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The same scientists publish things such as proof that testosterone levels vary by race ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... ) then create a politically correct shitstorm when someone dares note that this has behavioral implications. How ridiculous can this get?

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

Third suggestion:

Fungi can be used to remove heavy metal contaminants in flowing water. Place a bunch of fungi mycelium in sandbags in the water stream and the fungi will filter out the contaminants as the water flows through. Come back later, remove the bags and replace with a fresh batch.

Contact Paul Stamets' group over at Fingi Perfecti and see what their experts have to say. They might even have a product you could buy for the purpose.

Here's a paper and some contact info to get you started:

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

http://www.fungi.com/about-pau...

I'll try to get through without banging my head against the table too often, but every time I see Amory Lovins' crap I just want to kill myself. The guy has a totally rosy idea of how electrical and mechanical systems actually work and how we control them. He frequently overestimates stuff, such as this: "Biomass would supply about six times more energy in 2050 than in 2010". Biomass is pure and utter bunk and is just a way to subsidize certain industries. Germany has a rather sizable biomass energy sector and it has some rather unintended consequences (also some German reporting about the reality of biomass, especially interesting around 13:13 where they show massive deforestation in Brazil taking place to plant energy plants such as maize to export to Germany to get at the lucrative subsidies). In short, Amory Lovins lives to sell magic beans to believers.

The difficulty being, your references are estimates based on what dose threshold?

Well, you have to go three citations deep to reach the original model they're working off of. Which turns out to be a conservative application of Linear No Threshold. Which... isn't actually testable for any reasonable value of statistical significance over the populations they're attempting to apply it to.

The BEIR VII risk models are a combination of excess relative risk (ERR) and excess absolute risk (EAR) models, both of which are written as a linear function of dose, depending on sex, age at exposure and attained age. The BEIR VII risk models were derived from analyses of data on the Japanese atomic bomb survivors for all cancer sites except breast and thyroid; for the latter, they were based on published combined analyses of data on the atomic bomb survivors and medically exposed cohorts.40, 41 To estimate risks from exposure at low doses and dose rates, a dose and dose-rate effectiveness factor (DDREF) of 1.5 was used for all outcomes except leukemia.

The biological effects of acute radiation exposure >1 Gy are reasonably well-known, are the basis for the linear-no-threshold model, and completely inapplicable to this sitation, as even the most-exposed workers at the Fukushima accident site did even approach this dose, despite the multiple situations where workers were exposed to doses in excess of legal limits.

The biological effects of short term dose less than 0.05 Gy or low-dose long-term exposure are also reasonably well-known, in that there is no statistically significant effect.

Unless you're dealing with the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war, the linear-no-threshold model is nearly useless from an epidemiological perspective, and so are conclusions reached using it.

This is not "pop psychology", but hard science. The original article costs money though: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

You are trolling, and you continue to troll. A 15 second google("systemd sucks") would gives you a good overview. And stop fishing for something necessarily abbreviated from me the that you can then attack.

You can argue if you like that a ~ 27.3% increase is large but I disagree, since climate sensitivity to CO2... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-07-07]

Ocean acidification is independent of climate sensitivity, and it's another reason to be concerned about the unprecedented rapidity of our CO2 emissions.

I would also like to point out again that even if acidification is happening, the RESULTS of that acidification are probably less than alarmists have claimed. Example (2010 article): http://www.rationaloptimist.co... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-06-10]

Lonny Eachus also linked to that misinformation from Matt Ridley, a journalist with a long history of distorting climate science.

In contrast, I quoted from Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF), Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF), and Ken Caldeira’s 2012 AGU lecture. That last link was from my videos section which also includes:

• Andrew Dickson gave a technical 2009 presentation called “Acidic Oceans: Why Should We Care?”
• A series of panels at the 2011 AGU discussed declining reef health and tipping points.

I'm not a chemist or a marine biologist/ecologist, so I read peer-reviewed papers and go to conferences like the AGU to watch lectures by scientists who do specialize and publish in those fields. For instance, consider that 2011 AGU panel on declining reef health. Nina Keul observed one species of foramanifera Glas et al. 2012 (PDF) growing faster as carbonate ion concentration decreases (which happens when CO2 increases). She provided context by noting that this is one species from one experiment, noting that this is like looking at one puzzle piece of a big puzzle.

Then Adina Paytan provides further context by noting that most species aren't like this. She shows Fig. 2 from Crook et al. 2012 (PDF) which shows that only ~3 out of 9 species of coral are present in locations with naturally low pH and notes that "Because these three species are rarely major contributors to Caribbean reef framework, these data may indicate that today’s more complex frame-building species may be replaced by smaller, possibly patchy, colonies of only a few species along the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef."

Finally, Robert Ridin

Not the original poster, but here you go...

What aspects of autism predispose to talent?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Talent in autism: hyper-systemizing, hyper-attention to detail and sensory hypersensitivity
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Enhanced perception in savant syndrome: patterns, structure and creativity.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

The savant syndrome: intellectual impairment and exceptional skill.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Comparing the intelligence profiles of savant and nonsavant individuals with autistic disorder
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

are you sure ? http://www.greenmedinfo.com/bl...

Yes

A decades-long lead time is common in medicine. Research on implantable artificial kidneys has already been going on for about 30 years (the first patents date from around 1981-82), with no actual result yet. Here's a survey article from 20 years ago on biohybrid artificial organs. This kind of stuff takes a long time.

We also use very similar force algorithms in our cancer models. :-) e.g., http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

The description of the agents and forces in this summary was actually very well done.

Storm water is a pollutant depending on what it is flowing over or leaching through.

It's flowing over storm-drains of EXISTING ROADS. Not over nuclear disposal sites or something similar.
Creators are padding their project to seem even more eco-friendly than it is, when fact is that said storm-drains are already in place (in which case this is a waste of money) OR they are not needed (in which case this is AGAIN a waste of money - AND PADDING).

Not all concrete leaches C02. Make it out of geopolyer concrete a C02 sink closely related to the long carbon cycle

Except it kinda does.

Some case study geopolymer concrete mixes based on typical Australian feedstocks indicate potential for a 44â"64% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions while the financial costs are 7% lower to 39% higher compared with OPC.

So in theory it reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about a half, while the costs go from 7% lower to 39% higher.
That's a pretty big gap there. Almost 50% of a MAYBE cheaper MAYBE more expensive.
Sadly, that study is paywalled.

But this one isn't. And it says it's only "approximately 9% less than comparable concrete containing 100% OPC binder"

So, to sum it up.
CO2 reduction is either negligible, or "about 50%", while the price is either negligibly lower OR significantly higher.

And now the fun part...

IT IS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY!!!
Even if it is 0.0001% of CO2 at 0.0001% cost to regular, Portland cement, concrete - IT IS NEW AND ADDITIONAL AND UNNECESSARY.
And it would need to be done under every single square meter of "solar roadways".

Any CO2 saving made by the solar power gathered (and most of it would go on drying the road for snow and rain) would be far overshadowed by CO2 released to create this new network AND the power it would suck up during the night.
AND on top of that the efficiency of those solar cells would degrade much faster than that of the regular ones - cause they would accumulate oil, soot from exhausts, mud, rubber from the tires...
All that stuff that we don't have to care about right now, would become a HUGE efficiency problem.

Which gets us to the heaters...

If you have to invest some energy to raise the surface temp to just above freezing which then allows both traffic and restarting the solar panel it might be worth it.

No, it would not.

We are talking WINTER.
Shorter days. Less sunlight.
Meanwhile, it can snow FOR DAYS AND NIGHTS.

This contraption would be trying to melt AT LEAST 16 hours of snow to gain 8 hours of useful light - IF... IF it stopped snowing during the day.
Solar cells are at around 20% efficiency AT BEST, and they admit that a pretty big part of their tiles IS NOT covered with solar cells.

So how much are they producing?

Currently, the full size hexagons are 36-watt solar panels, with 69-percent surface coverage by solar cells. This will become 52-watts when we cover the whole surface when we go into production. When we add piezoelectric, they'll be capable of producing even more power. Also, as the efficiency of solar cells increase, more power will be converted.

We tested the heaters over the winter with a DC power supply that provided them with 72-watts. This was an overkill and made the surface warm to the touch on most winter days. We still need to experiment with different voltages at different temperatures, to determine the minimum amount of power required to keep the surface above freezing. Remember, they don't have to heat up to 85 degrees like the defroster wire in the windows of your car: they only have to keep the surface warm enough to prevent snow/ice accumulation (35 degrees?).

They ke

How about this: this? The human eye is generally limited to frequency response below 32 Hz.

First, I am a doctor, and I know both Drs Tisherman, and Rhee, having met both in person and having read many of both of their papers. They are both stellar leaders in the field of trauma surgery. I am therefore posting as AC to avoid the perception of any even quasi-official criticism. These are my thoughts on the subject and are meant only to educate the readership, not to try to detract from the work cited

Second, I'm not jumping on " confused one"'s post, just taking an opportunity to correct a minor misconception, and use it as a hook to provide some detail as I understand them.

cold enough to shut everything off, but not cold enough to damage cells. Basic principle originates in all those "miraculous" drowning victims who fall through winter ice and are resuscitated 20 or 30 minutes later.

The "miraculous drowning victims" to which you refer usually survive due to the mammalian diving reflex, which is a distinct event (although hypothermia is involved) involving a slowing of the heart, vasoconstriction, and a closing of the glottic opening due to the face being submerged. The principle this proposed technique is using is more of a physio-chemical slowing of the reactions in the whole body, but of prime importance the heart, kidneys, and brain (and to a lesser extent the liver and lungs).

The proposed candidate patients (I presume, not having read their IRB nor their treatment protocol) would involve patients with penetrating trauma (knife or GSW) that have already had a resuscitative thoracotomy (as per my interpretation of the New Scientist article). This means that the patient is either in extremis, or has lost vital signs (no B/P, no pulse), at this point, under certain criteria, the chest is opened and the heart prolapsed from the pericardium, the aorta is cross-clamped and open massage or defibrillation is performed along with massive volume resuscitation. For these patients, this is literally, pulling out all the stops to try to save them. It often has a low survivability (~7%) as there is literally nothing else that can be done....until this trial.

The effect would be to suspend cellular aerobic metabolism and induce a state of hypometabolism that could be sustained by anaerobic metabolism. Not quite the suspended animation of science fiction. This would limit the amount of oxygen radicals that can lead to reperfusion syndrome, but this is not a given.

The questions that remain: how will humans as a "higher lifeform" with a more temperamental neurological makeup deal with this hypometabolic state? Will they be able to cool them fast enough in the hectic conditions of a trauma-code to be useful? What will their neurological status be? What about the blood already lost - the patient will likely need significant transfusions, will this reduce the effectiveness of the treatment due to transfusion related lung injury or transfusion related immunosuppression. Will the patient tolerate the hypothermia as this is traditionally considered a part of the lethal triad, for that matter, saline is a very acidic substance (to the body), how will they tolerate that acidosis (also part of the triad). I hope they are able to obtain useful information about these (and other) questions that may make this a viab

I've seen resistor boxes used for testing EVSEs that take 6.6kW and of course don't fail.

AKA, space heaters? 6.6kW is nothing.

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

In accordance with the ITER specifications this switch will be used for continuous operation with DC currents up to 70 kA and shall be capable, on command, to transfer this current to a resistive load under a voltage up to 10 kV in less than 1 ms.

So, we are talking about an *impulse* of about 700TW... or 700,000,000kW for metric impaired.

I've seen it mostly in talks, and it seems like you can't have a reactor design study talk without discussing tritium breeding ratio results in the last couple years. If you just search through the journals for TBR, a lot comes up, although not necessarily the same ones I was thinking of earlier. Some examples for tokamaks one and two and even shows up a lot in design studies for other reactors types. The goal is a breading ratio over 1.05, and designs seem to hit 1.10 to 1.2, and in many cases shoot for a lower ratio while not needing enriched lithium.

The presentation you link to only seems to say that a ratio of 1 or greater than 0.9 is needed for some research work, although that is not the goal most DEMO-like design studies are going for. The article you linked earlier seems to be over estimating blanket volume by a factor 3-5 at least compared to some of the studies that came up, and a large part of the volume of the blanket is not lithium. Some designs don't use pure lithium in the lithium parts either, using various compounds which can be a lot cheaper. The expensive part comes down to if the lithium needs to be isotopicly enriched. If all you needed was something like 1000 tonnes of lithium oxides or similar, that is more like $5M for raw costs, plus the enrichment costs depending on the design.

I've seen it mostly in talks, and it seems like you can't have a reactor design study talk without discussing tritium breeding ratio results in the last couple years. If you just search through the journals for TBR, a lot comes up, although not necessarily the same ones I was thinking of earlier. Some examples for tokamaks one and two and even shows up a lot in design studies for other reactors types. The goal is a breading ratio over 1.05, and designs seem to hit 1.10 to 1.2, and in many cases shoot for a lower ratio while not needing enriched lithium.

The presentation you link to only seems to say that a ratio of 1 or greater than 0.9 is needed for some research work, although that is not the goal most DEMO-like design studies are going for. The article you linked earlier seems to be over estimating blanket volume by a factor 3-5 at least compared to some of the studies that came up, and a large part of the volume of the blanket is not lithium. Some designs don't use pure lithium in the lithium parts either, using various compounds which can be a lot cheaper. The expensive part comes down to if the lithium needs to be isotopicly enriched. If all you needed was something like 1000 tonnes of lithium oxides or similar, that is more like $5M for raw costs, plus the enrichment costs depending on the design.

I've seen it mostly in talks, and it seems like you can't have a reactor design study talk without discussing tritium breeding ratio results in the last couple years. If you just search through the journals for TBR, a lot comes up, although not necessarily the same ones I was thinking of earlier. Some examples for tokamaks one and two and even shows up a lot in design studies for other reactors types. The goal is a breading ratio over 1.05, and designs seem to hit 1.10 to 1.2, and in many cases shoot for a lower ratio while not needing enriched lithium.

The presentation you link to only seems to say that a ratio of 1 or greater than 0.9 is needed for some research work, although that is not the goal most DEMO-like design studies are going for. The article you linked earlier seems to be over estimating blanket volume by a factor 3-5 at least compared to some of the studies that came up, and a large part of the volume of the blanket is not lithium. Some designs don't use pure lithium in the lithium parts either, using various compounds which can be a lot cheaper. The expensive part comes down to if the lithium needs to be isotopicly enriched. If all you needed was something like 1000 tonnes of lithium oxides or similar, that is more like $5M for raw costs, plus the enrichment costs depending on the design.

Because any place that is designated as a "gun-free zone" thereby becomes a place of danger. Nowdays they are refered to as "Rob Me zones".

Generally speaking, bars are rather filled with people, so robbing people inside is impractical and a bit silly of an idea even when everyone is supposed to be disarmed.

Robbing them in the parking lot is a possibility -- bars seem to attract crime of all sorts -- but the typical target you want to mug is someone who can't defend themselves. For a bar, that most likely means drunk people, who would be in no condition to defend themselves if they did have a gun; you'd just end up with an escalation of the situation that would most likely work against the armed patron by encouraging the mugger to attack while the patron attempts to draw.

On the other hand, the threat of impulsive, alcohol-fueled murders in a flash of anger is massively increased when you let someone carry a weapon into a bar. 50% of all murders are committed under the influence of alcohol. Allowing guns into bars is a recipe for raising the local homicide rate.

Just look at what happened to the schools !

Over 99% of schools will never have a school shooting throughout their lifespan. There were 38 school shootings in 2000-2010 resulting in the deaths of 33 victims (not including the shooter). This number does not include colleges but does include a handful of non-public schools. There are just under 99,000 schools in America, meaning that around 4% of 1% of schools had a shooting, and of those most were single-target attacks or very short opportunistic attacks rather than the slow, deliberate Columbine or Virginia Tech style massacre that people hold up as an example of where a gun might help.

On the other hand, 606 people died of firearms accidents and 19,392 people died of suicide just in 2010 alone. So with that in mind, what exactly do you think would have been solved by bringing guns to a building filled with curious children and emotionally wrought teens other than a lot of opportunities for tragedy.

You have to do a fair threat evaluation. Guns in schools are a far bigger threat than they are a threat neutralizer.

And one other thing I forgot to add:

Had they focused their modifications only on creating high yield and high nutrition crops

There is no single gene for yield. Yield is a factor of weather, soil fertility, moisture, biotic conditions like disease, pest and weed pressure, ect. You take away pest pressure, and you don't think yield won't go up? well, it kind of doesn't, not in developed countries anyway, where we were spraying pesticides to control pests. But in developed countries, things are very different. So, you really can't say they don't improve yield, or sustainability. Even the much maligned herbicide tolerant ones do.

Of course, higher nutrient crops don't fair any better than Monsanto's crops, perhaps they are hated even more, if the protesting is anything to go by. Which makes sense I guess...the claim that GMOs are all bad and there's no nuance whatsoever and therefore you should don't money to professional anti-GMO activists might look a bit silly when it is out saving even more lives. God forbid Greenpeace, Navdanya, OCA, and all those other greedy sociopaths put humanity before profit. Their actions have lead to more deaths than the anti-vaxxers.

And one other thing I forgot to add:

Had they focused their modifications only on creating high yield and high nutrition crops

There is no single gene for yield. Yield is a factor of weather, soil fertility, moisture, biotic conditions like disease, pest and weed pressure, ect. You take away pest pressure, and you don't think yield won't go up? well, it kind of doesn't, not in developed countries anyway, where we were spraying pesticides to control pests. But in developed countries, things are very different. So, you really can't say they don't improve yield, or sustainability. Even the much maligned herbicide tolerant ones do.

Of course, higher nutrient crops don't fair any better than Monsanto's crops, perhaps they are hated even more, if the protesting is anything to go by. Which makes sense I guess...the claim that GMOs are all bad and there's no nuance whatsoever and therefore you should don't money to professional anti-GMO activists might look a bit silly when it is out saving even more lives. God forbid Greenpeace, Navdanya, OCA, and all those other greedy sociopaths put humanity before profit. Their actions have lead to more deaths than the anti-vaxxers.

Here's a paper about the wave function and computability (computability beyond P, NP, etc)

Marian Boykan Pour-El and Ian Richards. The wave equation with computable initial data such that its unique solution is not computable. Advances in mathematics, vol. 39 (1981), pp. 215–239.

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

Review at
http://journals.cambridge.org/...

is it complex innate behavior that evolved or "understanding"?

what is the difference?

Look at the elaborate nests of the Bowerbird: http://ngm.nationalgeographic....

Does that bird "understand" structural physics & bird mating behavior and "choose" based on its "understanding"?

No. According to this study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

That study and many like it examine **instinct** as the mechanism for this behavior...they do not **in any way** examine bird behavior in terms of "understanding"

So until I have a definition of "understanding" that is mutually exclusive of instinct & other well understood animal behaviors...and relates that to the human concept of "understanding" this research is claiming something that is not supported by evidence.

The Ruhlman/Polcyn charcuterie book doesn't go deep enough into detail, but cites Harold McGee's "On Food And Cooking". I don't have a copy, so I've tried to find some other sources.

• Ruhlman writes about "Uncured" and "No Nitrites or Nitrates Added" Bacon. Of particular note is his link to his article about meat curing safety concerns where he talks about the actual dangers of nitrites (only a few grams of sodium nitrite can kill you, which is partly why curing salt is only ~6% sodium nitrite).
• Very interesting article on how little nitrites even come from cured meat

  . 400+ hotdogs (or quite a lot of bacon) has fewer nitrites than a single serving of Arugula (a whole foods favorite) or 4 servings of celery or beets.

• Fact Sheet from American Meat Institute. Possibly biased source, but has some discussion of how beets/celery are used to create cured meats (which by definition include nitrites).
• UW-Madison Meat Laboratory pamphlet. Has some good discussion of what the different terminology on meat product labeling means. Particularly of note is the USDA rules that allow you to call products cured with non-traditional sources of nitrites "uncured" despite the fact that they are cured. Also discusses how meats only make up 5% of our nitrite intake and ~90% of the nitriate and nitrite added to meats is broken down and converted to other compounds, leaving very little behind.
• Some discussion on the curing process from one of the better sausage resources online. Cited for discussion of actual quantities and ratios of curing salts needed to work. You need about 50ppm to be effective, the FDA asks for 156ppm to ensure enough curing plus a safe amount of nitrites. If whole foods is selling it, you can be sure it meets these requirements.
• I recognize that I have yet to provide a source that substantiates the claim that the celery-bacon may have more nitrates than traditional bacon. According to this abstract (can't access the full paper), it is not possible/difficult to "analytically measure the amount of nitrite produced by this [alternative] process" (since nitrites break down and while you can measure their presence after the fact, you can't measure their presence in the initial curing)
• This GOOD article references a study that found more nitrites in the alternative bacon than in traditional. Unfortunately it is not available without a subscription (I think I actually remember reading that article which is probably why I made my original post, but my paper-subscription to Cooks Illustrated does not include online access).

Hope some of this answers your questions (or points you in the right direction if you have journal access). My takeaway from it all is that it really doesn't matter. There is so little of it present in cured meats compared to other foods that are never even questioned that it seems like a total red-herring used to sell one brand over another (like

There may indeed be an increased risk of brain tumors from cellphone use though http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

This has been known for a while. I didn't even know about the risk of cancer (which we now believe isn't there), but the risk of brain tumors is a concern for me. My phone switches to wifi when I am at home or work, and I increase the distance of the phone from my head by using bluetooth, or car stereo, and also limit time spent on the phone to try to decrease my risk.

I've heard considerable... controversy... surrounding that disposal method. You've got a very curious situation where a material either has to be treated as (low level) hazmat or can be declared delicious, healthful, fertilizer, and spread over agricultural land. Verdicts tend to vary from 'environmentally sustainable reuse!' to 'You don't fucking mean that we provide legislative incentives to build waste dumps with absolutely no containment on top of active farmland?'.

(In one particularly, um, polarizing, case the department of Housing and Urban Development funded a study (sorry about the paywall, fuck Elsevier) on some convenient poor urban neighborhoods to see if healthful biosolids could reduce lead uptake by the residents. Accounts... vary sharply... as to how much the study population was told about what exactly was being done. There have been a number of similar studies, mostly on similarly poor and black neighborhoods, which has raised some questions about whether the study sites were chosen in part for ignorant powerlessness. To my knowledge, no followup data are available on the health effects of those studies, positive or negative.)

First of all, is this the right paper?

It seems that the topic of the linked article is a new unsupervised algorithm that categorizes images. The linked article says that 'the Evolution-Constructed Features algorithm is notable in that it decides for itself what features of an object are significant for identifying the object', which unsupervised algorithms do implicitly, no? It is also stated that the algorithm 'is able to learn new objects without human intervention' - so if I'm interpreting this and the article's abstract correctly, the algorithm uses a novel approach to coding some sort of more or less raw image data which it receives as input? Otherwise, it appears that what makes the approach newsworthy is its extremely high accuracy, which was 95 to 100% on some measures. That sounds very good if the tests were representative of a real-world environment.

Published in Pattern Recognition Journal
$35.95 for the paper

Related papers from the research group.

Is this the one? It doesn't appear that the researchers have posted a manuscript, and I'm not sure that Elsevier would take kindly to it if they posted the published draft (although many researchers do so anyway). That, along with a lack of public interest in reading articles upon which pop science articles (like the one in the link) are based, probably explains the lack of a link or reference to the original article. If you have access to a library that subscribes to Pattern Recognition, you can get the article.

Here's the journal article:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031320313002549

I love driving. It's traffic I hate!

I love traffic that's why I use a bicycle, 20 miles is ok to do by bike. You are not alone in not liking traffic from a car, there are recent studies that says that if when you are in a car you will enjoy the city less than when on foot or on a bike.

The comments on this story indicate that nobody has read the article or its citations, so here's a better summary for those of us who don't want to read the article.

First, the experimental evidence: While the paper linked to in the summary is in fact a math paper (and thus has no new experimental resutls), it does cite a few science papers, of which the best describes a real experimental setup:

Gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) collecting food for storage violated this principle, and failed to support even weaker forms of transitivity. All subjects preferred option a (one raisin, 28 cm into a tube) over b (two raisins, 42 cm), and b over c (three raisins, 56 cm), but none of the subjects preferred a over c.

So we do have something concrete. Some birds are put in front of some tubes that have raisins in them. Some tubes have a few raisins near the front of the tube (easy to reach) and others have a larger number of raisins that are towards the back of the tube (difficult to reach). The birds must then evaluate the distance-versus-quantity tradeoff: is it worth crawling a little deeper into the tube to get more raisins? Birds were given three tubes to choose from and, like the article summary says, they thought tube A was better than tube B and that B was better than C, but they thought C was better than A.

What kept the birds from entering both tubes? Unfortunately, I don't know, but if someone will send me $40 I'll buy the Springer article and find out.

There was another experiment done on hummingbirds that did what the authors call a "binary/trinary" procedure: Three different types of fake flowers were created. All flowers were given sucrose in water, but the concentration of sugar and the total amount of available liquid varied between flowers. In A-type flowers, there was a small amount of high-concentration sugar water. In B-type flowers, there was a large amount of low-concentration sugar water. Then there were C-type flowers, which were strictly inferior to A-type flowers (less water and a lower concentration of sugar!) but only partially worse than B-type flowers (less water, but a higher sugar concentration). Then four experiments were run: Three binary experiments (where birds choose between A and B, between B and C, and between C and A), and one "trinary" experiment (where birds were given all three flowers at the same time). The binary experiments showed that birds consistently picked A over B, B over C, and A over C. That's perfectly consistent. But in the ternary experiment, six of sixteen birds decided that B was the best of the three. That's a violation of regularity because if A-type flowers are better than B-type flowers, then it shouldn't matter whether or not C-type flowers exist.

So... We have some experiments suggesting that birds don't rate their food sources consistently---what they pick depends on the context. There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to insist that an experiment on sixteen birds is too small to conclude anything (which is true) and therefore is too small to suggest that something is worth further investigation (which is silly). Another is to agree that the experiment shows that there's something complex about the way that birds rank their food sources, but to insist that it's non-news because "everybody knows the world is complex and that cows aren't spherical." That's a fascinating viewpoint---you could use it to trivialize all of science. Still another response is to make a post on Slashdot about how your options vary based on what's available because you need balanced nutition---at least you're thinking, but all of the experiments are careful to balance a single food type (e.g. raisins, sucrose) against a non-nutritional parameter (e.g. distance, concentration).

The authors of the present paper decided to present one mathematica

That's a popular little trivia fact that unfortunately isn't supported by the evidence. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691502000960

I find low and regular doses of caffeine to be much more effective than single, high doses. I have a half-litre thermos full of filter coffee which gives me about 50mg of caffeine four times a day. (And because I don't crash or get insomnia, I'm not going out and buying a second or third Red Bull to keep me going.) There seems to be good evidence that low doses of caffeine are effective as performance enhancers, without having particularly serious side-effects. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691502000960

Human cells already do some sort of checksumming on their genes. To start with, polymerases - the proteins that copy DNA - have proof-reading activity. That is to say, they check whether their copied DNA is equal to the parent DNA molecule. Then, if DNA damage occurs - which happens more frequently than you'd think - it gets repaired almost entirely flawlessly. Single strand breaks are easy to repair for the cellular machinery; they can use the opposite strand of the same DNA molecule as a scaffold for repair. Double strand breaks are indeed more difficult to repair, but luckily we have two sets of each chromosome (one from mommy, and one from daddy), so if one breaks, the other pair member is used as a reference. Sure, these pairs of chromosomes are not entirely identical, but for most cases, it suffices. As a result, the human mutation rate is on the order of about once every 100 million times. That's really low. Try to copy a 3GB file (roughly the size of human DNA) 100 million times on your computer, and I'm sure you'd have a lot more corrupted files than just 1. Unfortunately, the human body contains several trillions of cells, leaving enough room for incremental errors. One hallmark of cancer is that it relies on (partially) shutting down this "checksumming", and as such can attain a much higher rate of mutation - and as a result, a much higher rate of evolution - than normal cells. (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867411001279?np=y for a very nice overview). Besides that, just guarding the genes is not enough. Our genetics is more than enough to induce heavy proliferating cells. How else would we be able to grow from a single-celled individual (the fertillized egg) to a fully-grown body of several trillion cells? Healthy humans NEED proliferation (of certain cells), and thus we have genes that code for just that. The key here is activating certain genes in certain environments, and inactivating other genes. Every cell type has a different transcriptional landscape. This is controlled by epigenetics. Just guarding your genes would not guard against any changes in epigenetics, and you would still be prone to cancer.

Excess energy on the grid is a real issue, especially if there has been a significant wave of people adopting these systems. If there isn't demand for all the electricity being pumped onto the grid, there has to be a place to dump the energy. This is an even bigger issue with wind and other intermittent sources.

If the grid is overwhelmed and there is no demand, should folks expect to get paid for that energy, which could actually cost the utility money to dump somewhere?

Something else to bear in mind- the utility has to operate base load plants no matter what.

Recent literature indicates that these issues can be overcome (one example from Utilities Policy ), but that the process will take time. Utilities are a very conservative industry and are often slow to adapt new systems because they have stringent boundary conditions.

Just playing the devils advocate here- I'm sure profit is a part of it.

$31.50 to read this paper? Puh-lease!

For 10 cents a day, I'll take the risk that I'm wasting my money. It's cheap insurance, and there might even be a benefit.

You might want to consider that there might be a significant risk of harm too.

Slight negative effect on lung cancer survival for high doses of Vitamin A.
Increase risk of all-cause mortality for high doses of Vitamin E.
Significant increase in mortality from gastrointestinal cancers from high doses of antioxidants, A & E in particular.

One recent solution, posted not much above you: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4531753&cid=45634657

Another one, that's actually been around for quite a while, vitrification (i.e. glassification): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513010313

And yet another one, that Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed some years ago: http://web.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-2/text/radside1.html

There's no dearth of solutions. The issue is one of political will and public relations.

This is the primary call of the open letter, Responsible Nuclear Advocacy. Despite my criticisms of the Nuclear Industry I support the development of a reactor that addresses the issue of 70,000 tons of Pu-239 (and much more U-238) currently stored in reactor sites around America, simply because it's irresponsible for our generation to foist these issue onto later generations.

One of the core reasons I support the development of such a reactor because it is capable of utilising weapons grade plutonium as fuel creating an impetus for disarmament and, hopefully, slowly defusing the asymmetrical weapons threat.

Unfortunately, because there is no geologically sound Nuclear waste dump in operation it's totally inappropriate to discuss building a new reactor facility until a proper containment facility is available. 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 - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available.

We need something made of granite. The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore, so it has to be 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. As I pointed out in another post, the design of the Swedish facility shows how a reactor facility that complies with the industry designed improvements could be implemented.

Even doing that will probably take 30 years to complete, but there is more to it than that.

I was a big fan of the Integral Fast Reactor as a potential solution and in a way I still am. But the reality is 3rd and 4th generation reactors are a pipe dream because our material science is not advanced enough yet to produce a reactor design that will last the thousands of years it will take to use that fuel. If you are going to build reactors then do it properly and build a Terra-watt scale nuclear reactor facility the belly of a massive granite mountain with an attached waste facility and chomp up all your remaining plutonium or end all commercial nuclear activity altogether.

Why? Because Nuclear power is energy intensive *after* the energy has been produced simply because said technology (material sciences) are not adequate to produce a Nuclear reactor that has a life span that matches the geological time frames of the fuel. This exposes the facility to all the issues associated with de-commissioning reactor sites every 4 decades or so. A reactor design that lasts at least 1000 years and is a closed loop, i.e. the plutonium goes in and nothing comes out (except electricity and possibly hydrogen) and avoids all the energetic costs associated with mining, enrichment and de-commissioning/demolition of the reactor.

As long we are producing plutonium and there is no where for it to go we will have a Nuclear Weapons threat and this is the price we pay for opening that pandora's box. I don't hide the fact that I don't like the constant failure of

+5 insightful

Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are.

The key thing to understand in our generation is the cost of the infrastructure to transport the spent fuel around. In the U.S this is estimated to be a 30 year project with significant costs attached to it, in and of itself. Fukushima has demonstrated the danger inherent in the spent fuel cooling pools, that is why any infrastructure project has to start with an actual location to transport it to.

In the U.S Yucca mountain does not meet the requirements Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products, especially the ones you are referring to. Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash, you *need* granite if you want a serious facility. Even the Swedish test facility is better designed than Yucca and the design of the actual facility shows the U.S how it *should* be done.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871678412008801

Ok, here is the actual paper. According to it:

After 20 days of acclimatization, 100 male and 100 female animals were randomly assigned on a weight basis into 10 equivalent groups.

So, I can do a little math. Ten equivalent groups taken from 200 animals is 20 animals each. This isn't rocket science. Breaking them out by sex is even worse, since it means that each group had only 10 animals.

For each sex, one control group had access to plain water and standard diet from the closest isogenic non-transgenic maize control; six groups were fed with 11, 22 and 33% of GM NK603 maize either treated or not with R. The final three groups were fed with the control diet and had access to water supplemented with respectively 1.1 × 108% of R (0.1 ppb of R or 50 ng/L of glyphosate, the contaminating level of some regular tap waters), 0.09% of R (400 mg/kg, US MRL of glyphosate in some GM feed) and 0.5% of R (2.25 g/L, half of the minimal agricultural working dilution).

Here are the 10 (not 4) groups:

1) control (normal water, normal corn)
2) 11% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water
3) 11% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water
4) 22% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water
5) 22% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water
6) 33% GM corn, not treated with roundup, normal water
7) 33% GM corn, treated with roundup, normal water
8) normal corn, traces of roundup in water
9) normal corn, 0.09% roundup in water
10) normal corn, 0.5% roundup in water

So, I am speaking about this after having actually read and understood the paper. Why don't you give it a look?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637

The study involved 200 rats, half female, split into 10 groups.
As I understand it, the greatest 'statistical significance' comes from the female rats.

Taking one part, and closely analysing it.
'Up to 14 months, no animals in the control groups showed any signs of tumors whilst 10–30% of treated females per group developed tumors, with the exception of one group (33% GMO + R). By the beginning of the 24th month, 50–80% of female animals had developed tumors in all treated groups, with up to 3 tumors per animal, whereas only 30% of controls were affected.'

Starting with the first statement. 'up to 14 months, 1-3 rats in some of the groups developed tumors, whereas no rats in the control group or the group fed GMO + roundup did' So, of 7 groups, 2 groups were cancer free.

Going onto the next part.
3 rats got cancer in the control group.
5-8 in the other 6 groups.
But, half of those 6 groups were also fed roundup.

So, a total of between 9 and 15 extra rats got cancer, apparantly, if you multiply up the control group.

But - the whole basis of this paper now rests on two rats.
If in the control group at the 24th month, 5 rats would normally have gotten cancer, and 2 happened to get lucky, the paper largely becomes non-statistically significant.

I am not a statistician.

If normally, half of rats get cancer at 24 months, then you would expect 5 rats, not 3 in the control group to have it.
How likely is it that only three rats would die?
Only if this chance is under 5% does the rest of the paper have any weight whatsoever.

There's really no point in flying solar cells, they don't work any better than down on Earth

Actually, they do. Solar irradiance increases with altitude, at a rate of about 8% per 1000m.

Unfortunately, all known methods of wireless power transfer have highly non-linear transfer efficiencies that for any distance in the scale of kilometers introduce much more than 8% losses.

There's really no point in flying solar cells, they don't work any better than down on Earth

Actually, they do. Solar irradiance increases with altitude, at a rate of about 8% per 1000m.

My understanding is that cooler temperatures also increase solar cell efficiency, so getting them up into cooler air may be useful as well.

There's really no point in flying solar cells, they don't work any better than down on Earth

Actually, they do. Solar irradiance increases with altitude, at a rate of about 8% per 1000m.

Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759

We find that the least cost solutions yield seemingly-excessive generation capacityâ"at times, almost three times the electricity needed to meet electrical load. This is because diverse renewable generation and the excess capacity together meet electric load with less storage, lowering total system cost. At 2030 technology costs and with excess electricity displacing natural gas, we find that the electric system can be powered 90%â"99.9% of hours entirely on renewable electricity, at costs comparable to today'sâ"but only if we optimize the mix of generation and storage technologies.

OMG, she is much braver than I am. I would be totally grossed out and freaking out. Humans host a huge amount of bacteria, mites, virii, etc.... but there is something especially gross about visible parasites that just make my stomach turn.

This was a tangent link and I really feel sorry for people who have to live through such encounters, especially a multiple infestation:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893913001695

No it isn't. You may have noticed how people have become less healthy as they removed saturated fats from their diet. You may however missed the vast body of evidence that has replaced the crappy epidemiological evidence that wrongly implicated saturated fats in the 70s.

Really. Let's see a few more recent studies, then.

No. This is the thoroughly debunked consensus. It is not longer consensus.

Well then, let's see what major medical and health associations say, then:

• The American Heart Association: (1)
• The Center for Disease Control: (1)
• The European Food Safety Authority: (1)
• The World Health Organization: (1) (2)

It's ketogenic. The metabolic pathways that make this true are fully understood.

Okay, cool beans. Feel free to explain the pathways and why more ketones is a good thing.