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The ultimate in safety, especially if combined with modern glassification techniques. But why bother? Recycle using breeder reactors -- there is after all a finite supply of mine-able uranium on the planet.

One point though is that the neanthertals had larger brains than homo sapiens. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neandertal 1200-1750 cm skull capacity (10% greater than modern human average). This is one of the reasons why it would be possible that the big brain gene would come from neanthertals.
I guess they are still trying to push the neandertal/human hybrid theory. If you look at #5 at http://scienceweek.com/2004/sb040910-3.htm they think that it is not likely because of lack of mitochondrial DNA evidence.

No.

http://scienceweek.com/2004/sb040109-1.htm

1. ATMOSPHERE: ON THE ICE AGE CYCLE

The following points are made by Didier Paillard (Science 2006 313:455):

1) The exposure of Earth's surface to the Sun's rays (or insolation) varies on time scales of thousands of years as a result of regular changes in Earth's orbit around the Sun (eccentricity), in the tilt of Earth's axis (obliquity), and in the direction of Earth's axis of rotation (precession). According to the Milankovitch theory, these insolation changes drive the glacial cycles that have dominated Earth's climate for the past 3 million years.

2) For example, between 3 million and 1 million years before the present (late Pliocene to early Pleistocene, hereafter LP-EP), the glacial oscillations followed a 41,000-year cycle. These oscillations correspond to insolation changes driven by obliquity changes. But during this time, precession-driven changes in insolation on a 23,000-year cycle were much stronger than the obliquity-driven changes. Why is the glacial record for the LP-EP dominated by obliquity, rather than by the stronger precessional forcing? How should the Milankovitch theory be adapted to account for this "41,000-year paradox"?

3) Two different solutions are available. The first involves a rethinking of how the insolation forcing should be defined ...

A large fraction of the Asian nationals who earn their PhDs in the US stay in the US, so it's not clear that it makes sense to ignore these students. For instance, 10 year stay rates for Chinese nationals who earned their PhDs in the US are over 90% (see http://scienceweek.com/2004/sc040730-6.htm); China is the largest source of non-US-citizen PhDs earned in the US.

If you insist, though, here's the data:

PhDs awarded to US citizens by US institutions in the sciences and engineering in 2003: 15,669

PhDs awarded to US citizens by US institutions in the sciences in 2003: 13,506

Still way more than 4400.

http://scienceweek.com/

If I melted Lite Brite pegs and ate the resulting rainbow fondue, my vomit would resemble that site.

succinct, clear writing about serious science

The articles look interesting, but there's a definite political bent on the editorial pages. No matter what you think of National Review, calling them "a frequent repository of right-wing slop and spittle" is pretty inflammatory. I get tired of seeing politics everywhere. I wish science writers would frame things so that they're disagreeing with, say, "creationists," instead of "the right wing." It would be apolitical, and a lot more accurate.

ScienceWeek, no competition:

http://scienceweek.com/

It's not breezy, consumer friendly reporting of scientific oddities, but succinct, clear writing about serious science, complete with contextual explanations.

I don't bother with anything else.

"Yes, it said that last week in the journal of "Modern Brain Science.""

I take it my choice of words was too simple. Maybe I should a intelligized it up for your sake.

Here are some of the links I could find on the subject:

http://scienceweek.com/2004/sa040813-1.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262 232227/002-9095026-9962462?v=glance

After reading the actual Nature paper, it looks like they have tried to address any possible explanations I could come up with as a geneticist. I am however reminded of cases of papers which get withdrawn when another lab can not replicate their results or even withdrawn when the primary researcher finds out his grad student falsified data. I am not saying that either of these may be the case, but I think the thousands or more similar crosses done each year by researchers on arabidopsis alone would have turned this phenomenon up earlier if it were in any way general to this weed, and if it were applicable in any but the most rare of circumstances to animals it would have definitely been found earlier.

Mendel, Darwin, stop spinning in your graves, the majority of the genetics community still thinks you were right.

An older article on the prevalence of scientific fraud.

Along a similar thread, aerosols and other pollutants end up reducing global warming by seeding clouds and increasing cloud cover, which generally reflects more sunlight energy away from the ecosphere. ( ref ) So could more pollution be a way to counter global warming? Do we even have a planned response for when global warming finally does occur, other than to head for higher ground?

It does seem like governments are spending more time setting arbitrary controls on resource consumption and waste production, when they should be tracking quantitative measurements and setting cumulative budgets on system inputs & outputs.

Ultimately, if we don't want to take the blame for anything we do, we'd want to become fully self-sufficient... balancing our system inputs and outputs such that all of our waste byproducts are processed, treated, and cleaned. That way, we won't be leaning on the environment for cleaning up our exhaust, and we'll achieve some form of population scalability. Almost like making sure everyone can live in their own isolated biosphere. But in our current system, there's very little incentive to pursue this (other than maybe for long-term space colonization... ha)

I have not seen the show, but I have read about what you are talking about. A current theory is that Lake Agassiz, a 'super great lake', catastrophically drained into the upper Atlantic causing a shift in salinity, thus a shift in the temperature current flow, thus a shift in climate. Ref: http://scienceweek.com/2003/sw030627.htm

All this talk about historic climate change is like an ant talking about the nature of an elephant. We are too small, and the details are too big. To hear environmentalists talk about it, we are on the verge of disaster, but to hear geologists talk about it, we are just barely coming out of the last ice age. From a geological standpoint, everything I have read about says that our planet should be about 10 degrees warmer than what it is today. We're coming out of 'abnormal' climtes, and apparently inching back toward 'normal'. A google on "cenozoic ice age" will be instructive, as is this page: http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/ "During most of the last 1 billion years the globe had no permanent ice." North and south pole ice is an anomaly.

Nope! One theory goes that this is the same way that Earth got its water. (Orginal water was boiled away in early hot days when there was no atmosphere). The only problem with such theories is the isotope ratios of the water found in comets versus Earth. Search around a bit, you'll find more. One Two Three