Slashdot Mirror

Given the fact that power generating wind turbines only poke up 30-50m from the surface, I fail to see how the effects are going to be as significant as Keith suggests. Surface winds are already moderated by friction and topographically generated turbulence, while the vast bulk of wind energy exists above the boundary layer. We're unlikely to deploy large wind farms in a linear sequence anyway, so atmospheric coupling means surface winds will only be affected for a finite distance downstream of a given facility.

I didn't see where he made any dire predictions about the effects, other than an out of hand comment about what might happen if you covered the entire earth with windmills. Clearly he is not suggesting we are anywhere near that.

His whole point is that these turbines are packed too densely, and the front ones are shadowing the rear ones, and this fact seems to have been missed when people were making promises about the efficiency of large wind farms. Yet it is easily measurable by reading the output power from the down-wind turbines in existing large deployments.

I suspect that if simply reading the meters on turbines in the rear indicate a lower available energy budget, that this alone indicates there has been some environmental effect. Perhaps it is not significant, or far reaching. Maybe it is even beneficial to other land use (farming, etc)/. But the effect is there, and measurable. Further the effects may reach further than most people think. similar to the way that watering fields in California boosts rain fall hundreds of miles away.

That's not the only downwind effect than can be attributed to human activity.
Science News had an article on down wind rainfall being affected by large scale irrigation projects in California.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/347691/description/Watering_fields_in_California_boosts_rainfall_in_Southwest

I wonder how long it will take for someone to research downwind effects of some of the huge wind farms that have been built. Taking that much energy out of the atmosphere should theoretically have an effect that might be measurable.

When will people stop publishing news articles saying "the Higgs has been confirmed to exist"? This is driving me bat-shit insane. No, the Higgs has NOT necessarily been discovered. Particles have been observed in the LHC at energy levels that match the expected characteristics of the Higgs, but we DO NOT KNOW if it is the standard model Higgs or just something else that looks like it. Goddamn.

Read more: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342408/description/Higgs_hysteria

As far as I'm concerned, Sri Lanka has not been confirmed to exist. From my own personal experience, Sri Lanka might well be just a fabrication.

When will people stop publishing news articles saying "the Higgs has been confirmed to exist"? This is driving me bat-shit insane. No, the Higgs has NOT necessarily been discovered. Particles have been observed in the LHC at energy levels that match the expected characteristics of the Higgs, but we DO NOT KNOW if it is the standard model Higgs or just something else that looks like it. Goddamn.

Read more: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342408/description/Higgs_hysteria

Yes, thanks for this skepticism. In general the statement "x" is not produced naturally is false. Nature is surprisingly diverse and creative. For example one often sees statements like "dioxins don't occur in nature, or free chlorine doesn't occur in nature, or there is no natural equivalent to HFCS. These are false.

In reality what is important is the quantity of the materials, where they occur and what the environmental and health impacts are.

In the case of CFCs while there is evidence that there is some natural production (again the claim they don't naturally occur is wrong) the amounts on Earth are very small.

http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/pdfs/data/2000/157-08/15708-9.pdf

However the fact is other planets may have different proportions, so the presence of CFCs is not necessarily a sure indicator of civilization without knowing more about the planet.

This doesn't demonstrate that ocean acidification is a problem?

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/341465/description/Calcium_offers_clues_in_mass_extinction

I can't make you share my opinion, you have access to all the same facts as me, you're just reckless. I have similar conversations with text n' drivers.

I seriously doubt that Aristotle could have comprehended calculus or designed a Mars rover.

I seriously doubt Democritus or Archimedes would agree with you.

Especially Archimedes, who established a direct precursor of the calculus which was eventually invented a millenium and a half later by Newton and Leibniz.

Oh fart.

Methane is present in the atmosphere at pretty significant levels. That means it's present in all water.

Endocrine disruption usually occurs at extremely small doses.

Seems to me like more pseudo science going on here.

Yeh, smartfart, summer not hot enough just yet, a little more methane helpful?

http://www.nature.com/news/air-sampling-reveals-high-emissions-from-gas-field-1.9982
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338505/title/Natural_gas_wells_leakier_than_believed
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/17/151545578/frackings-methane-trail-a-detective-story
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/02/08/421588/high-methane-emissions-measured-over-gas-field-offset-climate-benefits-of-natural-gasquot/?mobile=nc
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/29/454445/natural-gas-industry-methane-leaks-save-2-billion/
all pseudo...
but once the permafrost opens up more, this won't matter - pseudo too, it's all illusion anyway, stay fresh

I didn't start reading science fiction until 9th grade so that's what..... 14? A friend told me to read Foundation's Edge. Prior to that point I mostly *watched* science fiction like Star Trek and Buck Rogers.

Back at age 8 I was more interesting in REAL science rather than fiction. Here's what I used to read back then:

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/
http://www.astronomy.com/Magazine/
http://www.sciencenews.org/ (once I reached middle school)

Biology is by far my weakest science and I'm not qualified at all to comment, but I just read two articles today which suggests that older fathers have longer lived children...

Here and here.

Just ask the Europeans.

Thanks, buddy. Waste of a click. Thankfully, _they_ haven't decided to tax those yet.

NASA pulls out of astrophysics missions

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Anybody care to provide a link that isn't paywall'd?

If you try to do it with the US, it would never happen. Just ask the Europeans. It's not like they're on great relations with the Russians, the only other country that can put humans into space.

So you're left with the Iranians, North Koreans and a couple of crazy amateur in Denmark.

Sounds like solo is the best approach.

Fixed Link:
http://www.sciencenews.org/
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/ (Formerly World magazine) These magazines are where I discovered my love of science and learning (and reading).

Guardian:

Teach both evolution and creationism say 54% of Britons British Council poll finds UK adults overtake Americans in wanting science teaching in schools to include intelligent design

Science News

Over the past two decades, science literacy in the United States – an estimate of the share of adults who can follow complex science issues and maybe even render an informed opinion on them – has nearly tripled. But – and it’s a big but -- the proportion of people who fall into this category remains small. Just 28 percent. [...] The U.S. figure is slightly higher than that for Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands. And it’s double the 2005 rate in the United Kingdom (and the collective rate for the European Union).

The work was done by Clive A.J. Fletcher, University of New South Wales, Centre for Advanced Numerical Computation in Engineering and Science (CANCES)

We should ask why this story is summarized with sociological mumbo-jumbo. I've been here a while now and I can't recall ever seeing a submission quite like that. This same story has been written in a comprehensible manner by many others. Some examples:

Public Apathy Over Climate Change Unrelated To Scientific Literacy
Culture splits climate views, not science smarts
Climate skeptics know their stuff

Most everyone else managed to express the central point clearly; the claim that AGW sceptics are comparatively ignorant is false. Yet, here we are at Slashdot with a paragraph full of obtuse weasel words that manages to avoid conveying much of anything.

Perhaps it's just that certain folks aren't happy with the otherwise obvious conclusion and can't bring themselves to expose it. Better to have not posted the story at all.

Perhaps if the Indians had done the same to the Europeans right from the beginning (instead of handing them land), they would still control America.

The Natives did (here) (humorously here). As history has shown all this accomplished was delaying things. Also the Natives were in number compared to when the Europeans started colonizing the New World.

Notice how the europeans had zero success taking-over China despite repeated attempts..... because the Chinese rejected the invaders.

The greatest killer of all was disease, failure of their own immune systems. Disease wiped many of these people out, this is documented with Cortez, too. There is some evidence of the affect these epidemics had relating to the carbon dioxide levels around the time of Columbus' arrival.

Also related, you may find Lies My Teach Told Me an interesting read.

Searching for a better detector for mesothelin, Andraka coated paper with tiny tubes of atom-thick carbon. Antibodies stuck to the carbon nanotubes can grab the telltale protein and spread the tubes apart. The carbon’s resistance to the flow of electricity drops measurably as more protein attaches. Tests of the paper using blood samples from 100 people with cancer at different stages of the disease identified the presence of cancer every time, Andraka reported.

I'm sorry, but that's simply not how statistics work. It's not about being "80%" sure.

This article on the subject is good reading: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/335872/title/Odds_Are,_Its_Wrong

Time keeping is getting better and better. I just happened upon this article recently which gives some history on timekeeping and what some of the latest efforts are working on: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/334983/title/The_Ultimate_Clock.

Here's an excerpt (emphasis added):

The metrology of time is not holding still. In the April-June issue of Reviews of Modern Physics, experimental physicist Hidetoshi Katori of the University of Tokyo and theorist Andrei Derevianko of the University of Nevada, Reno declared dramatic ambitions for a record-breaking atomic clock based on emissions from mercury atoms.

âoeIf someone built such a clock at the Big Bang and if such a timepiece survived the 14 billion years, then the clock would be off by no more than a mere second,â they note in the paper. That is actually conservative. The goal formally is to lose or gain no more than one out of every billion billion seconds. That is one second in about 32 billion years, and is 10 to 100 times better than any existing clocks.

The Science News story has some words of caution of equating this 'hole' to the Antarctic hole:

Geir Braathen, senior scientific officer with the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, concurs that âoescientists have not agreed on any threshold ozone loss, like 250 or 260 Dobson units [for a hole].â Still, this atmospheric chemist cautions, âoeI would be careful about calling the Arctic depletion an ozone holeâ because it might lead people to think it's comparable to what emerges in the Antarctic. And it isnâ(TM)t.

Antarctica's hole recurs annually, whereas mega-thinning in Arctic ozone is novel. Antarcticaâ(TM)s ozone also thins at some point to zero in a band many kilometers high. At no altitude has Arctic ozone ever fallen to zero â" even in 2011. Finally, Braathen points out, the aerial expanse and depth of the Antarctic hole greatly dwarfs the Arctic region that experienced substantial thinning earlier this year.

âoeGoing into this Arctic spring, many of us â" myself included â" really thought this might be the year that we would see a real Arctic ozone hole,â observed Susan Solomon, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, at the recent American Chemical Society meeting in Denver. "But in the end," she says, "I think itâ(TM)s fair to say that we didnâ(TM)t.â

It may be a matter of semantics, she concedes, but there was a rapid resupply of ozone from outside the Arctic vortex (that swirling wall of winds in the stratosphere that largely corrals a patch of atmosphere, rendering it vulnerable to ozone-destroying chemical reactions). Such a resupply does not occur in the Antarctic vortex, she notes; and that's what permits its stratospheric ozone concentrations to plummet to zero over a several-kilometer height.

So, although the new paper clearly demonstrates that at some altitudes Arctic ozone was efficiently destroyed, Solomon says, âoeI wouldnâ(TM)t call this an ozone hole.â

(sorry, Slashdot still protects us against dangerous quotation marks)

There are now multiple different approaches to fusion research. Laser fusion looks promising although we don't have a really good understanding of how to efficiently extract energy from laser fusion. Magnetic containment fusion in the form of tokamaks is also still ongoing. There is an international group working now to build ITER which will be a very large tokamak which will be in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER. There are other ideas out there but unfortunately many of the more interesting ones are not receiving much funding. Laser fusion confines the plasma and crushes it with brief intense laser pulses while tokamaks confine the plasma using a torus of electromagnets. However, stellarators use a different form of magnetic confinement and might end up working but they are getting almost no funding.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator

The idea that we are always 50 years from fusion seems to be unfair. We've gotten much better at handling the basics. We can now consistently get fusion to occur with a variety of methods. The primary problems are doing so efficiently enough to get more energy out than we are putting in. We've made slow but steady progress at improving efficiency through a variety of methods. The development of so-called high temperature superconductors (that is able to superconduct a bit over the temperature at which nitrogen boils) in the 1970s has helped a lot. And the engineering issues really are immense. We've also sort of been spoiled by the previous success with fission power. The United States pored a massive amount of funding and resources into fission research from the beginning of the Manhattan project until a bit after World War 2. If fusion power was treated the same way we might be able to develop it quickly also.

There's another aspect about this sort of thing that is good news. The United States is steadily eroding its scientific and exploratory capability. We've retired the shuttle with no replacement. In the 1990s we canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. As a result when the LHC came online the US lost a lot of particle physicists who went over to Europe. The US particle physics has been in a state of decline since then. Most recently, the US is closing down the Tevatron, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/68988/title/Tevatron_to_shut_down_in_September which is the star US particle accelerator. While the energy levels of the Tevatron are less than the LHC the types and variety of collisions it does are sufficiently different such that having both of them is very much not redundant. And, the James Webb Telescope might be getting canceled, so it looks like cutting edge astronomy is another area the US is giving up on. If I had just been told that there was a Slashdot headline about laser fusion in the US I would have guessed that it would have been funding cuts for the NIR. The fact that organizations from elsewhere are actually joining suggests that the decline in US science might not be as bad as a pessimist might think. It might be reversible.

If it really has been the warmest decade on record, why would anyone need to study and publish research on why the Earth hasn't warmed since 1998?

July 30, 2011
"A new study demonstrates why global surface temperatures defied a decades-long trend and didn’t continue to rise between 1998 and 2008"
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/332152/title/Sulfur_stalls_surface_temperature_rise_

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

.
Some sites that are helpful:

Science News

Science Daily

New Scientist

I also like Science News. I've been a subscriber to the magazine for many years. Their web site is actually http://www.sciencenews.org/, and you can subscribe to the magazine from https://sciencenewssubscriberservice.com/promo_pages/gen_order/OrderForm.php.

http://www.sciencenews.org/

26 issues a year, maybe 12-14 pages each. Extremely good information across all the fields of science, essentially synopses of all the cutting-edge stuff because if it's interesting you're going to dig into it on the web anyway. Serious coverage, not simplified for 'popular consumption'. Usually one or two focus articles on something of particular significance, these run a couple of pages.

Read it at online - I think pretty much everything in print is there.

I've been getting the print version of ScienceNews (bi-weekly) for 40 years. The online version http://www.sciencenews.org/ is just as good. There are many other good sites out there of course. This is one I can vouch for as a scientist without hesitation.

This is the best website for science news for reasonably educated but not specialized people: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Science News has a website - http://www.sciencenews.org/ and a weekly magazine which are always good, if overly sober, though the magazine doesn't have near enough content to cover everything that happened that week.

New Scientist is a weekly mag that has drifted towards Omni or PopSci lately ('IS SENSATIONAL THING TRUE? (...no)'), but will still keep you up to date on most happenings including things you might miss online. http://www.newscientist.com/

Scientific American is a monthly mag that's a bit too political but has some good articles: http://www.scientificamerican.com/

Then there's Discover Magazine, which is a step down from either but has some good blogs: http://discovermagazine.com/

Live Science is a further step down, a good site for training wheel science: http://www.livescience.com/

I won't recommend the mag Science, because even though it's The Magazine, it's not suited for the dabbler.

My balanced suggestion is add the news feeds for all of these to your RSS reader (like Google Reader), click on what looks interesting, and subscribe to New Scientist in print or on Zinio and read it every week.

Science News is good if you like printed material. It's bi-weekly and gives moderate detail. http://www.sciencenews.org/

link 1

link 2

All consciousness relies on electrons. You cannot have consciousness without electrons. So this would be one place to look.

But you cannot say that you can understand consciousness given only an understanding of electrons -- they are only a link in the chain.

But basically, if you don't have quantum consciousness you can't have consciousness on higher scales. So on some level these particles have self recognition even if it's through us. This doesn't answer whether or not there is free will, but the math is clear that if there is consciousness on the large scale it will also have to exist on the quantum scale. It's also proven mathematically that if free will exists on the large scale that it also has to exist somewhere somehow on the quantum scale.

For this reason, the fact that the math supports it, it's worth doing research and experimenting on. The problem or fear I have is if we did discover what particle or wave function is responsible for consciousness, or how, we'd have governments around the world using these discoveries to enslave and oppress people. It's the kind of question that I'd personally want to know the answer to, but I also recognize that as soon as we find the answer, it will open pandora's box which governments and corporations intend to completely exploit.

I share that fear

If we found a way to for example give consciousness to inanimate objects, or a way to have complete control over life in some way, or if we discovered that quantum computers could be made conscious, it would change everything probably for the worst because governments would then use this technology to enslave rather than use it in a transhumanist fashion. It would be used to make the perfect cyborg slaves, who have the mix of human consciousness, with the absolute obedience of a programmable robot. In essence this discover could lead to the end of "free will" as we know it, and lead to the beginning of technological slavery.

I suspect, but cannot prove, that consciousness requires, in order to be able to affect physical reality, as a foundation, something with a non-discrete complexity like what we see in the brain.

And unfortunately no political party is truly anti slavery. So we'd be collectively fucked.

Sources Quantum Entanglement Can be a Measure of Free Will The same experiments that reveal the nature of entanglement can also be interpreted as a measure of free will, say researchers.

Do subatomic particles have free will?

This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

When he wrote his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind in 1989, Penrose lacked a detailed proposal for how quantum processing could be implemented in the brain. Subsequently, Hameroff read Penrose's book, and suggested that microtubules could be suitable candidates for quantum processing. The Orch-OR theory arose from the collaboration of Penrose and Hameroff in the early 1990s. Microtubules are the main component of a supportive structure within neurons known as the cytoskeleton. In addition to providing a supportive structure, the known functions of microtubules include transport of molecules including neurotransmitters bound for synapses and control of the development of the cell. Microtubules are composed of tubulin protein dimer subunits. The tubulin dimers each h

All consciousness relies on electrons. You cannot have consciousness without electrons. So this would be one place to look.

But basically, if you don't have quantum consciousness you can't have consciousness on higher scales. So on some level these particles have self recognition even if it's through us. This doesn't answer whether or not there is free will, but the math is clear that if there is consciousness on the large scale it will also have to exist on the quantum scale. It's also proven mathematically that if free will exists on the large scale that it also has to exist somewhere somehow on the quantum scale.

For this reason, the fact that the math supports it, it's worth doing research and experimenting on. The problem or fear I have is if we did discover what particle or wave function is responsible for consciousness, or how, we'd have governments around the world using these discoveries to enslave and oppress people. It's the kind of question that I'd personally want to know the answer to, but I also recognize that as soon as we find the answer, it will open pandora's box which governments and corporations intend to completely exploit.

If we found a way to for example give consciousness to inanimate objects, or a way to have complete control over life in some way, or if we discovered that quantum computers could be made conscious, it would change everything probably for the worst because governments would then use this technology to enslave rather than use it in a transhumanist fashion. It would be used to make the perfect cyborg slaves, who have the mix of human consciousness, with the absolute obedience of a programmable robot. In essence this discover could lead to the end of "free will" as we know it, and lead to the beginning of technological slavery.

And unfortunately no political party is truly anti slavery. So we'd be collectively fucked.

Sources
Quantum Entanglement Can be a Measure of Free Will
The same experiments that reveal the nature of entanglement can also be interpreted as a measure of free will, say researchers.

Do subatomic particles have free will?

This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

When he wrote his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind in 1989, Penrose lacked a detailed proposal for how quantum processing could be implemented in the brain. Subsequently, Hameroff read Penrose's book, and suggested that microtubules could be suitable candidates for quantum processing. The Orch-OR theory arose from the collaboration of Penrose and Hameroff in the early 1990s.
Microtubules are the main component of a supportive structure within neurons known as the cytoskeleton. In addition to providing a supportive structure, the known functions of microtubules include transport of molecules including neurotransmitters bound for synapses and control of the development of the cell.
Microtubules are composed of tubulin protein dimer subunits. The tubulin dimers each have hydrophobic pockets that are 8 nm apart, and which may contain delocalised pi electrons. Tubulins have other smaller non-polar regions that contain pi electron-rich indole rings separated by only about 2 nm, and Hameroff claims that these electrons are close enough to become quantum entangled.[11]
Hameroff further proposed that these electrons could become locked in phase, forming a state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.[12][13] Furthermore, he tho

It's plain easy to calculate the sixty-trillionth digit of Pi... as long as you don't care about the digits that come before it: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/2_28_98/mathland.htm.

Yes this is a POOR article. The Summary I submitted was better:

LINK - http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/70134/title/Cell_phones_may_affect_brain_metabolism

"47 participants had pairs of Samsung cell phones strapped to their heads, one on each side. The phone on the left ear was turned off, while the one on the right received a 50-minute recorded message. This phone was kept muted so that the subject didnâ(TM)t know which phone was on, and also to prevent stimulation of the brainâ(TM)s hearing center.

"A few minutes after the call, a PET scan revealed that brain regions next to the working phone had higher levels of glucose metabolism. âoeThe human brain is sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that is emitted from cell phones,â says study coauthor Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, MD. The increase in brain metabolism observed in the experiment may be an underestimate, because cell phones emit more radiation when a person is talking.

This study involved computer based analysis using PET scan data*. Similar studies have often been shown to have overstated or no real statistical significance**. With only 47 participants this study has, in my eyes, about the same validity as the average undergrad study.

Unfortunately tomorrow it will be in all the newspapers to prove that cell phones cause cancer (ironically this study was done with ionising radiation, whose cancer causing effects are well known).

* I am a pysch student and these studies are the ban of my existence. They mostly have the same validity for studying human behaviour as the old method of making shit up based on observation. However they seem much more "sciency" to funding committees.

** http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_Are,_Its_Wrong

From this article:

In five different expeditions, the last one in December, Joye and colleagues took 250 cores of the sea floor and travelled across 2,600 square miles. Some of the locations she had been studying before the oil spill on April 20 and said there was a noticeable change.

Sounds like a fairly large survey to me. Definitely the largest to date (much larger than BP's "studies"). Now granted, I don't know if this entire area counts as "wellhead dives" as the language is a little vague but I'm confident we can believe her when she says the damage is extensive and widespread.

This is another interesting article postulating the mechanism behind the oil deposits.

The headline writer in TFA said 2010 was the warmest on record, not James Hansen. He said that it was equal top. The second paragraph in your first article states that the NOAA agrees with NASA's results, that the surface temperature for 2010 was tied with 2005.

The second article shows that the delta of the temperatures was the second highest (meaning the change in temperature not absolute temperature). That measures something different than NOAA and NASA.

Your third article shows that the lower atmosphere was tied with 1998. Once again, that is measuring something different than NOAA and NASA, and therefore does not conflict with their findings.

NOAA said "tied". Japan said "second highest". UAH says "tied" with 1998.

That's not what the media wants. When you need a really good headline you go to Hanson. He never hesitates to hand-wave statistical error and say "hottest" on cue.

The infanticidal tendencies of dolphins have been well-known for a decade. If a human did that, we would be forced to lock him up. Does the fact that it's a non-human dolphin make any difference?

There is evidence in cooling magma Earth's poles can and have changed rapidly. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/62947/title/Geomagnetic_field_flip-flops_in_a_flash

I've been to several McDonalds that just threw those kinds of receipts right in with the burgers and fries. Often times you wouldn't notice and the receipt would sit on the fries for a few minutes. It would come out looking like the ink evaporated and reformed on different parts of the receipt. Not like flowing like a liquid, but patterns from evaporation.
[/S] I eated BPA's. Is it supposed to make you feel like a girl?
CAPTCHA: Absolves

You'd have have a bigger reduction of BPA intake by making sure you wash your hand every time you handle a thermal printed receipt.

Calculus was "patented" for much longer than 20 years (the period was called the "Dark Ages") and we ARE centuries behind, actually. Please refer to http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/A_Prayer_for_Archimedes

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63859/title/A_thousand_points_of_height

...by investing in tech and science that can make them see it with their EYES!

While it is nice to see the gov't pass laws like this, it would be even nicer to see them put up the funding for developing the tech/science further behind studies like the one I linked to. Or lifting the ban on stem cell research so that we can really get on track with giving back the senses that have been robbed from so many people, among other things.

Well, it can certainly stand improvement. You can get many papers from arXiv, though it's a pain to hunt them down. You can also link to the professor or research group's home page (which is also a good way of giving them credit for whatever). But there are still other problems. The bare fact is that most of us aren't qualified to judge research. At best, we can say that it will be published in Science or Nature or some other prestigious journal, but frankly, you don't see many comments that deal with the substance of the research. You usually get some snarky reply where someone doesn't believe it because it conflicts with their politics or whatever and they come up with a 'rebuttal' that took half a second of thought (and which was answered in the paper... that nobody read).

There's also a more human problem. I've done my best to submit more than a few stories on hard science, quoting straight from the papers and leaving out any fluff or opinion, but ... nobody read any of them. Without something to excite people, they site in the firehose, unread and ignored. In short, people are complaining about this bad journalism because it's the only thing most people read. For the record, Ars Technica and Science News have the best science coverage I can find.

See this article, and the peer reviewed papers it references:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60850/title/Science_%2B_the_Public__Fructose_sweeteners_may_hike_blood_pressure

I too would like the actual article that he seems to refer to.

It refers to the last link in the summary, the only non-Slashdot link. I figured that out by going to the original submission.

Linking to the original submission is one nice thing that Slashdot does right. I fully agree with the grandparent that Slashdot often has confusing links in their summaries.

You know, I've often wondered why we don't join some of our existing technologies together and get on with things. I know it may not be as simple as it sounds, but we have this tech already:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/54170/title/Let_there_be_light
(Allows for manipulation of neurons with light)

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl051811%2B
http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/41146
(Nanoscale OLED displays)

http://www.egmrs.org/EJS/PDF/vo281/1.pdf
http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=6802
(Nanoscale light detectors)

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2108/zsj.22.535?journalCode=jzoo
http://www.jove.com/index/details.stp?ID=2081
(And we can stain cells with dyes that fluoresce when the cells experience activity now)

We have peanut butter, jelly and bread. Why can't we get this all together to make a sandwich? Or is this currently in the works?
Or am I missing something subtle, that someone who actually knows about this research can enlighten us about?