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Too bad what you learned was wrong.

I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. They're directly helping you and you're indirectly hurting people? They're injecting you with an inactive harmless version of the disease that will protect you, while you're infecting other people with an active harmful version of the disease that may kill them. In either case, the sanctity of someone's body is being violated and it seems to me that what you're doing is worse in every way that matters. Therefore, if they deserve death, you deserve it more.

Also what's your stand on inhalable vaccines? If you're not injected, but instead required to breath in the vaccine does that make a difference to you? Are you still allowed to murder people for violating your body or is it hunky-dory because it's not "piercing someone else's skin"?

As a GG app developer, let me give my perspective.

As a longtime GG user, perspective is a dim and distant memory.

So I'm trying to quantify the proprtion of nutrition label calories that get turned to ATP, and it seems that there's not much consensus. Here is an article claiming that "the calories that you see written on the back of a food pack have already had all of these adjustments made for the amount that will be digested and absorbed". Here is an article claiming that what's on the label could differ from what you actually metabolize by maybe 20%. Based on my non-scientific survey of google search results, a majority of people believe actual caloric value to differ from label caloric value, but there doesn't seem to be any consensus regarding what percentage is metabolized on average. Looks like I'll need to shit into a bomb calorimeter if I want a real answer.

Was hoping that I'd have some extra wiggle room in my diet based on all of this, but it's not clear that that's the case. So much for quantified self.

The gene that causes white skin is highly dominant, even with only 5% neanderthal DNA we still carry it.

Would you reference that? As far as I know, this assertion is false because there several genes involved and dominancy is partial at best.

It depends what apples you want to compare. The fact that it is cooler higher up is a result of the first law of thermodynamics. The pressure of a gas can be used to do work, so it should be counted as energy. These guys did a better explanation of it than I can do: http://www.thenakedscientists.....

  The premise of the greenhouse effect is that the atmosphere absorbs the heat radiating away from the planet leading to an increase in temperature. The atmosphere of Venus doesn't get down to 1 bar until you're 50 km away from the surface. At this point you're above 90% of the mass of the atmosphere, so there simply isn't enough CO2 (or anything for that matter) to absorb the heat being radiated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

If you were to look at a gas giant, the atmosphere probably absorbs a far higher amount of the radiated energy, even though there aren't as many of the "traditional" greenhouse gasses. As you said, the atmospheric temperature of Jupiter probably matches the same correlation for Venus, because it's far enough away from the surface of the planet that it is ruled by the simple physics of gas laws and absorption of radiation.

And it looks real pretty, too, when it burns.

Although that's not a mountain, just wool. But, when you thing about it, a lump of wool sometimes just looks like the "cloud" that just burned up here.

if you drank such water it would strip all the nutrients out of your body and kill you

Do you have a credible link to that obvious bullshit statement? I've seen it before, but it makes absolutely no sense at all.

They're using sterilized water so as not to pollute the lake itself with organisms or minerals.

My old man always told me "don't believe nothin' you hear and only half of what you see." You should follow that advice; whoever told you distilled water would strip the nutrients out of your body and kill you was someone you should NEVER get "information" from.

Apparently it is attached to the rover by the horizontal cylinder shaped appendix between the front wheels.
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/uploads/RTEmagicC_Msl-arm.jpg.jpg

Also google for "mars curiosity arm" theres some really nice pictures there.

Brief info on tides: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/1225/

And, of course, there's the Inverse Square Law: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/forces/isq.html

The CRT puts out a great deal of radiation and wastes a great deal of energy. Through a series of regulations at various national levels, a standard was put in place to limit the radiation of the CRT. The ultimate solution was the LCD, but that was expensive. However, in a short time, due to interaction between government and corporate interests, almost everyone has moved away from the CRT to a more efficient and safe LCD. Does the CRT really cause damage? Who knows, but because all this was done under the table we are saved from the hooligans of conservatism and libertarians shouting from the rooftops that the LCD is a communist plot and anyone who wants an LCD hates America, or whatever.

I congratulate you to a well written troll post. However, there are some nutcases that really believe a CRT TV put out harmful radiation, you might want to make sure you don't get confused with them in any way.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/2417/

It's wires and electricity, not nuclear waste. By your logic, maybe we should be afraid of balloons that we rub on our hair too.

And you don't need to be an electrical engineer to get a basic understanding of the difference between static charge and radiation.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/lighting-bulbs-without-wires/

And no one is trolling you. People are calling you out for your stupid, uninformed, FUD-mongering.

My post had nothing to do with being afraid of power lines or with spreading FUD. The original poster said walking under power lines made his skin crawl and his hair stand on end. He was responded to by saying he was nervous and illogical. If static electricity can make your hair stand on end, and power lines can make your hair stand on end, how the fsck is he 'nervous and illogical'?!?

It's wires and electricity, not nuclear waste. By your logic, maybe we should be afraid of balloons that we rub on our hair too.

And you don't need to be an electrical engineer to get a basic understanding of the difference between static charge and radiation.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/lighting-bulbs-without-wires/

And no one is trolling you. People are calling you out for your stupid, uninformed, FUD-mongering.

I dunno, though, it just seems like they could have done something new (at least new to the show) that would be just as engaging. Like debunking the professor's use of coconuts to power a radio on Gilligan's Island or something.

The Professor was a genius in the coconut-engineering arts, and I will not stand idly by while his good name is besmirched.

I challenge the Mythbusters to debunk that myth without resorting to pedantry.* Coconut milk is mildly acidic electrolytic solution. If you can power electronics using lemons and potatoes, you can power a radio using coconuts. Frankly, I don't think that it even constitutes a good challenge. Scale it up to charging the battery for the engine(s) on the S.S. Minnow and you might have something Mythbusters worthy.

*The power in these batteries comes from a redox reaction between the anode and cathode materials, rather than the food. You could power your radio with electrodes placed in saltwater rather than any of the lemons, potatoes, or coconuts and there's not going to be any make-it-or-break-it difference. However, coconut-engineering skills would have been more uniquely marketable to the likes of Tina Louise and Dawn Wells. Engineering might and business acumen all in one. Hail Roy Hinkley!

URL http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26641.100

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26641.100

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=27331.0

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/questions/question/2008/

The volcano is roughly 100 times as green if we're talking about CO2 emissions, and 10 times as green if we're talking about SO2. Of course, that's assuming that given

Pv = the pollution output from this volcano over two years
Pvt = total pollution output by volcanoes.
Pe = European airplane pollution
Pht = total human-sourced pollution

Pe / Pht == Pv / Pvt

And there are some gaping flaws in that logic, but the point is volcanoes are fairly inconsequential as drivers of pollution.

Already been done.

Like the other replies to this post, I completely agree -- I wish more teachers thought like this (and not *just* in chemistry). Teaching chemistry using "theory only" is like teaching programming using pen and paper (which I'm old enough to remember, and greatly resent).

This is about mnemonics. Associate formulas, tables, ratios and reactions with visual memory -- seeing is remembering. Sometimes you don't even have to do the experiment in class -- if something is either dangerous or expensive, there's probably plenty of videos online of the process. This is actually a subject matter in which youtube is a "good resource" (for the visuals, anyway).

Here are a few sites that either give examples of practical/cheap experiments or provide videos of all sorts of chemistry-related material:
thenakedscientists.com
http://www.rsc.org/education/teachers/learnnet/videoclips.htm
http://www.planet-scicast.com/experiments.cfm

Here are a few additional online chemistry resources (the more visual information, the better):
webelements.com
chemicool.com
periodictable.com
periodicvideos.com
practicalchemistry.org
mindat.org

It's like any other subject -- get the students *interested* in _topic_, and they'll teach themselves.

modest exposure to the sun without sunblock.

It's easy to blame it on video games and bad parents, all that money spent on PSA to always use sunblock isn't to blame.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/uploads/RTEmagicC_Blackest_Black_01.jpg.jpg See that center thing. It could be that color.

As a HAM, I have met a few who have nifty gear able to tune into cell phones and their 'pings' or tower replies (from post-911 US cellphones) and a few of them have told me that there seems to be more than just pinging or tickling the towers going on. More than is needed to keep up the TX/RX channels open or for simply switching towers based on cell tower capacity and range to the handset.
Others hinted that the removal of the battery does not fully prevent (post-911 US cellphones) from receiving radio frequency energy and replying uniquely (just like RFID tags do but cell phones have Much better antennas).
Links that touch some on this topic:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=8068
http://jya.com/cell-track.htm
http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/37748res20081112.html
http://allgpstracking.net/gpstracking/index.php/gpstracking/2006/03/12/how_gps_works_gps_tracking
http://ezinearticles.com/?Cell-Phone-Location-Tracking-Information&id=782355
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21442821-Cell-phone-location-tracking-without-telcos-help
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081116-foia-docs-show-feds-can-lojack-mobiles-without-telco-help.html
http://www.danbrown.com/secrets/digital_fortress/cell_phones.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3945496.ece
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but because RFID tags cost only a few cents each, why would similar capability NOT be incorporated into the chips of modern cell phones. Tear down an RFID tag, it is just a very very small semiconductor chip paired to a set of antennas between layers of opaque plastic tape an a sticker backing.
(NOTE: In college, we had fun by carefully removing discovered RFID tags and 'repatriating' them onto different and unrelated merchandise at our local Wal-Mart Supercenter... good times..... not to be confused with the old tried and true bi-metallic strips that loss control departments use which set off the door antenna loops that we all walk through. But sticking one of those to your buddy's jacket made for a good laugh...)

I listen to the following podcasts that cover technical subjects and are the best I've found. The Naked Scientists provide the best overall coverage in hour-long sessions. Leoville's Futures in Biotech is very good in this cutting-edge field, but offers a limited number of entries. Perhaps more donations would enable the producer to do more. Microbeworld offers one-minute bites. Some of the leoville material that covers his radio call-in program last 2 hrs. Except for the FIB, all of his stuff is electronics-related (computers--Mac and Windows --, computer security, cell phones, digital cameras, and home theater). Some casts involve panels and guests. I've not included several more he does relating to food and children. Time compression software or other enhanced playback options are helpful with it as well as the other items if your time is limited.The Lancet offers several categories of current medical info. Podnuts is a computer repair discussion. Ziepod on Vista Home Premium works well to download all new episodes once a week. http://leoville.tv/podcasts/twit.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/microbeworld http://www.theworld.org/rss/tech.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/kfi.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/fib.xml http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/quirksaio.xml http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/rss.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/leo.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laneur.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/lancet.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laninf.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/podnutz http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/mh/rss.xml

Perhaps you need to learn some chemistry, because what you wrote is total garbage.

I have an idea, why don't you just retake your chemistry course and pay attention this time. You had me questioning what I wrote so I looked it up and found that I am right. Maybe you should show some links to your restrictive theory on the subject, I am going to post a couple that completely disagree with you.

By definition a catalyst remains unchanged; if it's used up, then it's a reactant.

No, a separate reaction can be a catalyst in itself. But more importantly, that wasn't what I was talking about. I'm talking about the destruction of the specific arangment of the catalyst that causes it to lose it's effectiveness. Take the etching process in hydrolysis or even a lead acid battery, It doesn't actually convert the metals but it separates them from the electrode and you often have to reverse the energy to cause them to recombine. The electrode is basically destroyed in the process because it becomes the metal/material gets separated from the electrode itself and floats inside the solution and needs to be recombined later.

Because it's faster. But (again) it doesn't change the net energy balance. If you can't wait until you get to high school to ask the science teacher, look it up; google's over there somewhere.

OK, perhaps there is something wrong with your reading comprehension and you can't understand me or the science behind it. Both this encyclopedia page and this separate page parrot what I said. Hmmm... Must be because I learned about them from google searches.. That would mean that either you are right and everyone else is wrong or that I somehow confused everyone into ignoring what is right and believe what I say that is wrong. I think the likelihood of the second is pretty much nil, If I had that power, I would be a politician looking for payouts instead of sitting here talking to you. So that leaves us to the reality that your just wrong. There could be a lot of reasons why your wrong, we won't get into that right now, but your wrong. I can find other links backing my statements up and I doubt you can find a general link that doesn't deal with a specific reaction making your case.

In fact, I see how you avoided the entire why would you use a catalyst in hydrolysis if the input energy to cause the reaction process is already directly tied to how fast the process can work. If you would have attempted to answer that, you would have been painted into the corner of reality and had to admit that the "Catalysts work by changing the activation energy for a reaction, i.e., the minimum energy needed for the reaction to occur." and that reduced the amount of energy needed.

Are you really sure about that?

Why hasnt this been true in the case of boric acid vs cockroaches? We've used boric acid over 100 years, and no resistances as of yet.

There's just certain chemicals that directly affect the chemistry of a biological critter that I dont think we could ever adapt to.

Well, I was going to say that an example would be sodium cyanide... but this, specifically

and a few species (e.g. the Giant Bamboo in its shoots) are known to contain cyanides. Interestingly, the Golden Bamboo Lemur is able to consume Giant Bamboo shoots containing many times the lethal dose of cyanide for humans and most other animals, with no ill effects. The reason for its immunity is not yet understood.

proves me wrong, at least on -CN. I would still wonder if anything could survive fluorine gas treatments though..

Still, has evolutionary theory gave a timeline in which mutations of such scope would occur? I mean, one would need a mitochrondrial evolution to stop the denaturing of that protein.

Sure Dad's workbench had tools, but more importantly, there was scrap wood of all varieties and sizes, fasteners, ropes...

My first go-kart grew out of lawn mower wheels and stuff around, no adults involved.

Mom had cupboards filled with craft supplies. Want to make a birthday card for them or gift? There was sparkle, glue, wax for melting into candles. Need a parachute? Fabric scraps...

Another great thing my parents did was NOT give us "age appropriate" gifts but some gives we'd grow in to over the year. That "kit" that baffled us when we unrapped it might become a favorite ten months later.

Want a 10-speed bike? I couldn't have it until I disassembled and reassembled it.

(Thankfully I didn't have to do that with my first car, but my brother did.)

Lastly, there's also things like BBC radio show: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/ which offers kitchen experiments each week you can do in ten minutes to foster curiosity and a nugget of knowledge.

Subscribing to a magazine like that can do wonders.

hth! -Randy

PS: I loved reading, to not get caught reading after bedtime, I ran a train transformer's wire over to a thumbtack stuck in my bedroom door's jamb, back to a car's parking light bulb, so when my door was opened to check on me (from seeing the light spillage under the door), the light went off automatically and all I had to do was hide the book and pretend to be asleep.

The Naked Scientist actully just had a Podcast [MP3 Link] about music and science. If you find music and science interesting, I think it is a good listen. Not quite on the string theory level, but non the less I think it is relivant.

You might be surprised to find that in shanty towns in Johannesburg people have TVs even though they don't electricity. How you ask? They use car batteries.

You underestimate how important consumer electronics and information access are to people. People don't just go without water because their homes are not connected to the water supply. They grab it from the nearest well. Same is true for electricity.

Famine relief is important, but different types of aid are not mutually exclusive. And one might even argue that the OLPC project is more beneficial in the long term. You know, the whole teach a man to fish cliche. People make this sort of argument about any kind of cause: why do we care about human rights in China when people are dying of AIDS in Africa. People help in ways they are in a position to help. Folks at the MIT Media Lab are best at making gadgets, god bless 'em for putting their skills to good use. I'd rather them work on OLPC than mail flour to Sudan in bulk. Other organizations have the expertise and the resources to provide that kind of relief.

The rest die off in at most a few years, and decay pretty quickly.

Bingo! What do you think is trapped in decayed plant matter? Hydrocarbons.

No, I understand the biology completely. Unfortunately, you appear to be looking at this through an ideological lens. Plus you don't seem to understand where that 'soil-produced' CO2 comes from.

No, you're still missing my point. Fallow land looks like this:

CO2 -> live plant -> dead plant -> soil organic matter

This goes on for hundreds of years. Lots of carbon builds up in the ground that way. Sometimes that carbon gets buried for millions of years turning it into fossil fuels:

soil organic matter -> buried millions of years -> fossil fuels

You are complaining about the combustion of fossil fuels because it releases CO2:

fossil fuels -> oxidation -> CO2

Plowing exposes soil organic matter to natural weathering which results in erosion/oxidation and releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. Therefore, a plan to take land not currently in crop production to grow corn for bio-fuels looks like this:

soil organic matter -> oxidation -> CO2

Look familiar? I'm not talking about the CO2 that is in the air that you plan to recycle. I'm talking about the CO2 already captured in the ground where it will stay until you start your plows. Putting more land into crop production will release that CO2. You're essentially burning tons of fossil fuels before they become fossil fuels.

Besides that elementary fact about the carbon cycle... Keep in mind that farmers use lots of lime to raise the pH of acidic soils rich in organic matter.... CaCO3 + H -> Ca + OH + CO2. Then there's nitrogen fertilizer, used abundantly in corn production... yielding acid rain, smog, holes in the ozone, and greenhouse gases. Hooray!!

The sequestered carbon becomes fossil fuels.

Not if you oxidize it before it gets there.

Releasing that carbon is what upsets the balance and leads to a net increase in CO2 level.

And that's exactly what will happen with this retarded corn bio-fuel scheme. Releasing billions of tons of sequestered carbon that lived happily as soil organic matter until you decided to plow land it was trapped in. I'll assure you the people advocating this scheme know this. They only care about themselves and their corn prices. Starving people be damned, lets burn food!

If you really cared and wanted to reduce CO2, you'd be advocating no till farming. Maybe algae based bio-fuels would accomplish the goal of reducing CO2. Personally, I don't see CO2 as a problem, but if you do, you should at least know that this scheme is a really bad idea on a number of different levels. Sorry if any of this sounded condescending, but having to explain this stuff over and over again to people who've been misled by the talking heads isn't very rewarding. Don't let people with hidden agendas (Bush, realclimate.org, etc) lead you around by the nose.

Can you imagine having this discusion about the rights of a five year old child?

Yes they aren't human but genetically they are close.

What a disappointment that site was. I didn't find one naked scientist.

The Naked Scientists:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/

Berkeley Groks Science
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/

ScienceCast:
http://sciencecast.net/

Personally, I can't get into indie podcasts due to the typically poor production values. There are a lot of insightful podcasters that could be developing a real audience if they would just buy a high quality mic.

One of the stronger arguements against african origin is called the multiregional model which purports that humans evolved through variety of location.

So, as the evidence mounts in favour of a recent African origin, one might ask why we continue to speculate about our evolutionary history. Why are we still digging if the roots have been unearthed? The answer is that in spite of the facts, there is still no final answer. None of the deductions made thus far are watertight, and the methods and approaches employed are continually being reassessed. For instance, over recent years the assumption that mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited and thereby free from recombination has been disputed. If sperm mitochondria are found to recombine with mitochondria present in the ovum, the credibility of the mitochondrial evidence may be called into question. Similarly, flaws in the molecular clock technique have been highlighted.

The story is further complicated by the possibility that neither of the principal models (OAR and Multiregional) is correct. The true explanation may be an amalgamation of the two, which is reflected in the alternate "Hybridisation" and "Assimilation" models. These theories tone down the role of replacement in human evolution by incorporating gene flow and hybridisation yet still allow that Africa has a prime position in human genetic history. The exact importance of Africa, and indeed the full narrative, remains to be told. But with further advances in molecular techniques, and the use of alternate gene systems, we may finally be getting closer to solving the mystery of where we came from...
Paraminder Dhillon

There are other arguements against the african origin, just as there are mounting arguments against the land bridge theory. Much of the arguements is that we are finding the oldest humans in Africa because that is where we are looking. It's easy to find things in Africa, as opposed to say the frozen North, which may have older fossil evidence from when those latitudes were much warmer but are now buried beneath snow and ice. Regardless, these theories being held as "law" are making it quite difficult to do real science.

Proponents of the Land Bridge Migration have made it very difficult to accept dating clovis man, mummies in South America and sites in South Carolina older because they so conflict with their precious theory. In the same manner, evidence that conflicts with the African Origin theory is ruled as wrong rather than as interesting. To me, this doesn't seem like science but rather religion: if data conflicts with a theory, it should call the theory into question rather than the data, particularily when there are many data points that do not support a theory that is based on very little data.

Look at where these tennents are coming from -- victorian notions. We see our Christian views as central to everything and we try to fit our observations to fit these views. Rather than searching for "Adam & Eve", science should be searching for early humans and try to figure out what it might mean. We have very little data on humans past 100,000 years. It could very likely turn out that humans migrated to Africa for the weather when other regions became too cold. Older human remains than those found in South Africa where "Adam" is placed on the articles map have been found far to the North in Ethiopia.
--
don't anthropomorphize ancient people, they don't like it

I just had an argument with an Australian over gun control, on another discussion site. (plug: it's a decent science discussion forum, based out of the UK, but people all over the world read it. check it out)

Just goes to prove my point that people who want guns will find them on the black market anyway, so restricting law-abiding citizens from owning them only serves to strengthen the positions of gun-wielding criminals.

Bone Phone . I wonder if that works in the pool too? I can see it now: "Can yub hear bee nowub?"