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A little research (i.e. Google, the two lecturer's names, and two of the likely compounds they're working on) revealed an abstract from the paper which, I suspect, is at the root of the press release being reported on.
[SIGH] So many Slashdotters berate journalists (often with justification), then decline to go and do the basic ground work which science-educated Slashdotters should be capable of, while English/ Arts-educated journalists and PR flacks can't or don't do. [SIGH]

The researchers were : Craig Jensen (University of Hawaii), Sean McGrady, Reyna Ayabe (University of Hawaii), Ben Reddy (University of New Brunswick)
The locale was : 2007 APS March Meeting , March 5-9, 2007; Denver, Colorado, Session L39: "Focus Session: Hydrogen Storage II"

So, it's not a formally-published paper as yet, but it is research that is being "reviewed by their peers". Face-to-face. Which isn't exactly easy.
The abstract of the paper presented is at http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR07/Event/59811 :

"Alane, AlH$_{3}$ has many of the properties that are requisite for materials to be considered viable for onboard hydrogen storage applications. Most notibly, it contains 10.1 wt{\%} hydrogen and undergoes dehydrogenation at appreciable rates at temperatures below 100$^{\circ}$C. However, the very low, $\ge $ 6 kJ/mol, enthalpy of dehydrogenation of AlH$_{3}$ prohibits subsequent re-hydrogenation through standard gas-solid techniques except at very high pressures or very low temperatures. The extremely low solubility of gaseous H$_{2}$ in conventional organic solvents also vitiates a solution-based approach. Re-hydrogenation of Al using a supercritical fluid potentially offers a workable approach since the fluid can act as a solvent, at the same time remaining completely miscible with permanent gases like hydrogen. Recently, it has been found that mixtures of NaH and Al can be hydrogenated to sodium alanate, NaAlH$_{4}$ under modest pressures and temperatures in supercritical fluids. We have now extended these studies to the hydrogenation of Al to AlH$_{3}$. The results of these studies and experimental details will be reported."

Shortened version : getting the hydrogen back into aluminium-based materials is hard work, but it can be made easier by dissolving the hydrogen (and possibly the aluminous base) in a "supercritical fluid".
They carefully don't specify the chemistry of the supercritical fluid, probably for patenting reasons. My guesses : CO2? DHMO? both might have issues with strongly reducing aluminous compounds. How about short-chain hydrocarbons or short-organic amides? A bit rough for the general public to handle, but we're talking about the re-charging of the storage material here, not pouring the stuff into your fuel tank, so I wouldn't see that as a show-stopper per se). The general public would probably not be present at this side of the fuel-system cycle.

Interesting work. I can almost hear Grignard stop turning in his grave and pricking his dead ears up.

http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR07/Event/59811

extracted:

Investigation of the Direct Hydrogenation of Aluminum to Alane in Supercritical Fluids

Alane, AlH$_{3}$ has many of the properties that are requisite for materials to be considered viable for onboard hydrogen storage applications. Most notibly, it contains 10.1 wt{\%} hydrogen and undergoes dehydrogenation at appreciable rates at temperatures below 100$^{\circ}$C. However, the very low, $\ge $ 6 kJ/mol, enthalpy of dehydrogenation of AlH$_{3}$ prohibits subsequent re-hydrogenation through standard gas-solid techniques except at very high pressures or very low temperatures. The extremely low solubility of gaseous H$_{2}$ in conventional organic solvents also vitiates a solution-based approach. Re-hydrogenation of Al using a supercritical fluid potentially offers a workable approach since the fluid can act as a solvent, at the same time remaining completely miscible with permanent gases like hydrogen. Recently, it has been found that mixtures of NaH and Al can be hydrogenated to sodium alanate, NaAlH$_{4}$ under modest pressures and temperatures in supercritical fluids. We have now extended these studies to the hydrogenation of Al to AlH$_{3}$. The results of these studies and experimental details will be reported.

(The important question is now the energetic cost of preparing alane by this method, which
impacts the efficiency of using alane-derived hydrogen as a fuel.

Dark Matter is just a way of trying to guess whether the universe will keep expanding forever or will eventually collapse. It is really just a fudge factor that is adjusted according to the preferences of the reviewer for one theory or the other. Dark Energy is a different story. It is postulated to deal with observations of red shifts that don't match what is expected from the estimation of the distance to a certain type of supernova that should have a fixed brightness. There are a number of other possibilities that might explain the observations, but the theory is still debated. The best ideas about the observed anomalies that don't invoke an unobservable and mysterious energy with properties that are not understood is CREIL: http://flux.aps.org/meetings/YR03/APR03/baps/abs/S 3890006.html
This is only a theory, due to the problem of observing the effect from a known source that is a known distance away with a known composition of the intervening space. There is also a suggestion that the effect is due only to gravity: http://flux.aps.org/meetings/YR03/APR03/baps/abs/S 3890006.html
These ideas will require the revision or repudiation of the Big Bang theory, so the debate will take a long while before any resolution will be possible. There is also, for some reason, no consideration of the possibility of actual relative motion of the observed bodies, in addition to the postulated red shift due to an expanding universe. It seems that the number of complications will make the debate long and inconclusive for some time yet.

Dark Matter is just a way of trying to guess whether the universe will keep expanding forever or will eventually collapse. It is really just a fudge factor that is adjusted according to the preferences of the reviewer for one theory or the other. Dark Energy is a different story. It is postulated to deal with observations of red shifts that don't match what is expected from the estimation of the distance to a certain type of supernova that should have a fixed brightness. There are a number of other possibilities that might explain the observations, but the theory is still debated. The best ideas about the observed anomalies that don't invoke an unobservable and mysterious energy with properties that are not understood is CREIL: http://flux.aps.org/meetings/YR03/APR03/baps/abs/S 3890006.html
This is only a theory, due to the problem of observing the effect from a known source that is a known distance away with a known composition of the intervening space. There is also a suggestion that the effect is due only to gravity: http://flux.aps.org/meetings/YR03/APR03/baps/abs/S 3890006.html
These ideas will require the revision or repudiation of the Big Bang theory, so the debate will take a long while before any resolution will be possible. There is also, for some reason, no consideration of the possibility of actual relative motion of the observed bodies, in addition to the postulated red shift due to an expanding universe. It seems that the number of complications will make the debate long and inconclusive for some time yet.

I assume you are referencing Dimopoulos and Landsberg's paper http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v87/i16/e161602 . There is nothing to worry about. These physicists proposed that if certain theories were true (M theory, quantum loop gravity, super symmetry) then the energy densities seen in the RHIC or LHC experiments could produce something "mathematically analogous" to a black hole. There is no possibility under any current theory that an event horizon could form and attract matter.

Indeed.

http://focus.aps.org/story/v9/st16 in 2002, they discovered that Osmium which is rather soft compared to diamond was the stiffer material. That is to say it has the higher bulk modulus.

This is not quite true - it depends heavily on the particular journal, and the particular author. I've run a fairly decent-quality online journal [jmir.org] for the past few years, and I can attest that the copyediting, typesetting and formatting aspect of publishing is the most onerous and time-consuming.

These things improve the reading experience, and I appreciate them, but I don't think they're truly necessary. The arXiv does just fine with an almost fully-automated system. Aside from the occasional obvious crackpot, the scientific quality is comparable to the second-tier physics journals (I'm thinking of the Elsevier journals like Physics Letters).

Right now, the arXiv's goal is not to replace journals, but to be as fast and as efficient as possible at hosting preprints. If they set out to replace journals outright, and added a slighly more sophisticated review system and automated validation of input, they could do what most journals do with about 90% of the quality for about 10% of the cost. The remaining 10% could probably come from advertising, donations, government grants, or some combination thereof. Alternatively, you could sell "2-week advance notice subscriptions" for cheap, and make access free to anything over two weeks old.

The fact is, there is a great range in submission quality (in both content and layout), and for a fairly advanced journal that generates XHTML and PDF versions of articles from a standardized XML format (the one Pubmed Central uses), this can take on average 2-4h of copyediting and layout work per article.

I don't know too much about XML journal article formats, and would appreciate more info. PubMed's explanation didn't really help much. Why bother with XML? Why not just require authors to submit in LaTeX? Then you've got PDFs or DVIs or whatever "camera-ready" output you want with no further human interaction. If you combine it with a package like RevTex 4, you get standardized appearance and easy harvesting of meta-data. LaTeX predates XML and SGML (if you count SGML's age from when it was formalized as a standard). Why re-invent the wheel for publishing? My best guess so far is to accomodate authors who can't be bothered to learn LaTeX and insist on submitting Word docs, but that's about all I can think of. Why not just tell the Word users to suck it up and learn LaTeX?

Be careful. Slashdot has been running lots of stories that are "investment opportunities". Read this, the first comment to the story linked from the Slashdot story. I didn't write it, it was written by someone with the nick Emosson, but it sounds correct. (Also, read the other comments showing skepticism of the idea.):

"Unfortunately EEStor never made and will never make the supercapacitor described in the patent because they ignore a well known physical effect, called "dielectric saturation".

"Barium titanate has been used in capacitors for decades, due to its high dielectric constant: (PDF file).

"However, the dielectric constant drops as the electric field strength increases: http://www.nap.edu/books/NI000488/html/49.html
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v71/i12/p890_1

"At a hypothetical field of 3500 Volts over a thickness of 12.76 micrometers, as proposed in the patent, the dielectric constant of barium titanate would be orders of magnitude lower than the claimed 18500, reducing capacity and energy density by the same factor...

"This has been discussed in more detail by Prof. Anatoly Moskalev on December 24th and 26th, 2006 in
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/index.php?p=43

"with an update on January 20th, 2007:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/?p=46."

Also read this comment considerably below:

"Further evidences of EEstor's hype! by Roger Pham 1/22/2007 10:41 PM

"In his patent #7033406, Richard Weir, EEstor CEO, cited data published WAY BACK in 1985 from the Japan's Journal of Applied Physics, as basis for the high dielectric property of Barium Titanate (BaTiO3)powder, when coated with aluminum oxide and calcium magnesium aluminosilicated glass. If BaTiO3 capacitor was so good way back in the 1985, the likes of the GM EV1 would be around evey street corners since 1996, or the Prius would have been a PHEV way back in 1997!

"What held back coated BaTiO3 powder from becoming a SuperCapacitor was the fact that BaTiO3 has dielectric property that varies by nearly ten folds with just typical seasonal swing in ambient temperature, and the fact that its dielectric property drops by as much with high electrical field strength, as Emosson has brought up!"

Quantum cal-culations using sum rules have been used to place an upper-bound on the molecular susceptibilities; [1, 2, 3, 4] but, the largest nonlinear susceptibilities of the best molecules fall short of the fundamental limit by a factor of 10^(3/2).[4, 5] A thorough analysis shows that there is no reason why the molecular hyperpolarizability can not exceed this apparent limit.[6] In this letter, we report on a novel set of molecules where the one with modulated conjugation[7] is found to have a hyperpolarizability that breaches the apparent limit.

"Soybeans can give you 50 to 60 gallons of oil an acre compared to 75 to 125 gallons for canola, but algae is almost limitless because it grows so fast, so potentially you could get 10,000 gallons per acre."

I don't know what the current level of funding or commitment are, but there appears to be some information about Advanced Burner Reactors from the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership at the DOE. This appears to be related to the Advanced Fast Reactor design, which is itself an extension of the IFR efforts.

Honestly, there are real alternatives to the big bang theory. One of them is the idea that our "universe" is at the center of a black hole, which effectively places the same limits (you can't get out, and neither can light) on the boundary.

If that's the case, the "big bang" turns into the initial collapse; and the "dark energy" that drives expansion becomes the space-energy expansion inside the schwarzschild radius that is needed for conservation of energy.

I have a relative who is working on some of this...

http://absimage.aps.org/image/MWS_SES06-2006-00005 4.pdf
http://physics.fau.edu/Events/Gulf_Coast_2006/Talk s/Rudmin/POSTER0H.PDF

I am a physicist, specifically one who specializes in quantum information.

The write-up is total garbage. Sadly, I've read enough mangled pop-sci descriptions of quantum mechanics that I can translate most of it into non-gibberish--in true Slashdot fashion--without even reading the article (which is probably even more full of gibberish, and thus capable of rotting your brain). I did have to look at the article to figure out whether it's the journalist or the scientist that bears responsibility for this mess. Here's my translation:

The U of W physicists want to do a test of Bell's Theorem in such a way as to close one of the "loopholes" in previous tests (the possibility of signaling between particles).

Some background:
Bell's Theorem is at the heart of what makes quantum mechanics so shocking. If you want to understand one of the greatest accomplishments of modern science, you owe it to yourself to learn about the famous EPR criticism of quantum mechanics (Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, Physical Review 47, 777), Bell's Theorem, and the Aspect experiment. The EPR elegantly lays out what so many people find weird and shocking about quantum mechanics (and what Einstein et al took to be evidence of its incompleteness), while Bell's Theorem and Aspect's experiment show that yes, the world really is this weird, and the EPR paper is wrong.

The link I've provided to the EPR paper will unfortunately only get you the abstract, unless you're at a university, in which case your institution almost certainly has a subscription to Physical Review. To learn about Bell's Theorem, try the appendix in "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths. AFAIK, the derivation of Bell's Inequality is only a few pages, and requires only basic calculus. The derivation is accessible to non-physicists who either know or are willing to learn basic calculus.

The above reading is not an easy project for a layman, but it is doable. It will give you a better understanding of modern physics than any number of "popular science"-type books you could read. Without the math, all that's left of quantum mechanics is people BSing about their favorite "interpretation". If you want to know enough to make up your own mind, learn about the EPR paper and Bell's Theorem.

The U of W experiment:
So, if Bell's Theorem has already been tested by Aspect, what's left for the U of W team? Bell's Theorem allows one to disprove all local hidden-variable theories. Aspect's original experiment didn't quite satisfy all the conditions for such a test, in that there were "loopholes" through which a very contrived theory with bizarre features might escape. Many people have since done experiments to close some of these loopholes.

Initially, just based on the Slashdot write-up, I thought the experiment was designed to close the locality loophole: if the two particles are not spacelike separated, a subluminal signal could in principle be sent from one to the other to tell it how to "respond" to a measurement. The way to close the loophole is to make sure the measurements of the two particles are spacelike separated events. This would be a reasonable experiment to do, although I think may already have been done.

Having read the abysmal Seattle PI article linked in the write-up, it looks like that's not what's planned. Cramer is the inventor of a somewhat less-popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, in which particles send signals forward and backward in time. This isn't quite as crazy as it sounds, since there's time-reversal and other symmetries inherent in quantum mechanics, but I wouldn't call it well-accepted. What's more concerning

http://www.aps.org/meet/DPP06/baps/loader.cfm?url= /commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=78234

When I said cancer therapy I was thinking more along other known therapies such as Pion therapy, more novel but effective in treating tumor cells just as well. See here for Pion therapy: http://www.triumf.ca/welcome/pion_trtmt.html See here how to create Pion's using electron bombardment: http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v102/i5/p1392_1

I, for one, would not be surprised at all if the test was entirely bogus, in the sense that it did not use the EAST reactor, or DT fusion, or happened at all the way they said it has. There's also a good chance they beat ITER to sustainable fusion, and not using magnetic confinement madness.

Fast-rewind back to last year, and this announcement of Sandia, and report by Haines, that the pinch machine was reliably making plasmas at billions of degrees.

Around the same date as when the experiments were going on, the congress votes billions of dollars of funding for a project to replace existing nuclear warheads with "safer" ones. Hu-uh. I've heard more than one rumor of the Sandia guys placing a Li-H target in the machine for a free test while they were verifying their results. Wanna bet they had confirmation of fusion, just like last time ?

Starting to connect dots already ? How do you make an H bomb go boom ? With an A bomb that initiates a Li-H fusion. That means having to refine Uranium, which is extremely tedious and costly, and highly visible, having a lower power limit of 300 KT, and leaving radioactive dirt behind every explosion. With a Z-pinch detonator, there's no lower power limit, you can have H bombs of any size, leaving no radioactive dirt, and you don't need fancy material that fall under international scrutiny. The billions of degrees it reaches means it can initiate Li-H fusion, or B11-H fusion, which can also be used for power generation much more safely than currently envisioned methods, for example by feeding a Li-H ions spike into the steel plasma, using MHD for controlling the input, and for generating power on the output.

The Chinese and Russians have been building such Z-pinch fusion igniters since the original Sandia announcement, and so have the US, AFAIK. It shouldn't take very long before the first traces of all this start to emerge, until official confirmations.

At the 2006 March Meeting of the American Physical Society, some of us physicists (students and professors) went to Washington DC to lobby our Congressmen (see Congressional Visits ) about looming shortfalls of hard sciences in the USA and to encourage them to vote on upcoming bills to increase science funding.

There is alot of eye-opening data showing how Europe and Asia are significantly outpacing the US in terms of funding basic science education, in terms of the number of undergraduate and graduate degrees in the basic sciences, etc. Graphs plotting hard sciences degrees offered per year show the US lagging quite significantly (where we used to be leading 5+ years ago). Such trends are fairly worrisome because the hard sciences are tightly coupled to engineering and industry. Industries tend to attract to places with higher concentrations of scientists, so the US losing scientists will manifest itself in loss of industries down the line.

These are the kind of things that Senators and Representatives care about. To complicate matters there is a lag between industry and science, meaning that changes in science funding and numbers of scientists now won't be manifest significantly in industry until a decade or longer out. I met with two of my Congressmen and one of my Senators (really with their staffers), who luckily were familiar with this and assured us their bosses would be voting for the upcoming legislation to increase funding.

I come from a blue state, where the Congressmen are usually liberal with such education and funding programs. The red stater politicans were more hostile to funding sciences without seeing immediate industrial rewards. Such short-term thinking in those cases is what is leading to the decline of US scientific leadership.

On a different note, I've also seen major shifts in the attraction of foreign students to the US over the past few years. The Bush administration his been cracking down on student visas, which is also hurting our lead. In my department, within the past 3-4 years, each year a handful of good students accepted to the program are denied visas to enter the US (usually from China). Well, these guys aren't going to put their career on hold, and they'll go elsewhere. Many more foreign students are going to Canada and Europe, for instance, and the great brain drain that the US was known for the past few decades is beginning to show signs of reversing.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw in my two cents becuase I specifically lobbied my Congressmen about this very issue only six months ago.

At the 2006 March Meeting of the American Physical Society, some of us physicists (students and professors) went to Washington DC to lobby our Congressmen (see Congressional Visits ) about looming shortfalls of hard sciences in the USA and to encourage them to vote on upcoming bills to increase science funding.

There is alot of eye-opening data showing how Europe and Asia are significantly outpacing the US in terms of funding basic science education, in terms of the number of undergraduate and graduate degrees in the basic sciences, etc. Graphs plotting hard sciences degrees offered per year show the US lagging quite significantly (where we used to be leading 5+ years ago). Such trends are fairly worrisome because the hard sciences are tightly coupled to engineering and industry. Industries tend to attract to places with higher concentrations of scientists, so the US losing scientists will manifest itself in loss of industries down the line.

These are the kind of things that Senators and Representatives care about. To complicate matters there is a lag between industry and science, meaning that changes in science funding and numbers of scientists now won't be manifest significantly in industry until a decade or longer out. I met with two of my Congressmen and one of my Senators (really with their staffers), who luckily were familiar with this and assured us their bosses would be voting for the upcoming legislation to increase funding.

I come from a blue state, where the Congressmen are usually liberal with such education and funding programs. The red stater politicans were more hostile to funding sciences without seeing immediate industrial rewards. Such short-term thinking in those cases is what is leading to the decline of US scientific leadership.

On a different note, I've also seen major shifts in the attraction of foreign students to the US over the past few years. The Bush administration his been cracking down on student visas, which is also hurting our lead. In my department, within the past 3-4 years, each year a handful of good students accepted to the program are denied visas to enter the US (usually from China). Well, these guys aren't going to put their career on hold, and they'll go elsewhere. Many more foreign students are going to Canada and Europe, for instance, and the great brain drain that the US was known for the past few decades is beginning to show signs of reversing.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw in my two cents becuase I specifically lobbied my Congressmen about this very issue only six months ago.

to build a working Quantum Computer until 2007. It would be a nice surprise, actually....

As a small disclaimer: I work in QC field. There are a few approaches to building a superconducting quantum computer, but there are not many experiments coupling even two Qubits. One paper discussing one of the few experiments which worked is:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Pash kin%22%20intitle:%22Quantum%20oscillations%20in%20 two%20coupled%20charge%20qubits%22%20&hl=de&hs=oKY &lr=&safe=off&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla:en-US :unofficial&oi=scholarr

But there are severe problems with superconducting qubits, namely that the quality of the insulators used in standard processes are not good enough for building a working QC right now.
(http://eiffel.ps.uci.edu/cyu/publications/qubit.p df#search=%22mooji%20qubit%22,
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503)

It's not that these fundamental problems could not be adressed by developing better insulators or using other approaches
(http://www.solid.phys.ethz.ch/wallraff/content/sc ience/QuantumComp.html, http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503), but it is unlikely that any quantum computer will provide cheaper computing power for NP-hard problems than the cell processor until quite a while from now. In my personal opinion and also the opinion of some other people which i talked to is that the timescale for that is something like 10-15years of intense research.

But indeed, superconductors are one of the best candidates (others: atom traps etc.).

The role of D-Wave is that they are trying to push the development of superconducting QC to something which can be sold or where at least the patents can be sold. So it is natural (and probably good) that the external represantation on what they got is optimistic. But maybe it is important to point out to the slashdot readers that the blog of the CEO of a company is for sure an optimistic assumption what the future may hold and not the full criticism imposed by a peer-review in a scientific journal........

Another thing which makes it difficult to assess what they got is that D-Wave is usually pretty uninformative about what their specific plans are. Thats understandable because they spend a lot of money (for a company) into something where they will get out patents which would be weakened by prior art if they talk to loud.

to build a working Quantum Computer until 2007. It would be a nice surprise, actually....

As a small disclaimer: I work in QC field. There are a few approaches to building a superconducting quantum computer, but there are not many experiments coupling even two Qubits. One paper discussing one of the few experiments which worked is:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Pash kin%22%20intitle:%22Quantum%20oscillations%20in%20 two%20coupled%20charge%20qubits%22%20&hl=de&hs=oKY &lr=&safe=off&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla:en-US :unofficial&oi=scholarr

But there are severe problems with superconducting qubits, namely that the quality of the insulators used in standard processes are not good enough for building a working QC right now.
(http://eiffel.ps.uci.edu/cyu/publications/qubit.p df#search=%22mooji%20qubit%22,
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503)

It's not that these fundamental problems could not be adressed by developing better insulators or using other approaches
(http://www.solid.phys.ethz.ch/wallraff/content/sc ience/QuantumComp.html, http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503), but it is unlikely that any quantum computer will provide cheaper computing power for NP-hard problems than the cell processor until quite a while from now. In my personal opinion and also the opinion of some other people which i talked to is that the timescale for that is something like 10-15years of intense research.

But indeed, superconductors are one of the best candidates (others: atom traps etc.).

The role of D-Wave is that they are trying to push the development of superconducting QC to something which can be sold or where at least the patents can be sold. So it is natural (and probably good) that the external represantation on what they got is optimistic. But maybe it is important to point out to the slashdot readers that the blog of the CEO of a company is for sure an optimistic assumption what the future may hold and not the full criticism imposed by a peer-review in a scientific journal........

Another thing which makes it difficult to assess what they got is that D-Wave is usually pretty uninformative about what their specific plans are. Thats understandable because they spend a lot of money (for a company) into something where they will get out patents which would be weakened by prior art if they talk to loud.

Just to add another site to the many good ones already listed:

http://focus.aps.org/

Aip.org is not the American Physical Society, but in fact is the homepage of the American Institute of Physics. The APS website is at www.aps.org.

The research group of Mark Raizen of the University of Texas at Austin has been working on similar techniques of 'tweezing' and 'laser culling'. Theoretically, in quantum tweezing, Gaussian lasers would sweep over a Bose-Einstein Condensate of ultracold atoms. The velocity of the sweep can be tuned in such a way that Landau-Zener tunnelling criterion is only satisfied for one atom in the reservoir and it tunnels into the sweeping beam.

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/i7/e070401

  In addition, 'laser culling' is a process by which a doppler-cooled set of atoms, kept in a MOT trap, can have the nuber of atoms whittled down by lowering the trap height. This can be done until a sub-poissionian regime is achieved and a definite number state is in the trap.

http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2006/01/physics04.h tml

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.htm l

The proof, involving triple integrals, is left for the reader.

Of course, designing a spacecraft that is as spherically symmetrical and uniform in density as possible will be difficult. TFA refers to this, and before much money is spent on this project, one would hope some number-crunching is done to see how extreme the effect is.

Another problem will be microgravity. Orbital velocity is dependent upon the distance from the center of the object being orbited. In Earth orbit, even a few inches difference can produce a velocity gradient that can result in minute accelerations. At L2, some of these effects might be minimized, although again, number crunching should be done.

The late Robert L. Forward proposed a system of massive spheres that could flatten spacetime in a local region. To further minimize extraneous effects due to microgravity, a system like this might need to be used. One advantage would be that this same system might eliminate some of the problems due to assymetry in the spacecraft. One of the problems with this situation would be mass lofted, which currently tends to be expensive, and additional calculations that might be required to analyze the data.

In early tokamaks, the confinement times of energy and particles were seen to be much lower than what was anticipated from theory and also much lower than what is needed for fusion. The reason for this is attributed to anomalous transport of particles and energy across the magnetic field lines (which are intended to prevent this) due to various instability modes in the plasma.

Also, early tokamaks could not be heated to anywhere near the temperatures required for fusion since they used exclusively inductive current drive to heat the plasma, which is ineffective beyond ~1 keV. Auxiliary heating methods such as wave heating with electron cyclotron, ion cyclotron or lower hybrid waves and neutral beam injection were then adopted in order to further heat the plasma beyond the ohmic limit. Initially these were observed to further reduce the confinement time from the ohmic limit. Later the ASDEX tokamak observed an increase in the confinment time back to ohmic levels with auxiliary neutral beam heating. This regime of operation is referred to as H-mode. It required the auxiliary heating power to exceed a certain minimum threshold. http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v49/i19/p1408_1

Additionally, it has been roughly observed that the confinement times in tokamaks scale with the plasma parameters such as plasma current, toroidal magnetic field, plasma volume, etc. ITER was designed using a database of other tokamaks, their parameters and their performance, in order to scale the machine to the desired performance http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0029-5515/32/2/I11. Superconducting magnetic systems will allow ITER to have long pulse durations like Tore Supra (> 6 minutes) with better plasma performance than any of the big tokamaks now (JT-60, JET, DIII-D, T-15).

In assessing the usefulness of the ABL, the study group adopted its publicly reported design goals: 3 MW of power focused into a 1.2-m-diameter beam (close to the diffraction limit) that could illuminate the target missile for up to 20 s. We also considered the utility of systems with greater and lesser capabilities. We found that if the ABL achieves its design goals, it would have a range of about 600 km against liquid-propellant ICBMs. That would be useful against liquid-propellant ICBMs launched from North Korea, but not from Iran. Against solid-propellant ICBMs, its range would be only about 300 km, too short to be useful in any of the scenarios we examined. The ABL's range is relatively insensitive to its power.

These lasers are by no means pulsed, also a cursory google search shows the American Physical Society seems to disagree.

http://www.aps.org/public_affairs/popa/reports/nmd 03.cfm

A recent APS study (see the main report in particular) has tagged determining the absolute mass of the neutrino as amongst the highest priorities in the field. Another big mystery is to determine if the neutrino is it's own antiparticle (i.e. if it is of a Dirac or Majorana character). There is an interesting kind of decay known as "neutrinoless double beta decay" that only proceeds if the neutrino is its own antiparticle. This decay has never been observed (some members of the Heidelberg-Moscow experiment may disagree with me), but there is an active community currently looking for it in different candidate isotopes of Ge, Xe, Mo, and Te. The rate of this decay is directly proportional to the square of the effective neutrino mass. The lower limit on the lifetime of this decay in Tellurium is about 1E24 years, about ten orders of magnitude larger than the age of the universe. Not a trivial experiment to do.

Hopefully, in the next few years, discovery of this decay (and a strong statement about the absolute neutrino mass from the decay rate) will be a big headline story on Slashdot (and perhaps the NY Times and Physical Review Letters too - hopefully not in that order; are you listening Mr. Fleischman?).

Marta C. González, Pedro G. Lind, and Hans J. Herrmann, "System of Mobile Agents to Model Social Networks," Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 088702 (2006).

Marta C. González, Pedro G. Lind, and Hans J. Herrmann, "System of Mobile Agents to Model Social Networks," Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 088702 (2006).

Atoms are a good example- they're completely mythical, a model. Nobody has ever actually *seen* an atom, they're a consensus construction based on how certain molecules and compounds work-

1) You are using a completely contrived definition for "myth." You might as well call everything humans ever thought of as "myth" but then it means nothing.

2) Ever heard of an atomic-force microscope?

http://www.rso.cornell.edu/scitech/archive/95spr/a tom.html
http://focus.aps.org/story/v11/st19

Ernst Mach could get away with saying the atomic theory was only a model of chemistry, back before 1900. Statistical mechanics showed that atoms could have actual directly measurable effects (such as observed in Brownian motion), by the time of Einstein, and since then, things have gotten even more clearly in favor of the atomic theory of matter.

You cannot make an nuclear weapon if atoms aren't real particles. The phenomenon of critical mass depends very much on it.

The whole "electric power line - cancer" link is total garbage and has been used by lawyers to force companies to spend money on useless countermeasures or settle "damage cases" out of court. It is a legal protection racket, as are many (Most?) class-actions suits. The American Physical Society debunkled this nonsense, as did a National Research Council report.

Well, he's co-author on a paper with J.H. Marburger, back in 1978 (http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v17/i1/p335_1) - Phys. Rev. A 17, 335-342 (1978). The same John H. Marburger who is now science advisor to President Bush:
http://www.ostp.gov/html/_aboutostp.html#jhm. Does this make him more credible by association? (Or Marburger less credible...?)

Link needs login, here's another:
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v71/i7/p413_1

Quoth JH Van Vleck: "Even though electrically non-polar, oxygen gas absorbs microwaves because the magnetic moment of the O2 molecule interacts with electromagnetic fields." The Absorption of Microwaves by Oxygen

So molecular oxygen is an exception to the generally true assumption that a molecule needs to be polar to absorb EM radiation.

Some people like to argue that the current administration is actually increasing funding for research, something in the order of billions of dollars. True, missions like the one to Mars, which may not be feasible, do get more attention. Now, let me illustrate what effect the actual decrease of funding in nuclear research has on science. Last year, Dr. Christoph Leemann, Director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) sent a clear message (read it!) to all staff and users at JLab. This is alarming! For most people outside the scientific community it is probably hard to imagine what the loss of 45 jobs at JLab means. The situation at other labs, such as the Brookhaven National Laboratory is very similar, if not worse. Let me assure you that this cut has serious consequences for a lot of people at many research labs and universities in the US. We will see how this changes education in the US.
There is more information available at the APS Public Affairs web site.

The liquid-gas system is expected to exhibit distinct dynamic behavior in the fluid's critical region (model H). We present molecular dynamics simulations of a Lennard-Jones fluid model starting from specially designed, near-equilibrium, initial conditions. By following the fluid's relaxation towards equilibrium, we calculate the requisite transport coefficients in the critical region. The results yield the scaling behavior of the thermal diffusion coefficient DT~xi^-1.023+/-0.018 (xi is the correlation length) and a nonconventional divergent heat conductivity, all of which are in accord with mode-coupling and renormalization group predictions, as well as some experimental data.

The American Physical Society's Timeline of Physics in the 20th Century

1990-2000s:

1989 - 1992 "The cosmic background radiation is explored." (Never effect me)

1990 "The Hubble Space Telescope becomes operational." (Never effect me)

1998 - 2008 "The solar neutrino puzzle may be solved." (Never effect me)

1998 - 2008 "Weather and climate predictions come of age." (Weather Forecasting?)

1999 - 2009 "Simulation of Brain Functions in Real Time." (Neural Networks have been around since the 60's)

2000 - 2010 "Gravitational waves open a new window on the universe." (Still just General Relativity?)

2000 - 2010 "Photonics competes with electronics. (Just a prediction, hasn't actually happened yet)

Compare this with the 1930s

1938 - 1939 Atomic Nuclear fission is observed in uranium.

1939 The first FM (frequency modulation) radio station is built.

1939 The first helicopter designed for mass production flies.

1936 Sound is recorded on Magnetic Tape

So basically I want to know where is my flying car, d**mit!

the degree of precision required would be many orders of magnitude greater than any observations of any physical laws have ever been in a real experiment)

This is not true. The fault-tolerance threshold--the error threshold below which an arbitrarily long quantum computation can be performed to arbitrary precision with only polynomial overhead--is estimated to be anywhere from 10^-1 to 10^-7, depending on the physical system and the error model.

Now, 10^-7 is pretty hard to reach, but we most certainly have performed physical experiments to that degree of accuracy. Just not quantum computers, yet. It's important to note that there are other approaches to fault-tolerant quantum computation beyond just error correcting codes. Topologically fault-tolerant quantum computing is currently highly theoretical, but has a lot of potential.

In fact, part of the power of quantum computing is that (even without the somewhat less plausible factoring algorithm) we would have real secure encryption

Quantum cryptography, or, more correctly, quantum key distribution (QKD), only does a subset of what today's public key cryptography does. QKD requires that the two parties already have a small shared secret for authentication, and simply allows those parties to produce an arbitrarily large shared secret (e.g. random number which they both know, but is hidden from all other parties). That large shared secret can be used as a one-time pad. In other words, QKD solves the encryption problem, but not the authentication problem.

One of the sibling posts makes an incorrect statement about QKD:
The problem with quantum crypto is that it requires a direct transmission of photons from Alice to Bob. You can't have a relay station in-between, unless you are willing to guarantee its security (any relay station would allow for interception of the signal when it isn't entangled - which cannot be detected).

This is most certainly not the case if Alice and Bob have a shared secret, unless you use a particularly boneheaded implementation of QKD. QKD requires only a quantum and a classical channel between Alice and Bob. It doesn't matter if that channel is a single fiber, or a series of repeaters doing quantum teleportation and entanglement swapping, or whatever. The whole point of QKD is to allow Alice and Bob to detect tampering with the quantum channel, and that works regardless of the physical nature of the channel.

The catch is when Alice and Bob don't have a shared secret, as one might imagine in a large quantum network. If Alice and Bob have never met, but both know and trust Charlie, they can use him as a trusted intermediary for QKD. If Charlie cheats, then the channel between Alice and Bob is compromised. Otherwise, it is secure. Once Alice and Bob have successfully communicated (without eavesdropping) via Charlie, they then have a shared secret and no longer need a trusted intermediary.

References:
Aharonov et al
Raussendorf et al
Silva et al
Szkopek et al
Knill et al
Aliferis et al

Please read this article, published in Physical Review, which is quite arguably a mainstream physics journal: http://focus.aps.org/story/v16/st14 They are pointing out discoveries of flaws in the previous understanding of the Quantum model. The discovered behavior was not predicted by Quantum theory. So it's possible there are subtleties in Quantum physics that we have not yet accounted for.

A lot of these posts appeal to authority to determine if focus fusion is decent science, analyzing who I am, or even who people who talk about focus fusion are or who is on their board of directors. ... The right way is to look at the scientific work and ask--does it make sense, and does it follow the scientific method? Sometimes that's difficult if the work is only presented in technical journals. But in this case, our work is both available in technical form...and in layman's terms...

What you're saying would make some sense if you were talking to physicists or engineers who work on fusion (or at least nuclear physics), because those people would have the expertise to judge a proposal on its scientific merits. For the rest of us, though, it's really not possible to look at it with an informed, skeptical eye and determine its validity. I'm close to completing my Ph.D. in Physics, but even I don't know enough about plasma and nuclear physics to really give a good appraisal of a new fusion technique. That is the reason people spend years in school studying night and day in order to get a Ph.D. in a very narrow specialty. I have personally read works in my area of expertise (quantum information) that look fairly reasonable on first glance but are completely wrong when you look at the details. These errors can be so subtle they would go unnoticed by almost anyone but a specialist in that particular area. Putting it in "layman's terms" may give people more of an impression that they understand it, but it doesn't do anything to actually help them understand the technical details. In fact, when you do know the technical details, reading the layman's accounts of things that appear, for example, in the New York Times it is actually harder to determine if the research is valid, because none of the technical details are clearly explained.

So what can a layperson (or even non-specialist, like me) do when confronted with claims they don't understand the technical details of? Well, they look for the opinion of someone who does know about that specific area, which is, indeed, appealing to authority and is entirely appropriate and reasonable in that case. We must ask, have people with a track record of doing good, successful science looked at this and thought it was right? In the linked article, the only person who seems to be quoted giving an "expert" opinion on it is Dr. Thomas Valone, of Integrity Research Institute. And his credentials? Well, Integrity Research Institute seems to have dubious credentials at best and again a quick search on Dr. Valone again turned up no publications in peer-reviewed physics journals (if I missed some, I'd be interested to know). (A search on the web did turn up his support for ideas such as inertial propulsion. I can say with authority that that idea is nonsense; it is completely at odds with the known laws of physics, all experimental data on record, and plain old common sense.)

Another way a non-specialist can gauge whether some research has merit according to experts in the field is to see whether it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, showing that people with technical expertise in this area feel it is at least plausible that it's correct. I didn't find a paper on your idea in any of the APS journals or on Google Scholar, so at least that quick search seems to suggest it's never been published after peer review (the arxiv is not peer-reviewed, of course). Furthermore, I didn't notice any peer-reviewed articles by you on fusion at all, which might lead one to question your own expertise in the matter.

Basically, a non-specialist can try to judge the validity of a piece of work by asking, "Does the author have a record of research in the field that has been widely recognized as successful?" and "Have other specialists in the field (with a record of widely recognized success) looked critically at this research and thought it ha

Bush's whole Mars project is just a publicity campaign. Decisions about the project are going to be made after the end of his presidency. In the meantime NASA has to cope delayed compensation of inflation, namely those numbers you quote, while my friends at NASA tell me about the projects which are being canceled now. `Crisis' is written on the wall. Read the articles in the section "Research Funding" at http://www.aps.org/public_affairs/index.cfm and see yourself.

I guess this means these guys are wrong
We'll have to wait a lot longer for the Star Trek dream. :-(

This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that such a material could be made - there are a lot of new potential materials out there, so don't expect this record to stand forever. For example, pressure-induced interlinking of carbon nanotubes could potentially best it. There's no reason to think that C60 is going to be the best source material to interlink.

for those of you interested, after taleryakhan published a high profile experiment in Science magazine in 2002, another group at oak ridge published a counter-claim that with identical set-ups, they could not produce the correlated sonoluminescence and neutron detection.

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/e104302

as usual, an experiment with negative results are rare, and potentially interesting.

Robert Park and the American Physical Society have long been foes of both the Shuttle and the ISS.

First off, the American Physical Society has no stance for or against the Shuttle and the ISS. They are a professional society for physicists. They occasionally perform studies or issue statements based on areas of their expertise. The only statement about the ISS that I am aware is Statement 91.2 and was released in 1991. Basically it said that the APS feels there is no current credible scientific justification for the proposed ISS and that the scientific value of the ISS has been greatly overstated and can be done better and cheaper on Earth and/or in the shuttle. I think 14 years later it is hard to argue that statement has not proven accurate.

Bob Park writes a weekly one-page commentary work What's News pertaining to physics and general science folly. He is rather opinionated on many subjects and is not shy to state them (it is, after all, an opinion column). He does not speak for the APS any more than a political commentator speaks for any newspaper on the Sunday editorial page. Park's disclaimer at the bottom (at the time the link in question was posted) was:

THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY and THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the American Physical Society or the University, but they should be.

The "unique result" statement you criticize is taken from a report by the National Research Council (at NASA's request), which basically states (and Park reiterates) that nothing on protein crystal research has been done that has not been done on Earth. In fact, the exact statement taken from the Executive Summary is:

The task group heard a great deal about experiments to date in NASA 's macromolecular crystallography program. The results so far are inconclusive, and the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited. At this time, one cannot point to a single case where a space-based crystallization effort was the crucial step in achieving a landmark scientific result. In many of the cases that have so far been listed as successful, the improvements obtained have been incremental rather than fundamental. In addition, the difficulty of mounting simultaneous efforts to produce the best possible crystals both on the ground and in space has limited the ability of researchers to make the comparisons between microgravity and Earth crystals that would be necessary to demonstrate that the microgravity environment can produce superior crystals.

Finding: The results from the collection of experiments performed on microgravity's effect on protein crystal growth are inconclusive. The improvements in crystal quality that have been observed are often only incremental, and the difficulty of producing the appropriate controls limits investigators ' ability to definitively assess if improvements can be reliably credited to the microgravity environment. To date, the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited.

A more descriptive statement Park made was in a link in the link. They aren't comments to be taken with salt but rather a listing of damning facts regarding selling the ISS for growing protein crystals. There isn't any way to put a good spin on that.

That NRC report statement about protein crystals can be made for just about most of the research attempted on the ISS. You can argue all you want about the political and/or societial reasons for having or not having the ISS, but you cannot just

Robert Park and the American Physical Society have long been foes of both the Shuttle and the ISS.

First off, the American Physical Society has no stance for or against the Shuttle and the ISS. They are a professional society for physicists. They occasionally perform studies or issue statements based on areas of their expertise. The only statement about the ISS that I am aware is Statement 91.2 and was released in 1991. Basically it said that the APS feels there is no current credible scientific justification for the proposed ISS and that the scientific value of the ISS has been greatly overstated and can be done better and cheaper on Earth and/or in the shuttle. I think 14 years later it is hard to argue that statement has not proven accurate.

Bob Park writes a weekly one-page commentary work What's News pertaining to physics and general science folly. He is rather opinionated on many subjects and is not shy to state them (it is, after all, an opinion column). He does not speak for the APS any more than a political commentator speaks for any newspaper on the Sunday editorial page. Park's disclaimer at the bottom (at the time the link in question was posted) was:

THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY and THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the American Physical Society or the University, but they should be.

The "unique result" statement you criticize is taken from a report by the National Research Council (at NASA's request), which basically states (and Park reiterates) that nothing on protein crystal research has been done that has not been done on Earth. In fact, the exact statement taken from the Executive Summary is:

The task group heard a great deal about experiments to date in NASA 's macromolecular crystallography program. The results so far are inconclusive, and the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited. At this time, one cannot point to a single case where a space-based crystallization effort was the crucial step in achieving a landmark scientific result. In many of the cases that have so far been listed as successful, the improvements obtained have been incremental rather than fundamental. In addition, the difficulty of mounting simultaneous efforts to produce the best possible crystals both on the ground and in space has limited the ability of researchers to make the comparisons between microgravity and Earth crystals that would be necessary to demonstrate that the microgravity environment can produce superior crystals.

Finding: The results from the collection of experiments performed on microgravity's effect on protein crystal growth are inconclusive. The improvements in crystal quality that have been observed are often only incremental, and the difficulty of producing the appropriate controls limits investigators ' ability to definitively assess if improvements can be reliably credited to the microgravity environment. To date, the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited.

A more descriptive statement Park made was in a link in the link. They aren't comments to be taken with salt but rather a listing of damning facts regarding selling the ISS for growing protein crystals. There isn't any way to put a good spin on that.

That NRC report statement about protein crystals can be made for just about most of the research attempted on the ISS. You can argue all you want about the political and/or societial reasons for having or not having the ISS, but you cannot just

The paper by the Canadians is nice, but (a) it's not really a transistor, since there is no gate electrode, and (b) single-molecule transistors have been done by several groups.

See:

Park et al., Nature 407, 57 (2000)

Park et al., Nature 417, 722 (2002)

Yu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 266802 (2004)
and others.

Nanotube-based transistors came before these, too, though that's a bit of a cheat since nanotubes can be microns long.

I'm not so sure about the "informations needs to be free" stuff when it comes to peer reviewed science. Elsevier does run a racket, especially when it comes to the archive articles, if your university library doesn't purchase the extended subscription it can be $30 per article.

But as a member of the American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/ I have access to pdf's of Einsteins original articles just for the cost of my membership, every article published in the Physical Review series is available.

APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive. Furthermore maintaining and adminstering a network of peers to review articles is costly as well. Most of the articles deal with small minutia of physics that maybe dozens of people on earth would completely appreciate.

I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science. Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's, furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.

-- Brandon

>> Only heat (and radiation) can truly sterilize.

Not true. Plasma byproducts can also sterilize. There has been much research into plasma sterilization, and it works well now with viable products on the market.

When I was in college in the late '90s, my plasma science professor and a biology professor had gotten together to examine the effects of plasma byproducts (i.e. atomic oxygen, basically) on organisms. They found the same total cell destruction in the microorganisms exposed to the plasma byproducts as when an autoclave is used. But the plasma sterilized in less than a minute. (The byproducts have been cooled to room temperature before they are exposed to the materials to be sanitized, so the effects are from the byproducts themselves, not their heat.)

Note the links from the Google search - the first one is for a Johnson and Johnson plasma sterilization product (though their process takes a few hours). Those aren't places that would lightly confuse sanitation and sterilization. This is truly new technology, that will render autoclaves obsolete.

(My professor's work appears here in abstract form.)