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Ya ya, who cares. I'm a biology minor, and computer science major, and this article wasn't particullarly interesting to me even. ;)

You wanna see something cool... how about DNA having a parity bit?? Take a peek....
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/09112002/gra phb.htm

European scientists have carried out the first experiments on antimatter.
Wrong. They've been experimenting with antimatter for years. I think Carl Anderson's 1930s work was the first. This isn't even the first experiment with antihydrogen, or cold antihydrogen, for that matter.

Researchers in Geneva, Switzerland, have been able to trap and control anti-hydrogen atoms in a chamber at a sufficiently low temperature to begin studying their physics in detail.
Wrong. They haven't trapped it. Nor can they study the physics in detail yet.

Now they say they can store these fragile objects for study as well, allowing them to conduct simple experiments.
Wrong. They can't trap them, much less store them for any length of time.

By measuring the strength of the electric field, they hope to tell how tightly an anti-atom is held together and shed light on the differences between normal matter and antimatter that might explain why the Universe exists in its present form.
Not quite. They are able to tell how tightly these particular positrons are bound to their antiprotons, which reveals what quantum state the antihydrogens are in; this doesn't tell you anything about the properties of antihydrogen.

Cern physicist Jerry Gabrielse...
And, um, it's Gerry Gabrielse.

Much better articles available here, here, and here.

Look at this other article posted on CNN.com yesterday, about an astronomer (Feng Ma) observing a black hole eating another star.

It looks like CNN was actually a little late on reporting this actually, here's an article on the 7th about the same event. Actually, it looks like Feng Ma actually observed the "belch" the black hole gave out after consuming the star.

The Everquest economy will go bust in ~2 years. This calculation is based on a recent article in the respected Economic Theory journal. Also, for all you lawyers out there, can't this be considered making counterfeit money under U.S. criminal law? I think someone should report this.

Your understanding of heredity is a little bit off. The examples you give are perfectly consistent with red hair being recessive, black hair dominant. Here's a simplification of how it works: imagine we have a gene with two alleles, let's call one 'R' for red, the other 'B' for black. Each person has two copies, so the redheaded parent has RR, the black-haired parent has BR. If you look at all the combinations the children could have, 1/2 would be BR (and have black hair), and 1/2 would be RR (and have red hair). For more information, draw a Punnett square, which should spell it out more clearly.

Note, however, that in real life, things are not quite that simple. Hair color is determined by the interaction of a number of genes. Thus, people don't have either pure black, pure blond, or pure red hair. There are many subtle variations.

Also, the other poster, troll or not, was completely wrong about redhead genes fading out because they are recessive. Genes do not change frequency within a population because they are recessive or dominant. If you read up on Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium why this is true should be clear. Note that in very small populations (under say, 10,000), genetic drift and other random changes in the gene pool could wipe out some variants, but redheads number in the millions worldwide; their genes are not in danger of vanishing any time soon.

As a navy man owe up and call it a war, which is -exactly- what this "police action" will be. Hell, who wants to die in a simple "police action?" The moronic legal doublespeak necessary to choke this down the Constitution's throat is insufferable. Just changing the name of it doesn't the smallest difference, but it does insult people's intelligence.

Kinda reminds me of Blade Runner:

"Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"

I can assure you that there are other funds that allow us a great deal of R&D.

Like the "new" sonar that kills whales..?

-dameron

Much of the science that is used to theorize about the cosmos is verifiable right here on earth. (Fusion, fission, properties of light relativity, force, gravity) The question is does what (LITTLE) we know here properly extrapolate ad infinitum.

I am relatively convinced that there are people smart enough to understand that which can only be verified as a single point observer. The verification of a system of this scale is exceedingly difficult - but should be just be defeatist and mire ourselves in religious texts and ignore the existence of the cosmos and remaining in a comfort zone?

There are those who watch, say Star Trek (in reality there are quite a few people inspire by this show who do interesting things), and want this to be true, even in the face of near impossibly using the same physics that helped to verify the "flicker of light" in article above. They will spend a lifetime seek what now seems foolish. Then there are those who are defeatist and simply what to fulfill Maslow's triangle and live this life out.

If you would have asked about getting to the moon 200 years ago you would have been told its impossible.

Same situation today; the question we ask is faster than light travel? Are there transcendental methods of travel? Do the fundamental laws of physics change as the universal timeline progresses, . as some recent studies have suggested?

One of the more intriguing things about intelligent people I meet is this; they all know that intelligence aptitude may be innate, this can be leveraged with conditioning, but the ultimate test of intellect is to realize that the more you find out the more you realize how much less of the whole you seek you know. The universe, physics, even material science regarding CPUs, signaling in hard drives (what does the signal really look like that is a 1 or 0? You would be surprised. )is inexorably complex.

I think accepting the work of those who are doing what some day may be the salvation of human existence. Being a scientist these days isn't easy. But they must have fun. It pays bad, the aprecation by your peers is fleeting, religious zealots are all to quick to ignore something as basic as carbon dating and take a work of man as a literal and corporate swine, such as Carly Fiorina, expect results or you're fired (never mind the meritorious nature of your research, or the good it may produce for humanity, as were the ideals of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard [as is reflected by the huge charitable foundations left in their wake], who made equipment because it was needed by science, such as liquid chromatography machines, oscilloscopes, etc. It wasn't about the money, it was about passion for science and engineering.)

Ask yourself to have an open mind, imagine the possibilities, maybe even help to seed a super genius.

I always enjoyed physics. I enjoy using the by product of applied physics every day, TVs, planes, computers, energy, electricity, you name it, the predictability of complex systems that use the fundaments of physics and other sciences is quite impressive, and the amount of work that gets done in a planful way rather than an empirical way is also impressive. Things are build, rarely are they haphazardly conjured.

Who would I aspire to be? Carly Fiorina/Gill Bates or the next Einstein? I have a strong feeling that even the king and queen of gluttony will fade into footnotes while the real pioneers and innovated remain time honored potentially for millennia, maybe even forever...

Sorry, personal interest topic. Mental health issues are not widely understood, so let me say that I'm not sure Sony (or any other company, for that matter) would be classified as "bipolar". In psychological terms, "bipolar" means

a major affective disorder in which an individual alternates between states of deep depression and extreme elation.

In other words, "manic-depressive". I don't see Sony as ever being depressive in its actions against Aibo hackers... :-)

You probably want some variation of: Dissociative Identity Disorder, or "Multiple Personality Disorder".

Interested readers seeking background information on this subject may enjoy this 30-page excerpt from Questioned Documents: A Lawyer's Handbook by Jay Levinson, from Academic Press.

Interested readers seeking background information on this subject may enjoy this 30-page excerpt from Questioned Documents: A Lawyer's Handbook by Jay Levinson, from Academic Press.

...but the results are not from an accountable source...
All of the big breakthroughs that are real seem to be reported by actual news institutions.

All you have to do is read some of the descriptions of what goes on in places like The Three Sisters and especiallyYellowstone to get a real scare--the place has heaved up 86 cm this century.

A major caldera explosion at yellowstone could cover the American breadbasket with ash and plunge the world into volcanic winter.

So, why don't they build huge hydrothermal plants at places like that to siphon off some of the heat. That is, assuming that we could actually make a difference. When you are dealing with something capable of ejecting 240 cubic *miles* of ash into the atmosphere, I'm inclined to think we will be powerless.

Did you guys catch the really cool part about this proposal? Entangled photon pairs react in such a way that when the state of one photon is changed, the other is changed instantly. Therefore this is not just quantum encrypted communication, but quantum encrypted communication faster than the speed of light.

If you want to read a to read a far less pseudo-science description of this phenomenon, may I suggest the unisci article. There's a good article on the whole entanglement phenomenon at Daily Insight here.

p.s. "spooky action at a distance" was Einstein's phrase for it...

Untrue. They're mostly burned out now, but there are natural nuclear reactors. Truth is stranger than fiction.

It's funny that the proposal comes from South Africa, because there were quite a few natural nuclear ractors nearby, such as in Oklo , in Gabon. (here is a more technical article, and a cross-section diagram, neatly labelled in Japanese). And, of course, you can expect it to be threatened by mining...

(Here is my google search for the stuff).

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I remember seeing something about atom trapping. I was able to find a tone down version of the Science magazine article here: www.academicpress.com/inscight/06022000/graphb.htm

Schmiedmayer, who's mentioned in the parent story, is also in this story from mid-last year.

A recent slashdot article that I submitted also concerns the aspect of using silicon buckyballs as cages for qubits.

The crux of the matter still remains unsolved in this SciAm article, and I have yet to see any explanation on how to solve it in any of the scientific journals that I read: that is, we don't use pure quantum states to preserve the very fickle quantum condition. When we can do that - there have already been enough postulation on what a qubit can consist of - then we can seriously consider quantum computing in the future.

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