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Not to mention that we smoked weed on a quite so daily basis.

If schizophrenia runs in your family, you might want to consider not smoking the weed.

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s777336.htm

http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/marijuana/sc hizophrenia.jsp

No article on Nanobacteria would be complete without a reference to Philla Uwins. A geologist who in 1999 was inspecting (deep, hot and old) drilling samples from the Western Australian coastline with a scanning electron microscope discovered unusual possible life forms from 20nm to 150nm, christening them nanobes. Well below the accepted 200nm miniumum thought possible for life. (it is thought that no living thing can contain the necessary machinary in containers below 200nm).

What followed is probably more interesting than this reported story (the discovery of nanobes in blood and their possible link to disease predates this article). Things started to hot up in the nanobe world when some research money came forward to see if these nanobes contained the necessary DNA to disprove the many *non life advocates*. Even physicist Paul Davies (Australian centre for Astrobiology) pondered the possibility that nanobes could be a possible link between life and non-life.

Armed with some results the Unwin team sent off a paper to every *major* reputable scientific journal only to have them turned down. The most common reason.... too controversial.

So I read this story and think of *mayo* clinic and the *ohhh must be reputable* tag that goes with it and thinking why hasn't Nature or some other journal taken so long to publish these ideas?. Science publishing appears to be more about convincing publishers (and peers) less about looking at the data.

The postscript to the story: The dot com crash in 2000 killed off more research into the DNA tests, the possible application of the nanobes into eating plastic (nanobes had a voracious appetite for petri dishes) and a potential commercial spin off. Phillipa still works at UQ.

• 
  assorted links
  
  http://www.uq.edu.au/nanoworld/uwins.html
  
  http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/pdavies.html
  
  http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s2015 6. htm
  
  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s132 23 5.htm
  
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273 ,3 840998,00.html
  
  

No article on Nanobacteria would be complete without a reference to Philla Uwins. A geologist who in 1999 was inspecting (deep, hot and old) drilling samples from the Western Australian coastline with a scanning electron microscope discovered unusual possible life forms from 20nm to 150nm, christening them nanobes. Well below the accepted 200nm miniumum thought possible for life. (it is thought that no living thing can contain the necessary machinary in containers below 200nm).

What followed is probably more interesting than this reported story (the discovery of nanobes in blood and their possible link to disease predates this article). Things started to hot up in the nanobe world when some research money came forward to see if these nanobes contained the necessary DNA to disprove the many *non life advocates*. Even physicist Paul Davies (Australian centre for Astrobiology) pondered the possibility that nanobes could be a possible link between life and non-life.

Armed with some results the Unwin team sent off a paper to every *major* reputable scientific journal only to have them turned down. The most common reason.... too controversial.

So I read this story and think of *mayo* clinic and the *ohhh must be reputable* tag that goes with it and thinking why hasn't Nature or some other journal taken so long to publish these ideas?. Science publishing appears to be more about convincing publishers (and peers) less about looking at the data.

The postscript to the story: The dot com crash in 2000 killed off more research into the DNA tests, the possible application of the nanobes into eating plastic (nanobes had a voracious appetite for petri dishes) and a potential commercial spin off. Phillipa still works at UQ.

• 
  assorted links
  
  http://www.uq.edu.au/nanoworld/uwins.html
  
  http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/pdavies.html
  
  http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s2015 6. htm
  
  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s132 23 5.htm
  
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273 ,3 840998,00.html
  
  

Dr. Phillipa Uwins, an electron microscopist from Queensland Australia found nanobes less than 100 nanometres big when analysing core samples returned from petrochemical exploration.

1999 Discovery

Interview on Robin Cook's Science Show.

Dr. Phillipa Uwins, an electron microscopist from Queensland Australia found nanobes less than 100 nanometres big when analysing core samples returned from petrochemical exploration.

1999 Discovery

Interview on Robin Cook's Science Show.

ABC's Mediawatch had great coverage of how fuel companies put up 'no mobile phone' signs because of the media stories that phones are dangerous BECAUSE companies put up 'no mobile phone' signs because of the media stories that said they're dangerous because ... etc etc, and around we go.

my source is here

don't laugh. the computer that nasa used for the moon landing had 74k of rom, only 4k of ram and no external storage whatsoever. despite that it ran a real, interrupt-driven, multi-user operating system and, most importantly, it go the job done.

my source is here.

• ABC News Australia
• Mainichi Daily News Japan
• Straits Times Singapore (AP)

ABC news

Nobody is guaranteed anything in life, nor should they be.

Indeed. Like those whiny fucks who think that the Constitution guarantees them a writ of habius corpus or the right to a trial.

Assuming this isn't a hacked site--and it certainly looks OK--please note that that ABC News Online Australia article concludes:

"The alleged discovery has been greeted with barely concealed mirth by the Mediterranean island's tourism office."

Editorializing a bit, are we?

Don't coat them with rocket fuel then.

Another gyro failed two years ago, leaving only one working gyro.

"We cannot control the vehicle without at least two gyros," NASA maintenance manager Mike Suffredini, at the Johnson Space Centre, said.

NASA announced Thursday that the second of the international space station's four stabilizing gyroscopes failed on Wednesday night, but neither the station nor the crew were in immediate danger.

The first gyroscope broke two years ago as a result of a bearing failure. Two more are still operating -- the minimum required -- but one has exhibited power surges and vibrations over the past year. If another gyroscope breaks, thrusters on the docked Russian capsule and the station would have to assume control over the massive orbiting structure for as long as a year.

Theory is that gold nuggets don't just occur by themselves, they're deposited by microbial colonies.

"Coal ash is composed primarily of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury,

The article forgot to mention all of the other elements in the earths crust but that is the way it is going. Coal ash is mostly silica, with the other constituants in small amounts varying depending on where the coal comes from. I suggest you look it up in a reputable source. What you quoted is not a reputable source - cenospheres may be silica but they certainly are not "Tiny glass spheres".

The concentration of fissionable uranium-235 (the current fuel for nuclear power plants) has been established to be 0.71% of uranium content.

You do see the game that the author of the article is playing don't you? He's given you the number in the form of a percentage of a small percentage to make the number look bigger.

Anyone who doesn't speak well of coal is a nuclear industry shill.

Coal has acknowledged problems without the silly ones propogated by the "look coal is radioactive too - so nuclear is OK" articles. I used to work in coal fired power stations, with some work for hydro and brief visits to oil refineries so I could be considered suspect as well I suppose. I'm now working in association with the mining exploration industry, which really covers oil, coal and uranium.

Why does Germany have so many nuclear reactors if they are so expensive?

They were built a very long time ago to provide some independance from inported energy sources - the same reason Japan did. France had military reasons. France is so far the only country to successfully decommision a nuclear power plant - it cost an absolute fortune to do, and a few people were killed in a liquid sodium accident in the process. France does not appear to be likely to break even on nuclear power either, which is why they haven't built any plants in a long time.

The news completely sidestepped the fact that earlier that month, a reactor in Idaho peformed a test with the exact same conditions presented by Chernobyl

Mentioning that would have appeared a bit petty at the time. It's not the safe drivers that make the news, it's the ones that have accidents.

Chernobyl was a graphite reactor whose primary purpose was weapons production

I suspect you read something on the topic. Steam is not a weapon. Ohter methods are used to make weapons grade materials. I've worked with someone who worked in a plant of the same design (tenuous link I know), and from the description of how the plant worked I would have to say that you are wrong.

probability of uranium with a maximum concentration of U-235 at 3% going critical mass

Chenobyl was not a hydrogen bomb - it was a steam explosion that scattered radioactive materials - simple mundane heat and water. It was still a disaster.

I am sorry to hear about the accident in your country. What kind of reactor is it?

It was at a uranium mine. Water from the mine was piped by accident into the water supply. It was noticed when large numbers of miners became ill after a shower, and uranium was later found in the town water supply in the early stages of the investigation. It's ongoing, but there is something about it here.Radioactive materials need to be treated with respect, silly little incidents with small amounts can cause problems.

according to your observations, nuclear is a gratuitously expensive way to boil water

All the associated machinery required to run it and contain it is not cheap. All those rare earths in the components are - rare. When you have a combination of heat, stress and subatomic particles flying around you have to use fairly exotic materials if you want them to last - and you have to get it right

Not with a bang but a whimper etc etc

It's a Nokia, so it may well go off with a bang.

Australia has a long history of introduced species causing damage. The most obvious to people living in sydney at the moment is the Indian Mynah, after humans themselves ;-)

I thought this was familiar. There was a previous article I remember reading on /. that had similar events.

Keyless Entries Fail In Las Vegas On Friday
and
Valley has keyless encounters of the weird kind

Which then leads me to a couple questions. Do you think that Bush's push for continued exploration and work in space ( and Mars ) is completely altruistic?
BS
IMHO this is a cover for additional monies for the current and continued work of the $8.5 billion budgeted for US military space programs.

And considering that much of the civilized world as well as the US has its back up against the wall considering terrorism it only makes sense that EMP type stuff has been "happening".

Authentication against what, you twat?

Well, that's certainly an intelligent retort. I hesitate to reply to such, but what the hell.

Even without any foreign databases, this information can be used to establish a record of international travels. You don't necessarily need to authenticate them against their home country's records. There is value in authenticating a person as the same individual who enterred two months ago from Canada, using a different name.

Want to hide those trips to Libya? Well, just use your other passport when entering the U.S.. Want to obfuscate any travel records? Just use a new one each time you come & go. With fingerprint records, they can much more easily catch passport fraud.

And, what makes you think that foreign governments will not share fingerprint databases? Other countries have immigration related fingerprint databases:
France, EU, EU, Australia, considers a system similar to the U.S.,

The U.S. already has immigration controls tighly integrated with Canada, and it would not be surprising at all to see the EU, Australia, Japan, and others cooperating on this.

This is currently linked from the front page of ABC news: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1078997.htm

DIY cruise missile attracts defence offers

The Iranians made "very serious inquiries about investing in the development of the X-jet technology," Mr Simpson said on his website, aardvark.co.nz.

"I have since had emails from Pakistan, Lebanon, China and other countries, all of which sought to obtain details of the X-jet project and some of which have involved seemingly genuine offers of not insignificant payment for such information."

Dont you just use a PS2 for that?

LINK

People will carry on about the good old days of JJJ (or 2JJ when it was an under-ground local Sydney station), before it sold out. Those people need to spend some time in the UK listening to the 5-song-rotation playlist of Radio 1 to understand how bad things could be...

For those who are curious, JJJ streams over the 'net. It should be easy enough to locate from their site, along with a sample playlist.

JJJ is not greatly different to a good college station in the US, but it's national. I'm in a small city (80,000 people) just beyond reliable radio-listening range of Melbourne...but we have our own JJJ transmitter. Without it, things would be very grim.

The normal sequence of events is:

• Really new or left-of-field music gets an airing on Melbourne's community stations (RRR and PBS). I haven't spent much time in Sydney lately, but FBI may have gone some way toward filling the vacuum in that niche.
• A lot of it gets a run on special interest segments on JJJ.
• Some of it makes the JJJ daytime playlist, and gets enough airtime that those with a long attention span get sick of it.
• The same music gets an airing on the more progressive commercial stations, and is touted as "brand new".
• With good listener feedback, some new songs get mixed up with the other dross that the commercial stations call a playlist. This is, typically, about 3 months after it started playing on JJJ.
• 6 months later, the bubblegum pop stations (similar playlists to top40-style stations worldwide) will pick up one or two songs that has been popular enough to pop up on the sales charts without record company assistance. These songs are touted as "brand new", and are played hourly for the next couple of months. By this stage, JJJ listeners will have hidden the CD and will deny ever having listened to such crap ;-)

Sales would indicate that most record buying must be done by bubblegum radio listeners, because it's the bubblegum that sells the best.

Anecdotally, I think most kids are more into copying CDs and passing them around than they are into downloading. But that's no different to the age-old technique of copying tapes...

/tp

There isn't much bio information on the website but he is in his second year of presenting Triple J's current affairs program and was previously a reporter for same. You can listen to the show online.

He has written some interesting articles for the Sydney Morning Herald in the past, including this one on the decline of Sydney and another on censorship of CDs.

cheers
marty

There isn't much bio information on the website but he is in his second year of presenting Triple J's current affairs program and was previously a reporter for same. You can listen to the show online.

He has written some interesting articles for the Sydney Morning Herald in the past, including this one on the decline of Sydney and another on censorship of CDs.

cheers
marty

There isn't much bio information on the website but he is in his second year of presenting Triple J's current affairs program and was previously a reporter for same. You can listen to the show online.

He has written some interesting articles for the Sydney Morning Herald in the past, including this one on the decline of Sydney and another on censorship of CDs.

cheers
marty

Check this article for details, but apparently they used a 2 stage solid fuel rocket to accelerate the engine to Mach 7.6. Then they did a 6 second test of the scramjet.

If you listen to the ABC news radio either streaming radio or on the old fashion light spectrum then tonight, Australian time, there will be a documentary about this.

CrankyFool said:

I don't think any of them was forced into it, was he?

Actually it seems to be more complicated than a yes or a no. I recently saw a repeat of the disturbing documentary series Horror in The East, and they dedicated an entire episode to this question (not just Kamikaze pilots, but all of the Japanese suicides as the Allies approached). The attitude of many pilots to being a Kamikaze is briefly outlined in this program summary:

Program Summary

Seems there were precious few volunteers, and those that did it were mostly concerned about the shame and dishonour for their families if they didn't - not to mention being executed.

I found the entire series fascinating - full of subjects that serious written histories often discuss and grapple with, but that most TV docos don't.

All the best,

Skevos Mavros
http://www.mavart.com

"I find a lot of the double talk is because one arm of the corporations don't know or care what the other does. It's how a lot of our esteemed (ho, ho) companies that run record labels turn around and sell burners on the side. Oh, and music players."

I remember hearing on triple js' morning show (which has since morphed into Hack, that although the record label arm of the company doesn't like the electronics arm selling products that are used to copy music, they make too much profit for upper managment to tell them to stop. IIRC they were interviewing someone from Sony.

"I find a lot of the double talk is because one arm of the corporations don't know or care what the other does. It's how a lot of our esteemed (ho, ho) companies that run record labels turn around and sell burners on the side. Oh, and music players."

I remember hearing on triple js' morning show (which has since morphed into Hack, that although the record label arm of the company doesn't like the electronics arm selling products that are used to copy music, they make too much profit for upper managment to tell them to stop. IIRC they were interviewing someone from Sony.

With any luck, we'll be rid of Howard (US bootlicker) in November, so don't forget to speak to opposition MPs as well.

I wonder if this could benefit Stephen Hawking? Good thing he's got friends at NASA. ;)

From Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.
Bubbles 1
Bubbles 2
Bubbles 3

From Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.
Bubbles 1
Bubbles 2
Bubbles 3

From Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.
Bubbles 1
Bubbles 2
Bubbles 3

except its now the Jews locking up and torturing people not Nazi's

enjoy your fascist regime, it couldnt happen right ? its America

The government has been very secritive about the numbers of Iraqi dead. Independent researchers assume it is somewhere near 55,000. Iraq never supported terrorists. No proof was ever found. It was just another lie by the administration. Our own CIA and many other security organizations said that all the reports that they tried to gain Uranium were forged. The only ones to actually believe were the British Intelligence Units. A senior security official on Bushes staff apologized for allowing that lie to be in the presidents State of the Union speech.

I recently read some shocking news that may be of concern to Slashdot readers.
Excerpted from "Brain differences seen in gay sheep"

They found a densely packed cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus of the sheep brain, which they named the ovine sexually dimorphic nucleus (OSDN).

Makes one wonder, doesn't it?

I suggest that you start fighting against the FTA now. There are plans afoot for Australia and NZ to form a single economic zone. If this happens NZ will probably catch the FTA disease from Australia.

What else can we propel through the next blackout/apocalypse? I'm going old school and cranking up the old 8 tracks with some Barry White and my wife fsck all that other stuff. I'm contributing to the kids... segment lub dem kids

This guy is a close second.

--
Simon

Unless, of course, the male brain is bigger than the female.

He-he.

Here in Australia the government sent a fridge magnet to every household in an effort to stop terrorism. Thank god we have the fridge magnet! Our saviour!

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Hope they help.

Liquid waste is collected and jettisoned now and then, while solid waste is freeze-dried and brought back to earth.

As a side note, I worked for a time at the company that makes the space toilet. The lead engineer is now legendary (and known as "Dr. Flush"). There are some great stories that people tell about when it was being developed. In order to test it properly for things like odor containment, they had to have real samples... so they had a trailer out back for employees to go, uh, contribute to science.

There's also a story about a toilet malfunction and an astronaut eating M&Ms (on a live feed back to earth), but I won't get into that...

Now, to figure out why I'm spending this much time posting about space toilets...

Is the real problem that we're killing too many of the fishes we didn't intend to catch? Or is it that we're catching too many fish?