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It's probably also worth mentioning sex determination in reptiles, which is sometimes determined by the temperature the eggs were incubated at, rather than simply by what chromosomes were transferred. Biology can be a wild thing.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=experts-temperature-sex-determination-reptiles

People once though that drinking radioactive fluids would be a cure-all too (see radithor) but as it turns out a slow death that involves your jaw falling off isn't quite what the patients had in mind. There is a reason the FDA was put in place, and it isn't just to delay things for religious or political reasons.

It would be extremely interesting if the actual source of the invincibility AIDS were to be bone marrow rather than blood itself. Perhaps we have gotten it wrong for the last 30 years or so. What a fantastic world it would be with yet another disease conquered.

The article doesn't do a very good job of putting this finding in context. The idea of "reservoirs" of the virus is both fairly old and well established; reasonably soon after HAART treatments were able to knock down the blood virus counts to undetectable levels, researchers tried the risky experiment of stopping treatment only to see the virus instantly rebounds.

Dormant cells in the lymph nodes are currently considered the most important such reservoir. Various other reservoirs were known or hypothesized, which I would have assumed included bone marrow; apparently it's a new discovery. While important, it's not paradigm-shifting, nor does it offer an immediate path for treatment--we can't currently clear out the known reservoirs. This simply makes the challenge of finding a cure higher.

Scientific American had a pretty good overview issue on HIV cures and vaccines about a year and a half ago. I assume this is the article, but didn't re-read to confirm.

j.

"In short, imagine your home flooded to the roof with mud and contaminated, radioactive ash." (There, fixed it for you. ;-)

Ok, to be fair, it's not very radioactive, but it's still an important thing to consider - coal ash is slightly radioactive.

But, I think it's gonna be a long time before we can get away from coal completely. Still, it's important that we start now, if we want to be coal-free in maybe 100-200 years (hey, I can hope).

"Hey, why not disband the countries army then? Violence is not the answer, you know."

Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Venezuela: 1.06% of GDP
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=venezuela+military+spending

Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, United States: 4.28% of GDP
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=usa+military+spending

With its larger economy, and if you included interest payments and all related expenses (including incurred future obligations like for disabled soldiers), the USA spends about a trillion dollars a year on the military, so the more accurate figure may be closer to 8% of the US GDP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

There is nothing wrong with spending some on security if the focus is mainly about mutual security (so, everyone feels secure and part of a mutual security community, as in "We're all secure together."):
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and intrinsic security (sustainable resilient infrastructure as civil defense, as in "We're secure in our core infrastructure regardless of typhoon, earthquake, electromagnetic storm, crop failure, plague, or bombs."):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

But the USA has pursued mostly a doctrine of unilateral security ("We're secure because you're insecure") and extrinsic security ("We're secure because we have soldiers everywhere guarding insecure installations.") This approach persists because it is extremely profitable for a narrow part of society, as two-time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC) said:
"War is a Racket"
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

For all the money spent, the USA is one of the most insecure countries on the planet (with long energy supply lines, long food supply lines, long goods supply lines, an unhardened and unecrypted civilian communications infrastructure, no comprehensive national health care system scaled for disasters, and in many other ways). This can't be fixed by spending more money the same way on more soldiers and more weapons -- the USA passed the law of diminishing returns on that decades ago. These fundamental insecurities can only be fixed by spending the money differently.

For example, for one half of one year's military spending, the USA could go all solar with improved energy efficiency and no longer have to defend oil supply lines:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
(while also improving human health and environmental health and creating many jobs). As part of that, free luxury electric cars to everyone in the USA would greatly reduce our taxes for defense and care of the sick:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

Likewise, for a fraction of one year's defense budget, the USA could put in place local flexible manufacturing facilities that remove the need to defend shipping lines to China, as I suggest here:
"21,000 Flexible Public Fabrication Facilities a

This sounds like an incredible breakthrough. I thought that the very best solar cells were at about 40% efficiency. http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=new-solar-cell-efficiency-record-se-2009-08-27

This article describes ~80%. What am I missing? I can't understand why the article is written as it is if these are really the highest efficiency solar cells ever created.

You know, perhaps a swear jar is a very good idea--California's in a lot of pain right now, so if swearing is used for pain relief they could well make a <oblig>fucking</oblig> killing.

At least in the former case, it can relieve the pain of being bitten.

This is now my second self-response, having since slogged through a fairly close reading of Lomborg's 27 page rebuttal to The Deception and 30 page rebuttal to Scientific American from late 2001, as well as snippets of rebuttal rebuttal.

From Holden's Response to Lomborg's Response to My Critique of His Energy Chapter:

It must be added that the space allotted for reviews is always limited, as it was in this instance in Scientific American, making it impossible to mention, never mind to explain, every mistake that has been noticed. It should also be understood that, even if space were not limited, few reviewers would consider it their responsibility to explain every error that a deeply flawed work contains, once they have explained enough of them to establish beyond doubt that the author is not competent in the subjects he is addressing.

Did he did state "my objective is to brush aside an irritating gnat" in eminencese, or do my ears deceive me?

And this (emphasis mine):

This means resources of tar sands and oil shale that would be economically exploitable only at prices around $30 per barrel are in fact more expensive than oil has been for nearly all of the last century. They could be considered "reserves" material that is exploitable with current technology at current prices only in circumstances under which the price of conventional oil had risen to well above what has been usual for the past century, which was exactly my point.

Talk about missing the forest for seeing the trees. Holdren seems to completely miss the point that Lomborg is attacking the litany of the apocalypse, the unfounded extrapolations of doom that surround whatever ecological facts gain sway in the moment. Lomborg must lie awake at night sweating over his misguided use of $30/barrel to represent a viable future price of oil. The first chart I pulled up suggests that light sweet crude hasn't seen the underside of $30 since 2004 and might never see it again.

Minus one point to Lomborg for poor scholarship, plus one hundred points to Lomborg for having chosen a credible lower bound on the near-term future price despite the century of contrary pricing which so infatuates Holdren to no useful purpose.

Of the four SA critics, it was Holdren whose initial statement I found most persuasive:

What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy but that we are running out of environment--that is, running out of the capacity of air, water, soil and biota to absorb, without intolerable consequences for human well-being, the effects of energy extraction, transport, transformation and use.

Lomborg understands this, but makes light of the risk by putting too much faith in price trends. There's a lot of political incentive to keep the price of oil within relatively narrow bounds. One of the degrees of freedom to accomplish this is shifting the burden onto the environment, for example, the Bush administration lifting the drilling ban in Alaska. At some point the domino game of shifting the burden is doomed to fail, and then the price might suddenly spike upwards, like an uncontrolled housing bubble.

There was much reference to the IPCC in Lomborg's rebuttal. His critics were engaging in much finger wagging, while putting forth little additional data. How could they? They are eminent and political. The precise wording of IPCC reports is wrangled for years. They don't want to stick their necks out why gnat swatting. Makes me wonder if the end result of IPCC politics is on par with the report on the Challenger explosion that might have resulted without Feynman involved.

I would dearly love to see an incisive mind, such as Feynman's, write a review of Lomborg's tracts. Do you think Feynman would have carped over $30/barrel as an estimated futu

I remembered this article in which a few studies had found that poking people with needles could relieve pain, but there was no difference between traditional locations and random locations.

The Nuclear Energy Agency disagrees with those numbers. They say there is at least a 230 year supply. And that isn't even taking into account any increases in efficiency (most of the US nuclear plants were built using 1960s technology, newer plants being built today are more efficient), finding undiscovered resources, etc. into the equation.

Coal Ash more radioactive than Nuclear Waste

Meltdown proof reactors (search for meltdown to find the relevant part)

And the better overall part?: No greenhouse gases.

Forget about the CO2. What about the fact that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste?

just less concentrated. Interesting SciAm article

The Problem is that the majority of Brazil's soil is actually quite poor and loses it's sustainability as arable soil after 2-3 seasons (which is why they keep burning more and more forest).

Well the answer there is "terra preta do indios", or "black earth of the Indians"

The black earth areas, about twice the size of Great Britain, possibly as large as France together had supported as many as three million people - more than had been believed to have ever inhabited the entire Western Hemisphere at any one time. They had realized that the black earth was fertile, but had never imagined that the Amazon basin could be so hugely productive. Saving The Planet While Saving The Farm

Terra petra is fantastically fertile, the Brazilians actually mine this earth for use as potting soil, which is amazing considering most of it's age is measured in millennia not years! Also growing sugarcane doesn't necessarily deplete the soil if the cane field is burned and the char left on the ground, some varieties are even nitrogen fixing.
Additionally converting biomass to char produces distillates that are useful as fuel creating a win-win situation.

The fact is that the CO2 that humans put into the atmosphere is infinitesimal compared to volcanoes and the oceans. Not quite. Read on McDuff. And look, even more refutation. Are we done with this canard yet?

Yes quite. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TqqWJugXzs

The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is currently measured to be 0.038%. A staggering 0.28% of that is directly attributable to human beings. I can keep this up as long and probably longer than you can...

The fact is that the CO2 that humans put into the atmosphere is infinitesimal compared to volcanoes and the oceans.

Not quite. Read on McDuff. And look, even more refutation.

Are we done with this canard yet?

It does the same thing.

You were probably joking, but there is actual research that suggests you're correct (second link is about psilocybin but its effects are known to be quite similar)
http://books.google.com/books?id=mGscSLMA_P4C&lpg=PA199&ots=JOhFdkh5qu&dq=study%20lsd%20spiritual%20experience&lr=&pg=PA202#v=onepage&q=study%20lsd%20spiritual%20experience&f=false
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=visions-for-psychedelics

This is a really interesting question, and as your link points out, a very difficult one to solve given that we know so little of our own history. There is a lot of evidence human civilization was thriving until a comet strike about 13,000 years ago on the North American continent wiped out most of the worlds population and potentially raised sea levels dramatically, submerging their cities.

There is evidence that there were some advanced civilizations prior to the theorized comet incident. They might have had large populations. The problem is that this topic tends to attract the type of people that like to throw around terms like "Atlantians" and "Nephilim", so its really hard to casually research. Typing in "13,000" and "comet" to Google gets you mostly websites with black backgrounds with star fields on them, purple new-age-y fonts, and a lot of talk about Noah and aliens (contributing greatly to the 95% of the internet is bullshit figure above, I'm sure).

lol... it doesn't deny climate change, what it does do it show where source material came from

And my science link didn't sat where it came from? If you want me to believe that then you didn't read it.

also i think you'll find that little things such as the CRU data leak which showed them to be a bunch of number fiddling and lying turds also throw doubt on the human cause of any climate change.

Where did I say anything about CRU? Without googling it I don't even know what the CRU is.

now where you have people fiddling numbers and using dubious sources i think it's not unreasonable to have reasonable doubt.

Oh, I agree. Let's take for instance where deniers are saying we're in a cooling trend. If fact the 2000s were the hottest decade on record. The only way to make it look like there's been some cooling is by using 1998 as the starting date. Because of El Nino that was a hot year and temperatures spiked as shown by this graph. There is no cooling, in fact the 2000s was the hottest decade.

however i think it you google a little you will find the net awash with 3660 hits for "IPCC student dissertation climbing magazine"

And if you google Syed Hasnain new scientist magazine ipcc you'll find about 200,000. The first one is the link I provided with the two following also from "New Scientist". I don't know, maybe they were both used, so I'm willing to let that go for now.

there also happens to be an ASSLOAD of people making truckloads of money out of ittwinned with a mass of rank hypocrisy

And just as above, about "people fiddling numbers", there are lots of people who could make tankers full of money out of disproving Global Warming. Coal, petroleum, and other fossil fuel industries stand to lose a lot of money if their products are regulated and or taxed. Now which has the deeper pockets, Exxon-Mobile or Greenpeace?

Now I'm not saying we have to do whatever it takes to stop Global Warming. I don't even like that term and prefer Climate Change. What I would like to see is alternative energy sources developed and for the US to work on them before we become has-beens. While China is busy building new coal fired power plants they are also busy building massive wind farms and installing solar energy systems. Mexico and the Philippines are using geothermal energy and so can the US. By one estimate, SciAm's A Solar Grand Plan, solar energy can provide 69% of the US's electricity and 35% of it's total energy by 2050 using just a part of the Southwest. And the NREL's Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the Unites States lays out the wind potential of different areas of the US. The Rockies from Canada to northern Texas for instance contain enough potential energy to supply all 48 continuous states with electricity. However they aren't the only places. On the West Coast from British Columbia to Southern CA then east through AZ and NM to west Texas there's good wind sites. To the east from the Appalachians in the south up through the Northeast there is good wind potential both on-shore and off-shore. NIMBYs, notably the deceased Ted Kennedy, did whatever they could to stop offshore wind farms. In 2007 California, already mentioned for solar and wind power, got 4.5% of it energy from geothermal sources.

Also don't

Sorry, not on the tip of my tongue (or fingers). I remember there was a great Scientific American article about the technology in December of 2005. Unfortunately, they have changed their web site and you have to have a subscription to read it. SciAm is a good source of info on this topic. Here is a link to search results on SciAm's site. And here is a link to a talk by the scientist who is promoting the technology (I know. Esquire?).

Sorry, not on the tip of my tongue (or fingers). I remember there was a great Scientific American article about the technology in December of 2005. Unfortunately, they have changed their web site and you have to have a subscription to read it. SciAm is a good source of info on this topic. Here is a link to search results on SciAm's site. And here is a link to a talk by the scientist who is promoting the technology (I know. Esquire?).

The cost of a program to detect all credible collision threats and do something about it is, I imagine, around $1 billion per annum. The cost of a single asteroid collision in the developed world could easily run into thousands of times that. Look on it as relatively cheap life insurance, on a par with solving the Year 2000 problem and cheaper than protecting the US eastern seaboard against inundation, and it makes a lot of sense.

FYI, the estimated annual cost for finding 90% of near-Earth asteroids more than 140m in diameter is expected to be at least $50 million; currently only $4 million a year is spent on this. Here's a recent summary of the situation:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=new-report-warns-against-smaller-ne-2010-01-22

The bad news in the report from the National Research Council is that the $4 million in annual funding that several major NEO detection programs receive is nowhere near enough to meet a 2020 deadline set by Congress in 2005 for scientists to find 90 percent of near-Earth objects greater than 140-meters in diameter--space rocks of this size are likely to cause regional, rather than global, damage, though global damage is still possible. The mandate has yet to receive any funding. One of these regional-threat objects strikes Earth on average every 30,000 years, the report states.

Even $10 million in annual funds "would not allow completion on any time scale" of the Congressionally mandated survey of the threats, according to the report. Meeting Congress's goal would take at least $50 million in annual funding; even better would be $250 million in annual funding, with the latter allowing for completion of the survey and support for a space mission to test a mitigation plan.

Problem: Geothermal power triggers earthquakes. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geothermal-drilling-earthquakes

A collision between asteroids? Who wants to bet a woman was driving one of them?

According to this recent article, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pregnant-brain-as-racecar , they (at least the pregnant or postpartum) have a lot more on their minds than us simple menfolk.

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan (both known nuclear powers, who don't get along) could conceivably be enough to cause a 'nuclear winter': Scientific American

Basically, soot would get blown into the stratosphere, where it shades the planet. (Oh, and destroys the ozone layer while it's at it.)

So, it could be a problem for the rest of the world.

Recent article in Scientific American suggests that local nuclear war could have wider consequences than previously believed. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=local-nuclear-war

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=proof-of-martians-to-come-this-year-2010-01

He still (literally!) licks his plate clean at home.

Scientific American Mind recently published an article entitled Dangerous Liaisons: How to Deal with a Drama Queen.

Hopefully the tips therein will help you respond to your father's more outlandish displays. =)

I couldn't find that article, but I found this one. Could lead to better treatments for depression in the future.

Admittedly, whatever trite little phrases like 'citation needed' mean, I wouldn't feel comfortable referencing a popular science magazine (unless I was a wikipedia editor, of course).

How about stopping all this crap with so many vaccines?

Vaccines are good when they're needed but how many of them are not needed?

Do you remember how many vaccines you got growing up?
Well, check how many more vaccines children now get.

Vaccines are a hallmark of how great and beneficial our Medicine can be, but please:

Stop putting all this chemical crap into vaccines (preservatives, etc.) or at least give us (those who worry about what's injected into our kids) an alternative that we can trust. We're more than willing to pay extra for it.

Make those with a vested interest in the sale of vaccines have no say in which and how many vaccines we get.(Just check how much the H1N1 vaccine companies made, they love pandemics).

Stop with the "vaccines are the best things in the world and you are part of the 'axis of evil' if you think otherwise" BS. You're just as crazy as those who think that all vaccines should be banned. Just think critically and be skeptical both about promoters of vaccines and those who oppose them.

Many think that vaccines contribute to autism, I think vinyl floors could be worse. But in rare situation, maybe vaccines are a contributing factor, maybe they are not. Show me truly impartial research.

Now I'm off to research if all the money spent vaccinating children against polio in a country that hasn't had a "wild case" since 1979 would have been enough to have already eradicated the disease globally. It's frightening that this vaccine currently causes more harm than good.(In the US 8-9 cases/year caused by the vaccine, 0 cases are caused by the actual disease since 79, but the vaccine companies are laughing all the way to the bank)

If I glanced correctly at this article, which does ramble on, prions are rogue proteins which aren't just detrimental to the organism, but cause other proteins to mutate as well. It wasn't clear to me if they do this by altering the genetic code or the neighbouring proteins directly.

The host organism may apparently have DNA of such nature that a random mutation reliably triggers the disease symptoms. This indicates to me that the code molecules exist in a higher energetic state and them getting upset makes them fall to a predictable lower energetic state which happens to produce malignant proteins.

This doesn't seem to be about wether or not prions are alive, but if disease is living. I think that instead of giving life a broader sense, we need to split the concept up to be more specific. I would be comfortable calling things that have neurons and therefre possess intelligence "living", and everything else "biomass". That way a tree isn't alive, but it is capable of becoming dead biomass. A person in a coma isn't alive, but enters the category of biomass.

Of course more useful definitons are possible. This is just something to tickle your creativity.

First? Is there some reason we need to serialize the problems? I agree that humanity needs to try to level off population growth, and maybe even try to gradually decline it, over the course of a few generations, down to 4-6 Billion. Does that mean we have to wait until the population is lower to try to find the energy necessary for things like Water desalination/purification, air conditioning, refrigeration, etc?

I think these are problems that can, and must, be solved in parallel. Even if we could flatten population growth tomorrow, we still need more/cheaper energy. Also, we are in a race to ensure we have enough energy to just sustain *current levels* as oil production will likely gradually decline as we move into the future. Right now, the only thing we seem to have enough of to replace oil with is coal, but that produces lots of problems too - like radioactive waste emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.

Hence, current interest in solar and wind power. I tend to have some sympathy to the argument that, in addition to solar and wind projects, we need to look into developing the Integral Fast Reactor concept - because it solves 2 problems at once: what to do with radioactive "waste" we've already created and have tons of sitting in storage at reactors around the country and how to generate lots of power for the future.

Disclaimer: I'm not any sort of expert on this stuff. Ignore me or laugh at me as you like.

I'm dubious about this. The scale of the thing is staggering, and it's hard to believe it will produce a better electrical output than if you spent a similar amount of money building a molten-salt solar thermal plant instead. Unlike molten salt solar thermal, this won't make electricity at night.

The one thing that makes this interesting is that it combines a giant greenhouse with the energy generation. If you can somehow make the greenhouse part very profitable (growing exotic fruit that is expensive to transport, or some such) then maybe you might have a payoff to match the expense. Maybe. But I'm dubious.

steveha

Reading OMNI always felt a bit like an exercise in wishful thinking. It was like reading car magazines that feature incredible prototypes. Yes they're awesome, but you're never going to see one in your lifetime. OMNI was about what was possible, not what was actually happening.

To read about real advances, I preferred Scientific American, especially back when Martin Gardner wrote for them. Prior to that, I never used the terms "recreational" and "mathematics" in the same sentence.

On a side note, there was a fantastic 3D illusion created as a tribute to Gardner. It's still available for download here.

If only the US had launched some space observatories
If only the US had bothered to maintain some of its science assets
If only the US had conducted any exploration of our solar system
If only the US had commissioned any meaningful physics experiments
If only the US had any anthropologists discovering stuff
If only the US had any geneticists discovering stuff
If only the US had bothered to conduct any nuclear physics experiments
If only the US had any medical science to speak of
If only the US had any practicing bioengineers
If only the US had funded any studies into the harmful effects of BPA

...then maybe then SlashSnot editors would avoid indulging their myopic views of the US science.

But really, if these guys were so smart, why are they extinct? Our little, dumb human brains managed to figure it out, so...?

Given that they only died off about 10,000 years ago (meaning they survived a really long time as far as the homo genus goes) , I'm guessing that it was something specific that killed them like a sudden massive climate shift caused by a random event, like a comet hitting the earth. Granted these bones are from 10,000 years ago not 13,000, but 3000 years is a pretty reasonable amount of time for a species to die off after a major catastrophe if it has a major rival such as homo sapiens.

On the other hand, St. John's Wort has been proven as effective at treating depression as Paxil. So you can't lump all the herbals together. Just because Ginko doesn't work doesn't mean no herbs work.

Not according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Yes there has... on a far smaller scale, and just recently. Triggered earthquakes before they even finished the project.

Here's one report on why it's a bad idea:
How Does Geothermal Drilling Trigger Earthquakes?

Here's what happened when someone tried it anyway...
BBC News Report

Markus Haering's company had been working with the authorities in Basel to try to convert the heat in deep-seated rocks into electricity.

But the project was suspended in 2006 when drilling triggered the quakes.

Now, that was near a major fault line... so there is some difference. But the Yellowstone Caldera and such are ON a few hundred thousand cubic mile hotspot that may be connected to the Earth's core mantle. And Yellowstone is HIGHLY quake active. More so than many major fault lines. Ya know... only one thousand to two thousand (or even as high as THREE thousand) a year... and recently (like this past December/January) many times more than that.

Drilling on a restless supervolcano still seems like a bad idea - at least to me.

On reading many of these posts that show up whenever climate change is mentioned, I am reminded of the following article, which I will quote below in its entirety. I found it in Scientific American.

War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation?
In the 24/7 Internet world, people make lots of claims. Science provides a guide for testing them
By Lawrence M. Krauss

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

As I listen to the manifest nonsense that has been promulgated by the likes of right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors in response to the effort to bring the U.S. into alignment with other industrial countries in providing reasonable and affordable health care for all its citizens, it seems that things have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words.

English novelist George Orwell was remarkably prescient about many things, and one of the most disturbing aspects of his masterpiece 1984 involved the blatant perversion of objective reality, using constant repetition of propaganda by a militaristic government in control of all the media.

Centrally coordinated and fully effective reinvention of reality has not yet come about in the U.S. (even though a White House aide in the past administration came chillingly close when he said to a New York Times reporter, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”). I am concerned, however that something equally pernicious, at least to the free exercise of democracy, has.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.

Now fabrications about “death panels” and oxymoronic claims that ”government needs to keep its hands off of Medicare” flow freely on the Internet, driving thousands of zombielike protesters to Washington to argue that access to health care will undermine their fundamental freedom to have their insurance canceled if they get sick. And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ”breaking” coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ”fair and balanced” in their reporting.

“Fair and balanced,” however, doesn’t mean putting all viewpoints, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by

Unfounded denier claim #6 of 7. The coal/oil/transport industry probably spend more money in PR than all scientists taken together.

Is it so hard to give enough information to find the actual publication that has the important details? I'm taking it as a given that the Telegraph can't be bothered to explain -how- this is different from earlier muscle cell cultures, but at least they could give me enough info to find articles that will tell me that. I mean, did these researchers actually publish a real paper in a peer-reviewed journal or did they just bypass that and go straight to the telegraph?

What's new about this?

Muscle cells have apperantly been cultured since 1968, although there isn't much about whether or not these cells proliferate in culture. A paper from 1988 claims to have gotten progenitor cells to turn into muscle cells in culture.

This article, still not a paper, from scientific american suggests that at least one Dutch researcher is interested in turning embryonic stem cells into meat. Those cultures don't last very long either according to the article: "Unfortunately, Roelen's cultures only survive a few months before they sputter, failing to reproduce because of genetic problems—their chromosomes become deformed or cells end up with too many copies. His group also works with adult stem cells extracted from skeletal muscle—a direct approach for in vitro meat."

I guess this might be the article in question, Roelen reports isolating a progenitor cell type that can be directed to either increase their numbers or turn into muscle cells. That’s almost a year old though. This article is more likely the one that sparked the telegraph article, the lab discusses factors that affect that culture system.

Post, quoted in the telegraph article, doesn't appear to be too directly involved, his research interests seem more about blood vessels and I couldn’t find any papers from his lab that looked relevant, but I didn’t do an exhaustive search on pubmed.

That'll drive up the price of land. But don't worry, the market will fix it - people will produce more of it.

Fixed.

Falcon

Probably not true in the form the OP stated; he didn't even specify the capacities of the plants in question. However, it is true that, on a per unit energy produced basis, coal-burning power plants produce significantly more radioactive waste than a nuclear fission plant does - and, unlike the fission reactor, the coal power plant pours it all into the atmosphere. See Scientific American - Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste.

Not necessarily true, adaptations to consumption of milk has happened within a relatively short timespan: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neolithic-europeans-lactose-tolerance People live much longer than they did tens of thousands of years ago for several reasons, one among them being diets were no where near as varied and able to supply all the necessary nutrients we require as we have today ("Mammoth steaks AGAIN?"), even though there is plenty of unhealthy modern food, there is plenty which has been created within the even the last 100 years which has improved the quality of healthy eating. There have been plenty of developments in the history of humankind which have provided advantages, you really can't say that suddenly stopped 10's of thousands of years ago.

Either you smoke or you don't, that's your choice.

Addiction isn't the problem with smoking. The side effects of being a smoker--smelling bad, getting sick more easily, and risking lung cancer et al.--are what's wrong with smoking.

Personally, I love to smoke, but I hate being a smoker. Smoking a few cigarettes a week isn't a problem from my point of view, but it may not mean that you're not addicted to them.

Check out that link for some very interesting and, I think, necessary reading.

Cheers.

This is the same basic result as a previous article:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/26/1856230/New-Optomechanical-Crystal-Allows-Confinement-of-Light-and-Sound

The structure in the current article is a ring resonator in this article. In the previous article the structure was a grating based resonator.

I found an article with better information:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=optical-force-gradient

It may be more of a danger to children, but to dismiss an environment that is coated with poison dust as harmless without further study is absurd.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-third-hand-smoke

First, let's change the rhetoric to "chemicals" instead of the FUD "poison." Virtually the same chemicals exist in wood smoke that exist in cigarette smoke--unsurprising since they're both combustion byproducts of plant matter. If you want some pretty reliable numbers on amounts resulting from combustion, I refer you to the EPA's AP-42 for wood combustion (scroll down to Ch. 1.6). Pretty much every scary-sounding chemical in cigarette smoke is also in your friendly campfire. Dioxins, arsenic, mercury, lead, etc. The difference is people actively breathe in the smoke from a cigarette, which leads me to...

Second, how a chemical enters your body and in what quantities is equally important. Just as you haven't died from your first exposure to a campfire, so too will you not die from incidental exposure to cigarette residue. Inhalation and injection are efficient ways to get chemicals into your body, but absorption through undamaged skin is pretty damn inefficient for most.

All this to say that "third hand smoke" is a FUD buzzword. It's nothing more than the microscopic particulate traces (i.e. ash) containing the same compounds you'd find from standing near a campfire. Back to the topic at hand--that incidental exposure to a surface stained by cigarette smoke is unlikely to cause anything other than personal discomfort as long as you wash your hand afterwards.

It may be more of a danger to children, but to dismiss an environment that is coated with poison dust as harmless without further study is absurd.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-third-hand-smoke

I notice you did not comment on my limited resources refutation.

I didn't because that applies to virtually everything whether "green"or not. We haven't gotten to the point where we can get more energy out of hydrogen than what is put into making it.

I thought your characterization of NIMBYs had some merit.

Ted Kennedy who I had mentioned before was one of the NIMBYs who opposed an offshore wind farm in Cape Cod.

photocells: a more sophisticated approach as to how we make our living is that we increase the energy density in the productive process.

I don't know for fact but I think concentrated solar power has a higher efficiency than PVs. It also doesn't need as much rare earth metals I read in a science article. PVs can be used in smaller areas though.

I oppose general power supplies from solar power. Too low density to be really helpful for our continued existence.

Do you know more about solar power than those who write for SciAm? A Solar Grand Plan estimates solar power can "supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050." In the article Sunny Outlook: Can Sunshine Provide All U.S. Electricity? it is claimed solar can provide all of California's and Texas' electricity. It goes on: "The entire energy use of 2006, the current technology including storage would use a patch of land 92 miles by 92 miles," O'Donnell says. "Ten percent of the [Bureau of Land Management] land in Nevada is enough."

Now on to sanity. suppose we had a nuclear spasm.
would you classify that as sane? If not, why not? If not sane, how do classify the people who advocated this?
How do you classify the people whose policies led to this?

Sane? I don't consider nuclear power sane. As for those whose policies favored nuclear power, ump. Ike, Dwight D Eisenhower, favored policies friendly to nuclear power. He also warned about the military industrial complex, yet he made them powerful, with his push against democracy in Viet Nam. Yes he opposed democracy in Viet Nam. By 1954-55 the French and North and South Vietnam came to an agreement whereby the people in Viet Nam would vote for reunification. Ike sent then Colonel Edward Lansdale to South Vietnam to arm and train Vietnamese who opposed reunification. If it hadn't been for that military contractors may never have gotten so big. They had a new war, the Vietnam War.

Falcon