What Science is Like

Someone has an idea that might be crazy, but might explain things - in this case, a theory of a holographic universe:

"Scientists at Fermilab have decided that it's high time they build a 'holometer' to test the smoothness of space-time. Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking have proposed that space-time is not smooth but it's been a lot of math and no actual data. By building two relatively small devices that act as "holographic interferometers" to measure the shaking or vibration in split beams of light traveling through a vacuum. If the team finds the shaking in their measurements and records them, the theory of a holographic universe will have some evidence of non-smoothness in space-time and perhaps a foothold in bringing light to the heavily debated theoretical physics."

That's science. Take your potentially crazy idea, figure out a prediction it makes, and then figure out how to test that prediction. If all of these components are not present, what you're looking at isn't Science.

Evolutionary Computing, Ctd.

New Scientist points us to yet another amazing result in evolutionary computing.



Very cool.

Bobby Jindal, Tool

Not only has Bobby Jindal refused to call up the full allotment of National Guard Troops Obama has put at his disposal, but he's also the main guy that pushed for the barrier islands.  "We could have had blah blah blah miles of islands constructed already, but the federal government wont let us!"  That's right, Bobby, technocrats who actually care how well a policy works, and not how much noise you can make about it on TV, consulted scientists and found the idea to be almost totally without merit.  Only a few barrier islands were allowed to be built... this is why:

Those pictures were taken on June 25, July 2, and July 7.  Brilliant.  In the course of  two weeks, those thousands of truckloads of precious sand washed away.  And they're not good at protecting marshes even if they weren't washing away so quickly.  From Discovery.com:

The trouble is, building such ramparts could choke off the marshes by impeding the natural ebb and flow of the tides. Fish and wildlife may not be able to access the fertile estuaries, which they use as breeding ground. And the whole delta is sinking anyway (while sea level rises), making it just a matter of time before the levees are over-topped by a strong storm.

"Building what they call 'the Louisiana wall' makes sense at first, but the science doesn't support it," Bahr said. "The science should be leading this issue, but it isn't. It never has."

Unfortunately, the berms project has charged ahead in this vein, seeking to build (and spend hundreds of millions of dollars) first, and ask questions later.

That's right, because Republicans don't give a damn about Science.  It's always telling them things they don't want to hear.  This is another case of deciding on the conclusion, then picking your argument to fit that conclusion.  This is how you twist yourself into a pretzel, and you get nonsense policy as a result.

Fusion Ignition Time

They say it's always 10 years away, but Laser Ignition is more encouraging that the toroidal approaches:

The question, Moses said, is "Can we build a miniature Sun on Earth?" The recipe involves a peppercorn-size target of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium heated to 200 million degrees Fahrenheit for a couple billionths of a second. To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers---coherent light---at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: "no mass, no charge, just energy."

Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world.

And the bastards that oppose moving to renewable energies will be convinced they were right, when it was only luck that saved civilization from the end of oil. Oh well. I'll take the win.

Abiogenesis, Here We Come! Ctd.

Heads will explode:

In a development that seems likely to stir a firestorm of controversy, researchers said Thursday that they have used genes made in the lab to create a synthetic species of bacteria.

"We're here to announce the first synthetic cell," said J. Craig Venter, head of the self-named J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., and leader of one of the teams that decoded the human genome.

He told reporters that the new species -- dubbed Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 -- is similar to one found in nature, except that the chromosome that controls each cell was created from scratch. The research is reported in the May 20 issue of the journal Science.

The new species, Venter said, started with researchers digitizing the genetic code for the new species on computers, then assembling the nucleotides using "four bottles of chemicals" into sections of DNA. The DNA sections were assembled in yeast cells to form a synthetic chromosome, which was then transferred to a related species of bacteria, M. capricolum.

Yup.  Just a matter of time.

Here's a great line from later in the piece:

"This is the first self-replicating species that we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer," Venter said.

Gotta love scientists.

Abiogenesis - more proof

The march of science goes on:

Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules.

For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes - that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.

What’s more, these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely.

If you pin your god on "He Who Breathed the First Life," then you're going to have to find a new god.

Tabloids Aren't Trustworthy Science News Sources, pt 149,581

RealClimate, doing an utterly thorough job on the recent political and media assault on Global Warming, quoted in full:

IPCC errors: facts and spin

Filed under:

• Climate Science
• Communicating Climate
• IPCC
• Reporting on climate
• skeptics

— group @ 14 February 2010

Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

Let’s start with a few basic facts about the IPCC. The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in four technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. A large fraction of the relevant scientific community is thus involved in the effort. The three working groups are:

Working Group 1 (WG1), which deals with the physical climate science basis, as assessed by the climatologists, including several of the Realclimate authors.

Working Group 2 (WG2), which deals with impacts of climate change on society and ecosystems, as assessed by social scientists, ecologists, etc.

Working Group 3 (WG3) , which deals with mitigation options for limiting global warming, as assessed by energy experts, economists, etc.

Assessment reports are published every six or seven years and writing them takes about three years. Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was published in 2007. Its three volumes are almost a thousand pages each, in small print. They were written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors; most were not previous IPCC authors. There are three stages of review involving more than 2,500 expert reviewers who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts. These, together with the authors’ responses to them, are all in the public record (see here and here for WG1 and WG2 respectively).

Errors in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)

As far as we’re aware, so far only one–or at most two–legitimate errors have been found in the AR4:

Himalayan glaciers: In a regional chapter on Asia in Volume 2, written by authors from the region, it was erroneously stated that 80% of Himalayan glacier area would very likely be gone by 2035. This is of course not the proper IPCC projection of future glacier decline, which is found in Volume 1 of the report. There we find a 45-page, perfectly valid chapter on glaciers, snow and ice (Chapter 4), with the authors including leading glacier experts (such as our colleague Georg Kaser from Austria, who first discovered the Himalaya error in the WG2 report). There are also several pages on future glacier decline in Chapter 10 (“Global Climate Projections”), where the proper projections are used e.g. to estimate future sea level rise. So the problem here is not that the IPCC’s glacier experts made an incorrect prediction. The problem is that a WG2 chapter, instead of relying on the proper IPCC projections from their WG1 colleagues, cited an unreliable outside source in one place. Fixing this error involves deleting two sentences on page 493 of the WG2 report.

Sea level in the Netherlands: The WG2 report states that “The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55% of its territory is below sea level”. This sentence was provided by a Dutch government agency – the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which has now published a correction stating that the sentence should have read “55 per cent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding; 26 per cent of the country is below sea level, and 29 per cent is susceptible to river flooding”. It surely will go down as one of the more ironic episodes in its history when the Dutch parliament last Monday derided the IPCC, in a heated debate, for printing information provided by … the Dutch government. In addition, the IPCC notes that there are several definitions of the area below sea level. The Dutch Ministry of Transport uses the figure 60% (below high water level during storms), while others use 30% (below mean sea level). Needless to say, the actual number mentioned in the report has no bearing on any IPCC conclusions and has nothing to do with climate science, and it is questionable whether it should even be counted as an IPCC error.

Some other issues

African crop yields: The IPCC Synthesis Report states: “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%.” This is properly referenced back to chapter 9.4 of WG2, which says: “In other countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003).” The Agoumi reference is correct and reported correctly. The Sunday Times, in an article by Jonathan Leake,labels this issue “Africagate” – the main criticism being that Agoumi (2003) is not a peer-reviewed study (see below for our comments on “gray” literature), but a report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Climate Change Knowledge Network, funded by the US Agency for International Development. The report, written by Morroccan climate expert Professor Ali Agoumi, is a summary of technical studies and research conducted to inform Initial National Communications from three countries (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is a perfectly legitimate IPCC reference.

It is noteworthy that chapter 9.4 continues with “However, there is the possibility that adaptation could reduce these negative effects (Benhin, 2006).” Some examples thereof follow, and then it states: “However, not all changes in climate and climate variability will be negative, as agriculture and the growing seasons in certain areas (for example, parts of the Ethiopian highlands and parts of southern Africa such as Mozambique), may lengthen under climate change, due to a combination of increased temperature and rainfall changes (Thornton et al., 2006). Mild climate scenarios project further benefits across African croplands for irrigated and, especially, dryland farms.” (Incidentally, the Benhin and Thornton references are also “gray”, but nobody has complained about them. Could there be double standards amongst the IPCC’s critics?)

Chapter 9.4 to us sounds like a balanced discussion of potential risks and benefits, based on the evidence available at the time–hardly the stuff for shrill “Africagate!” cries. If the IPCC can be criticized here, it is that in condensing these results for its Synthesis Report, important nuance and qualification were lost – especially the point that the risk of drought (defined as a 50% downturn in rainfall) “could be exacerbated by climate change”, as chapter 9.4 wrote – rather than being outright caused by climate change.

Trends in disaster losses: Jonathan Leake (again) in The Sunday Times accused the IPCC of wrongly linking global warming to natural disasters. The IPCC in a statement points out errors in Leake’s “misleading and baseless story”, and maintains that the IPCC provided “a balanced treatment of a complicated and important issue”. While we agree with the IPCC here, WG2 did include a debatable graph provided by Robert Muir-Wood (although not in the main report but only as Supplementary Material). It cited a paper by Muir-Wood as its source although that paper doesn’t include the graph, only the analysis that it is based on. Muir-Wood himself has gone on record to say that the IPCC has fairly represented his research findings and that it was appropriate to include them in the report. In our view there is no IPCC error here; at best there is a difference of opinion. Obviously, not every scientist will always agree with assessments made by the IPCC author teams.

Amazon forest dieback: Leake (yet again), with “research” by skeptic Richard North, has also promoted “Amazongate” with a story regarding a WG2 statement on the future of Amazonian forests under a drying climate. The contested IPCC statement reads: “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000).” Leake’s problem is with the Rowell and Moorereference, a WWF report.

The roots of the story are in two blog pieces by North, in which he first claims that the IPCC assertions attributed to the WWF report are not actually in that report. Since this claim was immediately shown to be false, North then argued that the WWF report’s basis for their statement (a 1999 Nature article by Nepstad et al.) dealt only with the effects of logging and fire –not drought– on Amazonian forests. To these various claims Nepstad has now responded, noting that the IPCC statement is in fact correct. The only issue is that the IPCC cited the WWF report rather than the underlying peer-reviewed papers by Nepstad et al. These studies actually provide the basis for the IPCC’s estimate on Amazonian sensitivity to drought. Investigations of the correspondence between Leake, scientists, and a BBC reporter (see here and here and here) show that Leake ignored or misrepresented explanatory information given to him by Nepstad and another expert, Simon Lewis, and published his incorrect story anyway. This “issue” is thus completely without merit.

Gray literature: The IPCC cites 18,000 references in the AR4; the vast majority of these are peer-reviewed scientific journal papers. The IPCC maintains a clear guideline on the responsible use of so-called “gray” literature, which are typically reports by other organizations or governments. Especially for Working Groups 2 and 3 (but in some cases also for 1) it is indispensable to use gray sources, since many valuable data are published in them: reports by government statistics offices, the International Energy Agency, World Bank, UNEP and so on. This is particularly true when it comes to regional impacts in the least developed countries, where knowledgeable local experts exist who have little chance, or impetus, to publish in international science journals.

Reports by non-governmental organizations like the WWF can be used (as in the Himalaya glacier and Amazon forest cases) but any information from them needs to be carefully checked (this guideline was not followed in the former case). After all, the role of the IPCC is to assessinformation, not just compile anything it finds. Assessment involves a level of critical judgment, double-checking, weighing supporting and conflicting pieces of evidence, and a critical appreciation of the methodology used to obtain the results. That is why leading researchers need to write the assessment reports – rather than say, hiring graduate students to compile a comprehensive literature review.

Media distortions

To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current media discussion is in large part simply absurd and surreal. Journalists who have never even peeked into the IPCC report are now outraged that one wrong number appears on page 493 of Volume 2. We’ve met TV teams coming to film a report on the IPCC reports’ errors, who were astonished when they held one of the heavy volumes in hand, having never even seen it. They told us frankly that they had no way to make their own judgment; they could only report what they were being told about it. And there are well-organized lobby forces with proper PR skills that make sure these journalists are being told the “right” story. That explains why some media stories about what is supposedly said in the IPCC reports can easily be falsified simply by opening the report and reading. Unfortunately, as a broad-based volunteer effort with only minimal organizational structure the IPCC is not in a good position to rapidly counter misinformation.

One near-universal meme of the media stories on the Himalaya mistake was that this was “one of the most central predictions of the IPCC” – apparently in order to make the error look more serious than it was. However, this prediction does not appear in any of the IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers, nor in the Synthesis Report (which at least partly explains why it went unnoticed for years). None of the media reports that we saw properly explained that Volume 1 (which is where projections of physical climate changes belong) has an extensive and entirely valid discussion of glacier loss.

What apparently has happened is that interested quarters, after the Himalyan glacier story broke, have sifted through the IPCC volumes with a fine-toothed comb, hoping to find more embarrassing errors. They have actually found precious little, but the little they did find was promptly hyped into Seagate, Africagate, Amazongate and so on. This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.

As lucidly analysed by Tim Holmes, there appear to be a few active leaders of this misinformation parade in the media. Jonathan Leake is carrying the ball on this, but his stories contain multiple errors, misrepresentations and misquotes. There also is a sizeable contingent of me-too journalism that is simply repeating the stories but not taking the time to form a well-founded view on the topics. Typically they report on various “allegations”, such as these against the IPCC, similar to reporting that the CRU email hack lead to “allegations of data manipulation”. Technically it isn’t even wrong that there were such allegations. But isn’t it the responsibility of the media to actually investigate whether allegations have any merit before they decide to repeat them?

Leake incidentally attacked the scientific work of one of us (Stefan) in a Sunday Times article in January. This article was rather biased and contained some factual errors that Stefan asked to be corrected. He has received no response, nor was any correction made. Two British scientists quoted by Leake – Jonathan Gregory and Simon Holgate – independently wrote to Stefan after the article appeared to say they had been badly misquoted. One of them wrote that the experience with Leake had made him “reluctant to speak to any journalist about any subject at all”.

Does the IPCC need to change?

The IPCC has done a very good job so far, but certainly there is room for improvement. The review procedures could be organized better, for example. Until now, anyone has been allowed to review any part of the IPCC drafts they liked, but there was no coordination in the sense that say, a glacier expert was specifically assigned to double-check parts of the WG2 chapter on Asia. Such a practice would likely have caught the Himalayan glacier mistake. Another problem has been that reports of all three working groups had to be completed nearly at the same time, making it hard for WG2 to properly base their discussions on the conclusions and projections from WG1. This has already been improved on for the AR5, for which the WG2 report can be completed six months after the WG1 report.

Also, these errors revealed that the IPCC had no mechanism to publish errata. Since a few errors will inevitably turn up in a 2800-page report, obviously an avenue is needed to publish errata as soon as errors are identified.

Is climate science sound?

In some media reports the impression has been given that even the fundamental results of climate change science are now in question, such as whether humans are in fact changing the climate, causing glacier melt, sea level rise and so on. The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong. A reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously does not undermine climate science. Doubting basic results of climate science based on the recent claims against the IPCC is particularly ironic since none of the real or supposed errors being discussed are even in the Working Group 1 report, where the climate science basis is laid out.

To be fair to our colleagues from WG2 and WG3, climate scientists do have a much simpler task. The system we study is ruled by the well-known laws of physics, there is plenty of hard data and peer-reviewed studies, and the science is relatively mature. The greenhouse effect was discovered in 1824 by Fourier, the heat trapping properties of CO2 and other gases were first measured by Tyndall in 1859, the climate sensitivity to CO2 was first computed in 1896 by Arrhenius, and by the 1950s the scientific foundations were pretty much understood.

Do the above issues suggest “politicized science”, deliberate deceptions or a tendency towards alarmism on the part of IPCC? We do not think there is any factual basis for such allegations. To the contrary, large groups of (inherently cautious) scientists attempting to reach a consensus in a societally important collaborative document is a prescription for reaching generally “conservative” conclusions. And indeed, before the recent media flash broke out, the real discussion amongst experts was about the AR4 having underestimated, not exaggerated, certain aspects of climate change. These include such important topics as sea level rise and sea ice decline (see the sea ice and sea level chapters of the Copenhagen Diagnosis), where the data show that things are changing faster than the IPCC expected.

Overall then, the IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm. All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam. It is not up to us as climate scientists to clear up this mess – it is up to the media world itself to put this right again, e.g. by publishing proper analysis pieces like the one of Tim Holmes and by issuing formal corrections of their mistaken reporting. We will follow with great interest whether the media world has the professional and moral integrity to correct its own errors.

PS. A new book by Realclimate-authors David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf critically discussing the main findings of the AR4 (all three volumes) is just out: The Climate Crisis. None of the real or alleged errors are in this book, since none of those contentious statements plucked from the thousands of pages appeared to be “main findings” that needed to be discussed in a 250-page summary.

PPS. Same thing for Mike’s book Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming, which bills itself as “The illustrated guide to the findings of the IPCC”. Or Gavin’s “Climate Change: Picturing the Science” – which does include a few pictures of disappearing glaciers though

Abiogenesis, Here We Come!

Things are looking better and better for abiogenesis in the lab.

Having assembled RNA in the lab from a mixture that resembles what was likely the primordial soup. 'Until now,' Science News reports, 'scientists couldn't figure out the chemical reactions that created the earliest RNA molecules.' The new work started the RNA assembly chemistry from a different angle than what earlier work had tried.

So there's the basic building block of life, RNA, demystified. God's hand was not required, I'm afraid.

Infallible Policy!

Policy making at it's best!



Man, you gotta love the "infallible word of God" stuff!  In fact, it is "Infallible. Unchanging. Perfect." And God says there wont be any more floods that cover the entire earth - that the next global reset will be the return of Jesus.  Therefore, Man is incapable of destroying the earth via flood, and therefore we don't need to worry about Global Warming. Ipso Facto.

Of course, in order for this to be a defense of the planet against Science-Based-Inundation, there would have to be the scientific possibility of the scenario that would contradict God's literal word.  Punchline: there isn't enough water to cover the whole Earth.  Unless Global Warming will somehow create new water like Noah's Flood... in which case it would be God himself acting to break his Word.

Man.  Theology is confusing.

Right Winger Plans Dirty Bomb

During my lifetime all domestic terrorism in America has been committed by political conservatives.  I believe you have to go back to the Vietnam era to find examples of left-wing terrorism, and the exploits of the Weather Underground don't amount of the activities of a mastermind.  After all, Weather Underground killed mostly themselves, while Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolf did serious damage, destroying dozens of entire buildings and killing hundreds.

The modern tradition continues today with news of a right winger in Maine who got himself shot by his wife, who he had been abusing for years.  It turns out that when the police searched the house, they found industrial grade hydrogen peroxide - critical to the manufacture of homemade explosives - and various metal dusts used for amplifying the explosion.  More importantly, however, was the radioactive material he had stockpiled, and the extensive research he had on the more potent isotopes - Cesium 137, notably.  His wife explained that things had gotten a lot worse since the election of Obama, which made her husband "very, very angry."

Our very own homegrown dirty-bomber!  And this was the real thing, too, unlike Padilla.  This man had already assembled most of the components for the bomb, and was wealthy enough to get the last piece - the Cesium.  A single order from a medical imaging maintenance company and he'd be in ready to pull the trigger.  In fact, one of my old customers sells the things.  If you've got the money, the bomb isn't hard to pull off.

Now, the question becomes, "what's the deal with a dirty bomb?  what can it do?"  The answer, even with Cesium 137 as the payload, is "it can scare you."  You see, given the amount and potency of radioactive material in imagined dirty bombs, the resultant level of contamination just isn't big enough to kill people or even make them seriously ill.  Even with a large supply of dangerously radioactive material, the explosion disperses it exponentially with distance.  The resulting average dose would be less than 50 rem, which you would barely notice. The danger of a dirty bomb is the danger of the panic caused by it's use.  The public itself becomes the weapon.  This is why it was so shameful that the Bush Administration continued hyping the dirty bomb threat, making sure that in such event the public panic could be as feverish as possible.  

Way-to-go, Bushies.  Just one more thing they screwed up.

Record Gamma Ray Burst

The great guys at NASA just observed the largest Gamma Ray Burst in recorded history.  Luckily, it was far enough away not to cook us:

Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time. ...Fermi team members calculated that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions.

That's a biggun.  I hope I was on the other side of our planet at the time.

Global Warming is Fake!

Take a gander at the following graph, depicting the climate for last winter as deviating from the 1951-1980 average:

Of course, basically the entire national press corps lives in the area that got colder, so what kind of stories do you think we got?

Quantum Entanglement and the Diaspora

For my readers that know some quantum mechanics, Quantum Teleportation has been something for which we've been waiting.  For a few years we've been making incremental progress, demonstrating quantum entanglement at first minuscule, then slowly increasing small distances.  It looks like there's been a breakthrough, with information teleportation range of over a meter in the lab! Time Magazine has the layman's explanation.

Now, in order for the technology to be truly useful, we need to find some way to take these two entangled particles, isolate them in movable storage containers, and take one to the other end of the galaxy.  Hey-presto, an intergalactic modem!  No more pesky speed-of-light delays on our conversations across the globe, to low orbit, Mars, or the Local Group.

Now, couple that faster-than-light technology with a digitally encoded image of our consciousness, and you can go to sleep in Chicago and wake up in Betelgeuse, moments later.  What a wonderful world it will be.

My goal in life is to make enough money to insure that when the tech becomes available at a high price in my middle age, I have enough to guarantee my immortality.  Now that's a retirement plan.

Global Warming NOT Caused by Cosmic Rays

Via Slashdot:

A new study conducted by Norwegian researchers finds (again) that changes in cosmic rays most likely do not contribute to climate change. Previously, other researchers have claimed to have found a link between cosmic rays and surface temperatures."

Yeah.  Big surprise.  But don't expect the deniers to drop the talking point.  Zombie Lies everywhere!  They can't be killed!

Life in the Lab

Here's our (almost) proof of abiogenesis.

Summer Melt

There's that mythical northwest passage opening up. Despite last winter's heavy snow and freeze, we're still on track for record ice loss. I'm sure this evidence will convince the deniers, right? They did send around all those triumphant e-mails crowing about how much ice there was back in February, so I'm sure they're following developments closely. I'll hold my breath. Don't disappoint me GlobalWarmingHoax.net, or you'll have my suffocation on your conscience!

Prebiotic Environment on Titan!

Excellent science news today! Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is known to be almost entirely made of ice - much of it water. Comets bring tholins, which are simple organic molecules. Now, with some new science done by a grad student somewhere, it has been shown that tholins and nearly frozen water can interact, albeit slowly, to create larger organic molecules. These molecules form the basis for life.

While Neish’s work is not a perfect representation of chemistry on Saturn’s largest moon, it nonetheless suggests that similar processes could produce organic compounds in significant quantities during periods when liquid water is available.

On Titan, this suggests that prebiotic molecules might exist in melt water from impact craters and ice volcanoes. And similar processes might have occurred on the early Earth, before our atmosphere contained significant quantities of free oxygen.

Hooray! Let's say hello to our bacterial cousins!

Molecular Visualizations

Best freaking video ever:



This is still about politics, mind you! Republicans hate knowing this stuff. :)

I love seeing this stuff work. At the lowest level, we're just driven by thermodynamics. Amazing.

Complex Evolution Demonstrated in Lab

The Creationist's last available attack on Evolution is that there are chemical processes in our cellular metabolism that are "irreducibly complex" - that they could not have come about by a collection of random, naturally selected mutations. Well, let's see how they deal with this doozy:

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

The short story is that one of E.Coli's distinguishing traits is it's inability to metabolise Citrate, which has a very different molecular structure than E.Coli's primary food. After around 31,000 generations, all of a sudden this E.Coli started eating Citrate! With the frozen genetic samples, the researchers are able to go back in a frame-by-frame manner, and watch the mutations accumulate into this novel masterpiece.

So, there we have it. Genuinely new complexity from naturally selected random change! Woooo! Go Science!

Cancer and Vitamin D

Another amazing bit of science to improve our lives:

The trial involv[ed] 1,200 women, and found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error. And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day. One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. 'We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population,' he said, 'until we normalize vitamin D status.'"

That's a substantial breakthrough, if further study supports the conclusion.