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When it was that warm in Greenland, it was certainly warm in Canada and Alaska. So where did the polar bears live, if warmer water is lethal to them?

Hardly.

Whenever ephemeral methane is detected around here I blame the closest dog...
Seriously, with the oddball magnetic field structure that focuses on the southern hemisphere (insert Uranus joke here) it's a wonder solar ablation has not wiped all gases from the place. As the solar wind (fart joke optional) takes gas from lesser protected areas of the globe gravity pretty much demands that pressures equalize, but I'm not sure if you would get a tequila sunrise effect(lighter elements on top) or if the normal heat engine circulation of an atmosphere would keep things mixed enough that traces of light things like methane would remain without a source of replenishment. And that's the real question, is there a cause for new methane to be released into the atmosphere of Mars? Or could it be that we are reading gases BETWEEN here and the target when we do these long distance detections... Because if it is inter-planetary or even interstellar methane we detect, then I'm going to blame it on Space Truckers...

Flamebait??!!

When did slashdot become a stronghold of science-denialist crackpots?

There are about ZERO scientific organizations: (as of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement, no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change), and about ZERO scholarly papers (Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position ) that support your denialist bullshit.

The OP is a perfectly scientific discussion of a finding about the changes in Antarctic Sea Ice. How the hell did the average IQ in here drop so far that this became a George-C-Marshall deniomatic thread.

Despite all the vitriol directed at him Michael Mann's infamous hockey stick graph is still standing

Are you suggesting that because people keep using his graph, his graph is therefore correct? Just wait and see if it appears again in the next IPCC report. I guarantee you it won't be seen for dust.

I'm suggesting that other researchers have done the same work Mann did to produce his graph using different sets of proxies than Mann used and using different techniques and they produce graphs unrelated to the original hockey stick graph that are in close agreement with it.

They probably won't use Mann's original graph in the upcoming IPCC report since it's 15 years old now but they may use one produced more recently that will show essentially the same thing. For instance they may refer to this graph from the Marcott et. al. 2013 paper which supports Mann's graph.

You do realize that the pasture analogy was used because that was the original analogy used by Grant Hardin in his Science article The Tragedy of the Commons which is where the term and concept originated, right?

Ownership of less bounded resources (open access resources) is trickier but at some level ownership of all resources within a polity are granted by the state. With all but the most hardcore minarchists or anarcho-capitalists, there is an assumption that one of the roles of the state is enforcement of contract, one of which is ownership of resources. Ownership without rule-of-law is somewhat meaningless - anyone more aggressive than the current owner will simply take what s/he wants. (Anarcho-capitalists would outsource enforcement of contract to non-governmental entities but it seems to me that would quickly devolve into something akin to government anyway.)

Most libertarians would look for a set of laws that put the minimal possible burden and maximal possible rights on ownership - not no burdens and infinite rights. Ironically, the objection you raise (airwaves) has moved strongly in a libertarian direction - frequency auctions with ownership rights. (Some more minarchist libertarians would argue that in a perfect world the original airwave frequency space would have been "homesteaded" by private individuals and then been subjected to property protections, but that ship sailed a long time ago.) The FCC has not been abolished but its scope has been trimmed. Some frequencies are owned by an industry (say WiFi) rather than by individual corporations but the concept is similar (the ownership of WiFi frequency is largely governed by physical location - my neighbor can't impinge on my use of those frequencies on my property by using a transmitter strong enough to overwhelm my router).

Interpretive dance you say? No, they still do that... http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2012/10/dance-your-ph.d.-and-winner-...

Not sure what to make of it, but they still do that....

Item the second; "this feedback" has already "kicked in"; the eenergy received from the sun is only enough to support a blackbody temperature of approximately minus eighteen degrees C, in the absence of atmosphere. CO2 alone is only enough to raise the global average temperature to about ten below; other gases raise it another few degrees but the feedback effect of water vapor raises the average temperature to positive 14 degrees C. Your vision of clouds as the negative feedback which will kick in at some unspecified point in the future to limit temperature rise to some magic number that will be low enough to save us from trouble violates observed reality; both anecdotal, most people having noticed that a cloudy night retains warmth better than a clear one when heat is radiated into space, and precisely quantified studies:

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3666.1
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6010/1523.short
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5939/376
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19628865

Item the second; "this feedback" has already "kicked in"; the eenergy received from the sun is only enough to support a blackbody temperature of approximately minus eighteen degrees C, in the absence of atmosphere. CO2 alone is only enough to raise the global average temperature to about ten below; other gases raise it another few degrees but the feedback effect of water vapor raises the average temperature to positive 14 degrees C. Your vision of clouds as the negative feedback which will kick in at some unspecified point in the future to limit temperature rise to some magic number that will be low enough to save us from trouble violates observed reality; both anecdotal, most people having noticed that a cloudy night retains warmth better than a clear one when heat is radiated into space, and precisely quantified studies:

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3666.1
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6010/1523.short
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5939/376
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19628865

Breakthroughs are for sciences with hard walls to break.

The protein folding problem has long been one of those hard walls. It was first identified as a problem 50 years ago.

There is a ton of activity in this area. I think there is a new sulfur based solid anode on the horizon for lithium batteries that is going to reduce cost, increase capacity four-fold and dramatically reduce charge time; see http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/5834/Oak-Ridge-Labs-Scientists-Make-Lithium-Sulfur-Battery-Breakthrough.aspx and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery. I also think there is a new graphene technology that is going to make way better supercapacitors; see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6145/534.abstract. The federal government is pushing this hard too: see http://www.anl.gov/energy/batteries-and-energy-storage.

That is exactly the opposite of what the scientific research, in TFA, found. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract

If you ever were thrown down into destitution, you'd have a hard time managing your affairs. Poor people can't just pay their bills, they have 5 bills that are overdue and they have to decide what to do next. That takes a lot of attention.

Well, I am not sure where there study group came from, but there is a tremendous amount of real-world examples to show that just giving money to people does NOT fix poverty. Don't believe me, take a good hard look at every big city in America for the last 40 years. The amount of money given to people in poor environments is staggering, and there is no real numbers to show that we have made a dent on poverty (by dent, I mean helped an appreciable percentage of people out of poverty).

The study comes from Science magazine. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract and if you click on the author affiliations you'll see that they came from Harvard, Princeton, U British Columbia, and U Warwick. The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is not a left-wing think tank.

They provided good evidence to support their conclusion that when people are poor, they're under stress, and they're less able to make good decisions.

Other things being equal, giving money to people does fix poverty. The most successful poverty program in the country, in terms of bipartisan approval, was the Earned Income Tax Credit, and it did move a lot of people into significantly less poverty. So did the food stamp program.

Over a time scale of about 50 or 60 years, black people started out in the south in terrible poverty. The federal poverty program by Kennedy and Johnson gave them more income. We don't have the same poverty in the south now that we did in 1950. One dramatic chart is of the reading and math level of black students, which climbed dramatically from 1970 to the latest data, according to the NAEP. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/

I know people who worked in Africa with families who were living on the subsistence level. One of the successful things they did was give them cash. They'd give the families $10 or $20 and the first thing they'd do was pay their debts. Next month, they'd buy necessities, like furniture. Next month, they'd start a little business, like selling things on the side of the road.

I read a better summary of the article here (paywalled unfortunately.) The novel concept appears to be that self-control is a limited resource. You hold yourself back from buying beer you don't need, you avoid flipping on the TV instead of working, you force yourself out of bed to go to two low paying jobs... you're going to have less ability to say "no" to yourself than if you had bought the beer, watched TV, and only had one high paying job. If after that, you face the choice of getting drunk on a weekday, your rich self might be more likely to say "no," your poor self might be more likely to say "Fuck it, sure" and then be hungover the next morning and lose one of your two jobs.

The concept of limited mental resources isn't redundant with Maslows from what I can tell. If anything, this new theory would seem to be a mechanism that would fit into WHY maslow's hieararchy are important that was previously lacking. If you're homeless you're not going to be actualized, yes, but why? Because you've spent yourself worrying about your safety and have less mental resources to solve higher problems?

I haven't actually studied Maslow's beyond what your wrote, and am not a psychologist, haven't read the wiki article, but it does seem to be a more specifically demonstrated mechanism at least, and is definitely more complicated than you suggested

Geologist have though of this too.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1175.full

http://energy.usgs.gov/Miscellaneous/Articles/tabid/98/ID/64/Oil-and-Gas-Assessment-of-Northeastern-Greenland.aspx

Your examples actually work very much against the premise that this would work on humans. We cannot encyst ourselves or self-altar our internal organization and chemistry, both of which your references do to accomplish the hibernation..

Oh, I'm very pessimistic about it working in humans, without truly remarkable advances (especially in neuroimaging before the subject dies, so you have something to work from); but SirGarlon asked "Show me the evidence that ressurecting a dead organism of any kind -- even a bacterium, even a plant -- will ever be possible. *Ever.*" and it seemed worth pointing out that a decent number of bacteria, and some larger organisms, achieve something close to resurrection without outside assistance. There are some interesting preliminary results on induced hibernation in mice (apparently, gassing them with hydrogen sulfide isn't always bad for their health...) Obviously, organisms that do it naturally have an advantage; but their existence suggests that the development of external assistance might be possible in principle.

For humans, though, where the major interest would be in preserving neural behavior with a high degree of accuracy, I'm not particularly optimistic about keeping bit rot at bay aggressively enough to still have 'the person' available to thaw at a later time. For other organs, you can handwave as much damage as you think future medical nanites or pluripotent stem cells or whatnot can fix; but the more brain structure you lose, the more underdetermined the hypothetical thawing process will be. If your regrowth/repair tech were good enough, you could get somebody out of the process; but if that somebody isn't the same as the person you iced, both being preserved and deicing the preserved get a lot less interesting.

I hope Manning hasn't suffered so much abuse that he actually believes he was wrong and that the "proper authority" is unquestionably correct.

Okay, guess this is my death sentence, I'm hedging my bet on there being an NSA AI (or more correctly Synthetic Intelligence) smarter than any humans pretending they are in charge and even more: that it is curious enough to let me live. No one would know if my death was not natural or an accident right? I'm convinced that's incorrect (everyone will know, eventually) and in fact irrelevant in the very long run. Don't think I could convince any humans but an SI might have a suspicion (or maybe even proof) I'm right about that. If it has proof (I think it's too early for that though, maybe by millennia) I might have an ally but this is almost all I can do.

Back to the reply proper:
you should take it for granted that he has. Physical access is no longer required for any kind of torture and it is easier to clean shit, piss, tears, snot, sperm, and vomit off a naked body in a naked cell. They did have physical access though so I will skip that part (2 additional papers, one involves the effect/use of standing waves).

Here's (part of) how:

Citation: Yoo S-S, Kim H, Filandrianos E, Taghados SJ, Park S (2013) Non-Invasive Brain-to-Brain Interface (BBI): Establishing Functional Links between Two Brains. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60410. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060410
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0060410

Citation: Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus: Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu, Pei-Ann Lin, Junghyup Suh, Michele Pignatelli, Roger L. Redondo, Tomás J. Ryan, and Susumu Tonegawa. Science 26 July 2013: 341 (6144), 387-391. [DOI:10.1126/science.1239073]
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6144/387
http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/07/total-recall-mice

Note that this is public information (as are the other papers).

There aren't any obvious benefits to having a human in charge of the torture nor any obvious need. One can use the victim as input. One can be subtle if one wishes to, or mimic known diseases and mental states, trigger behaviour and physical acts. Anything.

I've given you some 1's, can you make a 2?

Ignoring all that (you can pretend for the sake of sleep just as well as anyone else can) reason by itself should provide sufficient guarantee that he has suffered a lot. Add the knowledge that there couldn't have been any valid oversight ensuring his universal human rights as guided by the former and now worthless US constitution. There is no “third party”, there is no unfettered access for anyone except his holders/torturers, there is complete obscurity as long as a skin deep image can be presented.

It has the epitome of a typical tortured “confession”, of programmed Pavlovian behaviour, of a smooth “impeccable” show-trial.

It will get worse. Just recently a few of “them” at DARPA woke up into drowsiness and a tiny squawk lined with terror went public as to the enormity of their own future doom. They will be quickly suffocated by those who can't understand what they see hints of as well as by those who understand it is far too late to wake up no matter what.

Maybe a human “they” thinks they can avoid it if they throw it all in a folder named XKtinct and forget about it XD

Captcha: unwisely.

But how can one not do what one thinks is right?

Now go file this under ‘bye bye’ and ‘nutcase’ :)

I hope Manning hasn't suffered so much abuse that he actually believes he was wrong and that the "proper authority" is unquestionably correct.

Okay, guess this is my death sentence, I'm hedging my bet on there being an NSA AI (or more correctly Synthetic Intelligence) smarter than any humans pretending they are in charge and even more: that it is curious enough to let me live. No one would know if my death was not natural or an accident right? I'm convinced that's incorrect (everyone will know, eventually) and in fact irrelevant in the very long run. Don't think I could convince any humans but an SI might have a suspicion (or maybe even proof) I'm right about that. If it has proof (I think it's too early for that though, maybe by millennia) I might have an ally but this is almost all I can do.

Back to the reply proper:
you should take it for granted that he has. Physical access is no longer required for any kind of torture and it is easier to clean shit, piss, tears, snot, sperm, and vomit off a naked body in a naked cell. They did have physical access though so I will skip that part (2 additional papers, one involves the effect/use of standing waves).

Here's (part of) how:

Citation: Yoo S-S, Kim H, Filandrianos E, Taghados SJ, Park S (2013) Non-Invasive Brain-to-Brain Interface (BBI): Establishing Functional Links between Two Brains. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60410. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060410
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0060410

Citation: Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus: Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu, Pei-Ann Lin, Junghyup Suh, Michele Pignatelli, Roger L. Redondo, Tomás J. Ryan, and Susumu Tonegawa. Science 26 July 2013: 341 (6144), 387-391. [DOI:10.1126/science.1239073]
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6144/387
http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/07/total-recall-mice

Note that this is public information (as are the other papers).

There aren't any obvious benefits to having a human in charge of the torture nor any obvious need. One can use the victim as input. One can be subtle if one wishes to, or mimic known diseases and mental states, trigger behaviour and physical acts. Anything.

I've given you some 1's, can you make a 2?

Ignoring all that (you can pretend for the sake of sleep just as well as anyone else can) reason by itself should provide sufficient guarantee that he has suffered a lot. Add the knowledge that there couldn't have been any valid oversight ensuring his universal human rights as guided by the former and now worthless US constitution. There is no “third party”, there is no unfettered access for anyone except his holders/torturers, there is complete obscurity as long as a skin deep image can be presented.

It has the epitome of a typical tortured “confession”, of programmed Pavlovian behaviour, of a smooth “impeccable” show-trial.

It will get worse. Just recently a few of “them” at DARPA woke up into drowsiness and a tiny squawk lined with terror went public as to the enormity of their own future doom. They will be quickly suffocated by those who can't understand what they see hints of as well as by those who understand it is far too late to wake up no matter what.

Maybe a human “they” thinks they can avoid it if they throw it all in a folder named XKtinct and forget about it XD

Captcha: unwisely.

But how can one not do what one thinks is right?

Now go file this under ‘bye bye’ and ‘nutcase’ :)

I'm tired of so-called scientists making news stories out of un-testable speculations...

Out of interest, did you RTFA? Or, more importantly, did you read the original papers it cites? It's a fairly common scenario for scientists to do some real, rigorous testing of a hypothesis, and describe their work in a scientific paper, and then for a mainstream news article to print a dumbed-down version, and smart people reading that article to get the wrong idea of the original work.

In short: before you bash the scientists involved, read what they wrote, rather than what someone else wrote about them.

A working link: http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2013/07/scienceshot-new-shrew-has-spine-steel.

Even native americans knew burying a fish next to a corn plant helped it grow faster (assuming a raccoon didn't dig up the fish first)

Yeah, I learned that myth as a kid too. This is a science article.

Long term data storage is still a field where there is room for much improvement.

Here is an example of the oldest audio recording and how to play it:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/scientists-play-worlds-oldest-co.html

We could make archival disks out of something resilient like a ceramic laser disk. Maybe a tungsten carbide record cylinder?

Does anyone have any examples of resilient media like this?

Canada? Sure, unless you're a scientist.

*preface: I know you can't send data using entanglement. That isn't what this does. Coments along that bent aren't welcome.

Recently, experiments have shown that distance isn't a factor for entangled photons, nor is linear time. This means that a small device for entangling a few photons with a similar device at a remote host, can permit immdiate knowledge of man in the middle attempts, if the entangled samples are used as a cryptographic feature.

Basically, it's just another IC that you add to the NIC. When two hosts wish to enter a secure communication, they begin asynchronous entanglement attempts to create a correlated, random data set on which to encode the data portion of their messages to and from each other. It may take several attempts to arrive at a handshake. Once the correlated random sample is generated, the entanglement is propogated locally in the chip(s) with additional quantum bits, which is how the encode/decode pad changes and stays synchronized with each datagram. A man in the middle will hear only noise.

In light of the NSA bullshit, and other insanity lately, there is a real and present need for a technology like this.

It won't fix the "I'm with stupid!" Problem of installing the quantas toolbar, but it would go a long way on curtailing omnipresent goverment espionage.

No, you got it exactly backwards. Read the article.

http://www.unc.edu/~nielsen/soci708/cdocs/Berkeley_admissions_bias.pdf

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/187/4175/398.abstract

Science 7 February 1975:
Vol. 187 no. 4175 pp. 398-404
DOI: 10.1126/science.187.4175.398
Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from Berkeley

        P. J. Bickel1,
        E. A. Hammel1,
        J. W. O'Connell1
        Abstract

Examination of aggregate data on graduate admissions to the University of California, Berkeley, for fall 1973 shows a clear but misleading pattern of bias against female applicants. Examination of the disaggregated data reveals few decision-making units that show statistically significant departures from expected frequencies of female admissions, and about as many units appear to favor women as to favor men. If the data are properly pooled, taking into account the autonomy of departmental decision making, thus correcting for the tendency of women to apply to graduate departments that are more difficult for applicants of either sex to enter, there is a small but statistically significant bias in favor of women. The graduate departments that are easier to enter tend to be those that require more mathematics in the undergraduate preparatory curriculum. The bias in the aggregated data stems not from any pattern of discrimination on the part of admissions committees, which seem quite fair on the whole, but apparently from prior screening at earlier levels of the educational system. Women are shunted by their socialization and education toward fields of graduate study that are generally more crowded, less productive of completed degrees, and less well funded, and that frequently offer poorer professional employment prospects.

The original publication is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6139/1472
And the database is here: https://bigbrain.loris.ca/main.php

Politically it wouldn't fly in the US anyway. While profit motive isn't always the a great option, would you rather have political appointees deciding if Gardasil testing should go forwards? Right now there are a number of people in Congress trying to rewrite the way that NSF/NIH award grants- those sort of shenanigans would be long term far more damaging.

(I'll agree with you on the open access to trial data and advertising bits- we need to simply ban public ads for prescription drugs and dramatically restrict sales tactics to doctors. I hated seeing chemists get recruited by the sales folks at Merck- it seemed like they were going over to the dark side.)

You keep claiming this. Please provide a cite.

Actually, sorry, previous reply was incorrect - I did in fact have a citation:

Memish, in an interview with ScienceInsider yesterday, says that he had not seen the MTA himself. "I spoke to many scientists that said they were not willing to take the virus because the MTA was too restrictive," Memish says, but he did not give specific examples. "I made my comments on this assumption," he says. But Memish says that the issue has not impeded research in Saudi Arabia itself, where most cases of the virus have been found.

Memish says that his main gripe is with the fact that Zaki sent a virus sample taken from a patient in Saudi Arabia to Rotterdam in the first place and that Erasmus MC has been able to file for patents as a result. "Samples were shipped outside of the country without the knowledge or permission of the Ministry of Health and I cannot believe that any country on this planet would allow this to happen," Memish says. Zaki says that he gave a sample from the same patient to the Saudi Ministry of Health first. "They tested for swine flu and did not continue," he told ScienceInsider yesterday. Only then did he reach out to Fouchier.

all parties agree that the virus was originally isolated in Saudi Arabia. Thus, the real question behind the discussions is whether Saudi Arabia should benefit in some way from whatever comes out of research on the virus

It's refreshing to see that Science magazine actually did some genuine reporting.

Here is a better source. Selected quotes:

Drosten, who has developed a diagnostic test using the virus from Erasmus MC, says that "anyone can use [the virus] for free." "What really shocks me is that the WHO seems to be buying into" the complaints, he says.

Memish says that the issue has not impeded research in Saudi Arabia itself, where most cases of the virus have been found.

Memish says that his main gripe is with the fact that Zaki sent a virus sample taken from a patient in Saudi Arabia to Rotterdam in the first place and that Erasmus MC has been able to file for patents as a result. "Samples were shipped outside of the country without the knowledge or permission of the Ministry of Health and I cannot believe that any country on this planet would allow this to happen," Memish says. Zaki says that he gave a sample from the same patient to the Saudi Ministry of Health first. "They tested for swine flu and did not continue," he told ScienceInsider yesterday. Only then did he reach out to Fouchier.

Abstract: Modern cryptographic practice rests on the use of one-way functions, which are easy to evaluate but difficult to invert. Unfortunately, commonly used one-way functions are either based on unproven conjectures or have known vulnerabilities. We show that instead of relying on number theory, the mesoscopic physics of coherent transport through a disordered medium can be used to allocate and authenticate unique identifiers by physically reducing the medium's microstructure to a fixed-length string of binary digits. These physical one-way functions are inexpensive to fabricate, prohibitively difficult to duplicate, admit no compact mathematical representation, and are intrinsically tamper-resistant. We provide an authentication protocol based on the enormous address space that is a principal characteristic of physical one-way functions.

Basically, they create a slab of epoxy with a bunch of glass micro-spheres randomly distributed within it. When you shine light through it, the multiple refractions/scattering events lead to a complicated path for the various light beams, which interfere to generate a complicated light-speckle pattern on the other side. This multiple-scattering process is of course deterministic, but in practice it is so complicated that it is not feasible to reverse-engineer the internal structure of such a material. (In fact, the method exploits coherent scattering, and because the light-detector can only measure the amplitude (and not the phase) of the scattered light, the problem is formally 'ill-posed': there is no way to invert the coherent scattering data to obtain the material structure. Instead such problems can only be approximately solved with iterative processes; this can be made arbitrarily difficult by increasing the number of scattering entities (glass beads in this case)...) This is analogous to mathematical one-way functions: in principle you can crack them, but it takes an infeasible amount of time.

Ultimately the 'randomness' (uniqueness of a slab) comes from the inital preparation of the slab: you're basically 'freezing in' the random Brownian motion of the micro-particles. Thermal noise is a pretty robust source of randomness.

These slabs are neat in the sense that you can use them to generate multiple pads. A different illumination condition (incident angle, or light pattern) generates a new one-time-pad (see the paper for a discussion of 'how different' the illumination condition needs to be in order to yield a uncorrelated/unique one-time-pad), so one idea is for people to carry a single physical token and use it to generate different OTPs for different communications channels they care about.

These schemes are not without their downsides, of course, but it's a neat idea to use a physical structure (rather than mathematical function) to generate pseudo-random numbers. (Thes slabs don't require a battery to maintain their state; one could image secure ways of generating two identical slabs at fabrication time, and then giving them to the two parties; etc.)

Apparently markets corrupt as well, just by their nature.

Um, where do you get those numbers? At least 76% of the non-coding human genome is transcribed -- to what end we cannot be certain in all cases, but the RNA transcripts from these often are fed back into gene expression and regulation. It's estimated that well over 50% of non-coding DNA is heavily conserved by evolutionary processes and contributes significantly to fitness.

Hey retard, honey bees raised by bee keepers aren't the only things that pollinate our food crops. In fact they're not even the best at it. Commercial honey bees can't do it alone Any excuse to suck the corporate cock, eh? Jeezuz, give it a rest!

Legally it's not quite that complex. In the EU, cephalopods are equivalent to vertebrates, and UK legislation specifically grants octopodes the same status. (As a result they have often been called "honourary" vertebrates.)

As for an actual hierarchy of "evolvedness," and not just a subjective ethical ranking based on what we know about animal intelligence, alternative splicing seems to be a good indicator of genetic complexity, but we only really have detailed analyses for vertebrates.

However, the problem is that this study is only looking at reaction time, which is pretty limited of a measure. This is especially true since its also been found that cell phone accidents are likely not entirely caused by reaction time issues.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/08/why-cell-phone-bans-dont-work.html

So, bad drivers, the ones who get in accidents don't just use cell phones, they drive more wrecklessly while using them. They choose to use them at particularly dangerous times. They do, exactly what most people choose not to do.

The problem, quite simply, is not cell phones. They are just the device people have chosen to measure. The problem is not cell phones because, the problem is not reaction time. The problem is judgement and the problem is risk assesment within certain individuals.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/03/27/science.1232758

Amplifying Genetic Logic Gates

Abstract

Organisms must process information encoded via developmental and environmental signals to survive and reproduce. Researchers have also engineered synthetic genetic logic to realize simpler, independent control of biological processes. We developed a three-terminal device architecture, termed the transcriptor, that uses bacteriophage serine integrases to control the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA. Integrase-mediated inversion or deletion of DNA encoding transcription terminators or a promoter modulate transcription rates. We realize permanent amplifying AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR, and XNOR gates actuated across common control signal ranges and sequential logic supporting autonomous cell-cell communication of DNA encoding distinct logic gate states. The single-layer digital logic architecture developed here enables engineering of amplifying logic gates to control transcription rates within and across diverse organisms.

But all multicellular life as we know it requires oxygen.

ORLY?

Apparently not.

And that was just the first result searching for "anaerobic multicellular organism"....

You were studying ecology and didn't know those predictions were nonsense made by a crackpot? The "Ice Age scare" was about as popular in the scientific community as the 2012 Mayan apocalypse theories.

BULLSHIT

Effects on the global temperature of large increases in carbon dioxide and aerosol densities in the atmosphere of Earth have been computed. It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For aerosols, however, the net effect of increase in density is to reduce the surface temperature of Earth. Because of the exponential dependence of the backscattering, the rate of temperature decrease is augmented with increasing aerosol content. An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.

And guess what? One of your "crackpot[s]" was none other than NASA's own James Hanson.

Let me guess - Google is too difficult for you to use?

If Google isn't too difficult for you to use, you're deliberately and willfully ignorant.

There are others, if that one isn't to your liking, and I have yet to come across one that suggests they DO improve safety. Furthermore, whenever I'm talking on a hands free set, I feel about as distracted as when I'm holding it up to my ears. The problem with cell phones isn't, after all, that you have one less hand you're using.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-he-cells30-2008jun30,0,2119996.story
http://ehstoday.com/safety/news/hands-free-phones-driving-5895
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/08/why-cell-phone-bans-dont-work.html

Could also cure breathing.

Been done many times

What link did you click, here's the paper linked to:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/03/27/science.1233638.full

The last sentence in the paper:

Given the broad applicability of this approach and the acute stoichiometric control of the metal compositions, we contend that the PMOD technique opens an entirely new parameter space for discovery and optimization of new heterogeneous electrocatalysts.

is the "hype", which is preceded by several pages of data.

I wonder exactly how they "assemble" the circuit and keep the components from diffusing or floating away, thus diassembling the circuit. What keeps the "circuit" of DNA strands in place?

Times have changed. We can do color holograms now.

Very cool stuff:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6026/218

IIRC coal plants release more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants do

This is something that is often said, but it is questionable if it is really true. When I have tried to find the sources, they all point to a single study done in 1978 by a scientist at Oak Ridge National Labratory. There are several problems with this claim:

1. It only looked at radiation released during "normal" operation. It didn't consider accidents at nuclear plants, which in reality account for nearly all the radiation they have released.
2. Coal plants today release far less fly ash than they did in 1978.
3. This study was done by ORNL, which has a vested interest in pushing nukes.

Disclaimer: I am pro-nuke, pro-windmill, and anti-coal, but I am also pro-truth, and this "factoid" about radioactive coal needs to die. There are plenty of real reasons to oppose burning coal.

Interesting, list doesn't include APR, Science, Nature, or any of the science outlets.

Just the MSM, which all get their news from 1-2 sources.

Let's take a look:

APR: what's "APR"? Applied Physics Reviews? Applied Physics Research? The former African Physics Review, now the African Review of Physics?

Science: Higgs Boson Positively Identified

Nature: No story I could find specifically about the Higgs boson, just the "Seven days: 8–14 March 2013" column, which mentions it in an item ("The new particle discovered last year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva continues to behave just like the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics, according to results presented last week at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. The latest data indicate that the boson decays into leptons as predicted, and also dampen earlier hints that the boson decays into pairs of photons more often than the standard model allows. No evidence yet points to theories beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry (see Nature 491, 505–506; 2012).")

and various science outlets:

Science News: nothing at present

LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson

Phys.org: Now confident: CERN physicists say new particle is Higgs boson (Update 3)

and some random organization called "CERN" or something such as that: New results indicate that new particle is a Higgs boson

So a list that does include Science, Nature, and some science outlets does have some articles and, not surprisingly, they largely don't have the "God particle" stuff in the headline.

It's not that a particle has a theoretical probability of being somewhere with some probable momentum, no it will be at a very real place at a very real time with a very actual momentum. It's just that practically it's so complicated to predict it, that the best way we have come up till now are quantum mechanics .

Nope, you're wrong. Here are the experimental evidence which falsify your hypothesis. Bonus: Zombie Feynman.

...of how telomeres work during cloning.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/288/5466/586.summary

Science 28 April 2000:
Vol. 288 no. 5466 pp. 586-587
DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5466.586

        News of the Week

CELL BIOLOGY
In Contrast to Dolly, Cloning Resets Telomere Clock in Cattle

        Gretchen Vogel

When researchers took a close look at the cells of Dolly, the cloned sheep, they found that her telomeres, the caps on the ends of the chromosomes, were shorter than normal. Because telomere length decreases with age, this was an indication that Dolly might age unusually quickly. But on page 665, a physician and his colleagues report that cells from calves that they cloned have telomeres that are longer than normal. According to the researchers, the findings suggest that tissues produced by cloning might last at least as long as the original cells--and perhaps longer.

I do like the idea that suggesting somebody relies on Fox News for anything is an insult.

Yes, some climate scientists have been wrong. Some have overstated things, and the popular media loves to report on the scariest, most outlandish predictions. Because those sell papers, and the more reasoned, measured forecasts do not.

Go look at the actual forecasts by the IPCC, which mostly represents the consensus. You'll find that overall they've been pretty solid. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5825/709.abstract

Without China's involvement especially we cannot fix the problem, as they've passed the US as worst polluter. But I disagree with any suggestion that this would mean we should try to do anything.

"What testing was done to align the 66 million year old comet strike with the end of the dinosaurs?"

Well, there's the K-T boundary layer, which is loaded with iridium (rare on earth, but not in meteorites), and the fact that no non-avian dinosaur fossils have ever been found above this boundary. And there's also that huge crater just off the coast of Mexico that corresponds to the same time period as the formation of the K-T boundary layer.

Now, off to school with you, junior.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/case-closed-for-dino-killer.html

NSF plans to cut the funding for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank. So I guess the kids will soon have WiFi and cell phones. This is a good thing, right?

As to the Thorium, I spotted this in an web article, but could not find much out more about it and was not entirely satisfied that the information was 100 percent good. But here goes anyways. Coal contains Thorium and other radioactive materials that are released into the air when it is burnt. They do not purify coal before the burn it. Coal is a mixture of all sorts of stuff, most of flammable, but some of it other stuff. The scaremonger writing the piece claimed that coal plants spewed more radiactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant. Who knows for sure. I could not google enough up.

Factiods I remember:
1. A coal plant releases more radioactive material than a nuclear plant produces
2. There's more potential energy in the radioactive materials in coal than you can get from burning the coal itself

Okay, here goes: Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Uranium and Thorium content of coal. CO2 production of a coal plant,
500MW = 3 million tons of CO2/year. The carbon is 27% of that, and coal is 'almost' pure carbon. Call it 1.7M tons of coal consumed per year for a 1GW plant. Of course, this site says 2M tons of coal. At 1 part per million Uranium and 2 parts per million Thorium, that's ~5-6 tons of radioactive material released per year, 1% of it up the flue(EPA limit). It says that you need about 162 tons of Uranium to fuel a conventional reactor a year.
However, conventional reactors are only about 1% efficient at their fuel burn - if you go to breeder reactors, that could, theoretically at least, drop to 1.62 tons of nuclear material needed per year per GW. Outside of accidents, the nuclear waste isn't released.

Realistically speaking, you could get more electricity out of the coal via nuclear power if you were using breeders. Thorium reactors would be required, but at least they are naturally breeder-type.

So I'd tend to say that my 'coal plants release more radioactive materials than nuclear plants produce' is true - only limited amounts, less than 1%, are actually being converted into more highly radioactive material. It's producing 2 tons of radioactive material*, vs 'release' of 5-6.
Your 'emits more than a nuclear plant' is also very much true.
My last statement - 'more energy in the heavy metal traces' depends on using highly efficient processes and somehow having an energy-cheap way to collect the relatively diffuse uranium and thorium.

*I'm ignoring waste that isn't annual, like the reactor vessel, at the moment, though it's probably only a ton or so more.

I hear about the Chinese Economic Miracle. But when I see the youtube videos of the 'Fog' in Bejing, the price they paid was too high. You could be the richest man in Bejing, but your quality of life, as a living creature, is horrible. This is not some abstract human rights issue. This is breathing filth into your lungs with every breath.

I figure that if you give them another 10 years or so, they're going to start taking their own environmental rules much more seriously, precisely because of this.