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This will probably be modded off topic or the like, but I wanted to just add a random fact. One of the authors of this paper was a post-doc in the same lab as me before he started working at Sandia; we were working on a solar cell material project together.

The paper regarding lithium intercalation is located here.

Initially, we measured traces of As by ICP-MS analysis of extracted nucleic acid and protein/metabolite fractions from +As/-P grown cells (11) (table S1). We then used high-resolution secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS) to positively identify As in extracted, gel purified genomic DNA (Fig. 2A). These data showed that DNA from +As/-P cells had elevated As and low P relative to DNA from the -As/+P cells.

So my question is basically what does it matter what they grew or washed the bacteria with when, in one of the many investigations, they found that gel purified genomic DNA had elevated levels of arsenic in them? Unless I'm misunderstanding what 'gel purified genomic DNA' means, I would assume that there's still several pieces of data in these experiments that point toward an organism that uses arsenic in place of phosphorous -- even if only somehow partially. Would this sort of spectrometry reveal any arsenic at all in my gel purified genomic DNA?

'Is this suggesting the bacteria might have piggybacked on an meteor? Could it have developed naturally on Earth?'

There's no particular evidence of an extra-terrestrial origin. It actually grows better when fed phosphate rather than arsenate, and the sequence of one of its ribosomal RNA genes places its pedigree in the known family tree of related organisms - see p7 of their supplementary data pdf (should be accessible to non-subscribers):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2010/12/01/science.1197258.DC1/Wolfe-Simon-SOM.pdf

The IIPC report disagrees with these numbers by a very large amount.

No, it doesn't. They're comparing two different things. The numbers in the IPCC report explicitly ignore any contribution from fast ice dynamics (read the footnotes). Those dynamics are precisely what have the potential for large sea level rise within a century.

You can run the numbers yourself.

Have you run the numbers yourself? Look at the papers on kinematic ice constraints (e.g. Pfeffer et al. (2008)) for upper bounds on how fast an ice sheet can lose mass.

It's also kind of ridiculous to say that Antarctica is "not important". The West Antarctic ice sheet could be an even larger contributor than Greenland, if eroding ice shelves accelerate the flow of land ice streams into the ocean (i.e., not "melting" the land ice but simply dumping it into the sea).

Yes, the dominant time scale of a melting ice sheet is hundreds to thousands of years, but there are enough fast processes out there (basal lubrication, ice shelf disintegration, etc.) to get a significant century-scale response. We don't know yet whether that is likely to happen, but as far as we currently know, it's at least physically possible.

FYI, I'm an employee of the nonprofit AAAS, which publishes Science.

These are Science articles, behind Sciencemag.org's paywall, not Nature's. Nature is a completely different journal by someone else.
The original post is linked to one freely-available summary; you can find the rest of the Science summaries linked from the table of contents.
You an also find a good description of this research on AAAS' website in " Science: LCROSS Impact Ejects Minerals and Frozen Water from Crater on the Moon." That contains links to publicly accessible news releases and, at the bottom, links to all 6 summaries.

What, you think there are no pollutants in farm-raised fish? In fact, there tend to be significantly higher PCB levels. I avoid high mercury-level species (swordfish, shark, etc.) with the exception of canned tuna, which I eat fairly frequently, on the order of twice a week.

I mostly don't worry about mercury levels with tuna too much. For starters, I buy canned tuna from companies that catch them off the US coast and publish their average mercury levels. More expensive, but the stuff tastes insanely good. Also, it's not fully understood, but you can find a fair amount of reference out there to the fact that the high selenium content of tuna offsets the toxicity of the high methylmercury content. Not to say I'd sit there and eat tuna all day long every day - might not be a great idea.

I also eat quite a bit of wild-caught salmon, which has rather low mercury levels anyway. Farm-raised salmon tends to have very high PCB levels - the levels are short of the FDA's ridiculously high limits, but are on average something like 8-10 times higher than in wild-caught salmon (see, for example, this blurb from Harvard).

Obviously, this is a statistical game. In my judgment, the risks of not eating any fish outweigh the benefits.

Nature and Science are not for hard science.

The actual research articles are hard science - this was just a news story for a general audience. The official publication of the results in Science magazine appears to be a pretty serious piece of work, and it's significant enough that the editors allowed them to make it reasonably long instead of a (severely compressed) three- or four-page summary article like most of what they publish. There are lots of valid criticisms of those two journals, starting with their length requirements, but they're not Scientific American, and publishing in one of these is practically a prerequisite for getting a faculty position in biosciences at a major research university.

They are here in the US, but just undeveloped.

How far will we have to go scouring the ends of the Earth and fueling conflicts before environmentalists allow development?

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/09/chinese-threat-on-rare-earth-minerals.html

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/16/1739241/US-Sits-On-Supply-of-Rare-Tech-Crucial-Minerals

...theory.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. More precisely, you're using the wrong definition.

A theory, in science, is a system of explanations to describe the observations. As more observations come along, theories change, filling holes that the old theories couldn't explain. New and completely different systems sometimes can describe different circumstances better, so we get conflicting theories.

An example theory, proposed by a child, is that the sky is blue with clouds because the Earth is inside a blue ball with white spots. After flying in an airplane, the new theory is that the clouds are inside the blue ball as well. The theoretical model is still wrong, but it's more complex than it was before, and a little more accurate.

Theoretical research is still research. Possibly-correct models are laid out, and their effects are calculated, with comparisons to all known previous observations and models. If the model's obviously wrong, it's easily abandoned. If the model matches 99% of previous observations, the disagreements are examined, and new theories fill those holes. Eventually, enough rules are established that every significant detail of an experiment can be accounted for - and that's when the really fun experiments start.

Seriously... We (speaking for the human race in general) have some rough ideas of how matter behaves. If those ideas are correct, then we can predict how black holes should behave. If those predictions are correct, then we can predict how particles near a black hole should behave. If those predictions are correct, then we can predict how the black hole would radiate energy in response. If those predictions are correct, then we can predict the properties of that radiation.

That takes a lot of redundant language to describe the levels of predictions, which scientists should simply expect. If only we could remove some of those words, and trust that the meaning would be clear to the intended audience, saying something like "we can predict the properties of Hawking radiation..."

I digress... By duplicating one of the predicted particle behaviors, the scientists observed radiation. The radiation matches what was expected, and now we have more observations. Time to go double-check all those predictions again! Maybe we can even confirm a model, or better yet, disprove it. After all, that's what we've been doing for the last few hundred years.

Theories change often. Some particularly lucky theories stick around for thousands of years before being shown to be wrong. All of our current theories are actually expected to be wrong, in hopes of finding a unified theory that describes everything. That's the way science works. Science is the pursuit of knowledge. It's not the pursuit of being right.

"... on the next Science"? Hmm... Maybe that means on the next cover of Science? Maybe a little editing could fix that? And maybe typographical errors like "moview" could be fixed? Perhaps by actually reading the summary, Timothy?

Just because you repeat it many times does not make it true.

Neither will denying facts make them false. You can blindly deny our incomplete knowledge all you want, but it makes you look like the idiot...

but to imply that there was some fundamental error or shortcoming in the understanding of flight over the past 60 years does not do justice to the way that modern science and technological understanding develop.

Okay, how's this:

"the performance of insect wings, when tested under steady conditions in wind tunnels, is too low to account for the forces required to sustain flight"

It is only in the past few years that the fact that "flapping wings generate additional forces during stroke reversals." was determined as a solution to the problem.

"the source of extra lift remains unknown." ... "An intense leading-edge vortex was found on the down-stroke, of sufficient strength to explain the high-lift forces. The vortex is created by dynamic stall, and not by the rotational lift mechanisms that have been postulated for insect flight"

When did the "hindsight" issue crop up? Only after the full 60 years or maybe it was after 2 hours with a paper and pencil back in the 1950s when someone said "hey, bees fly pretty slow compared to our jets - what's up with that?"

It's easy to recognize that something doesn't add-up. That's worlds away from having a plausibly-complete understanding of exactly how it DOES in fact work. Einstein certainly knew where General Relativity broke down, but he wasn't able to come up with a solution for it, and he had well more than "2 hours with a paper and pencil".

I see now it's not in-fact hindsight in your case, but unadulterated ignorance, which just happens to be pro-(omnipotent)-scientists rather than the more common opposite. I suppose you'd have been claiming we had a complete understanding of insect flight 15+ years ago, when there were many fundamental blanks in the equations. I'm sorry I wasted my time.

If you or anyone else are interested in the topic and would like to edify themselves rather than blindly tear-down others, here are a couple jumping-off points:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v384/n6610/abs/384626a0.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/50/18213.full

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uosc-lev030108.php

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/apr/featphysics

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5703/1960

It's a pity that the church is not as enlightened in its view of contraceptives where the scientific evidence is clear.

Catholicism's approach to science seems to be, 'We accept it unless it competes with our interpretation of the bible.'

Pope John Paul II was actually pretty cool in some ways. He put together a group called the Papal Academy of Sciences, and invited the best scientists he could get, including several Nobel laureates, regardless of religion, including some atheists. They gave him advice on the scientific background of moral issues,like nuclear war.

One of the panelists (I can't find the citation) said that John Paul was a real intellectual, interested and knowledgeable about everything. There was only one exception -- you couldn't talk to him about human sexuality.

Science 23 February 2001:
Vol. 291. no. 5508, pp. 1472 - 1474
DOI: 10.1126/science.291.5508.1472

News Focus
PAPAL SCIENCE:
Science and Religion Advance Together at Pontifical Academy
Charles Seife

VATICAN CITY--The Casina Pio Quattro ... now serves as a meeting place for the religious and secular worlds. It is the headquarters for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: 80 esteemed scientists appointed for life to make their cumulative collective wisdom available to the pope. Members run the gamut of disciplines, backgrounds, nationalities, and religious beliefs. Twenty-five of them are Nobel laureates. Some of the most famous scientists in the world are members, such as physicists Stephen Hawking and Carlo Rubbia, astronomers Martin Rees and Vera Rubin, biologist David Baltimore, and numerous others. Every other year, the group gathers in the Vatican Gardens for a plenary session at which members hold forth on the state of science and the world, pass resolutions for improving the latter, and renew acquaintances. They have, by all accounts, a heavenly time. As member Joseph Murray, a 1990 Nobel laureate who performed the first kidney transplant, puts it, "Every day is like Christmas." If so, the gift giving is mutual. The pope gets access to the scientific expertise of people at the top of their fields in astronomy, cosmology, genetics, and other areas that interest the church. In return, the scientists get the ear of one of the most important people in the world--and, through him, a chance to influence whether people accept or reject new knowledge and technology. ...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/291/5508/1472

(Subscription only, infopeasants)

Well, I also at one point picked up the notion that cooked meat provides better access to energy than raw meat, and that this may have contributed to our advancement as a species (fire => cooked meat => sudden energy availability boost => less time spend on foraging for food => more time for socializing/culture/science/etc).

It seems to be supported by wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

The cooking of meat, as evident from burned and blackened mammal bones, makes the meats easier to eat and easier to attain the nutrition from proteins by making the meat itself easier to digest.[20][21] The amount of energy needed to digest cooked meat is less than raw meat, and cooking gelatinizes collagen and other connective tissues as well, "opens up tightly woven carbohydrate molecules for easier absorption."[21] Cooking also kills parasites and food poisoning bacteria.

[20] http://www.digonsite.com/drdig/earlyman/33.html (what the hell kind of reference is this)
[21] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/316/5831/1558.pdf (paywall)

I'd like some better references myself too..

The Aug 27 issue of Science, in which the x-ray crystallography study from Scripps appears, actually pubished two papers that describe the structure of adenovirus. The two papers use different techniques to achieve the same ends: the study from the researchers at Scripps grew crystals of the virus and studdied the x-ray diffraction patterns to deduce the structure of the virus. The other paper, done in collaboration between researches at UCLA and Xiangtan University in China, used a technique called cryo-electron microscopy. In this technique, the researchers freeze samples of the virus and use an electron microscope to take tens of thousands of pictures of different viruses within their samples. Although the pictures only give 2D projections of the virus structure, the individual electron microscopy images show the virus from different perspectives. By computationally aligning the images, they can reconstruct the 3 dimensional structure of the virus from the many 2D images taken. While this technique avoids the inherent difficulties of producing crystals (a process that can take decades for some samples), until very recently it has been difficult to achieve high resolution structures using this method. The cryo-EM adenovirus structure is one of only a handful of atomic resolution cryo-EM structures that have been solved to date.

While both studies are very informative and represent scientific tours de force for their respective techniques, it is interesting that the Medical Daily focuses only on the x-ray crystallography study from Scripps. Indeed, in a commentary published by Science that accompanies the articles, Prof. Stephen Harrison of Harvard Medical School (the first person to describe the full structure of a virus) writes that, "Indeed, the cryo-EM density map of Liu et al. appears to be substantially clearer and more interpretable than the x-ray density map of Reddy et al." Perhaps Medical Daily needs to do a better job of doing their homework.

The cryo-EM study is available at the following link (subscription required): http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/329/5995/1038

Summary:
http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20100830/adenovirus.html

Paywalled abstract:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/329/5995/1071

Anecdotal evidence can be deceptive, I was somewhat surprised to read about it too:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/313/5788/765/DC1/1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/01/evolution-darwin-survey-creationism

In another article, not available in English, the numbers were broken down by denomination. Catholics were less likely to take the bible literally, which brings the percentage of creationists down in Germany and the Netherlands, which are both about half catholic, half protestant/none/other

Define intelligence first.
Then, define "before".
Tool use without hands; http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/, not as hard as you might think.
Also, the following; http://www.jcrows.com/crow.html
"While tool use among birds is not unheard of, Hunt's New Caledonian crows, close kin to American crows, were observed employing two distinctly different kinds of tools to forage for invertebrates such as insects, centipedes, and larvae. Such specialization in tool manufacture has not heretofore been observed in nonhuman animals, according to Hunt.

Hunt observed both manufacture and use of a hooked tool made by plucking and stripping a barbed twig. He also observed the use, but not manufacture, of what he described as a "stepped cut tool" with serrated edges. He did, however, observe and photograph leaves from which crows had started to cut such stepped tools.
The findings add to the growing debate over cognition in nonhuman animals. While man, in Shakespeare's words, may be "the paragon of animals," Hunt's findings suggest that the capacity for thought exists on a continuum where man is not unique".

But I think I know what you mean, and my guess would be no, we haven't had intelligent life on earth before. All the answers to my basic questions (who/what, where, when, how) seem to lead me towards "highly unlikely", if not "does not compute"; ).

We're not even the only animal that does that: http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/ But they haven't figured out how to make tools that make tools yet. When dolphins invent the microprocessor, humanity will finally have our worthy opponent!

you should be able to dispatch with his pathetic claims in a matter seconds

No way. That takes decades of studies.

you should be able to dispatch with his pathetic claims in a matter seconds

No way. That takes decades of studies.

you should be able to dispatch with his pathetic claims in a matter seconds

No way. That takes decades of studies.

Why are you talking about D-O events, which are generally accepted to be regional or at best hemispheric in nature and driven by changes in thermohaline circulation (like the Younger Dryas)? We're talking about *global* climate change.

For the record, the Earth as a whole was quite robust against the Younger Dryas, but the North Atlantic (briefly) wasn't. I do find it annoying that you keep trying to turn this conversation from discussion of global climate change to historical blips in North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.

Does this dichotomy not strike you as odd to the point of untenability, believing that the Earth's climate is profoundly robust against an event like the one that spawned the Younger Dryas but incredibly fragile against anthropogenic CO2 emissions?

Science doesn't work based on what you "feel" should be right. Science works on facts. But if you want help with the "feel" side, CO2 levels are the highest they've been in nearly 15 million years, all of this change since human industrialization.

If you need help understanding how humans could cause *that*, picture this. The Hindenburg was the largest aircraft every built, at over 800 feet long, 135 feet in diameter, and with a volume of 200,000 cubic meters. If numbers don't do the size justice, how about a picture?. Now, carbon dioxide was historically at about 280ppm. So if you filled the hindenburg with pre-industrial air, it would contain 56 cubic meters of CO2. CO2 has a molar mass of 44.010 g/mol. The molar volume of an ideal gas under STP conditions is 22.414 L/mol, or 44.6149728 mol/m^3, so the Hindenburg would contain 110 kilograms of CO2.

A gallon of gasoline, burned, releases about 8.7kg of CO2. Your average sedan has about a 12-gallon gas tank. For a full tank of gas, 12*8.7=104kg of CO2, approximately the same as in *an entire Hindenburg of pre-industrial air*.

The world consumes 30 *billion* *barrels* of oil per year. Each barrel represents about 42 gallons of gasoline (about 3 1/2 Hindenburg's worth of CO2). So every year, the CO2 emitted by our burning of oil could double the CO2 concentration of 100 *trillion* Hindenburgs. *Every year*. Yet oil produces only 45% of our planet's total CO2 emissions, and even less of it's total AGW load. Let's be generous and only call the total 200 trillion Hindenburgs per year.

Earth's surface area is 5.10072e14 m^2. The Hindenburg takes up an area of about 108,000 square meters when stacked side by side, end to end. Hence you could stack about 4.7 trillion Hindenburgs side to side, end to end across the entire surface of the planet. To put our emissions another way, then, a mere five years of emissions could *more than double* the CO2 concentrations in Hindenburg airships stacked side to side, end to end, across the entire surface of the planet.

Does that help with the "feel" side of things? So we can get back to the "facts" side of things?

The linked to article had little useful info - it didn't even mention who the authors of the paper were or the title of the paper. I had to do some digging around and found it Here's a link to the abstract: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/41/41ra51.abstract The basics are that they isolated 3 peptide fragments that have a very high immuno response - and two were from unexpected proteins

Thanks for the link - that was really interesting. Even more so when you consider that we may be natural overimitators, i.e. we have an innate preference for the tried-and-true, even if it is inefficient. Leads me to suspect that we actually have to be trained to convince ourselves that our nifty new ideas are preferable.

Here is a posting on Science Magazine's ScienceNow, and here is the original journal article originally published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society. I think it is always better, when possible to refer to original sources when talking about scientific issues. Scientific discussions can become muddled when translated by journalists.

Anyway, it's this:

Jie Hu and Min-Feng Yu (2010). Meniscus-Confined Three-Dimensional Electrodeposition for Direct Writing of Wire Bonds. Science 329(5989): 313-316.

about as readable as the Sunday Times website

I hate it when news articles don't either link to the original scientific paper, or at the very least tell me what issue of what journal it was published in! Given the state of journalism-about-scientific-research, I like checking up on the original paper, either for more details, or for a better "related work" section (often the actual papers will be much more honest than the press releases about which parts of the work are new and which parts aren't, and how it relates to existing work).

Anyway, it's this:

Jie Hu and Min-Feng Yu (2010). Meniscus-Confined Three-Dimensional Electrodeposition for Direct Writing of Wire Bonds. Science 329(5989): 313-316.

The in vitro / in vivo gap is definitely a worry. The next stages of trials will give an answer with regards to that. The current issue of Science has several articles about the spread of HIV, including a good review about why it is difficult to eradicate HIV in an infected individual. ( for those with access, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/current/ or http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/329/5988/174.pdf ) There are many great broadly neutralizing antibodies coming out right now, and even though HIV has an astonishing ability to escape our immune systems, there is hope that these will be successful for vaccines. ( http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-immunol-030409-101256 )

The in vitro / in vivo gap is definitely a worry. The next stages of trials will give an answer with regards to that. The current issue of Science has several articles about the spread of HIV, including a good review about why it is difficult to eradicate HIV in an infected individual. ( for those with access, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/current/ or http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/329/5988/174.pdf ) There are many great broadly neutralizing antibodies coming out right now, and even though HIV has an astonishing ability to escape our immune systems, there is hope that these will be successful for vaccines. ( http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-immunol-030409-101256 )

I expect you are underestimating the sheer vastness of the ocean

Dr. Joye suggests that some of the oil is concentrated in plumes. I'd send the Enterprise to float over one of those first.

and how many gigatons of O_2 would be required.

This is why the Enterprise's six nuclear reactors are needed - there just aren't any other 310 Megawatt floating power plants, that I know of... The Mighty (MYT) pump design will efficiently convert the reactors' steam into rotational motion. Furthermore, the same pump will be able to move 3x as much air as old compressor designs.

At this point try anything and the place is so fuct that messing with the chemistry a bit more can't make it any worse

Epic disasters call for epic interventions, do they not?

Except the earth, in its state before human civilization, was largely able to compensate for what it produced (catastrophic extinction-level events aside; since I'm guessing we'd like to avoid those today as well). Plants need CO2, an abundance of CO2 meant more plants. Then human civilization began blossoming, which started by clearing forests, which reduced the ability of the earth to compensate for itself. Then industry began blossoming, which introduced more CO2 into the atmosphere than the species of earth had ever evolved to compensate for.

That's certainly the conventional wisdom but,

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. Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999

It's probably a lot more complicated than you were led to believe; quite frankly I'd be surprised if it weren't more complicated than we are able to model.

"The probe did return, however, and JAXA hoped to salvage something, but now it appears that the only thing it accomplished was one long and error-prone journey."

No, it tested the ion propulsion system and the pictures of the asteroid are fantastic. Look at them all. The first "rubble pile" asteroid photographed up close. There was a whole special issue of Science dedicated to the imaging and other results. Sure, plenty of things didn't work, plenty of things broke, it took much longer, but the real accomplishment was still managing to get a very useful mission out of it, and as others have pointed out, it's premature to say there is nothing in the sample container.

This mission was a triumph! A huge success. And they're still doing science! :-)

I'm glad you admitted that you do not understand because that truly is the root of the entire debate.

Embryonic Stem Cell Basics [nih.gov]
- Embryonic stem cells can become all cell types of the body because they are pluripotent. Adult stem cells are thought to be limited to differentiating into different cell types of their tissue of origin.
- Embryonic stem cells can be grown relatively easily in culture. Adult stem cells are rare in mature tissues, so isolating these cells from an adult tissue is challenging, and methods to expand their numbers in cell culture have not yet been worked out. This is an important distinction, as large numbers of cells are needed for stem cell replacement therapies.

Pluripotent Adult Stem Cells
I'm sorry you missed the memo. Pluripotent ASC have been derived from adult skin cells. ESC research is fast becoming obsolete.

In conclusion, there is no sane reason to be morally opposed to embryonic stem cell research due to a need for dead babies as no babies ever die for embryonic stem cell research.

Or perhaps you believe that virtually every man and woman on the planet are baby killers because they do not ensure that every single spermatozoa [wikipedia.org] and ovam [wikipedia.org] is given a chance to become a baby.

Perhaps you think that manufacturers of sanitary napkins [wikipedia.org] and condoms [wikipedia.org] are the enablers of baby killing.

Spermatozoa and ovam are not people. Human zygotes are. Why would you assume I'm totally ignorant of basic science? Does the fact that I'm religious make you think that I'll buy something that stupid?

Chess has finally been solved to the point that there's now unbeatable AIs available to the average user (assuming it gets to move first)...

No, checkers has been solved to that point. The solution is available online. Perfect play leads to a draw.

Computer chess is merely at the point that if you haven't been on the cover of Chess Life, you're going to get trounced. Even if you have, you're going to lose more than you win. The current situation is that Deep Rybka 2010 has an ELO rating around 3150. That's running on a 4-core AMD-64 desktop machine. The all-time human record is 2851, which Garry Kasparov had in 1999-2000.

I strongly suspect most of the anger at UC is budget-concerned folk in the library system, not the rank-and-file researchers. They probably recognize a Nature boycott is likely bad for them and want this to not happen.

Here's a couple more links, to the ScienceInsider coverage (from Nature's primary competitor) and Nature itself:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/06/university-of-california-conside.html#more

http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cdl.html

Just to be clear, what is causing this huge increase? I find it weird that there isn't some more general outcry, why is it limited to UCL? That's a huge jump, completely abnormal for a commercial entity, and TFA is oddly scant on this rather significant bit of context.

Googling around a bit I hit this, which follows the old-skool "journalism" thing of finding out what the other side has to say:

The problem, according to NPG, is that CDL has "been on a very large, unsustainable discount for many years," and other subscribers "are subsidising them." UC's libraries now receive an 88% discount on journal list prices, and NPG wants to bring it closer to 50%, the letter says. It asks the universities to compare the proposed new download price for NPG papers, $0.56, with what UC pays for other publishers' articles. The company is also "utterly confused" by UC's estimate of the value of UC authors' papers.

I.D. is a valid scientific theory. Case and point: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958

That makes it a historical fact, not a scientific theory. It's important not to confuse the two.

It means that it is likely possible to create life. It doesn't mean that life on earth was created that way. Nobody disputes that life could be designed, just that that's not what the evidence shows to be the case for life on earth. There is no competing scientific theory for evolution. If IDers would like to create one, they are welcome to do the research, but so far they haven't.

I.D. is a valid scientific theory. Case and point: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958

That makes it a historical fact, not a scientific theory. It's important not to confuse the two.

I.D. is a valid scientific theory.
Case and point:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958

I.D. by "GOD" may be dogma, but synthetic life forms created by human beings are by all accounts intelligent design.

There are skeptics and there are "skeptics". "skeptics" make their first reaction to everything "this is BS"

That's a load of crap. Skeptics make their first reaction to anything for which there is not sufficient evidence present "this is BS." That's a critical difference. As far as I know, acupuncture has not been exceptionally good at proving itself. It is based on the flow of some qi or whatever and claims to have all sorts of healing properties, neither of which have been proven in the least, and that is something to be rightfully skeptical about. If you make an extraordinary claim, I require extraordinary evidence. Plenty of new theories and ideas are accepted by skeptical types (for example, this was new, but there was no skeptic backlash, because it was a reasonable claim with reasonable evidence); just because some old time quackery is rejected doesn't mean skeptics are closed minded, that's just a way to distract form a lack of evidence. Medical skeptics have long admitted that minor injuries like sticking needles into yourself may trigger some pain-killer response, and this new thing, if indeed true, confirms that, not the validity of acupuncture. In fact, another study once showed that fake acupuncture outperformed 'real' acupuncture. It's not about simply denying everything, it is about denying everything until a reasonable amount of evidence exists to support it.

You know, homeopathy used to 'work' too, back when mercury was a medicine, because it didn't do anything whereas medicine killed you, which may be why it is still around. Chiropractic, originally claimed to cure all sorts of things, has the same affects as a good massage. Do they get vindicated too now? Sometimes things get lucky, or traditions are held for some reason, and maybe acupuncture is one of them due to this effect, but there is still no reason to not be skeptical about redirecting your qi or whatnot, or its ability to outperform any modern science based pain killing methods (I'd go with a good hit o' weed myself, but that's a different debate). It's good to have an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.

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. Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999

back of the napkin results, 56.7 pentagrams or 56,700,000,000 tonnes total eaten by plants world wide

Now not only do humans suddenly add 3% on top, they also prevent creation of new plant matter at an increasing rate, mostly by cutting down rain-forests and replacing them with (at best) mono-culture trees.

wrong answer

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. Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999

and one of the authors, Charles D. Keeling, is from Scripps Institution of Oceanography so the "paid for by Big Oil" meme don't fly here either.

Plant growth, CO2 is a plant nutrient,

The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was increased by 200 microliters per liter in a forest plantation, where competition between organisms, resource limitations, and environmental stresses may modulate biotic responses. After 2 years the growth rate of the dominant pine trees increased by about 26 percent relative to trees under ambient conditions. Carbon dioxide enrichment also increased litterfall and fine-root increment. These changes increased the total net primary production by 25 percent. Such an increase in forest net primary production globally would fix about 50 percent of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide projected to be released into the atmosphere in the year 2050.
Net Primary Production of a Forest Ecosystem with Experimental CO2 Enrichment

and

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.Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999

you said

Right, but that's 3% over equilibrium, and it's cumulative.

and nature reply by sucking 6% more CO2 from the air!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

Raw data deleted.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7177230/New-errors-in-IPCC-climate-change-report.html

Documented errors in the ever popular IPCC report, simple one's that would've been avoided if good science had been used.

http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/test/

CRU refuses to hand over data. I don't CARE if they felt it was a burden, they refused to hand it over even under the act.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/689

Science Magazine used a photoshopped photo to "illustrate their point", but due to their lack of research for anything valid they found out it was photoshopped and later replaced it.

Phil Jones says there's no consensus. We learned from the e-mails that peer reviewed literature was being manipulated. Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA (among other credentials that are amazing but less related), also believes that AGW is false (see his new book "The Great Global Warming Blunder").

30,000 Scientists disagree with global warming, and are (somewhat silly but significant anyways) trying to sue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHW7KR33IQ

When the White House was asked about this, their response was "The debate is over".

No, the debate is not over. Yes, there are examples of HIDING, MANIPULATING, or using BAD SCIENCE with AGW.

Here's a simple heuristic for you - believe the vast majority scientists.

You can also look for statements from reputable scientists in reputable journals and see what they say.

Some nice points from the above linked article:

The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

For the sake of argument, though, let's pretend that AGW isn't a scientifically well-established. We still have to decide what we want to do about it. If you'll even entertain the possibility that it is real, let's look at the two worst-case scenarios.

If it is not real, but we act to reduce fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, we will have wasted a lot of money creating cleaner energy sources and suffered from some economic hardships as the economies transition.

It it is real, the potential consequences are well documented.

We have to switch off fossil fuels eventually. The fact that they are not renewable makes that statement unquestionable. The only question is when. If you look at the two scenarios above, I choose to do it now.

So you're saying that all the people who have checked the numbers and still doubt AGW are... deluded? Crazy? Blind followers of Fox News?

Yes.

Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.

As I've explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:

The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.

... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.

What article?

The same one I've been linking for a while now.

For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.

I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"

In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.

Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses, I guess there's no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor's links again. There's also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.

It's important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.

All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.

But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the r

If you follow the links, you'll see that only 70% of the female fruit bats do it. This is consistent with the widely known fact that most humans will burn in Hell, but some will be saved. Repent!

Seriously now, another very concerning note in the Huffington Post article was this link. Apparently a student in a university can be prosecuted not only for writing something, but also for reading a book from the university library.

I'm completely unaware of Dr. Jones being cleared of wrong doing, it it my understanding that Dr. Jones was not prosecuted because the British Freedom of Information laws have a 6 month statute of limitation,

... CRU head Phil Jones had tried to illegally shield data and correspondence from disclosure requests made under the U.K.’s Freedom of Information laws. Jones stepped down from his position in December while investigations are underway.

Now Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office says CRU probably broke the law, but that Jones and other officials won’t be prosecuted because more than 6 months have passed since the alleged breach. “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred,” an ICO spokesman told The Times. Climatic Research Unit Broke British Information Law

which is a far cry from being cleared of any wrong doing. As far as Mann, I don't see how the prosecutor having ulterior motives is germane if he is convicted, he was a public servant on a public or at least partially public payroll and shouldn't the public be able to expect their employees work in a forthright and honest manner for their pay?

The thing is, it was settled science by the 70s, so it's not surprising that you wouldn't find many articles about the topic.

In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s? If they were then surely there should be some literature. The clear implication being made is that a majority of experts in the 70s believed an ice age was approaching (quickly). The facts, as you cited them 7 papers predicting cooling, 44 warming give the lie to that.

Secondly, while Milankovitch obviously did his work earlier (he died in 1958), it is far from true that even the periodic nature of glacials, and how those periods are determined, was "settled science" by the 70s. The work on ice ages was very alive in the 70s (you'll find more than 7 papers which don't predict an "immient" ice age) and certainly not settled until after the publication of this paper in 1976.