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From what I remember, there's been a fair amount of species found that have developed a tolerance for cold temperatures; but there's been very limited results of research into obligate psychrophiles, which would have more likely evolved in a cold environment. I think this field is one of those areas of bacterial research that is going to be very slow in developing due to the incredible difficulty of culturing these kinds of organisms in vitro. One of my old professors published a very interesting paper on finding ways to isolate these difficult organisms: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/296/5570/1127?ijkey=2zqckfPCzt9z2&keytype=ref&siteid=sci

Full-length poliovirus complementary DNA (cDNA) was synthesized by assembling oligonucleotides of plus and minus strand polarity. The synthetic poliovirus cDNA was transcribed by RNA polymerase into viral RNA, which translated and replicated in a cell-free extract, resulting in the de novo synthesis of infectious poliovirus. Experiments in tissue culture using neutralizing antibodies and CD155 receptor-specific antibodies and neurovirulence tests in CD155 transgenic mice confirmed that the synthetic virus had biochemical and pathogenic characteristics of poliovirus. Our results show that it is possible to synthesize an infectious agent by in vitro chemical-biochemical means solely by following instructions from a written sequence.

Though it's pretty much automatic to exclude it presently out of scientific habit in our concepts of hereditability (like the summary seems to), don't forget epigenetics now tells us we have "mutated", "unmutated", and... "other", in terms of things that cause particular effects via descent.

Personally, I find it rather fascinating to be at the point of genetics that we can be mapping such subtle causal relationships, genetic and environmental.

Also interesting to me, as a side thought-experiment, is it appears that within epigenetics, Lamarck and certain Catholic literalisms (for those so inclined) are making something of a "comeback".

but i'll add anyway. David Tilman from U of MN has worked quite extensively with mono- and polycultures of plants/grass for purposes of productivity. his paper here talks about using switchgrass in combination with other plants to use degraded/poor ag. lands and still get better, even carbon negative, output than corn or soy beans for ethanol, without a lot of input. i don't know why this didn't get more press.

I'm relatively pessimistic about both of the technologies mentioned due to the inherent limitations that they pose (large leakage of radiated power or short range). I'm looking forward to seeing products based on the wireless power idea that came out of the Joannopoulos group at MIT in 2006.
The idea was that you can setup an RF wireless power transmitter in such a way that it does not actually transmit any power unless it resonantly couples to a precisely shaped receiver. This way there is little to no leakage and they claimed that the power transfer was quite efficient. I'm sure this was posted to slashdot, but I can't seem to find it. Here's a link to the paper if you are somewhere with access to Science: Science 6 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5834, pp. 83 - 86 and here's a link to the press release by the MIT news office (no subscriptions required).

My gift to you, another link:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/247/4943/699/

I am working on a similar process that synthesizes hydrocarbon fuels from carbon dioxide, water, and non-fossil energy (could be solar) and should eventually have some publications out about this. There are several ways to go about this. But first, let me comment on some of the comments:

Regarding the "They're leaving the production of actual liquid fuel to other people ... all this thing does right now is produce carbon monoxide." comment, reducing CO2 to CO is the hardest part of the process. Once you have concentrated CO, you can follow the coal-to-liquids processes and water-gas shift (CO + H2O => CO2 + H2) to get hydrogen and run the syngas (CO + H2 mixture) into Fischer-Tropsch reactors. They've been doing this for 50 years in South Africa to produce synthetic diesel.

Regarding the "Renewable not!" comment and using power-plant flue gas CO2 as the input to this process, this would indeed not be sustainable. However, if industrial capture of CO2 from the air is available, one can fully close the loop and have a sustainable hydrocarbon fuel cycle. Flue gas CO2 could be a good option in the short term, however. For instance, if solar and other nearly-carbon-free energy sources begin to rapidly take over, coal plants will not immediately be shut down. Other CO2-emitting industrial plants such as aluminum smelters, etc, will also have CO2 emissions to deal with, and this form of using it to store non-fossil energy by recycling it once as a liquid fuel would be worthwhile. One comment discussed this transition well.

Related, other comments say "why not just use the solar energy to produce electricity". These intermittent resources need storage, and liquid fuel storage is not a bad method (and very versatile). Others responded about storage.

So, processes like this are a way to store non-fossil energy as a convenient energy-dense fuel which can be used in our existing petroleum fuel infrastructure and vehicles (as opposed to hydrogen and batteries). Biofuels can do the same, and there are many comments above ("I saw something like this... it's called a tree") mentioning biofuels and how this process replicates it with much more complexity; indeed you could call this whole process including the Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis "artificial photosynthesis". However, this process cuts out the middle-man of the plant in biofuels processes, which has much lower sunlight-to-fuel efficiency than industrial solar collectors (PV or thermal) and requires a lot of fertilizers and pesticides to boost growth rate. Such land- and resource-intensive agriculture is not sustainable in its current form and may not ever be on the scale we will need it.

TFA discusses a solar-heat-driven thermochemical process that has potential. A somewhat similar solar-heat thermolytic process splits CO2 directly at higher temperatures. There are many other methods of accomplishing this that are at different levels of development and being researched, including electrochemical (pdf link1, pdf link2), photoelectrochemical, photo(bio)chemical...

This requirement for open publication is very nice for researchers and the public, but it's not completely new for research articles.

At The New England Journal of Medicine, subscribers have full access to all content, but folks who register - for free - have access to all research articles six months old and older. At Science, registered users have access to research articles at least twelve months old back to 1997. Science and NEJM are not the only journals or organizations with this option for registered users.

The real boon will not be in access to research articles for free, but in the ability to seach in a single location, rather than looking in forty places for information. The other real boon will be in access to summaries and reviews that are partially sponsored by NIH. There are many review articles in journals that aren't even abstracted at PubMed right now.

Typical radio transmissions virtually disappear well short of a single light year. And by "virtually" I mean our own giant radio antennas wouldn't hear them.

Not true at all. Back in 1978, Science published an article on the topic. Its title was "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth". If you're not a subscriber, you can find several copies of it online, as well as several other articles that cite it and do further analysis. The authors studied what could be learned about our planet by an astronomer with our level of technology (as of 1978) living on a planet within the sphere of roughly 50 light-years that our broadcasts had reached. They assumed that no program content could be deciphered by the remote astronomer, and only the Earth's changing spectrum over time could be measured.

Their conclusions were fairly impressive. They started by explaining the nature of the received signals, and how those could be used to determine our planet's orbit, its day length, the orbit of our large moon, and the rough temperature zone in which we live.

They went on to point out that our radio broadcasts are mostly done with hardware that puts its energy into a narrow frequency band, and mostly horizontal to the surface, so that from a remote viewpoint each broadcast station would appear briefly and fade. That is, the radio spectrum received from the Earth would come mostly from the limb, and not from the disk. This could be used to draw a map of the broadcast stations. The Doppler shift of each station as it appears 12 hours apart on opposite sides would give the station's latitude, the time would give its longitude. The resulting distribution would show that there are two different kinds of surface on our planet, and we live mostly on one of them (and mostly along the boundaries). Knowing the planet's temperature zone would tell the astronomers that we're on a water world, and our stations are on land.

As the stations' frequencies drift over the year, it would become clear that we are diurnal, and also active during the evening, but not active between midnight and dawn. Further analysis of the signals would show the use of several different kinds of hardware, and these are distributed in patches over the planet. This shows our ability to organize on a large scale, but not on a planetary scale. The use of the same broadcast hardware in different areas would show our ability to form distant alliances between our "nations".

Anyway, the article was an interesting illustration of what our broadcasts have been telling to any distant astronomers with technology as good as ours. They left it to the readers' imagination what could be deduced by more advanced astronomers. And, of course, our signals have propagated another 30 light years since then.

After the budget the Senate passed on Monday, doing much of anything is pretty unlikely.

NASA were just about the only guys to get a budget increase (3%), and even what they got will require sacrificing programs.

Landscape is even worse for other fields of science:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1218/1

Have a read of this: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1217/2 At the bottom of the article is states that although progress has been made for the anode, the cathode has not been improved. They say that real battery capacity gain is achieved my making the anode smaller and increase the size of the cathode. There are no numbers but I suggest that capacity increase probably is more in the order of 1.4 times and not 10 times as suggested. Dammit. I wanted to believe this news so badly.

I guess that it has already been done during the vietnam war:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/184/4132/47
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/184/4140/963.pdf

I guess that it has already been done during the vietnam war:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/184/4132/47
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/184/4140/963.pdf

Part of the problem is the insistence in Wikipedia that it cannot contain x,y or z. Here there is some rule that 'Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, or textbook.' It's very difficult to argue with people about this. When you point out that since wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia it can contain a lot more information than a regular one and therefore can have characteristics of a textbook you get circular reasoning of 'Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, or textbook.' If you dare to ask to change the policy people say there is already consensus.

But this 'consensus' is 'weird'. Sometimes even when there is a clear majority in favor of saving some article or changing some policy admins will say that 'Wikipedia is not a democracy.' If you then ask well what does determine it you also end up with a tautology. I once asked someone why they wanted to delete article x and they said they were a 'deletionist'. Again I asked why and ended up with circular reasoning.

As far as this issue is concerned I think without proofs you are missing a whole lot in math. This also makes Wikipedia a difficult forum to discuss math and science in terms of what goes into an article. As someone in this area I often try to explain to people that their idea about y or z here is doesn't work because of some scientific concept.

The problems occur when they consider their generalist approach most important even if they are ignorant of the topic area. For example I might be talking about Unsolved problems in biology or Unsolved problems in medicine. Well to really address the issue you need expertise in that area. Generalists without it go in and presume to understand what is an unsolved problem in a field in which they lack knowledge. I heard all sorts of bizarre ideas from people in the unsolved problems in chemistry deletion debate about the 'nature' of chemistry, how chemistry itself was not very precise and easy to define. It's so crazy because Science magazine had a whole issue on the topic of big unsolved problems in chemistry. Oh well I guess those people who are actually scientists just don't get chemistry in the same way as a wikipedia admin.

It gets really crazy in that although the above articles got deleted enough people kicked up a fuss to save unsolved problems in neuroscience, unsolved problems in chemistry and unsolved problems in economics to save them. To really converse on these issues you have to really understand neuroscinece but wikipedia admins seem to think not. They play sneaky games. If they can't delete them the first time around keep on referring it for deletion. They did this with Unsolved problems in biology here and here. Then if you try to recreate the article you get slapped down by an admin because the article has already been deleted so you lose not matter what.

I finally gave up on getting any logical argument from the admins when I pointed out that if unsolved problems in neuroscience could exist then why not have unsolved problems in biology. I even talked to some practicing biologists about what these problems might be and low and behold they gave me some. Then the admins said well its not biology, its really biochemistry. Then I asked well why not have Unsolved problems in biochemistry. And it went

Don't kid yourself -- there's a huge over-supply of graduate-level biologists with mathematical and computational training. The problem has nothing to do with the "softness" of the discipline, but rather, with the fact that academia pumps out doctorates at rates that can't be supported by industry.

Moreover, the button-pushers of the biology world are actually in a sweet spot, with regard to supply and demand. It's generally quite easy to obtain lab tech work with a BS (or even an AA). With one of these jobs, you'll live comfortably, work normal hours, and though you'll likely never lead a project, you'll earn respect and authority over time. An MS will bump you to a slightly higher salary, but it's questionable whether the gain is worth the opportunity cost (lost income, mainly).

By contrast, a PhD will leave you largely unemployable. You won't even be considered for most "PhD-level" positions, until you've completed an additional 2-4 years of post-doctoral "training", on top of the 5-7 years it takes to get the degree. And ironically, you won't even be able to get the lab tech work that you could have found with a BS/MS, because it is perceived as a "waste of talent" to put a PhD in a tech position, and most companies are fearful that you'll leave for greener pastures at the first opportunity (to be fair, this is probably true).

The OP is correct: if you're intelligent, and you're concerned about income, the biological sciences are a terrible place to be. Computer science is much more lucrative -- as are law, medicine, business and engineering. The perception that bio-tech is a job generator is largely a function of industry propaganda, and does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

If you doubt me, go to the Science Magazine Careers Forum, and check out the number of truly sad stories in the field....

Modest numbers of SNPs, especially those statistically independent ones, are as identifiable as social security numbers (1). Twenty statistically independent SNPs from single gene loci could pose more of a privacy threat than 75 SNPs with high LD from multiple gene loci. Even releasing eight SNPs can be risky for individuals with rare alleles, particularly if they are associated with a known phenotype.

It is in Science.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1151526

This is developing into a new field of study known as Epigenetics. Environmental factors, such as diet and exposure to toxins can activate or deactivate genetics.

Read more at:
Discover Magazine, November 2006
Wikepedia: Epigenetics.
Science Magazine

A brief violent torrent of water will blatantly blast in straight lines, whereas millions of years of slow erosion by a gentle river will meander in U-turns and erode and weather rock in exactly the way we see in the grand canyon, yet you close your eyes and hope it will go away somehow.

The arctic ice blatantly shows hundreds of thousands of yearly layers, yet you close your eyes and just plain ignore it.

There is over 5000 years of written Egyptian history, yet you close your eyes and tell me to "investigate" because you simply do not WANT it to exist. Go investigate it yourself, here's a good starting link, or go to your local library and open any history book, or go visit any major museum.

As I explained the very mountains record millions of years of tectonic folding and uplift, yet you close your eyes and just plain ignore it.

I mentioned that some bodies of water have tens of thousands of visible yearly cycle sediment deposits and glossed over about a half dozen similar examples, I haven't provided links but I absolutely could dig them up, but why should I bother when all you do is close your eyes and completely ignored them all. You didn't ask me about any of them, you didn't challenge any of them, you didn't doubt any of them, you didn't accuse me of lying about any of them, you just plain completely ignored them all.

Way-back-when at the start of this thread you were all eager to embrace Carbon dating when you thought it crapping-out at "several thousand years" might mean six thousand years. Yet you promptly closed your eyes and FORGOT it out of existence when it turned out that "several thousand years" meant documenting SIXTY thousand years of continuously documented carbon dated history.

You accused me of insist[ing] that everyone should blindly accept an old earth. You are being willfully blind, ignoring the existence of anything that does not fit your preconceived ideas of what should and should not exist. It is truly astounding logic to accuse me of asking people to blindly accept an old earth without evidence by the magic of you simply ignoring everything I've said out of existence.

Lets expand on the ice cores, just to drive the point home some more. If you look at the top 70-odd layers of arctic snow, you find that lead contamination in the ice suddenly shoots up for most of that period, then drops back down. In the 1930's we started using leaded gasoline. The lead contamination in the ice exactly mirrors the use of leaded gasoline, snow contaminated with atmospheric fallout of lead. If you look at the top few hundred yearly layers of snow you can find traces of soot and other contaminants exactly mapping the history of various human activities such as coal burning, and the yearly layers also document traces of ash from historically recorded volcanic eruptions. In each and every case the number if layers down in the ice exactly matches that number of years ago and trace contaminants exactly match the known historical events of those years. If you count down the layers and look at the range from 1700 to 2500 layers down you also find lead contaminants - exactly matching the Greek and Roman mining and smelting of lead and silver from 500 B.C. to 300 A.D.. 2500 layers down equals 2500 years ago equals 500 B.C. and records atmospheric lead contaminants from historically documented Bronze Age primitive metal processing. And from 2500 layers down the layers just keep going and going. A hundred thousands layers and more, and each and every one is a year.

You are just plain closing your eyes. You are just plain ignoring blatant PROOF that doesn't happen to fit the answer you wanted.

I defy you to offer any intellectually honest justification to dismiss the ice cores and persist in denying an Old Earth.

science is good for try

The video doesn't cover all of the details of the research since it is a high-level summary, but a more detailed description of the chromosome merger is in the section "Segmental duplications" in the original research paper here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7034/full/nature03466.html
The paper covers some methods how the merger could have have happened via genetic mutations and duplications, though some technical knowledge of genetics is assumed. More detailed theories concerning the exact temporal order and extent of the mutations and duplications are contained in the earlier research here:
http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/abstract/12/11/1651
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/215/4539/1525

Dr. Miller was an expert witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover ID trial, so I think he knows the arguments on both sides of the ID debate fairly well. Dr. Miller's main point in that lecture segment was that that evolutionary theory predicted the merging of a chromosome, and later we seem to have found the location in human DNA where the merging occurred when compared to ape chromosomes. He is trying to counter the argument that it is not possible that humans and modern apes share a common ancestor because we have different numbers of chromosomes, or because evolution can not create new species, etc. So this segment of the lecture is more pro-evolution than completely anti-ID. Much of the rest of the lecture (if you locate the full version) is what I would call anti-ID, though. He generally disapproves of ID books such as "Of Pandas and People" and groups like Answers in Genesis that he believes are also trying to push ID as thinly veiled creationism and he does not agree with the "irreducible complexity" ID arguments. You can view the full lecture and decide for yourself if his arguments counter the specific version of ID you have in mind, or if you think some versions of ID are immune to his criticisms, but be aware he is specifically talking about ID as it is being argued in Pennsylvania and Ohio by those wanting to integrate ID into science classes, and he would likely have other arguments against other variants of ID.

There are certainly ID proponents that believe in common ancestry (Michael Behe is one of those), but also believe that, for example, a supernatural being guides evolution, instead of unguided genetic mutations and natural selection alone. But keep in mind that about half of Americans do not believe in human evolution of any kind, and instead think that that a supernatural being created humans basically as they exist today. In effect, there are hundreds of millions of people that reject common ancestry, so Dr. Miller certainly has some people that he could try to convince with his arguments, even if some ID proponents do not need to be convinced of this specific point. That said, many scientists would note that it is a little odd that a supernatural being would create a world where life comes into being, but do so using a method that ends up making it very uncertain whether or not any supernatural being is even necessary. The view that common ancestry and evolution are true but that a supernatural being guides evolution may also be largely indistinguishable from materialistic evolution, though some people like Behe claim statistical methods and science can prove that random genetic mutations are not sufficient to drive evolution (though he is in the scientific minority on this topic). I'm happy to let Dr. Behe and others continue their ID research, but I don't expect much real evidence to come out of it, myself. To each their own.

I haven't heard yet of a model taking data from the 1960's /1970's that accurately matches to todays climate.

It's from 1990, not the 60s or 70s, but here's one such evaluation. (If you're unable to access that on-line, it's from the 2007 February issue of Science, and titled "Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections".)

With regards to point #2, I don't know enough about the actual data to know what is the best way to include the data. I am familiar with the need to do weighted analysis when some areas are more sparsely covered than others. I'm also familiar enough with climate audit's site to take anything they say with a grain of salt.

As for point #3, you'll note that I stipulated without using overground routes (as Amundson did) or ice-breakers. I suppose St. Roch's trip meets those criteria, but you'll note that the Northwest Passage was never completely open during that time period. Each year a slightly different region would melt which is why it took him 3 summers to make the trip! This year, the trip was made in a single summer without the use of icebreakers. (It's been made in a single summer in the past, too, but that was with icebreakers.)

Your last bit is extremely interesting. I'm still fairly certain that we're at record lows (after all, didn't they explore that region after the letter, and if so, wouldn't they have reported back that the Northwest Passage was open if it was?), but I'll admit you've introduced reasonable doubt.

1. There has been plenty of evidence to support AGW, both in terms of basic science and model validity. Ever since Svante Arrhenius, the basic science of how CO2 contributes to global temperatures has been known. More recently, studies have shown that predictions made from climate models of the 80s and 90s have largely borne out. Perhaps you're not familiar with these studies?
2. The "tweaking" of measuring stations has been downward, not upward, (to account for the urban heat island effect) so it hasn't exactly been in an effort to "fit the warming pattern". And, yes, the Southern hemisphere is not warming as fast as the Northern hemisphere—just as the models predict.
3. There have been no records of ships using the Northwest passage that did not involve either (a) overland passages, or (b) ice-breakers. If you'd like to prove me wrong, provide one such instance.

We demonstrated free-volume structures in dense vitreous polymers that enable outstanding molecular and ionic transport and separation performance that surpasses the limits of conventional polymers. The unusual microstructure in these materials can be systematically tailored by thermally driven segment rearrangement. Free-volume topologies can be tailored by controlling the degree of rearrangement, flexibility of the original chain, and judicious inclusion of small templating molecules. This rational tailoring of free-volume element architecture provides a route for preparing high-performance polymers for molecular-scale separations. Polymers with Cavities Tuned for Fast Selective Transport of Small Molecules and Ions

I agree the press release is misleading, however this method seems to provide a cheaper/faster way to separate gases, which is potentially beneficial for many industrial or laboratory processes. For the real details check the abstract in Science or the full article if available. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5848/254

On second thought, I'd like to amend my above statement - OCR is the second easiest application in AI, after game theory. A number of games have been completely solved (Connect 4), effectively solved (like Checkers, announced recently), or are very well done (Chess). Granted, they are not complex games (Find me an AI that can play Twilight Imperium well) but they are not trivial either.

HTMs aren't nearly as new as Hawkins would have you believe. The core concept was was devised by Hinton and Dayan in 1995. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/268/5214/1158 If you read through the pdf's on Numenta's site, they actually say explicitly that HTMs are 'like' a Helmholtz machine.

The idea of a Wake-Sleep model (AKA Helmholtz machine) where recognized input states are run through a network and then a generative fantasy state created. The fantasy is compared to the input and the NN weights minimized. An HTM does the same thing, but the input data comes in as changes in time. I'm sure someone had applied a Helmholtz machine like that before, but they didn't give it a fancy name, write two books and make a whole 'Neuroscience Institute' about it.

I think that any research or money put in this field (DARPA has money) is a good thing even some people aren't being given their due credit. Hawkins is actually applying very hardcore theoretical computer science. Even if he's not a scientist himself, that still puts him one step above code monkey.

HTMs aren't nearly as new as Hawkins would have you believe. The core concept was was devised by Hinton and Dayan in 1995. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/268/5214/1158 If you read through the pdf's on Numenta's site, they actually say explicitly that HTMs are 'like' a Helmholtz machine.

The idea of a Wake-Sleep model (AKA Helmholtz machine) where recognized input states are run through a network and then a generative fantasy state created. The fantasy is compared to the input and the NN weights minimized. An HTM does the same thing, but the input data comes in as changes in time. I'm sure someone had applied a Helmholtz machine like that before, but they didn't give it a fancy name, write two books and make a whole 'Neuroscience Institute' about it.

I think that any research or money put in this field (DARPA has money) is a good thing even some people aren't being given their due credit. Hawkins is actually applying very hardcore theoretical computer science. Even if he's not a scientist himself, that still puts him one step above code monkey.

It's not considered a tool if it's not created or modified by the user. In this case the crows just use the traffic 'as is', so it's not real tool using. This would be a better example.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5847/80/

Deposition of alternating nanoscale layers of clay particles and a polymer yields a transparent composite that is as stiff and strong as steel.

Nanoscale building blocks are individually exceptionally strong because they are close to ideal, defect-free materials. It is, however, difficult to retain the ideal properties in macroscale composites. Bottom-up assembly of a clay/polymer nanocomposite allowed for the preparation of a homogeneous, optically transparent material with planar orientation of the alumosilicate nanosheets. The stiffness and tensile strength of these multilayer composites are one order of magnitude greater than those of analogous nanocomposites at a processing temperature that is much lower than those of ceramic or polymer materials with similar characteristics. A high level of ordering of the nanoscale building blocks, combined with dense covalent and hydrogen bonding and stiffening of the polymer chains, leads to highly effective load transfer between nanosheets and the polymer.

Hmm R-ingTFA is highly recommended in these environs.

In fact, this particular topic isn't at all settled. It has been a very active area of research for decades, and questions related to this have spawned field changing debates. In a nutshell, before molecular biology, people thought all change was bad or adaptive. Then a dude named Kimura suggested that a lot of DNA change has very little consequence to survival. If most DNA changes are largely irrelevant to survival, then mutation rates largely dictate evolution. If mutation is dependent on metabolism, the voila! You get the result you see in the article.

However, another unrelated explanation with the very same prediction was made 34 years ago by a Tomoko Ohta, a student of Kimura's. If a lot of mutations have very small effects, then these very small effects can only be fully realized in large populations because of genetic drift. Thus, these small changes can be seen easiest in the larger population, which incidentally tend to be smaller and have higher metabolisms. Again, voila, you get the result you see in the article. In fact, the authors even admit as much:

...larger organisms generally have smaller effective population sizes (Lynch & Conery 2003), we cannot rule out the possible influence of effective population size, as predicted by the 'nearly neutral' theory (Ohta 1973).

Ultimately, the authors have added to the debate and have by no means closed it. But that's what's fun, isn't it?

Fuck gorillas. What have they ever done for us except giving us AIDS?

Hawking: "any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single repeatable observation which disagrees with the predictions of the theory"

I understand the distinction quite well, thank you.

"Please come down from the high abstract phrases and tell us one theory that is taken as law."

How about a whole slew of them? I don't have to do more than point you to a history book to show you how scientific history is littered with the corpses of those who objected to the theories of their times only to be vindicated later. You seem to think scientists have no egos.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/134/3479/596.pdf

In one of the links, b00b/breasts are shown. Here's an enlarged shot.

No, it was not known for Velociraptor. Your second sentence is correct. Feather impressions were known for some pretty close relatives to Velociraptor, and it was therefore suspected that Velociraptor could have had feathers too, but no direct evidence of them had been found until this discovery. This new discovery isn't feather impressions either, but the presence of knobby structures on the bone that correspond to where the base of feathers in modern birds are up against the limb bone.

The full article by Turner et al. can be found here in Science.

Looking at the pictures, the features are quite suggestive, and the structures are in the right place, but I'm not 100% convinced. If the interpretation is correct, though, these sorts of structures could be found on other specimens and in related species (according to the article, though, not all modern birds have these structures, so the distribution might be variable). I'm sure that this will be tested out fairly quickly by other workers.

I'll give you points for making an argument I hadn't heard before, even if it's wrong. The basic science is only a starting point, but detailed analysis allow you to make meaningful predictions about what happens when the concentration of CO2 increases. In fact, these predictions have borne out fairly well.

It's not just medical research. The scientific community works like any other community: the greater the implications, the greater the scrutiny, attempts to replicate, etc. The Huang embryonic stem cell study is a great case-in-point: the image-manipulation fraud was uncovered because of the vast number of researchers looking at the micrographs he published. (That sounds familiar, doesn't it: "Many eyes make all bugs shallow.") Global warming has many, many people working on models, taking ice cores, doing other analysis. Of course, the vast majority of published research isn't reported in Science or Nature, and so it doesn't get as much exposure. That's why around here (the University of Wisconsin), it's standard practice that if your work depends on someone else's result, you first replicate her experiment and make sure you get the same result. (If you can't, you write a letter to the appropriate publication making note of your inability to replicate the result.) This means that eventually the mistake gets uncovered, and your research doesn't get burned because someone else has been sloppy.

Like how the sea waters haven't risen near as much as originally projected, or how the total temperature isn't a high as it was said to be by now? Or would it be using faulty math to make you think that the 90's were the hottest years on record in the last century that conveniently skips over the 30's.

As a matter of fact, I believe you and I discused some of this previously then the faulty math story was on the front page of slashdot. Did you forget that you were wrong or are you doing this on purpose?

Going back to failed predictions and all, Do you think there is a reason they are attempting to change it from global warming to climate change?

Could it be because after things didn't start panning out, they could keep it going and keep the investments into the third world countries going?

But make no mistake, you are a pawn in it.

We can also talk about how H2O which is the most abundant GHG has been increasing almost as long as the "recorded global warming" has but is considered a feedback instead of a forcing in most of the models.

How people are getting their life threatened, how they are threatened with getting credentials removed and how they are having careers destroyed and losing their jobs if they question global warming.

The lack of creditable opposition doesn't prove much when people are fearing for their lives and lively hood if they come forward with something against the popular theory of the day.

Another improvement to the efficiency of solar panels is to surround each cell with a little parabolic mirror. Apparently, this helps concentrate the sunlight onto the cell. Then there are methods of stacking two solar cells with different absorption characteristics on top of each other

I would guess that the future goal is to have solar cells be able to absorb every possible frequency of sunlight.

The authors agreed that a single PCR wasnt enough, so they went with a hindIII digestion and an agarose gel run, to make sure that the pieces were all the right size, and nopt some funky recombination. They also managed a few southern blots to further ensure their results. AND they did 1300 Random Sequences (with luck a sequence can be read to 1000ish base pairs..), and IT ALL MATCHED.... 1.09 million base pairs all fit right...

So my point is that they did the work, made sure it was bulletproof, got accepted into a major journal. And sure they dont know the whole story of whats going on, but it doesnt matter, they DID IT, a full Genome transplant, with proper methods used to ensure its validity..

Storm

The researchers explained that the transplantation method is simple in concept, though complicated to execute. First, the proteins were stripped from the M. mycoides LC cells, resulting in naked DNA that can be passed between cells. Then this intact DNA was incubated briefly with M. capricolum cells, soaking in a solution that caused the M. capricolum cells to fuse together. As two of these recipient cells fused, they sometimes encapsulated a donor DNA chromosome.

Lartigue, Carole, Glass, John I., Alperovich, Nina, Pieper, Rembert, Parmar, Prashanth P., Hutchison III, Clyde A., Smith, Hamilton O., and Venter, J. Craig. Genome Transplantation in Bacteria: Changing One Species to Another. 3 August 2007, Vo. 317, Science.

Originally published in Science Express on 28 June 2007
Science 3 August 2007:
Vol. 317. no. 5838, pp. 632 - 638
DOI: 10.1126/science.1144622

Genome Transplantation in Bacteria: Changing One Species to Another
Carole Lartigue, John I. Glass,* Nina Alperovich, Rembert Pieper, Prashanth P. Parmar, Clyde A. Hutchison, III, Hamilton O. Smith, J. Craig Venter

As a step toward propagation of synthetic genomes, we completely replaced the genome of a bacterial cell with one from another species by transplanting a whole genome as naked DNA. Intact genomic DNA from Mycoplasma mycoides large colony (LC), virtually free of protein, was transplanted into Mycoplasma capricolum cells by polyethylene glycol-mediated transformation. Cells selected for tetracycline resistance, carried by the M. mycoides LC chromosome, contain the complete donor genome and are free of detectable recipient genomic sequences. These cells that result from genome transplantation are phenotypically identical to the M. mycoides LC donor strain as judged by several criteria.

The J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jglass@jcvi.org

Evolution is not testable in any kind of practical way, either.

It is testable in several ways.

First, it predicts what things we will discover in future digs. One of the complaints early on in the evolution/creationism debate was a lack of transitional fossils. These fossils hadn't been discovered yet. Evolution predicted that we would find them, and we did. Creationists then pointed out that there were new transitional fossils that hadn't been discovered (any time you fill a gap between one point and another, you're creating two new, smaller gaps). Evolution predicted that we would find those, and we did. Those were testable predictions. You're probably going to say it didn't predict anything because the fossils were already buried, waiting to be discovered. That same argument could be made for electrons before they were discovered. What it predicted was the result of future experiments (digs).

Secondly, and far less importantly, it predicts a useful technique — one that I use on a regular basis in computer science. Specifically, it led to evolutionary algorithms (of which genetic algorithms are one type).

I think anyone who says they "believe in evolution" is seriously confused about science. Does anyone "believe in F=MA"?

So you don't "believe" in science, you use science to develop theories that are useful and stand up to experimentation to arrive at conclusions.

I believe in a lot of things, and science is definitely one of them. I believe in the scientific method as sure as I believe in myself.

Thermodynamics and fluid dynamics are a couple of the theories on which Global Warming conclusions are based, but Global Warming itself isn't a theory.

Don't know the difference between a Climatologist, and a Meteorologist, do you?

Easy. A meteorologist has a significantly shorter period of time between prediction and verification than the climatologist. Therefore, his ability to predict accurately improves measurable within single human life spans. Climatologists have to wait much longer to discover how wrong they are and why, so their predictions are often ridiculously inaccurate.

As an example, climatologists predicted over thirty years ago that "the CO2 greenhouse effect warming trend should first become evident in the Southern Hemisphere." Actual observation over the last 25 years with NASA satellite data shows the exact opposite. No word, that I know of, as to why they were completely wrong.

Another example... In 1995, the IPCC revised warming estimates downward by 30% because the predicted temperature increases of 1.3 to 2.3 degrees C made five years earlier only turned out to be about half a degree. Apparently, they forgot to consider sulfate aerosols in their computer models... That's the stated reason, but I'd wager they forgot a lot more than that.

In a knee-jerk reaction to hurricane Katrina, climatologists and media everywhere were blaming global warming for increased frequency and severity of hurricanes. The world's foremost authority on atlantic hurricanes was crucified as a heritic when he called bullshit on them. Now, a new peer reviewed article in Nature by Quirin Schiermeier seems to dispute that claim as well. Run Quirin, run! Here comes a mob with pitchforks and torches... Apparently, we've been very fortunate for the past couple of decades and storm frequency and intensity is only now returning to historic averages. In the meantime, as GP poster pointed out... the past two hurricane season have been complete duds.

Having gotten so much egg on their faces in the past 40 years is bringing about a change in tactics though. I've noticed many climatologists' recent predictions are so far into the future, we'll all be dead before they can be verified.

It's easy enough to predict warming. The planet has been warming for the past 18000 years. It's going to get warmer? Ya don't say?! Warming thus far has only made the planet more habitable for human beings. Pardon me if I don't fall to my knees and repent to the holy mother Earth when a climatologist starts preaching fire and brimstone about future warming.

Over the last 500 million years or so, the number of species on Earth has tended to dip regularly about every 62 million years. The last time this happened, about 55 million years ago--or about 10 million years after the great K-T extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs--biodiversity sank by about 10%; around 115 million years ago, it dropped by a similar amount.

7. Present day -- the Holocene extinction event. 70% of biologists view the present era as part of a mass extinction event, possibly one of the fastest ever, according to a 1998 survey by the American Museum of Natural History.

"We need to more fully subsidize those degrees in fields where we're starting to lose our edge."

Except...we're not losing our edge. Not in terms of technically skilled graduates, anyway.

I can't tell you how many PhDs I know in the sciences (biology, chemistry and biochemistry, mostly, but also physics) who are languishing in dead-end, post-doctoral "training" positions. And it isn't simply a matter of idealism, or holding out for (rare) faculty openings; most of these people would gladly take jobs in industry, if they could obtain them. But when it comes right down to it, the propaganda doesn't match reality -- "tech" companies will hire a dozen non-technical employees for every scientist or engineer. Meanwhile, age (and salary) discrimination are rampant in technical fields.

One needs only spend twenty minutes perusing the Science magazine career development forum to read their fill of sad stories concerning highly skilled graduates who can't obtain work. Genentech and Amgen are hiring PhDs with years of post-doctoral research experience into lab tech (a.k.a. "Research Associate") positions. Microsoft and Google are clamoring for H1B visa caps to be lifted, while eliminating qualified American applicants from consideration based on essentially arbitrary criteria (Filtering PhD level applicants based on their SAT scores and college GPA, anyone?). Do these sound like the actions of employers who are desperate for technically qualified employees?

If Americans have lost their edge in the technical marketplace, it's only because they can no longer compete on cost. Meanwhile, our government continues to subsidize the over-production of PhDs, as well as the advanced training of foreign nationals who can (and do, in my experience) return to their home countries to use their high-quality American education while living comfortably on a fraction of the wages required here.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's definitely time to crank up the costs of those technical degrees. And while we're at it, we should stop funding the needless overproduction of graduate students, demand repayment for the training of foreign students who return to their home countries after graduation, and re-tool the US scientific funding system, so that graduate students are no longer viewed as the cut-rate backbone of scientific research. If government funding were limited to staff scientist salaries, and graduate students had to pick up the costs of their own education (rather than being viewed as a source of cheap labor), I think we'd really begin to get an idea of how much our society values "technical education".

For what it's worth...IAAPHD. I'm posting anonymously, because these are (obviously) not popular opinions in my field....