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Actually, humans spend the nine months in utero in a completely bacteria-free environment. However, babies born vaginally pick up their first dose of bacteria immediately as they emerge from their mother's birth canal, and even babies born via Caeserian section are bacteria magnets. The natural birth babies generally get a big dose of lactobacillus, while C-section babies tend to pick up strains found on the skin and the general hospital environment. Or so they say. But the bacteria are hardly "built into the body," which is why identical twins will have different gut flora.

Still, you may notice that TFA is about viruses, not bacteria.

Completely agree with this.

Statistics is more often than not used as a "tool on the side" to illustrate study conclusions, while it should be at the very heart of any scientific analysis, all the way from the initial measurement planning to the model validation and further. Too often, the scientific process is still largely based on subjective judgement instead of robust statistics. While experience helps to avoid glaring errors, the process is doomed to produce erratic research as long as decent statistics are not involved. Judgement can be deceived, numbers can't.

Quite interesting in this regard: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wrong

The differences in human breeds can show up at the extremes, even if they don't show up significantly for the averages.

Actually, there is a significant point gap in IQ scores between black and white populations.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/20/james-r-flynn/the-black-white-iq-gap/

Though this gap has narrowed by a third in the past 20 years, there is still a large difference in the averages of the two groups.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/7620/title/Racial_IQ_Gap_Narrows_Blacks_gain_4_to_7_points_on_whites

Not all prions are bad. Yeast for example have several prions that serve essential functions in the cell. The problem with human prions is that they are defective, they form plaques and damage cells while converting healthy proteins to defective ones.

Lead, tetraethyl lead, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT, mercury, methylmercury, friable asbestos, BPA ...
there's no end to the good things corporations would bring you-the-consumer if it weren't for we-the-people interfering.

Be grateful and participate in our government. It's you. The corporation isn't.

Oh, and remember -- don't lick your fingers:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48084/title/Science_%2B_the_Public__Concerned_about_BPA_Check_your_receipts

"... "When people talk about polycarbonate bottles, they talk about nanogram quantities of BPA [leaching out]," Warner observes. "The average cash register receipt that's out there and uses the BPA technology will have 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA." By free, he explains, it's not bound into a polymer, like the BPA in polycarbonates. It's just the individual molecules loose and ready for uptake.

As such, he argues, when it comes to BPA in the urban environment, "the biggest exposures, in my opinion, will be these cash register receipts." Once on the fingers, BPA can be transferred to foods. And keep in mind, he adds, some hormones -- like estrogen in certain birth-control formulations -- are delivered through the skin by controlled-release patches. So, he argues, estrogen mimics like BPA might similarly enter the skin...."

Just remember -- better living through chemistry, but they didn't say _whose_ living would be bettered.
KaChing!

Saw it in Science News last year. November 22, 2008.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/38338/title/Itch

"That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists." Really? Like James E. Hansen, Nasa's lead climatologist. Oh, no, I guess not. How about atmospheric scientists from the University of Oxford? Hmm. No. Or maybe you mean Jonathan Overpeck, the director for the University of Arizona's Institute for the Study of Planet Earth who once said of climate change, "The results suggest the threshold is close to the end of this century, and it could come sooner. The Arctic is already warming much faster than we thought it would. To think we're not going to get 4 to 5 degrees warmer in another 50 years is wishful thinking." Oh, no, you don't mean him. How about Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, or Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford ... no, not them. Perhaps you mean Roger Pielke Sr. of ClimateScience.org, who does at least say, "Policies that focus on CO2 by itself are ignoring definitive research results ... that humans have a much broader influence on the climate system."

I've not found a climatologist who has said that raising CO2 levels are a good thing or even a neutral thing.

I can find meteorologists, economists, physicists, and many other very clever people who say such things, but if there are climatologists out there saying "Ah, nevermind the CO2, it's no big thing," then they are outnumbered 100 to 1 at best. Is that "far less" consensus than the rest? No, I don't think so. Maybe a little less. But I'm giving you a hypothetical. I still haven't even seen one of these mythical pro-CO2 climatologists of which you write. Please enlighten.

Check it out: http://www.sciencenews.org/

"connecting cameras to their tongues" WTF?

The original ScienceNews article from 2001 is now subscriber only:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/1946/title/The_Seeing_Tongue

But you can read a copy of it at:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_9_160/ai_78681631/

A mere 400 years is not enough time for significant evolutionary changes.

You will be surprised how fast evolution happens. A good example is fishermen who threw back small fish and kept larger fish.

Most fishing records will never be repeated â" because fish has become genetically smaller. This can happen in a few years. One fish shrinkage article from many - http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/41407/title/Fish_shrinkage_reversible,_but_better_hurry

I agree. And how about those latest budget cuts?

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/43568/title/Federal_budget's_new_'black_book'

Each year, the administration releases its federal-spending blueprint -- usually in a series of phone book-sized tomes that must surely weigh eight to 10 pounds. And of course, the first thing most of us look for is what programs are slated for big gains -- or excisions. Well, team Obama made looking for the big cuts a little easier this year. This morning it issued a 120-page volume: "Terminations, Reductions, and Savings: Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2010."

A lot respondents are making hay over legal vs. illegal immigrants. Fine. But look at our real history of our immigration laws. You'd think it would be driven by many good things - such as what our infrastructure can support and so forth. And the pundits would have you believe that. It's not so.

First, we have people complaining about illegals using Social Security. Kindly note that the fossil records clearly show those illegals have paying into Social Security - something the pundits don't want to mention.

They're over-running our infrastructure! Yeah. It's not the white suburban kids pushing meth, it's not the middle-aged housewives enjoying a joint in the middle of the day, it's the not smokers, it's not the cops over-reacting to anyone near a .08 a block from their home, it's not that the insurance companies and HMOs have taken over what a doctor can do in his/her own judgement, it's not that we let the S&Ls and Enrons screw us out of real jobs, it's not that our trade and tariff policies are so fucking complicated that a gaggle of Ph.D.s still can't explain it to anyone reasonably intelligent, and it's not that all of our taxes are regressive, and it's not that the biggest corporations pulling in the most money pay the absolute minimum (if not zero) in actual money turned over as taxes - and it's not as if the whole fucking engine isn't powered by crooked politicians.

The real problem is those pesky, illegal Mexicans - with their strong sense of family and religion and culture and a desire to live outside of poverty, with a deep fear of the law because of where our Immigration Dept. will send them back to live if caught.

Oh yeah - illegal != legal immigration ... sure, that's the real issue. And I'm a monkey's uncle.

I believe you're proving my point for me when I say that the people who vehemently oppose the Electric Universe (EU) theory tend not to be familiar with it.

I'm guessing by your response that you believe their theory. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about them after Deep Impact because they were wrong about the outcome of the collision.

Even so, I'll see your link and raise you another: Electric sun

(Full disclosure: I believe in String Theory, even though it rarely makes predictions that can be proven in a lab. I also follow the Ekpyrotic universe model, which is almost as out there as the Electric Universe theory.)

I have read their works extensively and have never, ever seen the EU folks make the claim that the Universe is made up of antimatter. If you want to see what they had to say about the Deep Impact collison with Tempel 1, look here and you will find something entirely different from what you just described.

To date, I have never once seen an opponent of the EU theory who was thoroughly familiar with it. There is no substitute for your own inquiry.

To be completely fair, I haven't done due diligence with the Electric Universe model recently. I tried doing that once with the flat-Earthers to figure out how it all worked. After reading about 10,000 posts of back-and-forth I decided that sometimes the crazy theories really are crazy and not worth investigating. I read pro- and con- arguments for EU back before the Deep Impact mission and haven't looked at it since. I'm not really likely to have my mind changed now, but I'll browse their site(s) to see if they've made any new predictions.

> Better, or just what people are more used to?

Better. See this good summary; the research has grown quite convincing over the last decade.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40170/title/Darkness,_melatonin_may_stall_breast_and_prostate_cancers_

Well, the idea is that we need an extra dimensions. Since people have rather a hard time imagining a fourth spatial dimension, the best way to explain it is to drop everything by one dimension (ie. reduce something to zero width), so we're left thinking about 3 dimensions and 2 dimensions (both of which are easy to deal with). So you're correct - there isn't anything with 2 dimensions in real life, but this is just a metaphor. Now, like GP explains it, the idea is that the only way you can detect something coming at us from another dimension is because it's continually "vibrating" into our plane of existence - in other words (dropping dimensions here), even though it exists in the up-and-down land, and we exist in the left-and-right(-and-forwards-and-backwards) land, because these particles are vibrating left-and-right(-and-fowards-and-backwards), we can briefly see them. Another metaphor would be if you viewed the world through a tiny slit, and someone was running back and forth past your slit. No matter how skinny your slit is, the person is bound to cross your threshold of visibility (he was on your left and now he's on your right, and he didn't teleport). There was a rather good post on slashdot a while ago that helps you visualise in 4 dimensions. but this is the nearest I can find, sorry - http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35740/title/Math_Trek__Seeing_in_four_dimensions. I'm sure there's about a hundred caveats or imperfections in my explanation, but I'd say GP's explanation was pretty spot-on, as long as whoever he's explaining it to thinks in that sort of way.

I read this about bacteria communication as reported in Science News in January:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39602/title/Team_spirit

Different researchers are interviewed, though.

Its a shame the editors ran it into the ground and stomped on the corpse... if they had not, I'd still be a subscriber.

There are good alternatives, such as 16 pages of weekly ad-sparse science coverage.

This was the analysis of a Science News article I read a while ago. According to them, there was no consensus.

Then again, Science News also chooses to report a 9% growth in the arctic ice as "A near-record Arctic melting". Agenda, anyone?

This was the analysis of a Science News article I read a while ago. According to them, there was no consensus.

Then again, Science News also chooses to report a 9% growth in the arctic ice as "A near-record Arctic melting". Agenda, anyone?

It just took us that long to understand what it is we do.

Then even longer for us to understand every animal does it.

>Don't take my word for it, look it up.

Always good advice.

Science News, October 25 2008, page 5: retrospective on 1970's climate change literature.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37590/title/Cooling_climate_%E2%80%98consensus%E2%80%99_of_1970s_never_was
citing a review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by climatologist Thomas Peterson and collaborators.

Peterson expected to find predictions of cooling and the reality of what was in the literature came as "a surprise to us", according to Peterson. "[S]keptics had repeated their arguments so often and so strongly that we misremembered the tenor of the times".

Another place to look things up is this bibliography of 1970s climate science literature. Most of the papers of the time boiled down to "we don't know", with the occasional "this interglacial is due to end in the next couple of thousand years".

The kindest possible interpretation is that some people got Newsweek confused with the scientific literature and then somehow got hold of a megaphone.

The crystals and incense folk call this, "Mercury Retrograde", and in the case of Astrology, they're actually on fairly firm ground.

Communications and technology become jumbled and fragile in these periods. Global slowdowns and best laid plans going to pot.

Watch the patterns. One of my favorites was when those 5 undersea cables got cut and the world flipped out.

Happens twice a year for about twenty days each period. Back up your stuff before these times hit. Or just yell until you're blue, "Correlation does not equal causation!" --Which is actually quite true. Mercury isn't out there with bolt cutters. It's just a means of measuring the weather patterns of reality. This period ends Feb 1st. It's generally a good idea to hold off on signing anything important or buying any new hardware until after that date.

It's not just radioactive isotopes wobbling in their decay rates in time with the Earth's orbit. Everything is affected. --There are fundamentals of matter and energy, from which consciousness arises, which are not yet properly understood by modern science, and so we have to rely on the old-wive's rosemary-smelling almanacs for guidance. I suspect if the scientific community ever got over it's understandable knee-jerk over-reaction to the stupidity of religion and actually managed to work out the mechanics behind the observations, we'd zoom ahead by lightyears in our understanding of physics.

But the problem is that the "Must Not Offend Popular Consensus Even if it's Wrong" instinct affects scientists and laymen alike.

Ah well. We'll get there one day. I hope.

Cheers!

-FL

I was thinking of this one when I made that comment. The entire discussion, including a back and forth with a Nobel Prize winner, is embarrassing to read, and clearly evinces a total lack of understanding of undergraduate philosophy in the area. In particular, they seem to assume a simple form of incompatibilism is universally accepted (i.e. that free will and determinism are inherently incompatible), when it's actually probably a minority view, with compatibilism (e.g. recently defended by Daniel Dennett) being more widespread.

Hasn't this "glass is a liquid" bullshit been debunked countless times?

Yes, it has.

Here are some links:

http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/liquid-glass/
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_30_98/fob3.htm
http://www.thefoa.org/tech/glass.htm
http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C01/C01Links/www.ualberta.ca/~bderksen/florin.html

This urban legend has been thoroughly debunked. An amorphous solid (which is what glass is) is still a solid.

As for the other posters in this thread and in parallel branches who claim that there's no melting point for glass... this is also factually untrue. See this article for details.

This one actually gives some information on how they detected the belts (short version: it's based on infrared emissions that could only come from rocky debris).

And here is the actual paper on arXiv, if you want the full technical details of their methods.

but they appear to have helped at least one person

I'm not dissing you or your mother, but that could have been the placebo effect. Without a control group, we'll never know. I'm happy for you in any case, and I would say that if nothing else we need more research here.

Interesting article. This drug "reboots" the immune system, allowing myelin sheathes to reform. I'm waiting to see if these results can be duplicated; if so this stuff might actually be the holy grail you speak of.

In 1965 and through the 1970s and early 80s, virtually all scientists were Not discussing global warming. They were discussing Global Cooling.

You must be using some new definition of "virtually all" to mean less than a quarter.

I remember sitting in elementary school while the teacher made us read a scary article about "the darkening of the earth" due to increased clouds.

So ... your elementary school teacher was a climatologist?

Listen up, bunky: if you want to argue about actual science -- about the accuracy of historical temperature readings, about surface vs. air vs. satellite measurements, about the chemistry of greenhouse gases -- go right ahead. Contrary to what global warming denialists like to believe, science is a big tent; bring on your evidence (you do know what the word "evidence" means, right?) and it will be considered along with everyone else's. But the "global cooling craze" claim has been debunked over and over again, and yet you people never learn. Are you just pathologically unable to admit when you're wrong, or is it just this particular issue? I mean, if you said, "Lincoln was assassinated in 1864" and someone else said, "No, it was 1865," would you then go around telling everyone you met that Lincoln was assassinated in 1864 every time any subject bearing even vaguely on American history came up? If you wrote a C program in which all the statements were terminated by commas, and Asked Slashdot why your program wouldn't compile, and a bunch of people helpfully pointed out that you really ought to be using semicolons, would you stubbornly keep programming with commas and insisting that the /. folks (and your compiler) must be wrong because of something you heard on Fox News? I mean, I'm really trying to understand this behavior. Help me out here.

the wife's camry's hands-free bluetooth link also locks out dialing when rolling...it only allows calling stored numbers...but of course all u have 2 do is dial the phone directly;-)

btw, tech-driven driver distraction is nothing new: the installation of radios in cars was decried as dangerous;-}

and recent research http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/31426/title/Shifting_priorities_at_the_wheel has shown that the brain just can't handle 2 competing processes:-(

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/bryan_guarantee_of_deposits.mp3

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/taft_rights_and_progress_of_the_negro.mp3

Enjoy!

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/bryan_guarantee_of_deposits.mp3

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/taft_rights_and_progress_of_the_negro.mp3

Enjoy!

They are MP3s. Listen to them directly

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/bryan_guarantee_of_deposits.mp3

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/taft_rights_and_progress_of_the_negro.mp3

They are MP3s. Listen to them directly

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/bryan_guarantee_of_deposits.mp3

http://www.sciencenews.org/sounds/files/taft_rights_and_progress_of_the_negro.mp3

The Science News website has an image from the control center showing that the first proton beam went all the way around the tunnel.

Of course. Why ask when you could've found that out yourself?

30000 scientists against the IPCC "consensus":

When I (one of perhaps eight to 10 reporters in the audience) asked whether there were any climatologists who had signed the petition, Robinson said yes, 40 of them. Another 341 were meteorologists, and 114 were atmospheric scientists, he said. Add in environmental scientists and the total in this composite category jumps to 3,697. Some 900 were trained in computer science, math, or statistics. Roughly 9,900 were trained as engineers or in general science (whatever that means). An additional 5,690 were trained as physicists, 4,800 as chemists, and 2,923 as biochemists. Several thousand more were trained in still other fields. Of the total, roughly one-third said they held PhDs.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/32328/title/Science_%2B_the_Public__When_Is_a_Consensus_on_Climate_Not_a_Consensus%3F

(I selected an article by a seemingly very biased reported on purpose - to show what has been obvious in this Slashdot thread as well. Real science is apparently not of interest to the ones who, without factual support, keeps claiming that AGW has been "proven")

To download any of the videos directly, go here:
http://www.sciencenews.org/pictures/mathtrek/082208/

If you want magazine that does a good job summarizing recent developments in science in layman's terms (or pretty close), I've found Science News to be pretty good. I certainly enjoy reading it, and I feel they do a good job of summarizing without dumbing down.

The varnish on a Stradivarius is what biochemist Joseph Nagyvary thinks is relevant. Cheaper varnishes may be too rubbery and as a result damp high frequencies. He's built some violins based on his ideas, though apparently a good musician can still tell the difference between one of his and a Stradivarius.

One problem with the wood density idea is that not all Stradivarius violins have the sound for which they're famous.

Also, there has been recent progress towards creating aluminum salts that may yield another pathway to transparent aluminum (in addition to the Aluminum oxynitride and Al(2)O(3) pathways already mentioned.)

The hi-res version looks like Gumby making a basketball hoop with his arms.

M. C. Escher
There's the famous well known M. C. Escher famous for placing strange loops in his work thus making his tessellations and peculiar drawings centered on curious near mathematical conundrums (Mobius Strips, infinite limits, undefined boundaries, etc). For the most part, I believe he did woodcuts so if you're thinking about originals ... well, woodcuts are an odd market.

Fractal Art
There are several variants of this and you could buy some or create it yourself (not hard to find scripts that do this). It ranges from in your face to subtle. This is common and widely created.

Slashdot Story Art
A while back, there was a story on some humorous computer science-y art you could ask the original artist for permission to use.

Or you can just look at various collections for your own tastes.

Many puzzles have been shown to effectively be nondeterministic computers. E.g., you can make a sliding-block puzzle that is solvable if and only if a given traditional computation succeeds.

Science News story:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020817/bob10.asp

Personal plug:

Games, Puzzles, and Computation

I found a lcouple of links to NASA's "tethered satellite program":

Failed satellite experiment a devastating blow

The final conclusions

Try Science News. Short, clear articles on new scientific developments and some review articles, and when they do write about sociological or historical meta-issues in science, it's usually done so in a relatively unbiased manner and confined to separate articles.

That is one of the reputed effects, but what about the effects on males?

But even aside from that, why do you call it "speculative and paranoid"?? Growth hormones in beef production ARE known to mimic estrogen in the human body. That is anything but speculative. And such estrogen mimics are not JUST coming from the meat supply, they are also present in some of the polycarbonates and other plastics that we have traditionally used as water containers. So we are not talking about just a point-source here.

Further, if it is paranoid and speculative, as you appear to be claiming, why are entire governments concerned? They are, you know. I did not make that up. In fact, a very basic google search pulled up a huge number of links, and here is the very first one, about some concerns that the European Commission (hardly a bunch of crackpots) have about Canadian cattle, which are typically raised much as they are in the United States:

http://www.healthcoalition.ca/hormones.html

Quote: "A recent audit of Canada's food-inspection system by the European Commission (EC) raises serious questions about the safety of Canadian meat.(1) The audit reveals "very serious deficiencies" in the regulatory framework and documents wide-spread use of cancer-causing hormones, antibiotics and other endocrine disrupting substances in our meat supply. Canadian and European scientists believe that hormone-laced Canadian meat poses a serious threat to the public, particularly vulnerable groups like pregnant women and prepubertal children.(2) The 28 page audit is available on the Canadian Health Coalition website.(3)"

Here is another link from Cornell University: http://envirocancer.cornell.edu/Factsheet/Diet/fs37.hormones.cfm

The latter article really doesn't answer many questions, merely stating this or that "has not been shown". There is some useful information, however. One notable comment is: "Countries within the European Union do not allow the use of the protein hormone rbGH, for dairy cattle. In 1999, the Canadian government refused approval for the sale of rbGH for dairy cattle, based on concerns about the health effects including mastitis in treated animals."

And further yet, the concern is not just about excess hormones from eating meat from treated animals; it is in part a concern about those hormones entering our environment in other ways (but still as a result of dosing food animals):

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020105/bob13.asp

There are so many other sources to cite that I do not even really know where to begin. So, you can say that harmful effects have not been proven (at least, not since the removal of DES anyway, which WAS shown to cause hormonal disruption and cancer), but you have no place saying these things are paranoid or of no concern. There are very real, and quite scientific, concerns.

If there are legitimate concerns (and there are) about the long-term health effects of substances, especially hormones that are active in the human body, then they do not belong in food or in the water. Period. Doing it any other way, if you aren't starving, is DANGEROUSLY STUPID.

Thanks for the reference. Eurekalert does look much better than ScienceDaily.

I get most of my science news from Science News, which I'm really happy with, but they are a little slower (and more thorough), so a bit behind the quickest to publish.

I just wish Slashdot editors would exercise some judgment. A good first step would be never linking to ScienceDaily.

Guess this is meant for "tube" speakers in D.C. Science News has this piece on proposed federal R&D funding, including that for NSF: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20080209/fob7.asp

A couple of good examples of science writing for non-experts:

* Stephen J. Gould's books (e.g., "The Panda's Thumb") about natural history. He made a point of never "lying" to his students or readers. He believed that teachers only needed to fudge the truth if they didn't understand the material well enough themselves. His books are clear, informative and enjoyable, and they don't cut any corners on the science.

* Science News ( http://www.sciencenews.org/ ), which is one of the best examples of science journalism anywhere. I've subscribed to it, off and on, since the 1960s. (It's been published since the 1920s.) They're excellent journalists.

flywheels are an interesting method of energy storage undergoing contemporary research.
in my book they're cool because they're clean and simple.

there was a good article in science news a few months back, but it's subscriber-only.
here's another.

Here's a link discussing it, circa 1999.... AKA the "Hygiene Hypothesis".

About Indonesian islands being submerged? It's been going on for 8,000 years at least; this is nothing new. At the same time, the big island of Hawaii is adding area daily. Guess what: islands - and coastlines - always change. Always have, always will.

Oh, and about the air in China being unbreathable? I just got back from 25 days working in the Shanghai area (from Suzhou down to Ningbo). I can assure you I didn't hold my breath for 25 days. And in fact the air was cleaner than what I was breathing 40 days ago in LA. Thick dust blew into Shanghai one day, but no worse than the dust I've experienced in McPherson, Kansas or Lubbock, Texas. Thankfully the dust was gone in a day as we had some strong thunderstorms roll in...

Lastly, you're correct that "climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems". However, the Earth is NOT a closed system. Over 30,000 metric tons of space dust are added to the Earth each year, and the dominant source of energy - the Sun - is constantly changing it's input to the Earth.

Finally, the results of today's climate simulations--which are much more sophisticated than those that were available in the 1980s--suggest that even a nuclear exchange of just a few dozen weapons could cool Earth substantially for a decade or more.