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Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Comment Re:Basement Are Better for Isolation (Score 2) 88

This. And and unfortunately, the otherside is that administrations want to keep the 'dirty' bits of science away from where students study or alumni pay over-priced sums of money for sporting tickets. Point in case is when some animal facilities were told they had to move in Salt Lake City because they were going to be too close to the Olympic venues. They, too, got shoved in various basements.

Comment Re:What drugs and what protections from failure? (Score 1) 439

There's quite a few drugs that have very low lethal doses with multiple delivery routes. Fentnyl or carfentnyl can easily be delivered in a lethal dose in the microgram quantity. And there are more derivatives that we haven't explored much because they're too active that likely would suffice..

Comment Re:Question... (Score 2) 315

We can, and do, try this. It's called 'ancestral state reconstruction' and its what I make my students do each year. There's a ton of assumptions that go into it, though, and few few are likely to be correct over long timescales. We can do that with closely related taxa (I can make some educated statements about the last common ancestor of, say, black-tailed and white-tailed deer DNA-wise), but the further back in time you go, the more homoplasy (convergent/parallel evolution), atavism, and just plain weird crap (macro-mutations) happens. Heck, for some species, we have two+ chromosome counts running around at the same time. Dinosaurs are probably beyond our reconstructive ken.

OTOH, people are clever. I'm open to someone coming up with an interesting statistical approach that proves me wrong for these deep coalescenceses.

Comment Re:Question... (Score 5, Informative) 315

Scientist here (you can tell by my hat, and the fact that something like 90% of my comments on /. start with "I'm a biologist"). First, the DNA we get is from better preserved remains, which kicks the half life back further (It's in TFA, but not mentioned in the summary). There's still a 'deadline' around 7 MYA, where (allegedly) all the bonds would have pretty much been broken at that point - Frozen remains supposedly have a halflife around 158 kya. It's that dang phosphate backbone that's too willing to run off and go have reactions with any trallop of a molecule that wanders on by.

This means even in the relatively recent past, the amount of DNA we're looking at is pretty dang tiny. Part of the reason ancient DNA is so dang tricky is because the much of what you sequence is not actually what you're interested in - doubly so when you're sequencing something closely related to humans. For example, did some spot sequencing of ancient/historic polar bear remains, and had to toss out a chunk of the data we got back, as it was soil bacteria(/fungi/pollen) contamination. How do we know which is which? We had good scaffolds to align our bear sequences back up again, though not everyone is as fortunate as us.

In addition to being rare, what is left is fairly short. You can imagine if you start putting breaks in at random, your average length is going to start declining rapidly, and then level out at some small value that takes quite a while to get smaller. It'll get there, and given geologic time scales, a lot of what we want is that far back, but it'll take a while.

Finally, what isn't mentioned in this summary is that there was massive variance in the estimates of half-life. Supposedly only 40% of the variance in halflife was explained by age. Preservation, inter-lab differences, and good old fashioned luck probably contribute considerably to variance in half-life.

There are other factors too, but they're boring, and I should probably get work done instead of dragging out this reply.

(And to answer your latter question, Neanderthals have been sequenced whole genome, not just mtDNA).
Image

PETA Condemns Pokemon For Promoting Animal Abuse 418

SchrodingerZ writes "PETA, the same group that last November protested Mario for 'wearing fur,' has condemned the Pokémon media franchise and video game series. In light of the recent release of Pokemon Black and White Versions 2, the activist group is protesting that the Pokemon game series 'paints a rosy picture of what amounts to thinly veiled animal abuse.' As many of us know Pokemon is about young children who capture wild animals for the sole purpose of having them battle in non-fatal sparing matches. 'Much like animals in the real world, Pokémon are treated as unfeeling objects and used for such things as human entertainment and as subjects in experiments. The way that Pokémon are stuffed into pokéballs is similar to how circuses chain elephants inside railroad cars and let them out only to perform confusing and often painful tricks that were taught using sharp steel-tipped bullhooks and electric shock prods,' says a statement from the group. Ironically within Pokemon B/W 2 there an organization known as Team Plasma , which deals with taking Pokemon and retuning them to the wild. PETA is so up in arms that they have even created an anti-pokemon parody game in which you play as an escaped Pokemon battling your trainer. I recommend trying it, just for the laughs."

Comment Re:Rat murderer (Score 1) 356

Here's the link for the article. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637

I'm fairly underwhelmed with it. First is the issue you mention of "how many negative results did he not publish?" that is rather insidious. Then there's all the issues that come from his small data set size, and the fact that he did not use large portions of his actual data. And can't be bothered to report it. Or provide it. But it just wasn't useful data, for reasons not explained. I wouldn't accuse the authors of misconduct (no doubt the authors believe their ms is true), but the practices described is definitely a great way to get a false positive. Briefly skimming the interwebs show other people have some statistical issues with this too. http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/gm_maize_causes_tumors_rats_here_how_experts_responded-94259

Sadly, only "GM crops evil!" will get reported, because it plays into a social narrative. Not "shitty stats continues to be shitty!"

Comment Re:I'm really lucky ... (Score 2) 356

Dose makes the poison. Any chemist or biochemist would tell you that. Selenium is either a mineral requirement or a toxic substance, depending purely on the dose. As is the case for sodium, potassium, and good old fashioned water. On the other hand, there's likely some amount of elemental mercury in your drinking water right this instant. But it's so trace that it's hard to detect without clever setups, and it undoubtedly has no health effects because it's so rare.

If you asked a homeopath, though, the ultra-rare nature of the pollutant is what makes it especially deadly. Heaven help us if the mercury in the water become any more dilute, we'll all die from its toxicity.

And in any event, any analytically chemist would tell you that in many regulations out there, we set unrealistically low requirements for some contaminants. Sometimes its because water naturally has a lot of junk in it, and getting it out on a utility scale is tricky, but more often than not, the 'safe levels' are picked as arbitrarily low numbers by middle manager types without any understanding that the analytical methods for detecting the analyte of interest at that low of a level aren't feasible.

Comment Re:It's good to see... (Score 5, Insightful) 345

Your comment smacks heavily of "If he has nothing to hide, why is he fighting to hide things?" Here's an alternate explanation for why he's fighting too hard: The professor was personally offended by what he probably saw as a mob of science-denying jackals that were to sure to pick at his emails, find some quote, take it horribly out of context and trumpet it in the news as loudly as could be, front page headlines blaring. And then when a correction is published showing he did no wrong, that correction will be published on the 5th page of the middle section of the newspaper where none will ever see it.

It's hard not to be personally insulted in such a case. Hell. I'm starting to feel more than a touch offended on his behalf. I know in such a case, even if there was nothing I had ever written that could be misconstrued, I would fight bitterly and with all my reserves to thwart such an attack on purely personal grounds. As someone on slashdot, I'm surprised you don't realize that sometimes people fight even losing battles purely on principle.

Comment Re:I never understood the traditional species conc (Score 2) 169

As a biologist, I'd say you've hit the nail on the head. There's probably no such thing as a species as a discrete entity, and the reason we have about 57 different species concepts is that they're all differing models for categorically explaining a continuous phenomenon that otherwise defies enumeration. But like other models, they're fantastically useful in some respects, and we keep them around for those purposes. When species concepts start to break down, we start talking about things like gene trees, or population dynamics, depending on the level of precision required. Even those things are models, but models that are useful for the level of question we're asking.

At its root, the only things that really 'exist' are probably genes, which struggle for existence in communities of other genes, trying to replicate themselves as much as possible because the ones who don't aren't around anymore. But working purely with genes, and nothing else, needlessly complicates a great many things.
Networking

The Web Is Not the Internet 412

pigrabbitbear writes with this rant from Motherboard.vice.com: "The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. They're not synonyms. They don't even serve the same function. And, just like how England is in the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom isn't England, getting the distinction wrong means you can inadvertently sound like a dummy. Most of the time they can be used synonymously and no one will care, but if you're talking about history or technical stuff and you want to be accurate or a know-it-all or beat a computer at Jeopardy, you should know the difference. The Web was born at CERN in 1990, as a specific, visual protocol on the Internet, the global network of computers that began two decades earlier."
Earth

Sea Level Rise Can't Be Stopped 521

riverat1 writes "Sea level rise won't stop for several hundred years even if we reverse global warming, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. As warmer water is mixed down into the oceans, it causes thermal expansion of the water. Under the best emissions scenario, the expected rise is 14.2 cm by 2100; under the worst, 32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone. Any water pumped from aquifers or glacial/ice sheet melt is added to that."

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