Its not so much about paying people to do something as supporting them while they do it (ie enabling them to do the thing they love) otherwise you'll lose potentially good people to other careers. Disciplines compete for the best graduates, and a small financial incentive can make a big difference to a grad student deciding what to study if it means they can spend their evenings studying instead of washing dishes.

Bioelectrical impedance isn't a reliable enough measure of body fat for home use really (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioelectrical_impedance_analysis) - and if your bathroom scales do it just as well (or badly) it wouldn't add much to the Wii fit for the cost and hassle of adding it. I'd guess it only measures weight because it has the sensors to measure center of gravity.

Thanks for that. I'm most impressed by the knowledge that the vomiting response of the wrinkled frog varies seasonally.

Never?

This is true. I have both of these things (though I lack impulse control hence posting comments on slashdit when I should be working). But insecurity does make people unhappy - even though it drives success. I whether you'd rather be successful and anxious, or relaxed and 'mediocre' in your achievements. Perhaps that is to question to meaning of 'success'.

Very true - also a lot of people here forget that circumstances can easily change. You could lose your job, become sick etc so that you need child support where you didn't previously. Claiming benefits does not automatically make you a greedy feckless scrounger.

There's also now evidence that the action of chewing is important for maintaining cerebral blood flow. I guess you could also add a stick of chewing gum but the point is that the human body is a very complex system and its not obvious what the consequences of trying to replace the function of one part of it are. The whole process of eating probably has other important effects that we don't understand.

That's fine so long as you're telling people how things are, but very limited if you want to think about how they should be. The problem with abdicating from advocacy is that there are plenty of people without your knowledge, understanding or benevolence who are prepared to fill in the gaps for you. This is why 'promoting societal good' is rightly now a key aspect of scientific endeavour.

Nationality is an aspect of race, at least in UK law. US may be different but we do nominally speak the same language

Also with ageing - not just in dementia. My parents in their 60s/70s both struggle with remembering secure passwords.

That was just about the most intellectually lazy comment I have ever seen.

I was going to post a point by point rebuttal....but I couldn't be bothered.

Maybe - but it works in the short term. I lived in Ireland for a few years, the 22c was enough to make me (and most people) take my own bags shopping so far fewer bags were used. Now I'm back in free bag country and it feels weird and unnecessary to be given a load of new bags every time I go shopping.

I agree though that even an 80% reduction doesn't solve the problem, an environmentally safe bag would be the best solution.

That's also a tricky solution, how can you know what you would want when in a certain set of circumstances? People adapt very quickly in chronic illness, such that quality of life is maintained to degree that would be surprising to the 'healthy' individual. I would certainly never leave instructions for my own killing under any circumstances, because I know how quickly I can change my mind. Would you trust your 20 year old self to end your 80 year old self's life if it's not up to his youthful standards?

Also - the experience from the Netherlands is that advance directives for physician assisted suicide are almost never acted on for one reason or another. (Can't find the reference for that at the moment).

Agree that torture is a ridiculous word to use in this case, especially for somebody with no ability to communicate. I wonder how much the suffering of the patient is conflated with the suffering of the family, or the perception of what it might be like to be in that situation (without actually knowing).

But this is pretty much exactly what we have at the moment. Most journals will let you read papers online in this way, and provide a list of citing articles and hyperlinks to citations. Most journals accept comments, BMJ even has these as online comments. Look at PubReader for other innovations in this area. I don't think anybody has a serious complaint that academic research is organised badly, its just the cost issue that winds people up.

Academic research at the coal face is necessarily sprawling. The line in TFA that is telling is

Which shows a fundemental misunderstanding of what research writing is. The author is asking for encylopedia or textbook articles, for which there are already plenty of outlets (these are called 'encyclopedias' or 'textbooks'). So fine if they are proposing a new encyclopedia, though god knows why we need a new one, and I'm don't see how one could or should ever become definitive. To suggest that this will replace any part of existing scientific writing is a bit misguided. Two scientists can produce reviews on the same subject given the same source material with vastly different conclusions, its important that all voices can be heard, and 'curation by a community of experts' seems like the antithesis of this.

Well that is the position on just about every other mode of transport.