Amazing: 30k Year Old Flower Revived
BREAKING: GLEICK, CLIMATE SCIENTIST, FORBES CONTRIBUTOR, IS THE HEARTLAND DOCUMENT FAKER/LEAKER
Synergistic Toxicity: GMO Foods Much Worse for You Than Previous Thought
Transistor Made Using a Single Atom May Help Beat Moore’s Law
Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — Scientists have taken a first early step toward escaping the limits of a technological principle called Moore’s Law by creating a working transistor using a single phosphorus atom.
The atom was etched into a silicon bed with “gates” to control electrical flow and metallic contacts to apply voltage, researchers reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It is the first such device to be precisely positioned using a repeatable technology, they said, and may one day help ease the way toward creation of a so-called quantum computer that would be significantly smaller and faster than existing technology.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months to two years, and it’s predicted to reach its limit with existing technology in 2020. Cutting the size of a transistor to a single atom may defeat that concept.
“We really decided 10 years ago to start this program to try and make single-atom devices as fast as we could, and beat that law,” said Michelle Simmons, director of ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “So here we are in 2012, and we’ve made a single-atom transistor roughly 8 to 10 years ahead of where the industry is going to be.”
Moore’s Law is named for Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker. He first described the phenomenon in a 1965 report that was later cited by others with his name attached to it.
Read the rest here.
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Scientists Prepare Test-Tube Burger
By Clive Cookson in Vancouver
The world’s first test-tube hamburger, created in a Dutch laboratory by growing muscle fibres from bovine stem cells, will be ready to grill in October, scientists believe.
“I am planning to ask Heston Blumenthal [the celebrity chef] to cook it,” Mark Post, leader of the artificial meat project at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Vancouver.
Researchers believe that meat grown in factories, rather than on farms, will be a more sustainable and less environmentally harmful source of food. Live cattle and pigs are only 15 per cent efficient at converting vegetable proteins to meat from the grass and cereals they eat.
“If we can raise the efficiency from 15 to 50 per cent by growing meat in the lab, that would be a tremendous leap forward,” Professor Post said.
Starting with bovine stem cells, the Dutch researchers have grown muscle fibres up to 3cm long and 0.5mm thick. The fibres are tethered and exercised as they grow, like real muscles, by bending and stretching in the culture dishes. They feed on a broth of vegetable proteins and other nutrients, equivalent to the grass or grain diet of cattle.
At present the fibres are a pallid yellowish-pink colour, rather than the red of raw ground beef, because they do not contain blood, but Prof Post plans to improve their appearance.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Could Twitter Predict the Stock Market?
By Chris Taylor
NEW YORK | Thu Feb 16, 2012 4:43pm EST
(Reuters) – When Richard Peterson first started meeting with hedge funds about eight years ago to pitch using social media to predict market movement, investment managers looked at him as if he had just arrived from outer space.
Back then, what he was pitching them seemed pretty insane. Peterson, managing director of Santa Monica-based MarketPsych, said that social media can be mined for data about what people are thinking and feeling. And that, in turn, could translate into powerful investment ideas.
“People would say to me, ‘You’re crazy,'” says Peterson, who did postdoctoral studies in neuroeconomics at Stanford University. “‘You’re a psychiatrist telling me that funds should analyze social media? Come on.’ They didn’t think I was serious.”
They’re taking him seriously now. Usage of social media like Twitter has exploded in recent years, giving analysts a real-time reflection of popular sentiment. As a result, MarketPsych serves up reams of data to hedge funds (which swear Peterson to secrecy) and research firms like Titan Trading Analytics. Peterson even plans to roll out a hedge fund of his own.
“We’re champing at the bit to start trading,” says Peterson, who says his models work best in times of high volatility. “We’ve run simulations to see what would have happened by using our data in recent years, and we would’ve made 30 percent annually.”
Given the amount of irrelevant nonsense on Twitter, it’s natural to be highly skeptical of the strategy. The vast numbers of spambots, penny-stock touts and Justin Bieber fanatics aren’t helpful in generating any investment gains.
But think through the logic, and analyzing Twitter data isn’t such a bizarre idea.
A basic premise of behavioral economics is that the markets aren’t perfectly rational machines, but are expressions of human emotions like greed and fear. If you agree with that premise, and are looking for an immediate gauge of those human sentiments, then Twitter is one of the greatest tools ever invented.
“The importance of social media aggregation, and how that might influence the price of a stock, cannot be ignored,” said John Coulter, CEO of Atlanta-based Titan Trading Analytics, which uses MarketPsych’s data. “We’ve chosen to use it as one of many indicators, providing traders with alerts on events and by flagging socially expressed emotions which haven’t been picked up upon by traditional news outlets.”
The trick is how to crunch that data effectively and make some sense of the 250 million tweets generated every day. Peterson, for example, filters the data using 1,500 different factors, culling keywords to track global moods. His is essentially a contrarian take on the markets: If the public is overly bullish, it’s time to be cautious. If it is extremely gloomy, on the other hand, it might be time to snap up a bargain.
In that sense, it’s much like how some investment pros look at the American Association of Individual Investors’ sentiment readings as a contrarian indicator (link.reuters.com/dap66s).
But while those respondents answer a survey for a once-a-week reading, social-media sentiment analysis is immediate and ongoing.
Indeed, the Twitter-analysis trend seems to be just gearing up. Cayman-based Derwent Capital Absolute Return Fund Ltd., dubbed the first ‘Twitter Hedge Fund’ with $40 million in seed capital, was reported to have beaten the S&P by more than three percentage points in its first month of trading last July. More recent results were not available.
“It won’t make you a millionaire overnight, but it does work,” says Richard Gardner, president and CEO of Scottsdale, Arizona-based Modulus Financial Engineering, which amasses historic Twitter data for hedge funds and research firms to crunch. “The markets are moved by emotion, and I think this is going to be the future of trading. You can actually see global moods moving up and down in real time.”
Much of the excitement around Twitter trading stems from a paper by academics Johan Bollen and Huina Mao of Indiana University, and Xiao-Jun Zeng of the University of Manchester. The report found that gauging the investing public’s mood can be a startlingly predictive mechanism for the stock market. “We find an accuracy of 87.6 percent in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones industrial average,” the authors wrote.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Computers Taught to Discover if Your Mentally Healthy
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAnounv-I7s&feature=related 450 300] Comments »
SURPRISE: Sierra Snowfall Consistent over 130 Years
Peter Fimrite
Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday.
The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.
John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.
The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.
“The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified,” said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It looks like you’re going to have snow for the foreseeable future.”
Climate experts and water resources officials were immediately skeptical of the report, pointing out that it doesn’t come to a meaningful conclusion and uses data from a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.
Christy’s study used snow measurements from railroad officials, loggers, mining companies, hydroelectric utilities, water districts and government organizations going back to 1878. That’s when railroad workers began measuring the snowpack’s depth near the tracks at Echo Summit using a device similar to a yardstick.
“No one else had looked at this data in detail,” said Christy, a Fresno native who said some of the information will be published in the American Meteorological Society’s online Journal of Hydrometeorology.
Christy divided California into 18 regions based on the amount of snow that falls and on the quality of the records for that region, and crunched the numbers. They show no changes in average snowfall over the 130 years and no changes from 1975 to 2000, a period when studies have shown that global temperatures rose. The snow level was consistent even in the Sierra’s western slope, where much of California’s water supply comes from.
“California has huge year-to-year variations and that’s expected to continue,” Christy said. “California is having a snow drought so far this winter, while last year the state had much heavier than normal snowfall. But over the long term, there just isn’t a trend up or down.”
Read the rest here.
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WATCH: Vast Solar Tornado Spied on Sun
16 States with Legal Medical Marijuana See an Average 9 Percent Drop in Traffic Deaths
Pot predicament: Can marijuana use actually save lives on the road?
Kathryn Hawkins
Proponents of legalizing marijuana have long argued that criminalization of the drug causes more problems than it solves. For instance, taxpayers spend between $7.5 billion and $10 billion a year on arresting and prosecuting Americans for marijuana-related crimes. Supporters of legalized marijuana maintain that this money would be better spent cracking down on violent criminals.
Now, pro-legalization backers have yet another point in their favor: According to a new study from the University of Colorado-Denver, the 16 states that have legalized medical marijuana have seen an average 9 percent drop in traffic deaths since their medical marijuana laws took effect. The study analyzed data from 1990 through 2009.
“We went into our research expecting the opposite effect,” says study co-author Daniel Rees, a professor of economics at the University of Colorado-Denver. “We thought medical marijuana legalization would increase traffic fatalities. We were stunned by the results.”
When it comes to traffic safety, can marijuana really save lives?
Read the rest here.
Comments »EMR
The electromagnetic radiation (EMR) emitted from mobile towers is so powerful that it affects the biological systems of birds, insects, and even humans. The study, released by the environment ministry, called for the protection of flora and fauna by law.
Comments »“The review of existing literature shows that the EMRs are interfering with the biological systems in more ways than one and there had already been some warning bells sounded in the case on bees and birds, which probably heralds the seriousness of this issue and indicates the vulnerability of other species as well,” the study found.
Homeland Security: Another Carrington Event May Fry Your iPhone, Cause Social Unrest
Posted on February 14, 2012 by Anthony Watts
While we worry about future threats like global warming, and present threats like Iran’s escalating nuclear program, the sun’s propensity for belching out monstrous solar flares (like the Carrington event of 1859) could almost instantly create a world without modern conveniences, or even electricity. The sun could literally “bomb us back to the stone age”.
Imagine a world without iPhones, and you’d understand why Homeland security rates New York and Seattle the highest for likelihood of major social unrest. Humans don’t do well in the dark. DHS has taken notice.
First some history, from NASA:
At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England’s foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.
On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and “being somewhat flurried by the surprise,” Carrington later wrote, “I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled.” He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear.
It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed.
Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.
Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.
“What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun,” explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Read the rest, including the Department of Homeland Security Report, here.
Comments »The Mathematical Equation That Caused the Banks to Crash
The Black-Scholes equation was the mathematical justification for the trading that plunged the world’s banks into catastrophe.
It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream.
Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. These are not money or goods. They are investments in investments, bets about bets. Derivatives created a booming global economy, but they also led to turbulent markets, the credit crunch, the near collapse of the banking system and the economic slump. And it was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.
The equation itself wasn’t the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. It provided an industry-standard method to assess the likely value of a financial derivative. So derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren’t appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. It allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
Black-Scholes underpinned massive economic growth. By 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year. This is 10 times the total worth, adjusted for inflation, of all products made by the world’s manufacturing industries over the last century. The downside was the invention of ever-more complex financial instruments whose value and risk were increasingly opaque. So companies hired mathematically talented analysts to develop similar formulas, telling them how much those new instruments were worth and how risky they were. Then, disastrously, they forgot to ask how reliable the answers would be if market conditions changed.
Read the rest here.
The Galileo of Global Warming
I have written before about how the left loves to invoke the example of Galileo in order to present themselves as the great defenders of science against all of those knuckle-dragging religious bigots who don’t believe in global warming. But these same people don’t understand science very well themselves (remember amateur neurologist Janeane Garofalo lecturing us about the “limbic brain”?), so they end up using Galileo, a man who defied the “consensus” of his day, as a propaganda talking point to enforce the consensus of today.
It occurred to me a while back that there is something worse about this invocation of Galileo, because there is a modern-day equivalent to Galileo, specifically on the issue of global warming—and he’s on the other side. In this more civilized age, he is thankfully not threatened with torture or any kind of persecution. But he is a pioneer of new and important scientific truths who is being ignored and vilified because his discoveries run counter to the quasi-religious dogma of our day.
That man is the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who seems to have discovered the most important factor that actually regulates Earth’s climate, and who is quietly in the process of proving it.
I linked last year to Svensmark’s latest big breakthrough, but I didn’t get a chance to discuss it much, so I want to give a little more detail now, then show one of the recent consequences of Svensmark’s achievement.
Let me briefly sum up Svensmark’s theory. The temperature of the Earth, he argues, is regulated by the intensity of solar radiation, but not in the obvious way. It is not that the increase is solar radiation heats the Earth directly. (It does, of course, but not to a sufficient degree to explain climate variations.) Rather, an increase in solar radiation extends the Sun’s magnetic field, which shields Earth from cosmic rays (highly energetic, fast-moving charged particles that come from deep space). How does this affect the climate? Here is the crux of Svensmark’s argument. When cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, he argues, their impact on air molecules creates nucleation sites for the condensation of water vapor, leading to an increase in cloud-formation. Since clouds tend to bounce solar radiation back into space, increased cloud cover cools the Earth, while decreased cloud cover makes the Earth warmer.
So if Svensmark is right, lower solar radiation means more cosmic rays, more clouds, and a cooler Earth, while higher solar radiation means fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer Earth.
Those who have followed the global warming controversy over the years may recall that cloud-formation is one of the major gaps in the computerized climate “models” used by the consensus scientists to predict global warming. They have never had a theory to explain how and why clouds form or to account accurately for their effect on the climate. Svensmark has smashed through this glaring gap in their theory.
Like I said, Svensmark hasn’t just put this theory out there. He has been working to prove it. He has done some studies that attempted to track measurements of cosmic ray flux against surface temperature and cloud cover, with some success. But his big breakthrough last year was a long-awaited experiment at Switzerland’s CERN particle accelerator that demonstrated the most controversial part of Svensmark’s theory.
It is widely accepted that the Sun’s magnetic field helps shield Earth from cosmic rays, and it is also widely accepted that increased cloud cover cools the Earth (though expect this to suddenly come into question as Svensmarks’ theory gains ground). What Svensmark needed to demonstrate was that cosmic rays form nucleation sites that seed clouds.
Hence the aptly named CLOUD experiment performed at CERN last year, with the results published last August. The experiment was actually more than a decade in the making, but as Lawrence Solomon explains, it was help back for years by the scientific bureaucracy because of its potentially unwelcome results.
The results are indeed unwelcome, at least for the advocates of the global warming consensus. Anthony Watts explained the experiment at his blog, Watts Up With That? The CLOUD experiment used CERN’s particle accelerator to send a beam of artificially generated charged particles—simulated cosmic rays—into a gas-filled chamber and then measured the formation of aerosols, the kind of compounds that can serve as cloud nucleation sites. It found a direct and very significant relationship.
This is not a total demonstration of Svensmark’s theory. The Nature paper on the CLOUD experiment notes that “the fraction of these freshly nucleated particles that grow to sufficient sizes to seed cloud droplets, as well as the role of organic vapors in the nucleation and growth processes, remain open questions experimentally.” But last year’s result is a clear demonstration of a crucial step in Svensmark’s theory. It’s certainly a lot farther than the warmthers have ever gotten in demonstrating the physical basis for their theory.
(“Warmther,” by the way, is a coin termed—if I recall correctly—by occasional TIA Daily contributor Tom Minchin. It’s intended to put advocates of the global warming hysteria in the same category as the “truthers” and the “birthers.”)
What impact did the CLOUD experiment have? Well, the global warming establishment set out to make sure it would have no impact. Like I said, this is a more civilized age, so Svensmark and his colleagues will not be subject to an Inquisition. They will just be ignored, for as long as the entrenched establishment can manage to do so.
This campaign began immediately. James Delingpole’s overview of the reaction to CLOUD quotes the statement given to the press by Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN.
I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.
I don’t know what I find more amusing about this quote: the fact that he is directing scientists not to draw conclusions from data, or the fact that he then proceeds to assert his own interpretation of the data, that “cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” Well, no, if Svensmark’s theory is right, it is not “only one of many,” it is the central factor, far more important than human emissions of carbon dioxide. But thanks for telling us all ahead of time what we’re supposed to think.
Heuer’s statement is an example of an old warmther practice of releasing scientific results to the media only on the condition that upper-level science bureaucrats, the ones who want to increase or preserve the funding they get from government, provide the politically appropriate “spin” to the press. In this case, the appropriate spin is, “move along, nothing to see here.”
Read the rest here.
Comments »The Intelligent Investor: This Is Your Brain on a Hot Streak
By Jason Zweig
Past returns are no guarantee of future success. Just like smokers ignoring the Surgeon General’s warning on the side of cigarette packs, investors overlook the most obvious caution about the stock market at their peril.
Even after Friday’s stumble over renewed fears about Europe, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has gained 7% so far this year, and the Russell 2000 small-stock index is up 11%.
Why is it so hard for investors to regard such short-term hot streaks with the cold eye they deserve?
Decision Research, a nonprofit think tank in Eugene, Ore., has conducted a nationwide online survey of investors seven times since 2008. These surveys have shown that investors’ forecasts of future returns go up after the market has risen and down after it has fallen.
William Burns, an analyst at Decision Research, says investors’ forecasts of the market’s return over the coming year were heavily swayed by how stocks performed in the previous month.
They might not have had a choice. The investing mind comes with built-in machinery that sizes up the future based on a surprisingly short sample of the past. Neuroscientists say the human brain probably evolved this response in a simple environment in which the cues to basic payoffs like food and shelter changed slowly and rarely, making the latest signals most valuable—nothing like what today’s investors face with electronic markets in a constant state of flux.
Experiments led by neuroscientist Paul Glimcher of New York University found that cells deep in the brain calculate a sort of moving average of past events, giving the greatest weight to the most recent outcomes.
When the latest rewards turn out to be better than the long-term pattern, these neurons fire unusually quickly, spreading a burst of dopamine—the neurotransmitter that triggers the pursuit of reward—throughout the brain.
Thus, after a decade of mostly dismal stock returns, even a month or two of outperformance might prompt you into an impulsive plunge back toward stocks.
Some investors seem to have learned how to resist this tendency, and you should, too.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Understanding the Global Warming Debate
By Warren Meyer
Likely you have heard the sound bite that “97% of climate scientists” accept the global warming “consensus”. Which is what gives global warming advocates the confidence to call climate skeptics “deniers,” hoping to evoke a parallel with “Holocaust Deniers,” a case where most of us would agree that a small group are denying a well-accepted reality. So why do these “deniers” stand athwart of the 97%? Is it just politics? Oil money? Perversity? Ignorance?
We are going to cover a lot of ground, but let me start with a hint.
In the early 1980′s I saw Ayn Rand speak at Northeastern University. In the Q&A period afterwards, a woman asked Ms. Rand, “Why don’t you believe in housewives?” And Ms. Rand responded, “I did not know housewives were a matter of belief.” In this snarky way, Ms. Rand was telling the questioner that she had not been given a valid proposition to which she could agree or disagree. What the questioner likely should have asked was, “Do you believe that being a housewife is a morally valid pursuit for a woman.” That would have been an interesting question (and one that Rand wrote about a number of times).
In a similar way, we need to ask ourselves what actual proposition do the 97% of climate scientists agree with. And, we need to understand what it is, exactly, that the deniers are denying.
It turns out that the propositions that are “settled” and the propositions to which some like me are skeptical are NOT the same propositions. Understanding that mismatch will help explain a lot of the climate debate.
The Core Theory
Let’s begin by putting a careful name to what we are talking about. We are discussing the hypothesis of “catastrophic man-made global warming theory.” We are not just talking about warming but warming that is somehow man-made. And we are not talking about a little bit of warming, but enough that the effects are catastrophic and thus justify immediate and likely expensive government action.
In discussing this theory, we’ll use the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as our main source. After reading through most of the IPCC’s last two reports, I think it is fair to boil the logic behind the theory to this picture:
As you can see, the theory is actually a chain of at least three steps:
- CO2, via the greenhouse effect, causes some warming.
- A series of processes in the climate multiply this warming by several times, such that most of the projected warming in various IPCC and other forecasts come from this feedback, rather than directly from the greenhouse gas effect of CO2.
- Warming only matters if it is harmful, so there are a variety of theories about how warming might increase hazardous weather (e.g. hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts), raise sea levels, or affect biological processes.
In parallel with this theoretical work, scientists are looking for confirmation of the theory in observations. They have a variety of ways to measure the temperature of the Earth, all of which have shown warming over the past century. With this warming in hand, they then attempt to demonstrate how much of this warming is from CO2. The IPCC believes that much of past warming was from CO2, and recent work by IPCC authors argues that only exogenous effects prevented CO2-driven warming from being even higher.
This is just a summary. We will walk through each step in turn.
Read the rest here.
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.
Read the rest here.
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