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+ - Solar Impulse Airplane to Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America->

Submitted by
markboyer
markboyer writes "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The "Across America" tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."
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+ - Global warming forcasts prove accurate-> 1

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes "A recent Slashdot story noted a 1981 paper that predicted a rise in global mean temperatures and turned out to be surprisingly accurate — if a bit conservative. The guardian reports on a new paper that explores the performance of a forecast published in 1999. The new study predicted that the decade ending in December 2012 would be a quarter of degree warmer than the decade ending in August 1996 – and this proved correct to within a few hundredths of a degree. Compared to the forecast, the early years of the new millennium were somewhat warmer than expected. More recently the temperature has matched the level forecasted very closely" This relative slowdown has caused some journalists to speculate that global warming may have stopped. This paper shows that this is not the case. The author of the paper, Myles Allen, notes: "Of course, we should expect fluctuations around the overall warming trend in global mean temperatures (and even more so in British weather!), but the success of these early forecasts suggests the basic understanding of human-induced climate change on which they were based is supported by subsequent observations.""
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Medicine

+ - Human Brain Cells Injected In Mice, They Get Smarter->

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes "In an experiment that might seem like something only a mad scientist would conjure, researchers injected human brain cells into the brains of mice to see how it would affect the way the mice thought. It did: the mice got smarter. But the cognition boosting cells weren’t neurons, they were the red-headed step-children of neuroscience called astrocytes. The study turns on its head the role historically attributed to astrocytes of simply supporting the all important function of neurons without playing a significant role in how we learn and think."
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Science

Paper On Conspiratorial Thinking Invokes Conspiratorial Thinking 371

Posted by Soulskill
from the elvis-lives-on-the-moon-with-hitler dept.
Layzej writes "Last summer a paper investigating the link between conspiratorial thinking and the rejection of climate science provoked a response on blogs skeptical of the scientific consensus that appeared to illustrate the very cognitive processes at the center of the research. This generated data for a new paper titled 'Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation (PDF).' The researchers reviewed the reactions for evidence of conspiratorial thinking, including the presumption of nefarious intent, perception of persecution, the tendency to detect meaning in random events, and the ability to interpret contrary evidence as evidence that the conspiracy is even greater in scope that was originally believed. Some of the hypotheses promoted to dismiss the findings of the original paper ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. It is not clear whether the response to this paper will itself provide data for further research, or how far down this recursion could progress. I fear the answer may be 'all the way.'"

+ - Paper on conspiratorial thinking invokes conspiratorial thinking-> 1

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes "Last summer a paper investigating the link between conspiratorial thinking and the rejection of climate science provoked a response on blogs skeptical of the scientific consensus that appeared to illustrate the very cognitive processes at the center of the research. This generated data for a new paper titled "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation" The researchers reviewed the reactions for evidence of conspirational thinking including the presumption of nefarious intent, perception of persecution, the tendency to detect meaning in random events, and the ability to interpret contrary evidence as evidence that the conspiracy is even greater in scope that was originally believed. Some of the hypotheses promoted to dismiss the findings of the original paper ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. It is not clear whether the response to this paper will itself provide data for further research, or how far down this recursion could progress. I fear the answer may be "all the way""
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Comment: Re:Poor summary (Score 1) 468

by Layzej (#42777443) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared
Yup. You need to adjust for angle of incidence. As you note we are not far now from a collapse. If you want to use 1.3W/m^2 globally, that's fine, though I'm not sure why you would prefer it. How does that compare to 1.78W/m^2 for carbon? Solving for C, it looks like we would need to bury all the carbon released in the last 20 years just to cover for the loss of albedo. There is no cost effective way to bury carbon. Now do you get it?

Comment: Re:Look at the data (Score 1) 468

by Layzej (#42777209) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared

You think that scientific consensus is reached by vote? Interesting. This explains some of your earlier comments.

I think this conversation has run its course. To summarize your position:

  1. You believe that "True" Scotsmen /// scientists will look at the data and understand that sometimes you only know a range, choosing an exact number is not possible.
  2. You recognize that the scientific consensus as outlined in the IPCC AR4 finds sensativity to be between 2C and 4.5C, with a most likely value of 3C - but...
    1. you would prefer that the consensus was developed by vote rather than by a thorough review of the literature.
  3. You understand that the lowest end of the range (and the result found by this latest Norwegian study) puts us at the 2C threshold by 2050. Anything but the lowest value in this range puts us in considerably more danger.

Comment: Re:Poor summary (Score 1) 468

by Layzej (#42770907) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared

So if the change in albedo alone were enough to cause a runaway effect that was unrecoverable, then it would have already happened

Do you have anything to back that up? That doesn't even seem intuitively correct, let alone something that you could show.

Look at the area between the climatalogical average ice extent curve and curve for any year in the 80's or 90's. (see the bottom left quadrant of http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic). Sometimes the area is positive, sometimes negative, but always it is small. The albedo change year to year is negligible.

Now look at the difference for any year this decade compared to climatology. Extend solar irradiance (1365.5-1366.5 W/m^2 depending on the year) over that area. Now extend that over the part of the year with arctic daylight. Big number eh? Now compare that to CO2 (5.35 x ln (C/C0) W/m^2) over the surface of the Earth 24x7 for a year. How much CO2 do you need to bury to compensate the change in albedo (solve for C0)? Now do you get it?

Comment: Re:Seriously - what is slashdot's agenda? (Score 1) 90

by Layzej (#42760935) Attached to: Yes, PlayBook Does Get BlackBerry 10 Update

Slashdot does not sling FUD, users do.

A user submitted a story that the playbook would be upgraded with the new BB10 OS. A slashdot editor (timothy) tacked on speculation about whether the playbook has a 'crappy' camera. There is no need to speculate about this. The playbook has been out for almost 2 years. If it even has a camera, the quality thereof is likely well known.

He also added "from the seriously-how-is-blackberry-compelling-nowadays? dept". This is a good question and one that deserved to be answered in the summary. There are a number of compelling new features in the OS that make my iphone look clunky by comparison. This is the definition of FUD. No direct allegations are made - only leading questions and speculation are added.

This is not the slashdot community - this is slashdot. I don't think that I'm wrong to question whether timothy receives remuneration for adding FUD to Blackberry stories. I'm not saying he does - just speculating ;P

Comment: Re:Poor summary (Score 1) 468

by Layzej (#42760721) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared
... And therefore... ? Just stating obvious facts doesn't a compelling argument make. Where are you going with this? As near as I'm able to tell your argument is still akin to "It is cold in the winter so clearly summer ice will recover to historic levels." I have to presume you are going for something more sensible but I can't figure out what that might be. Throw me a bone here!

Comment: Re:Look at the data (Score 1) 468

by Layzej (#42760709) Attached to: Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared

That's not talking about consensus though, that's talking about the results of some climate results. Consensus would imply that something like a survey was done, or a vote was taken, to see what most scientists think.

Oh my god no! We're not going to vote for the truth. We need to review the literature to determine the consensus. You get to cast a vote by submitting research. It's not "this is what I think" but "this is what I've found".

Comment: Re:Seriously - what is slashdot's agenda? (Score 1) 90

by Layzej (#42754023) Attached to: Yes, PlayBook Does Get BlackBerry 10 Update
Then you may be glad to hear that it is getting a revamped OS. One that is causing quite a buzz. As to why the editor added speculation about the Playbook camera - I'm really not sure. I imagine that (if the playbook even has a camera) it is well known how it performs. If it does have a camera you may find the time shifting on photos to be a cool feature. This allows you to pull any spot on the photo back in time to capture the perfect smile on each of the subjects. How cool is that?

"I think it is true for all _n. I was just playing it safe with _n >= 3 because I couldn't remember the proof." -- Baker, Pure Math 351a

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