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no one ever cites those studies that show lower speed limits are safer... Because they don't exist.

...really?

That's fascinating.

Here's one.

Or perhaps this?

Suck it.

When considering whether someone thinks they are better than average in driving skill you should look at this study

Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, 93% of the US sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% (above the median). For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.

OK, to be fair, I only know of one vaccine that poses a real threat, and that is only because it is misused. That would be the chicken pox vaccine. It should not be used on children. The data supplied by virtually every source shows this, even when the sources conclusion recommends the vaccine.

Utter nonsense. Chicken pox hospitalizations and deaths have drastically declined since introduction of the vaccine. And despite huge numbers of people receiving the vaccine, adverse reactions have remained extraordinarily rare.

or he'd have some explaining to do!

I think we can guess this one: "We need more money."

That aside, I was reading a paper this morning about how the fluoridation chemicals that most cities put into their water supply, aside from causing cancer, causes lead to leach out of plumbing. America has half of the world's fluoridated population. Coincidence, perhaps.

When you have faith, true faith you see the weird man-made scaffolding of intelligent design theories as unnecessary and counterproductive. Where God seems to conflict with science some choose to believe that one is right and the other is wrong when the truth is that both are in harmony and it is our understanding of both that is flawed. Those who read only their own ephemeral rules, theories and prejudices into the bible have not accepted the spirit which is necessary to guide each of us through the poetry of God's creation whenever it seems to conflict with the logic of what we think we know.

A faithful person also knows (as any honest scientist should know), that those "gaps" where God must exist are enormous. The amount of her universe(s) we truly understand is vanishingly small, far less than 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the universe is known to us. What we know is certainly smaller than ourselves, our brain, a leaf of grass, , DNA, atoms, quarks, strings and everything. While we've come to learn more about each of these things with each passing day, we should accept that a scientist 50 or 100 years from now would look at the social constructs we know as scientific beliefs as being remarkably simplistic. Even for agnostics and atheists who choose to disbelieve in a universal creator with more embedded intelligence than the 3 pounds of chemicals within their brains, the Judeo-Christian bible contains remnants of the human story which pre-dates agriculture and civilization. In this age of short attention spans we need such an anchor to counter-balance pop-cultural fads and give us a longer view of humanity.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/17/ridleys-riposte-to-john-abraham/

Guest essay by Dr. Matt Ridley

On a blog called Desmog Blog, John Abraham has criticized my recent article in the Wall Street Journal on climate sensitivity. Here’s my piece http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579067532485712464.html
And here’s his piece: http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/16/john-abraham-slams-matt-ridley-climate-denial-op-ed-wall-street-journal.

It’s a poor response, characterized by inaccurate representation of what I said, even down to actual misquoting. In the whole article, he puts just four words in quotation marks as written by me, yet in doing so he misses out a whole word: 20% of the quotation. Remarkable. If I did that, I would be very embarrassed.

He directly contradicts the IPCC’s report on extreme weather, which found no link between current storms and man-made climate change; he is apparently unaware that the rising costs of extreme weather are entirely caused by rising investment and insurance values, not rising quantities of extreme weather, as even a small amount of research would have told him ( http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/follow-up-q-from-senate-epw.html ); he falsely claims that I say rising sea levels will be beneficial, when I wrote no such thing; and he wholly ignores the benefits of mild climate change, even though I was careful to say that the key thing is to compare costs and benefits. It is possible that he does not know the meaning of the word “net”: he certainly shows no understanding of the concept.

“General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

Mr Abraham’s main point is that up to 2 degrees C of warming is likely to do net harm. For this surprising claim, he produces noevidence. None. The evidence suggest the opposite – that less than two degrees of warming will cut excess winter deaths, increase average rainfall, extendgrowing seasons and increase rates of photosynthesis in wild and agricultural ecosystems. “A global warming of less than 2.5C could have no significant effect on overall food production,” says the UNFCC website.

http://unfccc.int/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/climate_change_information_kit/items/288.php

See links here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188913000092%00 and here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/.

And yet it is he who accuses me of “non-science nonsense”. It’s truly disgraceful that a tenured academic, as I assume Mr Abraham to be, should make so many mistakes and yet feel free to hurl unsubstantiated abuse at another human being, however desperate he may be. In writing about climate change I am careful not to make unprovoked ad-hominem attacks – until attacked in this way.

I always play the ball, not the man. Mr Abra

The only reason it was added to rice is because that's what these people grow/eat on a daily basis.

Actually many of the people with vitamin A deficiency live in Africa, in areas not known as rice country.

The actual problem is an economic system that leads to people growing rice almost exclusively: "Beyond that though, poorly-fed people are unlikely to be able to absorb beta-carotene even when they eat golden rice. To use it, they need a diverse diet, including green leafy vegetables. But the sorts of vegetables people used to be able to find have declined in number as the green revolution of the 60s and 70s emphasised monocultures of new varieties. Household consumption of vegetables in India has fallen by 12% in two decades." -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3122923.stm

Golden rice only contributes to the problem (economic and ecological) of monoculture. Growing carrots, sweet potatoes,mangoes, papaya, or other vitamin-A rich crops is a much more sensible answer -- unless one is devoted to the current exploitative system.

The purpose of "golden rice" is not to solve malnutrition, that could be done far more cheaply and easily with carrots, etc. Its purpose is to provide good PR for the biotech industry: "Why, yes, our GM crops are largely untested for safety, and most of the studies on safety that do exist are ones we've done ourselves (trust us!); and yes, they present a novel ecological hazard of genome pollution; and yes, they have led to increased pesticides use; and yes, they give more control of agriculture to corporate interests -- but look! We found a very expensive and impractical way to prevent some cases of vitamin A deficiency! Love us! Worship us! Big Science!"

It's not science, it's scientism in the advancement of corporatism.

There really is nothing TO discuss because if they haven't come up with some magical potion that keeps 100% of the ice crystals from forming AND a way to unfreeze without damage all they are gonna end up with when they thaw it is mush anyway. The way it was explained to me its not the flash freezing that is the biggest problem, after all you dunk a head in liquid nitrogen and it'll flash freeze alright, the problem is in the thawing as THAT is where all the damage occurs.

Actually, it's typically done these days using organ vitrification, which prevents ice crystals from forming. For most crypoprotectants used in the process of vitrification, you are limited to one cell type one which it has best effect. The CI folks mostly try their best to preserve the brain without freezing damage, at the expense of some of the other cell types. This has been successfully used on laboratory animal organ transplants for mammalian livers, kidneys, and hearts; the first reference is a patent on the method of prepping the organ, which the second is a PubMed article case study dealing with a rabbit kidney vitrification and subsequent live transplant.

https://www.google.com/patents/US5723282
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/

There has also been some interesting work in the last 5 years using in Japan using a 0.01 mT magnetic field. This prevents ice crystals from forming. The technique was originally developed by ABI, a Japanese company using a technique they call the "Calls Alive System", for storing sushi at cryogenic temperatures without permitting formation of ice crystals by triggerning through the glass phase change without normal expansion you would typically have with ice. The technique is currently being used for long term storage of live teeth, and has shown some merit for other larger organs:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20478291
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011224010000854

As ridiculously shallow as the TFA is, there is some work on nanoparticle-liquid suspensions:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135943111200511X

Nanoparticles in Thermoelectric Power Plant Cooling Fluids

Nanoparticle Additives Boost Industrial Cooling Systems (That Means Saving Energy)

I'll try to make sense of it (can someone more competent provide a Cliff's-notes version, please?).

Meanwhile, sorry to rain on the bash party.

A solar cell takes far more energy (likely coal or oil) to produce than the panel will ever, EVER, get back in its usable life.

Wrong, a solar cell will produce 6x as much energy over it's life as it took to produce. That factor is continuing to increase. It's not as good as most other electric power sources, but it edges out nuclear's 5x. http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/03/energy-return-on-investment-which-fuels-win

Zow, EROI of 5 for nuclear? That's amazingly low. Most quotes I see are for around 40-60.

The referenced paper: Life cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear energy: A review seems to be somewhat out of step with other figures I've seen.

This reminds me of the study that surveyed drivers. Naturally a majority of respondents claim they are better than the average driver.

To be fair to the journalists, it wasn't them doing the rounding: Conservation of Protein Structure over Four Billion Years.

OK, then, let's look at the first sentance of the summary of the source:

"Little is known about the evolution of protein structures and the degree of protein structure conservation over planetary time scales."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

To be fair to the journalists, it wasn't them doing the rounding: Conservation of Protein Structure over Four Billion Years.

Irony: An idiot calling others idiots. You realize we don't eat our ammo?

Actually, you do. You really, really do.

Now do you see why the NRA is attacking scientists? The facts just don't align with their policy goals, and if you can't get the facts on your side, you attack the people stating them. Same strategy for tobacco companies. Same for major carbon emitters. Etc.

What's claimed is pretty impressive. They say they've gotten 60% improvement in heart function from a month long treatment course in mice and even quicker protective effect against declines in function. The caveat, as always, is that many things work well in mice, but don't translate into human therapies.

This is still paywalled, but it has many of the figures from the article as well as the abstract.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867413008842

This is of direct interest to me as I have some right side heart enlargement (precursor to failure) and take medicine for it.

I see I accidentally double pasted in my previous post. Woops.

Some summary sources suggest that spicec and herbs have been in use since early hunter times, with documented uses as early as roughly 2000 BCE ([1] [mccormicks...titute.com], [2] [wikipedia.org]; and I'm half of Chinese descent).

I guess the general use of spices and herbs from around the world does go back a bit further than I thought. Thinking about it a bit more, the use of potent plants for medicinal purposes also seems like something that has been around for quite a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_medicine
There also does seem to be evidence of genetic adaptation to certain herbs, such as coriander: http://www.nature.com/news/soapy-taste-of-coriander-linked-to-genetic-variants-1.11398

I guess all the evidence points to using copious amounts of herbs is a good idea, health-wise. On the other hand it doesn't really make a case for avoiding synthetic preservatives. In fact, if we focus on the anti-microbial properties of herbs and spices, synthetic (anti-microbial) preservatives should also sound like a good idea. If on the other hand herbs and spices are beneficial due to vitamin and mineral content, synthetic preservatives lose out completely.

I don't really know either. I've heard about things like red-meat cravings for people with mild anemia

You seem to have mentioned the 'one' exception :) ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/food-cravings_n_1940299.html )
They mention sugar and its connection to serotonin, which I found interesting and related, and that lead me to this:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201105/sunlight-sugar-and-serotonin (most interesting bit in the last paragraph)
Also, interestingly, other mammals tend to seek out (crave for) umami food:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867403008444

Returning to the point about evolution and nutrients, one wonders what humans generally consume in a primitive society. From what I can find, modern day tribes in Africa and the Amazon mainly hunt animals, grow starch-rich 'vegetables', and pick fruit, nuts and some herbs. Apparently, growing leafy vegetables isn't all that 'natural'. On the other hand, if herbs are beneficial to health due to vitamin and mineral content, it kind of makes sense to cultivate something that is almost all leaves and easily edible. As much as I like herbs, I'm not going to eat 200 grams of them each day.

I didn't mean that present nutrients would be less absorbed or that other nutrient signals wouldn't still exist, just that those signals would get bundled up with there always being a sugar reward no matter the food source, and we might learn to seek out food largely on this anticipated reward.

This argument would work if we would experience rewards from eating things with certain other nutrients (vitamins, minerals and such), which I believe is not or hardly the case. I.e.: I'm not so sure those other signals even exist.

Well if you want to go ahead and taste-test corn-starch slurries with varying degrees of starch and salt, you go right ahead. And tell me the results :-)

I believe that means we have arrived at a stalemate here ;-)
We need a volunteer to test this for us. For science!

Another idea that I've heard that I guess may be related to the taste inhibition idea (maybe you've alre

Here's a more recent study with similar conclusions, studying high-school students in Taiwan. However another study, testing something slightly different, found that when students were given a quiz after reading a chapter in either a paper or electronic textbook, they did equally well.

providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.

Really? The NSA is now handing out classified intelligence to corporations like party favors??? No, I don't think so.

Except that I am sure that they do. I'm sure that they provide corporate espionage services in the interests of the NSA or those politicians who receive the right donations from the benefiting corporations. There have been allegations for years that the NSA has had a hand in building US business interests through electronic intercepts. Hard to find a lot of info with the internet blowing up right now but here is a paywalled article from 2000 dealing with the issue of Industrial Espionage and the NSA.

From the experiments that were done to find this new layer, it seems that it is very difficult to separate from the adjoining layer (Descemet's membrane). Getting Dua's layer to separate from Descemet's membrane was a serendipitous result of simulating eye surgery (a lamellar keratoplasty, which is a partial corneal graft) involving the "big bubble technique," which uses an injection of air to separate Descemet's membrane from the corneal stroma. It turned out that it was sometimes possible to create this air bubble in specimens where Descemet's membrane had been removed, meaning there had to be another layer for air to get into. Otherwise, it wouldn't be easily detected as a separate layer.

Here's what the "big bubble technique" looks like. It's pictures of eye surgery, so don't say you weren't properly warned.

This is typically described as quantum efficiency (QE) and is a measure of (detected photons)/(incident photons). Decent scientific CCDs have a QE above 95% across much of the visible-NIR spectrum. According to this paper, the human eye has a QE of around 1% in low light conditions. Overall, it looks as though the eye is a pretty lossy system.

Why is it that every time foreign people do something amazing, someone has to question them about the actions of their governments?

Because that's the only thing they can contribute. They don't understand the science, but they do understand geography.

In this case, I'd say it's more a fault of the articles than the reader: I'm a molecular biologist, and I can't figure out from the summary or the blurby article what's going on.

“Our results show a novel, synthetic designed computing machine that computes iteratively and produces biologically relevant results,” says lead researcher Prof. Ehud Keinan of the Technion Schulich Faculty of Chemistry. “In addition to enhanced computation power, this DNA-based transducer offers multiple benefits, including the ability to read and transform genetic information, miniaturization to the molecular scale, and the aptitude to produce computational results that interact directly with living organisms.”

Honestly, aside from "DNA-based" and "read and transform genetic information," that sounds exactly like the computer I'm currently typing on. There are no concrete examples of how this could be useful in any article I'm coming across. There's no video of this thing in action. It's all buzzwords and promises.

The actual article can be found here behind a paywall. The abstract:

As computing devices, which process data and interconvert information, transducers can encode new information and use their output for subsequent computing, offering high computational power that may be equivalent to a universal Turing machine. We report on an experimental DNA-based molecular transducer that computes iteratively and produces biologically relevant outputs. As a proof of concept, the transducer accomplished division of numbers by 3. The iterative power was demonstrated by a recursive application on an obtained output. This device reads plasmids as input and processes the information according to a predetermined algorithm, which is represented by molecular software. The device writes new information on the plasmid using hardware that comprises DNA-manipulating enzymes. The computation produces dual output: a quotient, represented by newly encoded DNA, and a remainder, represented by E. coli phenotypes. This device algorithmically manipulates genetic codes.

So... in other words they made sequences in ecoli which can be used as a calculator. A very, very, VERY slow calculator. This is not a novel concept people have used DNA for computations before. DNA based computers are probably never going to replace electronic ones, I mean fundamentally, DNA is slower than electricity. Even life finds DNA to be too slow for such calculations, which is why your thoughts are conducted via sodium and potassium gradients. The fact that they don't mention any real uses for this means they couldn't think up a good reason why you'd need to do computations with DNA. "aptitude to produce computational results that interact directly with living organisms" bullshit.

So, I'd say that Israel sounds like the most interesting thing here. I now know that the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel has a PR department that works VERY hard to make their results sound interesting.

I will say that the techniques here could have real uses and could be important, just not at all in the ways that are being discussed. It could lead to a useful lab technique, maybe. But making a living computer? I'd sooner believe that North Korea had invented cold fusion.

Just one of many articles that a Google search turns up. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012821X9500213V

> Atmospheric PCO2 as determined from the goethites in these four âoewell-behavedâ
> cases ranged from values indistinguishable from modern (within analytical
> uncertainty) to values up to approximately 16 time modern (modern
> atmospheric PCO2 was taken to be 10â'3.5 atm). One interpretation
> of the fifth, âoeanomalousâ, comparison is that atmospheric CO2 levels
> increased from about 3 times modern to about 18 times modern from the
> Triassic into the Early Jurassic. This inferred value for the PCO2 of the
> Early Jurassic atmosphere is not uniquely constrained by the existing data
> and needs to be substantiated. However, even considerably lower Early
> Jurassic atmospheric PCO2 values of 6 to 9 times modern (i.e., 1/3 to 1/2
> of the estimated value of 18 times modern) would still indicate significant
> differences between the global carbon cycles then and now. These
> results highlight the need for more research on the behavior of the
> atmosphere during and after the Triassic-Jurassic transition.

Guess what...
* planet earth didn't blow up
* it didn't turn into a Venusian hell
* planet earth had some of the lushest growth of flora and fauna in its entire history

And that's really the problem with GMO, testing sucks.

Not true.

Lots of short term test and tons of grandfathering in genes because they came from other organisms where they were not a problem.

What are you talking about? They didn't 'grandfather in' any of the genes inserted into crops. The genes are the various cry genes from Bt, the C4 EPSPS from Agrobacterium, the pat gene from Streptomyces hygroscopicus, the cspB gene and the NptII gene from E.coli, and the genes for coat proteins from papaya ringspot virus and cucumber moasic virus. Although I can find no cause for concern among those genes, I don't recall any grandfathering going on during the deregulation process. You are misinformed. At best you could argue that the herbicide applied to some GE crops is dangerous, but contrary to some very poor papers that attempted to make that case, that is not the case and ignores both modern weed management (surprise! It's more complected than simple talking points make it out to be) and the properties of those herbicides. And even if it were the case it would still say nothing of the rest of the GE crops.

But when it comes to comprehensive testing that could reassure the general population of the safety of GMO crops, there just isn't any.

No amount of testing is going to stop hard core denialists from spreading fear among the public. There's plenty of proof that vaccines are safe, that climate change is happening, and that evolution is real, yet those topics are still controversial. Genetic engineering is just one of those topics, unfortunately. Stuff like this is easily dismissed as part of the giant Monsanto conspiracy that controls everyone who doesn't say GE crops are poison.

Given the history we have with things like thalidomide, DDT, leaded gasoline, fen-phen, etc it is not unreasonable that people be genuinely concerned about GMO crops

And the based, emotion, belief, and politics driven bullshit doesn't help any either.

especially given how widespread they've become with such little public notice

Silly measurement. Did you know that the last apple you ate was probably a bud sport? Do you know what that is? I rest my case.

Dismissing those concerns as the equivalent of creation science is at least as bad as creationism itself because it is just another misplaced faith.

No, giving into baseless nonsense is what is bad. Do you have evidence suggesting that GE crops are, in any way, bad for you, or do you just have the same appeals to ignorance and fallacious tactics everyone else opposing scientific consensus has?

They seemed to have answered the rat strain criticism and the food intake one here, among other things:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512008149

I will grant them that all the data collected on 200 rats over several years is in sufficient quantity as to not fit into one journal article. That should not mean they did not use all the data for their analysis; however, I'd expect them to have the data available if requested for comparison purposes, otherwise this would start to look pretty fishy.

let's see ... google gmo liver damage ... first link is
http://worldcrunch.com/tech-science/new-study-says-monsanto-gm-corn-causes-tumors-kidney-and-liver-disease/gmo-nk602-monsanto-tumors-corn/c4s9636/
(paper link at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637)

Feel free to abuse google further on the subject. And ofc pertinent criticism is welcome.

No need to look very far for the funding, just go to the journal site:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13601385

The ad on the page has consistently Life Technologies GeneArt Strings DNA fragments "Synthetic Genes Ready to Clone—Affordable for Every Lab".

There is a bit of vested interest for that particular Journal to publish papers promoting genetic engineering:

It doesn't hurt that there is going to be a genetic engineering conference this June, so you would also want to prime the pump to fill up the conference hall. Nothing like a good controversy to sell tickets.

Meh, my phone integrates to the sound system of the car and is entirely hands free. I can even answer the call with a button on the steering wheel. If you're allowed to talk to passengers....

From the Journal of Safety Research:

Our review shows that talking on the phone, regardless of phone type, has negative impacts on performance especially in detecting and identifying events. Performance while using a hands-free phone was rarely found to be better than when using a handheld phone. Some studies found that drivers compensate for the deleterious effects of cell phone use when using a handheld phone but neglect to do so when using a hands-free phone.

Actually—(a) they're just called "papers," the "white" part is a specific piece of IT jargon, and should be pronounced "scientific-sounding marketing material," as white papers are almost never rigorous or unbiased, and (b) there are plenty of books published at levels above the expected comprehension of a graduate course; these are usually bundles of papers and protocols (procedures). They're sometimes called "textbooks," but more properly "monographs."

And for what it's worth, graduate textbooks and monographs are cheaper than undergraduate textbooks because they involve fewer writers, as the material is more narrow and there are fewer experts available. Monographs in particular are exceptionally cheap because the idea of publishing a book generally comes up after the material has already been written.

Regarding the availability of content, however, the Internet is really not all that it seems when it comes to content for fourth-year undergrads and grad students. Textbooks targeted at such groups generally require combing a great deal of journal articles, which are generally available, but may not necessarily be in a consumable format. My favourite example is this paper, which outlines a method of constructing a solution to a problem (WJISP in polynomial time) and then completely fails to explain how the method works (It takes about half an hour to work out even when you know what they're talking about.)

This is where having a competently-written textbook becomes invaluable, and were it not for Wikipedia, many more topics would be completely unrepresented in any electronic secondary source.

I notice that you've long had an interest in climate studies and have proposed novel ideas for removing carbon dioxide. Are there any good texts on the current state of engineering solutions to the symptoms of the problem of anthropogenic global warming? Also, in regards to engineering fast growing plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, wouldn't these be a scourge on the land and interfere with crops and food sources much like algal blooms and kudzu?

The only science I care about is published in reputable journals.

Like the discovery of "N rays". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray
And the discovery of "Potassium Flares" in the spectra of stars. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967PASP...79..351W
Not to mention the discovery of Cold Fusion by Pons and Fleishmann. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022072889800063

I feel this may have been tounge in cheek but, its a good point, and its a question that should always lead to.... is the only difference in how (or if) we are measuring? Clearly there will be no "cell phone related" accidents before the 90s (were there a few 80s car phones? Point is the same).

What is often missed is the question of self selection: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457512002734

Notice even here, the scientists can't get past the fact that using a cell phone shows measurable impairment, yet, it seems more that drivers getting in accidents choose cell phones and not the other way around.

My interpretation: I think we have too much of an innate desire to discount others ability to manage risk. Yes, using a cell phone is a significant impairment to driving. It is. I use one sometimes, I find it impairing. However, I drive differently, and much more cautiously on a cell phone than when not using one. A LOT more cautiously.

On the other hand, I think of the worst drivers I know. The people who not only get in accidents but, who I actually am scared to be a passenger in their car. They use the phone alot. In fact, they tend to be on the phone while driving more often than not.

And coal comes from a dust-free dispenser next to the tree of gumdrops on lollipop lane. oh wait it's also mined.

The launch window is small because ISS has to be essentially lined up in orbit in a tight tolerance (called the phase angle) to rendezvous this quickly. Usually the Soyuz plays "catch up" over 2 days by flying lower (and faster) than ISS. You can control the closing rate between the vehicles by altering the altitude difference between them, which allows you to make up differences in the orbits between the vehicles. Those differences are usually just fallouts of other things, like having uncertainty in launch dates, getting the altitude just right for other vehicles (there is about a rendezvous a month at ISS), etc. It's not because Soyuz is slow, it's because spreading the rendezvous over 2 days gives you some targeting flexibility.

You have less margin to work with when you are trying to get there in 4 orbits instead of 34 orbits. Hitting that target with both ISS and Soyuz is hard but it's more about ground targeting than performance of the launch vehicle. The launch vehicle didn't give any extra oomph to get there faster, the ground essentially had the vehicle phasing in a tight tolerance at launch. They also sped up some of the tracking that was being done and turning that around into updated burns for the next orbit instead of coasting to a set of burns the next day, which was a bunch of work for the ground in a short period of time.

The Russians that devised this actually published it - it's an interesting read if you have access to the journal or want to spend $32:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576510001633

I suspect the reason most nerds are bad at social etiquette simply because they don't see the point and don't care. It's a waste of time and/or something beneath their intellectual pursuits. If you are on the verge of a breakthrough in a new black hole theory, or revolutionary AI algorithm, everything else might seem unimportant by comparison.

If they started caring, picking up proper social etiquette is really not that hard. You don't need a school a class or an instructional manual... Just mirror whatever other "smooth" and "cool" people are doing. (The hard part is to hold an engaging social conversation talking about nothing, but that's a story for another day.)

So the key is to convince the nerd of the importance of social etiquette. Ironically, those who do go to this school probably don't really need it, and those who really need it haven't realized what they are missing... but sooner or later, they will do.

The deal is, if you only intend to deal with your peers, lacking social etiquette is fine. However, that also limits your interactions - if you ever intend to communicate your ideas to others who you consider "lesser" (less educated, the general public, whatever), then not conforming to what they expect discounts you as an "expert" in their eyes.

After all, just like everyone on /. thinks people should learn more about the computer that they use because they're smarter than the general population. Of course, the general population easily says the reverse - if these computer geeks are so intelligent that they should tell us what to do and know, why aren't they smart enough to look, act and play the part?

As much as everyone loves to say to not judge a book by its cover, it's what happens. Dress sharply, and people will listen. Dress like a slob, and people will think your thoughts and ideas are the same and refuse to listen.

And if you have to ever deal with customers (travelling, say) - even if they're engineers themselves - it doesn't hurt to be extra polite and show you do know your way around a dinner (especially with bosses and managers present).

It's why a properly fitted suit is often the ideal garment - it's one of the easier get-ups to instantly add credibility in the eyes of others.

Hell, look at scams out there. You'll find the perpetrator in confidence moves always dresses up because people typically let their guard down. If a slob approached you trying to sell you some hot investment, you'd turn them away. If a sharply dressed person did it, a lot of people drop their guard and listen. Same goes for pick-pockets.

An interesting study also shows that "clothes make the man" - how the simple act of wearing say, a lab coat can increase attentiveness and carefulness of anyone who wears them.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112000200 (paywall)

http://www.psmag.com/science/the-brain-focusing-power-of-the-lab-coat-40108/

So the conclusions of this study are rather obvious.

For a group allegedly filled with "science nerds", slashdotters are always so quick to ignore subtlety and declare studies "obvious". What I think is going on here, if I may generalize, is that slashdot is NOT full of "science nerds", but rather, slashdot is full of basement-dwelling cretins that criticize everything in sight in a pathetic attempt to look smart and prop their ailing self-esteem. The nerd-equivalent of machoism. For example, see this study (which I'm sure the parent poster will dismiss as "rather obvious"):
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022103183900343

So, enlightened 140Mandak262Jamuna, do you really think it was "rather obvious" that different cultures would react differently to the Muller-Lyon illusion? Or the rod-and-frame task? TFA is interesting and worth a read.

In the core of the Sun, where the temperature is many millions of degrees and electrons and protons are squished into degenerate matter, the probability that an electron and a proton will combine via the Weak Force to make a neutron is rather low --in spite of all the energy and pressure available to help. It is so low that a completely different reaction is described: two protons combine to make a deuteron (one proton becomes a neutron during that process, and a positron is emitted instead of an electron being absorbed).

While I also know that certain unstable nuclides are quite willing to capture an electron and thereby convert a proton into a neutron, I have doubts that a stable nickel nucleus can be induced to do it. Furthermore, such a reaction would completely fail to explain how experiments involving palladium and deuterium have generated so much "heat" (not just controversy!), and have even been replicated, as reported in a major physics journal. Then there is also titanium, another metal that has interested various cold-fusion researchers.

So I think a different hypothesis is needed to explain what happens inside those metals. Since the replication-experiments prove that something is indeed happening in there, the experiments need to continue, and the nay-sayers need to shut their yaps. Just remember that humans managed to extract metals from utterly non-metallic rocks for thousands of years before understanding the chemistry behind what they were doing. Knowing the chemistry allows more efficient extraction methods to be developed, and in this case a better hypothesis of cold fusion would lead to improved experiments. But lacking such a hypothesis, it is still possible to get useful results --it will merely take longer. It just doesn't need to take even longer than that, due to idiots who think that just because we don't understand what is going on, nothing can be going on....

They are in it for the money

So? Every company on the planet is in it for the money. My pen was made by a for profit company. That doesn't mean the company is bad or that my pen doesn't write. If you want to be anti-capitalism go ahead by don't pass it off as science.

It fits with Monsanto's existing marketing strategies, which are based on monoculture

Monoculture in terms of varieties, field level, or species? If the first, simply false. You can buy plenty of varieties of seed from the various licensed dealers. If the second, efficiency will tend to gain support. If the third, hardly Monsanto's fault that the average person isn't buying teff or quinoa and therefore the demand and thus relative cultivation is low. You could just as easily blame John Deere for monoculture.

When Monsanto begins to support rebuilding depleted soils by increasing the number of worms per acre, then that company will truly be making progress in agricultural practice.

Done. Herbicide tolerance contributes to no-till agriculture which preserves soil quality. You are condemning Monsanto for something they are helping.

1. Considering we are still in the process of learning how to effectively achieve (self-)organization of neural networks, of testing different learning algorithms and different activation functions, it is perhaps a bit much to dismiss non-organic hardware implementations of ever becoming a substitute for organics.

Which doesn't mean it hasn't been looked at:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092523121000216X
http://pdf.aminer.org/000/339/993/advances_in_and_problems_of_the_implementation_of_neural_algorithms.pdf

2. A lot of power is wasted in organics on matters irrelevant to intelligence.

3. Size and power could be traded off for robustness, plasticity, ability to control and maintain.
When did you last backup your brain?
Also, try holding your breath for an hour.

I'd be interested to see a telomere study. Physiologically she's four years old, but is she four at the cellular and genetic levels?

According to this study, her telomeres match her chronological age, so she appears to be aging in that sense.

There's more and more evidence that people who "Have Never Been Sick a Day in Their Lives", are in fact, typhoid Marys. They get colds and the flu just like the rest of us, but their immune systems don't go into overdrive, and they don't have symptoms, but they do spread germs to everyone else. Here's an article w.r.t. SARS http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971211000245

1. How do we know that a rock is from Mars, especially when its composition is different from what we've found on Mars to date.

Isotope ratios and certain element ratios. These depend on the history of a planetary body, and you can rule out every planet / asteroid but Mars. I always liked the conclusion in this paper :

There seems little likelihood that the SNCs are not from Mars. If they were from another planetary body, it would have to be substantially identical to Mars

Of course, there is no such other Mars in the solar system.

The existence and composition of little atmospheric inclusions (i.e., tiny little bits of Martian air trapped in the rock) were another convincing piece of evidence for the Mars meteorites, as was the evidence of alteration by water.

2. How do rocks leave Mars' gravity well in the first place? Are they shrapnel from Mars being hit by big meteorites?

In a way. Suppose you have a big meteor hit (the size of the one that formed the Baringer Meteor Crater, or bigger). The meteor drills into the body and goes beneath the surface. At some point, it is stopped, and it dumps its kinetic energy into the body of the planet (i.e., for big impacts the meteorite explodes at depth). The shock wave is roughly spherical, and so the part directed upwards lifts up the surface above where the meteorite hit. Most of this material is lifted not much more than the depth of the explosion, forming the characteristic lip of the crater, and typically turning the layers in the rock upside down at the lip. Some of this material can be accelerated to much higher velocities, however, forming (for example) the rays of the new craters on the Moon. If the meteorite is really big, some of the surface material is accelerated to escape velocity and away it goes. After a little while (a few dozen to no more than a million years), some material will hit another planet. Mars and Earth have been trading material like this for the life of the solar system.

The really amazing thing is that some of the material ejected is not treated too roughly. Spores and seeds etc. could definitely survive the trip.

The german article about the nordic bronce age is here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordische_Bronzezeit
And this article clearly states that "a bronce age warmth period" is a rumour and lacks so far any evidence.

FYI, as a Swede I studied enough German in school to conclusively tell you that you're misrepresenting what the article is saying.

More on the Bronze Age warm period: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440312000416

The first GMO's were things like rice that grew Vitamin A so rural Asian children wouldn't go blind. That was good.

Actually, that one isn't even on the market yet. The first GE crop was actually virus resistant tobacco, in China. the second was the Flavr Savr tomato, in the US. Do you think that Golden Rice is a good idea? Then keep in mind that, by and large, the same people opposing the other GE crops you mention are opposing Golden Rice.

But instead, we got crops that are resistant to pesticides that are applied by the tanker load

I agree that it sounds bad, but not when you consider things holistically. Those herbicide tolerant crops have increased the usage of some herbicides, but they've decreased the use of harsher herbicides and reduced the need for environmentally damaging tillage. They've actually been pretty beneficial. Note also that many of Benbrook's works have been often criticized. Obviously, spraying chemicals is never a good thing if it can be avoided, but if you've got a better way to control weeds a lot of farmers would love to hear it.

and vegetables that express their own pesticides, which, we're kinda-maybe-sure don't effect humans

They don't. It is the same protein that has been used in organic farming for years to no ill effect. We know very well how it works, and yes, there has been much study on the health effects. By the way, all plants produce pesticides. It's how they defend themselves. Even your non-GE corn is going to be full of insecticidal maysin.

The relevant study is Becker 2011. It's based on 60 years of "good quality" tide gauge records for sea levels, satellite altimetry, and GPS precise positioning records for measuring land subsidence. Feel free to cite a more recent study, if you can find one with different conclusions.

Interesting that your reaction to presented evidence is simply disbelief, followed by the assumption that the evidence must somehow be wrong, despite the lack of counter-evidence and (I'm assuming) relevant expertise.

It's not global warming that is killing coral reefs. It is ocean acidification.

In a nutshell: as more CO2 is released, it will dissolve into the ocean to maintain equilibrium. As CO2 dissolves into the ocean, the result is an increase in carbonic acid, creating bicarbonate and hydronium ions, which reduce the pH of the ocean.

Under "normal" conditions, the carbonate ions are supersaturated. As pH falls, carbonate ions become undersaturated. In these "abnormal" conditions, calcium carbonate and aragonite (what coral "bones" are made of) are vulnerable to dissolution.

In more plain terms, the coral reef's skeleton is being dissolved faster than the coral reef can build it. Note that the tests for this hypothesis controlled for pollution, so this effect is observed even if the only factor is decreasing pH. From the abstract of the paper cited below, "We investigated the calcification rates of five colonies of the zooxanthellate coral Stylophora pistillata in synthetic seawater using the alkalinity anomaly technique."

^ Gattuso, J.-P.; Frankignoulle, M.; Bourge, I.; Romaine, S. and Buddemeier, R. W. (1998). "Effect of calcium carbonate saturation of seawater on coral calcification". Global and Planetary Change 18 (1–2): 37–46. Bibcode 1998GPC....18...37G. doi:10.1016/S0921-8181(98)00035-6.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566119912004831

They already have a visual confirmation of DNA replication, obtained by transmission electron microscopy again.

Google "replication fork TEM" for some images. You have to prep DNA from cells, you can't see it happening inside cells, but it's very strong visual evidence of how replication happens.

There's also a cool visualisation method that allows you to see new DNA being laid down during replication using confocal (laser) microscopy. The way it works is: they feed an artificial version of a DNA base to cells during replication, then stop, and swap the first one out with a different artificial DNA base analogue to see the new DNA being made after the point that you change analogues. They then use fluorescently labelled antibodies to detect both types of bases, using (for e.g.) a red-labelled one for the first period of replication, and a green labelled one for the second period.

This is a good explanation. It can be used for some awesome experiments - here's an example from the same lab (Fig. 3).

Free Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) studies show no significant boost to crop development. And greenhouse studies show only a 4% increase to C4 plants, not 25%. Do you have a citation for this 25% number?

The controlled greenhouse studies do not model what happens in the atmosphere because, as I said, CO2 is not the limiting factor in the wild, but it may be in the greenhouse when you're looking at a potted plant that's not competing with other plants for the nutrients in its soil and it's getting regular water and sun that the experimenters provide for them. I can give you a ton of water, and you need that water to live, but if I don't also give you food, having excess water doesn't do you much good, does it?

Now, I do not want CO2 emissions to increase the global mean temperature, changing the climate. I hope the results won't be that bad (who needs Florida anyway? I live in Florida and believe me, we won't be missing much). And I wish it were true that plants nom nom nomed up all that tasty CO2 in the open atmosphere, as I rather like cars, a lot. But that's the thing about science: it doesn't matter what you hope or wish or how you think the world should work. It just matters what is.

And the plants don't eat CO2 in the same way they do in a greenhouse (see previous links), and they haven't been eating it (notice atmospheric CO2 levels continuing to rise despite there being lots of plants around). So, "plants will eat the CO2" as a solution to CO2 emissions is a non-starter, as they don't and haven't been.

There's also this report on some electron-generated thermal anomaly on Saturn's moon Tethys

Security Systems: http://www.zoneminder.com/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8513
http://linas.org/linux/secure.html

Alarm Systems: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/How+to+implement+an+alarm+system+with+Asterisk+and+a+webcam
http://www.linux-support.com/cms/diy-burglar-alarm-system/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/interfacing-disparate-systems

CCTV: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/build-your-own-surveillance-zoneminder
http://www.seattlesurveillance.com/

Building Automation: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092658050500097X
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1029022

Engineering Apps: http://loll.sourceforge.net/linux/links/Software_Applications/Science_-_Engineering/index.html

You get the idea I hope. So what can't run on Linux?