Slashdot Mirror

Here's the actual article: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.046805 . The summary linked is crap : "The quantum dot developed by Wolkow's team is much smaller; less than a nanometre in diameter and containing only one or two particles" It's a silicon atom. How many particles in that? I guess the author was talking about subatomic particles, right?? They also claim that Physical Review Letters, is considered the world's premier physics journal. By whom? It was 12th in the ranking in 2007. Finally, they say "The discovery is a highly anticipated milestone in nanotechnology circles." Uhhh?? I don't think so. As usual, this is self-publicity disguised as news.

life cycle of a red dwarf is around 100 billion years. trillions of years is out of the question. heck, the universe is only around 15 to 20 billion years old

Others with background in the field disagree: see wikipedia red dwarf reference [5], A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects. Also, The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity.

This is nice, but I see it as interim until we can produce superconducting puddles at room temperature.

Sorry ... steers the organisms toward evolutionary changes that make the creature fitter? How the hell does an organism know what is going to be fitter?

It's called positive feedback, and in this case it seems to be working to the advantage of the organism rather than the disadvantage, unlike most positive feedback mechanisms. From what I can understand, it's basically a self-optimizing system able to self-correct for any errors, and select for any optimizations that occur in the process. Since this is happening at the molecular level where everything is following simple rules based on the laws of physics and chemistry, there is no conscious intervention required. There's no "knowing" required in a system evolved to make itself more efficient. It just follows the path of most gain for least effort. Any mutation that hinders that is corrected, and any mutation that enhances that is kept. THAT is why it is evolution (from what I understand. I haven't been able to read the actual paper. Someone more knowledgeable, please correct me if I'm misinterpreting things).

You know, considering this research has been published in a peer reviewed journal (10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.258103), you might want to give the researches the benefit of the doubt. Unless you are going to post credentials that match or beat theirs or their peer review board, I'm going to go ahead on the basis that their analysis is probably more correct than your kneejerk reaction.

The image analysis question is interesting. You are trying to read dial positions, so conventional OCR is probably useless (unless there is a package to do exactly that?).

What you can do is use image processing commands (in your favorite programming language; a shell script, Python, etc.) to crop the image to generate a small image for each dial. Then convert to grayscale (and maybe increase the contrast to highlight the dial). To then calculate the preferred orientation in the image, you calculate gradients along different directions. There will be a much higher value for the gradient along directions perpendicular to the preferred axis. This procedure is described very briefly in this paper:
Harrison, C.; Cheng, Z.; Sethuraman, S.; Huse, D. A.; Chaikin, P. M.; Vega, D. A.; Sebastian, J. M.; Register, R. A.; Adamson, D. H. "Dynamics of pattern coarsening in a two-dimensional smectic system" Physical Review E 2002, 66, (1), 011706. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.66.011706

This is easiest to do if you use a graphics package that has directional gradients built-in (but coding it yourself probably wouldn't be too hard). Basically you create copies of the image and on one you do a differentiation in the x-direction, and for the other one a differentiation in the y-direction. Let's call these images DIFX and DIFY. Then you compose two new images:
NUMERATOR = 2*DIFX*DIFY
DENOMINATOR = DIFX^2-DIFY^2

Then you calculate a final image:
ANGLES = atan2( NUMERATOR, DENOMINATOR )

(All the above calculations are done in a pixel-by-pixel mode.) The final image will have an angle map (with values between -pi to pi) for the image. It should be easy to then use the avg or max over that image to pull out the preferred direction. You may also improve results by tweaking the initial thresholding, or by adding an initial "Sharpen Edges" step, or by blurring the NUMERATOR and DENOMINATOR images slightly before doing the next step.

In any case, the above procedure has worked for me when coding image analysis for orientation throughout an image (coding was done in Igor Pro in my case). So maybe it is useful for you.

This article from 2001, "Teach Photons to Tango", described how high-powered lasers could be used to bounce photons off each other and make then collide (a theory from QED).

RTFA that you just replied to.

Designs using Reactor-Grade Plutonium with No Yield Reduction

Probably all sides of this debate will agree that only a modern design could even conceptually use reactor grade plutonium without a severe degradation in yield. "Conceptually," because such a scheme has never been tested in the United States--nor elsewhere, to our knowledge.

        While modern designs may deal with the problem of pre-initiation, the heat problem is not totally eliminated and would still be of concern. The development of modern, efficient fission weapons required an extensive testing program, and any nation making such an effort will not waste its time and money on reactor-grade plutonium. It is far simpler to produce weapons-grade plutonium, as other nations, such as India, have done.

        The discussion above is restricted to the problems of pre-initiation and heat generation. There are other problems with bomb design and construction that are outside the scope of this article.

Reprocessing also increases the amount of waste there is to dispose of.

Complete and utter nonsense caused by a misreading of early safety reports. Allow me to inject some real information:

Rather, waste management [from reprocessing] is made very much easier. The decree that Yucca Mountain must isolate the waste for more than 10,000 years is due primarily to the presence of long-lived transuranic elements. Appropriate reprocessing will allow those troublemakers to be consumed in fast reactors, leaving only the real waste--the fission products--to be disposed of, and their radioactive toxicity fall below that of the original uranium ore after less than 500 years. Effective waste management becomes a slam dunk.

Are you even aware that the uranium used in reactors isn't bomb grade?

Are you aware that reprocessed Plutonium isn't bomb grade?*

Both would require significant reprocessing to be made into weapons. If you must do it, it's much easier to reprocess Uranium. At least then you'll be ready to build your bomb. With Plutonium, you're not even half-way there.

* http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2006/april/article2.html

In the past, people didn't have such a huge reference base so they could follow the logic, but now with computers, the Internet, and massive hard drives, papers ought to be much longer and more detailed.

While I agree with most of your post, I think there are real constraints on paper length. Mostly, these are researcher time - longer papers take longer to write, and to edit - and signal-to-noise - I need to know the basic idea of your paper *before* I decide to check your sign errors.

Of course, many papers in a high-profile journal have a more detailed, companion paper in some more specialized journal, which helps the situation - but you need to look for this paper! In some ways, it seems like we could profitably abolish "high-profile" journals and replace them with a combination of specialized journals and high-level overview articles like these for Physics

To say they want the models to be "more accurate" assumes that they were at all accurate before, and that's a load of crap. BS climate models

"When international summit [royalsociety.org] after international summit [pik-potsdam.de] after international summit [nationalacademies.org] all recognize global warming and the human influence how can you still deny it? When from every article [sciencemag.org] in a referred scientific journal about climate change from 1993 to 2003, there isn't even ONE that disagrees with the consensus that that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities, how is it not obvious? When even international panels like the InterAcademy Council [interacademycouncil.net] and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [bbc.co.uk] can agree on the human impact, what "controversy" is there?"

Because the statement of a scientific consensus is, among other things, propaganda. And furthermore, a number of climatologists have been caught making specious claims for what appears to be publicity's sake. The findings of the IPCC have also been called into question, in peer-reviewed journals.

So, let's go through some of the list here...

First, the "hockey stick" graph was discredited a few years ago when two Canadian mathematicians tried to reproduce it, and found that the data used had been cherry picked - only the lowest data points were used for the Medieval Warm Period, and only the highest data points were used for the 1980s onwards. For more information, see http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354

That, however, is nothing compared to how the "hockey stick" got into the 2007 IPCC report. That verged on fraud: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

The IPCC report itself was based on faulty mathematics. Christopher Monckton, a physicist, decided to examine the climate model used for the 2007 IPCC report, and found that the math was wrong, and that the impact of CO2 on climate had been overstated by anywhere from 500-2000%: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

Looking away from the science for a moment, why is it that Al Gore got a Nobel peace prize for a documentary that either misled or got a large part of its science wrong ( http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html )? Why is it that the skeptics who point at the problems with climate science suffer from ad hominem attacks, while the skeptics themselves are just looking at the science? Shouldn't the argument be in regards to the data - and for that matter, isn't the ad hominem attack usually used by the person whose argument is weakest?

The climate is changing - it always has been. In fact, the last eight years have been very abnormal due to the fact that the overall surface temperature of the Earth hasn't actually changed during them (the only measurement station noting an increase in temperature is from NASA, which relies on ground based thermometers which have been overrun by urban centers, which raises the local temperature anyway - sorry, but I don't have the link for this data on hand and I'm running out of time, so you'll have to google for this information yourself). And while CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is a very minor one. Climate-wise, we have been on an upswing for some time. But how much of that is our fault?

I don't know. But so long as the "science" that is being spouted on this is based on discredited graphs, cherry-picked data, and faulty mathematics, I don't think I'm going to find out any time soon. This "scientific consensus" is propaganda double-speak, and what's needed is honest science where theory is based on data, and not the other way around.

pp is pretty common usage.
Google - "pp cross-section" site:aps.org
e.g. http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v22/i13/p674_1
If it is good enough for Physical Review Letters, it should be good enough for you.
May I ask where you received you physics degree? Just curious.

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v46/i17/p1153_1

Which just goes to prove that having the job title "scientist" is no indication that you have the slightest clue about the climate. Point me to the research of a serious climatologist that believes this, and I'll read it with interest. Papers by people from outside that specific field - not interested! (hey, I'm a "computer scientist", would you like to read my paper about psychology?)

This might seem like a fair point but it isn't. Lets look at the scientists. I'm neutral on this, but I dislike the hysteria that seems to have gathered around each side. And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).

My major problem with this is that "climatology" is a difficult field. It combines geology, meteorology, atmospheric research, marine research and a few others. But by and large, the doomsday predictions are coming from a group that are climate modellers. These people build up computer models of the climate and tune them using data from the past. The models are then used to attempt to predict the future of the climate.

And they're all dead wrong. The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are. None of them are predictive. And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing" and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right". Building scenarios based on them is like playing with lego, you tend to end up with what you were looking for.

Here's an interesting paper (from a real journal).

Some highlights (emphasis mine although it's all interesting):

It is of no little significance that the IPCC's value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind's effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter K depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.

He goes on - the portion on how the models are verified is interesting

The point of this post is: hysteria solves nothing. We need to calmly move forward with rational solutions to the pollution that is caused by people, not suggest incredibly radical measures that are simply not going to be accepted by any but the most lunatic fringe. Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.

Okay, that's not a terrible summary, but for more details about this experiment and its importance, you can look at http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/4 which also cites the actual article.

Yes, I can. I think this technique is based on research described here:

Darks Physics Beats Light Limit

Paper:

Resonant Interferometric Lithography beyond the Diffraction Limit

Okay, I searched "Joseph D. Rudmin", and "Joseph Rudmin thoughts electron mass".
A google search turns up this:

A poster session, describes some of the equations, conclusions, and sources.
http://physics.fau.edu/Events/PastEvents/Gulf_Coast_2006/Talks/Rudmin/POSTER0H.PDF

The book is here:
http://www.allbookstores.com/book/9780976894728/Joseph_D_Rudmin/Thoughts_On_The_Electron_Mass.html

Other searches yield paper abstracts:
http://csma31.csm.jmu.edu/physics/mattson/csaaptvip/CSAAPT-VIP%20Fall%202006%20Talks.html
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/SES06/Event/55517

In a Wikibooks talk section, Joe writes about Kaluza's theory, which is the basis of Joe's work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Talk:Kaluza-Klein_theory

Yes, I am aware that things can be published on the web. Do a search of Rudmin Arthur Cerdic, and the first thing that comes up on Microsoft's live search is:
http://www.celtic-twilight.com/camelot/rudmin/arthur_cerdic_c7.htm

That was published on the web. But not everything is.

This is moving in the right direction.

The holy grail is an electrically pumped organic laser. Varying the co-polymer ratios has improved electron mobilities, but they still have many orders of magnitudes to go before they would get into the likely energy densities required for lasing.

People are attacking it from multiple ends. Bradley's group have gone at it by taking an efficient light emitter and attempting to improve its pitiful charge mobilities. Others have taken very good charge carrying organic materials, LETs (light emitting transistors) and attempted to improve their pitiful light emission. (paper)

Cold fusion isn't ruled out by any known laws of physics

No, cold fusion is ruled out by basic Quantum Mechanics.

The electrons are irrelevant since their density is so low, and nuclei must be within 10^-15 m to fuse. This only occurs at temperatures of hundreds of millions Celsius. If these experiments were generating temperatures this high, one could easily tell because they would also emit X- and gamma-rays.

Explanation of "cold fusion" phenomena (if these experiments are real and reproducible) would require a significant modification of Quantum Mechanics. This is exactly why physicists are so quick to dismiss the experiments. Few papers have been published "ruling it out" because it's so simple. However here is one: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v63/p191. The theoretical literature claiming to come up with exotic ways to allow the phenomena to happen are quite extreme, in my opinion.

I'm still thinking about collapsed waveforms and the difference between the macroscopic and the microscopic. I have played with superconductors (in an engineering sense) so its still unclear to me how you differentiate.

For anyone curious about the actual experiment whose data was recovered:

The abstract for the science experiment is at http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v77/e041116 (or in the table of contents issue is http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PLEEE8&Volume=77&Issue=4 ).

"We measured shear thinning, a viscosity decrease ordinarily associated with complex liquids, near the critical point of xenon. The data span a wide range of reduced shear rate ... The measurements had a temperature resolution of 0.01 mK and were conducted in microgravity aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia to avoid the density stratification caused by Earth's gravity."

I've published to professional journals (as a academic historian) before, and I've never had to surrender copyright to the journal (agreement was strictly for publishing rights).

For chemistry:

The undersigned, with the consent of all authors, hereby transfers, to the extent that there is copyright to be transferred, the exclusive copyright interest in the above cited manuscript, including the published version in any format (subsequently called the "work"), to the American Chemical Society....

From http://pubs.acs.org/copyright/forms/copyright.pdf

For physics:

Copyright to the above-listed unpublished and original article submitted by the above author(s), the abstract forming part thereof, and any subsequent errata (collectively, the "Article") is hereby transferred to the American Physical Society (APS)...

From http://forms.aps.org/author/copytrnsfr.pdf, which interestingly enough wouldn't let me cut-and-paste without using a hacked version of xpdf. :P

Hmm, here is some random page from Google on 'Optical Black Holes' http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog15/node10.html.

There is an early (2000) paper by Leonhardt (that I haven't read fully yet) talking about the theory behind this in Physical Review Letters Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 822 (2000), along with some follow-up discussion explaining why this model might not be, strictly, a 'black-hole' Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 5252 (2000) (but one which describes how it may be adapted to become a model of a black hole).

That Visser critique has a couple of references to papers by W. G. Unruh, who tries to claim, as far as I can tell, that black-hole evaporation processes may be observable and modelled by a sonic black hole: Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 1351 (1981), Phys. Rev. D 51 2827 (1995).

This work is presumably making a transition from sonic black hole models, to optical black hole models.

Hmm, here is some random page from Google on 'Optical Black Holes' http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog15/node10.html.

There is an early (2000) paper by Leonhardt (that I haven't read fully yet) talking about the theory behind this in Physical Review Letters Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 822 (2000), along with some follow-up discussion explaining why this model might not be, strictly, a 'black-hole' Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 5252 (2000) (but one which describes how it may be adapted to become a model of a black hole).

That Visser critique has a couple of references to papers by W. G. Unruh, who tries to claim, as far as I can tell, that black-hole evaporation processes may be observable and modelled by a sonic black hole: Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 1351 (1981), Phys. Rev. D 51 2827 (1995).

This work is presumably making a transition from sonic black hole models, to optical black hole models.

Hmm, here is some random page from Google on 'Optical Black Holes' http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog15/node10.html.

There is an early (2000) paper by Leonhardt (that I haven't read fully yet) talking about the theory behind this in Physical Review Letters Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 822 (2000), along with some follow-up discussion explaining why this model might not be, strictly, a 'black-hole' Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 5252 (2000) (but one which describes how it may be adapted to become a model of a black hole).

That Visser critique has a couple of references to papers by W. G. Unruh, who tries to claim, as far as I can tell, that black-hole evaporation processes may be observable and modelled by a sonic black hole: Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 1351 (1981), Phys. Rev. D 51 2827 (1995).

This work is presumably making a transition from sonic black hole models, to optical black hole models.

Hmm, here is some random page from Google on 'Optical Black Holes' http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog15/node10.html.

There is an early (2000) paper by Leonhardt (that I haven't read fully yet) talking about the theory behind this in Physical Review Letters Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 822 (2000), along with some follow-up discussion explaining why this model might not be, strictly, a 'black-hole' Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 5252 (2000) (but one which describes how it may be adapted to become a model of a black hole).

That Visser critique has a couple of references to papers by W. G. Unruh, who tries to claim, as far as I can tell, that black-hole evaporation processes may be observable and modelled by a sonic black hole: Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 1351 (1981), Phys. Rev. D 51 2827 (1995).

This work is presumably making a transition from sonic black hole models, to optical black hole models.

Please, New Scientist is not a credible source for news on physical science. I wish people would stop posting New Scientist articles. If you want to find out what's hot in physics the Physical Review Focus is a great accessible source of real science stories that are important, and unlike the PRL they are free to read. http://focus.aps.org/

Right, because Einstein wasn't just a math-loving, nobody patent clerk when he published some of the most important papers in the history of physics.

Beware of making universal generalizations.

Eyes rolling...

... I knew some of the Cyc people back in the 1980s, when they were pursuing the same idea. They're still at it. ... But after twenty years of their claiming "Strong AI, Real Soon Now", it's probably not happening.

The path Cyc is following may be a dead-end by itself until neuroscientists figure out how Nature makes brains work or hardware engineers figure out how to interconnect 100 billion transistors to approximate brain-sized neural networks. But the encoding of "world knowledge" and "common sense" by Cyc is definitely useful for future scientists. It would be nice if that knowledge and representation were open-sourced.

To the best of my knowledge 3-D Neutron Beam Analysis is the best non-destructive test available. It will not be affected by layers, etc. See http://focus.aps.org/story/v17/st20/ for a detailed explanation. Last I heard this method was going to be used at border crossings and on shipping containers to examine contents without opening any containers.

You can get mirrors with 99.99% reflectivity...they're expensive though. You need a very flat surface (near atomic level), and a very good coating. In fact the very very best mirrors can be as high as 99.9996% reflective (ref here). Now the problem is you need to coat a rocket surface with this...something that won't be damaged by the stresses and heat of the speeds.

And the first "practical" mention I have found of this technique so far is from 1979 (if one has access to Phys. Rev. Letters Online): http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v43/i4/p267_1

http://focus.aps.org/story/v9st3/

Electron microscopes can already image at the atomic level, but a positron microscope has advantages because it can give complimentary information (e.g. about the positions of atomic vacancies). You can also use positron beams for PALS (Positron Annihilation Lifetime Spectroscopy), which is a powerful tool for determining the distribution of sizes in (nano-scale) voids in materials (difficult to measure by any other technique). It's also worth remembering that PET scans used in medicine involves a positron-emitting chemical injected into the patient.

There are probably a whole bunch of other experiments that positrons would be great for performing, but intense positron sources are not readily available. The development of more intense positron sources will certainly be welcomed by the scientific community, as it may allow previously unimagined types of measurements.

Mário Norberto Baibich is the first to report the Giant magnetoresistance in 1988, he is the main author in an article published in the Physical Review Letters in 88, where Fert is a co-author .
Why this guy did not receive the Nobel Prize? Strange.....
Reference: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200303/prl-6.cfm

I've read Rider's papers and thesis. He basically goes through the various ways of creating a non-Maxwellian electron/ion distribution, and shows that there are significant problems with those concepts.

I've been through Rider's paper too. He essientially claims that ALL IEC devices of any sort can not maintain a non-maxwellian distribution. However, there is no basis for using the math models of particle distributions that he uses other than that they make the math easier. Read Rostoker .et al for better detail than I can provide. The short quote from the abstract follows:
A distribution function like f(v) does not apply to the CBFR, nor to any reactor concept that we are aware of.
Basically calling Rider's model flat wrong, just like Bussard.

If you look closer at Yoshikawa's papers after measuring the double well look close and you will notice he makes mentions of "potential for power generation" in the conclusions of the effects the well has on fusion output.

And as I mention in my prior post, MIT has a very recent paper that also supports Bussard's assertion that non-maxwellian distributions can be naturally maintained. Go here for more. Key quote from it is:
Further, this synchronization appears to modify the particle distribution so as to maintain the non-maxwellian, beam-like energy profile within a bunch.

There has been a resurgence of interest in IEC lately and it's not just Bussard who thought Rider's model and sweeping assertions where just wrong. Considering his stage in life his "fastest" proof was to just build the thing. Unfortunately for him, he didn't even have that much time. If Rider's paper is as bullet proof as many critics claim, why are so many fusion physicists investigating power generation with IEC? Clearly they aught to know better and be familiar with Rider's work. Rider even includes Bussard in his paper's credits because he consulted him for help in getting a model of polywell function. Bussard would have to have been quite nutty/senile to continue his research after Rider "proved" him wrong. Unless of course Bussard understood IEC better than a grad student new to the subject and was right to call Rider's model wrong.

As for the Polywell design:
I simply don't see how cusp losses can be overcome, nor the collisional dumping of energy from the ions to the electrons.
The loses are overcome by using an open, recirculating design. Electrons get out the cusps, and are drawn back in by holding the magnetic coils at a high positive potential. The cusps just need to make the electron density sufficiently higher inside than outside. The outside electrons need a low enough density that they don't arc out. The internal electrons need a high enough density to accelerate ions to fusion speeds. A simple enough design, but Bussard's team wasted a long time trying to design a closed mirroring version which they later demonstrated could never achieve low enough loses. A big reason for testing with non-recirculating designs was the easier engineering since they're budget was so small.

That doesn't make these people infallible of course but it does mean that their opinion of something they have been studying for ~20 years carries more weight than that of some random idiot - or journalist.

The basic idea is to create a small fission (not fusion) explosion using magnetic compression. Nuclear weapons use chemical explosives to create an implosion, and during the implosion the fissionable material is compressed hard enough to get a 1.5x to (maybe) 2x density increase. With magnetic compression, a small pellet can be compressed hard enough to get a 10x density increase. This allows smaller explosions, around 50 gigajoules instead of the 20 terajoules of a fission bomb. They want to use curium or californium as the fuel, rather than plutonium.

The experimental work (they compressed an aluminum cylinder with a big magnet at Sandia) was done back in 2002. This isn't really under active development... It's not a totally unreasonable idea, but it would be a huge job to make it work.

Good post.

To expand upon it a bit, I will observe that actual pressures and compressions demonstrated so far are maybe a couple of orders of magnitude below what is needed to achieve 10-fold compression of fissile material. They demonstrated pressures of 2.4 megabars (atmospheres) and roughly two-fold compression in aluminum, performance generally similar to what high explosive implosion systems have produced for over 50 years. Despite decades of work, HE implosion has never been scaled to the pressures or compressions postulated for this. See: APS and AIP pages on this.

Now, their ace-on-the-hole is that they can achieve isentropic compression (i.e. optimal compression, without heating) explosive systems cannot, but even so they aren't in the ball-park with this, only looking at it with binoculars. And the Z-machine is a huge immobile installation. How to convert a grossly souped up version of it to practical flight-ready hardware would be a staggering task.

So this is in the same league as commercial fusion power. A concept that has some grounding in reality, but possibly one forever beyond practicality, and certainly beyond the working career of any living engineer.

(1) Jane Austen's works are in public domain. You can do anything you like with them (including release them with the author's name changed to your own!) This man holds copyright to his own work and can severely restrict its distribution.

(2) Some journals have more "juice" than others, and the oldest ones have the most (usually.) I was told by a colleague in my field that, for example, Physical Review D (lots of pay-per-view / access restrictions) is a better place to publish than JCAP. I am small-fry, so I go where I'm told. (Although JCAP is now advertising a very high impact factor, not sure if things are already changing.)

(3) Not sure what this means. My scientific production is unconnected to my holding IP rights over it, but then, I'm a cosmologist. Many universities take control over your IP if it makes them money, or at least demand some profit sharing.

(4) Not sure, but as far as I can tell from posts below, they allow you to use CC licensing if you pay an additional fee?

Indeed, the presumed oscillations imply that the mass of the neutrino is small, but not zero. See, for example http://focus.aps.org/story/v2/st10 for a good discussion. Getting a good experimental measure of the mass of a particle that interacts so weakly with detectors has been a very long running challenge in experimental physics.

BS. Or mostly BS. Congress gives Bush whatever he asks for the Iraq War, but for the rest, he has less control over the Congress than Clinton did. The President's budget requests are used as an outline, but Congress makes frequent changes, diverting funding from things they don't like to things which the executive departments didn't ask for. This is what's called "pork" or "earmarks", and both the Republicans and Democrats have been guilty of it. Congress is running wild, and Bush has little control over them.

But that's not the worst of it. In 2006, Republicans and Democrats managed enough intransigence and sheer orneriness between them they didn't pass a proper FY 2007 budget. Only 2 out of the 11 necessary appropriations bills could be passed. In lieu of passing these parts of an actual FY07 budget, Congress gave up and passed a Continuing Resolution that simply repeated the 2006 budget less a 1% rescission. This severely impacts many parts of the government, including the DOE, which through its Office of Science is responsible for funding most government research into the physical sciences.

A Continuing Resolution wouldn't be so bad -- funding cuts in the physical sciences have been pretty much continuous since the Congressional Democrats killed the SSC in 1993 -- except that Congress insists on micro-managing the budget. So the specific funding allocations were carried over from 2006. This means large new projects that were supposed to ramp up in FY07 can't, because their money has blindly been allocated to projects that have ended in 2006.

Read about the initial effects of the FY07 Continuing Resolution here on the APS website.

If Slashdot or mainstream journalism cared about the sciences, they would have reported on this. But most people are totally unaware of the federal budget. The FY07 continuing resolution has not been reported on even once by Slashdot. It is a travesty for the US and should be a major embarrassment, but people remain blissful unaware. In substitute of actual, important news we have been fed five pseudo-news stories per week about the iPhone or about Paris Hilton.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the Bush Administration is not the main entity to blame here. Congress is. But don't let actual facts get in the way of the daily Bush-bushing orgy...

I don't know about him, but I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I've never seen or heard of any physicist submitting a paper in Word.

Whenever I submit a paper to APS I'm surprised to see that they even accept submissions in Word, though they do state that they prefer Tex.

Anyway, as for cosmic rays creating black holes, you might have a look at: Physical Review Online Archive Physical Review Online Archive: Black Hole Production by Cosmic Rays

Here's an idea I found for the power problem. Can someone translate this for the masses? IANAP, but it looks like it may be possible to use quantum entanglement for energy transfer. Ion or photon propulsion and a few GW (maybe TW) of power will get you there provided it gets funded, created, and scaled up.

The first discovery of this cyclicity in the appearence/ disappearence of fossil species or genera was published in approximately 1982 by David Raup and Jack Sepkoski (a project that pre-dates the Alvarezs' KT impact hypothesis). They see a 26 million year cyclicity. (Note - that link is to a proponent of the "Nemesis" hypothesis ; don't take this as endorsement of that theory. But the man provides an accessible summary of Raup & Sepkoski).
A few years later people looked at essentially the same data set through different statistical goggles. They came up with a 24 Ma cycle. Others have come up with figures around 30 million years, from the same data. Now someone is extracting figures of around 64 million years. Whoopy-dee!
As a geologist, I'm perfectly open to this sort of hypothesis. Space effects on life-on-Earth? Hey, I've been to Nordlingen - tick the box that says "space can affect life on Earth". But being open to this sort of idea does not mean accepting any presentation that's made. It's entirely possible that the observed variations in historical biodiversity levels are as much a product of variable preservation as of variable historical biodiversity.
My guess - there's a lot of statistical effort applied to "damp down" the effects of the big spike in extinctions at 63~65 million years ago courtesy of (amongst others) the Chixulub impactor ; but the studies all show a spike in extinction frequencies at half, one, or twice the period of the biggest spike in the data set. That sounds to me like over-correction or under correction of the data, not helped by the data set being one-sided (we don't know biodiversity rates for the next 100 million years).

So what you're saying is that our spaceships don't need a strong magnetic field... they need a really big magnetic field. Good info. So what we need is something that generates a large but relatively weak field and we're in business.

Fluid Dynamos (which is what the earth uses for it's field) seem like a good candidate.