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If somebody isn't immunized, then even the rich people who are insured are at risk in the event that their infants are too young to be vaccinated, or couldn't be vaccinated because of medical complications.

The self-indulgent rich are actually a huge part of the vaccination problem. Check out where some of the latest outbreaks have been- Hollywood, Disney world, etc- not places for people with no money.

A journalist named Seth Mnookin wrote a book, "The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear", and was Interviewed recently:

anecdotally and from the overall data that's been collected it seems to be people who are very actively involved in every possible decision regarding their children's lives. I think it relates to a desire to take uncertainty out of the equation. And autism represents such an unknown. We still don't know what causes it and we still don't have good answers for how to treat it. So I think that fear really resonates.

Also I think there's a fair amount of entitlement. Not vaccinating your child is basically saying I deserve to rely on the herd immunity that exists in a population. At the most basic level it's saying I believe vaccines are potentially harmful, and I want other people to vaccinate so I don't have to. And for people to hide under this and say, "Oh, it's just a personal decision," it's being dishonest. It's a personal decision in the way drunk driving is a personal decision. It has the potential to affect everyone around you.

Further:

I talked to a public health official and asked him what's the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there's a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, "No, really, I'm not joking." It's those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people.

There's also a great comment attached, by a poster named 'Tom Billings (qualifications unknown)', that gets into the causes of autism: Genetic

Actually, it's simpler than that. It's just very unpopular, because it says things about humans we don't like to hear. You don't need government subsidizing something for it to increase. That is only one cause of some increases in some things.

The genes associated with autism are mostly SNPs and single folds. Single nucleotide polymorphisms and single folds are single mutation events. You would expect those to be just as common throughout history as a result. So, why don't we see in the past the same rates of autism we see today? It's brutally simple. The children born with such genetic differences mostly didn't survive to reproductive age. They were murdered.

His comment goes on and it's worth a read.

Perhaps they fail to see the appeal of a career with diminishing pay Checks

Found it: http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

I believe this is the study in question.

By 98 to 1, U.S. Senate passes amendment saying climate change is real, not a hoax

Personally, when "the senate just voted" is linked to something in the summary, I would expect the link to tell me more about the outcome.

Or maybe say this radio signal was bait/chum and we (or perhaps our planet) are the game in someone else's sport.

Apparently nobody has a clue about these so called FRBs, so nobody can prove us wrong ;^)

On the other hand it appears that these signals are pulse compressed a bit by some kind of intergalactic dispersive media (electron gas?) so if someone was actually looking for some thing in the intergalactic void, this is a pretty plausible analogy to deep seismic sounding the cosmos...

Sorry to be the one to inform you, but everybody is wired different from birth.

I'm sorry Coward, I'm confused. Are you trying to extend my argument that people are wired from birth (and not by up bringing) or are you trying to oppose it. Or maybe you've decided on a false strawman claiming I said they are wired from birth only one way?

As far as your feminized son goes, there's plenty of evidence that it probably has to do with the level of testosterone in womb.

Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7C cooling through the middle to late Holocene ( 5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios. - http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

For what it's worth, the legislation is called the "Immigration Innovation Act of 2015 (I-Squared Act of 2015)". Here's another article along with the senate press release and the bill itself.

Here's a link to the actual paper, and a pretty nice editorial from Science (as opposed to CBC).

Here's a link to the actual paper, and a pretty nice editorial from Science (as opposed to CBC).

However, the hypothesis that a major astrobleme is necessary to trigger a Large Igneous Province at the impact's antipode does not have strong support. (Possibly it has no significant support - we have a very incomplete impact record.)

The hypothesis (implicit, but never as far as I know proposed by a serious scientist) that a Large Igneous Province (LIP) is incapable of causing enough global environmental stress to cause a mass extinction is not proven. LIPs come in many sizes, and since they tend to bury their early phases under their later phases, it is very hard to measure their actual durations and eruption rates.

The hypothesis that a large astrobleme is sufficient to cause a global mass extinction has not been proven. In fact, the classical case - the K-Pg or Chicxulub impact - itself shows an inconsistent story. Some dinosaurs died out (large ones) but small dinosaurs survived and are now the most species rich group of tetrapods (birds). Some free-floating plankton families died out (damn, where's a biostratigrapher when you need one?) and other, closely related families didn't. Some plant families died out, and others didn't.

Contrary to what "popular science" programmes will tell you, the pattern of extinctions at the K-Pg extinction seems almost random. Which suggests that the Chixulub impactor was not, in itself, sufficient to take out all of a group of life forms.

Possibly, to get a mass extinction, you need to combine a LIP (which is happening around 1/10th to 1/5th of the time) with another "point event" (impact [K-Pg], methane-clathrate destabilisation [Pg-Eo], ocean sulphate chemistry fuck-up [Palaeozoic-Mesozoic], or another impact [Manicouagan + 2 others in a chain, Triassic-Jurassic]). It isn't a simple story. But it's more likely to not be incorrect than the simple story.

Many other attempts at detecting causality exist. There's one based on dynamical systems theory (Takens' theorem): in a multidimensional, causally linked dynamical system, all the information in the high-dimensional system can be recovered from a multiple values of a single dimension over time.

The method works by reconstructing values of X from lagged vectors of Y(t) nearest-neighbor lagged vectors of Y in a training set. As the training set gets larger, the predictions get better. If they keep getting better, X probably causes Y. The idea that the noise in X(t) shows up in Y(t) but not the other way around is implicitly captured in that approach, although not in a statistically rigorous way.

Sugihara et al. Science 2012 (sorry about paywall).

Here is a non-paywalled version of the actual scientific article, including a graph showing the measurements as a function of time on page 7. It's a significant but still faint detection, with the highest value being about 4 standard deviations away from zero.

yep. That's the 0-level model.

On the other hand, we're heading to a mode of Earth's climate that we've never experienced. Not us living folks, not our species, not our genus or even taxonomic family. It last occurred during the "great Dying", 250 million years ago. Mammals had only recently evolved, and were lucky to survive. Only to cause a repeat of the catastrophe?

Humans, we humans, are causing a rapid change to the conditions of the end-Permian extinction event. "Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event,[5] possibly up to 10 million years." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Read this, try to remember to breathe afterwards:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... (paywalled)

Almost no vertebrates in the low latitude ocean, which would have been hot to touch.

On the bright side, yes, it did end the Permian, which was a drought-world.

yep. That's the 0-level model.

On the other hand, we're heading to a mode of Earth's climate that we've never experienced. Not us living folks, not our species, not our genus or even taxonomic family. It last occurred during the "great Dying", 250 million years ago. Mammals had only recently evolved, and were lucky to survive. Only to cause a repeat of the catastrophe?

Humans, we humans, are causing a rapid change to the conditions of the end-Permian extinction event. "Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event,[5] possibly up to 10 million years." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Read this, try to remember to breathe afterwards:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... (paywalled)

Almost no vertebrates in the low latitude ocean, which would have been hot to touch.

On the bright side, yes, it did end the Permian, which was a drought-world.

So, a Texas Republican who is a climate change and evolution skeptic that's been put in charge of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has a problem with an ecological project by the NSF. I'm shocked.

You might want to look at this Science article for a little clarification.

http://news.sciencemag.org/pol...

Meanwhile, the defense budget...

I don't think even-handed coverage is possible, when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another. People just want to read stuff that reinforces their preconceived notions, and I am no exception.

Find me a story with no slant, and i'll show you a story (virtually) no one read.

Here's one. http://news.sciencemag.org/arc... According to Feedly, it had 100+ readers on Feedly alone. I just read it yesterday.

As a journalist, I can tell you that there are a lot of different definitions of "even-handed", but it possible.

For about 50 years, the Wall Street Journal was very profitable, and it was owned by the Bankroft family, who hired the best editors they could find, gave them good salaries and budgets, told them to publish whatever they thought was important, and never influenced the news (unlike the New York Times). Their readers, the leaders of American finance want their own news to be straight. (They even had reporting on Israel/Palestine that both sides considered fair.) So that's the formula. Whenever you have those conditions, you'll have good reporting.

Then the money machine ran down, the next generation of Bankrofts weren't so idealistic, and they sold it to Rupert Murdoch, where it is now run pretty much as you say (though they have a lot of inertia).

There are other examples. I read the professional journals, which have news sections, which are usually pretty good. The Journal of the American Medical Association had a news section which was very good and not at all like the AMA policy. Then the AMA hired an executive director who was an asshole, who fired the editor of JAMA the first time JAMA printed something about politics that the director didn't like.

The original article in Science has considerably more detail too, although it's behind a paywall.

We were told that hurricanes, for example, would be increasing dramatically in the short term. The incidence of hurricanes - and hurricane severity - has gone down, for much the same reason as the article gives for increased lightning strikes.

The number of tropical storms (which includes hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones) hasn't necessarily increased but there is scientific evidence that the severity has increased. Here's one study from 2005.

No actually anyone can supposedly do it,

A study of sighted people newly trained to echolocate now suggests that the secret to Kish’s skill isn’t just supersensitive ears. Instead, the entire body, neck, and head are key to “seeing” with sound—an insight that could assist blind people learning the skill. ... Although some people are more naturally talented than others at echolocation, most got “quite good” after 2 to 3 weeks of training, Wiegrebe says, and could reliably orient themselves to walk down the corridor without running into any walls using just clicks and echoes.How blind people use batlike sonar

does seem like they learned to do it about twice as fast as I've seen reported elsewhere too.

The original article is pure speculation. Can life exist that is so different from the stuff we know, so that we can't detect it with current molecular biology techniques?

Sure why not. What the article fails to mention is that we can find life in other ways. Even if we can't sequence the DNA in many cases we can culture microorganisms from environmental samples. We can also use microscopy to directly examine environmental samples. In fact both the microbial cultures and microscope have been done on large scale over many years. Not once have we seen an organism that does not conform to our current understanding of life on earth. Life can also be identified by the changes in the environment it create. Again nothing we have seen so far has suggested that there is a life form so unusual that we can't detect it with our current techniques.

Where authors of the original article fail most miserably is their solution: high throughput sequencing techniques. Huh? How would those techniques lead to the discovery of life that is fundamentally different if they are dependent on the standard properties of DNA and DNA replicating enzymes??

The fish ladders allow the Salmon to migrate and been the main concern, this news is just bad.

Except they don't. That's the problem.

The French seem to of sorted it, see post #48303643 I've heard that the paint on boats and marine infrastructure is now polluting the oceans so I'm against paint that isn't biodegradable.

Personally I'm not keen on this system of dumping turbines into a bay, tidal lagoon and tidal barrier systems would surely reap far more power.

For example: UK Renewables May Be Turning The Tide

Well the problem was that Democrats wanted to use it to win elections - "If you don't vote for us, the oceans will cover the entire planet and we'll all die!!" Eventually, people will realize that it's horribly exaggerated and nothing major will even happen as a result of "global warming" / "climate change" / "whatever other terms are used because the previous ones didn't inspire enough fear".

How come the EU are committed to 20% reduction on 1990 CO2 emissions by 2020, and want to negotiate that up to 30%?

How come the UK, is committed to an 80% CO2 reduction on 1990 levels by 2050?

Did the democrats get to them, or is there some non-american-centric science behind the policy?

FYI the terms "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" are both in use in the scholarly literature. For instance:
Global warming and changes in drought NATURE (2014)
Climate change and wind intensification in coastal upwelling ecosystems SCIENCE (2014)

So your suggestion that there is some change from one to the other is wrong. Needless to add, your suggested reason for this non-existent change is also wrong.

Yes the ocean is a FACTOR. The Sun is a greater factor.

The ocean is a factor in the Norther Hemisphere Glaciation 2.7 million years ago. (As you can see from the abstract to the paper the articles is about). It is a factor because it transported heat from the northern hemisphere to the southern. Hence the title of the paper: "Antarctic role in Northern Hemisphere glaciation".

The sun has a different effect entirely, it changes the amount of energy incident on the whole globe/

CO2? not so much.

CO2 has been a significant forcing of global mean temperature throughout the past 420 million years. Particularly for the current warming, it is the largest single forcing.

We already have 18 years of no warming

The last 6 months were the warmest on record for the NOAA and the GISTEMP data sets, so I think that the hiatus may have finished.

Throughout that time there was warming, it's just that the oceans and cryosphere have seen more warming than the global mean surface temperature.

along with every other of their claims being wrong.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas?

Sea level is rising?

http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... This came out earlier this month. See http://www.sci-news.com/physic... for a summary.

One of my prouder nerd moments was when I came up with the idea of a better, more humane mouse dynamometer and had a prototype built later that evening

did you by any chance hook a motor/generator up to a rodent wheel? it has been documented that mice will run on wheels even in the wild, if provided with one, which I'm sure you know but not linking would have been lazy

Pakistan and India have been hostile since they first were separated from each other, but they're not so different!! Surely this gesture will make them realize this and they'll have no choice but to bury the hatchet, that's just how human psychology works.

Actually there is good scientific evidence for that.

http://www.sciencemag.org/site...
Human Conflict
Why We Fight—In this special issue we consider the deep evolutionary roots of violent confrontation. We trace the trajectory of violence and war throughout history, exploring racism, ethnic conflicts, the rise of terrorism, and the possible future of armed conflicts.

tldr; Human conflict and mass exterminations are constants that have been going on for as long as we have historical or anthropological records. Reconciliation is just as much of a constant. Human populations fight and make peace.

But the problem is that it's not just NG and peanuts, there's also soy, sunflower, corn oil, all sorts of things. And soy will always be cheaper than peanuts.

This is demonstrably false, otherwise any power plant ever built would use the cheapest and ONLY the cheapest source of fuel. Clearly that is not the case, is it?

You said it yourself: "And you don't use inferior tech if you have a choice." The problem is you might not fully appreciate what makes a particular technology "inferior" or "superior." Hydro electric power is by far the cheapest electricity there is, so by your reasoning every power plant would be a hydro plant... except that's not really the case. The reason why has to do with the more nuanced underpinnings of what makes a particular technology superior in a given situation.

To whit:

Got a lot of vacuum tubes that need replacement? None? Maybe because transistors are cheaper, more reliable, smaller and more powerful?

Vacuum tubes are still widely used in new equipment. For some applications their performance is unrivaled by silicon devices. And I don't mean audiophile bullshit either;

http://news.sciencemag.org/phy...

While lighter-than-air vehicles have largely (but not completely) been displaced for human and cargo transport, blimps and balloons are still used routinely because they are more practical and economical for certain situations. Balloons can reach altitudes that are extremely difficult for heavier-than-air craft and can do so for a fraction of the cost.

The only example you mention that has any merit is punchcards - but paper based scan sheets for data entry is still widely used because it's practical for some situations. The ubiquitous "scan-tron" exam answer sheet is an immediately recognizable example, and voting machines still use literal punch cards as a means to store information for later input into a computer. Even some electronic voting machines use scanned ballot sheets.

That's the problem when you speak in absolutes; it's very easy to prove them wrong.

And you have utterly failed to demonstrate that fusion power would necessarily be more expensive than any particular alternative, so even if the very premise of your argument worked in the real world, you still can't apply it to fusion.

Not there's only one: raising prices. Unless you are going to weasel-word your definition of "value", of course.

No weaseling here; you increase the value of a commodity by refining it into higher-valued commodities.

Let's use peanuts as your example. Not sure where you got $1/kg - probably another number you just made up - but they actually sell for about $420/ton. But why do they sell for even that much? Because they have a use! And if we increase the number of uses and/or the value of those uses, then the price will necessarily go up because of demand, barring government intervention/market manipulation.

Electricity is just like every other commodity. If you come up with new ways to use electricity that are otherwise superior to existing technologies, then the value of electricity is increased.

Value, of course, is not to be confused with price. They are related but not the same. Higher value can command a higher price, though...

Building a device that produces energy for higher prices does not lead to cheaper energy.

You haven't demonstrated that it would be at a higher price. Such a determination is impossible until we have a working technology, and even then it would be a tentative conclusion since future innovation might bring the cost down.

You're probably going to try to make a point about the billion-dollar price tag of ITER, but you'd be wrong for doing so because it's a research project and not a commercial endeavor. Thought I'd save you the trouble.

BTW, thanks for

Not true. First off, we DO NOT KNOW if these treatments will work.

We have reason to believe the treatment will work. We also have reason to believe they're safer than death (we have reason to believe they're reasonably harmless in their own right, but that's extreme compared to the benchmark of preventing death). Thus your statement is both misleading (not entirely inaccurate) and irrelevant.

Personally, I could accept giving drugs from Phase II trials to informed patients if the only costs were the financial costs, and the risks of adverse effects. But the real danger is that the medical community goes off in all different directions, without a strategy, and winds up with data that doesn't give them the information they need.

It's moot, because the costs to a drug company of giving individualized premarket drugs to patients is enormous, and they don't usually have drugs available for compassionate use anyway. They need their drugs for clinical trials.

Not true. That's the point -- more statistical data is useless if you're not collecting it in a way that will give you an answer. The only way to get an answer is with a randomized, controlled trial. Animals aren't humans.

I see you've done no real statistics or explored any real science.

Well, gee, I read half a dozen clinical studies in the major medical journals every week and write reports on them. My boss seems to think I understand them OK. And I go to conferences where I meet the investigators and talk to them, to make sure I got it right.

If, like them, you have a PhD or MD and work in drug development, I'll give your opinions appropriate weight. Although I think it's commendable when a layman tries to learn more about medicine and science.

Many mechanisms of actions for many modern drugs are explained by animal models. For example: anything that affects brain chemistry is explained by experimentation on rats. We know exercise and noopept (nootropic drug) both improve learning dramatically by increasing BNF and BDNF levels in the brain--because we tried this with rats (run on a wheel, then run a maze; compare to a lazy rat, and the exercised ones learn twice as fast, consistently) and then cut their heads open to see what was going on in their brains (this is fatal). Anti-depressants, SSRIs, NDRIs, and other drugs that modify your brain chemistry directly are known to work in those specific ways by animal model--nobody actually checked an actual human, ever.

The people who do actual drug development tell me it doesn't work that way.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Science 18 July 2014:
Vol. 345 no. 6194 pp. 252-257
DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6194.252
The elusive heart fix
Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
“In mouse studies there's always dramatic improvement,” says Joseph Wu, a cardiologist studying stem cells at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “Once you go to a large animal study, it's moderate improvement, once you go to a phase I trial, it's decent improvement, and once you go to phase II, phase III, there's no improvement. This happens again and again and again. It's the entire field of biological research.”

And just in case you say, "Well, it works half the time" -- the database studies they do are much more thorough than anything they could do in west Africa, where they don't even have medical records or death certificates. They do these studies in places like Sweden, where they have detailed medical databases of every citizen from birth to death. We don't have data like this for west Africa.

And this is where you show you don't understand what you're talking about.

"It works half the time" is roughly chance. "It's wrong 99% of the time" is proced

Not sure what you mean by few references...All these were on that page.

http://www.grida.no/publicatio...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncli...
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/...
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis...
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://web.archive.org/web/201...

As for Dyson...two imporat words you dont find in his biography are "climate scientist".
In fact, he rather quite well falls into the science trope of the phsycist who insits on talking about things outside his realm of expertise.
(There's even an XKCD for that, though I am missing the link atm)

Nature has the article in April 2012 'Signatures of Majorana Fermions in Hybrid Superconductor-Semiconductor Nanowire Devices':
[ http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... ]

Which led to reports in popular online media:
[ http://news-beta.slashdot.org/... ]

most likely this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Directly citing this: http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... (which was actually received for review in JULY).

You still need very pure water or you poison the process. Where's that water coming from? How do you collect the gaseous hydrogen? You still need to liquify it and all the emrittlement and cryogenic issues are still there.

Even if hydrogen gas is free, it makes no sense as an energy carrier for cars.

They don't collect the gaseous hydrogen in the electrolyzer; they soak it up with a "liquid sponge" ("a recyclable redox mediator (silicotungstic acid) " according to the article's abstract. In principle at least, hydrogen could be stored and transported in this form (a liquid sponge soaked with hydrogen).; the hydrogen can be catalytically released (wrung out of the liquid sponge) when needed. Whether such a system could be built with a practical size, weight, and cost for use in vehicles is another matter.

Peer review filters out the stuff that is obvious crap, stuff that doesn't even fit the form of a proper scientific article. The purpose is not to say that articles are true, but rather to get rid of articles that are obviously wrong. If the scientists are lying about their data, it's hard for peer review to catch that. That's why reproducibility is important. If it's a result you care about, you can reproduce it.

However in this case, the reviewers at science did indeed complain about aspects of the paper that ended up being part of the faked results http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...:

For the Cell submission, there were concerns about methodology and the lack of supporting evidence for the extraordinary claims, says [stem cell scientist Hans] Schöler, who reviewed the paper and, as is standard practice at Cell, saw the comments of other reviewers for the journal. At Science, according to the 8 May RIKEN investigative committee’s report, one reviewer spotted the problem with lanes being improperly spliced into gel images. “This figure has been reconstructed,” the RIKEN report quotes from the feedback provided by a Science reviewer. The committee writes that the “lane 3” mentioned by the Science reviewer is probably the lane 3 shown in Figure 1i in the Nature article. The investigative committee report says [co-author Haruko] Obokata told the committee that she did not carefully consider the comments of the Science reviewer.

and even the nature reviewers complained http://news.sciencemag.org/sit...

All three Nature reviewers concluded that the data presented in the submitted manuscripts were not enough to support such radical claims. “I would recommend the authors to be extremely cautious in their claims . The authors should look into the actual effect that the treatment elicits in the genome and they should assess genomic instability,” one writes. “There are several issues that I consider should be clarified beyond doubt because of the potential revolutionary nature of the observations,” writes another.

So in the end the editors seemed to just want the sensational paper published and let the community sort it out later. Retraction watch has a nice compilation about it all http://retractionwatch.com/cat...

Peer review filters out the stuff that is obvious crap, stuff that doesn't even fit the form of a proper scientific article. The purpose is not to say that articles are true, but rather to get rid of articles that are obviously wrong. If the scientists are lying about their data, it's hard for peer review to catch that. That's why reproducibility is important. If it's a result you care about, you can reproduce it.

However in this case, the reviewers at science did indeed complain about aspects of the paper that ended up being part of the faked results http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...:

For the Cell submission, there were concerns about methodology and the lack of supporting evidence for the extraordinary claims, says [stem cell scientist Hans] Schöler, who reviewed the paper and, as is standard practice at Cell, saw the comments of other reviewers for the journal. At Science, according to the 8 May RIKEN investigative committee’s report, one reviewer spotted the problem with lanes being improperly spliced into gel images. “This figure has been reconstructed,” the RIKEN report quotes from the feedback provided by a Science reviewer. The committee writes that the “lane 3” mentioned by the Science reviewer is probably the lane 3 shown in Figure 1i in the Nature article. The investigative committee report says [co-author Haruko] Obokata told the committee that she did not carefully consider the comments of the Science reviewer.

and even the nature reviewers complained http://news.sciencemag.org/sit...

All three Nature reviewers concluded that the data presented in the submitted manuscripts were not enough to support such radical claims. “I would recommend the authors to be extremely cautious in their claims . The authors should look into the actual effect that the treatment elicits in the genome and they should assess genomic instability,” one writes. “There are several issues that I consider should be clarified beyond doubt because of the potential revolutionary nature of the observations,” writes another.

So in the end the editors seemed to just want the sensational paper published and let the community sort it out later. Retraction watch has a nice compilation about it all http://retractionwatch.com/cat...

'Read TFA'? The one that is favorably disposed towards her and does zero reseach, analysis, or reporting of the root issue, which is the status and relationships of the organizations to which she belonged?

I really have to respond to this because I read Science every week and I know some of the reporters. So let me give you a quick lesson in Journalism 101.

Jeffrey Mervis, who I've been reading for years, didn't do "zero research." If you read the article again http://news.sciencemag.org/peo... and count the number of people he either interviewed or attempted to interview, you'll see that he either quoted or got a no comment from every government agency and from as many people who knew her as he could reach by deadline. He interviewed two lawyers who specialize in security clearances.

The next time you look at one of those so-called news sources on the Internet, see whether they interview people on both sides, or talk to experts like lawyers.

Again, baloney. The US constitution explicitly enumerates your right to *peaceably* advocate for the overthrown of the US government. The background check forms ask about *violent* overthrow.

Who decides when an organization is advocating "peaceably" or "violently"?

During the McCarthy days they put the editors of the Daily Worker in jail for publishing what the House Un-American Activities Committee concluded was advocating the violent overthrow of the government. And what 2 Supreme Court justices concluded was constitutionally protected activities. So Supreme Court justices can disagree. And it turned out afterwards that HUAC was misrepresenting a lot of documents -- that is, "lying."

In this case, Valerie Barr was fired because the agent accused her of not mentioning two organizations, one of which was opposed to the Vietnam war, the other of which supported Puerto Rican independence. First, there's no clear evidence that she was a member. There were lots of organizations like that and baking cookies for a meeting doesn't make her a member.

You tell me -- what's the evidence that either of those two organizations were violent? If you read the article again, you'll see that the Office of Personnel Management only said that those organizations were affiliated with violent organizations. Nobody accused them of being violent.

It seems to be the subjective assessment of an agent who thinks it's funny to beat up liberal college professors.

And we don't know what happened because the agent conveniently destroyed his notes after he wrote up his accusations, and they conveniently don't record their interviews.

Of course, we don't know for sure what happened, because the agent conveniently didn't record his interview and destroyed his notes after he wrote up his report.

You did read the article, didn't you? For your convenience, here's the link. http://news.sciencemag.org/peo...

It's a he said/she said deal in which the special agent who was responsible for the interview didn't make a recording of the interview, and destroyed the notes afterwards. The agent just gave his own subjective impression of what she said. Why don't they make recordings?

It's also an interview by an agent who thinks it's funny to beat up liberal professors. I wouldn't trust him to make fair judgments about "liberals." He shouldn't be working in government.

FTA:

http://news.sciencemag.org/peo...

Barr was given a chance to appeal NSF’s decision, and on 11 August she submitted a letter stating that OPM’s summary report of its investigation “contains many errors or mischaracterizations of my statements.” (As is standard practice, agencies receive only a summary of the OPM investigation, not a full report, and lawyers familiar with the process say that an agent’s interview notes are typically destroyed after the report is written.)...

In her 11 August response, Barr questioned whether the special agent who conducted the investigation “can be an impartial evaluator of academic scientists, or anyone with liberal political beliefs.” As evidence, she points to a posting on a blog maintained by the agent, a veteran who served in Iraq, and his family. The item is a copy of a popular Internet meme about an incident that supposedly took place in an introductory college biology course.

According to the story, a “typical liberal college professor and avowed atheist” declares his intent to prove that there is no God by giving the creator 15 minutes to strike him from the podium. A few minutes before the deadline, a Marine “just released from active duty and newly registered” walks up to the professor and knocks him out with one punch. When the professor recovers and asks for an explanation, the Marine replies, “God was busy. He sent me.”

That agent may have served in Iraq, but he didn't serve to protect our freedom. He served to come back and establish a police state that's starting to adopt a lot of the characteristics of the Soviet Union.

There have been many prosecutions in which the government's star witness testified about the defendant's statements, and then the defense attorney found a tape and it turned out the defendant didn't say anything like that at all.

There's one reason why criminal investigators don't use recordings: So they can make up things and the defendant can't disprove them.

. Since the article fails to name the two subsidiary organizations of which she was a member it is not possible to dismiss her claim that she was unfamiliar with their ties to the parent organization.

You can find that info here

A quick google search turned up the following paper

I wouldn't go so far as to say that chicken is the closest living relative to the T-Rex, just that it is the closest in sequence similarity to this particular collagen protein, out of all of the protein sequences known in 2007 (chicken could have been the only bird represented in the database at the time, but I am not going to take the time to look into this).

I just searched the GVQGPPGPQGPR T-rex collagen sequence given in the text against the NCBI nr database, which is pretty comprehensive. It yielded the following Collagen alpha-1(I) chain perfect matches:

Brachylophosaurus canadensis [dinosaur]
Tyrannosaurus rex [dinosaur]

Sarcophilus harrisii [Tasmanian devil]
Monodelphis domestica [Gray short-tailed opossum]

Corvus brachyrhynchos [American crow]
Gallus gallus [Chicken]
Manacus vitellinus [Golden-collared manakin]
Pseudopodoces humilis [Ground tit]
Anas platyrhynchos [Mallard duck]
Geospiza fortis [Medium ground finch]
Acanthisitta chloris [Rifleman]
Columba livia [Rock dove]
Melopsittacus undulatus [Parakeet]
Falco peregrinus [Peregrine falcon]
Falco cherrug [Saker falcon]

So, that's 11 birds, 1 other dinosaur, and 2 mammals (one placental, one marsupial). The list gets bigger if we relax the sequence similarity cutoff. Based on this single fragment of a sequence, we can infer that T-rex is generally more closely related to birds than to mammals or lizards (and no lizards made the top-hit list), since there were a lot more bird matches than mammals (and the lack of mammal hits is likely not due to lack of sampling relative to birds). This is a big inference to make from a single fragment of a single protein, but I'm reasonably confident that further analysis of additional T-rex sequences would strengthen this finding.

If more sequences have been published since 2007, then perhaps we could get a better idea of which modern bird T-rex is most closely related to, but there is no way to determine this from just the single example sequence above. We cannot say with any confidence that T-rex is more related to chicken than to any other bird, unless a much more thorough analysis is performed using a lot more data. Perhaps this has already been done, but I haven't taken the time to hunt for additional literature.

Liquid elemental mercury is actually hard to absorb by the body. It's chemically modified mercury, or mercury vapor, that are dangerous. Dimethyl mercury, for example, is fantastically dangerous stuff, and rapidly passes through latex, PVC, butyl, neoprene, and skin, and a drop of it can kill you. Meanwhile the mercury amalgam in my tooth fillings apparently is absorbed via vaporization and the lungs, and contributes about as much as occasionally eating fish, even though I have a few thousand mg of it in my teeth for decades.

And here's Murphy's douchebag, right on schedule.

Science right in your face.

DDT bans did exactly what they said they would.

(Also DDT is still in use for malaria control, not that we have that in the US where it's banned).

I have no delusions that I convinced you of anything. But it's nice to have someone to smack down for being a perfect example when they must have known I had this sort of evidence handy..

China accounts for 42% of the carbon emissions. US and Europe combined are 20%, so even if "the rich" country bankrupted themselves trying, they can't solve the problem alone.

Hmmm. probably helps to explain this. "Numerous methane leaks found on Atlantic sea floor. " at
http://news.sciencemag.org/cli...

a) What hiatus? The hiatus only appears when you use incomplete data. citation [slate.com]

It's cute using something like Slate as a citation to demonstrate the state of scientific research. Regrettably for your argument, actual scientific journal articles like these ones in Nature, IOPScience and Science all contradict your statement. These articles all note "Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century" with multiple citations to yet other scientific journal articles that demonstrated this.

... and that's assuming any positive feedback loops don't override it (look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).

And that's assuming any negative feedback loops don't override it (look at the Iris hypothesis for an example of what could happen).

The global mean temperature trend for the last decade has fallen outside the error bars of the climate model projections gathered by the first IPCC assessment. Go ahead and deny that all you like, but the actual scientists are looking at the why and trying to sort out what they got wrong, in articles like those I've linked above.

If this study is right then there will come a point when climate models are underestimating the warming again. The mechanism of this heat absorption is cyclical and eventually it will reverse leaving more heat in the atmosphere leading to rapid warming again. It's difficult if not impossible to put that into climate models partially because it's impossible (with our current knowledge) to know the timing of the switches in the cycle so models tend to just use the average which means sometimes their above the average and sometimes they're below.

The abstract:

A vacillating global heat sink at intermediate ocean depths is associated with different climate regimes of surface warming under anthropogenic forcing: The latter part of the 20th century saw rapid global warming as more heat stayed near the surface. In the 21st century, surface warming slowed as more heat moved into deeper oceans. In situ and reanalyzed data are used to trace the pathways of ocean heat uptake. In addition to the shallow La Niña–like patterns in the Pacific that were the previous focus, we found that the slowdown is mainly caused by heat transported to deeper layers in the Atlantic and the Southern oceans, initiated by a recurrent salinity anomaly in the subpolar North Atlantic. Cooling periods associated with the latter deeper heat-sequestration mechanism historically lasted 20 to 35 years.

The question climate science deniers need to ask themselves is "If all of this heat is going into the ocean why hasn't it actually cooled rather than temperatures just sort of plateauing?" If all that heat is disappearing into the ocean and we're not actually cooling that means heat is still building up.

... clickbait (this is /. after all)

modded "Troll"

I presume that the real story behind it is that an experiment to measure the muon magnetic moment has recently moved from Brookhaven to Fermilab to get access to more energetic muons.

modded "Insightful"

Your post has an elegant symmetry...you must be a theoretical physicist!