Slashdot Mirror

There is now a bill in the house to end this, I forgot the name of it but there was a slashdot article a couple weeks ago one it.

I hadn't heard of such a bill. Was it attached to SOPA/PIPA?

Also, the percentage of successful grant proposals is determined by three primary factors:
1) Amount of money available
2) Amount given out per grant
3) Number of applicants

Very true.

You are only focusing on one. Have any of the other factors changed recently?

I focused on that one because this article is about funding - hence money available - for research agencies. To address your point though, the number of applicants has gone up for some funding mechanisms.

The article on the NIH examining the drop in approval rates shows that as well. While there was a bit of a drop, overall the number of applicants for this year in comparison to 2003 is up quite a bit.

As for amount given per grant, that number has likely, on average risen to match inflation and other costs of doing science. As projects get bigger and more collaborative the costs of doing them goes up.

The National Institutes of Health would also see its budget remain flat, at $30.7 billion

Thanks a lot. And for those of you who think you don't care, it's worth pointing out that NIH is the first funding agency to require publications coming from its work to be put in open-access or publicly-accessible journals. The other agencies are still allowing their work to go into paywalled journals at the time. So even if you don't agree with their mission of health research, you might want to at least take notice that they are trying to ensure that the work the taxpayer pays for is in a place where the taxpayer doesn't have to pay again to see the results.

And being as NIH grant success rate is at an all-time low (same source), the odds of more great original research coming from their effectively-reduced budget is miniscule.

"Researchers have created the world's thinnest pane of glass—and it looks oddly familiar. The glass, made of silicon and oxygen, formed accidentally when the scientists were making graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon, on copper-covered quartz. They believe an air leak caused the copper to react with the quartz, which is also made of silicon and oxygen, producing a glass layer with the graphene. The glass is a mere three atoms thick—the minimum thickness of silica glass—which makes it two-dimensional. [...] In addition to demonstrating how graphene makes it possible to produce previously unfeasible 2D-materials, ultra-thin glass could be used in semiconductor or graphene transistors."

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/02/scienceshot-two-dimensional-glass.html

How about three atoms thick glass as an insulator between graphene layers?

Really?

From wikipedia: "The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most active Atlantic hurricane season on record, tying with the 1887 Atlantic hurricane season, 1995 Atlantic hurricane season and the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season."

I agree they don't mention 2012, so you may still be right for this year.

(see also http://www.sciencemag.org/content/293/5529/474.full for an overview up to the year 2000).

So no, for the end of the warm period to be 50,000 years from now would be quite divergent from the climatalogical pattern of the last million years, and leave us out of phase.

You need to read the literature on this subject. The glacial-interglacial cycles are not a perfect 100ky cycle (in fact, the cycles used to have a different period), and the relative importance of the eccentricity, precession, and obliquity cycles drifts over time. In fact, there is a lot of glacial dynamical theory which predicts an extended interglacial ahead. I didn't pull that 50,000 years number out of nowhere. For a couple references, see for example Berger and Loutre, Crucifix and Rougier. There is a third I saw recently that got a similar figure, and of course there are older papers too.

However, as I mentioned to the other poster, this is still very controversial within the geological community. There is a new paper by Tzedakis et al. that gets ~1500 years, and Ruddiman argues that the next glacial should already have started if it weren't for humans. On the whole, the papers I've seen tend to favor 20-50 ky rather than a shorter period of glacial inception. But this is way, way more subtle than "durr, it's a 100 ky cycle so we're due", and you can't predict anything at all from the past temperature record. At the very least, you need to study the Milankovitch forcings as well, and propagate those through a dynamics with long lag times to see what happens.

Biologists have determined that Polar Bears probably evolved in an area somewhere around Ireland, believe it or not. So a bit of warming will probably not hurt them a hell of a lot.

First a correction:

A team of 18 biologists whose findings and methodologies are questioned by other experts in the field have determined that Polar Bears probably evolved in an area somewhere around Ireland, believe it or not. So a bit of warming will probably not hurt them a hell of a lot.

Interesting supposition. What is it exactly which makes you think the Ireland of 110,000 years ago resembled the Ireland of today in climate? Another fascinating part of this is the fact that experts in the field think this might harm the species, yet a seemingly layperson who appears to have read a headline on the topic thinks everything is A-OK.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/polar-bears-rooted-in-ireland.html

reducing the number of plants

Recent climatic changes have enhanced plant growth in northern mid-latitudes and high latitudes. However, a comprehensive analysis of the impact of global climatic changes on vegetation productivity has not before been expressed in the context of variable limiting factors to plant growth. We present a global investigation of vegetation responses to climatic changes by analyzing 18 years (1982 to 1999) of both climatic data and satellite observations of vegetation activity. Our results indicate that global changes in climate have eased several critical climatic constraints to plant growth, such that net primary production increased 6% (3.4 petagrams of carbon over 18 years) globally. The largest increase was in tropical ecosystems. Amazon rain forests accounted for 42% of the global increase in net primary production, owing mainly to decreased cloud cover and the resulting increase in solar radiation.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/300/5625/1560.abstract

Unrelatedly: have they/will they publish a paper on this? I can't find anything mentioning a paper in the press releases.

The actual paper was published today in Science:
Sebastian Loth[1,2], Susanne Baumann[1,3], Christopher P. Lutz[1], D. M. Eigler[1], Andreas J. Heinrich[1] (Affiliations: [1] IBM Almaden Research Division, [2] Max Planck Institute, [3] University of Basel) Bistability in Atomic-Scale Antiferromagnets Science 13 January 2012: Vol. 335 no. 6065 pp. 196-199 DOI: 10.1126/science.1214131.

The abstract is:

Control of magnetism on the atomic scale is becoming essential as data storage devices are miniaturized. We show that antiferromagnetic nanostructures, composed of just a few Fe atoms on a surface, exhibit two magnetic states, the Néel states, that are stable for hours at low temperature. For the smallest structures, we observed transitions between Néel states due to quantum tunneling of magnetization. We sensed the magnetic states of the designed structures using spin-polarized tunneling and switched between them electrically with nanosecond speed. Tailoring the properties of neighboring antiferromagnetic nanostructures enables a low-temperature demonstration of dense nonvolatile storage of information.

Some big names are on this paper (Don Eigler is a pioneer of STM; responsible for the famous "IBM written with xenon atoms" proof-of-concept, and along with Lutz worked on the also-famous "quantum corrals").

4%? Haha. The similarity of DNA is a stupid metric used by idiots. Not all DNA is expressed as genes. This is where the term non-coding DNA comes from. You are a person of below average intelligence since you not only believe (incorrectly) that the DNA of living beings can be evaluated using percentages but also that "verbal coherent speech" can be quantified in some arbitrary DNA "percentage". I understand why though. Because you have limited intelligence you are unable to understand technical biological journals and so you are resigned to being informed on such things through articles in magazines meant for general consumption (aka. average stupid people). Ask someone of real intelligence to explain this to you: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/295/5552/131.short

Here's what they did, I don't understand a word of it but it was simple enough to google.

Here is the link to the actual article in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/12/21/science.1214383

The article claims that they recorded the brain patterns of jugglers imagining the act of juggling, and then had a non-juggler imagine doing the same thing and rewarded them if they matched those brain patterns, thereby teaching them how to juggle.

Maybe you should read it a little more carefully. That was a hypothetical procedure which the article specifically states they did NOT do, because they're not at that point yet.

But yeah, this article/attention-getting-blog is crap; they didn't even bother crediting where they got the news from. Here's the actual source:

Science Magazine - Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation

is it http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.full ? "Our results indicate that the adult early visual cortex is so plastic that mere repetition of the activity pattern corresponding to a specific feature in the cortex is sufficient to cause VPL of a specific orientation, even without stimulus presentation, conscious awareness of the meaning of the neural patterns that participants induced, or knowledge of the intention of the experiment. How is the present research on VPL distinguished from previous approaches? Unit recording and brain imaging studies have successfully revealed the correlation between VPL and neural activity changes (1–8). However, these correlation studies cannot clarify cause-and-effect relationships. The studies that examined the effect of a lesion (15) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) (16, 17) to a brain region on VPL have shown whether the examined region plays some role in VPL. However, these studies cannot clarify how particular activity patterns in the region are related to VPL. In contrast, the present decoded fMRI neurofeedback method allowed us to induce specific neural activity patterns in V1/V2, which caused VPL. "

When i hear the example voice ( http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/vocalfryshort.mp3 ) speak -prior to their example- i hear the same sound in her normal speech. Note the R / H usage:

registeRRRRRs.
piCHHHHHes.
tHis.

I know some would call this just pronouncing part of a word, but i clearly hear the same exact thing, and also, if i (as an euopean) try to pronounce these words with those sounds, i only succeed when i "vocal fry" as heared in the example.

I find these URRRRRR sounds in the middle of words make people sound not so smart (ppl that rather be lazy / hippies) just like how the french sound as if they can't find their words with their constant EUGHHHHHH groan in spoken language.

Behavioral experiments like this are relatively straightforward to plan and run. The hard part is to explain the result, and the reasons are not always what you'd expect on first glance, often due to confounding variables that you've inadvertently changed.

It's also worth noting that the news release throws in a quote about altruism, but the original paper's authors were careful not to go there.

For example, reading this carefully, it's clear that the rat frees its cagemate and then goes for the chocolate. It's not a binary choice between the two. Why does it do that? Perhaps it's hidden empathy/altruism circuitry. Or maybe the rat's just afraid of what its cagemate will do if it eats all the food and then the trapped rat gets out. Contrary to what most people think, domesticated rats are very much like domesticated dogs in terms of temperament... very social animals, usually with a playful temperament, but can also be very territorial and assertive. And territorial fighting usually occurs over shared, limited resources, like food. (I will say, chocolate is a good choice. Rats love chocolate. Some of our rats will eat 30 - 40 M&Ms in a half-hour experiment. Not bad for an animal weighing 300 grams.)

Maybe it is altruism or empathy. But true altruism is doing something good and expecting nothing in return, not a pain avoidance strategy.

Well... Humans were likely hunting similarly sized mastodons 14k years ago. I don't see why mammoths wouldn't be hunted. This was in the news recently recently :
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44995744/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/sleuths-solve-american-mastodon-mystery/#.Tt-OXWAgcmQ

And the science paper the article is based on:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/302

I suspect that isn't the only overwrought element here. In my, admittedly limited, search I have yet to find reputable sources confirming any but the barest of details in this story; let alone "Kill Half Humanity" (Wikipedia's already infected, care of rt.com.)

The Canadian Press, which brings us the Winnipeg Free Press article, fails to provide anything real to back up its statements. I can't really follow it any more than looking up the organizations provided and looking for related news postings (of which I found none.) Subsequent searching leads me to a Gizmodo article (links provided for those who wish to follow my searches.) Of it, there are two meaningful citations (that is, not links to the about pages of the source in question.) Science Insider and a pdf announcement detailing the schedule of the September influenza conference in Malta, in which this announcement is quoted as having been made.

The first thing I noticed within the pdf (aside from the garish design) is the absence of any announcement on GM influenza, (or Ron Fouchier, or his organization.) Admittedly, this hardly means this didn't occur; merely that this (what is essentially a flier) is not a meaningful source of information.

As for the Science Insider, it provides few additional details, mostly regarding vaguely related discussions on the classification/pre-approval of these sorts of studies. The closest thing it provides to something interesting is a (Dutch language) greenlight for what is supposed to be Ron's project.

Indeed, the Dutch link does concern GM influenza, and is an answer to a question on procedure for studying this sort of thing (of which they already apparently had a license to do.) It does not corroborate any of the stand out details of this article (how could it, considering it's from 2007.) Of minor note, there is no mention of ferrets; only standard embryonated [sic. Google Translation] chicken eggs.

Color me skeptical, to say the least.

This asshat's ego is what has caused [...] an engineered avian flu that can kill off half the planet's population

Actually, that would be the NIH ( http://www.nih.gov/ ), who requested that this research be done, funded it, etc.;
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/11/scientists-brace-for-media-storm.html

And really, I'd rather they do research it and find some manner of defense against it than that some actual 'asshats' figure it out and use it as a weapon first, or nature finds its own way to such a 'killer virus', without a defense in place.

The only particularly troubling time is when these findings are made public, because among the "ZOMG WE'RE DOOMED" people like you there's always the chance that there's one complete nutcase who goes to such a research facility to try and disrupt the work - and inadvertently releases things into the wild with far worse consequences.

That's not to say it shouldn't be made public - just that the designation of risk is often misplaced.

Besides, the world doesn't hate scientists - if they did, the world should be largely Amish (actually, they don't even hate scientists, but their lifestyle would come close to one in which a society does hate scientists).

One of the neater things I've read about is how Lockheed Martin went back to Tesla's technology to make a communication system for miners:

A magnetic-wave generator developed by Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago as a wireless communication device has been updated by engineers at Lockheed Martin to save lives after mining disasters.

Magnetic waves -- unlike radio waves -- can penetrate hundreds of metres of solid rock. MagneLink, the fridge-sized device developed by Lockheed Martin, allows for phone calls and text messaging. It was tested this year at a mine in Virginia, and production is expected before 2011.

-Nikola Tesla’s patent redux (very short)

Heres another link: Tapping Tesla to Save Trapped Miners

If Tesla was 100 years ahead of everyone else, that means we should be plugging our devices into the Aether ("The wheelwork of nature") soon.

...Warmists actually publicly acknowledge the existence of hard ice core and geological data which shows a steady level of atmospheric CO2 over the last 15 million years which kinda trumps their six-month data spans - the data also shows midtide sea levels back then over a hundred feet higher than they are now.

...Shills who paid attention in chemistry 102 manage to shout loud enough over the doomsayers and Greenparty nutjobs that the biggest carbon sink on the planet isn't quite at saturation yet and won't be when the sun expands and the oceans boil off. Still, anything other than oil for energy is gonna hurt their bottom line so they're just gonna have to think of something else to scare the sheeple with. Buy solar, you're supporting terrorists, that sort of bullshit.

Can I throw in a bit of an incitement to mutiny here and suggest that we do two things:

1. Carry on as is as far as fossil fuels are concerned, maybe without the bombing of indigenes to the stone age (I heard Afghans excitedly twittering "Ooh, upgrade!!" just then, I swear)?
2. Use the time we have with our love affair with the black gold (it is limited, the Earth's crust is only 15 miles thick hence can only hold so much oil) to create a renewable energy infrastructure - so when it does run out we have a reliable fallback rather than having to resort to the utter waste of biomass inherent with resource wars?

Just a suggestion. I'll be round later for my Peace Prize.

...Warmists actually publicly acknowledge the existence of hard ice core and geological data which shows a steady level of atmospheric CO2 over the last 15 million years which kinda trumps their six-month data spans - the data also shows midtide sea levels back then over a hundred feet higher than they are now.

...Shills who paid attention in chemistry 102 manage to shout loud enough over the doomsayers and Greenparty nutjobs that the biggest carbon sink on the planet isn't quite at saturation yet and won't be when the sun expands and the oceans boil off. Still, anything other than oil for energy is gonna hurt their bottom line so they're just gonna have to think of something else to scare the sheeple with. Buy solar, you're supporting terrorists, that sort of bullshit.

Can I throw in a bit of an incitement to mutiny here and suggest that we do two things:

1. Carry on as is as far as fossil fuels are concerned, maybe without the bombing of indigenes to the stone age (I heard Afghans excitedly twittering "Ooh, upgrade!!" just then, I swear)?
2. Use the time we have with our love affair with the black gold (it is limited, the Earth's crust is only 15 miles thick hence can only hold so much oil) to create a renewable energy infrastructure - so when it does run out we have a reliable fallback rather than having to resort to the utter waste of biomass inherent with resource wars?

Just a suggestion. I'll be round later for my Peace Prize.

That's what I thought. Then I came to the US. https://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/289.full

Rational decisions will ruin us, and condemnation is all we have to oppose them. See Garrett Hardin's seminal essay The Tragedy Of The Commons or, if you're in more of a rush, the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Here's the article in question. It's a mix of physics and math and insanely boring to me.

To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.

Only someone who doesn't understand evolution can say such nonsense. Bacteria don't "react" to antibiotics. There are no little "scientist bacteria" wearing tiny lab coats trying to come up with ways to make themselves and other bacteria immune to some antibiotic. Antibiotic effectiveness is driven down simply by natural selection. When a colony of bacteria is exposed to some antibiotics, the ones that aren't immune die, period. The ones that already had immunity survive, and eventually reproduce (their offspring also being immune to that antibiotic). They weren't "encouraged to become resistant", they already were resistant. In fact, it's been shown that there are antibiotic-resistant bacteria even in ice cores that pre-date the existence of humans.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/superbugs-predate-wonder-drugs.html

Yes, antibiotic overuse can lead to an increase in the number of resistant bacteria (by killing their non-resistant competitors), but it's not the antibiotics that create the resistance.

Assuming that the risk is proportional to dose (the linear no-threshold hypothesis), a 10-rem whole-body dose would bring with it a risk of cancer death later in life of about half of one percent.

The very high thyroid doses from the Chernobyl disaster were due in large part to the failure of authorities to block the consumption of milk produced by cows grazing on contaminated grass. By contrast, in Japan, shipments of raw milk and vegetables from Fukushima and three neighboring prefectures were blocked on March 21, six days after the large release that caused the high contamination. Screening of produce for radioactivity began the next day

Very little potassium iodide was distributed in the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl accident. In Poland, however, more than 10 million children, 16 years of age and under, and approximately seven million adults received at least one dose of potassium iodide, reducing their thyroid doses to “negligible levels”.

Finally, it is important to note that, if not dealt with properly, the psychological consequences associated with accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima could damage many more lives than the cancer consequences.

My "belief system" include bringing data together from different sources. For example: comparing doses received by residents with typical CT or X-ray.

After Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6032/908.full

He thinks the reaction to low doses could be quite complex. “There's not going to be a uniform response of all biological functions to low levels of radiation,”

Some researchers doubt that any study in Fukushima, no matter how well devised, will reveal much. The radiation exposure of the general population “is too small to give a statistically significant increase in stochastic effects such as cancer,” argues Ohtsura Niwa, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Kyoto University.

We need power or people will die from malnutrition, hypothermia and diseases (just like in developing countries right now) in much higher numbers than even those caused by coal burning, as no other technology has proved itself in high-scale power production, we can make it only from fossil or from nuclear. You have not provided any source stating that nuclear is less safe than fossil. If you want to live in developing country, then please, do so. You may take your Greenpeace pals with you. In the meantime, by using coal electricity, you're responsible for more deaths than it is necessary.

First off, the slashdot summary is somewhat misleading, because the result is not new. Their result was announced in August 2010: http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907 . What is new is that they finally managed to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. You can't judge whether it's right or wrong simply based on whether it's been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Peer review doesn't judge whether a result is right, or whether it can be reproduced. Peer review just tries to judge whether there are obvious mistakes, and things like whether it properly cites the previous literature. The fact that the journal is a prestigious one also doesn't mean it's right; it just means that *if* it were right, it would be of a high level of scientific importance.

Second, it's not really correct to say that the result is controversial. It's not controversial. It's wrong, and the fact that it's wrong is uncontroversial. Just because there's an overwhelming consensus that a result is wrong, that doesn't mean it can't be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Below is a FAQ entry I wrote about this stuff.

Has the fine structure constant changed over cosmological timescales?

It has been claimed based on astronomical observations that the unitless fine-structure constant alpha=e^2/hbar*c actually varies over time, rather than being fixed.[Webb 2001] This claim is probably wrong, since later attempts to reproduce the observations failed.[Chand 2004] Rosenband et al.[Rosenband 2008] have done laboratory measurements that rule out a linear decrease of alpha with time large enough to be consistent with Webb's results.

Webb et al. have recently made even more extraordinary claims that the fine structure constant varies over the celestial sphere.[Webb 2010] Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Webb et al. have not supplied that; their results are at the margins of statistical significance compared to their random and systematic errors.

Even if their claims are correct, this is not evidence that c is changing, as is sometimes stated in the popular press. If an experiment is to test whether a fundamental constant is really constant, the constant must be unitless.[Duff 2002] If the fine-structure constant does vary, there is no empirical way to assign blame to c as opposed to hbar or e. John Baez has a nice web page discussing the unitless constants of nature.

J.K. Webb et al., 2000, "Further Evidence for Cosmological Evolution of the Fine Structure Constant," http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0012539v3

J.K. Webb et al., 2010, "Evidence for spatial variation of the fine structure constant," http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907

H. Chand et al., 2004, Astron. Astrophys. 417: 853, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0401094

Srianand et al., 2004, Phys.Rev.Lett.92:121302, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0402177

Duff, 2002, "Comment on time-variation of fundamental constants," http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0208093

Baez, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html

Rosenband et al., 2008, 319 (5871): 1808-1812, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5871/1808.abstract

I like this guy, he gets intrigued by some rather simple common things, then does the research to actually understand it, publishes it and closes the case. Here is another curiosity that he has researched. Perhaps not amazingly useful at face value, but it may well help someone else with an idea or understanding of something else.

It's probably the same people claiming that GE crops are producing a vague, unspecified toxin that hurts people. The cry proteins, the group of insecticidal proteins that GE crops produce (well, some of them anyway, not all GE crops are the same) are very specific, and does not affect bees. They simply don't have the gut receptor that the cry proteins bind to. In fact, in places where they've relied on the GE crops instead of using pesticides, they've found an increase in insect biodiversity (which has brought its own challenges, namely mirid bugs and other insects that are unaffected by the cry protein and were previously killed by the pesticide sprays are now able to become pests). It's just par for the course from the anti-GE folks. They'll say just about anything as long as GMOs are the bad guy, like accusations that they, somehow, cause autism, sterility, sudden death of anything that eats them, spontaneous generation of virus sized fungal pathogens that infect both plants and animals, (I wish I could say I was joking, but that is one is pretty mainstream in the anti-GMO community), and other things that they conveniently won't back with evidence or even a plausible mechanism for how it could happen. If there's a problem with GE crops, it will be investigated, confirmed, and published scientifically (like the mirid problem). No offense, but this isn't exactly an interesting theory, more like yet another stupid urban legend from the the anti-vaxxers of agriculture

So, when exactly did this change occur? Obviously it had to be before the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 1988. Certainly long before Science magazine published Barrett and Gast's article titled Climate Change back in 1971, I assume. Probably even before the publication of Gilbert Plass's study The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change back in 1956.

Please, enlighten us. When did this "name change" occur to avoid all of this ridicule?

I think the more reasonable concern is that crops will yield less over time due to climate change. Combine that with ever-growing population (+ a billion people every dozen years or so) and you have a real problem. Shortages of food lead to riots and further instability of governments that are already shaky. Of course, this wont happen soon but probably in the next 100 years unless some sort of technological breakthrough happens. People probably exaggerate the effects because the smaller effects over time are harder to recognize as being caused by climate change.

It's funny that you think scientists aren't up to answering trends over 100 years. There was a paper that came out in Science yesterday predicting temperatures back 800,000 years ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/347.abstract ). It's the job of scientists to question these narratives, too, but it's also wise to look at all of the data.

That girih, that's Farsi for "knot," patterns were created 500 years ago that produce non-periodic penrose patterns - see the article by Lu in Science Magazine from a few years back: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5815/1106.short shows that math sometimes imitates art too.

You should look into sea level, it's really pretty interesting. There are all sorts of regional effects. For instance the gravitational attraction of mountain ranges like the Andes and the Antarctic Ice Sheet make sea level adjacent to them higher than it would be otherwise. The Antarctic Ice sheet increases sea level around the continent by as much as 30 meters (damn, that's a lot). Here's a paper on the subject but since that's paywalled, here's an article on it.

You're talking about this slashdot entry from 5 months ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/03/28/239212/artificial-leaf-could-provide-cheap-energy
Not exactly a dup; they link to different articles.
This one's article has a video showing the prototype in operation, which is kind of cool.
The old one's article has no video, but they basically make the same points in text.

A multiple research groups have targeted CCR5 using gene therapy before. An old (2007) review details the methods a number of groups have been trying including Carl June (you may remember his name from the leukemia story involving the HIV-vector). Building an HIV-Proof Immune System: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5838/612.full

Yes you will. If you want, you currently can look at the "Supporting Online Material" links for each of the papers now. It's not very satisfying, but they contain some information related to the main papers. In a year people will be able to access the articles in Science by registering on their web site. For example, it means you can now view the bunch of articles on Ardipithecus ramidus from 2009, and it means you can also look at the previously-published papers on Australopithecus sediba from April of last year.

So, it's more of a "delayed link" than a "missing" one.

Yes you will. If you want, you currently can look at the "Supporting Online Material" links for each of the papers now. It's not very satisfying, but they contain some information related to the main papers. In a year people will be able to access the articles in Science by registering on their web site. For example, it means you can now view the bunch of articles on Ardipithecus ramidus from 2009, and it means you can also look at the previously-published papers on Australopithecus sediba from April of last year.

So, it's more of a "delayed link" than a "missing" one.

Yes you will. If you want, you currently can look at the "Supporting Online Material" links for each of the papers now. It's not very satisfying, but they contain some information related to the main papers. In a year people will be able to access the articles in Science by registering on their web site. For example, it means you can now view the bunch of articles on Ardipithecus ramidus from 2009, and it means you can also look at the previously-published papers on Australopithecus sediba from April of last year.

So, it's more of a "delayed link" than a "missing" one.

Yes you will. If you want, you currently can look at the "Supporting Online Material" links for each of the papers now. It's not very satisfying, but they contain some information related to the main papers. In a year people will be able to access the articles in Science by registering on their web site. For example, it means you can now view the bunch of articles on Ardipithecus ramidus from 2009, and it means you can also look at the previously-published papers on Australopithecus sediba from April of last year.

So, it's more of a "delayed link" than a "missing" one.

Homo sapiens has had more impact on biodiversity than any other species. The Great Oxidation Event lasted hundreds of millions of years and, while we have no means of establishing a survey of taxa from that era, it was most likely the result of a very large number of species, and indeed is such a long period of time that many speciation events could readily have occurred. Further, the autotrophs that released the oxygen in the first place had no means of affecting many of the anaerobes that live deep underground—and we do.

Here are your citations for humanity's impact. Suffice it to say that many of them will still be noticeable in a few million years:

• Climate Change, Human Impacts, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs
• Consequences of changing biodiversity
• A continent transformed: Human impact on the natural vegetation of Australia, which went on for something like sixty million years before we screwed it up.
• Tropical forest recovery: legacies of human impact and natural disturbances
• The Future of Biodiversity, the abstract for which starts: "Recent extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times their pre-human levels in well-known, but taxonomically diverse groups from widely different environments. If all species currently deemed "threatened" become extinct in the next century, then future extinction rates will be 10 times recent rates. Some threatened species will survive the century, but many species not now threatened will succumb. Regions rich in species found only within them (endemics) dominate the global patterns of extinction."
• Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Conservation
• Biodiversity inventories, indicator taxa and effects of habitat modification in tropical forest (PDF)

I don't know why you then decided to compare humanity's effect on biodiversity to that of mass extinction events, but let me explain to you why they are completely different.

When an extinction event occurs, there is a single source of pressure that living organisms must accommodate, or at most a couple: the sky is darker, the air is colder, the atmosphere is now filled with water rather than ammonia, et cetera. Humans have not been exerting this kind of pressure at all. We systematically destroy ecosystems, replacing hundreds of species of plants and animals with just one or two (which are, naturally, attuned to depend on us feeding, fertilizing, irrigating, and sheltering them) and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us.)

This is too much for evolution to handle. Especially due to chemical poisoning, many of the hardiest species most likely to survive a natural disaster have been snared by exotic and unexpected genetic vulnerabilities. DDT was found to act as a sex hormone in birds, for example, causing males to develop female genitalia. As a South African, I'm sure you're aware that it's still in use, combating Malaria, even though it has been banned in many countries.

We are whittling down biodiversity in ways that the Great Oxygen Catastrophe didn't. It selected one major branch of the tree, the organisms that depended on a reducing atmosphere, and marginalized them, creating room for the healthy and d

Homo sapiens has had more impact on biodiversity than any other species. The Great Oxidation Event lasted hundreds of millions of years and, while we have no means of establishing a survey of taxa from that era, it was most likely the result of a very large number of species, and indeed is such a long period of time that many speciation events could readily have occurred. Further, the autotrophs that released the oxygen in the first place had no means of affecting many of the anaerobes that live deep underground—and we do.

Here are your citations for humanity's impact. Suffice it to say that many of them will still be noticeable in a few million years:

• Climate Change, Human Impacts, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs
• Consequences of changing biodiversity
• A continent transformed: Human impact on the natural vegetation of Australia, which went on for something like sixty million years before we screwed it up.
• Tropical forest recovery: legacies of human impact and natural disturbances
• The Future of Biodiversity, the abstract for which starts: "Recent extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times their pre-human levels in well-known, but taxonomically diverse groups from widely different environments. If all species currently deemed "threatened" become extinct in the next century, then future extinction rates will be 10 times recent rates. Some threatened species will survive the century, but many species not now threatened will succumb. Regions rich in species found only within them (endemics) dominate the global patterns of extinction."
• Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Conservation
• Biodiversity inventories, indicator taxa and effects of habitat modification in tropical forest (PDF)

I don't know why you then decided to compare humanity's effect on biodiversity to that of mass extinction events, but let me explain to you why they are completely different.

When an extinction event occurs, there is a single source of pressure that living organisms must accommodate, or at most a couple: the sky is darker, the air is colder, the atmosphere is now filled with water rather than ammonia, et cetera. Humans have not been exerting this kind of pressure at all. We systematically destroy ecosystems, replacing hundreds of species of plants and animals with just one or two (which are, naturally, attuned to depend on us feeding, fertilizing, irrigating, and sheltering them) and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us.)

This is too much for evolution to handle. Especially due to chemical poisoning, many of the hardiest species most likely to survive a natural disaster have been snared by exotic and unexpected genetic vulnerabilities. DDT was found to act as a sex hormone in birds, for example, causing males to develop female genitalia. As a South African, I'm sure you're aware that it's still in use, combating Malaria, even though it has been banned in many countries.

We are whittling down biodiversity in ways that the Great Oxygen Catastrophe didn't. It selected one major branch of the tree, the organisms that depended on a reducing atmosphere, and marginalized them, creating room for the healthy and d

Stratospheric water vapour and co2 are in the wrong forcing ratio on that graph. SWV is about 30% as effective as a ghg. It's been falling in concentration since around 2000 and partially explains the hiatus in warming. Solomon 2010 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1182488

One approach to energy harvesting is to increase the efficiency of human walking and capture the energy the human would have expended walking. This has actually been demonstrated with an energy harvesting backpack. The amount of power the human should consume carrying the backpack and doing work on the generator was found to be more than the amount of power the human actually consumes.

So in other words, you still have to pay for your lunch, but you get more for your money.

see "Harvesting Energy by Improving the Economy of Human Walking," for more
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5741/1686.short

Ok, I'm was geniuenly surprised and I'm probably to the last person on earth to hear about this.

Why does it take FOIA filings to get access to the documents related to Mann's paleoclimatology research? Are these relevant data or is someone just fishing? Does anybody know anything about this?

Why is it necessary that people sue each other about this? Considering how important and visible this is, wouldn't it be better to just put everything out there?

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/08/university-turns-over-some-mater.html?ref=hp

One thing I found misleading about the article is that it refers to the core as having 'the size of Jupiter' and 'the mass of Jupiter.'

Here's the correct Science Journal link and here is a better press release from the Max Planck Institute that clarifies:

For the newly discovered pulsar, known as PSR J1719-1438, the astronomers noticed that the arrival times of the pulses were systematically modulated and concluded that this is due to the gravitational pull of a small orbiting companion, a planet. These modulations can tell astronomers several more things about the companion. First, it orbits the pulsar in just two hours and ten minutes, and the distance between the two objects is 600,000 km - a little bit less than the radius of our Sun. Second, the companion is so close to the pulsar that if its diameter was any larger than 60,000 km (less than half the diameter of Jupiter) it would be ripped apart by the gravity of the pulsar.

So it appears that the article saying "size equivalent to Jupiter" (volume?) is wrong if the Max Planck Institute is correct in saying that its diameter has to be less than half the diameter of Jupiter.

Atomic resolution of atoms and molecules with SPM have been around for a while. Pentacene was imaged back in 2009 and atomic resolution of surfaces goes back to the 90s . The only thing that is new about this article is a slightly different flavor of STM. Not what the authors are imaging with it.

Atomic resolution of atoms and molecules with SPM have been around for a while. Pentacene was imaged back in 2009 and atomic resolution of surfaces goes back to the 90s . The only thing that is new about this article is a slightly different flavor of STM. Not what the authors are imaging with it.

1) Graphene absolutely can be damaged; any material can. How do you think diamonds are split by steel tools? You're confusing *abrasion resistance* with *damage immunity*. Micrometeorites pack a large amount of energy in a tiny amount of area -- WAY more than the SP2 bond energies in the graphene bond structure. A micrometeorite impact turns what it strikes into plasma.
2) Your concept simply doesn't work because you have to be able to get your elevator back down. And to do so would require tethering it to Earth with a second space elevator even larger than the first. The net result is that you more than double your tensile strength requirements, which are already preposterously high.
3) Growing a single sheet of graphene is a neat lab trick. It's meaningless, though, because we're talking about *bulk* material. Producing objects that are an atom thick in a serial manner is beyond pointless when your goal is mass production. And FYI, "Ahn and colleagues showed that their graphene-based touch screen could handle twice as much strain as conventional ITO-based devices.". Yeah, what a supermaterial -- a whopping two times as strong as ITO. :P

Sure. $75 to $149/year, please. Plenty of pleasuresaurs in the back issues.

This isn't "new news" so much as it is a follow-up on old news.

No, it's new news. While some parts of the trial started as much as a year ago, the result of the trial were presented yesterday (8/10): http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/95/95ra73.abstract

While the "idea" obviously isn't new, just having ideas isn't worth squat. This is the first time T cells have been effectively primed (including memory T cell production) to completely wipe out all traces of cancer. And not only a tiny amount, in a dish, or in a mouse; the human tumor masses were measured in pounds. This makes it big news. Someone realizing something completely new and reporting on it, is infinitely more interesting than yet another daydreamer having an idea that turns out impossible even before it leaves the napkin.