Mentre procede la campagna di disinformazione sul clima – in Italia, ci pensa pure la sacra alleanza du sabre et du goupillon, quindi attenti al rimmel (h/t Ivodivo) – Nature festeggia i 25 anni dell’IPCC e la pubblicazione il 27 settembre della sintesi del suo quinto rapporto. In realtà, trova il Panel ingessato. La scadenza quinquennale del rapporto lo rende obsoleto, tanto più da quando dati e ricerche sono subito disponibili on-line:
- Instead climate scientists should focus on smaller and more rapid assessments of more pressing questions that have a particular political interest and for which science is evolving quickly. These reports could look more like the panel’s recent special report on extreme weather; longer and more detailed assessments could be performed as needed, when there is sufficient interest from the governments that the IPCC serves.
- Such a structure might also help to avoid an unfortunate consequence of the current framework, which ensures that the IPCC’s mega-assessments are out of date by the time they hit the streets. For the latest document, some 20 international teams participated in coordinated modelling experiments, providing the core climate projections that the global community will use in the coming years; this is one area in which the IPCC has clearly driven the science forward. However, owing to logistics and deadlines, scientists barely had time to conduct a preliminary analysis for the current assessment, and as a result it lacks the more detailed analyses and most of the new science being published in journals today.
- Absent from next week’s report, for instance, is recent and ongoing research on the rate of warming and what is — or is not — behind the plateau in average global temperatures that the world has experienced during the past 15 years. These questions have important policy implications, and the IPCC is the right body to answer them. But it need not wait six years to do so.
“Dietro il plateau” che segue il picco del 1998, per esempio ci sono i dati del WMO usciti pochi mesi fa.
Dopo ProPublica, il NY Times, il Guardian, l‘Economist ecc., Nature protesta contro la NSA che, deliberatamente,
has compromised or got around the encryption techniques on which the security of Internet communications, electronic health records, e-commerce and banking are based.
Alla sfiducia verso gli USA, dovrebbero rimediare “scienziati e legislatori”, ma finché sono gli stessi che l’hanno provocata mi sembra una pessima idea. Forse Dilma Roussef e altri governanti spiati dovrebbero creare un Ipcc…
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Elogio di Thomas Pynchon che – a proposito di prognosi – aveva già immaginato una NSA e i suoi misfatti:
- There are few novelists who can claim to successfully unite the two cultures, but Pynchon does it by dispensing with metaphor and turning to science itself.
e recensione del suo ultimo romanzo, Bleeding Edge, rif. anche il Guardian.
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Ho letto solo l‘intro dello “speciale” sull’eterogeneità dei tumori. Sponsorizzato dalla Gilead, nome poco rassicurante che fa pensare al Racconto dell’ancella di Margaret Atwood (brava, ma non all’altezza di Pynchon);
Alison Abbott si occupa dello scontro EU-Israele, sui finanziamenti Horizon 2020 che non possono andare a enti di ricerca israeliani con sede nei territori occupati:
- Israel has been involved in EU research programmes as an associate country since 1996, and is one of just a handful of non-EU member states — including Switzerland and Norway — to have this status. It has benefited enormously. The country paid just €534 million to join the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the forerunner of Horizon 2020, but its net gain once FP7 finishes at the end of this year will be about €634 million, with almost 1,600 Israeli scientists participating in grant agreements under the programme.
Il governo israeliano potrebbe ritirarsi da Horizon 2020, per rivendicare la propria sovranità sui territori. La cosa più assurda è che l’EU paga quasi tutta l’assistenza nei territori occupati, e che
- the restriction of Horizon 2020 funding to the non-occupied territories would have little impact on Israeli scientists, almost all of whom work within pre-1967 borders. Only one beneficiary of FP7 grants, cosmetics company Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories in Mitzpe Shalem in the West Bank, would have been ineligible had the guidelines been in place for FP7, and currently only about €1.5 million flows into the occupied territories.
Per fare le sue creme, l’azienda di cosmetici sottrae acqua già scarsa ai palestinesi che non hanno il diritto di scavare pozzi nemmeno sulle proprie terre e se ci provano, i pozzi vengono distrutti dall’esercito. Come documentato da Codepink, l’Ong israeliana che chiama da anni al boicottaggio di Ahava.
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Molti papers interessanti erano stati anticipati on line, come è successo ieri sera con quello dei genetisti del Weizmann: per riprogrammare cellule somatiche e derivarne staminali pluripotenti, hanno disattivato un singolo gene (Mbd3). La cosa impressionante è che hanno ottenuto staminali indistinguibili da quelle embrionali entro una settimana nel 99% dei casi partendo da cellule adulte – epidermide e sangue – sia di topi che di umani.
Dal com. stampa:
- This finding has significant implications for the producing of iPSCs for medical use. Yamanaka used viruses to insert the four genes but, for safety reasons, these are not used in reprograming cells to be used in patients. This gives the process an even lower success rate of only around a tenth of a percent. The researchers showed that removing MBD3 from the adult cells can improve efficiency and speed the process by several orders of magnitude. The time needed to produce the stem cells was shortened from four weeks to eight days.
- As an added bonus, since the cells all underwent the reprograming at the same rate, the scientists will now be able, for the first time, to actually follow it step by step and reveal its mechanisms of operation.
E niente brevetto… altro che “metodo Stamina“.