Official "Science News" Thread

[chappy]

Originally Posted by xilman

a cooler which can take in air at 1200C and reduce its temperature to -200C in less than 10 milliseconds.

And then Nucleon could double the size of his farm!

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Batalov

So, by which statement do you stand now?

Both of them, of course. There's no contradiction.

I've answered two sets of your questions. Now answer my questions:
- how well do you know the scientific publishing (and retraction) standards?

I know some of those standards, but not all. Tell me how you want "how well" measured.

- how many articles have you published in Science?

None.

how well do you know specifically Science's publication policies?

Tell me how you want "how well" measured in this case.

Do I have them memorized? No.
Have I ever read them? Yes.
If I needed to know some specific part of them, I can look them up.

how many articles have you cited and based your research on the fact that these articles describe factual and reproducible truths (and not the falsities)

(I presume that where you wrote "fact" you really meant "assumption", and am answering as though that were true.) As many as I thought I needed at the time.

- how many articles have you written outside of your area of expertise and at the same time deliberately avoiding any contact with the experts (probably for the reason that they would steal your results at the first possibility)?

None, as far as I recall.

I don't deliberately avoid contact with experts. As far as I can recall, I would have welcomed useful expert commentary on anything I wrote, whether in or out of my area of expertise.

- who says that in addition to demonstrating the falsity the other researches also have a burden of proving misconduct?

I don't know. You tell me, if you know.

- - -

It looks like you're building up some sort of straw man argument wherein you will cite some gap in my experience or expertise as a disqualifier of the opinions I've expressed that you don't like, and/or you will criticize some statements I've made by pretending that they must be interpreted according to a very exact template that you draw up.

Why not just straightforwardly outline your disagreements with my expressed opinions instead of spending time and effort to lay "traps" for me? Was my reply to your JIR comment so embarrassing that you feel that you simply must "get me back"? If so, I will refuse to cooperate. I will point out rhetorical trickery if you use it.

[only_human]

Originally Posted by Batalov

- how many articles have you written outside of your area of expertise and at the same time deliberately avoiding any contact with the experts (probably for the reason that they would steal your results at the first possibility)?

Originally Posted by cheesehead

I don't deliberately avoid contact with experts. As far as I can recall, I would have welcomed useful expert commentary on anything I wrote, whether in or out of my area of expertise.

Cheesehead, this was not aimed at you. Sure he used "you" in the sentence but he was really bringing up the topic of familiarity with this type of scientific misconduct.

Let it go.

I'm not going to try to parse into any minutia; in fact I couldn't do it competently on my very best day.

I would rather humbly state that one side claims particular expertise with proper scientific comportment, while the other is particularly good at looking at specific facts and assertions.

I stand in a third position.
Things don't go how we think they should, but if they did, it might actually be a bad thing because humans have a way of planning one thing and ending up with another.

I personally have a problem letting things go. That's one of the bugbears in my list of things that I work on.

Peace out everyone and let's wrest a good holiday season because we deserve some cheer sometimes.

[Batalov]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Why not just straightforwardly outline your disagreements with my expressed opinions instead of spending time and effort to lay "traps" for me?

I was genuinly interested in why people think what they think. Not just what they think (which also has to be decyphered from what they write). I am giving anyone a raincheck to hear my answers to the same questions when you will have calmed down. These were not traps.

Originally Posted by cheesehead

... you simply must "get me back"?

I cannot continue a dialog that is perceived to be an attempt "to get you". Obviously, I am not out there "to get you". You are totally free to think what you want.
_____________________________________________________________

I do however care of this cautionary tale itself (do not care whether you agree with it or not, or care to convince you) and will gratuiously go on a tangent, quote this and wholehertedly recommend the whole blog (you can easily google it); I couldn't put this together better if I retold it:

This is a story of serial failure. Lead author convinced of evidence without good research, senior authors didn’t provide supervision. Co-authors should have accepted responsibility. Reviewers failed, missed a lot of problems. Science failed in selecting reviewers.

“And finally, NASA failed big time.”

But the process of science did not fail.

Peer review like democracy (as described by Churchill), is terrible, but the best we have.

Lots of “seriously flaky” stuff gets published, so we don’t have to worry about strangling science.

Idea of arsenic life “unlikely to be true,” but an “okay hypothesis.” You always fall in love with your own ideas. “It’s the ultimate high in science.” But you need self-discipline to test your hypothesis and see if it’s wrong.

There exist three excellent papers to read (pubmedIDs: 22773139, 22773140, 23034649; PM me if you cannot get PDFs) and there's a lot of interesting history in Wiki Astrobiology article edit history (you will call it irrelevant, I know, sure. I simply like the wikipedians at work; not many people know how much fun it is to browse histories!). And finally, I have in fact seen a similar story happenning; the next stop is retraction. If the authors will continue bucking, the retraction will be effected by the editor of Science. They still have a reputation to maintain.

Now what is important is that researchers browse pubmed all the time. They will still find the article, open it (it will continue to exist) and will see the first paragraph: "This article has been retracted". Then they will know that acetylglucosamine-serine cannot be biosynthetically incorporated in a defined site ...etc.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by only_human

Cheesehead, this was not aimed at you. Sure he used "you" in the sentence but he was really bringing up the topic of familiarity with this type of scientific misconduct.

Oh, come on -- if it had not been aimed at me, it would have been worded differently. Your attempt is charming, however.

Let it go.

That's already done! :-) The final two paragraphs of my preceding post are my disengagement.

[Dubslow]

New evidence for ice at Mercury's poles

[Dubslow]

Canadian scientists create a functioning, virtual brain

"It's all in a machine, but we're actually simulating all those voltages and currents down to the level of things you can measure in real cells," says Eliasmith, noting there are no connections in Spaun that aren't seen in the brain.

His team reports that the virtual brain can perform eight tasks that involve recognizing, remembering and writing down numbers.

They say Spaun can shift from task to task, "just like the human brain," recognizing an object one moment and memorizing a list of numbers the next.

And like humans, Spaun is better at remembering numbers at the beginning and end of the list than the ones in the middle.

Spaun's cognition and behaviour is very basic, but it can learn patterns it has never seen before and use that knowledge to figure out the best answer to a question. "So it does learn," says Eliasmith.

But it is not - at least not yet - a match for the real thing.

"Spaun is not as adaptive as a real brain, as the model is unable to learn completely new tasks," the team reports in Science. "In addition, both attention and eye position of the model is fixed, making Spaun unable to control its own input."

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by tServo

Various news feeds have been reporting that NASA have made a
"discovery for the history books" !!
Evidence of life ? Life itself ? Jimmy Hoffa's body ?

A misunderstanding?

It now seems that what happened is simply that the NPR reporter who wrote the original article misinterpreted comments by the mission leader he was interviewing.

"NASA's 'History Book'-Worthy Discovery Is Really Just a Big Misunderstanding"

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slate...ut_entire.html

Well, this is a letdown.

Remember last week when we told you about how NASA's Curiosity rover had reportedly sent back some very interesting data from Mars in the form of a soil sample that could be, in the apparent words of one of the mission's leaders, "one for the history books"? Yeah, well, now NASA is saying that all the hype is actually just a giant misunderstanding between the scientist and the NPR reporter who interviewed him—a mistake that was then multiplied many times over by each news outlet (again, including us) who picked up the story.

Here, let's have Mashable, which did the legwork to follow up on the original NPR report, explain (emphasis ours):

The quote heard around the world came shortly after [scientist John] Grotzinger explained that NASA had just received the initial data from Curiosity’s first soil experiment using a new Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which is capable of identifying organic compounds.

Naturally, the public assumed that this meant Curiosity had discovered a complex organic molecule. But while NASA does have the latest soil samples, the mission team tells Mashable that researchers haven’t determined that particular groundbreaking discovery. ...

What Grotzinger was actually trying to convey is that Curiosity’s data over her entire two-year mission will further our knowledge of Mars more than ever before, making it a historical mission.

So to recap, Grotzinger was apparently trying to express just how excited he was about the entire mission, not about any one specific discovery; it is the sum of all of Curiosity's past and future discoveries that he thinks will be historic. His particular choice of words—"This data is gonna be one for the history books"—however, along with the suggestion that his team was currently double- and triple-checking data it had received (something that is standard procedure) gave NPR the mistaken impression that there was something specific that NASA was eager to celebrate as a major discovery.

. . .

[xilman]

Originally Posted by xilman

There is, and a very old one. According to legend someone wrote a letter of complaint because when she switched on the wireless (that show you how old it is!) she heard the words "great tits like coconuts" and immediately switched off in shock. The BBC responded that she had heard a few words of a programme about feeding wild birds in the garden.

Hereis evidence to support that claim.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by xilman

Hereis evidence to support that claim.

So THAT is what great tits look like. Pretty birds. Thanks for the picture. The story is worth a good chuckle, too.

I'm a bird watcher so I really appreciate seeing examples from non-US locations.

[Batalov]

We grew up with these little guys. They were everywhere. If memory serves me right, they were almost more common than sparrows.

And in winter, we had these beauties (hmm, maybe we only noticed them in winter? they look great when snow is everywhere, and in summer - who cares): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Bullfinch (Снегирь)