Nobody will read this comment since this thread is long dead. But the website I mentioned earlier (Comment 2) has a follow up article on this story. It seems that the audacious claims made about the paucity of dark matter near our solar system's region of space are illfounded - as in literally founded on false assumptions.

Of course, the unaudacious claim that the audacious claim is probably incorrect won't make the headlines.

Comment 1 by Schrodinger's Cat :

I'm not clear what they mean by dark matter in 'the space around the Solar System'. Given that dark matter supposedly does not interact other than gravitationally, why should one suppose that it is rotating along with the matter to the extent that there'd be any noticeable long term effect ?

From the article discussing this on the website I mentioned above:

"Their approach is to study the gravitational effects of nearby matter, as reflected by the motions of a small sample of the stars that lie within a few thousand light years of the sun. [Sorry -- I still don't understand their method well enough to explain it to non-experts, but will fill in more details if and when I do.] . And they claim that the motions of those stars suggest that the only matter nearby is the ordinary matter we can see around us, with no dark matter in addition."

Hope that helps.

There's an excellent website run by a professional physicist I find very useful for keeping up with the latest from the frontiers of physics. There's also lots of careful explanations regarding firmly established theories and concepts.

I recomend it to those who worry that something gets lost in translation between the physicist and the news outlet desrcribing the findings and their implications. It's particulary good for getting the inside stories from the LHC.

There's an article about this story in which the author urges caution about the validity of the results and explains why it may not be much of an upheaval in any case.

Comment 10 by mmurray How does "bred specifically for purpose" make an difference to monkeys? We used to breed slaves specifically for purpose. Did you read the book or see the movie Never let me go ? That was about humans cloned specifically for the purpose of having their organs harvested.

Well it doesn't make a differenec to the monkeys - they obviously don't know the purpose for which they were bred. But I wouldn't want to see the number of monkeys living in the wild dcrease as a result of experimentation.

If there were nothng ethically wrong with enslavement per se, but that we did think it wrong to take humans away from their previous lives against their will and make them slaves, than breeding them for the purpose of enslavement would negate that dilemma.

Not that enslavement is ethical, of course.

They still kill macaque monkeys in japan - using lethal injection - in order to dissect the brain and find out exactly where they were recording from. I know because I'm currently doing a a piece of coursework for my MSc and I've read a lot of recent (2000 - present) research on it.

I'm not sure if there's a non-lethal way to determine the recording sites with the same degree of accuracy, given the recording methods. Although, I'm of the opinion that if the animals were bred specifically for the pursposes of the experiment, that they were not caused any pain or psychological distress while they were alive and that their death is likewise without pain or psychological stress, then it's perfectly ethical.

What do the rest of you think about the ethics of the situation I've desribed?