avian influenza viruses." [emphasis added]

Those are just a few out of a great many. Would you like more? A brief moment on Google brings up pages and pages of just such references.

You are simply wrong. And an arrogant ass as well.

Fiction. Laser reflector makes the case, however...

Does it? Because the Soviets left some too and officially they never walked on the moon ...

I'm a scientist. We live or die by how well our theories explain the natural world. You seem to be suggesting that there's a cabal of scientists who are for various reasons trumpeting "the hoax" for precisely what? Our reward system would make any of us fabulously rich if only we could conclusively prove man-made warming is wrong. It hasn't happened.

Science is an honorable profession, but it is still a human activity. Not everyone engaged in science has pure motives. The reward system in terms of grant and program money directs the money to those who are producing the desired results, generally in programs that already take global warming a given. Some people clearly understand that large emergency programs to take control of economies to curb carbon emissions to reduce global warming before the imminent catastrophe predicted represent two things: power, and enormous amounts of money. Sadly, both will be misused if recent history is any guide.

This somewhat reminds me, and here I'm betraying my own bias, of the controversy over smoking. Does it cause lung cancer or not? It took years and many "scientists" on the take form the tobacco industry to swear it didn't before it was finally resolved. And it wasn't resolved within the scientific community (they were adamant that it did), it was resolved when the public finally decided whom to believe.

And now we have states and localities moving to ban tobacco smoking and permitting marijuana smoking. We're trading off a source of lung disease for a source of psychosis and lung disease. I wonder how many bodies it will take for the next discussion to get through?

Do you feel lucky? Should we wager the planet on, "Gee, I don't think it could happen" when most scientists are telling you it could?

Should we wager our freedom, economy, and way of life on something that could happen? (With the value of could varying greatly from can't reproduce what's happening now to never happen to "Oh my God! We're all gonna die next spring!"* depending upon whose cracker jack model is being used, with what assumptions, with what scrubbed/adjusted/fudged data?) I think we can afford to let the "consensus" die down, improve the science, and make some better choices.

BTW - Good luck with your career.

*Exagerated for effect.

The reason drugs are so expensive in the US is that drug companies need to have somebody pay for R&D.

Giggle.

Snort.

ROTFL.

which you can make out of old newspapers or shredded documents (we have alot of those here in the United States). http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110825105024.htm

Well, FUD you too, then.

Carbon credits are merely a capitalist proposal on how to deal with carbon reduction - nothing more, nothing less.

And if we must impose Draconian limits on carbon emissions, I do think a market in credits is a good way to go. Markets tend to work better than top-down controls.

And the "trillions of dollars of harm to the economy" is of course a pack of nonsense.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I found some numbers on the Internet. They should serve for a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculation.

According to this report, the cost to the USA of complying with the Kyoto Protocol would be on the order of 4% of GDP. According to Wikipedia, the GDP of the USA is over 14 trillion dollars per year. That means it would cost half a trillion dollars per year, every year, just to comply with Kyoto.

I skimmed that report and I don't believe that the 4% number includes jobs lost (for example, the coal miners, the truckers put out of work because the costs of running a truck are so much higher, etc.). The actual costs would thus be higher.

And Kyoto, by itself, is not enough to satisfy the people who are really worried about AGW.

Saving energy is saving money in the age of peak oil.

Everyone wants to save money where they can. We replaced our windows with modern double-pane windows, sealed and filled with argon, to save energy. So I don't argue this statement, by itself. But it's kind of irrelevant to this discussion.

A really effective plan to curtail carbon emissions in the USA would need to do something about the coal plants that produce the majority of electricity. According to this page, coal power produces almost 50% of all the carbon emissions in the USA, generating about 1.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

What will you do to get rid of the carbon dioxide from those coal plants? Shut down half of them and quadruple the cost of electricity to encourage people to conserve energy? Tear them down and build nuclear power plants? (I'd be in favor of that; cleaner air right away, and cheaper power in the long run. But it will cost a lot of up-front money to build all those nuke plants, and one or two people will object, so you had better plan on hiring lawyers to help push the project forward.)

You cannot seriously propose to replace those coal plants with solar or wind power, because you won't get anywhere near enough power. And coal and nuclear power plants can operate continuously, while wind and solar plants seldom operate at 100% capacity.

You can't replace them with hydro power, because all the good hydro locations have already been built; and environmentalists hate the damage a dam does to the ecosystem of a river, so good luck building any new ones, let alone enough to replace 1500 coal plants.

So then, having solved the coal plants, you have to solve the other half of the problem: trucks and cars. All-electric vehicles are currently not practical for general use; the batteries are expensive and charging times are slow. If you want to either force people to use electric cars, or subsidize the cars to encourage people, either way it will cost a lot.

Or, you could just quadruple the price of gasoline and diesel, using taxes. That would encourage people to drive less. But that will cost a lot.

Hybrid vehicles are already being sold (the Prius is rather popular) so, given that saving energy is saving money, the government doesn't need to do anything; those cars are already selling. But they don't have zero carbon dioxide emissions, just somewhat less than non-hybrid vehicles.

So as I said, if you are going to do something really effective to actually reduce carbon

the uncertainty limit isn't a limit on measurements. It's a limit on what the universe is capable of representing.

Only partially true. What many people don't know is that Heisenberg's derivation was slightly wrong because while it modeled the thing being measured with quantum mechanics, it incorrectly modeled the measuring device classically.

A rigorous analysis using qm for both was done Ozawa in 2003 (see http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1833 which shows the correct uncertainty equations on p. 2).

From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120116095529.htm "In order to describe the fundamental uncertainty and the additional disturbance due to the measuring process, both particle and measurement device have to be treated in the framework of quantum theory,...But the product of error and disturbance can be made arbitrarily small -- even smaller than Heisenberg's original formulation"

betterunixthanunix sneered:

How about scanning a book within a few minutes of its release in the United States, so that poor people in South America can have access to it? No? We are not allowed to ever paint copyright infringement in a positive light?

There are plenty of books, music, movies, and software that are simply not being made available by the people who hold copyrights on them, except in select places in the world, or in some cases not being made available anywhere. For people living in those places, those works might as well be lost to history.

And your point is what?

There are plenty of people in the world who lack access to all kinds of things: sufficient food, clean water, medical care. Those are actual needs. Entertainment is not. That someone else desires my property in no way obligates me to satisfy his desire. As for "those works might as well be lost to history," hyperbole much?

You are starting from the premise that "intellectual property rights" are "natural rights" like the right to live; not only is not universally agreed upon, it is not even in agreement with the very people who created such rights in this country. Yes, created those rights, because without a legal framework those rights do not exist at all -- which is not true of natural rights (nobody "created" your right to live; you were born with it).

I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut if my contention that intellectual property is a natural right is "not universally agreed upon". That slavery was morally right, that ALL humans have a natural right to be free was "not universally agreed upon" in this country until after the Civil War. Today, however, with the exception of pimps and the employers of illegal aliens, it IS universally agreed upon. Societies evolve. What you are advocating is the tyrrany of the majority - a concept that both I and the Constitution reject.

In reality, "intellectual property rights" are a myth designed to make people forget that we created the copyright/patent/trademark systems for a reason: to benefit everyone. You were not born with the right to tell people they are not allowed to make copies of the books you write, that right was conferred to you by the law, in an effort to establish a system whereby the public would have access to books (etc.). There was no concept of "intellectual property" before such systems were created; at one time, anyone could simply copy books or retell stories (compare to the right to live, which has existed in one form or another for as long as we have historical records -- every society protected the right of at least some of its members to live).

Oh, bosh.

I was born with the right to be free. That the laws of the United States did not grant that right to every law-abiding resident of the U.S. until after the Civil War doesn't affect the fact that freedom is an inherent, natural right of all human beings. It just took a long freakin' time for society (and law) to acknowledge that right exists for everyone. The same logic applies to my right to control the fruits of my creative labor - right now, international copyright agreements accord that right only limited status. In time, it will come to be seen as an inherent natural right, just like freedom from slavery, free association, voting, freedom from discrimination, and many, many others have done, because societies evolve.

Sure societies evolve, but natural rights do not evolve. Natural rights do not require complex legal frameworks to exist.

See above.

The concept of "natural rights" is a construct of human civilization. The Universe at large recognizes no such rights. "Right to life?" Tell it to the great white shark. Or Ebola. "Right to freedom from slavery?" Tell that to aphids. "Right to freedom of association?" Well, the l

Ok, so it's only 90% with shills for the oil industry being the biggest doubters.

As soon as the President of Harvard said he wanted to study if women were not as good in Math as men, he was vilified in the press and fired from his post.

Because, of course, he was wrong , not just spouting an unpopular opinion. No significant gender gap appears in studies until secondary education, and that gap closes as more females participate in the advanced math classes. In other words: the gender gap only appears because women weren't pursuing mathematics, and rapidly closes as more women are encouraged to participate. You could, perhaps start educating yourself on the issue here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080724192258.htm

I know it's not politically correct to say, but there is probably a biological reason why males are much more likely to be diagnosed as color-blind [wikipedia.org], stutterers, autistic, or as having aspergers syndrome, than women.

Yes, they're called sex-linked traits, and are generally tied at least in part to mutations on the X or Y chromosomes. Of course, we can empirically determine that more men than women are subject to color blindness; we have not yet empirically determined that women are "bad at math and science." It's a question of *participation* not one of *ability*.

No its the reverse - IPCC has underestimated climate change:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100322232229.htm

Multiple studies, at least within the context of software development, seem to be in conflict:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/12/001206144705.htm

Ants rule. This is the coolest article Slashdot has published all week. Just look at these things. They're oversized, phallic monsters of doom with giant fuck-off heads. Unfortunately, it's hard to find out more about this ancient caste of ant because all the Google results right now are about this story, and there's no "History of ants" article on Wikipedia. But check out Martialis heureka, a newly discovered species in the Amazon that may represent the oldest living lineage of ants today.

Wrote a longer response to the reply below yours. Just in short, it turns out there are bacteria that get their day in the sun, and above the ozone layer, no less.

If the UV produced by this and other UV sterilizing sources are not meager, and the UV-C and UV-B these lamps put out are as incredibly damaging as you say, why would anyone want a keyboard that, by your account, would be far more dangerous to them than any bacteria living on their keyboard? I mean, if you're going to use something that's damaging to humans anyway - burning their skin and potentially causing deadly melanomas - why not just just use a keyboard with keys with a surface temperature of 80 degrees celcius or so. That way, they would stay sterile, but a fast touch typist could probably avoid burns and not get cancer. Otherwise, I expect that the UV radiation is adulterated to contain little or no UVC and not really all that much UV-B, not unlike a day in the sun.

In any case, plenty of bacteria exist in Earth's atmosphere, I'm pretty sure I've heard they can even be found in the stratosphere, so no reason for them not to be exposed to UV light above the ozone layer (although they would probably be killed by it). Huh, as a matter of fact, after that last sentence, I did a google search and found this. So it looks like not only are there micro-organisms that make it that high, but they also do have high UV tolerance. Score one for adaptability.

That article is simply a report that outlines a proposed evaluation model and poo-poos past research that didn't use that model. Surrounding that report from Science Daily are others such as: Despite Popularity, Not Everyone Can Successfully Learn Through Online Courses http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080226113511.htm and
Visual Learners Convert Words To Pictures In The Brain And Vice Versa, Says Psychology Study http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090325091834.htm

So what if "Aural" is passe'.

That article is simply a report that outlines a proposed evaluation model and poo-poos past research that didn't use that model. Surrounding that report from Science Daily are others such as: Despite Popularity, Not Everyone Can Successfully Learn Through Online Courses http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080226113511.htm and
Visual Learners Convert Words To Pictures In The Brain And Vice Versa, Says Psychology Study http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090325091834.htm

So what if "Aural" is passe'.

Actually I'm sorry to say but the whole auditory/visual learner thing was debunked a couple years ago. Huge upset in psychological research in recent times. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091216162356.htm

The US doesn't need to research alternative energy, it already knows how.

The welfare-warfare state makes certain plutocrats rich, and it has more
to do with lining the pockets of the ppl Eisenhower warned us about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

We can use non-arable land to grow algae oil at a rate of 100,000 gallons
per acre per year in the desert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hioZ7C6HLs

We can use biological processes to grow hydrogen.

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

1% of the jet streams on earth would replace all forms of power one earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream#Future_power_generation

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090615102038.htm

Just the flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar current has 125 times the flow
of all rivers on earth and we have know for years how to tap it.

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

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

Solar thermal of the world's deserts could power 100 earths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Energy_from_the_Sun

We know how to power the earth many times over not even
mentioning Geo thermal, but the ppl who make billions off war
are merely using oil security as an excuse to keep making billions
just as Eisenhower warned decades ago.

Actually, animals such as whales engage in what we would consider copyright infringement. They've probably been distributing songs across the world without paying royalties for much longer than humans have.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110414131444.htm

Then here's a better study for you: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm

Approximately half of the participants were non/low caffeine consumers and the other half were medium/high caffeine consumers. All were asked to rate their personal levels of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after being given either the caffeine or the placebo. They were also asked to carry out a series of computer tasks to test for their levels of memory, attentiveness and vigilance.

In that study, they used placebos so they didn't know whether they were consuming caffeine or not and had them perform objective tests. Conclusion: regular consumption of caffeine provided no net benefit.

My boss also experienced awful headaches when he tried to quit drinking coffee. The headaches lasted for days until he finally gave in and started drinking coffee again. It's a very common withdraw symptom.

The problem with coffee is that not only do you build a tolerance for it, but the withdraw symptoms match the symptoms you were originally trying to treat, namely alertness. See this (for example, I've seen other studies that come to the same conclusion): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm

If you consume caffeine regularly, you won't receive any net benefit at all. With gum, at least you're getting fresh breath for a while.

What he said is based on several studies (not conducted by Mormons). Here's one, just for example: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm

The study, published online in the journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, reports that frequent coffee drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing effects and the stimulatory effects of caffeine. While frequent consumers may feel alerted by coffee, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal. And given the increased propensity to anxiety and raised blood pressure induced by caffeine consumption, there is no net benefit to be gained.

Caffeine is highly addictive, and you cannot simply quit without severe side effects if you drink coffee daily. My boss tried to quit once years ago, and had the worst headaches of his life.

You can quit, but you have to ease off of it, not simply stop unless you want to experience terrible pain.

Come ON people! In 1900 the average life expectancy of a male in the U.S.A. was only 46 years for Pete's sake. No wonder on average most of the 'BIG' work was done before age 40. In 1940 life expectancy was 60 years, and in 1960 it was 66. Considering that even 50 years ago, as people approached these ages many were in nowhere near as good good health as people are today when approaching end of life, so they likely weren't productive at anything in the last few years (back then smoking was advertised as good for your health... heavy bacon and eggs was a 'healthy' breakfast, exercise was not part of the urban or the new 'drive everywhere' suburban vocabulary, etc etc. etc.).

Now we have a life expectancy of over 80 years old in some countries like Canada and some Western European countries. Heck even in the U.S. with it's criticized health care system the average age is over 77.5. And to top it off, people are in much, much better health all the way to within a couple of years of the end. I see people who are in their 70s now-a-days who like folks who were in their 60s or younger a few decades ago. Mind you there are still people living unhealthy life styles, but they are the ones who are keeping the life expectancy averages lower than they could be (i.e. they die earlier than they should).

For a good example of how modern health care keeps us "younger" as we age, look at the Afghan girl (in a Pakistani refugee camp) that was on the iconic front cover of National Geographic in 1984. And then how she looked in 2002. When she was maybe 13, 14, or 15 she captured the worlds attention with her stunning eyes and the photo became one of the most viewed in the world. They went back in 2002 to find her. She had gone back to Afghanistan and had 4 children (one had died by then... life expectancy...) and even though they figured she was between 26 and 29 then (even she wasn't sure) she looked like a 45 or 50 year old woman, maybe older in Europe or North America. Interestingly and sadly, the average life expectancy in Afghanistan today is the same as what it was in America in 1900. Think about it.

So this whole notion of looking back and making judgements about what we should expect our productive ages to be is utter horseshit. Because of advances in medicine, better food, and better life style in general, the only way to determine when someone is less productive is when they are less productive. To arbitrarily say that after 50 you aren't able to think anymore is something that someone who doesn't think to begin with would say. No matter how old they are. We live far longer, and healthier lives. Therefore our productive years are far longer. That is the bottom line.

Some science has already been done on this subject, and it suggests red light cameras actually increase the rate of accidents. If i remember correctly it was even covered previously on slashdot.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080311151159.htm

Guess the person(s) / corporation who sold this idea to the decisionmakers were not so keen at looking at what had already been established.
Also, I posted the full link as I don't know how to "linkify" a word, and could not find a guide anywhere. I'm a med student and not a programmer. Please, have mercy.

There is the Chandrasekhar limit which defines the maximum size of a White dwarf star .

There is a theoretical maximum limit for a neutron star, which seems to be about 3 - 3.2. This also applies to pulsars, which are spinning neutron stars.

There is also an upper limit to the size that a black hole can become

There is the Schwarzfield radius which defines the escape limit for the speed of light.

Maybe the maximum size of neutron star is the minimum size of a black hole? Or is there something inbetween?

OK let's do this more scientifically then. Do a statistically survey in terms of "net benefit to society". Define "benefit to society" and the "minuses" how you like so we can figure out what and how you're measuring. Whether it's helping the poor, feeding the starving, building/running hospitals and schools or killing people, DUI, etc.

Then take a random sampling of a large number of atheists, christians, muslims, buddhists, etc. See how many are doing the "good stuff" vs the how many doing the "bad stuff" vs how many not doing anything, per capita and net total[1].

Then figure out which belief system is best for society, by your standards.
[1] Net total is also important because if a belief system is not fit and doesn't reproduce itself well, then it's not going to do very much good (or bad), so even if it is a greater net positive per capita, it's not going to benefit society as much as a belief system with much higher reproductive fitness, even if it is a smaller net positive per capita.

Lastly, any claims that atheists are less prone to irrational or delusional thinking and that's why Atheism is so great need to be backed up.
1) Rational thinking is overrated in terms of evolutionary fitness
2) There are plenty of irrational/delusional atheists. For example, Dawkins himself is being delusional when he claims "for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind". From what I see it's unlikely that atheists "nearly always" never get mental illnesses, dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinsons... So does Dawkin's mean that atheists will stop being atheists once they get stuff like age-onset dementia? Live long enough and there's a 1/7 chance you'd get dementia, even if you're an atheist. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071030112105.htm

I also found this story here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111211134002.htm

It's a good question, but it's not too hard to imagine that while standing on the shoulders of giants, she spotted something he missed. Would she have spotted it without him? Definitely not. Would he have spotted it without her? Perhaps not. It is often a lot easier for someone with a different perspective to spot something new when you've been staring at it for 20 years. Or if nothing else, to ask questions that challenge assumptions you've built over the years.

OTOH, it's also not too hard to imagine him giving her credit in exchange for sex. ;-) I'd say it's about a 50/50 chance one way or the other.

It's likely that she stood on the shoulders of these giants.

The following is what I could dig up on the effects of multi-lingualism. It does impact the brain in many different areas and there appears to be a growing belief that learning a new language at any age will have a pronounced impact on your ability to think and reason, but that if taught young the improvements are far more dramatic still. I didn't want to clutter the submission with this stuff, especially as these studies don't have nearly the same level of rigour as the MRI scans of the taxi drivers (where a whole host of variables can now be examined directly versus the somewhat more indirect studies done on polyglots). They're also a bit more controversial, with opposing studies claiming that the benefits either don't exist or don't exist in the way that is claimed.

http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/0012brain.html
http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=brainbriefings_thebilingualbrain
http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/11/10/cognitive-ability-improved-when-bilingual/20740.html

(Press coverage adds yet another level of indirectness and potential sources of errors, but there's still some useful info here)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3739690.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/18/bilingual-alzheimers-brain-power-multitasking

The impact of music on learning is also not very well studied - I can find press links that talk about the research, but not much actual research.

http://www.livescience.com/5327-music-memory-connection-brain.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801122226.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3095807.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12135590

However, the story gets MUCH more complicated...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15791973
http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/misc/amnesia.html

There IS a fascinating "reverse" case, where alteration of the brain resulted in a remarkable alteration in musical ability, but as far as I know there has been no real work done on what changes the brain has undergone as a consequence of the new obsession.

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

If anyone can add to the list, that would be great, especially for the different areas you were mentioning.

whoever does come up with the total cure for cancer is likely to get some small-prize announcement and that would be the end of the story by the news media

It's doubtful anyone will come up with a "silver bullet" that will cure all cancers, because all cancers are different. It appears that they have cured (or at least stopped progression of) breast cancer. From an item I saw on the TV news the other night, it looks as though this will work even after the cancer has metathesized and spread to other parts of the body. The next step is combining it with radiation and other treatments. Not yet FDA approved, still experimental.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111025122615.htm

Sentient bacteria have constructed a 0.000000708 meter tall model of the model of the earth.

But still constrained by the Periodic Table of Elements and the properties of matter. Unless you think it's different out there?

Well, obviously, for such a nearby region.


But new data suggests Stanislaw Lem might have been on to something. ("A Perfect Vacuum", "The New Cosmogony")

In the past they've been been guilty of spending more on advertising than research.

And don't forget, they've got twice as much money for advertising those drugs as they have for researching those drugs and running those clinical trials.

Wrong. Read the article. According to the article, they spend more on marketing than R&D. R&D does not include clinical trials, which are by far more expensive than R&D.

Also, the researchers estimates of marketing expenses are very odd. From the article:

CAM reported total promotion spending by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry as US$33.5 billion in their 2004 report, while IMS reported US$27.7 billion for the same year. The authors observed, however, important differences in figures according to each promotion category. By selectively using both sets of figures provided by IMS and CAM, in order to determine the most relevant data for each category, and adjusting for methodological differences between the ways IMS and CAM collect data, the authors arrived at US$57.5 billion for the total amount spent on pharmaceutical promotion in 2004. The industry spent approximately US$61,000 in promotion per physician during 2004, according to Gagnon.

So, we take the estimates from two respected industry sources and add them together? What kind of biased selection was used to get $57.5 billion?

Drugs come from... drug companies, not from universities, because drug companies have the billions of dollars to put a compound through clinical trials and the expertise to make the drugs usable.

And don't forget, they've got twice as much money for advertising those drugs as they have for researching those drugs and running those clinical trials.

Actually, I sold my Pfizer stock long ago, because in an era where medicine's costs are skyrocketing, share value remained pretty much flat. Or dropped.

After a while I noticed that the REAL drug development seemed to come out of small companies. Big Pharma (Pfizer and friends) were more interested in buying them out than in actual productive work of their own.

Liptor is the Drug From Hell as far as drug companies are concerned. Every attempt to replace it with something with a newer patent has exploded in their faces, as all the Lipitor "improvements" have been pretty darned dangerous, whereas Lipitor is fairly safe for most people.

Drugs come from... drug companies, not from universities, because drug companies have the billions of dollars to put a compound through clinical trials and the expertise to make the drugs usable.

And don't forget, they've got twice as much money for advertising those drugs as they have for researching those drugs and running those clinical trials.

Except for the occasion rabies infection: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/020506074445.htm

The studies done so far don't show any correlation between vaccination and the hygiene effect.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030304072832.htm