Official "Science News" Thread

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by rogue

Cold fusion reactor independently verified, has 10,000 times the energy density of gas

Serial fraudster and scammer Rossi once again fools a bunch of people.

In another forum someone posted the following links recently.

http://www.science20.com/quantum_dia...on_real-112511

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.3913.pdf

(The extremetech.com article came out only a day after the science20.com article. Both refer to the same arXiv paper.)

My response in the other forum:

Andrea Rossi is a scammer, as discussed previously . . .

He's developed a device and supposed physics explanation that can fool most folks, especially those with money to invest. But he gives himself away by refusing to allow any investigation or demonstration of his device in a manner that could exclude all possibility of deception.

Review Andrea Rossi's history of past misdeeds at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_...iness_ventures

Like other energy scammers before him, Rossi refuses to let experienced hoax-detectors get a close-enough look at his device to be able to detect deception. He doesn't allow anyone to test his device in a setting that would eliminate the possibility of his fraudulently obtaining energy from sources other than his device.

No third-party investigation of his device, regardless of how lofty are the investigators' credentials, is worth anything unless (a) the investigators include experienced world-class hoax-detectors and (b) they were allowed to test in a setting where Rossi could not deceive the testers -- a setting not subject to Rossi's control -- that would be approved by the experienced hoax-detectors.

From the science20.com article:

... but I must admit that this study impressed me for its reported result.

An experienced hoax detector would be impressed by a report that described in detail the measures that were taken to exclude deception. This report may seem, at first glance, to do that, but phrases such as "under controlled conditions" are not supported by details of hoax-detection or -exclusion measures. There are oodles of description about careful measures of supposed energy production and such, but not about hoax-detection or -exclusion procedures.

- -

Later, after someone posted this link:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibb...nge-after-all/

I responded (in that other forum) with:

Forbes is also a prime purveyor of anti-AGW propaganda articles, so Rossi-adoration is a good fit there.

The author does retain a little sense of danger:

... more of Rossi’s unsupported and infuriating claims that included building large-scale automated factories to churn out millions of E-Cats (the factories still have no sign of actually existing) ... unsubstantiated performance claims ...

... the paper ... would appear to deliver what we wanted.

... they are all serious academics with reputations to loose and the paper is detailed and thorough.

I'd be more impressed if the latter said, "... they are all experienced world-class hoax-detectors who have debunked earlier energy scams, and the paper thoroughly describes their measures to prevent and detect fraud."

The authors also note various assumptions they made about the test and that they weren’t in control of all of the aspects of the process but they apparently didn’t consider any of these to be egregious enough to be showstoppers.

Alert! Alert! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
(Pardon my boldface.)

While a few commentators have raised criticisms concerning how the measurements were made and sources of error ...

... unless this is one of the most elaborate hoaxes in scientific history ...

Too bad the Forbes author's not an experienced hoax-detector -- this could've been quite a scoop.

[rogue]

cheesehead, you're starting to sound like Ernst.

I actually mean that in a good way as I'm referring to how Ernst tends to dissect articles.

[rogue]

Scientists uncover frozen mammoth, blood flows out

[Batalov]

[cheesehead mode]
Serial fraudster and scammer Hwang Woo-Suk once again fools a bunch of people gullible reporters.

North-Eastern Federal University has partnered with controversial South Korean cloning scientist Hwang Woo-Suk (who was found to have faked data involving a procedure to clone human embryonic stem cells) for a mammoth-cloning effort.

On the University's website (which appears to be the initial source), I found some (to say the least) strange details: blood and muscle samples were located outside of the body.

В пробирки со специальным консервирующим веществом были отобраны образцы крови животного. Кровь очень темного цвета, она находилась в ледяных пустотах ниже брюха, и когда мы в нескольких местах пробили кайлом эти пустоты, то она вытекала. Это тем более удивительно, что температура окружающего воздуха в момент раскопок держалась на отметке -7…-10ºС. Можно предположить, что кровь у мамонтов обладала некими криопротекторными свойствами.

The last phrase rather belongs in the "how superman shaves" thread. Yeah, right, "mammoth's blood had some krypto cryoprotective properties." That's right. Like frogs. That's why they survived the ice age. Oh wait...
[/cheesehead mode (parody is a form of flattery!)]

I'll just say: beware.

[only_human]

Originally Posted by Batalov

[cheesehead mode]
Serial fraudster and scammer Hwang Woo-Suk once again fools a bunch of people gullible reporters.
On the University's website (which appears to be the initial source), I found some (to say the least) strange details: blood and muscle samples were located outside of the body.
The last phrase rather belongs in the "how superman shaves" thread. Yeah, right, "mammoth's blood had some krypto cryoprotective properties." That's right. Like frogs. That's why they survived the ice age. Oh wait...
[/cheesehead mode (parody is a form of flattery!)]

I'll just say: beware.

110% agree. Mainly for the Hwang Woo-Suk connection, but also for the hiding of the storage location of the Mammoth. That may be necessary and practical, but nevertheless makes my spidey sense tingle.

[ewmayer]

Oklahoma tornado was widest ever measured in U.S. - NWS

(Reuters) - Luck was on the side of El Reno, Oklahoma, on Friday as the widest tornado ever measured in the U.S. took a long detour around the city, according to the National Weather Service, which released its findings on the massive twister on Tuesday.

The rare EF5 tornado, 2.6 miles wide and with wind speeds reaching 295 mph, touched down southwest of El Reno at 6:03 p.m., making a semicircle for 40 minutes around the city of 17,200 people, the National Weather Service said.

"It missed," said Doug Speheger, a National Weather Service meteorologist. "It's very fortunate that it happened ... missing El Reno."

The storms and flash flooding that followed on Friday and Saturday claimed the lives of at least 19 people, including three storm chasers, according to the Oklahoma chief medical examiner.

It followed another EF5 tornado on May 20 that flattened whole sections of the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore and killed 24 people. The weather service said it was the first time in Oklahoma history that two such powerful tornadoes struck within such a short period of time.

[ewmayer]

Palm-Size Fossil Resets Primates’ Clock, Scientists Say: A nearly complete skeleton of a creature that weighed less than an ounce dials back the primate fossil record by eight million years, paleontologists report.

A nearly complete skeleton of a tiny, ancient primate — one that weighed no more than an ounce, had a tail longer than its body and would fit in the palm of your hand — is the earliest well-preserved fossil primate ever found, dating back some 55 million years and dialing back the fossil record for primates by an impressive eight million years, a research team declared on Wednesday.

The finding adds weight to the evidence that primates originated in Asia — not Africa — and that they emerged relatively soon after the extinction of the dinosaurs, which happened about 66 million years ago.

The older date brings scientists closer to pinpointing a pivotal event in primate and human evolution: the divergence between the lineage leading to anthropoids — which include modern monkeys, apes and humans — and the one leading to tarsiers.

In a report published in the journal Nature, an international team of paleontologists led by Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing said that the skeleton, recovered from an ancient lake bed in Hubei Province in central China, set a new benchmark for the time that primates started roaming the planet.

The primate skeleton belongs to a species never seen before, one the researchers identified as the earliest known ancestor of tarsiers — a type of small, nocturnal primate living today in Southeast Asian forests. This unprepossessing early primate was even smaller than today’s smallest primate, the pygmy mouse lemur of Madagascar.
...
K. Christopher Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and an author of the journal report, said: “We’ve heard of the ‘out of Africa’ theory of human evolution, but that’s recent history. So there may now be the ‘into Africa’ problem.”

How and when did some primates finally make it to Africa, which was an island until as recently as 16 million years ago, to set in motion the emergence of the human species?

There is evidence that 38 million years ago, some primates had apparently crossed open water to colonize the African continent.

[cheesehead]

"Stars Don't Obliterate Their Planets (Very Often)"
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-190

Stars have an alluring pull on planets, especially those in a class called hot Jupiters, which are gas giants that form farther from their stars before migrating inward and heating up.

Now, a new study using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope shows that hot Jupiters, despite their close-in orbits, are not regularly consumed by their stars. Instead, the planets remain in fairly stable orbits for billions of years ...

. . .

The Astrophysical Journal paper:
"Stars do not Eat Their Young Migrating Planets: Empirical Constraints on Planet Migration Halting Mechanisms"
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/769/2/86/

The discovery of "hot Jupiters" very close to their parent stars confirmed that Jovian planets migrate inward via several potential mechanisms. We present empirical constraints on planet migration halting mechanisms. ...

[rogue]

Thousands of cave paintings have been discovered in Mexico

Physicists Unveil World’s Most Precise Clock (And a Twin to Compare It Against)

[ewmayer]

Don’t Take Your Vitamins

[rogue]

Rediscovered “Extinct” Frog is Not Only Alive — It’s a Living Fossil

A Password So Secret, You Don’t Consciously Know It

New input can warp fresh memories

Scientists Map the Wiring of the Biological Clock

Are Humans Getting Smarter or Dumber?

Quantum teleportation between atomic systems over long distances

7 Bizarre Ways Kids Entertained Themselves Before Video Games