ananyob

Not paywalled anymore-(Economist journo)

"Some of the mice they removed were delicate mutants and immunosuppressed ‘nude’ mice, which die very quickly outside controlled environments" Sheesh

>>>The proud new owner is Jack Wang, chief executive of a Chinese company that intends to sell [walnut-sized, flying saucer-shaped] electromagnetic devices that it claims have medically regenerative powers."<<<< None of the claims are proven yet of-course...

Yeah - the trick worked both ways>> "on the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time."

"In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner."

From the article -"The research world’s most famous human cell has had its genome decoded, and it’s a mess. German researchers this week report the genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which originates from a deadly cervical tumour taken from a patient named Henrietta Lacks.

Established after Lacks died in 1951, HeLa cells were the first human cells to grow well in the laboratory. The cells have contributed to more than 60,000 research papers, the development of a polio vaccine in the 1950s and, most recently, an international effort to characterize the genome, known as ENCODE."

NASA's just confirmed this story on their twitter feed. >>>@NASA #RussianMeteor is largest reported meteor since Tunguska event. Impact was at 3:20:26 UTC. Still being measured. More info to come.

Bit unfair. The article repeatedly says there are promising techniques for crowd-sourcing etc and that Google Flu Trends has been quite accurate in the past. Also says that a few methods have entered the mainstream. It's a rather good overview of the efforts for tracking flu IMHO.

To an extent, engineered bacteria do this already. Though E coli are quite tolerant, I've known instances when they reject foreign DNA that you're trying to get into them (eg to express a protein).

He doesn't say nothing was really proven - he just says that they didn't establish whether this dislike of dissonance was innate or not. That wasn't what the experiment was about. It was to find what caused the dislike - and they ruled out 'beating' and propose it's harmonicity. It's also not beating per se which people find unpleasant but rapid beating -roughness. Does Gamelan try to produce 'roughness'-ie rapid beating - or just beating - which I could imagine would be quite cool.

That's underselling it a bit, I think? They've ruled out the dominant hypothesis with their experiment (beating/roughness) and propose another - harmony of overtones. Quite clever to do the experiment with people with amusia. Wonder if this has anything to say about the old CD versus vinyl debate? Or was that nonsense anyway?

No. That's not why they were found guilty. Sigh. http://www.nature.com/news/italian-court-finds-seismologists... http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110914/full/477264a.html

Some news sources have consistently misreported this as saying that they were being tried for "failing to predict the earthquake". That would, of-course, be nonsense as no-one can predict when an earthquake might strike. However, that is not what the prosecution said - their case was based on the scientists failing to communicate risk properly. Quoting the source: "The verdict was based on how they assessed and communicated risk before the earthquake that hit the city of L'Aquila on 6 April 2009, killing 309 people" That was the real reason.

Nice interactive graphic showing the breakdown by country http://www.nature.com/news/lands-of-promise-7.6955?article=1...

Ref and link to the abstract of the paper Hwang, S.-W. et al. Science 337, 1640–1644 (2012). http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1640.abstract

Reference: Seifert, A. W. et al. Nature 489, 561–565 (2012). Abstract: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11499

From the source: Jeremy Brockes, who studies limb regeneration in newts at University College London, agrees that it should be possible to use this work to improve wound healing in people. “The genomic resources are so powerful now that one could easily identify some aspect of regeneration in mice that could be helpful for human health,” he says.

Alright, alright. Obviously the statue is not from space. Just the rock it's carved from.

Link text should have said 'Many' stars are born as two separate stars. That is consistent - it's not clear to me what proportion of single stars started off as binaries - probably not 'most', I admit. The implication of the paper, though, is that many stars around now that we think of as 'single stars' started life as binaries.

Full disclosure: I wrote the opinion piece.

To be fair, the paper and the news piece is talking about extreme caloric restriction (which some folk practice in the hope of living much longer). It's not talking about watching your weight - which nobody disputes is a good thing. Nor does it say being obese is healthy - far from it as the quotes you have show.

So this is causing a bit of a storm. When I read it though, I thought this is sociology of science 101. To the layman, and to all non-specialists, science is a belief system. We take certain things on trust - like the discovery of the Higgs. It doesn't mean that science is not based on empirical evidence.

Sure. Though if oil consumption isn't falling/remains high, the US isn't going to be reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

I think the Atlantic is regarded as vaguely liberal/left. The important thing in the article - far more important than car ownership is the energy usage figures. The US uses a lot more fossil fuel per capita than Western Europeans - even if they have fewer cars.

Citation and link to abstract for those interested in such things (also in source). Nirenberg, S. & Pandarinath, C. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1207035109 (2012).

Thanks. Dumb error on my part.

His prediction isn't just based on the three spikes though. And the deeper pattern he sees in the US holds in other countries.

"A flexible electronic sensor made from interlocking hairs can detect the gentle steps of a ladybird and distinguish between shear and twisting forces, just as human skin can. It can also be strapped to the wrist and used as a heart-rate monitor... Such subtle tactile input would be very useful for robots designed to interact with people."

With the Olympics due to kick off on 27 July in London, this article takes a look at how far science would be able to push human athletic abilities if all restrictions on doping were lifted. The article mentions anabolic steroids (up to 38% increase in strength), IGF-1 (4% increase in sprinting capacity), EPO/blood doping (34% increase in stamina), gene doping and various drugs and supplements, as well as more 'extreme' measures such as surgery and prosthesis. Hugh Herr, a biomechanical engineer at MIT, says performance-enhancing technologies will one day demand an Olympics all their own. But is that time already upon us?

For the record, NPG actually supports the form of open access being put forward by the UK and the EU (check out the statements on their website). The company already complies with the 6 month rule and helps authors deposit in PubMed Central. It also runs a number of open access and hybrid model journals...