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The Rotterdam prospective study of 5395 individuals (6 year study, 99.7% participant followup) found that incidence of dementia was significantly reduced in moderate drinkers, even after controlling for "age, sex, systolic blood pressure, education, smoking, and body-mass index". There was "no evidence that the relation between alcohol and dementia varied by type of alcoholic beverage."

Link is to the abstract on PubMed, the original citation is Ruitenberg A et al. "Alcohol consumption and risk of dementia: the Rotterdam Study." Lancet 359(9303):281-6 (2002). The full text is here.

On the second point yes, the talk about "cencentration camps" was stupid, but that is not the point, If they first had reviewed it on a scientific basis and decided to publish it, they should not back off just because some of their readers dislike the wording in the paper. The paper was significant and important in the field and the "concentration camp talk" allthough stupid, was just a detail unrelated to the data, methods or conclusion. People have written far more controversial stuff than erroneously calling a refuge camp a concentartion camp without publishers pulling out.

And the "common with earlier studies" was the Observers remark, not the writer(s) or the publisher.

After the controversy Villena resubmitted the paper without the "concentration remarks", you can read in the Observer article how he agreed that they where irrellevant to the conclusion in the paper, and the publisher agreed to consider it for publication. But they never published it.
You can search their archives here and here but you won't find anything.
Even without the "concentration camp" remark they would not publish it. How do you explain that?

So much for "providing an exchange of information and ideas on structural polymorphism of HLA genes" .

I have experienced that debates on nuclear tend to go over to irrationality quite fast. According to Godwin's law Lovelock has already lost the argument, but whatever.

First, oil use produces waste that causes moderate, gradual modification of the environment. Nuclear can cause much worse effects. Ok, I know, this side of the world we have super-duper-safer reactors; but the main consumer of energy will sometime soon be China. I personally don't trust anyone with nuclear power anyway.
However bad an accident is in a refinery, there's no way a city can be obliterated by it, or a continent poisoned. The damage is intrinsecally limited. A nuclear reactor (maybe supercritical?) can do much worse, and these things do happen at some point--No matter how good security can be, there is no such thing as 100% safety.

Right now only a fraction of world energy is being produced by nuclear, and thus you hear people boasting about "hundreds of years" before depletion of the sources. Of course what many forget is that, if all energy were to be produced by nuclear, this time would shorten to a few decades. This also means that less economical fissile fuel sources would have to be used, driving up the already high prices of nuclear power.

Many nuclear plants means more people working on nuclear tech. Many planes in the air means also more people training to become pilots, and some might get by unobserved studying only how to fly, and not how to land. See where it's going?

Please go to a university library and look up this article: Paine, Jeffrey R., "Will nuclear power pay for itself?", The social science journal, vol. 33, n. 4, pages 459-473, 1996, JAI press. Paine analysed the real (as opposed to speculated) data about nuclear power production, to conclude that nuclear power may at best be economically marginal, paying back for itself only after large times and only in the most optimistic conditions. RTFA before saying it's crap; it's also available on ScienceDirect if you have access to it. I have heard often, in the academic environment, that nuclear in some cases is not even producing enough energy to pay for its cycle: what you get out at the power plant can be less than what you put in extraction, purification, enrichment, transport and security.

And, after this happened (Fish for non-Italian speakers, but there are surely plenty of English articles, I'm only being lazy), the very last thing we need is more fissile material going around.

IMHO, until someone cracks fusion, nuclear is a very interesting technology that had however better not be applied. It's immature, expensive, easily misused. Maybe the positive attitude towards nuclear power by many Americans is due never being hit by something like the Chernobyl cloud. Yet, I read somewhere that new reactors have not been built in the US since 79.

Short term: natural gas.
Mid term: solar, wind, tide, hydro, other renewables.
Long term: fusion.
That's how I see it at least. All these sources can be converted to hydrogen.

Couldn't gravitational lensing be a possible means for testing frame dragging?

Theoretically, yes.... there's a recent paper that works out the numbers for lensing from a spiral galaxy, and it's roughly on the order of a few micro-acroseconds. Possibly detectable by SIM or GAIA.

[TMB]

Genamics lists 989 journals related to Computer and Information Sciences. Surely some of them are good.

How about the Journal of Functional Programming or Theoretical Computer Science, or perhaps the Journal of Algorithms. And, for a more general approach, there's always the Journal of the ACM.

I haven't read any of these extensively, but surely some of them will have the kind of articles you'll enjoy.

Genamics lists 989 journals related to Computer and Information Sciences. Surely some of them are good.

How about the Journal of Functional Programming or Theoretical Computer Science, or perhaps the Journal of Algorithms. And, for a more general approach, there's always the Journal of the ACM.

I haven't read any of these extensively, but surely some of them will have the kind of articles you'll enjoy.

• 
  It has been found that the states of the 2-charge extremal D1-D5 system are given by smooth geometries that have no singularity and no horizon individually, but a `horizon' does arise after `coarse-graining'. To see how this concept extends to the 3-charge extremal system, we construct a perturbation on the D1-D5 geometry that carries one unit of momentum charge P. The perturbation is found to be regular everywhere and normalizable, so we conclude that at least this state of the 3-charge system behaves like the 2-charge states. The solution is constructed by matching (to several orders) solutions in the inner and outer regions of the geometry. We conjecture the general form of `hair' expected for the 3-charge system, and the nature of the interior of black holes in general.
  

How exactly would that happen? Being a biochemist myself, I don't see a plausible cause for that scenario.

there are probably also antibiotic drug resistance genes used during the cloning process

Especially for the construction of GFP transgenes, you don't have to resort to antibiotic selection. Simply transfect a cell line with a retroviral vector containing GFP and screen for positive transfections using a cell sorter with fluorescence detection (compare, for example this article). Or, to be further on the safe side, use direct DNA injection into oocytes and thereby abolish the need to use retroviruses (summarized in the same paper as above).

So Hilbert was asking about the "shape" of algebraic curves (I think).

Yeah, that's pretty much the first part of Hilbert's 16th problem. For example, just by using quadratic equations, one can obtain a single infinite curve (like a parabola y = x^2), a single closed curve (like a circle x^2 + y^2 = 1), two disjoint infinite curves (like a hyperbola x^2 - y^2 = 1), or two intersecting infinite curves (like the pair of lines x^2 = y^2). That's about all you can do with quadratics. With cubics, you can get more complicated things (like a closed loop together with another infinite curve - look up "elliptic curve" for some examples), and so on and so forth. The first part of Hilbert's 16th is to classify all the possible numbers of loops and infinite curves that an algebraic equation of a fixed degree can generate, as well as their relative position (if an equation generates two loops, are they disjoint, or intersecting, or is one contained inside the other? etc.)

The second half of Hilbert's 16th is similar, but deals with curves that are not solved by algebraic equations, but rather by differential equations. For instance, the differential equation dy/dx = y gives exponential curves such as y = e^x. Sometimes these curves converge to a periodic loop known as a "limit cycle"; Hilbert's problem is then to count how many limit cycles there are and how they are positioned.

Oxenhielm's paper can be found here. It seems that she hasn't solved Hilbert's 16th problem for all differential equations, which would be absolutely amazing, but only for a specific class of such equations, although this does still seem to be a substantial achievement.

Terry

Her website is here.
The abstract for her paper is here.

For matematics, computer science, applied mathematics, physics, statistics, and other things in that vein, the indespensible resource is MathSciNet, a service of the AMS (American Mathematical Society. Almost every article is reviewed, many have abstracts, and all have citations. Some have the full text of the article (or links to it).

You should also check out jstor.org, sciencedirect, and springerlink.

This site gives a general overview of current fusion studies.

For the more technically inclined, you can check out the journal Fusion Engineering and Design (Sorry - if the link doesn't work for you, it's probably a pay-per-access journal and your business/school/self isn't a subscriber). Anyway, it's full of juicy fusion engineering and design details.

When I read this story, I knew I had heard about something like this before, and I eventually turned up the source: I was browsing a scholarly journal website collection and I saw a journal by the name of Network Security.

(side note: for those that are coming from .edu, your school probably has access to it online for free. Go to ScienceDirect, log in, browse the letter N in journals, and you should find it. The issue is Jan 1999)

In this issue, a gentleman by the name of Bill Hancock describes the vulnerabilities of network routers in his article "Attacking Network Routers" the vulnerabilities of these routers:

"To understand the problem, consider the fact that as far as most routers are concerned, a network router path, such as a leased line, technically never goes 'down'. Instead, when a line is determined to be 'dead', a router will shift the artifical cost of the line to a cost that is higher than the highest line....

"In a particularlly clever router attack, a packet [caused] havoc on a router for a specific protocol which caused the router to 'think' that it had lost multiple paths...."

(I take full responsibility for misspellings in above passage.)

The article goes on to say that the root of the problem is that there is no authentication on router-to-router updates, and if there is one sabotaged router it will quickly "infect" all the rest.

Further information about this attack and how to defend against it can be found in the above journal.

Hope this is interesting.

_____