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Did you see the model in the story's photo?

This is most definitely not a win-win.

I, for one, fear our wine-dress wearing, water-emerging, zombie-lookin' overlords.

My understanding is that this would only be true if it were year round. Accidents increase on both the days that we spring forward (less sleep) and the days that we fall back (interruption in our "circadian rhythms").

Of course, it turns out that it might not even save lives if year round (search for "school bus accidents").

The chaser http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/ is actually humour to be enjoyed. I know Chris and Julian personally and tehy are really funny guys. Julian got arrested for streaking through a streakers trial, you can't get much funnier than that. Also for anyone who doesn't know what I'm on about most of the episodes are available freely from the site I linked.

Am I the only person whom finds 'Quirks and Quarks - The flagship science programme of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation" really ... dumb?

As a long time (well, 18 months) listener to the programme, I find it terrible the lengths to which the host goes to ask the most inane, obvious and useless questions. Great selection of stories, access to key researchers, high production standards, but really, really dumb interviews.

Smart Researcher: 'So, we managed to slow down light, transform it into a meta state, then re-animate it.'
Bob McDonald: 'Gee, wow. So, you slowed light down? Then got it to move again later?'
SCR: 'Umm ... yes. [thinks: Isn't that exactly what I just said]?'
BM: 'Gee. Golly! [giggles]. Gee!'

I'm Australian, and I'm probably spoilt by The Science Show. To anyone whom listens to Quirks and Quarks on their commute, do youself a favour and download a dozen episodes of The Science Show aswell.

It's worse than that:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s348188.h tm

Maybe they have improved it, but at some point, I read that the freeze dried poo had a tendency not to stay 'contained', making longer missions increasing uncomfortable.

The thing I find odd is that most of the advanced civilizations were in Mexico and S. America, rather than from the North. Aside from the Incas and Myan's, there is also good evidence the Amazon was once crisscrossed with roads and towns. Civilizations pop up in the most bizzare places, Easter Island anyone?

Why is it so hard to belive these people had been trading in ideas and customs for mellenia, then one day someones idea took the traceable form of a clovis and spread rapidly through an existing network?

No, no other English-speaking nation in the world is on your side in this .. well, maybe Ireland.)

Nope, In Ireland football is a game played with 15 players a side and run by the GAA
Soccer is something played by delicate flowers who fall in a breeze and generally bring disgrace upon themselves and their nation and shouldn't be confused with sport being more in the realm of performance art.

Though footie as played in Oz seems suited to a bunch of ex-crims, they really shouldn't be allowed abroad to perpetrate International rules on others ;)

The terminator gene is useful here because it prevents the crop from spreading into the wild. In this way it's a safeguard.

Apparently, it doesn't work so well.

Why is everyone acting like this is (a) just some 'America meets the third world' issue, and (b) all to do with money and big pharmaceutical companies and how, oh, but they need that money to develop it?

Okay, yes, on the one hand this is Slashdot, most of you are American. But on the other hand, this is Slashdot, most of you are aware of the world beyond your borders, or so it usually seems.

Here's a story a week earlier from the (Australian) ABC on Indonesia criticising an Australian pharmaceutical company for developing a vaccine with "their" IP. The company says that they won't and in fact can't profiteer out of this vaccine, that it's been developed for a fixed sum. This is of course only what the company themselves say about themselves, but in context I'm more likely to take them at their word, given the Indonesian government's position.

How many criminals wear gloves? That's how many criminals will potentially carry a bottle of somebody's cultured DNA.

Just a quick note, did anyone see the Australian science show "Catalyst" on a new yeast that can digest cellulose and C5 sugars? They are saying this sucker could brew up paper and cardboard, all sorts of agricultural waste as well as the left over bagasse waste from the sugar-cane currently used in ethanol production techniques. EG: Double your yields from sugar-cane, but when applied to all that waste paper.... stacks more fuel! http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1763365.ht m/ I ultimately see ethanol as a mere niche market as the environmental risks of degrading more soils are just too great. But if waste-paper is a problem anyway, i say brew it up with this new super-yeast for a bit more fuel. Can't hurt in a world about to be slowed down considerably by peak oil.

In reply to the query about who is Philip Adams and can he be trusted in calls for investment.

Philip Adams is a well known personality in intellectual culture in Australia. He has a radio program on the national broadcaster, the ABC, which has been running for at least ten years. The show runs 4 nights a week and on it Philip interviews prominent people from around the world. He is very successful in getting very highly regarded people to speak because 1) he is a very good interviewer 2) his audience in Australia is very substantial and 3) because the level of discussion usually goes much deeper than is usual in the media.

I think you do not need to be very suspicious of his motivations because his reputation is his most precious asset and he would be very wary of supporting things that look at all dodgy. Also, he has been independently wealthy for a long time (made his fortune in advertising in his younger days) and has shown little motivation to increase his wealth since those early days.

However, he's no scientist or engineer. I wouldn't back him to pick the difference between science and snake oil, and I'm afraid this smells like snake oil.

I live in Brisbane in the state of QLD - you need to use a bucket to do anything outside with water... water the garden, wash the car, etc.... You aren't even supposed to have a hose hooked up to your taps, let alone use it to do anything. This is called level 3 water restrictions.

We need sustained rainfall of 50mm (2 inches in the old imperial system) in a 24 hour period to produce some run-off to start filling up our dams. We haven't received rainfall such as this in approx 14 months. However, to make things worse, we have been suffering from the El Nino http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/elnino/story.ht m effect now for about 3 years.

Don't get me wrong - it still rains here. We had a storm 2 nights ago that dumped 70mm of rain in 1 hour on the city of Brisbane - the dam catchment is 50KM northwest of me and it hardly got a drop. Same goes for the storm that hit us on Thusday evening last week. Besides - all storms do around here is rip roofs off houses and bring down power lines. They don't fill up dams.

At the moment we have about 2 years of water left in Brisbane - the state government is building various water pipelines to move recycled water (treated sewage) back into the dams - to keep them topped up. These pipelines won't be finished for about 2 years, so things could get really interesting around about the time the dams actually do run out.

Bottom line - Australia has always had just enough rainfall and just enough dam capacity to deal with this sort of thing - but not anymore. Population density on the East coast from Mackay/Rockhampton all the way to Melbourne (3000KM) and west to Adelaide (another 1000KM or so) has been increasing steadily for the last 10 years or so - but water storage solutions haven't really grown at the same rate during that time - mainly due to environmental concerns and NIMBYism - not to mention the economics of building dams.

Australia needs to be smarter about water and think more about localised water storage and catchment concepts - re-cycling used water back into the dam system is an excellent first step.

Put it this way - if my house used Tanks for it's potable water supply - they would be over-flowing right now - and if the tanks were big enough EG: 2 x 10 000L, at no point in the last 3 years would I have run out of water for my house. There has been enough localised heavy rainfall (those damn storms I mentioned) to keep tanks like that basically over-flowing for the last 3 years. Just to put this in perspective, a small in-ground swimming pool is approx 60 000L in capacity.

As for the article - it has no technical details - so it remains to be seen if this is a real technology... But something like this would be really, really welcome right now.

>> They are having a related problem in Cambodia where young people don't believe the Killings Fields ever happened.
> Do you have sources for that? When I was in Cambodia it wasn't my impression that the Cambodian government tries
> to deny their country's past.

Aware that Cambodia is *nothing* like China, and yes, they do try. From memory, no one had talked about the Killing Fields and it wasn't taught in schools. Having gone so long having heard nothing, when someone finally says something, it's a big like talking about a faked moon landing. A similar, albeit much more low key thing in modern Australia, is that a young person today can't comprehend the social movements of the 1980s. It's beyond their memory and not taught in schools, so doesn't exist. Same but starker in China; if no one dares talk about it, it ceases to exist.

I heard it on Radio Australia's Asia Pacific Programme. Here are some links. If you want to see the film, contact the makers. I think they'd only be too happy to share it with you:

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/asiapac/programs/s1815949 .htm
http://www.bigpond.com.kh/users/kid/
http://www.sangsalapak.org.kh/whatson/2006/12/film -screening-at-fcc-on-dec-13-phnom.html

At least you have it announced, it still remains to be announced in Australia. I've seen two PS3's in Australia and both of them were running Linux at Linux.conf.au 2007 (from the Yellow Dog Linux guys, so I don't think they were local). So to answer your question? It isn't. I can understand localization issues in parts of Europe might cause delays but for Australia were technically its British English but due to the absolute raping that occured during our early TV development where the US TV producers firmly established their foothold in Australia (to the point that easily 50% or more commercial TV in Australia is American; the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Radio National weekly 'The Science Show' covered this in one of its broadcasts on TV in Australia), American English would be accepted normally without a second thought. I'd almost suggest it'd be easier to ship the PS3 from Japan to Australia than it would to get it from Japan to the UK - especially via boat.

At least you have it announced, it still remains to be announced in Australia. I've seen two PS3's in Australia and both of them were running Linux at Linux.conf.au 2007 (from the Yellow Dog Linux guys, so I don't think they were local). So to answer your question? It isn't. I can understand localization issues in parts of Europe might cause delays but for Australia were technically its British English but due to the absolute raping that occured during our early TV development where the US TV producers firmly established their foothold in Australia (to the point that easily 50% or more commercial TV in Australia is American; the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Radio National weekly 'The Science Show' covered this in one of its broadcasts on TV in Australia), American English would be accepted normally without a second thought. I'd almost suggest it'd be easier to ship the PS3 from Japan to Australia than it would to get it from Japan to the UK - especially via boat.

At least you have it announced, it still remains to be announced in Australia. I've seen two PS3's in Australia and both of them were running Linux at Linux.conf.au 2007 (from the Yellow Dog Linux guys, so I don't think they were local). So to answer your question? It isn't. I can understand localization issues in parts of Europe might cause delays but for Australia were technically its British English but due to the absolute raping that occured during our early TV development where the US TV producers firmly established their foothold in Australia (to the point that easily 50% or more commercial TV in Australia is American; the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Radio National weekly 'The Science Show' covered this in one of its broadcasts on TV in Australia), American English would be accepted normally without a second thought. I'd almost suggest it'd be easier to ship the PS3 from Japan to Australia than it would to get it from Japan to the UK - especially via boat.

It appears to be a slightly more advanced system than SNUPA http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/stories/s112369.htm developed at the University of Melbourne, which I believe didn't differentiate between different explosive compounds.

>>Personally I was planning to get XM radio because Im sick of the ten minutes of music then ten minutes of commercials I get on terestrial radio.

Listen to JJJ then.

Yup, it was Nancy Knight (at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado) - here's a reference.

Shouldn't US have rebuilt New orleans and Missisippi devastated by Katrina before jumping into the Iraq War?

Yes, if you live in a crazy world where time runs backwards.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1784760. htm

Basically, she found two hexagonal prisms that exhibited the same crystal-formation pattern. Molecule-for-molecule, they weren't identical, but they both had formed in the same lattice config (which is enough for me to say that they're dupes of each other).

-- Posting AC 'cause I was itchy with the modding stick.

"You suggest that expressing skepticism is incompetence."

No, and that burning smell is your strawman going up in flames.

I suggest: Willfully expressing profound ignorance of a realted field of expertise and repeatedly passing it off to the public as an authorative scientific statement after being corrected by one's peers IS by definition incompetence, but you can assume mallice if you like.

And as I said from the very start this is not about censorship it's about misinformation. Ironically it now appears that TFA is actually a politicaly inspired character assasination. So far from defending science against "censorship" it would appear that you are unwittingly aiding a certain politician's personal crusade to "dismantle the scientific method".

I could care less if the weatherman says "everyone knows the moon is made of cheese", since it's obvious he is joking. Nor do I object if he presents his personal opinions as personal and as opinions. And if you dig a bit deeper you will find that the scientist is not suggesting skeptsism be censored from science, she is suggesting AMS members be held to proffessional standards of behaviour and ethics.

Disclaimer: "Why is it so?" is a question that has stuck with me since watching the originals in the 60's. Here is my definition of skepticisim that also has an excellent rundown on the scientific method. Here are some fresh fruits from the dedicated and large scale application of those principles. I have held a BSC since 1990, I do not belong to any proffesional or political organisations, nor do I intentionally speak for anyone else.

At first, I thought this was going to be similar to the method of generating hires images from a small number of sensors utilized by jumping spiders. Basically, they vibrate their retinas, recording datapoints from the in-between locations to get in-between pixels.

The US army's lost 3,000 soldiers over 4 years, while achieving objectives which 20 years ago would have required a force 5 times their size.

Heco bastion isn't sandbags, you're a bigoted prick, propaganda != lies (look it up), mortars (especially larger ones) generally don't fire 30 rpm, accuracy matters.

1) Human beings may or may not have had an influence on the Earth's climate in the past few hundred years.

Uh, no. I think I clearly said we have, or at least was asking "how much." I think by asking "how much" I clearly accept the fact that we have.

2) There exist people who claim that the Earth's climate would, right now, be different if only Bush had signed the Kyoto Accords

Yes, very many leftists blame Katrina on right wingers, especially Bush (taking the blame even if he had no choice). Perhaps they don't phrase it that way, but here's a few choice ones:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi's Gulf Coast, it's worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush's iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

Now, you can argue he didn't come out and say it, but he certainly is relating Kyoto with Katrina.

From here: German Minister Links Katrina to Global Warming, Bush Policies.

How about this one: "Katrina's Real Name is Global Warming", with this choice quote: "In 2001, the Bush administration announced it would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol that has been signed by 120 countries."

Again, why does the author include this in the article if it's not his sentiment that Kyoto and Katrina are related?

And here: "In Australia, the Greens party said Katrina was aggravated by climate change and criticised Bush for pulling out of Kyoto."

Again, the association goes Katrina as a result of global warming as a result of Bush not signing Kyoto.

The implication is clear.

I mean, if women actually attracted more men when they look attractive, then we wouldn't have had a surge of babies 9 months after the northeast power blackout, quite the contrary.

We're certainly happy to give them something else to whinge about http://www.abc.net.au/cricket/scores/ckt_scorecard _1016_4.htm.

Though this scramjet will wreck one of the classic English visitor jokes;

Q: How can you tell when a 747 full of poms lands in Australia?
A: The whining keeps going after the engines have been shut off...

Not sure about American law versus British or elsewhere, but there have been convictions without bodies, yes: http://www.sclomax.co.uk/glynrazzell.htm http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200612/s18119 08.htm http://tafkac.org/legal/no_body_not_no_murder.html One of the links seems to be saying that Texas is the only state where you aboslutely have to have a body. I recall reading about a case a while back (can't find cite now, sorry) whereby there was no body but the cops found prosthetic body organ parts of some sort (heart valve? or similar) in a vat of acid. It was enough to convict the main suspect of the murder.

All of what you said is contradicted by basic primatology. We are not deer. We are great apes.

Great apes do not mark their territory with piss or pheromones. Great apes live in groups, so they don't need to smell each other to find each other -- they wake up with each other every morning, and go to sleep next to each other every night. They are all right in front of each other's faces.

Great apes attract and find mates based on vision, not smell. Have you ever seen a female chimp in heat? I have. Her hind end swells up to the size of a human buttocks. Here's a picture. With baboons, the labia become swollen and cherry-red. It looks like the mother of all veneral diseases.

This is true for out closest relatives -- gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos. Sure, guys might be attracted to the scent of a woman, but what really gives you a boner is the sight of sexually mature breasts or a mature female butt with the wide hips. Porn is images, not smells.

When a human female menstruates, she is not leaking 'hormones'. It's not a stream of estrogen. The reason it's so exciting to wild animals is because she is bleeding and shedding endometrium tissue, and the animals are smelling blood.

I am Australian. I'd like to bring your attention to this:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200612/s18111 75.htm

People are a lot less likely to die in knifings and beatings. The gun ban works.

How a 10m proximity device would track his location constantly is a mystery to me.

If he's being kidnapped, the napper would be aware that there is a very small window of opportunity to remove the child from the park before he's noticed missing, this window is made wider by your "it's ok he's been tagged, he'll turn up" mentality.

And that window doesn't need to be very wide at all

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200606/s16726 04.htm

I'm pleased to see alternative technologies to split water using sunlight, but the idea is not new.

There is a group at UNSW who have been working on ceramics which use sunlight to split water (via a process of electrolysis). It's still in research (mostly due to efficiency), but it's an interesting option if you're interested in this stuff.

Their website is pretty sparse, but there is a story on them here.

I've heard complaints about Wikipedia from many people who are eminently unqualified to make such assertions.

Conversely, the experts in the area seem to like Wikipedia, much as the above story suggests. Along these lines, I was interested to hear a podcast from Australia's Science Show talking about this very issue (the podcast is no longer up, but there is a transcript).

I've heard complaints about Wikipedia from many people who are eminently unqualified to make such assertions.

Conversely, the experts in the area seem to like Wikipedia, much as the above story suggests. Along these lines, I was interested to hear a podcast from Australia's Science Show talking about this very issue (the podcast is no longer up, but there is a transcript).

I fear that you're wrong, and the guy is just a conservative technophobe

I think what the guy has realised is that a cheap laptop is certainly not going to be some silver bullet in the heart of bad education.

It never took off. The Australian Government (and I use the term loosely) expects Australians to rush out and spend $$$ buying settop boxes all so they can see the same thing. Yes, there are extra digital channels, but they ALL SHOW THE SAME THING. LITERALLY! The government didn't want to upset Rupert Murdoch (FOXNews) who owns the cable network, so they woudln't let TV stations multitask. Add that to the hassle of video records not working, TV reconfiguration nightmares (I have to turn on the set top box, the VCR *and* the TV) to watch anything. People have stayed away in droves.

And all for what? So, if you have a HDTV, you can watch HDTV movies full off adds, covered by a watermark and with banner commercials racing across.

Internet TV would have been a far better deal, but the Australian Government didn't want to upset Rupert on that either.

Australia is a total f##king joke. We lost it. Pathetic Nation. Yes, I am an Aussie.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaking/aust-slow-t o-embrace-digital-tv/2005/09/02/1125302722377.html

Funny how the government broadcaster completely respins this story:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200611/s17955 42.htm

(BTW the percentage is more like 23%)

As reported here

ANDREW DENTON: A lot of people see you as this... this larger than life STEVE IRWIN, in some ways a one-dimensional, almost cartoon character. But what they, perhaps, don't know is you've bought huge tracts of land in Australia, Vanuatu, Fiji, US. Why have you done that?

STEVE IRWIN: I'm a conservationist through and through, Andrew. That's, er...that's why I was put on this planet, um, for the benefit of wildlife and wilderness areas. That's what I'm into. That's what makes me pumped, mate. That's what myself and Terry (sic.) and our families have been all about.

A fantastic idea, and as the previous poster stated, a great way to protect the land, when it's managed appropriately.

We allmost had a 'super cell' tornado in Brisbane (aus) on the same day. Weathers wacked out eh? http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200611/s17896 95.htm

As the summary noted there has also been a rapid political shift in Australia, A few weeks ago I watched an interview with our environment minister and could not belive it was the same person who inhabited that body a year ago. However I think the most significant shift in opinion has been Rupert Murdoch "turning green", I also think Tony Blair deserves an honourable mention for the current u-turn towards "greener" politics.

OTOH: The political shift in Australia could be due to the "worst drought in 1000yrs" or some other anecdote, such as today's news where we saw snow falling around bushfires! For those unfimilair with Australia, snow in November is a rare occurence, it's happened twice in the last month along with a record breaking heatwave in October that reached 37C in Melbourne.

On a more somber note: Currenty we have culled 20% of our dairy heard and reduced our forecast grain harvest by 50%. The markets are flooded with malnourished livestock, the antarctic blasts and the associated frost has ruined our fruit and wine crops, and our bannanas are still recovering from a cyclone that wiped them off the map earlier this year. I understand our agricultural problems are not all directly caused by AGW but it certainly isn't helping the situation (except maybe for snowing on bushfires).

Speaking of agriculture it is difficult to get much in the way of historical data (last 20yrs) for total world harvests without paying a few hundred bucks, anyone got a link?

Triple J - the national youth broadcaster in Australia - runs a competition to expose the Triple J "drum" logo to as many people as possible.

This year (whoa... actually... 2004...!!! lost a couple of years there) the entry that won was a 1km x 1.5km image of the drum logo, plowed into a field. Cool :)

Check it out here

That got modded insightful?

Heck, this whole discussion has gotten off to a bad start. Maybe it's the video that did it; too many people are seeing this as a gimmick or even a fake, just because 'it doesn't look right'. The ABC's coverage does a better job than the SMH, methinks, and of course there's the CSIRO's own release.

This shirt is real. The idea is to get people interested in the idea of this sort of wearable technology. There are more practical applications being put forward by the team behind it. That's not to say they're not going to try and market this one, though.

• The article is in Australian IT, connected to The Australian newspaper.
• The report in question is a draft of a confidential briefing. So it hasn't been published, and so can't be "cited" in the conventional sense, by The Australian or anyone else.
• It's quite common for newspapers to mention that they've seen unpublished material that they're writing about, usually with the phrase "seen by"
• However, in Australia/NZ the phrase "sighted by" seems to be more common in this context.

Explanation of the science from Catalyst a science show on the ABC.

A summary of the moral issues from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference

These are authorative sources.

As much as I would like to see the possible payoffs from such research, my personal feelings are that the Australian parliament has fallen into the trap of allowing the end to justify the means. As explained by Catalyst, the plan is to insert human DNA into a rabbit's egg. That really is a significant step to be making, even if the human/animal hybrid is a single cell.

Explanation of the science from Catalyst a science show on the ABC.

A summary of the moral issues from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference

These are authorative sources.

As much as I would like to see the possible payoffs from such research, my personal feelings are that the Australian parliament has fallen into the trap of allowing the end to justify the means. As explained by Catalyst, the plan is to insert human DNA into a rabbit's egg. That really is a significant step to be making, even if the human/animal hybrid is a single cell.

"This is /. buddy, what you'll get is a bunch of reasons why its right or wrong from people that didn't read the article."

Yep, I skimed the article and found "the UN abolished the medieval warm period", if the submitter found the article "convincing" then it does not reflect well on his knowledge of the subject. My view is the guy has nothing new to add and is very pissed off about suggestions we should pay the full costs of an industrialised society.

Assuming the submitter really does want a detailed rebuttal on the climate (psudeo)science in the article he could try a seach for the word myth on RealClimate. If it has not already been debunked in that list then the world renowned climatoligists from the site (many of whom he is attacking), may have a look at it for him.

Having said that I would be very surprised to see something new, similar articles have appeared since the Stern report, and (surprisingly?), have also been debunked by the "mainstream media". Now this may be coincidence but I do belive Rupert has gone pale green.

BTW: Apart from the Melbourne Cup, the headlines today in Australia are telling us about the "the worst drought in 1000yrs". My only advise is to invest in solid gold "bling" and hunker down for the population implosion that is coming our way (Exhibit A: the plethora of "surviour" type TV shows).

You would have to be american to think that that was racist in some way. They claimed he went to a playboy sponsored party. Are you telling me that playboy have never featured non-white women in their magazine? Now that would be wierd.

More significant (but not in the ad) was him ranting about the nuclear threat USA faces from the aspirations of Australia, Argentina and South Africa. WTF? South Africa is the only country who has had the nuclear bomb and then (voluntarily) disarmed itself of it (years ago). Australia is one of your staunchest allies, shoring up your rear now that you decided to give up on fighting al-quaeda and the taliban so you could concentrate on Iraq instead.

I agree with your sentiments but think that your obsession with voting for the ever-so-slightly-lessor of two evils is a cop-out. Out of 300 million americans can't you even find 100 good ones?