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It looks to be inaccessible. Here are the abstract and fulltext links.

It looks to be inaccessible. Here are the abstract and fulltext links.

I assume that the hardware at Science can withstand a slashdotting better than the crappy blog linked in the summary:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5910/133

Um.. no. He's talking about the fact that world temperatures started to come down in 2002, and the rate of CO2 rise has just started to slacken.

Um, no, he's talking about the hundreds of years (can't you read) lag between temperature and CO2 (e.g., here).

Yes, there is. The only way to avoid admitting that is to claim that anyone who doubts the fraudulent science is a denier, and not a climate scientist..

No, it's trivial to support: just look at the number of papers which were published on solar effects on modern warming 20 years ago, and the far fewer such papers published today.

We're not adding very much as a percentage, but we ARE increasing our output.

We've added 35% to the atmosphere since pre-industrial times, and are looking to easily double, triple, or even quadruple it.

And the temperature has been going down since 1998.

Cherry picking a giant El Nino year doesn't help your cause. And no, there isn't any statistically significant decadal-scale cooling.

Incidentally, you know what the response of true believers is to those figures is? If the temperature goes up, it's Global Warming. If it goes down, it's a weather anomaly...

Anything trend deviation over less than 10 years is almost certainly weather noise regardless of which way it goes.

And yes, temperatures have been trending downward since '98.

Not if you use any other year except for your enormously cherry picked 1998.

And they have been trending downward very steeply since 2006.

Two years is even more meaningless than 10 years, especially when you throw a La Nina in the mix.

How many years do we need before it's no longer a 'monthly fluctuation'?

The standard duration for a climatological average is about 30 years, which is why it took so many years before climatologists were able to definitively attribute the trend. After about 20 you start to see a real signal.

Yes there is. See almost any dendrochronology site.

Sadly for your link, neither solar nor thermohaline circulation trends agree with the modern warming. Also, their reconstruction in Fig. 3b predicts strong cooling post-1950, which didn't actually happen in Finland. Maybe it happened at some particular lake where they took cores, but then its utility as a proxy for regional temperature, let alone global temperature, is questionable.

>Its starting to look like the increase is due to people living in an environment that is 'too clean'

Cite multiple peer reviewed studies in respectable journals or else stop spreading New Age myths on the internet. Thanks.

What, google too hard for you to use? There are literally hundreds of such studies with enough results to back my original statement.
How about from now on you fuck off with your self-aggrandizing judgmental imperative. Thanks.

Gibson, P.G., et al. Migration to a western country increases asthma symptoms but not eosinophilic airway inflammation. Pediatric Pulmonology, 2003; 36 (3):209-215

Marra F, Lynd L, Coombes M, et al. Does antibiotic exposure during infancy lead to development of asthma?: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Chest. 2006;129:610-618

Alm, J.S., et al. 1999. Atopy in children of families with anthroposophic lifestyle. Lancet 353(May 1):1485.

Oldstone MBA. Prevention of type 1 diabetes in nonobese diabetic mice by virusinfection. Science, 1988; 239: 500-2.

Braun-Fahrlander, C.H., et al. 1999. Prevalence of hay fever and allergic sensitization in farmer's children and their peers living in the same rural community. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Allergy 29(January):28.

Farooqi, I.S., and J.M. Hopkin. 1998. Early childhood infection and atopic disorder. Thorax 53(November):927.

Kramer, U., et al. 1999. Age of entry to day nursery and allergy in later childhood. Lancet 353(Feb. 6).

That's interesting because James Hansen of the NASA global warming fame wrote his first paper on the global temperatures in the 1970's and it actually called for global cooling.

Anyways, the paper itself said that Co2 effects surface temperature but it's effect don't scale well where aerosol increase by a factor of 4 and "If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age."

This supposedly came directly From Mr. Hansen's work. I'm sire the media outlets rant the story but they didn't make anything up. This investors.com story seems to have a couple of good questions on it.

Actual research tells a different story. Communism, as evil as it is, is based on the idea of selflessness or at least the idea that humans are capable of acting selflessly.

A study last year, reviewed the success rate of Kibutzim in Israel (semi-autonomous communist enclaves). Love it or hate it, Israel is the only place in the world where Communism kinda sorta worked. The study broke down the Kibutzim (that's plural) into 2 groups, secular in religious. You can do that in Israel, because the divide between them is so huge, for ideological creations like Kibutizim, there is little grey area.

What they found was staggering. First, religious Kibutizim had 3 times the success rate(with 80% all Kibutzim failing after 60 years). Male members of kibutzim that met 3 times daily for communal prayer, were more likely to take care of children in the family, then those who didn't.

Oh, and no I'm not pulling this out of my arse:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/322/5898/58

You are completely correct and people are not able to accurately compare MPG ratings, as demonstrated by a recent paper in Science. See article and blog post, which doesn't require subscription.

Controlled breeding is time-tested, genetic modification is not. That doesn't mean 'don't do it', it means 'extensive research should be done first'.

"Transgene introgression from genetically modified crops to their wild relatives"(pdf)

We still do not have a comprehensive understanding of the risks of transgene introgression. We know that genes can be naturally introgressed between different species, albeit at generally low frequencies and over long periods of time. However, government regulators of transgenic plants are interested in specific transgenes, transgenic events, crops and wild relatives, in time spans of tens of years and beyond. Also, risks must be measured against benefits.

"The Ecological Risks and Benefits of Genetically Engineered Plants"

Discussions of the environmental risks and benefits of adopting genetically engineered organisms are highly polarized between pro- and anti-biotechnology groups, but the current state of our knowledge is frequently overlooked in this debate. A review of existing scientific literature reveals that key experiments on both the environmental risks and benefits are lacking. The complexity of ecological systems presents considerable challenges for experiments to assess the risks and benefits and inevitable uncertainties of genetically engineered plants. Collectively, existing studies emphasize that these can vary spatially, temporally, and according to the trait and cultivar modified.

Much of the research that has been done is encouraging, but there are still many unknowns. Conservatism is warranted when it comes to tampering with complex systems.

This article (at Mongabay, not Science) starts out strong, saying "accessible and unpolluted freshwater is a necessity for every nation's stability and well-being." Unfortunately, that first sentence was the last reference in the article to the issue of pollution or non-salt contamination.

What we really need is the ability to farm directly in the ocean without producing inedible food. The article's referenced halophytes (plants that can grow in salt water) are just one piece of the issue, as the ocean is also filled with other contaminants (mercury, industrial waste, and so very much more). We can probably do some farming with net-like filters around enclosed areas (similar to the way most fish farming works). Wikipedia calls this "open cage aquaculture." However, these filters can only get so much, and once you get complex enough to need a treatment facility, you've defeated the purpose of farming in the ocean (unless you treat the whole ocean...).

The referenced Science Magazine article gets published tomorrow, but you can see related documents by searching for the authors (Rozema and Flowers) and salination. Perhaps the actual article will discuss this issue...

You don't seem to know what a prediction is then.

No, you don't. But it's really funny watching you lecture a scientist on what science is.

A prediction can be made about any observation which wasn't used in making the prediction. It doesn't matter whether the data was taken before or after the prediction was made, as long as the prediction doesn't use that data.

Please explain a method "The Theory of AGW" uses to predict a future observation (ie: an equation), and then we can examine its skill at predicting it.

You use a climate model, ranging from a simple energy balance equation to a GCM fluid dynamic simulation.

These models have only existed for a couple decades, so it's hard to test their skill on future data, especially since it takes a couple decades for a climate trend to rise above the noise in the system. But for one example, see here. They find agreement of modeled and observed temperatures but disagreement with sea level rises, probably due to the fact that none of the IPCC TAR models had ice sheet mechanics (just thermodynamics). You can also look up the 1988 projections for Hansen's GISS Model II.

P.S.: There is no "The Theory of AGW'. There are a variety of related theories, each represented by a different model.

There are an infinite number of equations that can fit any finite set of past observations.

You're concerned with overfitting vs. generalization. As I said, this is not a problem if you're not actually tuning the prediction to the past observations. GCMs aren't tuned to, say, the observational surface temperature time series, or stratospheric cooling trends, or the diurnal temperature trend. They are tuned to some things, e.g., the Earth's observed radiation balance at the top of atmosphere, and then they are asked to predict other things they weren't tuned to, like global temperature, precipitation, ocean heat, and ice trends.

The only evidence there can be that you have an equation that shows skill, is predicting data that was unavailabe during its formulation,

Yes, exactly. Which is why you withhold data from the model when it makes its prediction, and test it against the withheld data. That's how cross validation works. Certainly it's nice to have the luxury to be able to compare against future observations, but that's difficult when the system response is slow and noisy. It is incorrect, however, to claim only forecast skill is an indicator of predictive skill. Hindcast skill is an indicator as well, as long as you predict and validate with separate data sets.

Also on Yahoo, but with a horrible headline. Anyway both just reproduce the AFP text.

The original article seems to be this:

Ab Initio Determination of Light Hadron Masses
S. Dürr, Z. Fodor, J. Frison, C. Hoelbling, R. Hoffmann, S. D. Katz, S. Krieg, T. Kurth, L. Lellouch, T. Lippert, K. K. Szabo, G. Vulvert

Science 21 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5905, pp. 1224 - 1227
DOI: 10.1126/science.1163233

Look at the caption on your graph. Hansen's Scenario A is a high emissions scenario which does not correspond to the emissions which actually occurred. If you want to legitimately test the skill of a climate model, you need to compare apples to apples. In this case, Hansen's Scenario B is the one that most closely corresponded to the real emissions trajectory. (Since Hansen is a climate scientist, not an economist, he gave a range of possible emissions scenarios and did not claim the world would follow any specific one of them.) Even Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit acknowledges this.

Your snide reference to "Saint Gore" indicates that your skepticism has more to do with your emotional biases than with any true scientific motivation. And citing a graph which makes a point of comparing a single month's temperature to another month's temperature makes me question your critical thinking skills. (Well, choosing to get your "science" from skeptic web sites instead of from the scientific literature is the main reason to question your criticial thinking skills.) But if you want to read some science, you could start here.

Go to the exoplanets.EU site ; follow the news links to publications about HR 8799 and also see Science for the abstract on Formalhaut (if you're working through a location which pays for access to Science, which I'm not, you should be able to get the paper from there ; there's also Supporting Online Material available, which isn't terribly informative. Now, contrary to SlashDot procedure, I'm going to shut my flap while I RTF-Papers. Shocking, isn't it?

If you feel that scientific research funding is important to education (or anything at all, for that matter), then you should be concerned about the Science Budget Freezes Proposed by John Sidney McCain III.

Frequency-following responses are pretty well established. How the poster can claim otherwise is beyond me.

This paper from the 1970's addresses the problems the parent claims have simply gone unnoticed: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/169/3951/1222

If you're interested in the topic, do what the parent is apparently incapable of doing: a literature review!

That's a pretty well developed pot/kettle correlation effect you've got there. Hope you enjoy it.

FFR is the response in the auditory system to a continuous stimulus while while the frequency remains constant or while changing (it's trivial in the former, interesting in the latter). It's produced by the signal from the hair cells to the olivary nucleus. It represents the fact that the hair cells transduce the incoming frequencies in a nearly analog fashion. They proceed along the converging cochlea, and as they get smaller, respond to higher frequencies. It is measured as the FFR from the ear to the primary auditory cortex.

That has nothing to do with binaural beat. The latter is an artifact of beat frequency. In order to produce effects detectable by and interesting to known EEG frequencies, the beat frequency, ie. the difference between the two tones, must be very low. Typically the beat frequency is set at something like 4 to 7 Hz to induce theta, 7 to 12 for alpha, 12 to 20 for beta (the precise numbers vary wildly between opinions for no good reason). The beat frequency is too low for the hair cells to react to. There is no FFR below 20 Hz. There can be two simultaneous responses, at say 440 Hz A and 450 Hz. There are two FFRs to these, A beat pattern can be seen if the instrument detects signals from the two frequencies. That only means the instrument is detecting two frequencies that interfere in the context of the instrument. It does not mean there is such a frequency, that the auditory system can respond to a 10 Hz signal (which doesn't actually exist), or that a signal is being induced by the frequencies presented.

Not only can I do a literature search, I can trim down the collected works by excluding the irrelevant, as is FFR. I did it 6 years ago, and I did it now. I can do this because I know enough about the subject to know whether something is pertinent or whether it just happens to have some words and/or phenomena that are similar, but explicate a subject entirely different from that which is under examination. If you'd done a literature search on the material I was writing about, for instance the work from TMI, you'd find that the observed induced power changes happened over a much wider area than the primary auditory cortex (ie. not FFR).

In summary, BB != FFR. We studied the former using beat frequencies well below the response range of the auditory system, and thus produce FFR. In the exceedingly unlikely event we happened to pick up beat frequency induced changes in FFR, it begs the question as to why we saw only it when the subject was wearing an EEG cap with headphones over it, as opposed to the complete lack of response to the same tones presented to the same people when using the air conduction auditory stimulus mechanism.

To respond to the previous follow-up (hellgate (85557)), the results are maintained my colleague that runs the lab at U.Va. Wise: http://people.uvawise.edu/jeh2b/ The presentation was at the meeting of the Society of Psychophysiological Research (SPR), October 2002.

Frequency-following responses are pretty well established. How the poster can claim otherwise is beyond me.

This paper from the 1970's addresses the problems the parent claims have simply gone unnoticed: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/169/3951/1222

If you're interested in the topic, do what the parent is apparently incapable of doing: a literature review!

okay, here's your direction

Oh? Who, I ask, ruled them out?

I repeat: So which "natural cycle" is it? It appears you'd rather play conspiracy theorist than provide any evidential support for this claim. If you think there's any reason to believe that it's due to a natural cycle, which cycle is it and what's the evidence?

And by the way: citing Monckton? Give me a break.

On what evidence do you base this claim?

Try this.

There is hard evidence showing carbon dioxide concentrations are much lower now than in recent geological ages.

That depends very much on your definition of "recent".

As I said, current levels are higher than they have been in millions of years. We are currently at around 384 ppmv. According to the above link, CO2 hasn't been that high for over 20 million years.

The theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming doesn't predict the current cooling since 1998.

As I pointed out to you in another comment which you ignored, there has not been cooling since 1998, and the decadal trend is within the range of natural variability. (Your linked "evidence", by the way, says nothing specifically about warming or cooling since 1998.)

In Biochemistry 'The Great Pentaretraction' is along those very lines. One swallow might doesn't make a summer of course. Here's another swallow (as it were).. these guys are real fraudsters, the first group were simply relentlessly incompetent.

Ok, that certainly has to be the worst layman's summary of a scientific paper I have ever seen. The actual article is here. You will need a subscription to Science to read it, which most university libraries have. The researchers have used time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy to measure excited state lifetimes of DNA molecules. They found--surprise!--that the mean lifetimes are dependent on the structure of the molecules, which is ultimately dependent on the sequence.

These are very difficult experiments to do, and the data is good, but there isn't anything particularly breathtaking about the results. Perhaps the resolution is a bit amazing. It is theoretically expected that sequences of 5'-d(AAGAAAAGAAAAGAAAAGAA)-3' and 5'-d(AAGAAGAAGAAGAAGAAGAA)-3' would have different decay properties, but you might not expect it to be measurable by an ensemble technique.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with the summary. This isn't "light sensitivity" of DNA. This can't be applied to DNA sequencing, at least not in any practical way. And there is no possibility of repairing genetic mutations with light. The computing thing...also quite a bit of a stretch. Of course, this isn't Roland's fault. He just quoted the German press release....

A warmer planet is good.

Good for who? Norway? Or West Africa?

A warmer climate leads to more arable land and longer growing seasons.

Depends on where you are. If your plants are temperature limited in a temperate climate, maybe. If they're already in a warm climate, maybe not. And don't forget precipitation. When rain belts get shifted around, a lot of people end up unhappy.

CO2 is good - it is the world's best fertilizer.

This has got to be the most oversold benefit of CO2. CO2 fertilization helps, up to a point, if you have C3 photosynthesizers; C4 plants don't benefit. But direct manipulation FACE experiments show that this effect quickly saturates, and CO2 is often not the rate-limiting nutrient in photosynthesis; often it's water or nitrogen availability. The initial promise of CO2 fertilization hasn't really panned out; see here. It does help, but it doesn't quite help as much as one thinks, and it is often more than offset by negative climate changes.

Of course, all recent evidence points to warming having ended,

I hate to break it to you, but 10 years of below-average warming in a highly noisy system doesn't exactly overturn anthropogenic global warming.

and having been due to natural climate variability and/or solar cycles.

Natural climate variability counts against your claim, not for it. See the above: natural climate variability is quite large on short time scales, which makes short-term trends very unreliable evidence of anything. Over the long term, "natural climate variability" utterly fails to account for temperature trends over the 20th century; the only really long term cycles within the climate system itself are oceans, and the space/time pattern of ocean warming indicates the atmosphere is warming the ocean, not the other way around. Turning to external influences, there are solar cycles. Solar trends have been pretty much flat since the 1950s, and completely disagree with the warming experienced since then. They can account for some of the warming in the early 20th century, but very little of it since then.

1. The age given is 3.8 to 4.28 billion years (why billion, not giga. Dunno.) The scientist favours the oldest possible date, at a guess because that increases funding,

Oh come on. Maybe your first guess could involve something, I don't know, scientific, instead jumping straight to bias? Right or wrong, you don't get published in Science, which is the world's leading scientific journal along with Nature, without at least some plausible if not airtight evidence supporting your interpretation.

If you read the abstract, you find that they get a samarium/neodymium ratio which indicates an age of 4.280 +.053/-.081 million years, which is right at the upper age limit and definitely excludes 3.8 billion years. I don't have access to the full text, but some further Googling says that "conventional dating" gives a date at the lower end of the range (although no error bars are given), and Sm/Nd dating (which applies to particularly old samples) gives a date at the upper end of the range. Given the tight error bound on the Sm/Nd date, it seems that there's something in there that's at least 4.2 billion years old. But one possibility is that there's a mix of materials of different ages; zircon crystals which are even older than this have been found before, embedded in younger rock.

The important phenomenon at work here is that of Rossby waves. It's interesting that this type of polar standing wave may also be implicated in the famous Saturnian hexagon.

At the moment Publishers get a good deal. They charge huge amounts so that Universities (or anyone else) can have access to their journals. why do Universities (and others) pay these huge amounts? Because they need the journals. Why because of the CONTENT, i.e. the academic research papers. Who pays for researchers and academics to carry out the research to write up those papers? Universities, funding councils, tax payers. So how much do Universities get from publishers for this valuable content. NOTHING!

We (universities, the tax paying public) are paying huge amount to publishers to access content which we (universities, tax payers) have given them for free.

The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK).

The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps a board of Editors), they are unpaid (with a few exceptions).

What does the publisher do, well they help facilitate this (with web based software, all quite simple and there are open source solutions to do this), and they provide clerical services such as proof reading and putting the article in to a page template (actually a few make the academic do this as well). They then put it on their website.

They charge HUGE amounts for this, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars/UKpounds, many hundreds of thousands of dollars going to one publisher, per year, for one smallish university. That's only to have access to recent editions, want the older stuff... pay more. Want to cancel access to a journal, then pay a penalty (or pay more for the whole lot for the right to do so). Many academics do not even have access to their own articles. And because journal subscription inflation is about 7% a year (for about the last 10 years) the only option is to cancel more and more.

Publishers do very little and charge huge amounts, every increasing, for access to content the 'customers' basically wrote, reviewed and edited (collectively) themselves.

Now, there are open access journals. These are freely available on the web. They either keep their costs down (perhaps using resources of a given University). Or charge for people to submit articles. This may sound bad, but in reality researchers will have research grants and 'publishing fees' can be included in research bids. This pays for running of the Journal and the articles are free to all, including the Tax payers who probably paid for it, keen members of the public, and those from the third world who had no chance of paying the fees of the traditional publishers.

Their are also open access REPOSITORIES. These are either subject based (pubmed, arXiv.org, etc) or institution based, ie based at a university. An academic publishes in to a traditional (high cost) journal, for the peer review and kudos, and then puts their article in to their institutional (or pubmed/arXiv.org) so that it is freely available to everyone. Even though publishers put huge restrictions on this, such as embargos and which copy can be used (normally the academics original copy, not the publisher's version) they unsurprisingly don't like this. Think about it, though the academic/university paid for and created the research, the publisher still tells them when they can upload their own version of the article (i.e. not before a year after publication).

For this story see:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/911/1

For more information, google for "open access"

Chris

Urey and his student Miller showed in the 1950s that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can spontaneously form from hydrogen, methane, and ammonia with an electrical current applied to mimic lightning (ScienceMag http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/130/3370/245) (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment). Fox later showed that amino acids can spontaneously form small proteins. Of course, many postulate the primordial Earth's atmosphere was carbon dioxide and nitrogen, but that's beside the point. The point is that these chemical reactions happen, and can happen spontaneously given thermodynamics and probability. It's not a matter of IF these reactions occur, just how often they do. They seem to have happened often enough to form life at least once on one planet ... that is unless His Noodly Appendage is to blame for all this. Sonne Times: Political and Social Commentary http://jsonne.blogspot.com/

Every time early researchers solve part of a problem they seem to label the part they haven't solved as being unimportant or irrelevant.

Maybe it's different for different sciences, but in cell or molecular biology that is not the case. Most papers I read specifically adress the unknowns in the discussion section, usually a one line thing that amounts to "we don't understand why this happened in our experiments, but it is very important" or "This helps but it isn't the complete picture, we still need to do X, Y, and Z." Other times they suggest hypotheses or models that are not supported yet by the literature and say those should be tested next.

Part of the reasons they point this out is because typically the lab that published the paper is going to be putting out research on that soon, intends to look at it, and/or is genuinely intrigued by it. Nearly all answers in science raise more questions than they answer if you're doing it right at this stage.

What you may be confused by is that the meat of the article is going to be about parts the researchers HAVE figured out and want the world to know. It would be totally backwards for most of the research article to be focused on what isn't yet known. "Yeah, our evidence supports the idea that so called 'junk' DNA probably gave rise to some of our features, heres a picture supporting that, but lets focus on what we don't know, you can ask us the next time you see us how we determined this junk DNA gave us thumbs if you're really interested. How about the rest of it though? I wonder what it does. Mystery!"

It also might be that you're reading the dumbed down article linked to instead of the actual primary literature, IE the stuff a journalist wrote instead of the researchers. The actual article (probably requires a subscription, but here http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/321/5894/1346) focuses on this one example that they DO know about already (I just skimmed it myself). And indeed if you can't access the article yourself I can tell you they do explicitly point out what they dont' know without saying it's unimportant or irellevant. Quite the opposite.

The role of CENTG2 in limb development has not been evaluated. Mouse Gbx2 is expressed in the developing limb, but Gbx2 null mice have not been described as showing abnormal limbs (25). The potential impact of humans pecific changes in the expression of these genes on limb development thus remains to be explored.

The article also does you one better and suggests strategies for further studies, using their study as an example

Independent of these considerations, our study suggests that adaptive nucleotide substitution altered the function of a developmental enhancer in humans, and illustrates
a strategy that could be used across the genome to understand at a molecular level how human development evolved through cisregulatory change

The researchers are far from arrogantly assuming they know all that is important. They know better than anyone the limitations of their research. It's the journalists and non-scientists who are trying to make it sound like a complete picture, since that's the better story.

"IIRC, flowering plants evolved during the Eocene, ~10 My after the K-T impact. This includes grasses."

The oldest know fossil of a flowering plant is about 125 million years old, so they certainly didn't evolve in the Eocene.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~steurh/engplant/eblad4.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/170/3957/547
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant

Grasses were also around during the Cretaceous, and herbivorous dinosaurs ate them:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5751/1177

"IIRC, flowering plants evolved during the Eocene, ~10 My after the K-T impact. This includes grasses."

The oldest know fossil of a flowering plant is about 125 million years old, so they certainly didn't evolve in the Eocene.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~steurh/engplant/eblad4.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/170/3957/547
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant

Grasses were also around during the Cretaceous, and herbivorous dinosaurs ate them:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5751/1177

The study they're summarizing in the article seems to be this one: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/1164685

When international summit after international summit after international summit all recognize global warming and the human influence how can you still deny it? When from every article in a referred scientific journal about climate change from 1993 to 2003, there isn't even ONE that disagrees with the consensus that that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities, how is it not obvious? When even international panels like the InterAcademy Council and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can agree on the human impact, what "controversy" is there?

It is so painfully obvious that we do make a difference, that CO2 concentration is much higher than ever seen before, as shown by the Keeling Curve. And I can only hope most people understand that high CO2 levels lead to high temperatures and I don't have to spell that out.

It's not a debate. There is no "maybe." There's no confusion. The entire world's academic and scientific community have come to a consensus on it, but apparently some people here just don't get it.

Its at the point where both U.S. presidential hopefuls have made it both policy and goals to cut down on emissions, its not even politically dividing.

Global warming is real, it does exist, we do contribute, and if you think otherwise you're honestly in denial.

Just to make you paranoid, the sum of the mass of oort cloud objects is far more than the mass of the sun and all the planets

Not supposed to be. The mass in the Oort cloud can be estimated by assuming some sort of mass function (i.e., a distributon of number, and thus total mass, with the mass of the object. Unless there a some unknown big objects out there, the total mass is order one Earth mass to maybe 100 Earth masses. And, there have been negative searches in the IR for very large (Jupiter size and larger) objects, so it's almost certainly nowhere near as large as 1 solar mass.

It is interesting that the "knots" seen in the Helix Nebulae are likely to be super-comets (Sedna sized bodies ablating under the bright glare of the dying central star), so if you want to get a look at an Oort cloud, here is a good one.

While I would certainly like to believe that, and held to that belief for many years, mtDNA and nuclear DNA evidence seems to point in the other direction. Certainly, there is always more evidence that can be collected, but most of the good genetic evidence indicates that H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis were/are distinct, though related, species. See, for example, Sequencing and Analysis of Neanderthal Genomic DNA.

This is not a new technology but it is helpful to have refined, although the first use when the technology matures will be short range devices (1-2ft) not long range devices (10-20ft).

Actually it IS a new technology. Anyone who is spouting off bombast about how Tesla came up with this a hundred years ago, or that we've been using this in transformers for years is WRONG. Transformers are not resonant devices and rather rely on the closeness of the windings/core to guide the majority of the field lines to the other winding. As for Tesla's work, he used strictly far field EM radiation, which differs fundamentally from this effect, which uses near-field interactions that tend to "stick" for lack of a better term to the power source unless transferred to another device capable of resonating with it. This is what makes this 2006 discovery so great because it is extremely efficient and doesn't rely on line of sight or broadcasting a huge amount of power so that a device a reasonable distance away can receive the power it needs to operate. According to the 2006 article ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/83 ) the electric fields involved are small too: around 200V/m which is about double Earth's field at ground.

And finally, The human body has little to no magnetic response which is why MRI's don't kill you with their multi-Tesla magnetic fields (the Earth's magnetic field is 0.5 Gauss = 1/20000 T, for reference)

Crows have been observed making tools and using them.

Birds are in general a lot smarter than we've given them credit for. It might be time to rethink the term 'bird brain'.

This article in Science Magazine indicates that the Sahara was fully formed by 2300 BCE

To me, the timing between that and the rise of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (~ 2600 BCE) is too close to be coincidental. I think we will find that people migrated from sites such Gobero to the Nile, and that precipitated the formation of political organization in Egypt.

Well, until recently, pretty often. It 30% shows me there is obviously some form of survival benefit to this for it to be so high.

Newsweek misinterpreted the numbers in the article, which is why that figure seems so high.

According to the actual journal article, it's not that 30% of children possess the allele that reduces dopamine receptor density.

Rather, it's that children that possess the allele have a 30% reduction in dopamine receptor density.

I would much rather read the original article than an oversimplified Newsweek summary.

I work in a group researching magnetocaloric refrigeration at room temperature. I read the Science paper, and this is about the same, except with electrical polarization instead of magnetic. It's promising in some ways, but have some potentially fatal problems.

1. 12 deg C is a really large temperature change, we have to do with 1-3C. My group would kill for a material like that, $EVIL_GENIUS_LAUGHTER. (With a design like this, it's possible to have a much greater cumulative change of temperature than what any single piece of material does, so that's how to cool from +25 to -18 C).

2. The hysteresis is not too high, look at fig. 1 in the paper. This is important, because hysteresis means you're converting electricity to heat inside your fridge. Many materials have great change in entropy and temperature when you put an electric or magnetic field on them, but it's killed for practical purposes by hysteresis.

3. You need a really high electric field. The curves in the paper are done at 100-200 MegaV/m, meaning that you need 100-200 kV to polarize a layer of 1 mm thickness. A CRT uses voltages of around 20 kV, and so it's plausible to use thin layers, or just live with the fact that you'll only get 1-2 C temperature change. (Which means it has to compete with magnetic refrigeration on an even footing).

4. It's hard to polarize and depolarize the material without electric losses. (This is a problem for ferroelectric cooling in general). You're basically charging and discharging a huge capacitor, and you'll lose the charge on the capacitor every round. This could be fixed by putting it as the "C" in an oscillating (LCR) circuit with some inductance, but it's not easy to get an inductance (L) high enough, unless you run at high frequency. This material looks to work at high frequency (the hysteresis curves are taken at 1kHz), but how do you transport the heat into/out of it? If you run at 1kHz, you'll have less than half a ms to transfer heat to the cooling fluid, which means you'll need to use a very thin layer indeed. (Incidentally this will make it easier to get a strong field gradient). Then there's the problem of moving the cooling fluid back and forth over many layers of sub-mm thickness polymer. I'm not saying it can't be done, and there might very well be smart solutions I haven't thought of, but it's not trivial. (And btw, magnetic cooling doesn't have this problem, because we can use a permanent magnet with a several cm gap, and balance material moving into the gap with material moving out.)

maybe this is what you are looking for?

"For one, professors have to get grants to do their research, so they are sometimes given to overstatement to that end. They are, after all, only human which means that not all of them are honest. Also, some are simply unrealistic. They think they can do something, so they announce it, even though they have no idea how to get there, and then maybe never end up doing so. Finally sometimes shit just ends up being impossible. "

I think this is for real, they've reduced the Voltage needed to split water down to 1.29V.. very impressive..

This RCS article (free) is somewhat more descriptive.

They use a solution of Cobalt and Phosphate Salts.. Ph of 7. (Now that's a real breakthrough.)
Anode is made of Indium Tin oxide (ITO) and a Cathode plated with Platinum??

It would be interesting to see how this apparatus operates @ 10 and 20 atm.. (self pressurizing storage??) and elevated temps.(Maybe reduce the voltage needed by using a thermal energy component)..

Sometimes I think people on SlashDot are not necessarily the smartest in the world.

So tell the AAAS that... http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/docx.dtl "Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science. Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the MathType equation editor or the legacy equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word, which can be accessed from "Insert Object" from the "Insert" ribbon in Word 2007." Um... I don't think Word is an answer

While its true that the events around reconnection can accelerate the particles, there are many other effects in the magnetosphere that are capable of this as well.

As far as reconnection, most if not all of the community agrees that reconnection takes place as well as current disruption for nearly every substorm. The question is when. This article states that the reconnection is occurring before the current disruption. There seems to be only 3 cases that have been studied, including the one on Feb 26th, 2008 presented in the Science paper by Dr. Angelopoulos et al.

I certainly have not formed an opinion either way and this has not sufficiently provided me with enough evidence to think that this is the only "trigger". It still does not explain internally triggered substorms and does not adequately describe what causes the reconnection in the first place.

One interesting statement that is made is the fact that the aurora appears to intensify before the current disruption and before the magnetic pulsations, (Pi2 pulsations) which normally mark the onset at the Earth. This is a very interesting result and if true, poses a very interesting problem as to why.

TActualFA from Science was authored by 5 women.

Here is a link to the actual paper published by the MIT team:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/321/5886/226

In fact there is some research that suggests for certain kinds of decisions, more thought is actually counter-productive. That is, initial "gut" decisions are sometimes more optimal than carefully-considered ones (where "optimal" is measured by longer-term happiness/regret of decision). (For instance, check this writeup of this paper, or the associated Slashdot submission.)

The point is that while thinking long and hard about some problems can be helpful (e.g. designing something complex and technical), for other kinds of problems, added thought can hinder (e.g. when there are many confounding unknowns).

The fallacy here is that the assumption that the government or science has any firm idea of how to force somebody else or even one's self to not be fat. There's just that fascist impulse to raise the hammer of punishment and expect the overweight to find a way.

Here's a set of links on various ties between obesity and infection, to get the pot boiling.

• TCS Daily - Eating Some Crow on Fat
• Discovery Channel :: News - Health :: Study: Gut Bacteria Determine Fat or Thin
• Lipid metabolic changes in experimentally induced ...[Indian J Exp Biol. 2001] - PubMed Result
• Obesity Virus?
• BBC NEWS | Health | Obesity 'may be linked to virus'
• Bacterial-Modulated Signaling Pathways in Gut Homeostasis -- Lee 1 (21): pe24 -- Science Signaling
• An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increase...[Nature. 2006] - PubMed Result
• Obesity alters gut microbial ecology. [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005] - PubMed Result
• Gut microbiota and its possible relationship with ...[Mayo Clin Proc. 2008] - PubMed Result
• Biology News: Fat people harbour 'fat' microbes
• Discovery Channel :: News - Health :: Study: Gut Bacteria Determine Fat or Thin
• Symposium: Emerging Role of Pathogens in Chronic Diseases ... Uses the term 'Infectobesity'.

Informative? What?

Parent is saying glass should be solid because other non-crystaline solids are solid... (a weak inference)... then goes on to mention wood (which I understand is made of cellulose, a crystaline polymer).

This seems like a case of a layman trying to apply "common" sense understanding to scientific language and failing.

+2 Funny maybe, but +5 Informative? Slashdot deserves its decline.

I have quite a few, many of which have someredundancies, but I just don't want to miss out on information :)

They are also cathegorized:

1.) Games
- www.areagames.de - quite decent german gaming site, especially important for local releases
- www.gametrailers.com - a lot of junk I don't care about, but every now and then very good HD vids
- http://news.filefront.com/ (Gaming Today) - Great gaming Feed
- http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp - Often funny, and good comments on things
- http://www.thelastboss.com/ - Was my favorite, giving lots of Vids and stuff, but it seems to be dead since over a year

2.) General Tech
- http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/News - A little too ITish at times, but great comments and opinions
- http://www.dailytech.com/ - Most of the time the right amout of ITism, but few opinions and trivia
- http://www.chip.de/rss/rss_tests.xml - A lot of reviews on different produkts
- http://slashdot.org/ - Could be more ITish at times, but good general articles make up for that

3.) Handy Stuff (in German mobile = handy, so this is a wordplay)
- http://www.areamobile.de/ - Not so good on the hardware part, but great for knowing releases and new contracts in Germany
- http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/Handhelds/News - Again good comments and opinions
- http://www.engadgetmobile.com/ - Very good for hardware and some trivia
- http://news.google.com/news?q=i-mate+7150&output=rss - Was looking forward to that device is it looks dead to me...
- http://www.slashphone.com/ - Kind of redundant with Engadget mobile, might get the axe, but still a good feed.

4.) Hardware
- http://www.anythingbutipod.com/ - Good MP3-Player feed, updated seldomely, but is still good
- http://aqua-computer.de/newsfeed_de.rss - A RSS feed of a watercooling company
- http://www.notebookcheck.com/ - Good reviews on new models, updated infrequently
- http://www.notebookjournal.de/rss/notebookjournal_news_feed.xml - Notebook news, updated infrequently
- http://www.notebookjournal.de/rss/notebookjournal_tests_feed.xml - Notebook reviews, very good, updated infrequently
- http://www.notebookreview.com/ - Great page for getting first looks on the new or upcoming top notebooks
- http://www.themp3players.com/ - Also on MP3 player, updated very seldomely
- http://www.hardwarezone.com/ - Good on general hardware (graphics cards and stuff)

5.) Science
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/sci/tech/default.stm - Good articles but sometimes too much on legislation and stuff
- http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml - Also great with some good long interesting articles
- http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/ - A very good quick view on what has been discovered or researched

6.) Stuff
-