Sorry, skeptics: NASA and NOAA were right about the 2014 temperature record

Posted on by

Last week, in an announcement that not only drew massive media attention but was seized upon by President Obama in his State of the Union address, NASA and NOAA jointly declared that 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded, based on temperature records that go back to the year 1880.

The news came out on Fridaymorning. It was announced through press releases by the agencies, but also through more thorough discussions for the public and media, including this PowerPoint presentationand a media briefingdiscussing it.

Why revisit all of this? Because since the announcement there has been a strong reaction, and a lot of climate skeptics have suggested that really, 2014 might not have been the hottest year after all. Consider, for instance,this articlein the UKsDaily Mail,whosefirst sentence reads, The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.

Given the stakes here this is the biggest news story about climate change in quite some time I think it is important to examine this charge. For further discussion of the matter, by the way, you should also seethis postby Andrew Revkin at theNew York Timesandthis oneby Andrew Freedman at Mashable.

So whats up with this 38 percent figure, and does it really undermine the idea that 2014 was the hottest year on record?

The figure comes from slide 5 of the PowerPoint presentationmentioned above, where NASA scientists noted that there was a 38 percent chance that 2014 was the hottest year, but only a 23 percent chance that the honor goes to the next contender, 2010, and a 17 percent chance that it goes to 2005.

The same slide shows that NOAAs scientists were even more confident in the 2014 record, ranking it as having a 48 percent probability, compared with only an 18 percent chance for 2010 and a 13 percent chance for 2005. Here is the slide:

According to a NASA spokesman, the PowerPoint containing this slide went online at the same time that the 2014 temperature record itself was announced. So it may not have been as prominent as the press releases from the agencies, but it was available.

The slide was also discussed in the press briefingwhen the news of the new record was released. In the briefing,NOAAs Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, noted:

Certainly there are uncertainties in putting all this together, all these datasets. But after considering the uncertainties, we have calculated the probability that 2014, versus other years that were relatively warm, were actually the warmest year on record. And the way you can interpret these data tables is, for the NOAA data, 2014 is two and a half times more likely than the second warmest year on record, 2010, to actually be the warmest on record, after consideration of all the data uncertainties that we take into account. And for the NASA data, that number is on the order of about one and a half times more likely than the second warmest year on their records, which again, is 2010. So clearly, 2014 in both our records were the warmest, and theres a fair bit of confidence that that is indeed the case, even considering data uncertainties.

See more here:

Sorry, skeptics: NASA and NOAA were right about the 2014 temperature record

'Nano-bots' implanted in mice

Posted on by

Can robots travel inside living animals? It sounds like science fiction, but scientists have just made it a reality by implanting tiny nano-robots inside living mice. Researchers from the Department of Nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego, published their report on the first successful tests of implanting micro robots designed to disperse drugs within a body, reports SmithsonianMag.com.

As the research report states, these kinds of robots have been tested in vitro, or outside the body, in the past, while this is the first time that this technology has been studied in vivo, or inside the body. The zinc-based robots only the width of a strand of human hair were ingested orally by the mice. The zinc reacted with the animals stomach acid, producing hydrogen bubbles that propelled the robots into the stomach lining. As soon as the robots attached to the stomach, they dissolved, delivering the medicine into the stomach tissue, i09 reports.

For the researchers, this work could pave the way for implanting similar robots in humans. This could be an effective way of delivering drugs to the stomach in order to treat something like a peptic ulcer, the BBC reports.

While additional in vivo characterizations are warranted to further evaluate the performance and functionalities of various man-made micromotors in living organisms, this study represents the very first steps toward such a goal, reads the research report. According to the researchers, this work moves toward expanding the horizon of man-made nanomachines in medicine.

Original post:

'Nano-bots' implanted in mice

Which cloud personality are you? Three ways to approach online storage

Posted on by

Cloud storage is incredibly convenient, but it can also be confusing. Sometimes youre just not sure what files to put up there or if you should store anything online at all. One way to approach the issue is to ask yourself what you want to get out of storing files online. Is your overarching concern convenience, security, or a mix of the two?

Heres a look at what you might call three different cloud personalities that can help you decide what you want to get out of a service like Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. Ive also included some suggestions about services or strategies that might work best for each type.

This type of person who isnt concerned with issues surrounding security or privacy like hackers or governmental snooping. Their primary concern is simply having access to their files across all their devices.

The fact that most cloud storage companies secure downloads and uploads via HTTPS and keep personal files in a secure manner in their data centers is enough reassurance for these people.

If this sounds like you, then you probably shouldnt worry too much about what kinds of files you put online. But even if youre care-free youd still do well to keep any personal financial information out of the cloudjust in case.

Care-free types would find OneDrive a good choice, since Microsoft offers unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers paying $70 or $100 per year, or 15GB of free storage (with the option to pay affordable prices for more) to non-O365 subscribers.

This type of person is more wary of the cloud after the Snowden revelations. Constant stories of hacking also remind the secure types how vulnerable online information can be to exposure.

There isnt really a perfect answer for the deeply security consciousat its core, cloud storage is all about storing your files on somebody elses serverbut a good solution might be to encrypt files yourself before they get sent up to the cloud.

The thing about self-encrypting files is that you have to be careful not to have an encrypted file open on two devices at once. That could end up corrupting the file. You also have to figure out how youre going to decrypt files on your various devices. If you use something like miniLock, for example, youll be restricted to accessing your files on PCs.

Secure types will also want to watch out for features on their smartphone that automatically upload photos and other data such as passwords to the cloud.

Follow this link:

Which cloud personality are you? Three ways to approach online storage

Bad 'Precision' Medicine — If Nobody Knows How It Works, Sometimes It Doesn't

Posted on by

The endeavor known as precision medicine, which Obama singled out in his State of the Union Address, may sound futuristic, but its been around long enough for people to have screwed it up, and badly. One of the worst medical scandals this century started with cancer researchers at Duke promising something that sounded a little too good to be true and ended with retracted papers, dashed patient hopes and lawsuits.

But precision medicine is obviously moving forward. To learn more about it, and what lessons the past has to offer, I caught up with Keith Baggerly, whose dogged investigations uncovered the problem with the Duke project. Baggerly is a professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Division of Quantitative Sciences at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. (He is also a witness in a pending lawsuit filed by patients and their families.)

Though precision medicine has different meanings, medical researchers tend to use that term or personalized medicine to refer to the use of individual DNA differences in tailoring treatments to patients. The strategy is being driven by advances in the ability to quickly and cheaply read the sequences of code characters in DNA and by the growing use of big data to find patterns. As described in this Philadelphia Inquirer story, a number of big data cancer initiatives are gathering momentum.

The dream of precision medicine has been particularly tantalizing for cancer treatment, since cancer cells are just ordinary cells with broken DNA mutations that change the cells instructions and cause them to run amok.

And so, in 2006, cancer researchers around the word took notice when a team led by Dr. Anil Potti at Duke claimed in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine that theyd created a highly complex mathematical system that could assess a given patients tumor and determine from its genetic make-up exactly which drugs would give that patient the best odds of survival. While investigations have revealed fraud on the part of Anil Potti, many other people made mistakes in ignoring whistle blowers and allowing the technique to be used on cancer patients in a clinical trial.

While some avenues of precision medicine could lead to new, prohibitively expensive drugs used for rare subsets of patient, the Duke technique promised to chart the best course among existing treatments said Baggerly.

It would be based on the DNA in individual patients tumors. And it didnt just apply to one kind of cancer but to cancers across the board. Instead of telling a patient there was a 70% chance a drug would work to kill her tumor, he said, they could find out ahead of time if she was in the other 30% and prescribe an alternative course of treatment.

Doctors were excited and thought if the system worked, they owed it to their own patients to adopt a form of it, he said. Several groups asked Baggerly to look into it. One danger with the approach, he said, was that it was impossible to know how the technique worked. The data were so big they were measuring thousands of things per patient and there was this perception that the analysis of such data sets would be complex, he said. In most medical tests, theres some understanding of how they work. Thats true in some of the early advances in precision medicine. In some cases of melanoma, for example, theres a break in a particular gene called BRAF, and drugs that target cells with that broken gene. Theres a mechanistic understanding of how it all works.

But with the Duke project, he said, nobody has a good intuition of what 50 or 60 things are doing at once. And so there was no way for intuition to tell anyone whether it worked at all. When Baggerly started to re-analyze how the Duke researchers created the system in the first place, it didnt work. Was he using the system wrong or was there something wrong with the system?

As he investigated further, he found egregious errors that should have prevented it from working. The team had relied on cancer cell samples that had various degrees of resistance to an array of drugs. Those had been mislabeled. Some were reversed, so that the cells that were most resistant were labelled as the least.

See original here:

Bad 'Precision' Medicine -- If Nobody Knows How It Works, Sometimes It Doesn't

UnitedHealth's $43 Billion Exit From Fee-For-Service Medicine

Posted on by

Continuing the health insurance industrys march further away from fee-for-service medicine, UnitedHealth Group UnitedHealth Group (UNH) executives said this week they will increase value-based payments to doctors and hospitals by 20 percent this year to north of $43 billion.

UnitedHealth, considered a barometer for the health insurance industry given its size, is rapidly departing from the traditional fee-for-service approach that can lead to overtreatment and unnecessary medical tests and procedures. Value-based pay is tied to health outcomes, performance and quality of care provided.

We are expecting about a 20% increase in the concentration of value-based reimbursement, Dan Schumacher, chief financial officer of UnitedHealths UnitedHealthcare subsidiary, told Wall Street analysts on the companys fourth-quarter and 2014 full-year earnings call earlier this week. We ended the year at about $36 billion of spend in value-based arrangements and were looking to drive that north of $43 billion in 2015.

UnitedHealths pronouncements are in keeping with its previously stated commitment to increase payments that are tied to value-based arrangements to $65 billion by the end of 2018.

Value-based payments come in a variety of forms. They include: pay-for -performance programs, patient-centered medical homes and accountable care organizations, a rapidly emerging care delivery system that rewards doctors and hospitals for working together to improve quality and rein in costs. UnitedHealth said it is generating 1 percent to 6 percent in savings from its various value-based reimbursement approaches.

Once rolled out by commercial and government insurers on a pilot basis, they are quickly becoming the norm. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said 20 percent of its payments are no longer fee-for-service based for providers reimbursed by the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly, a spokesman confirmed to Forbes this week.

As insurance companies report their fourth quarter earnings in the next two weeks, look for Aetna Aetna (AET), Cigna Cigna (CI), Humana (HUM) and others to provide updates on their value-based contracting for this year.

The structure actually drives volume towards the better providers that enter into these performance contracts, UnitedHealth chief executive Stephen Hemsley said earlier this week. Were progressing these contracts into more sophisticated forms where theyre actually taking on even greater performance responsibility over time. Wondering how the move away from fee-for-service medicine will affect your health care? The Forbes eBookInside Obamacare: The Fix For Americas Ailing Health Care Systemanswers that question and more. Available nowat AmazonandApple.

Read the original here:

UnitedHealth's $43 Billion Exit From Fee-For-Service Medicine

Preorder The Libertarian Mind by David Boaz, available February 2015 – Video

Posted on by


Preorder The Libertarian Mind by David Boaz, available February 2015
Libertarianismthe philosophy of personal and economic freedomhas deep roots in Western civilization and in American history, and it #39;s growing stronger. Two long wars, chronic deficits,...

By: Libertarianism.org

Follow this link:

Preorder The Libertarian Mind by David Boaz, available February 2015 - Video

Rush To Embark On Final Major North American Tour

Posted on by

KANSAS CITY, MO - AUGUST 04: Musicians Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart of Rush perform at Sprint Center on August 4, 2013 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by Jason Squires/WireImage) | Jason Squires via Getty Images

(New York-AFP) - Canadian progressive rock giants and libertarian icons Rush on Thursday announced concerts across North America in what the band said would be its last major tour.

The tour, which comes 41 years after Rush released its self-titled debut album, will start May 8 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and close on August 1 at the Los Angeles-area Forum.

Rush's three members in a statement said they wanted to "celebrate with the most loyal fans in the world" by playing four decades worth of material on what "will most likely be their last major tour of this magnitude."

Rush had its start in Toronto playing the hard guitar-driven sound that was then becoming popular but eventually became a major force in so-called progressive rock, which employed synthesizers and explored more complex song structures.

The band's lyrics, written by drummer Neil Peart, often examine the responsibility of the individual in society in songs inspired by science fiction and ancient mythology.

The lyricism has made Rush the favorite band for many in the libertarian movement, which opposes a large role for government, although Peart and lead vocalist Geddy Lee have steered clear of identifying themselves directly with political groups.

Peart, Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson were the first rockers to be decorated with the Order of Canada, and Rush was inducted in 2013 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Close

Peter Gabriel wore this bodysuit in the Steam music video and also at the 35th Annual Grammy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1993. The 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee exhibit opens May 31, 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio.

The rest is here:

Rush To Embark On Final Major North American Tour

Researchers discover genetic links to size of brain structures

Posted on by

ATLANTA--Five genetic variants that influence the size of structures within the human brain have been discovered by an international team that included a Georgia State University researcher.

Their findings were reported this week in the journal Nature.

In the study led by Drs. Sarah Medland, Margie Wright, Nick Martin and Paul Thompson of the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia, nearly 300 researchers analyzed genetic data and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from 30,717 individuals from around the world. They evaluated genetic data from seven subcortical brain regions (nucleus accumbens, caudate, putamen, pallidum, amygdala, hippocampus and thalamus) and intracranial volume from MRI scans.

This is the largest analysis of brain structure and genetics ever done, said Dr. Jessica Turner, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgia State, who organized some of the teams collecting and evaluating data from participants with schizophrenia.

The goal was to determine how common genetic variants affect the structure of these seven subcortical brain regions, which are associated with memory, movement, learning and motivation. Changes in these brain areas can lead to abnormal behavior and predisposition to disease.

Previous research has shown the brain's structure is strongly shaped by genetic influences. Identifying genetic variants could provide insight into the causes for variation in human brain development and help to determine how dysfunction in the brain occurs.

"The team looked at several million base pairs or locations on the human genome," Turner said. "Through a large-scale, international data sharing and data-analysis-sharing effort, we were able to actually successfully identify genetic effects on the hippocampus, putamen and other brain regions that no one had ever successfully identified genetics effects on before."

The researchers discovered five new genetic variants that influenced the volumes of the putamen and caudate nucleus. They also found stronger evidence for three locations in the genome that influence the size of the hippocampus and intracranial areas of the brain. The strongest genetic effects were observed for the putamen.

"Those are brain regions," Turner said, "that we know are involved in various psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. In trying to figure out the genetics that make them either larger or smaller, it could have great benefits for understanding mechanisms of these disorders."

###

Read the rest here:

Researchers discover genetic links to size of brain structures