Domain: sciencedaily.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to sciencedaily.com.
Comments · 1,588
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CO2 decreases conginitive function
More to deny http://thinkprogress.org/clima... the exposure—response between CO2 and cognitive function is approximately linear across the concentrations used,” [500 ppm - 1500 ppm] https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... Carbon dioxide is 'driving fish crazy'
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Re:Not just Southern Spain DGW - Dinosaurs WARMED!
Look, who wants 26% atmospheric oxygen? More air to breathe? Who wants that?
I dunno. You also get worse wildfires. Add that to the drought and there could be even bigger trouble.
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Why?
Why waste time turning air into water when we already have the holy grail of turning air into alcohol?
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Re:Cost?
even if the catalyst wasn't poisoned, a biofilm would clog those activity sites in an open body of water.
Intuition tells me that ethanol should destroy the biofilm. Research tells me otherwise. It actually seems to encourage it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
However, as hankwang mentioned, bacteria doesn't do so well in elecrolyzed water.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Algae might not be safe either:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... -
Re:This doesn't prove what they were hoping to pro
Your IV example is not a good example, that is actually something people are working on, here some quick list of some links:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Bury trees
I read an interesting article about the possibility of just burying trees in huge amounts to capture carbon. https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... Might that not be more easily scaleable than carbon capture systems near powerplants?
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Why I'm not surprised
Not much of a shocker. Cool that's there's more data. I know this much: we're all descended from tiny animals that survived some shitty days back in 65,000,000 BCE. The large fauna at that time were the non-avian dinosaurs. Now they're dead, Jim. The shitty environment killed a lot of the flora that the large herbivores ate, which starved the large carnivores that ate them, and then it's dead turtles almost all the way down from there. Luckily, at the bottom of the food change worms and other tiny things were able to survive. That was able to support our tiny ass ancestors, small birds, etc. Let us hope that we're all small enough next time shit goes down.
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Asymetric supernovae
Some novae occur though a gentle accretion process, such as a burnt out star with a companion, and some occur through expending all of thier fuel and the lack of thermal pressure causes collapse. Rarely one can be created through a merger of two stars but it's not exactly the same thing. In the first two cases it's not very clear what causes this but there is some evidence the process is not always symmetrical. A supernova often expends as much energy over a few hours to days as the star previously expended in its lifetime. Much of the material is blown off at up to 10% light speed. With the release of so much energy, even a very small deviation from being spherical can provide enough velocity on the black hole to exceed the pull of the gravity in these small globular clusters. So the result of the simulation is interesting and points the way forward for follow up observation.
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Re:Colossal Space Adventure
You jest, but... http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
Aligned quasars suggest there is some kind of directionality at large scales, even if not universal. -
In need of a solution
Maybe they should just let these go to town on the cleanup?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140909093659.htm -
Stronger passwords won't help
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Re:Chemicals?!
Oh god, not chemicals! Tell me there's not dihydrogen monoxide in my drinking water! The government is spraying chemtrails over my house and sometimes when I water my tomato plants I see rainbows in the water, you can't explain that! The orange cheeto people are trying to enslave us but I won't let them win.
Yaeah, here's your arsenic trioxide sauce. Drinky up! I triple dog dare ya. It's a chemical, and anyone who thinks chemicals are bad is a kook.
And how can there be radiation? How can something you can't even see be bad for you?
I hope you realize you are just as silly and as unintelligent as the people you are mocking in your post.
Here's a link for you to mock. http://www.nicole.org/uploaded...
Now personally, I'd be more concerned about the estrogen mimics we are consuming in increasing amounts.
http://www.environmentalhealth...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Even (get ready for this) Fox News, has reported on this: http://www.foxnews.com/health/...
And BPA isn't the only estrogen mimic. We are being hammered with Estrogen mimics, and with phytoestrogens from food.
Now I do suspect unless you are a total misanthrope and just enjoy people's problems, that you don't really approve of this kind of stuff.
But Bisphenol A is an example of a large scale experiment which has caused a lot of harm to humans and other creatures. We did the same with DDT, thalidomide, lead, and more. These PFA chemicals are a likely carcinogen, and since they take a heckava long time to break down, it becomes a real problem if/when that is confirmed. Aside from drinking water, there are some people, like firefighters, who are exposed to a huge amount when they use fire suppressant foam.
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Or...
...they don't know the cause. It might be down to genes causing both brain-shrinking and obesity, or it could be that changes occurring in the brain lead to overeating.
Or it could be that overconsumption, especially of certain nutrients like animal fats, processed meats or refined sugars, also leads to a decline in brain health and tissue-loss. There is in fact research which demonstrates that, eg eating animal fat has a direct impact on people's congnitive performance, and there is a large number of other studies that demonstrate similar effects. Sorry, no citations, but it should be easy enough to find these things on, say, https://www.sciencedaily.com/i.... As far as I can judge, the case is pretty clear.
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Hydro clean
Hydro-electric dams cause more greenhouse warming than coal
(methane caused by stagnate water and anaerobic metabolizing of dead plant materials under water), but there's plenty of other toxins coal emits.
Long story short: A hydro dam (specially in alpine regions) has more in common with mountain lakes than with swamps.
- The water isn't stagnating that much (the whole point of a dam is not to keep the water forever sequestered, but to use its flow to produce electricity. The artificial lake forming is only a *temporary* storage of energy - like a big battery).
- Water in colder/high altitude region is less likely to encourage proliferation of anaerobic bacteria deep in the water.
- Both (water flow and seasonnal cold temperature causing currents inside the lake) increase level of oxygen in (artificial-) lake water, favorising more aerobic metabolizing compared to what is typically found in swamps.
- Colder climate among other means less water loss in normal operation. The level won't go that much down simply because it's dry and hot (as opposed to more power output needed). Depth contributes to the above effect.
- Mountain lake (and dam) configuration is different, they tend to be deeper (they happen/they get constructed in valleys which were dug by glaciers), which again contribute to above effect.
- Banks around alpine damns are steeper, meaning less vegetation forming between low and high water level, less biomass is injected to rot (and anyway it tends to rot less in this water as said above)
- Why let good wood rot at the bottom of a flooded valley ? Lots of the biomass get lumbered away as precious resource.
All the above (and much more factors) brought the realisation that the greenhouse warming caused by hydro-electric dams has been grossly over estimated. They actually end-up being more environmentally friendly than previously taught and more than fossil-fuel burning power plants.
Specially the deeper (as found in alpine regions) artificial lakes in colder/higher altitude region.On the other hand, shallow dams in tropical area are a very bad idea (even from a mosquitoe point of view if you want to ignore the carbon impact).
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20x better
Researchers are developing a new type of environmentally friendly fuel cell that runs on aluminum and renewable resources and generates about 20 times more electricity per pound than car batteries.
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Re:Cheap nuclear
Indian Point 3 probably isn't built to withstand the seismic risk now known for the site. https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
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Re:Except at night.
All this talk about how a given solar panel's output being cheaper than coal always avoids the extra infrastructure needed to bridge that cloud-period gap.
Always? Nope. There's plenty of discussion of grid management, but then you'd know that if you bothered to be part of any discussions of say, Solar Thermal power generation, that it can operate as a heat bank itself.
Of course, as anybody with a hospital or medical refrigeration system knows, or running a water company, you have to have backups anyway, because SOMETIMES the local plant goes offline. Even the grid itself has to compensate. Sometimes it does it poorly, as folks who suffered the Northeast Blackout found out.
And if you're a nuclear plant, if you don't have a place to dump power, you're likely going to emergency shut down.
But hey, maybe next time you can back off the hyperbole? Always is a high bar, and easy to disprove. They don't avoid it. It's faced head-on.
I know you'd like to believe otherwise, because then you can just smirk and walk off in some sense of superiority, but it's really just empty arrogance.
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Re:Wrong as per usual Warming Alarmists
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Re:Why do you need to know the state?
Hmm. Actually I got a link by a poster here, which is pretty interesting and deals with exactly that:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Now... the whole thing of me saying it's impossible is based on the assumption that you can't measure a qubit directly without destroying the wavefront. Which, while not a 'law' of physics, was pretty much a core tenet. If that doesn't hold anymore, the principle objection to FTL communication is gone too (I've made another post explaining why, but I'm sure you can see and realise this yourself too).
I too, want to see it repeated and verified first as well, though.
:-)IF it's confirmed, it should be relatively easy to test if it's also applicable and suited for FTL communication. I'm rather sceptical as of yet, but in principle, if the paper is right, I'm forced to re-evaluate my stance on FTL, at least on the grounds that I used (there could be other reasons).
The only thing I find a bit surprising is, if the paper is correct - and it's from 2013 I believe - why no-one has tried out the obvious FTL implications of it. (And if they were successful, I'm sure we'd heard about it).
I find it...unlikely... but not to the same degree as the EM-drive being an actual reactionless drive.
;-)If you have any thoughts on this matter, feel free to share them.
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Re:FTL communciation with entanglement not possibl
Meaning, the moment to interact with your entangled electron or photon, it would 'set' its state, but in a random way.
didn't we overcome the uncertainty principle when making quantum computers?
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Re:Holy Shit!
https://www.sciencedaily.com/t...
This is what you just did and told the world about.
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Re:Solar is not cheaper than coal
But, make no mistake, growing silicon consumes a ton of energy, a ton of water,
And then again - the technology behind solar cells is evolving quickly, as this article shows: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Solar technology has huge potential and is evolving fast, and the same is true for batteries, whereas coal burning, after having been around since before the industrial revolution, probably won't evolve much further.
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Re:May not continue for the long-term
It can? When the solar panels are covered in snow?
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Re:Question is and always has been STORAGE
Just because there is a need for better storage doesn't mean it will be found, or found cheaply.
Here's a recent example. https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Sadoway and Ouchi stress that these particular chemical combinations are just the tip of the iceberg, which could represent a starting point for new approaches to devising battery formulations
This is not fusion. Solutions to storage are within reach, but they were never developed because there simply was no need. And in addition to these storage methods, there's still a lot we can with smart grids in combination with electric cars, and flexible manufacturing around cheap energy.
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Re:What straw will break the camel's back
A quick google shows that scientists are working on it and that it may be possible.
https://www.google.co.uk/searc... -
OK, fair enough.. but do a little digging....
Fair enough, I didn't cite it well and didn't back it up. My post wasn't meant to be an entire essay or statistics lesson. It was one of those things that I remembered from the various books / papers I have read on the topic. It was based on a fairly large set of data. And this is NOTHING NEW by the way.
Google turned up a few hits - please by all means look up more. They are out there.
The above were from 2009, and look like they may have some redundant data. And actually, this points to a higher percentage and focuses on LDL. But, my point stands that there is no definitive link between saturated fat and blood cholesterol and heart disease. You are correct, there are MANY factors, but our "scienticians" boil it down to good-cholesterol bad-cholesterol. Nearly any doctor in the country will tell you "raise your HDL, lower your LDL - here take these drugs to do it." It's not only quite wrong, it could be exacerbating the problem!
A really good one was a 10 part series by Dr Peter Attia around cholesterol. The series gets pretty deep into the topic, but here is a good summary: marksdailyapple
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I hope they pay their people hourly
if they're salaried it's not equal pay for equal work as women take more sick days. First link I found says SIGNIFICANTLY more. https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
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Re:Are Evangelicals dangerous?
I don't know, what such "biological basis" can possibly mean.
Well, here's some reading for you: Transgender: Evidence on the biological nature of gender identity. And Science in transition: Understanding the biology behind gender identity. And Structural Connectivity Networks of Transgender People
Any male body is much closer to Napoleon's, than it is to a female body.
Wow, you know nothing about genetics or biology, do you? Two unrelated people are much more dissimilar than fraternal twins, one of whom happens to be male and one female. Secondly, false analogy again: Someone who isn't Napoleon but claims he is has no biological basis for that claim. I am not claiming to be someone that I'm not. Quite the opposite: I am expressing my true gender identity as it is forged in my brain.
I contend, that "his own life" and "pushed onto others" are inseparable, if formulating and/or executing public policy is the person's very job.
You can contend that all you want, but it's false. Our former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a religious Christian personally very opposed to abortion, but he did not force his views on the electorate, mostly because he knew he'd lose, but partly because Canada in recent years ironically has more of a tradition of keeping religion out of political discourse than the US. In the US, the Religious Right has been extremely successful in pushing policy changes that implement its religious views.
Likewise, your claim of facing high risk visiting a wrong bathroom because of Evangelicals remains unsubstantiated.
It was Evangelical pressure that got the North Carolina anti-LGBT bill passed, and there are bills pending in several states that are both explicitly anti-LGBT and claiming to be in support of "freedom of religion", just so long as your religion happens to be Christianity.
You can contend that all you want, but it's false. Our former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was quite religious and was personally opposed to abortion. However, he refused to reopen the abortion debate in Canada because most Canadians are pro-choice and he knew he could not force his religious beliefs on others. In the US, unfortunately, the religious right has been much more successful in forcing its beliefs on others.
BTW, you are yet to explain, why you single out Evangelicals so fervently?
We're talking about Donald Trump. If you want to see me to write nasty things about Islam, try looking at some postings I've made on Slashdot where Islam is a relevant part of the discussion. I assure you that I am an equal-opportunity religion-basher and think that Islam is one of the worst out there. But that's not the issue in the USA; evangelical Christianity is the issue there.
And if you must know, I'd certainly take Donald Trump over Ted Cruz, who is a poster-child for the dangerous religious extremist politician.
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So what's the deal with this? Is it a lie?
Ok, so what's the deal with this 'battery breakthrough'. Is it a lie? I ask the provocative question because I've heard a *lot* of "battery breakthrough" stories (they are almost as common as solar panel breakthroughs), and yet
....new batteries that store gobs of power? Example: a few years ago, there was a 'super battery breakthrough' here, that is supposed to be a wildly better way to manufacture batteries where the cathode is so much better than before. And if you note the date of the article, its more than a couple of years ago. And super cheap, super powerful batteries sure look like the batteries you bought in 1970. And either the whole thing is a dud, or someone came along, bought the technology, and is sitting on it. Now it could be argued that either of those is possible, but certainly the net effect is either of those. Now we get another story about 'super battery technology' that promises blah blah. So what are the odds that in 5 years your batteries will look exactly like the ones you have now? I think pretty darn good. -
Re: FUD
Being anti GMO is every bit as nonsensical as being an anti-vaxer.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Goodie! Fresh meat! You wanted evidence? You can't handle the evidence, And my little chachalaca, I will definitely expect more thasn a one sentence off the cuff dismissal
Heeeeere we GO! Wif cytaytions
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent paper in thte Medical Journal "The Lancet"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The paper had 13 co-authers who ended up repudiating the possibility that MMR vaccines could cause autism.
So what happened Oh yes, we'll go into this, yes we will.. As it turns out, this staretd a little time before, when teh good Richard Barr, a lawyer, met up with the Good Andrew Wakefield. This was a marriage made in heaven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As well, teh Good Andrew Wakefield recieved 55,000 pounds from other lawyers who were looking for evidence to use in lawsuits agains MMR manufacturers. But don't worry, it must have been on teh up and up because Wakefield kept this a secret from his co-authors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Turns out that the Good Andrew Wakefield and his lawyer buddy had big plans to make a lot of money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Eventually, after investigations of manipulation of data, a General medical council investigation and eventual full retraction of the paper by the Lancet,
And in 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just in case you aren't reading the citations, and I don't believe you will: 28 January 2010, the GMC ruled against Wakefield on all issues, stating that he had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant",[13] acted against the interests of his patients,[13] and "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his controversial research.[14] On 24 May 2010 he was struck off the United Kingdom medical register. It was the harshest sanction that the GMC could impose, and effectively ended his career as a doctor. In announcing the ruling, the GMC said that Wakefield had "brought the medical profession into disrepute," and no sanction short of erasing his name from the register was appropriate for the "serious and wide-ranging findings" of misconduct
Here's a pdf of their findings https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Now I betchya you are just about sick and tired of Wikipedia citations aintchya? http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBl...
Maybe it's a conspiracy. But they removed the deadly autism causing agent from vaccines, that the good Andrew Wakefield said was a cause, and, and, and, didn't change a thing. It might have appeard that it went up, but considering that autism speaks seems to be moving toward a world where everyone is autistic, that data is fuzzy at best, IMO http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
There's all of about zero credible scientific data against it.
You want credible evidence GMO is bad? Go to home depot and buy a bottle of roundup. Read the warning label.
Until someone can explain with a straight face how Roundup r
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Re:I have an idea ...Google is your friend. Of course, this was already in the newspapers before google ever existed. However, if you google for computers in school a failure, you'll see plenty of stuff, such as:
Computer use at home linked to school failure, increased drug use
Ipad initiative failure
Why the computer is not dominating schools
Why has the computer failed in schools and universities - 20 years later, the "solutions" outlined at the end are still not workable, because, ironically, they need much more individual teacher input than was realized at the time.
There are no technology shortcuts for good educationThe history of electronic technologies in schools is fraught with failures.
Computers are no exception, and rigorous studies show that it is incredibly difficult to have positive educational impact with computers. Technology at best only amplifies the pedagogical capacity of educational systems; it can make good schools better, but it makes bad schools worse.
Technology has a huge opportunity cost in the form of more effective non-technology interventions.
Many good school systems excel without much technology.The inescapable conclusion is that significant investments in computers, mobile phones, and other electronic gadgets in education are neither necessary nor warranted for most school systems. In particular, the attempt to use technology to fix underperforming classrooms (or to replace non-existent ones) is futile. And, for all but wealthy, well-run schools, one-to-one computer programs cannot be recommended in good conscience.
How many schools can even afford one-on-one computer classes, even in the industrialized nations? Because it doesn't work when you try to do it in bulk, as if the kids were computers to be programmed.
A search for "double-blind experiment computer use in schools" doesn't produce anything apparently relevant. Why are there no hard data available on something that's gobbling up $10 billion a year out of school budgets? The simplest answer is, as always, follow the money.
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Re:Correlation != causation
Actually...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...Moderate exercise reduces appetite.
"A vigorous 60-minute workout on a treadmill affects the release of two key appetite hormones, ghrelin and peptide YY, while 90 minutes of weight lifting affects the level of only ghrelin, according to a new study. Taken together, the research shows that aerobic exercise is better at suppressing appetite than non-aerobic exercise and provides a possible explanation for how that happens."
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Re:Altering the GHG balance of the atmosphere
Yes, there is growing evidence. If the oceans became anoxic in past global warming extinction events, then it stands to reason that anoxia is a risk in the anthropocene.
And that temperature risk is on top of the acidification risk which is already being felt.
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
http://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean...You have to be in deep denial to think the oceanic (or land-based) food chain "seems just fine". It is anything but.
There is no "do nothing" option. We have the choice of continuing current biosphere-damaging industrial processes (the real extreme here) or switching to processes that stay within ecological limits that the biosphere is able to handle.
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Re:As a diabetic
Fascinating article re: Diabeetus type 2: http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
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Misleading title
Unless nasa has gotten some really interesting data from SETI im pretty sure its from outside of the light cone of the experiment, not an actual event horizon of the black hole.
Not that the actual paper or press release is linked at this time (who reads those?) but there have been experiments lately that close loopholes in bells theorm and show that the details are truly random until measured yet correlated upon measurement. This includes determining the experiment details randomly from outside the light cone of the experiment using advances in optical measurement of single photons and random number generation.
link to a related article -
Re:Yeah, I know, I'm probably a denier...
No, I'm with you on this one. It's ALSO part of the media "machine" to try to frame everyone as either at one end of the spectrum or the other on a topic.
What happened to sensibly, cautiously looking at the data and finding that quite likely, the truth is someplace in the middle?
There are some cases where scientific research is simply done in error:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
In other cases, all of the facts aren't really stated or taken into account. I see no compelling to reason to flat out deny the climate is undergoing some change? Apparently, a lot of scientists think it is and they know more than I do about the topic. But that being the case, there's WAY too much money and political agenda behind convincing people of one result or another to take any of these long-term predictive models without a large heap of salt.
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Re:Was Darwin partially wrong then?
It seems like stress can have an impact on our genetic system that can be passed down to the offspring. Seems like an evolution not just based on natural selection but also based on the parent gene's experience as well. This is just a long shot, I am not an expert on this by any means!
Not likely Natural selection is natural selection. Ignoring th efact that Darwin didn't even know about genes, teh question isn't relevant to him. More likely (though I do nopt know at this time) the stress has an effect on the genetic makeup of the father's sperm.
Another similar thing is a "maybe" link between obesity issues, possibly caused by exposure to estrogen mimic plastics, that may be pased to future generations.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
Now DES is a mimic that has been already linked to birth defects.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
And bispnenol-A was yanked for being a mimic. That was in a lot of childrens drinking bottles.
A long, but good paper on xenoestrogens and the problems they cause.. Xenoestrogens's links to obesity
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... But here is where it gets even more interesting. http://www.technology.org/2013...
Now scientists may indeed tie the two together. Too much estrognen mimic substances causeing male birth defects and obesity, being passed down to offspring by way of damaged genes. These damaged genes might be (un) natural selection in reverse. Not so good.
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Re:One sentence stands out as most interesting
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Re:Yes
Your link amazing coward.
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Re:How to end all arguments
It always depends on how you compare. "All other things remaining equal" is one of the ways one can compare. It's valid but one has to be careful about conclusions because the other things are not remaining equal.
CO2 has a large impact on plants in arid regions because plants have to sacrifice a lot of water in order to get the CO2, and when there's more CO2 in the air the plants lose much less water. See for instance here
When water is not scarce most plants benefit from the extra CO2 but there are plants with an enhanced carbon metabolism that are more efficient at capturing CO2 and they don't benefit from rising concentrations: corn, sorghum, sugar cane , a range of tropical grasses.
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Re:Huh?
What about a 100 megawatt fusion reactor generating an artificial ionosphere, or more likely an elongated ionotorus? Plus tricks such as tungsten on Kevlar for suits. http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
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Re:Oh no no no!
No, no , no, this is natural transgenics, and that makes things fine, because evolution just smooths things out like that, like it did with the appendix. That was the reaction to natural transgenes in sweet potatoes anyway You joke this might have an impact on the GMO controversy. It won't. Horizontal gene transfer has been known to exist for a long time; amazing what a little hand waving, armchair speculation, and goalpost moving can do to buffer an ideology.
But this doesn't really come as much of a surprise. I think that as more genomes are sequenced and compared to other sequences, we'll probably turn up a lot more examples of horizontal gene transfer. We've already seen a similar case in the plant parasite, striga.
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Re:Exposed ice?
What I've read from following the story at the Planetary Society blog (and assuming I'm remembering correctly) is that the team does not find the spectra of the bright spots to be indicative of ice thusfar. They still don't know what they are but salts of some sort are a leading hypothesis.
Very interesting terrain coming into view here - and not just how the bright areas seem to all be localized depressions. There's a lot of fine, very straight rift/fissure structures, like some sort of horst/graben terrain, tracing their way across the crater. Almost like Enceladus's tiger stripes or some of the rifting on Europa. We also see such terrain here in Iceland due to continental spreading. The features run parallel to each other locally but the directions are different in different parts of the crater, so whatever the cause of the pressure differential, it's nonuniform across the crater. Really fascinating to see!
If I had to speculate wildly... I'd wager that it might be a sign of localized (and perhaps extinct) soda cryovolcanism like on Enceladus, with the water sublimated off and only the salts left behind. But that's just me talking out my arse
;) -
Re:US Bill is only 4 Trillion?
The only way this isn't true is if the tree was going to burn anyway.
There's a good chance it was.
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Re:Ignorance?
There is no realistic defining moment where a human organism can be called a person in terms of scientific data, partly because each human develops at a different rate --no "one size fits all" definition will work. The Law uses "birth" as a dividing line, granting "legal person" status to newborns regardless of what the scientific data has to say about them.
There is one thing that both the Law and the science agree on about personhood --persons are minds, not bodies. For proof, consider a brain-dead human adult on full life-support. The brain weighs about 3 pounds, so if the adult weighs 100 or more pounds, even if the brain is dead the overall human body is 97+% alive. Nevertheless "human" does not equal "person", because if the brain is dead, the mind is dead --the person is dead. And so the Law allows the "plug" to be pulled, so that the living human mere-animal body can die. If the human body alone was a person, the Constitution would grant it right-to-life, and the plug would never get allowed to be pulled. But since science knows that a person is a mind, not a human body, and the Law agrees (because this is NOT about the special "legal person" status), the plug can be pulled.
Next, it just so happens that certain scientific data about personhood/minds is quite solid --it doesn't begin to become achieved until significantly after birth. Look up the data on "feral children" for proof. Human biology alone cannot result in persons! Alone, the result is a feral child, basically just a clever animal, only and always.
That information provides a key insight to the Overall Abortion Debate -- no unborn human, even just before birth, can ever qualify as a person per the scientific data, period . Anti-abortion idiots can be relied-upon to immediately take that data and change the subject and start spouting nonsense about infanticide, which has nothing to do with the Overall Abortion Debate (and the Law already forbids infanticide, thanks to "legal person" status, so why do they waste time on it?). They cannot refute the data about feral children --the Debate can be declared OVER -- so they try (and fail) to convince others to ignore it.... -
Modern diets?
Modern diets are only about 10,000 years old, and the calorie rich eating of today is less than 100 years old.
That's a bit of a fallacy there.
Corn, potato, beans, tomato, turkey, cocoa, peanuts, sunflowers (8-11% of vegetable oil comes from its seeds)... and many more.
All those didn't exist as far as the world is concerned until the discovery of America.
And so many more would only become common and thus cheap after being transplanted to Americas and farmed there on all that empty and rich land, with free slave labor, then traded with the rest of the world.
Sugar was known for thousands of years, but it didn't "take off" until 18th century.And that's all just before we changed those foods to be better. Wind the clock back mere decades and look up Norman Borlaug.
The bread we eat today could not exist mere 50 years ago.So, from one side, 10000 years as a limit to the "change in our diet" due to agriculture is nonsense.
From another, we didn't go out there into the wild, experimenting willy-nilly what to grow agriculturally.
We just picked the BEST food for US and planted and cultivated MORE of it.We have an enzyme which takes a rather rare (in nature) sugar called sucrose and splits it into fructose and glucose so we could both get energy and save energy (eat our cake and have it too) from a single molecule.
We EVOLVED to be able to do that - so we planted crops that make more of that molecule.
Some of us have an enzyme which allows us to digest lactose and get energy from that too - after we wean off from our mom's milk.
So we bred cattle that produce THAT molecule (and fat, and meat, and hides...).
Some Japanese can digest cellulose cause they have special gut bacteria with enzymes which allow them to get energy from algae.Why all those various ways to harvest energy from all those plants and animals?
Because there never was enough of it. We went hungry.
Again - India mere decades ago. Parts of Africa today. Europe and Americas before that, mere decades not centuries ago.
Heck... centuries ago we had nearly no way to preserve food.
Canning is an early 19th century invention. Refrigeration took decades more. Modern refrigeration took even longer.
Before that we ate when we could, what we could, stored some dried foods and prayed for short winters.
And we went hungry.We did not "change our diet" 10000 years ago by content, nor did we do it by quantity until recently.
The fact that we ARE getting fat off of modern food PROVES that we have evolved to eat that kind of food.We did not evolve to not spend those calories by sitting the whole day working, sitting while going from place to place, spending winters in comfortably warm rooms with all that cheap food we don't have to hunt, or plant, or harvest or even steal... right there at our arms reach.
There's no "modern" diet, in a biological sense. Same food, just more of it, more easily.
There IS a modern lifestyle and modern technology. Like cars, electricity, penicillin...
That's the bit we haven't yet figured out how to adapt to ourselves in a way that we get more benefits.
Just like we fixed plants to be more nutritious. Or edible.There's a technology we figured out long ago that allows us to digest otherwise indigestible or poorly digestible food.
I.e. To get more benefits out of food by adapting it to ourselves.
It's called cooking.There is a science that's equivalent of cooking for modern life, but it is in its infancy.
It's called ergonomics.
But it is where cooking used to be back when we would scour the ground after a forest fire, looking for animals that got cooked alive. -
Re:And another 'heretic' theory...
All interesting theories yes, but much of it applies to single celled organisms. I read that the California Institute of Technology did some research with bacteria along those lines. http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
But it still doesn't directly apply to complex sexually reproducing organisms. You can't seriously compare the DNA changes in things that reproduce by cell division with multicellular organisms that reproduce sexually. And even with recessive genes, there is no "trigger" that causes a group to suddenly express a gene at the same time. That kind of reactive evolution has been disproven time and again.
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Re:Capitalism is killing them
The progressives are responsible for making our air clean. The big cities in America used to look like China is now, but the EPA was created to do something about it, and has succeeded admirably.
Uhh...that depends. Maybe it has changed somewhat recently, but I'm quite sure it's far from perfect.
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First things first
Teach toddlers how to become a sociopath;
http://www.lovefraud.com/2013/...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...And stop importing sociopaths from India;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
https://petitions.whitehouse.g... -
Re:Ah, But this Problem Has Already Been "Solved"
That quote above actually comes from here, but the conclusion was apparently shared by many.