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If you have access to Science it looks like some of this work was published last October. I haven't read through it properley but the abstract looks like it is the same http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306 /5696/704

There's a strong scientific consensus that you're wrong. Of course, since you're a member of the rich world maybe you're not *dead* wrong. But articles like these suggest a lot of folks are gonna die due to pigheaded-do nothing attitudes like yours.

Purposely setting the US up as the fall guy on global warming may look pretty amazingly stupid in just a decade or two. All those WWII era Germans and Arab terrorists that are the stock embodiment of evil today? I'm not looking forward to it changing to a fat American in a Humvee. (Some of my best friends are overweight and many of them like to travel.) Fair? Of course not. But the price of stupidity rarely is just...

However, there is another more liberal use of the phrase to claim that humans are at fault for the world getting warmer. That is lacking in proof.

You do actually read Slashdot don't you?

The fine folks at Science Magazine have done an analysis of the last ten years' published scientific articles (articles from crank or non-peer-reviewed publications were not counted) on the subject of global climate change. The results themselves are interesting, but the most remarkable part was that, of the 928 papers they found, 75% accepted that global warming was caused by human activities, either explicitly or implicitly. 25% made no mention either way. AND NOT A SINGLE PAPER ASSERTED OTHERWISE.

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

If you haven't gotten this impression, it's because you've been tainted by having too much knowledge of real molecular biology. Read this quote taken directly from Science's writeup

5 Hidden DNA Treasures. Biologists digging through the DNA between the genes and between a gene's protein-coding regions are unearthing new insights into how genomes work. Protein-coding sequences take up less than 10% of the human genome. The rest, previously considered a genetic wasteland, are proving quite influential for gene function.

As you say, the existence of noncoding regulatory elements has been known since the days of the lac operon, which I think is the mid-1960s. So who considered non-coding regions a "genetic wasteland?" Science writers, not scientists.

Here is a reference from the primary literature:

Nobrega et al. Science 302:413- (2003).

Nobrega et al. made 2 knockout mice, deleting 2 Mb and 1 Mb (Mb= 10e6 basepairs of DNA) regions, respectively, of the genome called "deserts", i.e., gene poor regions that nonetheless are highly conserved between humans and mice, but not humans and fish. The authors believed that since this sequence was conserved, it must not be junk, and therefore likely contains cis-acting regulatory sequences that important for gene regulation. When these regions were deleted, however, the mice developed normally and had no apparent defects or pathologies. In other words, what was once thought to be junk, then thought to not be junk, turns out to be junk again (sounds like a Fark cliche).

Here is another link that is informative. One possibility that is mentioned in this blurb is that the knockout mice are just defective in a non-obvious way.

Not only has the recognition and category task been done in primates (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/29 1/5502/312) but all three of these areas have been found in previous fMRI experiments.

I actually find these results extremely misleading -- there is no way that these three processes occur in complete isolation across these three areas. The recognition and recall task has been shown to rely on hippocampal regions (through lesion studies). A correlative finding is very weak.

No kidding you're going to have a lot of bills to pay!

Without taxes, you'd have to foot the bill for

-- A private police force
-- A private road system
-- Your own sewage-treatment plant
-- Private schools (would be the only option)
-- Food testers (since there'd be no government program to try to ensure the safety of the food supply)

You wouldn't have the benefits of all the scientific research from public universities. Nor would you be participating in this conversation if it wasn't for the Internet, which was originally ARPANET, and was funded with -- oh, looky here! -- tax dollars!

Generations of American citizens have paid their taxes, knowing that in return, they'd get a system which was the envy of the world, and knowing that they'd be taken care of in turn by future generations of taxpayers who would keep things going, and benefit, as you do, from the investments of the past.

Now who wants to use other people's money while selfishly hording their own?

Oh, and by the way, check out some details on the "dubious science", that "fantasy" you so scornfully refer to: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. It's pretty well accepted by reputable scientists that global warming is happening, and it's being caused by human activity (such as the hot air coming from certain directions on this thread)

Finally, I have to point out that this country has a glorious (well, sometimes) tradition of finding business opportunities in every challenge, be it war or male impotence. There's a huge potential market in environmentally friendly products and green energy generation technology. We could be CREATING jobs while slowing global warming!

Speaking of Science, which like I said is one of the top two science journals and even from U.S. :), has an editorial with the title The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change --- well worth reading.

The original Nature article about summer 2003 blame is reviewed here, reading the article itself requires a subscription either from you personally or from your institution. Possible speculation about juridical consequences is also there.

The magazine Science posted this article today. To quote its conclusion for those who can't RAFA:

"there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen."

First of all, no species has ever been shown to evolve into another species. No scientific experiment has ever proved this.

Article: Evolution on the Fast Track

The link is kind of crappy. It's sort of hype-ish without real science, which coincidentally is the name of the journal whose latest issue is mentioned in the link as containing the paper describing the breakthrough. What a sentence that was...anyways, here you go. You should be able to read it even if you aren't at a subscribing institution since it's the latest issue.

It's worth noting that UTD has only been hard at work in CNT research for a few years. I was there in 2002 when the NanoTech institute was still being built. They had a bunch of Dells sitting outside the building with no one watching...but I guess they didn't worry. I mean, who steals a Dell?

Other good links, mostly culled from the above Science article:
Baughman's summary of nanotube work
Smalley (the Nobel prize winner) and his CNT work:: He invented the HiPCO process for large-scale development of CNT's...from what I gather, fiber-spinning like the UTD method is a direct competitor.
A really good (and 46 page!) discussion of nanotube work
Strong Bad, in case you get tired of science.

The link is kind of crappy. It's sort of hype-ish without real science, which coincidentally is the name of the journal whose latest issue is mentioned in the link as containing the paper describing the breakthrough. What a sentence that was...anyways, here you go. You should be able to read it even if you aren't at a subscribing institution since it's the latest issue.

It's worth noting that UTD has only been hard at work in CNT research for a few years. I was there in 2002 when the NanoTech institute was still being built. They had a bunch of Dells sitting outside the building with no one watching...but I guess they didn't worry. I mean, who steals a Dell?

Other good links, mostly culled from the above Science article:
Baughman's summary of nanotube work
Smalley (the Nobel prize winner) and his CNT work:: He invented the HiPCO process for large-scale development of CNT's...from what I gather, fiber-spinning like the UTD method is a direct competitor.
A really good (and 46 page!) discussion of nanotube work
Strong Bad, in case you get tired of science.

Additionally I think it's good that IBM too have an interest in this area, since 1) competition is always good and 2) it makes for more accurate results. With some luck we can have peta-byte based grid by 2007.

I think Science Magazine had an article about this, it was called the Neutron Science Project.

See, for instance, Global Warming Trend of Mean Tropospheric Temperature Observed by Satellites, by K.Y. Vinnikov and N.C. Grody, Science 302, 269-72 (2003), which points to the difficulty of maintaining calibration of the microwave radiometers through the diurnal cycle and the problems of determining appropriate weighting functions to calibrate measurements taken with the radiometer pointing somewhere other nadir.

Slide 3 makes me thinking about van Gogh. link

Excerpt: "This year's winners -- in categories including photography, illustration, instructional graphics, and interactive and noninteractive multimedia -- spanned the gamut, from intricate depictions of events at the cell membrane to the nighttime drama of a sonar-guided bat closing in on its prey."

Walter Cronkite squirmed a bit at this characterization. "The problem really is Nimbyism," he admitted when I reached him by phone not long ago, ''and it bothers me a great deal that I find myself in this position. I'm all for these factories, but there must be areas that are far less valuable than this place is." With prodding, he suggested the deserts of California. Then, perhaps realizing that might be a tad remote to serve New England's energy needs, he added, "Inland New England would substitute just as well. ... it will be most unsightly for what is now open bay. Everybody will see it, anyone who wanders on the water, who has a home that faces the water." [Emphasis added]

I am sorry if my comments made it seem that I was tarring everyone on the Cape & Islands as rich. I know plenty of people working hard year round to make ends meet and am well aware that more than just vacationers live there.

What you don't address is that if the Cape and Islands continue to produce their electric power by burning fossil fuels, they are contributing to sea level rise that will, over the next century, threaten fresh water supplies, accelerate beach erosion, and threaten fish populations. It's nice to go fishing in the sound, but it's also nice to be a good steward of the area for future generations.

Fossil fuel power plants on the Cape also produce pollution that hurts the area in the short run. In April 2003, 98,000 gallons of oil bound for a power plant in Sandwich spilled into Buzzards Bay from a leaky barge. This oil killed fish and birds, contaminated shellfish beds, and mucked up beaches along 93 miles of coastline.

It looks like Science, the -other- premier research journal also gave questionnaires to the candidates. Their responses are available here.

Some of the responses are copied-and-pasted, but the Science questionnaire also covers issues like Creationism, NSF funding, and their "top three priorities in science and technology," which the Nature article doesn't cover.

I found their top 3 priorities in science and technology particularly interesting:

Bush: ensure every American as access to affordable broadband by 2007, perform next-generation hydrogen research, and recruit science and technology to combat terrorism

Kerry: restore and sustain preeminence of American science and technology, ensure Americans prepared for jobs of future, and ensure that his administration's decisions are informed by the best possible science and technology advice

Yup, same Whipple. He also co-invented anti-radar chaff (or, at least, the means of producing it) in World War II.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/289/548 0/728

Actually, there has been a substantial amount of research on physiological differences by geography amongst athletes, but most of the science editors of the popular media outlets have had the good sense to not highlight it and bring it before the general public like they do with, say, cancer research, or other hope-bringing medical advances. See the July 30, 2004 Science for example. It's good that they do this because some layman fucktard would not understand the science behind it, misconstrue it as justification for an absurd and unsupported position on intelligence and achievement between races, and lead us over the brink. This person (the fucktard) would probably be either a politician or a contributor to an online chat forum (I don't mean you, parent or grandparent, I'm presupposing some replies here) in all probability.

The reason that evidence for physiological differences between races in athletic competitions should not be used as evidence of innate intellectual differences is that
1.) There is no reason at all that the two would be connected.
2.) We lack the science to resolve significant differences in cognitive ability and justify them on a biological level, so right now we'd have to rely on psychology for such studies. Psychology is a non-science discipline just north of a divining rod or horoscope in its degree of accuracy.
3.) As you point out, a truly massive number of external factors would have to be controlled for, some of which are completely unknown (e.g. your grandfather taught you to tie knots when you were really little, and thus your interest in plane geometry and mathematics was stimilated a little at just the right time).

So while we have some knowledge about basic differences between races, like tanning, muscle and skeletal development, and disease succeptability, those things are usually due to only one or two differences in a couple of proteins and are, in a relative sense, easy to explore and explain. The brain is many orders of magnitude more complex and we aren't even close to understanding its development or functioning, so lets not go there.

"Science Express" has its own paraphrasal of the paper at its website but you have to pay for the full text. There is also a link to "supporting online material" that includes a free document describing some of the methds and results.

Subject to the caveat that I did not fork over the $$$ for the full article, I'd say the conclusions appear unremarkable. Humans raised in cultures that lack counting can't count beyond 3, and also can't express the concept. I see no experiment that indicates causality between what I consider two aspects of the same phenomenon.

As for the amyloid, there has been some recent work (referenced in the paper) stating that amyloid deposits on histology are not necessary for disease. This has made some people think that they are just another symptom. Personally, I think that the deposits are stil there, just far too small to be seen by gross histology. This (the seeded vs unseeded) data seems to support the idea that deposition of amyloid is needed for the disease to progress. We just may not be able to detect it with these methods. I don't know if immunogold has ever been done, but it might be worth a shot.

The Nature reference is an editorial discussion, there is one in Science as well.

The abstract for the original Science article is here. However, you need to register(free to see abstracts) first. You can also pay to see the fulltext.

Read the original paper, and note that two of the assembled genomes (and therefore two of the the most abundant sampled organisms) are probably contaminants - neither Burkholderia nor Shewanella have been found in earlier 16s rRNA surveys of the Sargasso Sea in significant numbers.

This sort of mistake is not one that a great scientist would allow to waste resources or to be published without pointing out. If Venter would be more careful and critical, or simply have less of an ego, this mis-direction of resources would not occur.

The original paper, only available with a subscription (go to a real-world library if you don't have one). Or read a overview

And yes, IAABEM (I am a bioinformatic environmental microbiologist).

Quantum chemistry is my field, and we are some of the few who actually study biochemical systems with it.

Unfortunately, I can't really say much about long-range effects myself; The number of atoms which can practically be modelled at the same time is about 100. (that's one-hundred! Not much!)

I'd say possibly the most important QM effect strucurally in enzymes is pi-stacking and pi-cation interactions. It's not something which can be modelled well by a point charge.
(And what is worse, not all QM methods can model it either; DFT is infamous for not predicting pi-stacking or VdW effects)

Another significant thing which only QM can really model is transition-metal complexes. The coordination is very difficult to predict offhand. (Field splitting, spin states, spin interactions, Jahn-Teller effect, etc, etc..)

Just the other month, Science had some interesting results, including a completeley unprecedented mode of binding for nitric oxide to copper in nitrite reductase.

Our area is the study of the catalytic functions of metalloenzyme active sites. Again, this is not something which is easily predictable.

(Like, look at Cytochrome c Oxidase.. The function was determined in 1977, X-ray crystal structures have been known for over a decade. The mechanism of proton-pumping is still unknown. (And there's lots of notable people studying it.)

I used to work for AAAS, the publishers of Science Magazine. Science is the premier and oldest peer reviewed general science journal (about 150 years). One of my projects was working on their Manuscript tracking system, including making the submission process electronic through Submit To Science.

Science has a greater-than 80% rejection rate, because there are only so many pages in the magazine. Many people are frustrated that they've been rejected five and six times (they have about 20 years of author submission history online), but with a general science journal you have to pick the best of the best astronony and biology and signal transduction papers to print.

The review process is laborious, it involves a lot of people, but it works pretty much flawlessly. Certain aspects have evolved over time, but frankly the people who get published thing the process works and it's great, the people who don't are the ones who grouss. There are constant arguments (almost every week) about what concessions can and cannot be done without risk to watering the quality of the journal down.

But we *have*; and given the repeated observations...regardless of the curve, there will *still* be some particles at the extreme ends. Given that our detectors are still fairly primitive, it's possible that the high-e events are statistically more likely to be detected, is it not?


(Yes, I know we've seen them. Otherwise I'd be in a different field right now, and the waiters in Malargue, Argentina wouldn't all know me by name. :) But the fact that we've seen them probably implies that we don't know the source, not that we don't understand the propagation.)

I think you're missing what I'm saying - the only way we could've seen any of these particles is if they came from less than 50 Mpc. The GZK effect gets much, much stronger as you go to higher energies. After 50 Mpc, a particle that starts off at 1E21 is below 6E19. Same with particles of higher energy. Astrophysically, that's right in our backyard. There's nothing we know of that could accelerate particles like that. There's an additional problem, which is the fact that there's a spectral change in the 10^19 range that we can't explain, either. Spectral changes occur when acceleration mechanisms change. Supernovae fall apart in the 10^14-10^15 range, and there's a spectral change there, too. The fact that the spectrum continues after 10^19 (in fact, it flattens) implies that there's a new source that's "turning on" in that energy range.

As far as I understand it, the mw background is the peak energy distribution, not the total one. It's what we built our detectors to observe because it's easiest to observe - sorting random noise from the detector noise in gamma/XR is damned difficult.

It's a pure blackbody distribution, with a characteristic temperature at 2.7K. In order to have a particle out of that spectrum at 10^20, it would need to have about 10^23 times the most probable value. I haven't done the math, I'll admit - but something like e^-(10^23) probably times even the size of the Universe probably doesn't even equal *1*. (Oddly enough e^(-(10^23)) times the *number of bits* in the Universe through the end of Time wouldn't even be 1)

We don't know that, because we don't have a source for those protons. Sure, there's nothing on that vector, but even ultra-high-c factor particle paths can be altered by gravitational fields - which were not mentioned in the OMG webpage)

Yes, we do. The GZK cutoff is not "experimental physics". It's the delta++ resonance. This is stuff that they did in the 1950s, and has been extremely well studied since then. It's just proton-photon interactions. Unless Lorentz invariance is wrong (which is possible! but you should read the paper on that suggestion, and it's very, very bad), we know that GZK will slow a particle travelling faster than 6E19 couldn't've travelled more than 50 Mpc.

And gravity doesn't alter particle's paths anywhere near as much as magnetic fields do, and those particles have such high speed that neither gravity, magnetic fields, or anything else could possibly alter their path more than a tenth of a degree.

The "OMG particle"'s webpage (which, by the way, I've never heard it called - which is... odd) is a little sparse. Try the Auger homepage, this UNM site, or this LSU site. If you've got access to Science magazine, also here.

There are actually many, many more interesting things going on in the UHECR field which I haven't even mentioned.

The really interesting part is that we don't really know what process would produce such a thing. Since then, several other cosmic rays(subscription required) entering the atmosphere with energies over 10^20 eV have been detected by Japanese, Russian, and American observers.

I don't think anyone over the age of six is in danger of being misled into thinking they are actual stars falling from the sky.

Not sure what country you're from, but sadly, in the USA, less than half of the adults realize the earth revolves around the sun once a year. Keep using antiquated and misleading speech and that sad situation will continue.

The IAU definitions you were kind enough to provide are consistent with the definitions I use. Like the definitions I later found and provided, the IAU definitions also include the deprecated and antiquated definition of a meteor as the object, but only after the preferred definition of it as "the light phenomenon". Note the use of "particularly", and "more generally". It's clear the IAU is trying to provide definitions that are consistent with modern scientific knowledge, while still offering the historical but inaccurate definitions needed to understand writings from a less enlightened age. We can forgive the dead guys for using the inaccurate terminology of their day, but we should use the technically correct definitions for modern writing.

...we salute you!

Here is the link:

http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/bloom.pdf

In addition to New Scientist, you can usually find good stuff on the same topic in Science News, Scientific American, Nature, and Science, to name a few.

Shoen had gotten his PhD from germany already and he was a postdoctoral researcher at bell labs (which is not a university)

The only "peer review" at that point that needed to be done was in the journals he was publishing in. He had, before the hoaxes were caught, already published in both nature and science, two of the more preeminent (and most rigorously peer reviewed) journals in the international community. In fact before the hoaxes were caught, there were quite a few famous people tallking about him being a Nobel Prize candidate.

Try reading this or this old ny times article -bloo

I do believe you are correct. Looking at both Nature's and Science's submission FAQ's, both seem to be free of cost. Anyone who has actually published with the big two care to comment?

Telomers. Here is a good article on the application of removing telomerase to extend the life of humans. Mice studies have shown that by capping the Telomers to keep them from unwinding that mice can be made which seemingly cease to age and which are almost immune to carcinogens. There have been mice that live several years whereas their untreated brethern die in weeks or months.

In setting out to prove that there are an infinite number of arithmetic progressions of prime numbers with four terms, two mathematicians appear to have proved the result for prime progressions of all lengths.

Something I read in Science the other day: There's a new proof in review that there are infintely many sequences such as 199, 409, 619, 829, 1039, 1249, 1459, 1669, 1879, 2089 -- primes that differ by a constant offset. See also Mathworld.

When you read the original article at Science, you will see this is no elevator in fact.

Stoddart et al have made a system which can move stepwise in solution by adding or releasing protons (acid). Since this whole experiment is done is solution nothing is going in any particular direction, everything is randomly organized in solution.

So until this system is fixed on a surface and can actually preform some work, e.g. moving a weight from one station to another, I think the term elevator is premature.

And if you want to be able use this system for some real work, you should move it out of solution and into the solid phase. This is one of the biggest challenges of all these kin of Rotaxane based systems

In fact, a lot of journals (e.g. Science, Nature) do not allow you to seek attention outside of the science community. You can present your results at conferences, but not at press conferences. (If per chance a reporter is present in a scientific meeting and puts it on the cover of the NY Times, no big deal). If you violate this, they may withdraw your paper.

Phys Rev E is not that strict, I believe.

a quote from the Science magazine guide for authors

In addition, reporting the main findings of a paper in the mass media may compromise the novelty of the work and thus its appropriateness for Science. Authors are free to present their data at scientific meetings but should not overtly seek media attention or give copies of the figures or data from their manuscript to any reporter, unless the reporter agrees to abide by Science's press embargo. If a reporter attends an author's session at a meeting and writes a story based only on the presentation, such coverage will not affect Science's consideration of the author's paper. (For more information, please see the embargo entry in the Science Contributors FAQ.)

Heh... note the email address Annalee Newitz is using here... she evidentally creates a new mail alias for every column: sugarpill@techsploitation.com

Ah, slash ids pushing a billion and whining about what a sewer it's become...

Bullshit. HST is among the most productive astronomical facilities ever, measured in publication and citation count ( analysed here). HST data is typically used in more than 150 peer-reviewed papers a year. These are papers in journals such as Astrophysical Journal, Science, and of course Nature. A simple seach of the Science archives show 68 original research publications with "Hubble Space Telescope" in the text since 1995. A similar search for "International Space Station" returns ZERO hits. A search of the Nature website returns an interesting article: " Biologists recommend scrapping NASA's research on crystals" (Nature394, 213 (16 Jul 1998)) that starts out: "A panel of US biologists has called for an end to protein crystallography experiments in space -- one of the highest-profile research activities..."

The fact that the general public is fairly deluged by pretty HST pictures is in addition to the fact that the astronomical community is using HST very actively; it's not an artefact of some PR department.

Don't get me wrong - I think manned spaceflight, and the space station are good things, and should be funded. But let's be honest here; HST blows ISS out of space when it comes to publications and scientific impact.

Also, if you are going to be paying money to fuel your car would you rather pay it to American farmers and corporations or foreign oil barons and corporations

Or foreign governments that sponsor Al qaeda activities *cough*Saudi Arabia*cough*.

One has to wonder if the day comes where their revenue stream starts to dries up, they will start to get a lot more friendlier to the U.S. and get serious about removing terrorists like they do somebody who steals an apple out of one of their markets.

When I saw this in the news, I was all over it. This really could be an opec-buster if we wanted it to be.

I did RTFA by the way. You can buy it for $10 from Science. What makes this thing intriguing is it's simplicity. The artcle does not have a picture per se, but a simple schematic.

At one end is an auto injector where the ethanol is enjected and a port where oxygen (air) would be sent in. The mixture flow hits the heated tube (at 300 F) and is vaporized. As it travels through the tube it is heated to 1700 F then the mixture encounters the catalyst where the reaction takes place and hydrogen is produced.

C2H5OH + 2H2O + 1/2O2 --> 2CO2 + 5H2

The total time for the mixture to travel through the tube is 50 milliseconds

As can be seen, the conversion is complete. If you "burn" ethanol, you're going to have undesirable particulates. While CO2 is a "greenhouse gas", it still is a lot cleaner than burning gasoline.

I should mention here that the article is all chemistry and no mechanical details are given. But one really does get the sense you could knock one off in your garage. You will need college chemistry to understand the details, but it is straight forward. It's a pretty complete article.

The "secret sauce" is keeping the ethanol from catching fire.

There is a lot of FUD in the comments here about how enviromentally unfriendly/uneconomical growing corn is.

Ethanol is being made from other sources, like super enviromentally friendy switchgrass that can grow in 3/4 of the US

Advantages to this technology;

1) It's going to be quiet, and with a quiet fuel cell, would be appropriate for a small powerplant in a house. It would be more quiet than the furnace that blows air through your house.

2) It is an efficent process. Coupled with the high conversion rates and efficeint fuel cells it becomes economically viable.

3) Ethanol can be distributed easily using current distribution channels.

4) Ethanol is a renewable energy source, that could boost the farm economy, give jobs to Americans, lower the trade deficit, and give us something to export for a change. It does not need to be "found", it's "grown".

5) There are straightforward engineering solutions to the few problems that might remain.

Drawbacks;

1) It takes 1700 F heat for the process

2) Large companies are not going to want to see you leave the grid, and will do anything to influence corrupt politicians to tie it in red tape. Expect to see legislation because "it is a fire hazard".

3) It does produce CO2. However, it can't be any worse than what natural gas, coal fired plants produce. This also might be mitigated by the development of inexpensive CO2 scrubbers.

I find it apropos that news of this breakthrough appears on the same day that Opec decides to cut back production.

Current price for a gallon of ethanol is $1.30. A gallon of gas is headed to record levels.

People are going to start looking at ethanol technology pretty hard when gas hits $2.50 a gallon.

If I were OPEC, I'd be shaking in my boots.

Science article, full article available to those with access to Science
More at EurekAlert

Yes. Ethanol engines require very pure ethanol. Ethanol is produced by fermenting biomass (in this case, corn). The end result is a ethanol/water mixture, which requires extensive purification in order to be useful. This reactor tolerates ethanol/water mix around 50% (they used 103 proof ethanol). You eliminate the distillation costs which makes this reactors a lot cheaper than a pure ethanol engine.

(Actual article for this instututions with subscriptions is here. The Science summary is here.)

Yes. Ethanol engines require very pure ethanol. Ethanol is produced by fermenting biomass (in this case, corn). The end result is a ethanol/water mixture, which requires extensive purification in order to be useful. This reactor tolerates ethanol/water mix around 50% (they used 103 proof ethanol). You eliminate the distillation costs which makes this reactors a lot cheaper than a pure ethanol engine.

(Actual article for this instututions with subscriptions is here. The Science summary is here.)

In fact, if I remember correctly, some species' telomeres actually lengthen after cloning.

If they had implanted the egg into a uterus instead of extracting the stem cells it would have developed into a more or less normal human.

Um, not exactly. In fact, I'd be very surprised if it survived past a few more cell divisions. Last I heard, it was virtually impossible to clone primates due to a lack of mitotic-spindle apparatus in the transferred nucleus. (see here)

Having said that, from what the article said it seems they've found a way around that somehow. I'd wait until it's had some proper peer review before I believed it, though.

From http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/

Recently the virus has been reconstructed from the tissue of a dead soldier and is now being genetically characterized

Yes Wolfram used a lot of work based on others (and he cites it all), but he has also studied Cellular Automata for somewhere between 12 to 20 years.

There are others who disagree with this to a certain degree. The following quote is from a review of the book published in Science Magazine, by Dr. Melanie Mitchell, a well known researcher and author in the field.

She writes: "In fact, most of what Wolfram describes is the work of many people (including himself), and most of it was done at least ten to twenty years ago. Nearly no credits to the contributions of others appear in the book's main text. Some credits can be found in the long notes section at the book's end, but many are not given at all. For example, the snowflake models Wolfram discusses are based on the work of Packard (13), but Packard is not mentioned in connection with them. This is only one example of such inexcusable omissions. Moreover, the book does not contain a single bibliographic citation--an astounding lapse that will put off serious scientific readers. Wolfram's Web site (14) includes "relevant books," but this list is no substitute."