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http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/315/ 5819/1646
Two powerful champions of biomedical research blasted the White House's proposal to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 and invited research leaders to vent their own frustrations at a Senate hearing this week.

Another story last month
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/315/581 3/750
*Research Rises--and Falls--in the President's Spending Plan*
Just as he has stayed the course in Iraq, President George W. Bush has stuck to his guns with his budget proposals. On 5 February, he sent Congress a 2008 budget request for science that favors a handful of agencies supporting the physical sciences and puts the squeeze on most of the rest of the federal research establishment as part of an overall $2.9 trillion plan that clamps down on most civilian spending....

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/315/ 5819/1646
Two powerful champions of biomedical research blasted the White House's proposal to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 and invited research leaders to vent their own frustrations at a Senate hearing this week.

Another story last month
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/315/581 3/750
*Research Rises--and Falls--in the President's Spending Plan*
Just as he has stayed the course in Iraq, President George W. Bush has stuck to his guns with his budget proposals. On 5 February, he sent Congress a 2008 budget request for science that favors a handful of agencies supporting the physical sciences and puts the squeeze on most of the rest of the federal research establishment as part of an overall $2.9 trillion plan that clamps down on most civilian spending....

This method of producing biofuels looks as though it might enhance soil as well. Looks a bit like a bison ecology: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314 /5805/1598.
--
Graze the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Ask, and ye shall receive.

-Ted

The problem is that is exactly what is going on, despite a very clear consensus in the scientific community.

For every respected scientist that comes out in favor FOR global warming, there is another respected scientist that comes out against it..

That you say that means you aren't really paying attention. Can't totally blame you given the false equivalence the media has allowed, but that is still wrong.

Again.. I haven't decided which way I believe. Give me some real, unbiased facts, and I'll maybe make a decision. But if there's any hint of bias, I will see it and disregard said report.

As I point out almost every time this topic comes up, there is still no meaningful debate amongst the scientists. There are always a few crackpots (Flat-Earth Society anyone?), but amongst real scientists publishing in quality peer-reviewed journals, the debate is not whether anthropomorphic global warming is happening, but how much and how quickly.

What bothers me, as a scientist, is that even this article gets used in the he said/she said argument, when even the scientists it is discussing say, "I've no doubt that global warming is occurring..."

-Ted

You can start here:

          http://www.sciencemag.org/

Type "global warming" into the little search field top right and stand back.

There are many many scientists, not funded by big-oil, who seriously doubt or outright disagree with the conclusion reached by a few high-profile scientists in regards to the veracity of man-made global warming.

No there's not.

And there are certainly none who have published a paper to that effect in a peer reviewed journal in the last 14 years.

When Halliburton moves some of it's operation to Dubai, how do you think that US laws will be applied? If they can make huge amounts of money by working with Iran, do you think that US law will stop them? If oil rich Saudi groups want to influence US energy policy to keep the country dependent on middle eastern oil, wouldn't it be easy to do this based in the middle east? But it's OK, Dick Chaney will keep us safe...

If the numbers don't add up then the science that claims to explain them is wrong.

That's how we measure science: by its ability to accurately predict the numbers.

Like others said, it's the phase velocity that can be greater than the speed of light. But they were talking about a negative speed of light. Ever heard of metamaterials? You can see such phenomena in those artificially designed metamaterials. If booth the permittivity and permeability of the material are negative, the refractive index an thus speed of light is also negative. Light exits the material before it has even entered it. Victor Veselago thought of that long ago and John Pendry was the first to create such a material. My professor does this kind of crazy stuff all the time: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312 /5775/892

Then I want to make a three-dimensional gyroscope

Actually, it was Nosovelov and Geim's group in Manchester. See e.g. their original article in Science.

There are two ways to make graphene I have known, one is to exfoliate graphite and the second one is to produce an oversaturated silicon carbide single crystal, and the graphene will grow epitaxially from the carbon layer on the surface of the silicon carbide crystal. None of these two can be "practical" IMHO. I also believe the researchers claim the new transistor is "practical" just to differentiate them from the old ones. Anyway I will read the real paper on Nature Materials and see what Novoselov's group has done this time.

It looks like sanity may have temporarily prevailed and funding's been increased for some American science. Science 23 February 2007:Vol. 315. no. 5815, pp. 1062 - 1063 (sorry no linky-unless you're at a uni you probably gotta pay) says that the NSF's budget increased by $334 million, matching it's 2007 request (NSF they say has a $4.4 billion budget). NIH also got a boost of $612 million, and the DOE $200 million. So that's about 1.1 billion, or for the median 'merican that increase is less than half a Big Mac a year--truly a fucking bargain. However according to the article science is still expecting hard times in 2008. Not that the last couple of years have been a picnic by any means...

The birds are in on it too: this totally blew me away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo
looks like an animal crafting a tool to me.

More about this here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/

Cheers,
Rob

In this article, apparently even Mr. Taleyarkhan is frustrated by the secret panel that exonerated him. And this article says about the panel, "Purdue's finding is as mysterious as bubble fusion itself".

Article reporting the milliHz hum in 1998
IDA (International Deployment of Accelerometers) used to detect the hum.
Article in Nature (1979) assesses if IDA can be used to detect very low frequency seismic data. Looking at the figure 1 of amplitude(?) ("MD counts" at Rarotonga station not shown on the current IDA map) I can see the aftershocks in 2 hour intervals after the Indonesia earthquake, but the subj frequencies could be detected only by obtaining the spectrum (Fig.2) at mHz range which frankly looks like white noise - irregular beats.

Most interesting figure is Fig.3 which shows the 0.43-0.52mHz of the _processed_ spectrum measured at six different stations around the world at Hour 25 and on. The Alaska station (CMO) has much clearer spectrum compared to the closest (?) RAR station.

All of it must have meant something for a seismologist which I am not.

The prize conditions do mention that the carbon has to be kept out of the atmosphere for 1000 years, so if you make a useful product, you've got to be sure that it is not useful in a way that it goes back into the atmopshere. Fuel is out, some plastics which degrade are out too. For long term storage, mineralization looks good: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/300/ 5626/1677 though not terribly useful. Need to read whole article so this might send you to the library. It might be better to put the carbon into soil as charcoal, using the only a portion of the potential combustion energy from biofuels. Engineer-Poet has been working on this.
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Don't burn coal http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I think finding a single scientist that is skeptical about the primary cause of Global Warming as strictly human based CO2 generation, is easy to do with google.

But like I said, you already made up your mind. Don't bother then.

Which is my continual point in these matters that the science is bad, is corrupt and short sighted and ignorant because a DOGMA exists in the community right now. All other ideas are blocked out. That is too bad. You my friend are an excellent example, thanks for proving my point.

Now, if you can't answer my question, just be honest about it. I've got to believe you don't know of a single climatologist who disputes that man-made contributions are a significant component of global warming. despite the fact that you imply there are lots of them to be found. Don't try to hide behind "find your own climatologist you've already tried to find and can't" and "DOGMA". That's all I'm asking, and frankly it doesn't seem like that much to ask for.

Ooops. Link.

Well, many companies will control what can be published from the research they pay for, but when it comes to the government, that is not the case at all.

Naive today, aren't we? Government can choose to suppress research in a number of ways. Either through 'censorship' (see above), or lack of funding entirely as is the case with embryonic stem cell research.

In the case linked to above, the cult of global warming calls foul because the Bush administration decided to tone down the cultists' language. Not change their findings mind you... simply take out the inflammatory language. And that makes the cultists sad.

Worth noting: King George is not alone on the phrase "global warming." Even the fine gentlemen over at realclimate.org don't want you calling it "global warming" any more. They prefer "anthropogenic climate change" now. That way, they can claim victory regardless of the direction temperatures actually go...

Sea levels are falling in the arctic? It must be anthropogenic climate change. Ice getting thicker in Greenland? Yet more anthropogenic climate change! Temperatures falling in Greenland? ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE!! Woohoo! This is great! It works for hot AND cold! Awesome!! I wish we'd thought of this five dollar word for 'man-made' sooner! Tell all the troops to discontinue the use of 'global warming' and start using 'anthropogenic climate change' as soon as possible.

Some recent work suggests that this might not be the case http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314 /5805/1598.
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Beat the rush into renewables: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Yeah, it definitely could be a combination of all manners of cycles. That's the thing about climate shifts- there are so many variables interacting, that some interact in very different ways. I wrote a summary paper a few years ago for a seminar about a theory of frequency modulation of the Milankovitch cycles to help solve some of the classic Milankovitch "problems". Here's a link for it: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/285 /5427/564. Looking at the followup research, Dr. Rial has done both frequency modulation to see what he can do with the three main Milankovitch cycles (that being orbital eccentricity (changing in how "oval" the Earth's orbit is, every 100,000 and 400,000 years), planetary precession (changing the location of the seasons, so that the Northern Hemisphere winter moves from January to January over the course of 21,000 years) and the planet's obliquity (changes in the tilt of the earth from 22.5 degrees to 24.5 degrees, over a course of 41,000 years). Through this frequency modulation, he was able to produce a signal very close the delta-O 18 ratios found for the Vostok core in Antartica. His theory also was able to "demodulate" the Vostok core to get peaks at 41kyr (kyr = 1000 years), 100kyr, and 21kyr as predicted by the classic Milankovitch cycles. While these solar fluctuations may exist (and I'm not an astronomer, just a meteorology/atmospheric science/climatology PhD student) I'd prefer to firm them up before they replace the classical orbital mechanisms that we know exist. Whether they cause the Ice Ages or not, they are present in the orbital path.

I'd like to take that suggestion a step further. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming. ... Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy

The AMS Seal of Approval was launched in 1957 as a way to recognize on-air meteorologists for their sound delivery of weather information to the general public.

In January 2005, the AMS introduced a new program called the Certified Broadcast Meteorologist (CBM) program, intended to raise the professional standard in broadcast meteorology and encourage a broader range of scientific understanding, especially with respect to environmental issues. The goal of the CBM program is to certify that the holder meets specific educational and experience criteria and has passed rigorous testing in their knowledge and communication of meteorology and related sciences needed to be an effective broadcast meteorologist.

The Japanese government has taken up the gauntlet out of embarrassment, not chivalry. In 2004, women made up only 11.1% of the scientific workforce, the lowest proportion among the 30 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (Portugal has the highest rate, more than 40%; the U.S. f igure is 26%.)

So why is Portugal's percentage high and Japan and the US's percentages low? My opinion is that it is partially culture based. Just turn on the TV in the US and you'll see all of these commercials toward women advertising clothing, jewelry, and beauty products. In TV shows the scientists are almost always men. The engineers are almost always men. The geeks are almost always men.

If you want a neutral preference on gender in workforces, you're going to have to disassociate the cultural links between gender and professions. But that will never happen because the marketing departments will always choose the best role model for gender when they want to sell a product to a group of people.

Programs that may attempt to include bonuses for women to enter into male dominated fields don't work in my opinion. It's like saying you're entering a one sex dominated field and you probably won't feel as welcome just because you're surrounded by guys, but hey, to make up for it we'll offer you a scholarship of some sort. Every girl I talked to when I was in school I asked "why did you choose cs?" and the answer was never "because it's dominated by guys and I can get this cool scholarship." It was either the girl was actually interested in it, she had friends that were going into CS, or her parents influenced her decision. STRANGELY, those answers aren't all that much different from guy answers...

Want your kid to be more interested in sciences and engineering? Take away the doll and give her Legos. And don't turn on the TV to let her see all those commercials of "girl" toys either. It starts when they're kids, not when they're 18 and have already been influenced by so many outside inputs.

How about this for casting aside "geo-political crap":

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686

That's 928 peer-reviewed papers, zero dissent - and the agreement of every major scientific body in the country.

The fact is, there is ZERO debate in the scientific community. In other words, questioning the reality of global warming is political crap. Supporting it is not. There are always people on both sides of an issue who are unreasonable, but this one is shockingly one-sided.

So who should we believe, the thousands of scientists who all agree, or the 50% or so of politicians and bullshit artists who say there is a doubt? Just because a politician can make an intuitive argument doesn't mean there is any truth to it - just that maybe he was on the debate team.

Seriously, of course most of the general public will never be able to tell the difference, because we aren't all climatologists... but do we really believe POLITICIANS more than SCIENTISTS, even when thousands of scientists all agree???

A counter example is Harvard's failure to promote Mageret Geller.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/286/ 5443/1277?ck=nck

True, astronomy does not come into the prize metric, but her work
on dark matter is revolutionary despite requiring a lot of gathering,

Then the other wavelength is that what you're describing (dedicated links) has little to do with network [non-]neutrality. If the issue was simply "buy a link into our network for better service to our customers" then nobody would be up in arms. Hell, my own company's servers have links out the wazoo. The problem is that there's a strongly implied "or else we'll make your normal routing even worse than it is now" in the wording of the ISPs' positions on the subject. Ignore HBO for a second, take Google (a popular target of ISPs who think they deserve money just because someone else used them to make billions. Who do they think they are, Shuji Nakamura?).

Think about it. When did you start having trouble searching on google? What does google stand to lose if they don't pay for these links?

Recently, a group of researchers (with which I have no affiliation, btw) have demonstrated how to convert sugar derivatives into actual short- and medium-chain alkanes, i.e. gasoline. Check out the paper:

Huber, G.W., et al. Science, 308, pp. 1446-1449.

Yep. Precisely physically IDENTICAL to that very thing. EXACTLY. It's uncanny. Well, sorta. ...and maybe just a little bit like this, around the areas of the epiglotis and the cuticles: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/274/529 5/2010 (*NOTE: Any percieved disregard for proper spelling, grammar and/or graham crackers is strictly intentional, I use it as troll bait and a diversion tactic. It's better than kryptonite for FReeperz and other lesser developed, less eel-volved critters.)

It seems the ice has been getting thicker in Greenland over the past decade or so.

The article you quoted doesn't really support your statement. Sure, the ice has been getting thicker in some areas, and has been getting thinner in other areas. That is not the same thing as the total of the ice increasing! For a total, look many other articles, such as this later article in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/580 3/1286.

"From 2003 to 2005, the ice sheet lost 101 ± 16 gigaton/year, with a gain of 54 gigaton/year above 2000 meters and a loss of 155 gigaton/year at lower elevations. The lower elevations show a large seasonal cycle, with mass losses during summer melting followed by gains from fall through spring."

"Mass changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet are of considerable interest because of its sensitivity to climate change and the potential for an increasing contribution of Greenland ice loss to rising sea level. Observations and models have shown that in recent years Greenland has experienced increased melt (1), thinning at the margins (2-4), and increased discharge from many outlet glaciers (5). At the same time, the ice sheet has been growing in its interior (3, 4, 6)."

Also see http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/steffen/g reenland/melt2005/

Get over it, Greenland's ice is melting. Now for the news that you might think is better. Because the center of Greenland is a large plain mostly surrounded by mountains, it will take at least several centuries for much of the ice to melt, even in a much warmer world. The edges will melt faster.

--

Is this a sig? Why, or Why not?

"No. If you could read,..."

And if you could read you would find your precious "article" is actually an abstract, the paper itself does not account for the edges but does agree they are shrinking, and if you read past the 54cm bit you would find a citation at the bottom of your link pointing to the GRACE study that contradicts your 54cm claim.

Now if there are contradictory findings and you had any research skills at all, you could easily find a scientific critique of the two papers. Don't dispair, you do have some skill, at least you can quote an abstract from science that (on the surface) appears to pander to your world view and assists in you ridiculing people, perhaps if you brushed the chip of your shoulder you could learn something about the world around you. OTHOH: I suspect you are trolling and don't really expect a sensible reply to the GRACE data that I and others have pointed out.

BTW, the oil company shills have blown the cooling craze completely out of proportion to what it was (and yes, I do remeber 1975 and was old enough to read newspapers at the time).

First up nobody disputes there has been increased snowfall in Greenland's interior, in fact it was predicted by climate models.

Second, there have been more comprehensive and more recent studies from the GRACE sattelites, seen in the citation record at the bottom of your link. Also note in the GRACE mission statement that NASA purposfully designed the sattelites to measure the "exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the oceans".

Third, Johanessen et al. came to the best conclusion using the data they had, they just didn't have all the data available today.

Fourth, both the paper by Johanssen in your link and the more recent paper based on GRACE data from Rignot and Kanagaratnam agree with the predictions of climate models that say the interior will build and the edges will melt.

Last of all, allthough the result of 54cm is "very simple", measuring a volume of ice the size of Greenland is not a simple task and the error bars in the studies reflect that difficulty. Johanessen is a genuine skeptic when it comes to the impact of AGW, however even he does not doubt it is happening, nor does he doubt our CO2 emmisions are to blame.

It's also an accepted scientific "fact" that Greenland and the Antartic peninsula are subject to a phenomena called "polar amplification" which has seen their regional average tempratures rise by 3 degrees, compared to the global average of 1 degree. Now tell me again about "global warming scare mongering" or are you just trolling for AC's?

An unpublished study according to the link you provide. Really, I'd love to see that study, but all you've provided is an article in National Geographic. Of course, we can all remember National Geographic led the global cooling craze in 1975. But now, I suppose, they are an authoritative source. Much moreso than a peer reviewed scientific journal...

You can read the paper here. It was published in Science on August 10, 2006. Abstract:

Using time-variable gravity measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission, we estimate ice mass changes over Greenland during the period April 2002 to November 2005. After correcting for effects of spatial filtering and limited resolution of GRACE data, estimated total ice melting rate over Greenland is -239 ± 23 cubic kilometers per year, mostly from East Greenland. This estimate agrees remarkably well with a recent assessment of -224 ± 41 cubic kilometers per year, based on satellite radar interferometry data. GRACE estimates in southeast Greenland suggest accelerated melting since the summer of 2004, consistent with the latest remote sensing measurements.

Sorry, but this was predicted by the models.

What happens is that warming causes ice near the edges to melt. This dumps cold freshwater into the water nearby, disrupting warmer ocean currents. It also increases humidity. Due to the disrupted ocean currents, the prevailing winds go inland, taking the humid air with it. This gets dumped as snow in the middle, causing the central ice dome to increase. A similar effect occurs in Antartica, where the central ice dome is about 4ks thick.

As shown in the link you provided, _below_ 1500m, the average change was a shrinking of 2cm (+- 0.9cm). Yes, the overall effect was to increase the thickness of the ice dome, but the dome is definitely getting more pronounced.

What the models predict next, however, is that as the slope of the dome gets more steeper, it gets unstable. You then get large stress fractures occurring, and huge slabs - say, about the size of New York State - break off and slide down to the ocean. Fun stuff.

Also, there's ice and there's ice. Old ice is very dense - it's been compressed over thousands or even millions of years, and contains more water by volume than the newer ice being laid down above. The main contributor to this is that the new ice has a lot of gas dissolved into it, or caught in bubbles. What this means is you can melt a million cubic meters of old glacial ice to get a bit less than a million cubic meters of water. However, the same volume of water (a bit less than a million cubic meters) falls as about 3 million cubic meters of snow inland, which gets packed down to about 1.5 million cubic meters of new ice. So, yes, the _volume_ of ice over Greenland is increasing, but the quantity of water in that ice is decreasing.

Here's an paper from the same March 2006 issue of Science that describes the process.

Now if only the ice were getting thinner in Greenland, we'd have something to worry about. Unfortunately for you global warming scaremongers, that isn't the case. It seems the ice has been getting thicker in Greenland over the past decade or so.

Your link mentions a thickness increase in the interior only; there's a decrease on the margins. NASA says:

Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, while the high-elevation interior gained 54 gigatons (14 cubic miles) annually from excess snowfall.

Another study and that NASA report points to an overall decrease in ice.

Now if only the ice were getting thinner in Greenland, we'd have something to worry about. Unfortunately for you global warming scaremongers, that isn't the case. It seems the ice has been getting thicker in Greenland over the past decade or so.

It takes more than 20 years for ice this thick

Evidence please..? Or are you just making this up on the basis of your own prejudices.

to melt to a shelving point..

Ah, I think you're answering my question here. Ice shelves don't 'melt to a shelving point.' Meltwater collects at the surface, then migrates rapidly to the base, causing breakup.

Do please try to avoid the trap of your own small-scale assumptions.

This all comes from the 22 December issue of the journal Science, in case that wasn't clear from the original posting. All of the stories from the issue are indexed here; to get access to the articles I believe you need to register with the site. There's also a podcast, which doesn't require registration.

This all comes from the 22 December issue of the journal Science, in case that wasn't clear from the original posting. All of the stories from the issue are indexed here; to get access to the articles I believe you need to register with the site. There's also a podcast, which doesn't require registration.

I think this one should take the cake! http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/580 7/1850a/F4

True. Alternatives are *possible*. However, the trick is, the deposits do look different from other, known deposits produced by dust avalanches elsewhere on Mars, and, furthermore, the erosive channel systems above the deposits look consistent with a water interpretation and seepage from underground, rather than a "dry debris flow" interpretation (e.g., the channels converge at the top in tributary systems and meander towards the bottom on lower slopes, which is more characteristic of fluids than dry flows).

Here's the NASA press release with some pictures. There are many more pictures at the Malin Space Science Systems web site (they're the ones that ran the MGS until it was lost a few weeks ago). Also at the same time as the "possible water" press release, they were releasing information on recent cratering -- i.e. craters formed within the last few years. The published article is supposed to be in the Dec. 8 issue of Science, but it isn't released yet and you'll probably need a subscription to read it when it is.

"Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686/

Calm down people. They haven't cured diabetes; in fact, this cure for diabetes (in mice) isn't new at all. This isn't a phase I clinical trial. They haven't tried it on people, and I really doubt the FDA will approve any such trials in the next few years.

The controversy is over the role of stem cells. No one disputes that adding Freund's adjuvant to the NOD mice can cure their diabetes, and it seems to work through a hazily-understood modulation of the immune system. That has been established for 15 years. The question is whether adding spleen stem cells to the adjuvant facilitates the process.

When Faustman first published the paper stating the spleen cells were crucial, the NIH quietly contracted three independent labs to confirm the result. No one could could show that the transplanted spleen cells were actually doing anything. Now, it seems that Faustman's group has responded to some of the criticisms, repeated the experiments, and can reproduce their own data. But as long as another lab cannot reproduce it, the role of stem cells will remain very controversial.

Why hasn't there been more of a push to use this in people? The problem in people is that you have to inject the adjuvant fairly early in the disease, and most people with type I diabetes are diagnosed pretty late when most of their beta cells have died. Additionally, no one really knows how exactly the adjuvant works (it's just a bunch of dead bacteria) and whether it will elicit nasty reactions in people that are worse than diabetes itself.

For those technical, you can read the actual papers for free online.