Because the poor will be greatly benefited by rain belts shifting away from them, or being knee deep in water.

And where exactly will the US get its grain from when the rain belt ends up in northern Canada?

The Beringia hypothesis has the advantage of not invoking a paleolithic ship construction industry. I know this is all very romantic, but for the moment, there is little evidence beyond some chicken bones that even Polynesians, within the 1,300 to 1,500 years (the settlement date of Easter Island) made it in any significant numbers. The simplest explanation is that multiple groups, some with different genetic heritages, went across the land bridge, some basically settling there until the end of the glacial maximum, and others possibly coming later. Multiple waves don't require multiple routes.

I'm thinking the worst aspect of that higher gravity would be a much denser atmosphere. We certainly could survive in 1.6g environment, but we couldn't survive the crushing weight of that atmosphere.

Well, bully for you. I bet you feel all special posting this here. Makes you feel superior and important I bet.

You can be a lot more subtle - tell them that your host is xbcd.com

I always keep an "atashi" or "eg" subdomain on my sites configured thusly ;)

Um... read the paper, page 10.....

Voltron [33] is a language designed for distributed mobile sensing. Voltron allows the developer to specify the logic to be executed at several locations, without having to dictate how the robots must coordinate to achieve the objectives...

Why did you create a brand new programming language rather than just a library? I looked at the examples and I don't see any functionality in there that can't just as easily be accomplished with current programming languages and a simple library.

For the moment, I think we need to point to the simplest hypothesis, which is these genes were present in at least of the proto-Indian populations that went over the land bridge. That's not to exclude the possibility of new evidence pointing towards some sort of trans-Pacific input into the Americas, but the evidence, as small a body as it is, simply does not support that conclusion. More studies will be needed to determine if there are other loci for these genes, in the hopes of establishing at least the rudiments of a migration pattern.

This does not appear to be the claim. If I'm understanding the research, it's likely that this as yet unidentified progenitor population existed long before the entrance into the Americas, and may be a signal of a very early modern human population in Asia.

Google should interpret Universal's request to delist "127.0.0.1" as "We want you to delist us" and promptly oblige ;)

127.0.0.1 is clearly unresponsible to DMCA takedown efforts; legal approaches simply won't suffice. I recommend that Universal Pictures launch a coordinated effort hack into it using as many computers as possible, gain root access, and write over its hard drive.

That actually doesn't sound that bad:

"For example both alcohol (ethanol) and water produce large peaks on an IR spectrum and from the video it would seem that the user provides some background data on what the sample is via the app, so that saves a lot of work. It would be easy for the algorithm to say, 'the user says this is drink and I can see that about 40 per cent of the total spectrum is ethanol so I should give a reading of alcoholic beverage with 40 per cent alcohol content'. Or 'this is a plant and 70 per cent of the spectrum is water so it must be 70 per cent hydrated'. This could also be done with total sugar content for common sugars such as sucrose and fructose," he said.

"Similarly, it would be possible to get a spectrum good enough to recognise something like fruit or Tylenol and then send back generic data (easily found via Google)

That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.

Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).

How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?

How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?

Smartphones are still drastically slower than individual PCs, let alone cloud services.

I know they're overstating the case, and that it's a near-IR spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. That said, I still like the general concept. Does anyone know whether near-IR spectroscopy can be used for identifying mineral species (for example, between different types of zeolites and the like)? I love rock hunting but many species have similar visual appearances.

And even on the food standpoint I find it interesting... I'm a tropical plant nut, and lots of people I know over on the forum breed unusual varieties of common fruits as well as rare fruits (some of which don't even have scientific names). It's be neat to be able to get a basic compositional profile - no, not "this fruit contains X ppb of this gigantic-complex-unique-protein", but just the major constituents. It'd help, for example, the mango breeders to know if their fruits are compositionally different from the fruit of the parent cultivar.

More samples is good, but I question your statement that the sample size in question isn't large enough. The fact is that the DNA is present, it shows a link to a previously unknown Asian progenitor population, a population that also bequeathed their DNA to some south Asian populations and to indigenous Australians. Better sampling may identify other areas of the Americas where these genes ended up, which would help understand migration patterns not only from Asia to the Americas, but also within the Americas themselves.