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http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/plutonium.pdf

It's at the bottom of page 3. The risk is life time cancer mortality.

The folks at Argonne are often thought of as competent, I note that you happily use nCi in the rest of your post.

The thing is that radiation comes in different flavours. Some radiation (the stuff that plutonium majors in) can be stopped by a barrier like a bit of paper. We call this "alpha" radiation. If one breaths in a source for this radiation (for example a particle of plutonium) you are in trouble because your lungs don't have an inner paper coating. If you receive it from a decay in the atmosphere you are not in trouble because nature and evolution have equipped you with a layer of dead cells we call skin.

The trouble with the plutonium particle is that not only does it produce one decay - it sits in your lung repeatedly producing alpha particles which go on to do all sorts of mischief.

I can't think how you got that from what I wrote, however here is where I got my figures from.

http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/plutonium.pdf

This is a document published by Argonne National Laboratory, in a form that they call "a fact sheet".

You can see that there a thing called a radiation co-efficient chart. This provides the risk of death that can be expected by exposure to 1pCi. If you don't like reading things then you can find the table at the bottom (right hand) of page 3.

If someone was exposed to 9000^12 pCi via inhalation I think that they would die in about 3 minutes - due to suffocation. Afterall - we are talking about some kilos of material.

None of this is comic.

The extrapolation lies in the likelihood of exposure to individuals, and the error I made is that in fact we are talking about 18000 * 10^12 pCi, not 9000. At the top end we are talking 200 million human deaths from cancer due to that accident. I think it would have required a very deliberate regime to do that much killing with that much plutonium, but you get the significance of the event from that (remote) possibility.

...and they're bringing down the score. We were tied, but it looks like this puts Mars up by one.

The cluster you use doesn't have to be in the University the research group is housed in. Many clusters are available to researchers worldwide; you just upload your data/code to a processing queue and it gets run. You can remote-login to monitor the status, restart jobs, etc. You have quite a bit of control.

In fact, if the research in question is "high quality" and not proprietary then you can get access to various clusters for FREE. It's hard to beat free in terms of bang/buck. For instance, the US Department of Energy runs various computer clusters within "user facilities" (other funding agencies in US, Europe and elsewhere have similar programs). What this means is that you submit a proposal/request where you describe the research you're doing and what kind of resource you need (in this case, routine access to a computer cluster). If the proposal is highly rated (externally peer reviewed) then you're allocated access for free. In addition to getting access to the cluster itself, you get "access" to the experts who run the cluster--their expertise in optimizing and parallelizing code is extremely valuable.

I understand that having immediate access to computing power is useful. But if you're on a shoestring budget then something's gotta give, and using pre-existing clusters is a very efficient way to spend money. In the case of user clusters, if you can get free access then you can use a mixture of a smallish in-lab cluster and occasional access to the large-scale cluster. This is so easy to do (and did I mention free?), there's almost no reason not to try. (Yes, the DoE accepts proposals internationally, so there's no problem there.)

Disclosure: I work for the DoE, so I guess I'm biased. Here are some links that might help:
http://www.bnl.gov/cfn/facilities/Theory_and_Computation.asp
http://computing.ornl.gov/
http://www.alcf.anl.gov/

Efficient in what sense? Who cares if half the heat is lost? Car engines lose like 90% of the energy value of fuel and we still use them (although electric cars are better and we will be seeing them -- and electric car batteries could help level the grid load from renewables in various ways).

By the way, just to make gasoline from oil it may take more energy from electricity and natural gas than the gasoline holds:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

Add on 90% conversion losses on top of that, and how is that for "inefficiency"? But look around you and there are probably gas powered cars everywhere (mostly for political reasons at this point):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

I'd generally agree with you that if you want heat energy, you are best off collecting solar as heat. However, you stated essentially there are no storage solutions, and I pointed out one that is obviously working and could be used further.

Also, solar electric can be a lot more convenient in a lot of places than solar thermal (like for air conditioning loads that peak with the sun, or charging electric cars during the day, or when you have limited space on your site, or when you want electricity, and so on), so efficiency is relative to what you want to optimize and other constraints.

Another storage medium is creating synthetic carbon-based fuels using solar power and some feedstock.

What does "efficiency" matter in that sense, if the alternative is more Fukushimas or Chernobyls or some Peak Oil Dark age? So, we produce twice as much solar panels to deal with 50% thermal losses. Big deal. PV Solar panels will be dirt cheap (or really, as cheap as leaves) in twenty years. Who cares about 50% efficiency loss in that sense? Even if more storage conversion efficiency would be nice, don't get me wrong, and I'm all for energy efficiency in use as well.

Yes, I know newer nuclear plants (Hyperion?) are supposed to be safer (although they may still have unsafe chokepoints with reprocessing plants), but the point is, there are lots of factors to consider. You said no storage solutions exist, but they do exist. That is a fact, like that solar thermal plant shows, and that has been knows for decades.

Which is more likely to be workable in the short term, using molten salt to store excess wind and PV energy (to smooth the grid) or inventing a whole new nuclear cycle (and even thorium reactors and the related bigger processing cycle are vulnerable to big risks).

Compressed air stored in salt caverns is another solution that has been in use for decades in one location.
http://web.ead.anl.gov/saltcaverns/uses/compair/index.htm

If we invested any significant amount of money in refining these ideas, on the order of the scale of the energy problem, so trillions of dollars of investment, we would have amazing solutions. That we have the solutions we do is a tribute to the human spirit of continued innovation despite most energy-related financial resources going to prop up the oil, gas, and mainstream nuclear industries as well as the wars and mining that support them -- either directly or by ignoring externalities like health issues from mercury pollution or defense taxes or nuclear meltdown risk assumed by the government and so on.

There has also been a lot of progress on both hot and cold fusion, even on relatively small budgets, so it may be a lot closer than you think, as may other innovations (many may be BS but it only takes on success -- Hydrogen doing something interesting in Nickel matrix looks interesting, for example):
http://newenergytimes.com/
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

With that said, it is a shame that we did not develop thorium reactors in the 1940s. Peo

I'm thinking plasma pumps...

Nano my ass. The fucking abstract:

Electrons from a scanning tunnelling microscope are used to drive the directional motion of the molecule in a two-terminal setup.

When your motor "power delivery" mechanism looks this big, your motor it's hardly a nano-device anymore.

Then again, you may not know what you talk about at all...

That uranium is "natural" is relevant. Besides, _enriched_ Uranium is what is used for nuclear plants, which is very different radiological properties.

Standing next to uranium may hurt you if you stand close enough (alpha-decay), but the issue here is whether an explosion will cause uranium dust, which is very dangerous for you:

http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/health/faq28.cfm

I am in favor of using nuclear power for space exploration, but saying that it is all natural and "it is really very safe" is not going to help.

Yeah I keep hearing these same quotes that either ethanol uses more energy to produce or it breaks even. I rarely hear anyone sourcing where this information comes from or a breakdown of these energy costs. Most of the petroleum costs that are quoted refer to fertilizer and tractor fuel, etc and not the actual production of Ethanol. I believe they generally use natural gas in the production.

Most of it sources papers by David Pimentel who seems to have a real axe to grind against ethanol. There are a lot of contradictory studies too.

From an energy standpoint, the problem with ethanol from food crops is that we've reduced the labor to produce food crops by massively increasing the energy costs. That is, as technology drives the cost of energy down and the standard of living up, labor becomes much more expensive than fuel. So food production has been optimized to minimize labor, substituting the burning of more energy instead. Think about it - you can't eat oil. But by mechanized growing of crops, you can turn oil into food. Since food is much more important than oil, it makes economic sense to pump more energy into food's production than you'd get back if you merely burned the food as fuel.

The U.S. produces an excess amount of food (particularly corn) in order to stave off famine should there be another major crop failure like in the early 1930s (this is the primary rationale for farm subsidies). Consequently, we're left wondering what to do with all this excess corn. Some gets donated as foreign aid. Some is converted into high fructose corn syrup. Some is used as cattle feed to lower the price of steaks, since people like steaks. And we still have tons of it left. Someone came up with the bright idea of turning it into ethanol to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. If you add up all the energy used to produce corn ethanol, I'm fairly certain it would cost nearly as much or more energy than the fuel it produces. But that's beside the point because that corn would still be produced regardless of whether or not it's converted into ethanol.

The real problem with turning food crops into ethanol is that there's no market barrier between the two uses. If the price of fuel goes up, more corn gets shifted into ethanol production, meaning less corn for food, meaning food prices go up. If we're going to be turning corn into ethanol, then the farmers (farming corporations really) should be required to specify at planting whether that field's crop is going to be used for food or for fuel. That way the government can still work to ensure there's still an oversupply of food, and farmers aren't tempted to sell their food corn as fuel corn should the price of gas rise.

Correct. Plutonium is not only less toxic than dimethyl mercury; it is less toxic than ordinary caffeine. Less toxic than arsenic or cyanide. Much less toxic than botulinus toxin or anthrax spores or ricin. The claim that one atom of plutonium would have any meaningful effect is simply laughable.

During the Manhattan Project, 26 individuals ingested plutonium, each in amounts greater than what is supposed today to be a lethal dose. By 1987, 4 of them had died - however, 10 of 26 random subjects who were adults during WW II would be expected to have died. Only 1 of the 4 died of cancer - 2 or 3 would be expected to have randomly died from cancer.

Ralph Nader's statement that plutonium is "the most toxic substance known to mankind" is only one example of the hideously incorrect and damaging false claims he has spread.

http://atomicinsights.com/1995/05/how-deadly-plutonium.html
http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/plutonium.pdf
http://russp.org/BLC-3.html
Google Books: Case Studies in Environmental Science
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf15.html

Integral Fast Reactors are awesome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
http://www.skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/02/21/response-to-an-integral-fast-reactor-ifr-critique/
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy99xx7.htm
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2009/10/21/how-the-integral-fast-reactor-was-killed-10214.aspx

Have you looked?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides
"Metal hydrides, such as MgH2, NaAlH4, LiAlH4, LiH, LaNi5H6, and TiFeH2, with varying degrees of efficiency, can be used as a storage medium for hydrogen, often reversibly.[8] Some are easy-to-fuel liquids at ambient temperature and pressure, others are solids which could be turned into pellets. These materials have good energy density by volume, although their energy density by weight is often worse than the leading hydrocarbon fuels."

http://web.ead.anl.gov/saltcaverns/uses/compair/index.htm
"Salt caverns or mines have been used to store air under high pressure.
* Compressors use off-peak electricity to fill the cavern with compressed air.
* For peaking demand, the compressed air is withdrawn from the cavern, blended with natural gas, and used to drive a gas turbine to generate electricity.
* CAES Plants of 110 â" 290 MW exist."

http://www.saltcavernstorage.com/caes.html

http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2000/alert14
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2003/update24
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4/PB4ch5_ss2
"Europe is already tapping its off-shore wind. An assessment by the Garrad Hassan wind energy consulting group concluded that if governments aggressively develop their vast off-shore resources, wind could supply all of Europeâ(TM)s residential electricity by 2020. 13 ... This climate-stabilizing initiative would require the installation of 1.5 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts each. Manufacturing such a huge number of wind turbines over the next 11 years sounds intimidating until it is compared with the 70 million automobiles the world produces each year. At $3 million per installed turbine, this would mean investing $4.5 trillion by 2020, or $409 billion per year. This compares with world oil and gas capital expenditures that are projected to reach $1 trillion per year by 2016. 29 Wind turbines can be mass-produced on assembly lines, much as B-24 bombers were in World War II at Fordâ(TM)s massive Willow Run assembly plant in Michigan. Indeed, the idled capacity in the U.S. automobile industry is sufficient to produce all the wind turbines the world needs to reach the Plan B global goal. Not only do the idle plants exist, but there are skilled workers in these communities eager to return to work. The state of Michigan, for example, in the heart of the wind-rich Great Lakes region, has more than its share of idled auto assembly plants. 30"

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2010/08/24/plan-seeks-100-pct-renewable-energy-australia-ten-years
"The report, entitled Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan, "outlines a technically feasible and economically attractive way for Australia to transition to 100 percent renewable energy within ten years." The plan specifies that the 100 percent renewable grid be "based on proven technologies that are already commercially available and that have already been demonstrated in large industries.""

Recent:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-scientists-breakthrough-nanocomposite-high-capacity-hydrogen.html

Look at the way we invented the number zero. There's no ready analog in the natural world. We can point out the first, second, third, ... apples in a row, but not the zeroeth one, and say "that is apple number zero".

It's one reason we don't use roman numerals for math - no zero (they wrote nullus instead) - and why it was replaced with hindu-arabic numbers.

Even back when we were learning to count on our fingers, we used numbers (or digits) to communicate more than just an abstract concept - we instinctively associate numbers with the objects they represent when we communicate with math. X dollars @ YY.ZZ per hour for an hourly wage, for example. We expect to be paid in dollars, not the abstract number behind it (though fiat currency and the fed are doing their best to change that :-)

If the oceans warm, then more carbon dioxide is forced out of the oceans than is absorbed, so how can the oceans be acidifying because of carbon dioxide? (insert bullshit pseudoscientific answer right here).

How do you reach that conclusion?

Water's capacity to absorb CO2 increases with temperature.

It generally works that way. You can trivially test that you can dissolve more sugar in hot than in cold water.

They don't keep all the accumulated heat. The heat inertia effect is closer to 50%.

Actually...

“The oceans are absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat from global warming,” he says. “If you aren’t measuring heat content in the upper ocean, you aren’t measuring global warming.” [Dr. Josh Willis]

Josh's estimate is plausible because:

• Oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface.
• Water's specific heat is over four times greater than that of rock.
• Water stores heat using the heat transfer mechanisms present in rock plus convection.
• Water is more transparent than rock so visible light warms more than just the very top layer.

But I'm not sure why you're saying that oceans aren't warming.

Nice link, but he's probably referring to a (resolved) problem with the Argo data that's discussed in that same article:

“So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis.

Helium is going to run out, forever. Helium is a limited non-replaceable resource.

Helium is always being made anew. Alpha particles from radioactive decay is the nucleus of helium. Of course eventually radioactive particles won't last forever, but neither will humans.

Falcon

"to lift 1000 grams (1 kg), you need about 163 grams (~0.16 kg) of helium"
150 tons = 150,000 kg
150,000 * 163 = 24,450,000 grams of helium needed
24,450,000 grams of helium = 137,000 cubic meters
"A billion cubic metres - or about half of the world's reserves"
2 billion / 137,000 = 14,598.5

14,598.5 airships before we run out of the current reserves. I think we're good. (Except for that last half airship, it'll be kinda screwed.)

Gasoline, huh? I guess that big tank of liquid hydrogen is just used for buoyancy.

From http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/newton/askasci/1995/environ/ENV165.HTM

"Author: bob w whitbeck
What kind of fuel do space shuttles use?

Response #: 1 of 1
Author: jade hawk
It depends on what you mean by "space shuttle" -- the official name is Space
Transportation System (ever wonder what the "STS" stands for in the mission
names?). For launch the STS uses 2 systems: the main engines in the orbiter
that burn hydrogen and oxygen from the external tank (the great big orange
cylinder that the orbiter is attached to for launch); and the SRBs (Solid
Rocket Boosters) that burn a solid rocket propellant that is a mixture of
powdered aluminum and ammonium perchlorate. These are used only for launch.
The orbiter (what most people think of as "the Space Shuttle") has two
propulsion systems: OMS (Orbital Maneuvering System) used to change orbit and
to return to earth, and the RCS (Reaction Control System) used for station-
keeping and attitude control. Both systems burn hydrazine with oxygen."

You sound so smug and superior, I had to find a source. The magnetic field certainly is a significant source of protection.

this also applies to the parent of your post.

It seems complex because it IS complex. You've boiled an extremely complex problem down to "all you have to do" and "simply"! I'm sure Argonne National Lab would love to hire you.

This has been a topic of research for over a decade at ANL, and they publish their work as the "GREET" model.

http://www.transportation.anl.gov/modeling_simulation/GREET/

The industry term you're looking for is "MPPGE" or miles per gallon gas equivalent, which is a best-effort to compare different drivetrains with a common number. It's far from accurate because there are a vast number of variables that can be taken into account, but it's a starting point, at least.

Here is a link (PDF warning: 154 pages) to the ANL study. Skip to page 133 of the PDF.

If you really, really want to go crazy, then head on over to Argonne Nation Labs and check out this.

Testing has shown that the Tesla roadster is around 250 watt*hours of electricity per mile. The Rav4 EV (which uses a less efficient drive train) is around 300 watt*hours per mile. You can plug this in to the EPA Power Profiler and get CO2 per mile for various areas. But all in all, the real advantage of an electric car is that electricity comes from renewables and nukes and gas does not yet do so.

Here is a link (PDF warning: 154 pages) to the ANL study. Skip to page 133 of the PDF.

If you really, really want to go crazy, then head on over to Argonne Nation Labs and check out this.

Testing has shown that the Tesla roadster is around 250 watt*hours of electricity per mile. The Rav4 EV (which uses a less efficient drive train) is around 300 watt*hours per mile. You can plug this in to the EPA Power Profiler and get CO2 per mile for various areas. But all in all, the real advantage of an electric car is that electricity comes from renewables and nukes and gas does not yet do so.

It's the other way around, actually. 80 - 90% of a vehicle's lifetime energy use is in driving it around.

Furthermore, the primary energy cost in manufacturing a car is smelting the steel. The batteries (even on a hybrid vehicle) are not significant by comparison. See, for example, Figure 7 (p73) of The Transportation Vehicle-Cycle Model from Argonne National Lab.

What type of air pollution are you concerned about?

most plastics have highly toxic emissions when burned

I think it's closer to 1 in 2.

Or maybe not. I admit I'm fairly ignorant about this. I realized that you can have energy bound up in non-matter arrangements, like water raised above the surface of a planet, or a rubber band stretched, or a chemical bond. I found an interesting discussion of the matter that made me think more about it.

what value would we get out of colonizing the moon. Or Venus or Mars? [...] We can't even bring ourselves to build reasonable colonies underwater on earth, or at the south pole

There are plenty of people who would be glad to leave their tyrannical states and go somewhere else, to create another state of their own, not as corrupt yet.

But there is no free place on Earth to do that. All usable land belongs to someone. Antarctica is so harsh and inhospitable that it probably rivals the Moon (get out without a suit and you die.) There is far more economic advantage to have a city on the Moon than in Antarctica.

Creating such a state under the sea is definitely a possibility, but it's quite expensive. Probably cheaper than doing the same on the Moon, but they both are orders of magnitude more costly than a bunch of wannabe settlers can collect. Eventually, though, underwater cities will be built - it makes plenty of sense; there are natural resources in oceans, and many people are used to living in steel (stone) caves already, so what's the difference? A city a mile underwater is also very safe from weather, and can be built to tolerate large earthquakes by making the buildings sufficiently light; if their supports fail they simply slowly drift some 100' to the bottom instead of crashing hard. Such a city is also safe from asteroids striking the planet.

technology is not going to allow us to circumvent the speed of light.

That can be said only if you have the Complete Theory of Everything in your posession. Besides, the 'c' limit is valid (if it is) in this Universe; we don't know that about other Universes. For example:

In the first 1E-35 seconds (that is 0.00..(34 zeroes)..01 seconds after the big bang the universe expanded to a diameter of something like 1 meter carrying all matter with it. So it was expanding something like 3E26 (that is 3 followed by 26 zeroes) times faster than the speed of light! (link)

That is because the space itself expanded faster than light. Find a way to create (and destroy) space at will and you have FTL. This, actually, had been proposed many decades ago by at least one SF writer.

The active material in Li-ion batteries isn't metallic lithium, but lithium carbonate - A 2007 article from eworld.com claims that 1.4kg of lithium carbonate is required per kWh of capacity. For 100kWh, this gives us ~140kg per home. This article takes some information from a 2000 report from Argonne National Labs, so these numbers may be conservative.

A 2006 report on Lithium claims the naturally available lithium carbontate reserve base to be 58MT. Metallic lithium can be converted to Li2CO3, just multiply the weight by (3*2+6+8*3)/(3*2) = 6, which adds another 66MT of lithium carbonate.

So the simple estimate goes up somewhere in the ballpark of 880 million homes at 100kWh each.

http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1180&first=6240&end=6239
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/149.pdf
http://www.evworld.com/library/lithium_shortage.pdf

This is the usual set of fictional arguments against fluorescent bulbs, and it comes up on every Slashdot discussion. I don't know why it got modded-up this time.

1. CCFLs last longer. There's no research anywhere that says otherwise. I'm sorry you got some bad ones.

2. Fluorescent lights do not have a higher startup current.

3. Never heard of this one before, and I can't find anything about it either way. It seems unlikely to be true since fluorescent lights put out more visible light and less "other" light than incandescent bulbs -- that's the very reason they are more efficient.

4. There is an insignificant and irrelevant amount of mercury in fluorescent bulbs.

Various Slashdot discussions on this

The mercury thing comes up on every Slashdot discussion of fluorescent lights, all because of one particularly overblown story. Fluorescent lights can be disposed of in normal trash.

ANot surprising: higher temperature -> oceans heat up -> less dissolved CO2.

Next time you go to the kitchen, do a little experiment with the sugar: does it dissolve more easily in hot water, or in cold water? I think you'll find it's the same with CO2. Better find another explanation.

CO2 becomes less soluble in water at higher temperatures.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/mole00/mole00246.htm

If the trends are to be believed, they are already back peddling on their estimated barrels per day. Somehow their math seems to be 'fuzzy' already in guestimating they could produce 120m barrels/day by 2030. They've lowered it 3 times already, and we are still producing less than targeted. We're going the wrong way. Production should be going up, not down.

Considering we are producing 83m b/day, one has to question just how accurate their guestimates are.

It would be insane to withhold such information. Without said info, the industries could not prepare with new technologies to replace the old. If we were simply to 'run out' all at once, with no time to prepare, basic infrastructure would break down on a global scale, making recovery many times more difficult than if they were prepared in advance.

I've never understood these 'drill baby drill' folks. The amount of oil is finite. Given our current refining capacity, even a huge motherload would take a lot of years to develop and turn out refined oil in any quantity. Why not wean yourself off of oil while it's still reasonably cheap and viable to do so?

There are already designs for 'safe' nuclear power plants. Why aren't they investing more time and money into these?

It's lower than I assumed, but not insignificant. 13.8% of the land's "theoretical" (according to the article) energy production, for modern corn farming at least, is provided by fossil fuels. For the sake of simplicity, I guess we can say the rest is photosynthesis.

A corn-fed (or corn-fed-chicken-fed) dog would then require 15.7 gigajoules of fossil fuels, compared with the SUV's 55.1 gigajoules.

Of course, the SUV could be powered by renewable biofuels instead of fossil fuels.

We utilize a number of tools depending on the site, but generally:

Version Control (Subversion) for management of the code base (PHP, CSS, HTML, Ruby, PERL,...) - http://subversion.tigris.org/
BCFG2 for management of the system(s) patches and configurations (Uses svn for managing the files) - http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2
Capistrano/Webistrano for deployment (Webistrano is a nice GUI to capistrano - http://www.capify.org/ / http://labs.peritor.com/webistrano

However, all of the tools above mean nothing without defining very good standards and practices for your organization. Only you and your organization can figure those out...

The antibody in question binds the EGF receptor. Off the top of my head I can think of..... oh about every stem cell in your body that expresses this receptor.

If I recall, it's also expressed at much, much, much higher levels in many cancers than it is in normal cells.

And the abstract to this paper suggests that as well: "Overexpression of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is observed in many cancers, sometimes accompanied by gene amplification." That abstract also suggests that in at least one type of cancer, the more EGFR you have the worse the cancer is. I'm not a cancer biologist and I'm not reading any more than abstracts tonight, but this paper and this paper at first glance seemed to indicate the same thing.

While the good cells are wearing targets, the bad cells are wearing many more targets, so if your efficiency at hitting targets is lower than 100%, you're going to be killing more bad cells than good cells.

The author's system is great in a petri dish, but there's a reason it's published in a low tier journal.

And that reason is probably the following: the 80% of cells in a dish is probably not that impressive compared to developed drugs, however this was just a proof of concept. The wright brothers only flew a few hundred feet. There are undoubtedly refinements that could be made to this system that would increase the efficiency, but it's not to that stage yet. This technology might turn out to be a true cure for cancer once it's refined.

And don't criticize them for doing it in a dish just yet, this press release says "So far, tests have been done only on cells in a laboratory setting, but animal testing is planned for the next phase."

They can hardly be blamed for not delivering the magic bullet cure to cancer in one fell swoop, that's just not how these things work.

This all actually sounds sort of like they are trying to implement something like MPICH in their OS.

I'd be much, much more interested to know how much of the currency showed evidence of, say, uranium or plutonium. Those are supposed to be scarce, really, really scarce.

Plutonium, yes, uranium, no. Uranium is actually fairly abundant - about 4 ppm average in the Earth's crust, or the 48th most abundant element in natural crustal rock. Plutonium OTOH is entirely man-made. It is present in nature due to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing back in the '40s, '50s and '60s, but the levels should be below detectability in currency, I believe.

In any case, you would be perfectly safe, unless you were using the bills to snort the plutonium. Most common uranium and plutonium isotopes are almost pure alpha, with inhalation being the major danger. You'd have to have really bad luck to get any detectable health effects even if you inadvertently handled directly contaminated bills.

That's because the source is too big to fit on a CD, there is, however, a source DVD image available for download.

Of which the waste can be dealt with with current technology (pebble bed reactors),

I don't get it - why pebble bed reactors? They don't seem suitable for destroying waste (that is, transmuting and fissioning the transuranics). First off, many PBRs are completely unsuitable for this - because they are uranium-cycle reactors in the thermal spectrum, and are not breeders - they do not destroy TRUs, but in fact create more of them. I guess some PBRs could be breeders - maybe the thorium PBRs, but even then there's a huge problem. PBRs are not designed for a closed fuel cycle - quite the opposite, the extremely-hard ceramic pebbles are designed to be indestructible and inert, not easily amenable to chemical reprocessing (which as a first step, means dissolving or melting the spent fuel elements.)

There are other reactors that are designed for closed fuel cycles, and disposing of nuclear waste. One class is the liquid-metal fast breeder reactors (LMFBR), like the IFR that was developed at Argonne national lab. The IFR was designed around a reprocessing cycle (pyroprocessing): that is why it uses metal fuel, as opposed to the common metal-oxide fuels, which are harder to reprocess because you need to reduce the very stable uranium/plutonium oxides. (Or even worse, the carbide fuel in TRISO pebbles).

Another reactor designed for reprocessing is the molten salt reactor, which has a liquid core (!) of a low-melting point fluoride salt. This is even more amenable to reprocessing - there is no need to break down - and then fabricate again - the solid fuel elements, as there aren't any!

But as far as I know, pebbles beds have no chance as a closed fuel cycle.

Strictly speaking you are certainly right. Any human cells can survive outside the body in tissue culture. However, the information I can find suggests that normally they die off in just the same way as normal human cells so they can't normally survive outside the body.

Do you have a better reference for this?

I missed the word "wind" in the summary and thought they had developed a current turbine. Ocean currents have incredible potential, but maintenance challenges make underwater turbines impractical today. But unlike wind and solar power, ocean currents and waves could actually displace fossil fuel as a primary source of energy.

There are oodles of configuration management tools out there that do at least most of what you want. My personal recommendation is Bcfg: http://www.bcfg2.org/ . It doesn't quite have the entire web interface (yet), but it is fantastic for keeping everything up to date and clean and telling you when you have outliers. I currently use it for the 350 or so support machines for the 5th fastest computer in the world, and I know _much_ larger installations are using too.

I forgot to include that there are movies of proteins during catalysis by using Laue diffraction, and I've been lucky enough to see a talk where they speaker showed such a movie. While I can't at the moment find a good example I did find this large .pdf of a powerpoint presentation. Scroll down to page 17 and you can start to see a little bit of what's going on in the case of release of carbon monoxide from myoglobin. Which has some broader relevance as carbon monoxide poisoning results from that molecule binding to hemoglobin and out-competing oxygen. Got published in Nature too.

Well for high-speed crystallography it isn't so much that data collection is the problem (for most applications). You can collect a high-quality data set of a protein at APS in under a half an hour. The real bottlenecks in x-ray crystallography is, was, and unfortunately most likely always will be protein crystallization. Way back in the day when protein crystallography was just starting, it was thought to be somewhat bizarre for proteins to crystallize. Fast forward four or five decades and now if your protein is reasonably soluble, reasonable stable, and has a definite structure (not all proteins have a well-defined structure and just flop about in a range of states), then you can probably get it to crystallize well enough to solve the structure. But it might take a long time to pull off, years even. But that's only for soluble proteins. If a protein is normally in the cell membrane, it is much, much harder. A cell membrane is basically soap. Soap doesn't crystallize. There are only a few structures of integral membrane proteins despite a lot of work on the problem. Also proteins that only have one domain or even just a helix poking into the membrane can be tricky--they're usually done by just removing the offending membrane bit but often suffer from solubility problems.

For part two, lasers produce monochromatic light. One technique for doing real-time x-ray crystallography involves using polychromatic x-rays. Normally you get a single, specific, monochromatic wavelength (, or at least close enough that for data processing you largely ignore everything else. The resulting diffraction pattern looks something like that seen on wikipedia's page. That page and links are actually pretty good. However you can use a broader spectrum of x-rays and get a different diffraction pattern due to having different wavelengths of light hitting your protein crystal over the course of the exposure, or a Laue diffraction image (ignore the color--computer added). Interpreting Laue diffraction's significantly harder because you also have to take into account that you have basically multiple different wavelengths of light producing multiple different, overlapping diffraction patterns. Unlike monochromatic diffraction patterns, which require exposure times of at least tenths of a second even at APS (or potentially hours on a weaker rotating anode x-ray source like at an individual lab), Laue diffraction can be measured in picoseconds--on the time scale of chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes. A few groups have done time-resolved x-ray crystallography with reactions by building up series of Laue images. You can't do it for everything, though. Data processing problems aside you typically need a chemical reaction that can be triggered by light. Also, proteins frequently undergo structural reorientations during catalysis--the change will have to be small enough so that the packing of proteins in the crystal lattice will not be affected. Time-resolved x-ray crystallography using Laue diffraction is never going to be widely used, but the results can still be very exciting.

What these guys have in mind and how practical it is I don't know since I've somewhat shifted away from protein x-ray crystallography. I do remember going to a conference a few years ago where some guys wanted to use a single molecule to collect data on--by blasting the bajesus (that's a technical term) out of it with an extremely short, extremely massive burst of x-rays. They had the problem though of ripping off basically all of the electrons in the process, IIRC. Even at weak home rotating anode x-ray sources you still have to worry about radiation damaging your crystal (and affecting your resulting model of the protein), but blasting away all the electrons? That's like comparing a flyswatter and a tactical nuke.

Since you said experimental physics... :)

The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is a set of Open Source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments such as a particle accelerators, telescopes and other large scientific experiments.

EPICS is often used with the free real-time operating system RTEMS to build custom control systems.

Users of EPICS+RTEMS include Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Argonne National Labs, Brookhaven National Labs, and Canadian Light Source.

Many larger places in the world use EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System). An experiment I am a (small) part of use EPICS for control.
It is an open source control systems frequently used for particle accelerator control and observatory telescope control. We use it slightly differently, but for what we need to do, it works very well. It is maintained primary by Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. You can read more at the following URL:
http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/
In case you are wondering, no, they don't use EPICS for LHC. They use a commercial SCADA program called PVSS (for the most part anyway).

The electron storage ring at APS has a circumference of 1104 meters. The Experiment Hall wraps around it and is where all the beam lines where most of the work is done are at. Even though I've been a site user there several times I couldn't tell you what sort of lights are used, other than they seemed to be large lights like what a warehouse would use, and were harsh. APS has a picture. Yes brilliant scientists could have put in nice soft full spectrum lights that didn't hum. But they cost money which is in very short supply and high demand. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost for replacing the lights (initial bulb/tube cost, labor, plus any rewiring) in a building that big would be greater than the cost of a brand new detector at a beamline ($million plus). The detector is a major component in what allows us to do work. Lights on the other hand, as long as you don't need a flashlight, suck it up.

well according to the current score, the game is about a 20 all tie -- although this doesn't count any points scored this year

http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/marsscorecard.html

Incidentally, here's a citation to support my assertion.

Think of a rubber band; they're easier to snap when they are really cold. Warm them up, and they are more elastic.

I know what you're going for there (brittleness when cold), but that's an example which exactly contradicts what you're wanting to say: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy00/phy00525.htm

    If you have access to the "Big Red Books" (i.e. Feynman's Lectures in Physics ), look up "rubber band heat engine", or just google it.

A big part of the problem is "How do you define life? Add to that the fact that we are often looking for evidence of past life and you have quite a complex puzzle to solve.

It gets more complex as you go. The universe is vast. It is easy to say "Deploy said rover/robot/probe." but deploy it where. We do not have the resources to explore even our entire galaxy, let alone the universe.