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• BBC News: China water pollution so bad, one third of rural water is undrinkable
  
• BBC News: Chinese corrupt officials sacked for ignoring pollution
  
• Air pollution so bad in China, it's killing crops
  
• Chinese pollution so bad it threatens regional political stability
  

Actually, any stem cell continues spawning adult cells until it fails due to DNA degradation or expiration of its host's body. It's the offspring that become static and expendable.

AlpineR

"it takes, on average, 10 years and 1 billion dollars to get a new drug approved in the U.S. ..."

This is simply incorrect. It is likely that this statistic is referring to the time it takes for a drug company to develop and gain approval for a new drug. According to Washington Monthly in May 2000, at that time the FDA approval process was taking about a year, and had decreased from about 2.5 years after so-called "fast track" procedures were implemented in the 90s: (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/00 05.pomper.html)

"If you are arguing that the FDA plays down risks in order to allow buisnesses to sell dangerous products, that is just not true."

I am, and I am by no means alone. For evidence and opinions on this side of the question, you might want to check out:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6520630/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pres cription/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A313 5-2004Dec15.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1126/p02s01-uspo.htm l

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/11/23/MNGSPA04NI1.DTL

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050205/bob10 .asp

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/15/60II/mai n674293.shtml

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050806/bob8. asp

Tad McGeer has been making similar walking robots since the eighties. I wonder if these guys did a proper literature search.

Another name that comes to mind is Mark Tilden. He was one of the first to point out that by mimicing natural processes, you greatly reduce the processing power needed. His robot insects use the music chips from greeting cards to control them.

As back up to the poster's statement:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060401/fob1. asp

-- MarkusQ

P.S. Am I the only one who thinks it sad when a link to an article by Ivars Peterson adds details to a discussion? The posted article said...basically nothing about the topic. Not surprising when you've got the equivalent of one typewritten page to work with and you feel the need to start by explaining what primes are. But still sad.

How can ANY game be rated as 'mature' when it features players committing murder, torture, violence, speak foul languages, or other forms of antisocial acts in the name of entertainment, performed by underage spoiled brats? In fact, the only people who enjoy committing these acts are people with underdeveloped brains[1]! It clearly shows the ESRB ratings are only served to fatten game publishers' bottom lines rather than helping gamers to make the proper purchasing decisions.

[1] http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040508/bob9. asp

(Indeed, the fetus often gets cells from the mother, too. Many women have cells of their own, and from their mothers, and from their children...)

How many honey bees does it take to cook an egg?

*Ahem*. Dogs certainly do know calculus.

Your (his?) claim that "There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease" is refuted here and here, the latter of which links is an anti-vaccine site.
this link gives references to more scientific studies. And this link also responds to your claims.

And, it's blazingly obvious that smallpox, pertussis, and polio have responded to vaccine regimes. In areas that lacked polio vaccine, polio cases continued. When those areas began to receive the vaccine through WHO (including Europe), the cases reduced or stopped altogether. Case closed.

Vaccination also fits well with the established mechanism of disease resistance. Those who have received vaccination show an increased level of antibodies to the disease vaccinated against; the antibodies are the proteins used by white cells to identify and then destroy the invading pathogens.

I recommend getting your information from medical journals and sites instead of scare websites.

And if you have a child, PLEASE get your vaccination information from repuatable sources.

Actually, if you're worried about type II diabetes, you might really want to lay off the caffeine.

People who ingested caffeine in a controlled experiment had 21% higher blood sugar levels than people who took a placebo after eating breakfast (which is equivalent to amount reduced by diabetes-controlling drugs). They also did an experiment where they had a bunch of sedentary, obese men go on an exercise program to lose weight. At the end, those who were given caffeine saw none of the benefits to their blood sugar from exercise that those who didn't have caffeine received.

Some assembly line thing or another.

I would argue thatchances are that the folks who work graveyard have higher exposure to potentially cancerous materials than your average 9 to fiver.

They compared them directly to their daytime counterparts. They also found that exposure to light prevents melatonin release (or manufacture - I don't remember), and confirmed that the night shift workers had much lower blood levels with no peak during the day when they would be sleeping. They also ran lab tests on rats (I think) and saw that cancerous tumors grew at a rate inversely proportional to the melatonin blood levels. Finally, they saw that the night works had higher cancer rates.

If I seem hesitant, it's because I don't have the article nearby and don't know any more about the study than what was in the article, but they made the gist of it very clear: being awake at night increased some people's chance of getting certain types of cancers.

Oops, I take that back. The full article, along with references is available at Science News. It's much clearer than I could hope to be.

No, this is not a spinoff of space-industry research. This technology was developed in the academic community. At least some of it is military-funded. Here's an earlier story on this technology from a few years back: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010217/fob2. asp

Even concentrations of only 0.1 percent caffeine may prove useful. Sprayed onto such slug-prized cuisine as cabbage leaves, those concentrations deterred feeding by 62 percent, respectively, when compared to uncaffeinated salad greens. This suggests that a regular spray of leftover coffee, which tends to have a caffeine content of about 0.1 to 0.05 percent, might control nighttime crop losses in the garden.

And another one here. Wiki, oddly, has nothing about it. I could change that, I guess...

Chemical anlaysis of wine has been going on for some time for a variety of purposes.

I don't think that would be a very fair test...

if you saw yourself in a photo, surrounded by a dozen perfectly identical copies of yourself, do you honestly beleive you could tell which one was the "real" you?

I don't think I could, and if I can assume that I am self-aware and conscious, then we are not testing self-awareness or even self-identity.

Personally, I'd like to see AI progress to the point where we can use the "dolphin test" on a robot to determine self-awareness.

references:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050723/fob6. asp
http://forum.darwinawards.com/lofiversion/index.ph p/t5184.html
also, google for "dolphin self-aware paint mirror", that will provide other sources.

I was just on Some Random Website the other day reading about how before hops found its way into beers (sometime around the fourteenth century, I think), its principle use in Europe was as a medicinal herb. Usually brewed as a tea, as I recall.

Another Fun Beer Fact: before the British "discovered" how to put hops in their beer, the primary flavoring agent they used was creeping charlie. Ever since I found that out, I've always kinda wondered what that would taste like ...

Another plant that seems to have tremendous health benefits (fightin' cancer, and alzheimer's, and as a general anti-inflammatory, etc.) is turmeric -- which is one of the primary ingredients of curry.

Hmmmm ... beer and curry ... the British must live fer freakin' ever.

Finally, a laser to fit Dwarf Sharks!

next up, an army of Barbie fem-bots!

http://www.smm.org/buzz/node/267
http://www.weeklyreader.com/featurezone/article_08 192005.asp
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050813/fob3. asp
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/11/14/new.lemu rs/
http://monkeydaynews.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_monke ydaynews_archive.html

This is crap. I *personally* have witnessed a cow tipping. It is not that difficult. When the cow is asleep, it is not consciously adjusting for it's balence, if you run at it and give it a hard shove, it falls over pretty easily. I have seen it myself.

For those who don't get the subject, I suggest http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040911/matht rek.asp

The spacecraft design with the angled rockets is wasteful, but if you are getting the fuel from the asteroid, the fuel is effectively unlimited. But: if you are getting fuel from the asteroid, you should be able to keep the spacecraft attached to the asteroid by the "hoover"ing effect of sucking up the raw material you are ejecting to the sides!! - a force far, far more potent than gravity would be.

Alternatives: You could focus mirrors one side of the asteroid and take advantage of the outgassing...

Or you could (my preference) just mine the asteroid down to nothing long before impact...

After all, covering that 400 million dollar launch cost would be a lot easier if we just shipped a few billion dollars worth of materials back to LEO!

"The greatest mass extinction in Earth's history may have resulted from a release of carbonated seawater"

And this site kindly points out the following:

"But when dissolved in frothy, carbonated seawater, all this CO2 becomes a corrosive gas."

Not to mention the environmental effect of millions of farting & belching sea creatures. I think we should keep a close eye on this man :)

If you can spring for an Audible subscription ($49 a year I think), I'd *highly* recommend the weekly Science News . It is concisely written for an intelligent lay audience, covering all the fields, with strength in physics, astronomy and the biological sciences (They are pretty weak in compsci though).

SciNews is run by some non-profit organization, so its not the watery, awkwardly-written PopSci articles you get with most commercial publications, i.e. the "Discovery X Can Cure Cancer" or "New 2006 Automobiles Filled with Science!"

New Scientist ain't bad either, though can be a bit flakey. I'd avoid the audio broadcasts of Scientific American, which has articles that tend to be longer and murkier. That pub's seen better days.

For example. Honeybees generate heat in the winter to keep the hive warm and use heat to kill predatory wasps -- surrounding the wasp, heating up to 45 C (113 F) and killing the attacker.

This guy agrees, claiming that the light-sensitive patch genes are pretty conserved.

However, this crowd seems to think that although opsins are remarkably well-conserved across different phyla, the controlling genes that the abovementioned people were obsessed by control many other gene families, besides eye development, so it's still possible that there are different complete eye evolution families.

They talk a bit about fish and squid eyes: I didn't know that squids and octopi have inverted (compared to mammals) retinal structures. They must be *very* good at low-light conditions.

The moral dimensions to mass produced antibiotics and antivirals are more complex than just the issue of patents.

In the interests of balance ... if you are referring to Thailand, I don't know if it's entirely fair to say that "people will sell their daughters into the sex slave market". Maybe this is the case in other countries I haven't read about (link me up!).

In Thailand... http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050924/bob9r ef.asp It turns out that it isn't the mean old parents, it is the acculturation of the children, especially in the poorer, less educated north of the country. Incidentally, while "our religion" sees prostitution as a great evil to be stamped out, theirs does not. It is honorable in their case (especially middle-daughters according to Rende Taylor) for them to help their families (parents and the oldest and youngest sibling) with prosperity (food, clothing, shelter) and education (either in the south, or abroad in southeast Asia, including Japan and Korea). Sadly, when middle daughters move off for higher education the costs and their percieved debt to their families often results in prostitution.

However, there is still a "blame the parents" argument: If only they weren't Buddhist and hadn't raised their daughters Buddhist and instead raised them with a purely Western set of beliefs and social obligations! Only then would they understand that children should fly the coop and become rugged, self-actualized, bootstrapping, materialistic individualists precisely at age 18 (they should also count age the way we do in the West) with all of the tenuous kin-bonds that that implies (E.g., in America the extent of our responsibility to aged parents is to hold them in institutions/infirmaries until they die of old age, hopefully --for our bottom lines-- for much less than the 18 years they invested in us). Non-Buddhists are liberated by only having to live right for 60-odd years (and most Christians get the free-pass of Divine Forgiveness). These girls on the other hand, through no fault of their own, merely the indoctrination of their communities, are trapped by the oppression of eternal karma.

Yes, I'm using hyperbole, but the point is the same: (cultural) context matters. This is not to excuse actual incarceration, coercion or exploitation (i.e., actual sex-slaves). It may be offensive, but being free would logically mean being free to sell sex -- just like any other contracted service (fortunately we have laws to prevent consenting citizens from doing things that are offensive and more laws about who can consent and under what conditions). These laws are the same thing that makes this statement false: "It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." (Don Rumsfeld, April, 2003)

But yeah... worrying about scratches on iPods... it sure does pale in the face of these scary societal questions. Nods to the sibling poster about strawmen arguments, though. Suing about scratches seems a little frivolous, but the existence (or legality) of prostitution really has no bearing on the debate.

Sorry everyone for this post being all over the map! I'm bored! Speaking of karma though -- I better post this AC :-D haha

Carbon Nanotubes have already been proven to be toxic in laboratory mice and in some extreme cases fatal.

This article shows that inhalation of nanotubes can cause lung scaring significant DNA damage, blood clotting and the death of macrophages similar to that of exposure to asbestos.

Two more suggestions: Science News http://www.sciencenews.org/ and New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/

I'm a longtime and mostly happy subscriber to Science News. It's weekly and seems to hire educated reporters.

This model reveals that there are several other "reasonable" ways of lacing shoes. Of these, the bow-tie method is the most efficient in terms of requiring the shortest lace yet using all the eyelets. However, the two traditional "dense" styles win when you're looking for the strongest lacing--that is, the one that gives the maximum tension on both sides of the shoe. Which of the two is stronger depends on the distance between the two rows of eyelets: zigzag when the eyelets are close together and straight when they are farther apart.
Hundreds of years of trial and error have led to the strongest--if not the most efficient--way of lacing our shoes, Polster concluded. That's in the face of a staggering 51,840 possible lacings for a shoe with just five eyelets on each side."

taxing Beethoven would level the playing field for young/contemporary "classical" composers who have to compete with the huge body of royalty-free music.

Taxing the wheel would certainly level the playing field for young inventors who have to compete with the huge body of royalty-free inventions.

If companies had to pay a hefty tax for using ordinary wheels then they would have a huge incentive to pay inventors to create innovative alternatives that would be cheaper than paying the tax. Just imagine all of the new innovation in reuleaux triangle wheels and cuboid wheels and even perfectly square wheels!

We should tax the entire public domain! Why should we let people get away with using old stuff for free? Better to stimulate the economy by forcing them to hire someone to make something new. People using old free stuff are nothing but a bunch of theives, dragging down our economy.

Chuckle.

-

Whether the child was a hybrid is subject to debate. Given that the judgement is not settled and there's only one such skeleton, it would seem a bit rash to claim it to be a cold hard fact.

Do you mean the "nitrogen diamond"?

http://www.physorg.com/news693.html

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040717/fob4. asp

Maybe not that poisonous to us but it is poisonous to other animals - slugs, snails, frogs etc.

BTW: other stuff that's relatively harmless to us but poisonous to other animals: chocolate for dogs, aspirin for cats, and the fumes from teflon frying pans for many types of birds.

(acetaminophen/paracetamol/tylenol is very toxic for cats, but IMO I wouldn't say it's harmless to humans).

Several of the people I work with in Caltech's Control and Dynamical Systems department work on celestial mechanics and calculating space flight trajectories -- and I can assure you, it's some pretty complicated stuff, involving invariant manifolds and (IIRC) patching together different three-body systems. There's a good popular article about this in Science News, and you can find more info (in as much detail as you'd like!) on Shane Ross' homepage.

Cheers,
IT

Nothing like rushing into something before its been fully studied. Buckyballs and nanotubes both present unknown amounts of harm to the environment and to the health of animal life. This is a case where we might want to figure out disposal methods first, because there is evidence that these substances can accumulate in certain environments.

You need to learn how to construct an argument.

You're right, I wasn't very clear.

You can't claim the Shuttle is a shitty compromised bastard design, and then also say that NASA should have bought and used the Buran

Right. Except that the Buran's tile system is more robust than the Shuttles (according to a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan).

Anyway, the Russians still had their capsules. Building Buran to be completely automated suggests that they intended it to be for the heavy lifting - and that they were still going to use the capsules for humans (as they still do now).

You can burn up a capsule with a re-entry angle which is too steep. Just like the Shuttle.

Yes, again you are right. But in the shuttle you have to maintain the craft's orientation by moving control surfaces. There's an angle of attack that must be maintained relative to the direction the craft is actually moving in. There's a system there that can fail.

A capsule is a teardrop shape. Once it's re-entry trajectory is defined, the shape of the craft gives it aerodynamic stability. The correct attitude will automatically be found and maintained by interaction with the atmosphere. Push it out of alignment and it'll drift back. You could be tumbling and that motion will simply be stopped by the airflow. Almost nothing can go wrong.

And you'll have to supply a link to the alloys you claim will withstand 3000 deg F

There's an introduction here in an article entitled building a better shuttle, scroll down to this bit:

"So-called hot structures would replace thermal tiles, heat blankets, and other thermal-protection devices external to the craft's skin. Instead of relying on the continuous shunting of heat away to prevent structural materials from melting, engineers are developing metallic alloys or ceramics that don't melt--or even lose strength--at any temperature they might encounter during space flight."

The specific search you want to use is "hot structure" spaceflight to find out more information. There's even a NASA paper from 1976(!) referenced in one of those links that talks about hot structures.

"The environmental impacts of getting a newspaper dropped on your doorstep each morning vastly outweigh those of receiving the same information via a handheld electronic device such as a personal digital assistant (PDA)", according to this article.

You are correct. I was wrong to state two Lagrange points are stable without some qualification.

Since we were talking about Earth-Moon Lagrange points (presumably, as I did not RTFA). This system does exceed the stability ratio, so I didn't feel the need to qualify it. As you point out the Earth-Sun system also has two stable Lagrange points, as well as many other bodies in our solar system.

While L4 & L5 are valuable real estate (in a sense) as the article apparently implies, L1, L2, & L3 are also of value for low energy transport nodes. (http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0207/21highway/ and http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050416/bob9. asp).

Of course, trying to try L1, L2 and L3 into choke points such as L4 & L5 would be a fuel expensive proposition.

In any event, keeping all of these points freely available I feel ought to bring far more benefits than restricting access to any of them. Again, I did not RTFA, so I'm just responding to the /. zeitgest FWIW.

What impact do all the turbine jets on airplanes have on weather patterns?

A noticable effect, actually. And not due to their effect on winds but rather the contrails left behind. See here for more information.

This article reminds me of two solar cells concepts that are being created. The first one that I remember is one that is using the proteins from spinach to actually create power. Here is a link. http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040605/fob2. asp Also, I actually created a crude solar cell from either rasberries or blackberries at a science musuem. It actually worked. Now all that needs to be done is to stop the cells from breaking down.

Science News printed this vitamin D story last year. I thought the bit about the needs and lack of vitamin D in the elderly in the US were particularly interesting.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041009/bob8. asp

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041016/bob9. asp

Science News printed this vitamin D story last year. I thought the bit about the needs and lack of vitamin D in the elderly in the US were particularly interesting.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041009/bob8. asp

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041016/bob9. asp

Some friends recently gave me some zinc oxide based sunscreen that has no chemical sunblock, made by a company called Birch Trees.

A likely additional problem with most sunscreens is that the active ingredients may be harmful. See:

http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc98/6_6_98/b ob2.htm

From the birchtrees.com website:

Why we use Zinc instead of Chemical Sunscreens

Zinc oxide is a natural mineral, used safely for generations to shield against the harmful effects of the sun. Zinc oxide forms a protective physical barrier over the skin and stops the harmful UV rays, providing the most complete protection. BirchTrees Daily Guard Sun Screen uses Z-Cote®, a transparent, microfine form of zinc oxide to protect in a clear, smooth, non-sticky and non-irritating form. Unlike chemical sunscreen ingredients, zinc oxide cannot be absorbed into the skin and is not metabolized by the body.

Chemical sunscreen ingredients are designed to absorb portions of the UVB (burning rays) or UVA (cause of aging and skin cancer) rays and are often used in combination to achieve adequate UVB and at best, limited UVA protection. Z-Cote® is the only single transparent sunscreen ingredient available today that uniformly protects against the full "broad spectrum." Additionally, unlike most chemical sunscreen ingredients, zinc oxide is known to be stable and it won't degrade in the sun. As well, it is the only sunscreen ingredient recognized by the FDA as a Category I Skin Protectant and is recommended for use on environmentally challenged skin.

BirchTrees Daily Guard Sun Screen uses 15% zinc oxide for an SPF 15 meaning it effectively blocks 93% of the sun's burning rays. Because zinc oxide uniformly protects against the UV spectrum from 290-380 nanometers(nm), we believe our Daily Guard Sun Screen is also effective against 93% of the sun's UVA rays. While other sunscreens claim "broad spectrum" protection, the amount of protection a consumer is receiving from the damaging UVA rays is virtually unknown. Even the sunscreens which include zinc include far smaller percentages and thus offer far less coverage against the UVA spectrum than BirchTrees Daily Guard Sun Screen does.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/44340.html

or

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050702/fob7. asp

we get a space wasting dupe.

Smooth move, zonk.

AC

The amazing thing about the human brain is its ability to parallel process. Although the recitation of digits was only at 6 baud, you're forgetting the massive amount of processing for the individual to:.........

Except for the last item, the blue jays outside my office can do all of them too. A bird may not be able to recite digits of pi, but some of them are able to remember thousands of food cache locations. In fact, they may even be able to do some of the last item based on some psych experiments on these birds that suggest they are capable of inferring the likely thoughts and future actions of other blue jays.

Yes, brains are amazing things but a creature really does need that much brain power to do most life activities.

I would have to agree with this. I think there is amazing potential, but we need to get the companies to focus on controlling their products and the disposal of them. There's already one article about the effects of "nano-pollutants" . It would really be frightening if a company dumped a batch into a local landfill. I think this would be great if companies can move the tech forward, but be responsible.