Slashdot Mirror

I'll be curious to see this tied to the "single-LED" chemical sensor, described at http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

So far the treatments of tinnitus have been effective, but with a few caveats (as with all medical interventions).

Here is the original animal study regarding tinnitus: http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
And a review paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
Here is a clinical trial that happened: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
And another clinical case study: http://journals.lww.com/otolog...
And here is a clinical trial currently happening: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2...

To sum up the clinical trial that has already been published: researchers found that VNS did improve tinnitus, but only in patients that were not on drugs that affected neuromodulators such as acetylcholine and norepinephrine.

... high sunspot activity generally means fewer clouds, which in turn means it gets hotter. When "solar storm" activity is low, more cosmic rays leak in, forming more clouds, cooling the weather.

When more cosmic rays leaked in, the climate didn't change. Richard Alley mentioned (at 42:00 in his 2009 AGU talk) that beryllium proxy data reveal a spike in cosmic ray intensity during the "Laschamp anomaly" ~40,000 years ago, but the corresponding oxygen isotope proxy for temperature didn't change unusually during that time period.

Without a shell game of tax dollars shuttling in and out with many transfers of project ownership, there would be NO turbines standing.

Do you really expect us to believe that power plants burning coal or gas don't involve any political shenanigans and don't benefit from any subsidy?

You do realize that even when those monsters are turning in the wind, they usually are just lubricating internals and not generating?

Wrong: The EROI for wind energy is between 20 and 25, meaning they produce 20 to 25 times more energy than has been used for their construction, operation and decommission.

Is it unlikely? Probably. Am I entirely wrong? No.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

I was surprised to see that all double blind tests are now showing liberals as more racist than conservatives. The average liberal now has a default "affirmative action" position and is racist against white people. This has been confirmed over and over again in studies, one even showed that liberals are far more likely to sacrifice a white person to save multiple black people than they are the other way around. So we gave truely crossed into delusional type unlogical thinking in politics as well.

Let's see now, where's the pony inside this pile...
"Overall, Republicans are slightly more likely to assess blacks unfavorably on these dimensions. For example, 39% of Republicans place blacks on the “lazy” side of the scale, while 31% of Democrats do. But by and large, Tabarrok is quite correct: both parties include substantial fractions willing to stereotype blacks unfavorably....This graph shows that identification with the Democratic Party tends to decline, and identification with the Republican party tends to increase, as attitudes toward black become less favorable—at least when attitudes are measured with two different racial stereotypes." http://themonkeycage.org/2012/...
"We examined the relation between political ideology and racial categorization. People categorized morphed faces that ranged from 100% Black to 100% White. Conservatism (vs. liberalism) was associated with the tendency to categorize racially ambiguous faces as Black. Relation between ideology and categorization was mediated by opposition to equality. This research helps to explain the ideological underpinnings of hypodescent." http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
" in Studies 1a and 1b we found that liberals were less willing to endorse the killing of an innocent person on consequentialist grounds when the name of the individual suggested he was Black than when it suggested he was White. Study 2 demonstrated that liberals’ biased application of moral principles, when made salient in a within-subjects design, was eliminated. When given both the Chip and Tyrone scenarios, participants were strikingly consistent in their use of consequentialist or deontological principles, such that their responses on the second scenario almost always mirrored those in the first. This suggests that participants explicitly believed that the principles they were invoking were general enough to apply regardless of the victim’s race. In Study 3 we found that conservatives were more likely to condone the killing of innocent civilians in a military attack when those civilians were Iraqis killed by Americans rather than Americans killed by Iraqis, while liberals did not demonstrate such a flexible set of responses. Finally, in Study 4 we primed participants with either patriotism or multiculturalism, and found that, analogous to the effects on self-reported political ideology in Study 4, participants primed with patriotism (compared to those primed with multiculturalism) were more likely to accept collateral damage when Iraqi civilians were killed by American forces, but not when American civilians were killed by Iraqi forces." http://journal.sjdm.org/9616/j...

Slow down here folks.

The use of fatality rates here and news headlines, like most metrics, tells a specific story. The metric is chosen to support the story. I'm ok with that, but unfortunately people tend to draw wild conclusions (often by design), which I'm not.

You resent the police because of claims they have a dangerous job, yet not many of them die? All while no one sheds a tear for roofers?

While workplace fatality's aren't something to be minimized, here's a couple points to consider;

First, fuck you.

Secondly, why do police get attention? Let's take Mother Nature (heat, high seas, lightning, gravity) out of the list and re-evaluate. You could further cull the list by removing equipment failures.

One key difference between Police and the rest of that list is that they are at risk because of "People with Bad Intentions". People, with a conscious, who made a decision to injure. Gravity never chose to kill anyone. There are people who cause traffic fatalities but there's a difference between carelessness and murder.

Lastly, danger is not exclusive to death. There are lots of outcomes of "danger". Police didn't make that list because they're damned good at risk mitigation. They're equipped and trained in offense and defense. Some estimations say Iraq suffered 35,000 deaths during the 1990 - 1991 conflict; while the US lost 146 solders (source: wiki). That's less half a percent for you headline folks. How many hours of classroom and road training do you think the average car thief has? What would happen if we took some 16 year old and have then put 500 miles behind the wheel of your truck?

Roofing is #4 on that fatality list, random one picked, quick Google search, "112 case reports filed by Occupational Safety and Health investigators for the years 2005â"2010 were examined. In almost all of the recorded cases there was no adherence to the then current safety standards" (source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...)

Ya, people needlessly die every day. It sucks, but let's not pretend death statistics are the whole story.

Actually, the IPCC models have been very good at predicting the changes.

• IPCC model global warming projections have done much better than you think
• Contrary To Contrarian Claims, IPCC Temperature Projections Have Been Exceptionally Accurate
• Models successfully reproduce global temperature since 1900.
• Validation and forecasting accuracy in models of climate change
• New Paper “Validation And Forecasting Accuracy In Models Of Climate Change” By Fildes and Kourentzes

This one? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1367912015000917

That's what Google gave me. The abstract looks very interesting.

There is nothing stopping a Google search and checking several astronomy data set repositories online, as the field tends to have a lot of open papers and datasets. The first result when I Google for examples has a complete list of spectral peaks which is more than enough to do a full calibration yourself. There are probably plenty of examples of rawer data around for other examples, and it just takes time to track it down, although the fastest method I've found is to just email paper authors and ask for a copy.

Do you have any citations for your first paragraph? It looks like utter nonsense to me. For example, people aren't necessarily immune to a disease after getting it.

Immunity against measles in populations of women and infants in Poland. Low titers of measles antibody in mothers whose infants suffered from measles before eligible age for measles vaccination. Outbreaks of Measles have occurred in schools with 99% vaccination rates.

As far as your second paragraph goes, the useful question is not "Does the MMR vaccine kill more people than measles kills in a mostly immunized population?" but rather "Does the MMR vaccine kill more people than measles would kill in a mostly unimmunized population?".

Yes, I have thought about that. Most people are vaccinated for Measles so there are a lot less people getting it that would otherwise if the whole population were not vaccinated. But still, the primary cause of problems from Measles is due to the complications that arise from things like dehydration or poor nutrition. Ask your older relatives how many people they knew when younger that died of Measles. I bet you won't find any. Everybody got it and it wasn't a big deal then. Today it is made out to be a big deal. If you are some starving African kid with no medical attention it can be a problem. But that kid probably doesn't have access to the MMR shot anyway. Here in the USA we have good nutrition and access to medical care. Complications from Measles would be rather rare.

Severe complications from measles can be avoided through supportive care that ensures good nutrition, adequate fluid intake and treatment of dehydration with WHO-recommended oral rehydration solution. This solution replaces fluids and other essential elements that are lost through diarrhoea or vomiting. Antibiotics should be prescribed to treat eye and ear infections, and pneumonia.

All children in developing countries diagnosed with measles should receive two doses of vitamin A supplements, given 24 hours apart. This treatment restores low vitamin A levels during measles that occur even in well-nourished children and can help prevent eye damage and blindness. Vitamin A supplements have been shown to reduce the number of deaths from measles by 50%.

> Back when I was working on lasers for power beaming

Short or long haul? Down or up?

We looked at lasers for space-to-Earth power beaming, but it's less practical than you might think-- heat rejection gets to be a serious problem. Most of the practical applications were Earth-to-space or space-to-space power beaming.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...
http://proceedings.spiedigital...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10...
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.js...

Must I, or are you just dodging?
You see, I asked you for yours, because upon googling, I could find no such study information.

Now, if you google "gender differences in spatial intelligence", you're going to have quite a different result. The consensus is moving toward spatial ability gender differences being a matter of nurture, not nature. Determined by culture, not sex organs.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://pss.sagepub.com/content...
Wikipedia has probably the most comprehensive list of scientific citations on the topic, with the debunkings of decades-old studies that failed to account for even a modicum of non-physiological possibilities. You should read up. Learn something new.

Ultimately, though, given just how much information there is on the topic, I'm pretty sure you're playing off of some pre-conceived cultural leanings.

Technology is neutral and amoral.

That opening sentence clearly reveals the bias of the author. Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical applications. By definition, those are not neutral or amoral because that application is driven by whoever wants to create the practical application. Further, multiple studies have revealed how biased scientific research can be since humans by nature have biases that we often don't even realize we believe until we're confronted with overwhelming evidence. While this book sounds like it's worth reading, please don't fall into the trap of believing technology is somehow inherently neutral. It's a directed process. The beliefs and morals of those doing the directing invariably influence the technology.

Some links to research into bias in science:

• https://explorable.com/research-bias
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16505391
• http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/ar_bias.html
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368108001155

It would also require more rare earth elements than exist in the earth's crust.

Wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. The oceans alone contain more than enough of every element we care about. If the demand is there, the supply is easy. The only limit is ramp-up time for extracting.

Lithium: The total lithium content of seawater is very large and is estimated as 230 billion tonnes

Neodymium: 0.1ppt in the oceans still means >1.2 million tonnes.

Freakin' Uranium: over 1 BILLION TONNES just hanging out in the water.

I hope you've learned something today, and that you stop spouting nonsense.

Well, hell, why not? Just remember that it's Climate Change now though, not Global Warming. Among other amazing things, Climate Change is responsible for:

ISIS: Yup, somehow, Climate Change was one of the reasons we have ISIS.
Crime. Climate change is also responsible for more rape.
Prostitution. Yeah, see, climate change may increase prostitution too.

I know, I know, this comment is a little snarky, but even the people here on Slashdot that are hardcore global warming types can see that there's a whacko fringe in their camp that is beyond ridiculous.

DUI laws being a classic example: studies show the majority of people are NOT significantly impaired at 0.08%).

Nope.

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...

>10 21–35 yr old male moderate drinkers were tested on divided-attention and information-processing tasks at blood alcohol levels (BALs) of 0, 15, 30, 45 and 60 mg/dl. All response measures showed evidence of impairment beginning at 15 mg/dl and increasing impairment with increasing BALs. Findings provide no evidence that low BALs improve performance on driving-related skills, as has sometimes been suggested

http://ajph.aphapublications.o...

>CONCLUSIONS: It all states adopted 0.08% legal blood alcohol limits, at least 500 to 600 fewer fatal crashes would occur annually.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...

>There is no evidence of a threshold blood alcohol (BAC) below which impairment does not occur, and there is no defined category of drivers who will not be impaired by alcohol....These more sophisticated studies show that significant impairment occurs at very low BACs ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

>results from the pooled analyses were clear and consistent. Changes in legal BAC limits significantly affected alcohol-related fatal crash involvement for both the SVN and BAC test result measures, and the laws affected drivers at all drinking levels.

Printed parts are still by far inferior to more conventionally produced alternatives. For organs with 3D architecture, by far the most successful approaches have been to basically seed the relevant cell types in layers on a gel or degradable fiber based scaffold. Anthony Atala's group at Wake Forest (no association, just a fan of their work) has made replacement urethras and bladders among many others that have actually been implanted in patients. I believe the bladder work is currently in a phase II clinical trial on its way to becoming more widely available. Sangeeta Bhatia's group has done amazing work on liver tissue, although their focus has been on laboratory samples for drug testing rather than implantation for the time being. They actually do use a 3D printing approach to their work but only to build a sugar-based scaffold that can dissolve away and leave space for blood vessels to be engineered. The tissue itself is just dumped onto the scaffold in a gel slurry and organizes itself.

I think 3D printing tissues is a rather short-sighted approach to assembling structures whose function and shape is self-organized. The most successful approaches thus far (in terms of having products on the market or organs in people) have been strategies that rely on the intrinsic self-organization of tissues. Even more complex structures such as the colonic epithelium can be generated this way.

I don't think this is at all special. There have been tons of space-matter-abiogenesis experiments that have been done, with similar results. For example, it's been shown that Titan's atmosphere can produce at least 16 amino acids and all five nucleotide bases, and we've already detected organic molecules over 10000 daltons there.

Nature likes to produce rather complex mixtures of organic chemicals without any help from life, nobody should doubt this any more, there's been way too much evidence that it happens. Nature is more than happy to continously rain down vast amounts of varied, complex organics given the right situation, providing both potential organic catalysts to develop into early life and "food" that they can scavenge. The question that needs to be answered next is, from a random diverse mix of organics, how does a hypercycle get started, wherein some chemicals / mixtures of chemicals / families of chemicals begin to encourage the creation of more chemicals "like" them, increasing the odds that there will be more produced of whatever is needed to keep the cycle going. Once you get to that point, you have the potential for evolution to take hold - first by a simple race to produce the most exact copies of the most efficiently-catalyzing chemicals and the poisoning of competing chemicals, up to the development of membranes to provide defense/hoarde resources/survive adverse situations/etc (the first "ur-cells").

For me, the page is blank but then redirects to: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

From the PDF:
The participants were Italian and white. They were psychology students (N = 96; 48 women, 48 men) who volunteered to participate without any reward. Their mean age was 24 (SD = 2.82).

Nice of them to not even test black people saving white, that way white people can feel like shit.

No. The human brain is not made to last.

http://cercor.oxfordjournals.o...

Even with VERY mature stem cell based regenerative medicine, there is going to be problems with the buildup of neurotoxic metabolites within the brain over time, This is essentially what alzheimer's disease is (but the jury is still out on weather the creation of amyloid beta plaques and/or tau tangles is causal or symptomatic.)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

The brain does not seem to have a very good elimination system for the purging of toxic metabolic biproducts, which causes slow, cumulative damage over time.

You are going to have to do some rather invasive interventions with genetically engineered glial cells and other neural progenitor cells to prop up human brains if you intend to have biological immortality.

No. The human brain is not made to last.

http://cercor.oxfordjournals.o...

Even with VERY mature stem cell based regenerative medicine, there is going to be problems with the buildup of neurotoxic metabolites within the brain over time, This is essentially what alzheimer's disease is (but the jury is still out on weather the creation of amyloid beta plaques and/or tau tangles is causal or symptomatic.)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

The brain does not seem to have a very good elimination system for the purging of toxic metabolic biproducts, which causes slow, cumulative damage over time.

You are going to have to do some rather invasive interventions with genetically engineered glial cells and other neural progenitor cells to prop up human brains if you intend to have biological immortality.

No joke:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

Boy, 10, dies after his brother accidentally shoots him in the head with a BB gun at close range: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.gloucestershireecho... BB gun accident takes life of a 20-year old boy: http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/...

You can surely find a lot more googling a little. I also recommend taking a look at Google image-search. The thing is, if you shoot someone in the head with a BB-gun there actually is quite a risk of bodily harm (torn eyes etc.) and loss of life. They're unlikely to kill you if you fire them somewhere other than the head, but they certainly are dangerous items and they can still cause damage to internal organs, depending where the shot lands and its angle. I have a BB-gun that's capable of easily piercing an aluminum can and I certainly wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of the barrel.

Just about anything can be used in some way to kill a person. That doesn't make everything a deadly weapon. I think "deadly weapon" ought to be redefined as something that it's actually practical to use to kill a person. Otherwise, we may as well criminalize butter knives, lawn darts, paintball guns, and sling shots.

There really has to be some sanity here: the weapon must be able to cause grievous bodily harm in order to justify heavy sentences. A BB gun doesn't qualify

Boy, 10, dies after his brother accidentally shoots him in the head with a BB gun at close range: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.gloucestershireecho...
BB gun accident takes life of a 20-year old boy: http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/...

You can surely find a lot more googling a little. I also recommend taking a look at Google image-search. The thing is, if you shoot someone in the head with a BB-gun there actually is quite a risk of bodily harm (torn eyes etc.) and loss of life. They're unlikely to kill you if you fire them somewhere other than the head, but they certainly are dangerous items and they can still cause damage to internal organs, depending where the shot lands and its angle. I have a BB-gun that's capable of easily piercing an aluminum can and I certainly wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of the barrel.

Yes, BB guns can be dangerous and they should not be treated as toys, but so are a lot of things are are not counted as deadly weapons, like the weapons the OP mentioned.

There really has to be some sanity here: the weapon must be able to cause grievous bodily harm in order to justify heavy sentences. A BB gun doesn't qualify

Boy, 10, dies after his brother accidentally shoots him in the head with a BB gun at close range: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.gloucestershireecho...
BB gun accident takes life of a 20-year old boy: http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/...

You can surely find a lot more googling a little. I also recommend taking a look at Google image-search. The thing is, if you shoot someone in the head with a BB-gun there actually is quite a risk of bodily harm (torn eyes etc.) and loss of life. They're unlikely to kill you if you fire them somewhere other than the head, but they certainly are dangerous items and they can still cause damage to internal organs, depending where the shot lands and its angle. I have a BB-gun that's capable of easily piercing an aluminum can and I certainly wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of the barrel.

Look for it in print, or something that quotes the print, and you'll see, but you don't have to - just think about my next point.

You mean like the CRC Handbook of Radiation Measurement and Protection that discusses potassium 40 levels in various foods, going back to at least the a version from the 1970s that I have? Or do you mean publications like journal articles, like this one that discuss measurement of potassium in food? I have a small collection of books discussing prospects of nuclear war from early cold war (50s and 60s), some of which mention bananas and other potassium foods, although don't give quantities, and the one that does give a quantity it is correct. How about giving some citations of print (and not internet posts) that get it wrong, instead of telling someone to prove a negative?

How do those "setting off alarms" comments make any sense when a banana emits far less radiation from potassium than a single human being (as pointed out by another poster)?

Bananas have an activity of about 120 Bq/kg, and the decay produce high energy betas and gammas mostly. For humans, it is about half this, 60 Bq/kg, from potassium (plus some C14, but the beta from that is weak enough most of it won't leave the body). It is more common to find large piles of bananas than people, but you can still find examples of using a scintillator and MCA to do gamma ray spectroscopy on a person as a lecture demonstration, usually requiring them to sit on the detector for the first half of the lecture to get a good, clear spectrum. And you can find discussion of detection of humans at border crossing radiation monitors due to radioisotopes, but otherwise material about using such monitoring portals only discusses bulk biological goods for K40, as even a bus carrying a football team isn't going to compare to the mass of material a truck full for produce or fertilizer will be carrying.

Which medical models are you referring to? I know of no computer model designed to predict how long a person will live. Or did you just get confused by the meaning of the word model?

First of all, "computer" is extraneous to modeling. Newton was modeling objects in motion as point masses quite a while back.
Second of all, all science is modeling.
Third of all, what world do you occupy? Or are you posting from the past? Start here: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/c... and work your way down. http://dmm.biologists.org/ http://idmod.org/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... http://www.intellectualventure... and keep going.

In a word: entropy.

Good call! Don't see red shift explained either.

In this model, the universe is still expanding, it's not static at all. So redshift is just explained the normal way, in fact the Hubble constant is mentioned in the actual paper.

The paper is far above my level of understanding but, as far as I understood, when you play time backward but take quantum trajectories (whatever those are) into account, the universe doesn't come together in a single point but in some other state, much more dense than today but not a singularity. So the universe is still expanding from a very dense earlier state, but there's no longer an actual singularity in the beginning. At a point in the past where people used to naïvely think the density had to become infinite, quantum trajectories actually keep it from reaching a singularity.

There is considerable evidence that testosterone actually DECREASES male lifespan, perhaps by as much as 20 years. For example, from a very well controlled study on the lifespans of Korean eunichs: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...: "The average lifespan of eunuchs was 70.0 ± 1.76 years, which was 14.4–19.1 years longer than the lifespan of non-castrated men of similar socio-economic status. Our study supports the idea that male sex hormones decrease the lifespan of men." I entirely support having the choice to take testosterone, for whatever reason one would like. I have a friend who's life has been quite improved by testosterone treatment, in fact. BUT taking T to help with unspecific effects of aging is a dangerous experiment and fad and people should be aware that there are likely to be some very serious and unforeseen consequences. I managed to talk my aging father out of this treatment, and as a consequence I just may be able to enjoy his company for years to come. Any doctor who suggests taking T to prolong lifespan is either critically misinformed or displaying severe lack of judgement, imo. And the author of that paper, who keeps referring to T as a magic wand? He is an idiot. I'm not a medical doctor but I am a PhD and I have done studies on the effects of sex hormones on animals. It's not clear why testosterone might decrease the lifespan of men, but one likely candidate is the fact that testosterone clearly decreases immune system function.

What, do you expect people to give you dozens of links for you for each element? Did you even check yourself at all? Why should we expect you to even read links given, since you have already been given links that show uranium metal reacts with oxygen in air and water at room temperature.

There are quite a lot of papers on the chemistry of uranium, but I'm not going to look one up for every single reactions. At least this one discusses reactions with several different halogens and involves a bunch of reactions done at room temperature and uranium metal (or even several that are done at dry ice temperatures). There will be lots of stuff around that mentions reactions at higher temperatures because industrial chemistry is about reaction yields, not just getting things to react, but that in no way negates that there are a lot of reactions at room temperature. Older production methods of uranium involved a lot of processing with alkali metal salts with reactions that happen at room temperature. Even the first search result for organouranium synthesis talks about reactions at room temperature forming various organic chemistry bonds.

Considering you don't even read or comprehend things already linked to you, there is no expectation that more links would fix anything. But for others that might be curious, this stuff is really easy to find in general considering the volumes of work on uranium chemistry compared to other heavy elements.

Since you are obviously cherry-picking your sources again (which I have pointed out to you before), let me add some recent sources from highly respected journals about the risk of low-dose radiation. Ofcourse, according to Mr. D. all these journals just publish pseudo-science. Reminds me of the old joke with the wrong-way driver.

"... First, it is clear that we have now passed a watershed in our field, where it is no longer tenable to claim that CT risks are "too low to be detectable and may be non-existent" (5). A large well-designed epidemiologic study has clearly shown that the individual risks are small but real..."
Journal: Radiology
Link: http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/...

"...We noted a positive association between radiation dose from CT scans and leukaemia (...) and brain tumours (...)."
Journal: The Lancet
Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

"Conclusions The increased incidence of cancer after CT scan exposure in this cohort was mostly due to irradiation. ..."
Journal: British Medical Journal
Link: http://www.bmj.com/content/346...

"The study supports the extrapolation of high-dose rate risk models to protracted exposures at natural background exposure levels."
Journal: Leukemia
Link: http://www.nature.com/leu/jour...

And with respect to Fukushima there were recent estimates from a Stanford guy:
"We estimate an additional 130 (15â"1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24â"1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposureâ"dose and doseâ"response models used in the study. We also discuss the LNT model's uncertainty at low doses. .... Radiation exposure to workers at the plant is projected to result in 2 to 12 morbidities. An additional [similar]600 mortalities have been reported due to non-radiological causes such as mandatory evacuations."
Journal: Energy & Environmental Science
Link: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content...

> uncertain methods of execution

Just adding a must-read citation in the Lancet to this: Inadequate Anaesthesia in Lethal Injection for Execution.

"Just the right properties" is not really needed. Simple gas pressure can overcome the need for specially prepared palladium. That is, the classic CF experiments were done at ordinary atmospheric pressure, so it takes a long time for the deuterium to permeate the palladium and, yes, apparently the palladium's molecular structure is important in helping CF to happen (if it happens at all). However, if you simply take a piece of palladium and put it in a pressure chamber, and pump in lots of deuterium gas under pressure, well, not only does it take less time for something interesting to happen, the results are highly repeat-able. Here are some links: old internal NASA paper, a formal journal publication, and a 2010 overview.

Telomerase only works (naturally) in 3 kinds of human cells

Not once in the article I quoted nor my posts have mentioned Telomerase, shifting the focus of the discussion, instead of admitting your error.

Finding a study is a simple task by googling "diet and exercise telomeres", yielding Scholarly links

But nooo, you insist on being an a irrational poster, changing the subject and complaining I haven't met your requirements. If you really want a science links here, but the Prostrate cancer study, (5yr follow up, Blood cell telomeres lengthened by +10%, verses -3% control group) is behind a pay-wall. I suppose you'll complain about that as well.

scholar.google.com if anybody's interested.

Effects of scheduled overtime on labor productivity - Abstract says 'no significant effect on productivity'
Productivity in manufacturing...: As hours/day dropped, they worked more days(of the year), so productivity remained about the same.
Scheduled Overtime and Labor Productivity: Quantitative Analysis: Productivity drops 10-15% for 50/60 hour work weeks.
Effect of Reducing Interns' Work Hours: Surprise, Surprise, NOT working medical interns for 24+ hours straight reduces serious medical errors by more than 50%.

Therr numbers don't even match their references.
Form this;

The study estimates that wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh.

That is higher than the 0.269 in the graph. Note the article refers to "birds and avian wildlife";

The paper concludes that further study is needed, but also that fossil fueled power stations appear to pose a much greater threat to birds and avian wildlife than wind farms and nuclear power plants.

Another example from another reference;

I estimated 888,000 bat and 573,000 bird fatalities/year (including 83,000 raptor fatalities)

So the high should be 1.46 million avian deaths.

I'm not sure medical science understands (well enough) the relationship between carbs/blood sugar/cholesterol and cardiovascular disease

Sadly, medical science has, for decades, had a better understanding than you seem to think. The problems arise from advisory organs (from the individual dietitian to the WHO) having to justify their existence by coming up with some kind of advice.

"In general, we're not really sure about a lot of things, but it is pretty obvious that nutrition raises your blood sugar levels, with the speed of the increase related to the glycemic index of the food and that both very high and very low blood sugar levels have negative effects on your body, so you should manage your nutritional intake based on your blood sugar levels. Oh yes, and don't forget the buffering effects of glycogen storage in your muscles and liver" makes for great but very unmarketable advice.

"Fat is bad, mmkay" and "High cholesterol will kill you" are a lot more palatable.
Who cares about scientific accuracy nowadays? Most 'journalists' don't. Most politicians don't. The average Joe certainly doesn't (at this point he doesn't even trust those scientist fuckers, always 'saying' different things in the papers).

Take it from me: the science is out there and has been for a while. Believe nothing you read about the subject of dietary advice, unless it is actual research or the stating of hard facts:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
(note the years of publication)

Looks like you're right. I must have gotten my links mixed up. Thank you to those who pointed this out.

Anyway, here is a link to one paper. It isn't the only one.

OK, then why is it estimated that power transmission lines kill (annually) something like 170 million birds all over the US? (source) The current estimates for the same pertaining to wind turbines across the US are on the order of hundreds of thousands per year at most. Some people think that figure is overly optimistic, but it's still a few orders of magnitude lower, so I still doubt it's anywhere close to the power transmission lines figure.

"It attaches current-carrying handles to either end of the central plasma"

“Here we imposed the asymmetric field, so the plasma doesn’t have to go unstable in order for us to drive the current. We’ve shown that we can sustain a stable equilibrium and we can control the plasma, which means the bottle will be able to hold more plasma,” Jarboe said.

The UW apparatus uses two handle-shaped coils to alternately generate currents on either side of the central core, a method the authors call imposed dynamo current drive. Results show the plasma is stable and the method is energy-efficient, but the UW research reactor is too small to fully contain the plasma without some escaping as a gas. Next, the team hopes to attach the device to a larger reactor to see if it can maintain a sufficiently tight magnetic bottle.

It is a Spheromak that makes use of technology developed for the ITER fusion reactor.

A high- spheromak reactor concept has been formulated with an estimated overnight capital cost that is competitive with conventional power sources. This reactor concept utilizes recently discovered imposed-dynamo current drive (IDCD) and a molten salt (FLiBe) blanket system for first wall cooling, neutron moderation and tritium breeding. Currently available materials and ITER-developed cryogenic pumping systems were implemented in this concept from the basis of technological feasibility. A tritium breeding ratio (TBR) of greater than 1.1 has been calculated using a Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP5) neutron transport simulation. High temperature superconducting tapes (YBCO) were used for the equilibrium coil set, substantially reducing the recirculating power fraction when compared to previous spheromak reactor studies. Using zirconium hydride for neutron shielding, a limiting equilibrium coil lifetime of at least thirty full-power years has been achieved. The primary FLiBe loop was coupled to a supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle due to attractive economics and high thermal efficiencies. With these advancements, an electrical output of 1000 MW from a thermal output of 2486 MW was achieved, yielding an overall plant efficiency of approximately 40%.

I have no idea if this is a breakthrough or not. I don't know if it will scale up. It's not my field.

I do know that you are a Slashdot Pundit who lives in a fact free void and you are spewing meaningless nonsense. Although you quote some of the UW press information, you obviously did not bother to read or comprehend what they were saying. You didn't even bother to get the facts right about what kind of magnetic confinement topology they use. You went off on a rant about a completely different system.

Do Slashdot and the world a favor: STFU. You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and leave us alone. You are wasting every one's time.

Sensationalist? What are you talking about?

Not peer-reviewed? Mersini-Houghton's results were published this month in Physics Letters B, Backreaction of Hawking radiation on a gravitationally collapsing star I: Black holes? I don't expect you to read the existing literature, but the least you can do is check the indices to see if it exists.

And there's also a reallllllllllllly telling quote in the actual paper I'm still reading to make sure I understood the context right, but,

Consider a spherically symmetric, uniform density, perfect-fluid star, undergoing gravitational collapse. The stress energy tensor of the fluid is ...

Looks like a hell of assumption to make about stellar density. We know the cores are way more dense than the rest of the star, that's the magic that makes the fusion happen.

Now if this assumption is qualified and addressed later in the paper, I'll be guilty of not being careful enough, but I haven't found that clue yet.

There have been numerous studies linking artificial sweeteners to both obesity and altered metabolic states, however some of the studies in question may be self-fulfilling prophesies. For example, of course individuals that consume "diet," or no-calorie products are more likely to be overweight, that is likely why they consume them. That being said, there is still significant evidence that these products can indeed cause weight gain, though there is not enough to conclude much more than, "it's worth looking into."

The most obvious approach is to combine the 2 methods - much like humans do, especially in noisy environments.

Obvious, indeed. There's already a textbook for the subject, Multimodal Signal Processing...available for free online, no less.

This is exactly the sort of system you'd want on a flight deck, to supplement the accuracy of speech-recognition in the presence of noise, especially intermittent noise such as turbulence. It can also help with speaker identification.

As for the hopelessly naive idea that "society" should be able to choose whether this sort of thing should exist...the textbook came out in 2009.

Part of the method may very well be to put the clustering algorithm directly onto the the same chip as is doing the digital readout of the sensor, i.e. bump-bonded on the back of the sensor, directly providing estimated (x,y) coordinates of the particle hits instead of raw pixel data with zero-suppression as is traditionally done.

However, this is not what this paper is discussing. It discusses mapping the parameter space (m,q) of the gradient and intercept of a particle track y=m*z+q into some kind of matrix, and then applying an algorithm which describes how well the data fits with each of the points in the parameter space. This is thus integrating the information from several sub-detectors, and can thus not be done on the "image sensor" (which is usually a "hybrid", i.e. a chip with an array of detector diodes, coupled to another chip which has the electronics).

While this paper is pretty light on details (I'm guessing some sort of conference paper), it references another single-author paper in NIM A (which author is also a co-author on this paper) from 2000:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
It appears to be open-access, at least I can read it without logging in to VPN.

I agree that waste in casks at nuclear power plants is reasonably safe but it would still be better to move it to Yucca Mountain. If nothing else, security would be a lot cheaper. It's utterly ridiculous that all that money was spent on a waste repository that, thanks to NIMBYism on the part of Nevada politicians, doesn't look like it'll be used any time soon. At least nuclear waste is the one form of toxic waste that will eventually go away on its own. Arsenic, mercury, lead, thallium and other chemical poisons remain toxic forever.

Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste, and long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water revealed by Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology ) is just not available.

We need something made of granite. The only human made structures we've seen that last 10000 years resembles the pyramids, and it is an engineering project of that scale, because the logistical problems of transferring the 70000 odd tons of Pu239 to the spent fuel containment facility are so involved that you want to get it right the first time and only do it once. The design of the Swedish facility shows how a reactor facility that complies with the industry designed improvements could be implemented.

IIRC, NIMBYism is how the project ended up in Nevada in the first place because one Nevada politician did not show for the vote and that was enough to place the facility at Yucca. This is not the way to place a spent fuel containment facility. A location evaluated by science and engineering practices is.

You can't. You just think you can because you over-estimate your abilities. I encourage you to do an internet search for the relevant research. There was a slashdot story about it ~ 5 years ago.

I did do an Internet search, and in fact found plenty of research that indicates humans and other mammals can in fact localize sound in the vertical plane (i.e. whether it comes from in front of behind of you). Of course, it doesn't work for all sounds, but the capability is there.

How is that controversial? All you need to do is look at average testosterone levels to begin to see why different races have different percentages in the ranges of cultural expression, and health, etc.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0039128X92900325

Right. And Testosterone is positively correlated to criminality. The reality is that Men ages 10-40 commit most of the crime, black men in that age group are about 3% of the population and commit 50% or so of violent crimes. Any society that was rational would look at the numbers and have screening program for testosterone levels and early intervention to try to keep young men with high testosterone out of trouble. Imagine the lives, money and time that could be saved.

Of course the fact that we may be biologically different by race goes against our current civilizational religious beliefs (the blank slate). In a sense, it's almost unfair (DISCRIMINATION!) to pretend everyone is equal and the same....to expect them all to sit in a classroom or office and get along when some people are at a drastic chemical disadvantage in such environments.

How is that controversial? All you need to do is look at average testosterone levels to begin to see why different races have different percentages in the ranges of cultural expression, and health, etc.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0039128X92900325 [sciencedirect.com]

Age-adjusted testosterone from their Table 2:
white 637
black 657
Asian 688
How big a differences does it take to affect "cultural expression?"