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Contrary to what some have speculated, this is not just science by press conference. There is an actual paper out today in Science magazine (subscription only, but a summary is here). It is speculative, but not of the "arsenic life" or "bacteria in a Mars meteorite" variety.

Contrary to what some have speculated, this is not just science by press conference. There is an actual paper out today in Science magazine (subscription only, but a summary is here). It is speculative, but not of the "arsenic life" or "bacteria in a Mars meteorite" variety.

Here's the paper, just published in Science (unfortunately not open access). They're interpreting dark, downward-branching linear features that seasonally form on steep slopes as seasonal flows of water on the surface -- essentially seasonal surface springs of what what would have to be fairly briny water. They incrementally form in the warm season (i.e. progressively extend down the slope) and disappear in the cold season.

Some people were guessing earlier that it might have to do with methane. Apparently not. This is an extension of previous work on Martian gullies from Mars Global Surveyor and other imagery.

Of course I can point out how the video is incorrect - it asserts that because the primary data for the MWP came from the northern hemisphere (or northern europe), it can be disregarded as a regional phenomenon, not a global one. But this is clearly problematic on two points:

1) in order to assert that global average temp during the MWP was actually not anomalously high, you'd have to show evidence from other regions being sufficiently anomalously *cold* as to counteract;

2) the same argument about regional variation can be made about current "global warming", with some areas experiencing much different average trends on a regional basis.

As for Broeker's 2001 article, the case for the global MWP has become much more conclusive over the years - again read the cites :)

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5923/78.short

How about we add to europe (which you seem to accept), and show antarctica:

http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Ste2009a.pdf

I know as a point of faith it is difficult to let go of the hockey stick, but Mann was a fraud, pure and simple. The clever and skillful manipulation he proposed made for a great slideshow, but wasn't very truthful.

You're offering a false dichotomy. By constraining your imagination to only those factors in climate models, you prejudge the question (and frankly, you can tweak the model however you want, say by hard coding unjustified feedback from CO2 to H2O). The opposite of "Anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for observed recent warming" is not "The Sun is primarily responsible for observed recent warming", it's "natural forces are primarily responsible for observed recent warming".

Who said anything about constraining imagination? For what it's worth, you're free to add any factor you want or a combination of factors as long as you can provide mathematical description of its effect and accurate measurements of the factor in action, including the number of active sea pirates.

But the thing is, if you scratch anthropogenic CO2 from the model and stick with just natural levels of CO2, whatever changes you do to the equations, you'll always be left with a gaping hole in the shape of anthropogenic CO2. No matter how much you try to make the model fit the past records, it won't be able to recreate or predict new events as well as AGW models do.

You cannot say "I assert human CO2 is responsible. To refute me, you must prove that something else is specifically responsible, otherwise, I win by default." The null hypothesis cannot be so cleverly avoided. Your placement of human CO2 on the pedestal of supernatural primacy that must be disproved, rather than in its proper place as a hypothesis that must compete against the primacy of natural climate change, is unjustifiable.

I don't. I'm saying that right now, we have a pile of evidence as high as Empire State Building which points at anthropogenic CO2 as the main culprit as opposed to purely natural forces. A non-trivial part of this evidence are experiments which go along the lines of "what would the climate look like if we left anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation". And vast majority of those experiments come to the conclusion that it'd be completely different from what it looks like in reality.

Furthermore, why would you assert that we'd have higher warming in tropical regions if the sun was driving warming? The transfer of heat throughout the globe seems to have more to do with ocean currents - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6033/1076.abstract

Ummm... because that's where the the most heat enters our atmosphere and where those ocean currents take heat from? If you don't pump more heat into ocean currents in tropical regions, where do they take the extra heat that they're supposed to deliver into polar regions?

That all being said, given the prediction of the CO2 hotspot, would you accept that the lack of such a hotspot represents a solid refutation of your hypothesis? http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf

I have a question for you: where did the purple region above 16km in the "no hotspot" picture come from? The patterns on page 8 list it under "an increase in non-water-vapor greenhouse gases" and there's no other cause of such cold pattern anywhere else in the list. As for the hotspot itself, the measurements are within confidence intervals of IPCC models (link taken from your article).

If you don't accept that as a solid refutation, are you willing to make other specific predictions about what kinds of patterns we could observe that would prove your hypothesis incorrect? I'm assuming you would have a longer list than "if the tropics warm more than the poles" - that seems like a pretty broad inclusionary criteria that doesn't logically lead to human CO2 based warming exclusively (especially if we could observe similar warming patterns before h

You're offering a false dichotomy. By constraining your imagination to only those factors in climate models, you prejudge the question (and frankly, you can tweak the model however you want, say by hard coding unjustified feedback from CO2 to H2O). The opposite of "Anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for observed recent warming" is not "The Sun is primarily responsible for observed recent warming", it's "natural forces are primarily responsible for observed recent warming".

You cannot say "I assert human CO2 is responsible. To refute me, you must prove that something else is specifically responsible, otherwise, I win by default." The null hypothesis cannot be so cleverly avoided. Your placement of human CO2 on the pedestal of supernatural primacy that must be disproved, rather than in its proper place as a hypothesis that must compete against the primacy of natural climate change, is unjustifiable.

Furthermore, why would you assert that we'd have higher warming in tropical regions if the sun was driving warming? The transfer of heat throughout the globe seems to have more to do with ocean currents - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6033/1076.abstract

That all being said, given the prediction of the CO2 hotspot, would you accept that the lack of such a hotspot represents a solid refutation of your hypothesis? http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf

If you don't accept that as a solid refutation, are you willing to make other specific predictions about what kinds of patterns we could observe that would prove your hypothesis incorrect? I'm assuming you would have a longer list than "if the tropics warm more than the poles" - that seems like a pretty broad inclusionary criteria that doesn't logically lead to human CO2 based warming exclusively (especially if we could observe similar warming patterns before human CO2 was significant in the *same* pattern).

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/291/5508/1497.short

http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2010/sep/15sep2010a2.html

Oh, and that data is all accessible through standard FOIA procedures :)

The MWP was a global phenomena. Read the following references:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/291/5508/1497.short

http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/medieval-warm-period-rediscovered

Assuming that my refutation of your position is reflexive, rather than thoughtful, is a mistake on your part. I have read the references. I have researched the material. And your video is simply incorrect.

Now, I understand how a global MWP undermines the faith of AGW and CAGW, so I understand how threatening idea this can be to your world view, but perhaps, just perhaps, if you're willing to admit that the existence of a global MWP refutes AGW (or CAGW), we've made some progress.

Science magazine's podcast is a nice weekly overview for the non-expert. IEEE's monthly Spectrum magazine is good for tech/engineering topics.

I'm sure Nature, or other similar quality journals, would work as well (I choose Science, mostly because I found a subscription card for them).

Long-term population viability of Fraser River sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) is threatened by unusually high levels of mortality as they swim to their spawning areas before they spawn. Functional genomic studies on biopsied gill tissue from tagged wild adults that were tracked through ocean and river environments revealed physiological profiles predictive of successful migration and spawning. We identified a common genomic profile that was correlated with survival in each study. In ocean-tagged fish, a mortality-related genomic signature was associated with a 13.5-fold greater chance of dying en route. In river-tagged fish, the same genomic signature was associated with a 50% increase in mortality before reaching the spawning grounds in one of three stocks tested. At the spawning grounds, the same signature was associated with 3.7-fold greater odds of dying without spawning. Functional analysis raises the possibility that the mortality-related signature reflects a viral infection.

Here's the URL for the article (which requires access to Science).

H. neanderthalensis is thus, descended from a species that left Africa, but is not FROM Africa.

This is questionable. A paper published in 2010 on a draft sequence of Neanderthal genome would suggest that the source population of non-African modern humans were already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa

We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710

... too many people keep saying that tidal and wave power will "run out" if we try to harness it.

Technically true, but not because extracting tidal energy will cause the Moon to move closer to the Earth. In fact, the Moon would recede from the Earth even faster, resulting in an imperceptibly small decrease in tide heights, because lunar tide heights are proportional to the inverse cube of the distance between the Moon and the Earth.

Thanks for reminding me that i had things wrong - but at the same time mind doing the math for the correct answer?

Extracting tidal energy would cause the Moon to move away faster, so one could ask "how much potential energy would the Moon gain by moving away from the Earth by 1 km?" Well, G = 6.67x10^(-11) m^3 kg^(-1) s^(-2) and m1 = mass of Earth = 6x10^24 kg and m2 = mass of Moon = 7.3x10^22 kg.

The (current) average distance from the Earth to the Moon is r = 384,399 km. So the potential energy of the Moon in its current spot is -7.60007x10^28 J. (Gravitational potential energy is negative.) Moving the Moon 1 km away from the Earth raises its potential energy to -7.60005x10^28 J, an increase of 2x10^23 J.

But, as I pointed out, the Moon's gravitational potential energy isn't the source of tidal energy. The rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is. The Moon's ascent from Earth would be a byproduct of extracting tidal energy, not the source of that energy.

The lunar ocean tide M2 currently dissipates ~2.4 TW of power. The Moon is receding at a rate of ~3.8 cm per year which is slowing the Earth's rotation by ~2 ms per century.

Knowing that the rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is the source of tidal energy, we can approximate the Earth as a solid uniform sphere which has a moment of inertia of I = 2/5 m1 a^2, where a = mean radius of Earth = 6371 km. So the Earth's moment of inertia is 9.74x10^37 kg m^2. Since KE = 1/2 I omega^2, and omega = 2*pi/sidereal_period (currently 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.091 seconds), the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is currently 2.59001833x10^29 J. In 100 years, the Earth's sidereal period will be ~2 ms longer, at which point the Earth's rotational kinetic energy will be 2.59001821x10^29 J, a decrease of 1.2x10^22 J.

The lost rotational kinetic energy is converted into frictional heat on the ocean floor and continental boundaries, and some of it goes into raising the Moon's orbit. Thus we can perform a sanity check by verifying that the energy gained by the Moon is smaller than the lost kinetic energy of the Earth. If 1 km of lunar recession is worth 2x10^23 J, then using a linear approximation 3.8 cm of recession each year is worth 7.6x10^18 J of additional potential energy each year, or 0.24 TW. Each year, the Earth's rotational kinetic energy drops by 1/100 the amount it does each century, which means 1.2x10^20 J are lost each year, or 3.8 TW. (Note that this is close to the 3.7 TW reported by Munk and Wunsch.)

So the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is the source of tidal energy. It's decreasing faster than lunar potential energy is increasing, which is physically plausible. Roughly 6% of the lost rotational kinetic energy goes into raising the Moon's orbit. The rest is converted to heat by friction and turbulence.

The article specifies private and commercial jetlines. Military, prop, or turboprops don't fall into those categories.

Though the research may be valid, the summary article is a disaster, which is becoming quite common in the media today.

The "journalists" in science based reporting often have NO CLUE on basic scientific stats, ie odds ratios are routinely wrongly reported or commented on. But I've noticed even more basic factual errors aind inferences being drawn. I've pretty much given up on media reports of science, I simply find the source article if it's at all interesting.

Can't blame journalists for quoting the scientists though: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6038/77

Formation and Spread of Aircraft-Induced Holes in Clouds

Andrew J. Heymsfield1,*, Gregory Thompson1, Hugh Morrison1, Aaron Bansemer1, Roy M. Rasmussen1, Patrick Minnis2, Zhien Wang3, Damao Zhang3

1National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO 80301, USA. 2NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA 23681, USA. 3Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: heyms1@ncar.ucar.edu ABSTRACT

Hole-punch and canal clouds have been observed for more than 50 years, but the mechanisms of formation, development, duration, and thus the extent of their effect have largely been ignored. The holes have been associated with inadvertent seeding of clouds with ice particles generated by aircraft, produced through spontaneous freezing of cloud droplets in air cooled as it flows around aircraft propeller tips or over jet aircraft wings. Model simulations indicate that the growth of the ice particles can induce vertical motions with a duration of 1 hour or more, a process that expands the holes and canals in clouds. Global effects are minimal, but regionally near major airports, additional precipitation can be induced.

You should be using LSD already. All of the positive effects of an intense spiritual experience without the woo-woo of religion. Psilocybin works too.

I would agree with "you should try LSD," but no one should be "using LSD." It's not that kind of drug.

You should be using LSD already. All of the positive effects of an intense spiritual experience without the woo-woo of religion. Psilocybin works too.

Carbon dioxide does not cause catastrophic runaway global warming. It may cause approx. a degree or so of warming. Any more would require positive feedback and there is no evidence that is happening. We've measured the radiation in at all wavelengths and we've measured the radiation out at all wavelengths. The evidence for positive feedback is just not there.

This is false.

http://www.science20.com/news_account/greenhouse_gases_and_water_vapor_when_positive_feedback_is_a_bad_thing
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010JD014192.shtml
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m2054qq6126802g8/
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL035333.shtml
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2007JCLI2142.1
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL025505.shtml
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005.../2005GL023624.shtml
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v164l177374p1445/

Let's just look at one abstract.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5749/841

Climate models predict that the concentration of water vapor in the upper troposphere could double by the end of the century as a result of increases in greenhouse gases. Such moistening plays a key role in amplifying the rate at which the climate warms in response to anthropogenic activities, but has been difficult to detect because of deficiencies in conventional observing systems. We use satellite measurements to highlight a distinct radiative signature of upper tropospheric moistening over the period 1982 to 2004. The observed moistening is accurately captured by climate model simulations and lends further credence to model projections of future global warming.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/new-superbug-found-in-cows-and-p.html?ref=hp

A novel form of deadly drug-resistant bacteria that hides from a standard test has turned up in Europe. Researchers found the so-called MRSA strain in both dairy cows and humans in the United Kingdom, suggesting that it might be passed from dairies to the general population. But before you toss your milk, don't panic: The superbug isn't a concern in pasteurized dairy products.

MRSA, short for meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a drug-resistant form of the widespread and normally harmless S. aureus bacteria. Many people walk around with MRSA in their noses or on their skin yet don't get sick. But in some hospital patients and people with weakened immune systems, MRSA thrives, and it is blamed for about 19,000 hospital deaths a year in the United States.

Mark Holmes of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and colleagues stumbled upon the new strain while studying mastitis, or infected udders, in U.K. dairy cows. Some milk samples from sick cows contained S. aureus bacteria that grew in the presence of antibiotics, which is one test for MRSAs. Yet the same samples turned up negative for the drug-defying bacterium when the team used PCR, a DNA amplification technique, to detect a gene called mecA, which is found in all MRSA strains.

The PCR test doesn't always pick up variants of the gene it's meant to detect, however. To check this, the researchers sent a cow S. aureus sample to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, which sequenced the bacterium's entire genome. "Lo and behold, there was a mecA gene there," one whose sequence overlapped with the better-known mecA by a surprisingly low 60%, Holmes said today in a press conference.

The researchers then looked for this mecA gene in people. They tested 74 samples of S. aureus isolated from people from the United Kingdom and Denmark that were drug resistant in the antibiotic growth test but not in the PCR test—most from carriers but some from patients who were sickened by MRSA. They found the new mecA in about two-thirds of the samples, they report today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. A nearly identical mecA gene has also now been reported in human samples from Germany and Ireland.

The strain is still relatively rare—it probably makes up less than 1% of all detected MRSA cases, the U.K. team says. But its prevalence appears to have risen in the past decade. "More likely it's been around in the environment for a long time, and it's just getting into the human population," says University College Dublin microbiologist David Coleman, whose team reports on the Irish samples today in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

The new superbug probably isn't leading to missed infections, at least in the United Kingdom, because hospitals that suspect a patient is infected with an MRSA nearly always use the antibiotic growth test in addition to PCR, Holmes says. (Patients with a confirmed infection then receive antibiotics that work on MRSAs.) However, many hospitals in continental Europe are moving toward using only PCR tests; this is a warning that those tests need to be modified to test for the new mecA gene, Holmes says.

The study also points to dairy cows as a possible reservoir for the bug, just as pigs seem to pass MRSA to humans in the Netherlands. The bug probably doesn't get to humans through the milk supply, because almost all milk in the United Kingdom and Denmark is pasteurized, a process that kills bacteria. But workers who come into contact with infected dairy cows could be carriers. Holmes's team reports "circumstantial evidence" for this, such as the fact that genetic subtypes of the human and cow samples from the same geographical areas were nearly identical. "The main worry would be that these cows represent a pool of the bacteria" that farm workers spread into the human popula

This is the release on NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/may/HQ_11-171_Moon_Water.html
And here's the paper (requires subscription): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/05/25/science.1204626.full.pdf

I find it interesting that both email addresses given on that response are on gmail domain.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/05/26/science.1202098.full.pdf

I she afraid she will be fired?

I haven't studied quantum information theory (I dropped Paul Ginsparg's quantum information theory class after a few days because I had too much work this semester), but it's general knowledge among physicists that Dwave has not made anything worth writing home about. Two wide-audience survey articles about this are http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/loser-dwave-does-not-quantum-compute from IEEE and http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/controversial-computer-is-at-lea.html?ref=hp from the magazine Science

It's simply survival of the fittest. At the turn of the century, nanotubes and buckyballs were "cool" academically. Now it's graphene. Though these have been around since 60 years (see the 1947 paper The Band Theory of Graphite ).

I agree that fads are fads, but this is how science will progress from hereon. It used to be a practice of a handful of people in the early days, even towards the first half of the 20th century. Academic research now is a valid career option for a large number of people. Just like any other career, it has certain "return on investments". The ROI's in this case are papers, patents and awards. This IS the yardstick with which your success is measured in the scientific field. It goes to logic people are going to try and stay at the top of their game by going after "modern" and "cutting-edge" topics.

I wouldn't completely agree with your argument of only a few applications remaining. I am not an expert on buckyballs, so I'll refrain from commenting on that, but for Carbon Nanotubes (CNT) there are an insane number of applications already in place. They range from CNT based logic, radio, Atomic force microscopy etc (too many to fit here)

Scientific (or otherwise in the BBC case) media will always glamorize any scientific discovery and exaggerate its potential, as it does for everything else. This is not necessarily an issue with the scientific community who does the research work. If anything, media stories like these end up slapping unreal expectations on scientists and engineers. This ultimately results in a "disappointment" on the public's side when all the proclaimed applications are not realized and electronics industry still runs on Silicon.

Global warming is caused by the emission of gases, mostly CO2, but also CFC replacements that are 1000s of times more potent than CO2.

While that may or may not be true, the amount of CFC replacements is hundreds of thousands of times less than the amount of serious green-house gases. The ozone layer itself is only composed of the equivalent of 2 centimeters worth of ozone planet-wide. It doesn't take much CFCs to mess that up.

Solubility of gases in water is directly related to the temperature of the water. If the radon released is hot enough, it could conceivably heat the water as it's rising, impeding its ability to solubilize. Also, ocean water is pretty aerated already, so it is conceivable that it might hit the saturation point quickly.

That being said, as the radon rises, the pressure of the ocean will decrease, the radon bubbles will expand, and the temp will drop, facilitating the dissolution of the radon. I think you're probably spot on, the radon would just hang around in the ocean, slowly ionizing it instead of rising and ionising the air. Here is one of the sources about radon being released prior to a quake, but it has no data about bubbling through bodies of water first. That paper cites a Science article, but it seems to be just about ground water, and for some reason I can't access it, though my university has a subscription.

If anyone wants to do the math, the 50th ed. CRC lists the solubility of radon as 51 cc/100cc hot water, and 13 cc/100 cc cold water (no idea what actual temperatures those might be). I'm not sure how to reasonably estimate a volume of water for this, though.

I also just realized that I've been reading too many British papers, since I spelled it "ionising" instead of "ionizing." Or maybe it's because I just read Thunderball

At the moment, the global temperature anomaly is 0.1C BELOW the thirty year running mean (and has been for a couple of months now).

Using the Hadcru data, I get 0.058C above the 30 year mean.

Whose data are you using to get this 0.1 below?

So yes, global warming is real, but it is entirely possible that its cause is, and has been in the past, the Sun. Not CO_2.

There are vast number of independent ways by which it can be shown that the current warming is due to greenhouse gasses, and is not due to the sun.

For one thing the stratosphere is cooling. The sun warms the whole atmosphere, from above. However the greenhouse effect traps heat low in the atmosphere leading to this cooling.

For another the North Pole and the Antarctic Peninsula are the fastest warming parts of the globe. The sun's effect is strongest where it's light is most direct ... in the tropics. However the CO2 greenhouse effect overlaps with the H2O greenhouse effect so its effect is greater where absolute humidity is low.

For a third thing, the warming is happening more at night. The sun warms things when it is shining. However the greenhouse effect slows the rate of heat loss, without affecting the rate of heat gain as much, so the greatest effect would be seen at the coldest part of the day.

Similarly and for a fourth thing, winter temperatures are warming slightly faster than Summer ones.

For a fifth, the temperature response due to CO2 can be calculated, such as has been done in this paper. It turns out that the warming is anthropogenic.

Warm weather is good. Plants grow. People eat.

Already less than they would if there were no global warming:

Worldwide, the authors report online today in Science, yields of corn and wheat declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared with what they would have been without global warming.

You seem to be very full of misinformation. Have you been reading Wattsup?

It turns out scientific sources provide better information on this topic than popular interest ones.

The goal was to get numerical results to 1% accuracy, and the actual measurements only achieved %19 percent accuracy. This was due to a design error.

Mechanically, the spheres were the roundest objects ever manufactured, Everitt explained. Were one blown up to the size of Earth, the biggest hill on it would be 3 meters tall. However, trapped charges in the niobium made the gyroscopes far less round electrically; an Earth-sized map of a sphere's voltage landscape would sport peaks as high as Mount Everest. Interactions between those imperfections and ones in the gyroscopes' housing created tiny tugs, and to reach the final precisions, researchers spent 5 years figuring out how to correct for them.

On top of that, other researchers made better measurements using other much cheaper satellites.

Gravity Probe B fell well short of the precision developers had hoped to achieve in making the key measurement. Moreover, the project got scooped 6 years ago, when two physicists made a similar measurement using data from much cheaper satellites.

So they got scooped and their final results were not what they had planned. Not a complete failure, but not a real success either.

He didn't make fun of all Libertarians, just followers of Ayn Rand, who said:

Soviet Russia is the ultimate result, the final product, the full, consistent embodiment of the altruist morality in practice; it represents the only way that that morality can ever be practiced.

And other fun quotes about the subject.

Biology is still making real progress, and has plenty of work ahead.

As someone working in biotech, I can very heartily second this sentiment. There are a lot of well-paying, satisfying careers in the biological sciences, especially if you also have programming/computer skills.

Also, from my perspective, I predict that the next century will see a biotech boom that is the analog of the computer boom in the last century and that advances in biotech will have some dramatic (and possibly terrifying) impacts on day to day life. The reason is that we are really only just now starting to have the technology available to even read the basic instructions of life (ie, DNA) in a cost-effective way. Combine that with improvements to DNA synthesis (ie, Venter's recent work), and there will be changes.

Good question. First, I didn't say we don't know how to look for it.
I said we looked for common terrestrial forms. My first suggestion
is to look for uncommon terrestrial forms also. But we could broaden
that a bit.

How about we limit the search to chemical based life. Then we can
come up with a scientific definition. The definition would include
organized chemical processes that reduce their own entropy at
the expense of the environment with the goal of reproduction.

Then you begin to look for unexplained chemical processes. Like
excess methane on Mars. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1758
Or Formaldehyde http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050221/full/news050221-15.html

A serial founder effect model of phonemic diversity was used to infer the most likely origin of modern languages, following an approach outlined in studies of human genetic and phenotypic diversity (S6). Under this model, during population expansion, small founder groups are expected to carry less phonemic diversity than their larger parent populations.

This approach only models the decrease in phonemic diversity due to migration. It does not say anything about how phonemic diversity grows. In essence, it models only half of the system. To me it seems difficult to answer questions of the origin of language without also modeling the growth of phonemic diversity Phonemic variation can be introduced to the region by migration as well (as in the case of the apparent migration of phonemes from Borneo to Madagascar).

One word of caution: I am not an expert in the field... just a slashdot reader.

A serial founder effect model of phonemic diversity was used to infer the most likely origin of modern languages, following an approach outlined in studies of human genetic and phenotypic diversity (S6). Under this model, during population expansion, small founder groups are expected to carry less phonemic diversity than their larger parent populations.

This approach only models the decrease in phonemic diversity due to migration. It does not say anything about how phonemic diversity grows. In essence, it models only half of the system. To me it seems difficult to answer questions of the origin of language without also modeling the growth of phonemic diversity Phonemic variation can be introduced to the region by migration as well (as in the case of the apparent migration of phonemes from Borneo to Madagascar).

One word of caution: I am not an expert in the field... just a slashdot reader.

Actually there's a little more to it than that - lung expansion injuries are only one of the dangers divers face.
The real decompression problem is that nitrogen in the air is absorbed into body tissues at depth. If you absorb too much nitrogen it takes a long time to release it again without causing bubbles. Bubbles of nitrogen in your blood cause blockages and clots, which are not very nice.

Whales and dolphins are also absorbing nitrogen from tha air compressed in their lungs, (it's 1 atmosphere at the surace but gets compressed another atmosphere for every 10 meters deep they go) but usually adopt dive profiles that allow the absorbed nitrogen to escape safely without causing bubbles - deepest part of the dive first, then going up to shallower depths progressively.

Whales however can get bent - http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2007/12/14-02.html apparently, if they come up too fast after being scared by sonar.

High intensity lasers change the optical properties of the air such that the effective refractive index becomes a slight function of the intensity. Asymmetric laser profiles, shaped in the just the right ways, can be constantly refracted as they travel and produce curved beams. Here is an example: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5924/229.full.

This approach is of course inefficient, impractical, and not used by the current weapon, because it ionizes the air along the way, but line of sight is not a fundamental problem with lasers in atmosphere.

I guarantee that you have never seen anything quite in the same league as the videos made by Sapientia University

Without diminishing the creativity of these videos, I recommend that if you enjoyed these you might do a Google search for "Dance Your PhD".

Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/and-the-dance-your-phd-winner-is.html

Nucleic acids never looked so good.

Gravity worked in the same manner before Einstein defined it that it does now.

That doesn't necessarily imply that it will work the same in the future.

Repeateable observation does not require faith

Until you want to use that observation to predict any future behavior. When you do (and I do) you have to assume some non-provable assumptions, like assuming the universe will continue behaving as what we have observed and *interpreted* so far. It's just that the realm of physics seems to have given moslty good results when using those assumptions, while other fields, like economics have not.

Observation does not change constants

No, but observation changes the value we know constants have. Else we wouldn't be using expensive experiments to better know about them , like we are still doing for G: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5808/74.abstract And, observation has even shown us that the impact of those constants is different than we assumed. Before relativity, we had no idea that gravity would affect light.

Sampling on the RV Weatherbird II was done as follows: Seawater (170 liters) from stations 11 and 13 was directly filtered through a 0.8m Supor membrane disc filter (Pall Life Sciences) followed in series by a 0.22m Supor membrane disc filter (Pall Life Sciences). The sample from station 3 was pumped into a 250 L carboy prior to being filtered through the impact filters. The length of time from collection of the sample until the end of the filtration step was approximately one hour. Filters were placed in 5ml of sucrose lysis buffer (20mM EDTA, 400mM NaCl, 0.75 M Sucrose, 50mM Tris-HCl, pH 9.0) and stored in liquid nitrogen on the Weatherbird then placed at -80C until DNA extractions were done.

Sample preparation. The impact filters were cut into quarters and placed in individual 50 ml conical tubes. TE buffer (5 ml, pH 8) containing 150 ug/ml lysozyme was added to each tube. The tubes were incubated at 37oC for 2 hours. SDS was added to 0.1% and the samples were then put through three freeze/thaw cycles. The lysate was then treated with Proteinase K (100 ug/mL) for one hour at 55oC followed by three aqueous phenol extractions and one extraction with phenol/chloroform. The supernatant was then precipitated with two volumes of 100% ethanol and the DNA pellet washed with 70% ethanol.

Which is all to say that a large amount of seawater was filtered through filters of appropriate pore size to catch microbes, the cells were broken open and the proteins were broken down, and the DNA was extracted with alcohol. The DNA extraction procedure is pretty standard for anything whose genes you'd like to sequence; more commonly, the sample would be made of cells from a single species or organism, like a human blood sample or a bacteria cell culture, but in this case, the sample is a mixture of all of the microbes in 175 liters of seawater.

The US estimates 320 radiation caused deaths world wide from coal electrical generation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Human-caused_background_radiation
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.abstract

Nuclear power puts out 1% of the radiation that coal does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_nuclear_power#Risk_of_cancer
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/calculate.html

Do you live within 50 miles of a coal fired power plant? - .03 mRem/year
Do you live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant? - .009 mRem/year

Coal releases Uranium, Thorium, Radium, Radon, and Polonium into the atmosphere, how are those less radioactive than what a nuclear powerplant generally doesn't release?

1. 1. the isotope ratio of BP's methane is distinguishable - "the Macondo methane isotopically unique compared to methane from other nearby reservoirs and for the Gulf in general: it has a 12C to 13C ratio of about -60. The oil is -27. So we can track methane into the microorganisms that consume -- and then into the organisms that consume those microbes -- by monitoring the carbon isotope composition. These measurements take some time but we are doing this to track the path of methane through the system."
2. 2. the disputes of Joye's findings, including those being parroted here, are wholly unscientific, corporatist propaganda - "BP and NOAA are collaborating on the sediment sampling and BP sampled some of the same sites we sampled and confirmed our results (these data are in the OSAT report). We have sampled at different places and different times and have used different techniques. For example, the flocculent oil-containing layer we discovered would never be sampled with a box cover, it would literally be blown away by the pressure wave of the instrument. If the multiple corer is not lowered slow enough, the layer could be disrupted or destroyed. I only know how we sampled and we were using a multiple corer and approaching the bottom at a very slow speed so as not to disturb the sediment."

[Comment From Steve ] Methane has been the "hidden" impact of the spill. Rarely, if ever has it been mentioned in media reports. Is there any way to measure the long term impact of the methane released into the Gulf?

11:21

Mandy Joye: Steve-I agree that methane has received nearly enough attention. We can measure it's long term impact because it has a unique signature--the Macondo methane isotopically unique compared to methane from other nearby reservoirs and for the Gulf in general: it has a 12C to 13C ratio of about -60. The oil is -27. So we can track methane into the microorganisms that consume -- and then into the organisms that consume those microbes -- by monitoring the carbon isotope composition. These measurements take some time but we are doing this to track the path of methane through the system.

SCIENCE: It works, bitches!

If I read the original Science paper correctly this is nothing more than an etalon in front of an absorbing material (i.e. a plate of silicon, as they used in their experiment, in front of a black sheet of paper). Of couse it works as a selective absorber or "anti-laser", this is well known.

I wonder if they wrote the Science paper just to show what you can publish using a lot of buzzwords...

Since the provided Fox News link is useless, here is the link to the original Science paper published today by the researchers. Requires paid access, if you don't have that, try PhysicsWorld.

Basically, it is a time-reversed laser, so it absorbs coherent light.

This net thing is a great yarn, but I'm sorry to say it's just not true. As the good people at Science point out, the original press-release was about a space tether that could be used to collect debris. It's now gotten way out of hand. Of course a space "net" isn't going to work. The amount of space you'd have to cover is enormous, and in many cases there's no way to discrimnate between junk and LEO satellites. Also, the relative velocities of the different bits of debris mean that the net would be literally trying to catch bullets.

is "would this happen without patents".

I can agree on that. And science studies have shown that progress would "happen" without patents; Promoting Intellectual Discovery: Patents Versus Markets.

Drugs simply won't happen without patents

But, besides the above science link, I totally disagree with this. There are alternatives to pharmaceutical patents. Governments fund drug reseach too. The US's National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars developing and testing Taxol, a drug used to treat breast and other cancers. The NCI then sold all the exclusive rights to the use of the research for FDA approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). How much did BMS pay? A fraction of NCI's costs. Add how much money did BMS make? In 2000, BMS bought the rights in 1988-9, BMS made almost $1 Billion. Besides that, answering the question Do drug companies do more marketing or research? is answered as thus: Drug industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing than on research and development. Beyond that, Economists say copyright and patent laws are killing innovation; hurting economy. Thomas Jefferson once said "inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Falcon

If you look on the right side there is a link to the abstract but unfortunately it is behind a pay wall. For the most part these ScienceExpress articles will not publish data and frankly I find this fine since the full paper was not provided. Had they provided the full paper so we as readers could engage...well either way we all hate pay walls. (try debating facts when you don't have all the facts, we know how well those go...lol)

In a paper published in the Dec. 24 issue of Science Magazine, the IBM researchers report that domain walls have mass and do indeed take a bit of time to speed up to peak velocity, and to slow down. Knowing this, they'll be able to move and retrieve data on a racetrack trip accurately. There's still a lot of work to be done before racetrack becomes a reality, but according to Parkin, the biggest questions -- whether an electric charge would move these domain walls, and whether or not they have mass -- have now been answered. Now the problems are more practical and less theoretical: how do you build a racetrack chip that works reliably with millions or even billions of these racetracks, for example. "Those are the questions that we can only address by building prototypes and testing them for a period of time," Parkin said.

And the official IBM press release:
https://www-304.ibm.com/jct03001c/press/us/en/pressrelease/33291.wss


I see more data center utilization for this technology rather than consumer devices. Be nice if I could get a home NAS on one of these in 5-10 years.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and irradiation happen to be the general subject of a term project I'm finishing up...

There's a lot of uses for CNTs ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/297/5582/787.full Might work. Might be paywalled. Yay University). The article didn't look to specific. (Or just plain wrong) I'm not clear if they're cutting a single CNT at a time or not.

One approach I've seen is suspending CNTs in a H2O2 solution, and irradiating with gamma rays to get shorter more uniform lengths of CNTs. The result basically is sphaghetti. A potential application though is as an additive in epoxies for strength. Identify the ideal length for structural purposes, and irradiate CNTs to get said length. This article also mentioned using ultrasonic treatment or whatever to shorten CNTs. (So this article is not new science, I think) ("Shortening of multi-walled carbon nanotubes by c-irradiation in the presence of hydrogen peroxide," Jung, et al., 2008)

I've also seen electron irradiation for cutting multi-walled nanotubes. The electron microscope pics look almost like chopped up tree trunks.

Diameter of (single walled) CNTs is on the order of 0.5 to 5 nm. (Interestingly, carbon fiber fibers have diameters on the scale of microns, e.g. 1000x greater)

That is one arrogant attempt at bludgeoning everyone over the head with the general relativity as if it were some kind of religious doctrine.

At no point in time did that Rich dude (horrible diagrams notwithstanding) actually proved breakdown of causality. All he demonstrated was that by using FTL communications one can receive information about events faster than by the means of speed of light, but at no point before they occur. Also simple experiments such as this demonstrate that general relativity is far, far away from explaining the nature of the physical Universe, never you mind the nature of far more convoluted concepts such as information.

You remind me of the physicists of the Newtonian establishment who used to strut around with their "infallible" "Clockwork Universe" ideas and who downright ridiculed anyone who tried to point out that their model was somewhat deficient.

And if time travel is possible, then (to paraphrase Fermi), where are all the time travelers?

Since FTL does not imply (colourful pictures notwithstanding) backwards time travel, there is no paradox.

Still not seeing any citations, but perhaps you should be reviewing your own examples. The hockey stick has been confirmed by multiple independent lines of evidence:

McIntyre 2004 claimed that the Mann 1999's hockey-stick graph shape was a result of the analysis method used (principal components analysis), and was not statistically significant. However, the National Center for Atmospheric Research reconstructed (Wahl 2007) the graph using a variety of techniques (with and without principal components analysis), and with some slightly different temperatures in the 15th century, confirmed the hockey stick. Furthermore, independent measurements from boreholes (Huang 2000"), stalagmites (Smith 2006) and glaciers (Oerlemans 2005) all confirm the same dramatic recent temperature rises. Mann 2008 combines these with ice cores, coral and lake sediments to confirm the same hockey stick shape over the last 1300 years, without requiring the disputed tree-ring data.

If you're referring to Steig 2009, perhaps you can point us to evidence that discredits this? You'll have to forgive us for not taking your claims that it is "unmitigated bollocks" at face value. Rather, measurements from the GRACE satellite (Velicogna 2009) show very clearly that the Antarctic land ice sheet has lost around 900 gigatonnes in the last 7 years, and this loss rate is accelerating, even in the previously-thought-stable East Antarctica (Chen 2009). The Antarctic sea ice sheet is actually increasing, however, for numerous possible reasons, but at a lower rate than the land ice loss.

From the abstract of the associated article, the contribution is realtime visualization of the growth of the nanowire during charging. It's hard to get this sort of setup into a transmission electron microscope. If your institution has access, the full article can be obtained by following the link from the abstract. I can't imagine why the editor posted this without an appropriate link to the article. The video is otherwise meaningless.