I know the above comment is modded flamebait because of the stupid note about nuking Japan, but he's completely right about the lateness of the laser's invention. The laser could have been invented in the 1930's, and very nearly was! Ali Javan himself, the inventor of the ubiquitous (or, at least, once ubiquitous in the 80's and 90's) helium neon gas laser said he would've almost certainly invented it in 1938 had he been around then. It is an accident of history that the laser took another 25 years to invent after most of the underlying science ("negative absorption", coherence, etc) were understood.

Seems to be a pretty common occurrence, whatever the cause.

Ha HA! Wow! Cuompulsory state sponsored sterilization! What a whackjob, he actually WAS serious! So tell us, did you work at Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald in the '40s?

Oooh yeah I'm really religiously "jumping" to conclusions. We've had DECADES to flesh this one out and the evidence is not there. The onus is on the claimant to prove the phenomenon exists, not on me to prove it doesn't. The religious ones are the ones who take flaky anecdotes and blurry photos as real evidence and reject any skepticism about their credulity as "hasty". No.

They're called sparks Einstein, nothing "fell off" the plane.

I think the third video in that list you are talking about showing "BL" in Saudi Arabia is very important for everyone to see. How many times have we heard of people having BL sightings around power lines or "following power lines"? Frequently! And what does that video show? NOT BL! It's just arcing between two of the power lines that's traveling down the line Jacob's-ladder-like, probably due to wind. Was it initiated by lightning? Maybe, but it is not BL at all. People trust their senses and their assumptions way too much.

Absurd, you'd might as well also claim the Fox Alien Autopsy video and all the various close encounters of the blurred kind on Youtube aren't explained by the fact that we now understand things like kanashibari. The videos of so called ball lightning out there are far away, shaky, defocused and about as convincing as Chupacabra photos in the Weekly World News.

Look, I'm sorry to piss on everybody's parade, but its time to relegate ball lightning to its rightful place in history alongside phrenology and N-rays. The invention of the CCD and the associated UNBELIEVABLE proliferation of personal digital imaging devices over the past decade means that virtually everyone has a camera in their pocket at all times now. If the phenomenon of ball lightning existed at all, we should be seeing like one multiply reported HIGHLY CONVINCING video a week uploaded to the internet showing this. In fact, the number of ball lightning sightings and recordings over the past who knows how many years has pretty much stayed constant. If ball lightning exists at all, it's in the heads of observers, either as a result of a terrified mi-d thunderstorm hallucination or a result of some magnetic field induced phosphene as reported in this new paper.

If ball lightning were an actual physical phenomenon, the number of video observations of it should have skyrocketed over the past 10 years along with the availability of personal digital imaging devices in the same way that once Red Sprites and Blue Jets were first reliably observed with very high speed video in 1994, observational replication around the world was practically IMMEDIATE and widespread.

Sweet URL that goes nowhere bro! I tried copying it in here but /. gave me a lameness error "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.".

Do editors do ANYthing at this site anymore?

Try here instead:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8627835.stm

Maybe because in addition to removing racial bias and social fear it also removes around 40 IQ points on average?

Well, are you sure that it didn't... maybe just make you feel a little.... inadequate?

http://skepchick.org/blog/2010/04/doctor-whos-new-tardis-nsfw/

Just remember to turn the mic to Houston off of VOX.

HOUSTON: "Uhhh, were getting a pretty steady 2-3 Hz slapping sound down here guys. Are all systems ok up there, and any ideas on a cause?"

"This one will be ignored by the nay-sayers just like all the others."

And all the rather serious problems with this particular study's methodology that everyone else here is pointing out definitely won't be ignored by the true believer yea-sayers such as yourself. Right?

I would like to endorse the sentiment expressed by Ars and expand upon it. Since I have access to most scientific journals, a couple days ago when this study was first published, but before any secondary analysis appeared on the web, I printed it out and took it home to read. I read scientific papers all the time (usually physics and chemistry), probably hundreds of papers per year, so I like to think that I'm pretty familiar with how good science is done and what constitutes a well designed, rigorously conducted investigation.

The impression I got while reading this paper, is that it is a total piece of crap. It is confusingly written to begin with, but there are serious problems with methodology, controls, conclusions, assumptions about caloric intake and claimed statistical significance. It's a joke. Which, I guess is why it's published in an obscure journal with a pathetic 2.7 impact factor. Two sites explaining the problems in more detail are the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe forums at: http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,26925.15.html and this blog post by Marion Nestle (a New York University professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health with a Ph.D. in molecular biology): http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/

None of this told me how Princeton, of all places, could publish such a shit study though.....until I noticed this at the top of the paper that all the authors are from the Uni's PSYCHOLOGY department. Oh, I guess that's how.