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There'll be people who would pay $50,000 on top of the car itself for a true self-driving car.
Probably.
But most likely not if it looks like this: https://cosmos-magazine.imgix.... (Article is here: https://cosmosmagazine.com/tec...)
That car actually is already self driving without Ãoebers/Googles or Teslas "tech". Toyota has self driving cars since more than 15 years.

And then again: that would perhaps be the US market only. In Europe school kids use the bus to school, or walk, or they use the bicycle. It is a rare occasion that parents ride their kids to school or pick them up there.

Keep in mind we are talking about cars that would cost some 40,000 EURO, no one is buying such a thing for 95,000 EURO so he can safe pick up time from school.

What we are waiting for are cars with multiple lidar systems, that are spread over the corners and long edges of the car.

"That said, pansperia is a load of crap: it explains nothing about the origin of life (even if life didn't originate on Earth, it had to originate somewhere, can't be turtles all the way down)"

They *think* they're ready for that argument :

"Wickramasinghe, Hoyle and Steele have all entertained the notion that there is no need for such a creation story. When asked if there must be abiogenesis at some point, somewhere in the universe, Steele replies, “Actually no. If the universe is steady state infinite there is no formal abiogenesis!"

https://cosmosmagazine.com/bio... logy/viruses-et-and-the-octopus-from-space-the-return-of-panspermia

I don't think you understand the difference.

How does superposition help?

The difference between regular computers and quantum computers boils down to how they approach a problem.

A regular computer tries to solve a problem the same way you might try to escape a maze – by trying every possible corridor, turning back at dead ends, until you eventually find the way out. But superposition allows the quantum computer to try all the paths at once – in essence, finding the shortcut.

Two bits in your computer can be in four possible states (00, 01, 10, or 11), but only one of them at any time. This limits the computer to processing one input at a time (like trying one corridor in the maze).

In a quantum computer, two qubits can also represent the exact same four states (00, 01, 10, or 11). The difference is, because of superposition, the qubits can represent all four at the same time. That’s a bit like having four regular computers running side-by-side.

If you add more bits to a regular computer, it can still only deal with one state at a time. But as you add qubits, the power of your quantum computer grows exponentially. For the mathematically inclined, we can say that if you have “n” qubits, you can simultaneously represent 2n states.)

Qudits: The Real Future of Quantum Computing?

The superpositions that qubits can adopt let them each help perform two calculations at once. If two qubits are quantum-mechanically linked, or entangled, they can help perform four calculations simultaneously; three qubits, eight calculations; and so on. As a result, a quantum computer with 300 qubits could perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the known universe, solving certain problems much faster than classical computers. However, superpositions are extraordinarily fragile, making it difficult to work with multiple qubits.

I'm pretty sure your PC isn't going to be able to do that.

can you explain what gravity is?

Gravity is a dent in the fabric of three dimensional, Euclidean space-time.

What energy is?

The problem with your questions is that they are overly simplistic and lack any specificity. What do you mean by "what is energy"? There are many ways that could be answered. The simplest textbook answer is that energy is the property of matter and radiation which is manifest as a capacity to perform work. The lengthier and more encompassing answer is this.

Where the universe came from?

Nope, but I never claimed to and, unlike you flat-earthers and religious types, I'm not afraid to say "I don't know, I'm still working on it".

You have to have a lot of faith to say it was always there.

Which I never said.

Did you know Big Bang theory was originally dismissed because it sounded too biblical? It supports that there was a beginning, which is the first part of Genesis in the Bible.

The big bang theory was never "dismissed". There were religious idiots who didn't agree with it and believed that the universe was always in a steady state, but it was never dismissed by the scientific community.

Christians created the University... and the Bible tells us to do science. It started with God commanding us to give taxonomy to all the animals.

Christians didn't create anything but a bunch of bullshit. The bible is a collection of faerie tales written by men and "god" is a concept fabricated by men.

Now let me ask you a question that any grade school child should know the answer to. Why is the sky blue? I'm betting anything that you as an uneducated flat-earther/religious nutter won't know the answer and will have to look it up. Oh and hint, it's not "god did it".

If you bothered to at least google the matter instead of just making a cynical comment, you'd learn that you can actually find something like this in the soil.

What do you base your doubt on? Gut feeling or something substantial?

What? I need to "google" - for what is "normal" here? Just MF look around!

There is absolutely no condition in the past except magnitudes of extinction which is comparable to this situation right now and to call anything "normal" because there was something minor in the past is baloney, just a maybe unintentional attempt to console. It's on the same level as some new guy in some office claiming there is no global warming - or climate change is a hoax.

There is one species on this globe with some larger brain and creating with it this havoc comparable only with a few events in the past of this planet.

Yeah, google that:

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
https://cosmosmagazine.com/pal...

Enjoy!

Tell it to the BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi... or http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... or https://www.forbes.com/sites/a... or https://cosmosmagazine.com/bio... or http://scholar.harvard.edu/fil... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Let me guess, you love firing lead bullets at firing ranges with your buddies, as much as possible.

#5, axial tilt

"The gravitational push-pull of the Moon on iron deep inside Earth keeps it hot and molten"

This is why Mar's axial tilt wobbling is so extreme.

Hmmm ... I'm going with "fusion power has been 10-15 years away since the 50s".

It's been known about since the 30s.

The bottom line is that outlawing drugs reduces their use

Does it? On the surface, it seems that what you say is true. Do you have any data to back that up with?

Personal anecdotes:
When I was in school, all the cool kids smoked marijuana despite its illegality. Numerous people were induced to use it despite not showing the desire to use it. Marijuana was most definitely illegal at the time. Legality had no effect on usage that I saw.

When I have visited Amsterdam, there were coffee houses and such that sold marijuana openly. The businesses did not seem overly busy and at most, i saw one or two small groups of people chatting away inside. Definitely not of apocalyptic proportions. Once or twice while wandering around downtown looking at the amazing architecture, I smelled some marijuana smoke but despite my efforts, I never saw who was smoking it. Legality had no effect on usage that I saw.

But do it factually rather than the misinfotainment spouted by both sides. Take pot for instance... the genetic and economic damage is huge.

Ok, let's talk facts. Provide links to reputable studies demonstrating genetic damage over and above genetic damage from background radiation, drinking water, or eating bananas. I did a quick search and the top article was this:

http://cosmosmagazine.com/news...

Honestly, it sounds rather hokey. They submitted cells directly to smoke condensates and they did not specify the type and amount of genetic damage. It seems to me that if they had subjected cells directly to any kind of condensed chemical that cell damage of some type is sure to occur. This is not normally how cells are exposed.

Tobacco was also measured this way and found to cause genetic damage. Again, seems rather suspicious to me. No studies not performed in this manner seem to indicate genetic damage.

150x the THC is not the harmless stuff the hippies from the 60's smoked.

I recognize this talking point. It is laughable because hashish has been available for thousands of years (condensed marijuana). Marijuana has been cultivated for thousands of years as a recreational chemical. It does not seem reasonable that all of the strains from the 60s were so weak when it is clear that farmers have known how to create selective strains for thousands of years, e.g. corn and wheat.

The political Right makes it a boogy man

Indeed.

but the political Left pushes "medical marijuana" which is a bigger lie than "Iraq WMD".

Hm. If it is a lie, then why does the federal government grant prescriptions for marijuana use? Sure, at the state level, the requirements are much (MUCH!) less strict, but even at its strictest, the federal government knows there are actual medicinal uses for marijuana.

Both drive from their marketing basis rather than act on fact.

It seems like you need to do some more investigation. Yes, there is a LOT of political spin from both sides. The idea is that YOU research the facts and come to a conclusion yourself. It appears as if you have not actually researched the subject deeply and are making an opinion based on "things you have heard".

Really, try researching it with an open mind. It will not attack you and hurt you.

Please note that I am not arguing for or against, I am merely responding to what you have written.

Kind regards

And in our one sample of life on Earth, we don't have any evidence in all of Earths history, of any of the steps happening TWICE, independently. Instead, it's all a nice, neat, clean, singular and unbroken, tree.

Well, 'convergent evolution' begs to differ. Plenty of things in life have been invented many times over.

As for basic lifeforms themselves, look up those weird and very ancient fossils found in Africa a couple years ago that seem to indicate multicellular organisms way before and way different than what came next. Dead-end or ancestors ?

Psychopaths have empathy, it's just that they are capable of toggling it off and on at will when it bests suits them. http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/5798/psychopaths-can-empathise-demand

I presume that someone is already 'guilty' of not getting this right ('this' being "able to see into the future" and predicting the need for weather satellites) so, the person(s) need to be charged, found giulty, and incarcerated. After all, that will always make a positive impression on scientists and engineers, as it did recently in Italy. This also applies to those responsible for the launcher, and the weather forecasters who clear the launch window, the space-junk trackers who clear the window, and so on...... :-)

The spread of the theory of relativity is not an example of biological evolution.[...] if you decide to redefine the evolutionary history of the human species as [...]

That's the core of our disagreement. You are redefining the history of the human species as being purely biological. That's patently wrong. Knowledge, civilization, communication between individuals shape the evolution of humanity more than biology, to the point where some refer to this well known effect as "the end of evolution". It's like computers: the nature of my laptop is defined more by the fact that it runs MacOSX than by the fact that it has a Core i7 inside. To wit: not so long ago, my Mac laptop had a PowerPC in it, it still was a Mac. And surely you would not debate that man and woman are biologically different.

To be clear : in my mind, "Adam" was probably born non-human. Then he groked something, updated his software, became human and spread this virus around him, starting with "Eve". And that process repeated itself multiple times, for multiple things that we associate to being human: bipedalism, use of fire, speech, self-awareness, burying the dead, religion, art, etc. In that sense, there may have been multiple Adams. But I'm pretty sure very few of these key evolutionary steps were biological or genetic in nature. And I'm pretty sure that in all cases, Adam was alone for a while, then they were two.

The Bible, assuming it's actually the point of view of God, tells us that one specific event was more essential than the rest in defining us as human. It was the end of innocence, the precise moment when someone first realized that he was responsible for his own actions. That makes sense, even if you are a scientist. So, even with all our scientific knowledge, I don't see Genesis as a strong argument against religion. On the contrary, I find the choice of what defines us as human really subtle and interesting. I find the storytelling really great for a text that old (compare it to other creation myths, you might see my point, I posted another comment here on this topic). And I find the philosophy disturbingly advanced for its time.

By the way, there is another similarly advanced insight in the Bible: "I am that I am". The insight is this. If you trace where something comes from, you can trace it to some other event, and then again and again. From there, there are a few logical options, e.g. :

1. a cyclic causal chain of events (i.e. A caused B that caused C that caused A), something that creates so many logical problems and occurs so infrequently in nature that we typically eliminate it as a possibility.

2. a chain of events with an unexplained end-point (e.g. the Big Bang in cosmology: we don't have an answer at this point to "what caused the Big Bang", though some theorists are pushing this limit, e.g. bubble multiverses, but we'll be back in the same situation).

3. a chain of events with an self-explaining end-point, e.g. "I am that I am", "I exist without a cause".

So when I read that "I am that I am" is the name of God, and when I think that this was written eons ago, I'm just puzzled. Either the guy who wrote that was über-smart, or he was über-lucky, or He was in the know.

As usual there is nothing here beyond an angst-ridden blog post about how some law might someday be (mis) applied. (Next up: Will Shariah Law take over the UN!??? Oops, we already did that one today.)

I am more interested in how this applied in the case of large meteors that leave large deposits of valuable minerals in the earth's crust. These are not little objects you can walk away with, but rather, large areas rich in minerals due to (usually) prehistoric impacts that are already productively mined. It seems less of a stretch that somebody would abuse this meteor law to exploit public lands by showing the minerals there were "originally" from an asteroid, since the minerals can be extracted at a profit (sans sci-fi).

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/online/1601/why-organic-food-cant-feed-world

Is this a joke? Have you never seen the red/blonde haired blue/green/grey eyed people in northern South Asia? Or the blonde Aborigines? Or black people with blue eyes? The iconic ancient painting of (maybe) Tocharians with red hair and blue eyes? Sure, the diversity increases in (northern) Europe, but it assuredly exists elsewhere (the Nazis had problems explaining it).

Surely you have heard of recessive genes, and the decreasing chance of being Black or Asian and having blue eyes.
Without a blue eyed person in the family tree of BOTH parents your chance of having blue eyes is slim to none.

Try here for a simplistic (but still pretty good) explanation.

It turns out its not quite as simple as that because eye color is not controlled strictly by one gene, and there are more than one path to blue eyes (and all of them are recessive genes).

There are rare mutations that can spontaneously cause blue eyes as well. These are even rarer.

That you can point to a few individuals that have unexpected eye and hair color means nothing.

Your memory is not reliable. Objective testing has shown that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

First, genetic engineering is a way of improving a plant. A monoculture is growing all the same thing. these are entirely different concepts. Trying to link the two only makes it look like you don't know the definition of either.

Second, how are Monsanto's seeds wrong? sure, the make Monsanto a profit, but there's nothing wrong with that. The insect resistant ones have feared pretty well, reducing pesticides and even benefiting farms that don't grow them. The herbicide tolerant ones have, for all their ill will, been environmentally positive, having reduced the need for tillage to control weeds (tillage degrades the soil quality and promotes fertilizer runoff into water systems), reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and replaced harsher herbicides.

Monsanto? Is that why anti-GE groups are protesting the publicly funded Rothamsted GE wheat trial in the UK? Is that why they complain about the Rainbow papaya, Arctic apples, Golden Rice, and BioCassava, or why groups destroyed the GE grapes in French, GE wheat in Australia, GE potatoes in the Netherlands, and GE wheat in the UK? It might be true for you, but that is minority thought. You can not play that card while the vast majority of the protest against GE crops is also applied to those that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

The actual problem is licensing and economics.

The problem with that notion is that there is just as much opposition to publically funded research as ther is corporate funded research. What do GE grapes in French, GE wheat in Australia, GE potatoes in the Netherlands, and GE wheat in the UK have in common? They were all publicly funded, and they were all attacked. The Rainbow papaya (a virus resistant GE papaya) was developed not by a corporation.but by the University of Hawaii, and you are free to save the seed, yet the anti-GMO people are against it just as much as they oppose Monsanto's crops. The same could be said for Golden Rice, which was developed for the sole purpose of helping people. I've never seen a single major anti-GMO group voice support of any GE crop, even ones that do not have the issues often used to argue against GE crops. So, you can't say that it is about licensing and patents and the like when this sort of stuff happens. It is about the science, and those issues (regardless of whether a particular topic in that area has merit) are added as secondary arguments.

Yes, because we all know that scientists never error and always agree.

Science is not some priesthood that never has to explain to the people who pay their salaries, and need merely agree with themselves. If their explanation can't be communicated to your average college educated person than perhaps they have to rethink it.

The chemical signature of the rocks and the Martian air match

How many core samples of Mars do we have to determine the atmosphere centuries ago when these rocks were supposedly blasted from the martian surface? What the composition of the atmosphere is today has nothing to do with conditions at that time unless you assume an absolutely static planet.

Mars are more geologically active, its rocks tend to be much younger

How can you determine the age of a rock that was blasted from the surface by a meteor strike without resort to sample from the surrounding area. Such huge impacts can mimic a more recent formation as the rock is essentially melted and reformed in the ejecta.

These scientists are GUESSING, and the others come along and use their guesses as a basis for claims that can't be proven, and which is all based on the original conjecture. There isn't a single rock on earth that can be stated with absolute certainty to have come from Mars. All we have is hard to explain rocks being found in hard to explain places.

There were firm conclusion about the surface of the moon that were proven utterly false upon the return of moon rocks. The entire field of study was re-written by the return of the moon rocks. The history of Mars as we know it has been largely rewritten since the several landers have touched down. And still we are dealing with this planet at the end of a sensor stack, with no real material in hand.

There is arrogance here, but its not to be found in the common man in the street asking questions. Its in the assumptions and flat out assertions that can't be proven, the utter arrogance of denying any responsibility to offer an explanation on the grounds that scientists are some how above having to do that.

discovered electricity, writing, forms of societal representation beyond "tribe," compasses, sextants, printing presses, base 10, windmills, aqueducts

And wine, don't forget the wine. Plus, it's safe to walk the streets at night.

it's widely believed that aborigines caused the extinction of many species! http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/990/aborigines-blamed-big-mammal-extinction [cosmosmagazine.com]! So much for sustainability!

Similarly for the Native Americans. Perhaps if horses had survived they'd have had cavalry to drive the dagoes, cloggies and limeys back into the sea where they belong.

The buffalo seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Is it less advanced to live in sustainable balance with your environment than to rape and conquer it (and other cultures)?

Let's see how our "advanced" culture looks 75.000 years from now.

What an utterly stupid comment. I've read a lot of dumb comments on slashdot, but ... wow, yours might just be the stupidest thing I've read on the Internet.

First, yes, a culture that never invented writing or the wheel is not advanced, and is markedly less advanced than ones that discovered electricity, writing, forms of societal representation beyond "tribe," compasses, sextants, printing presses, base 10, windmills, aqueducts, gunpowder (I'm trying to pick a wide range of innovations from around the globe here, in case it wasn't obvious) or ones that built pyramids, dams, palaces, walls, houses, etc. I honestly can't see how any remotely rational person would even try to claim otherwise.

Secondly, and what really makes your post stupid, what on earth makes you believe that the Australian aborigines "live[d] in sustainable balance with [their] enviromnent [and didn't] rape and conquered...other cultures"? It's widely believed that aborigines caused the extinction of many species! http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/990/aborigines-blamed-big-mammal-extinction! So much for sustainability! Likewise, not only was warfare between aboriginal peoples very common, so was cannibalism.

But really, why let facts stand in the way of your Green Religion that makes being an allegedly noble savage with a small carbon footprint the ideal human life?

I always like to know how far away something is from us. Most articles on the web give direction toward Leo, but for distance I only found one reference that said it was hovering 3,500 light-years above the disk of the Milky Way. So it's near our Milky Way

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/4690/impossible-star-discovered

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Though shalt not make spaceship with maximum speed limit.

unless you state that its in different universe.

It'd have to be in a different universe not to have a speed limit. Interstellar travel is just plain unrealistic in a universe like ours.

Actually it worked in the submission (I saw it after I'd submitted an unintentional dupe.) From memory it was Cosmos.

My own links were via NewScientist: This story.
A story about the discovery of radiation eating bacteria by the same team.
And a long article from '96 about what this all means for the search for life on (or in) Mars.

At first, I read:
"Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star's 'Goldilocks zone', where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form."

But then I also read:
"The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth....A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years."

Can't we find a more habitable planet closer to home that has water, and is reachable within say, 2 months?

Researchers in the OP article need to get together with these guys http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1086/deep-ocean-chasm-baffles-researchers

Far more likely its based on stolen US plans. This has previously happened several times in the past. The Russians are very well known for stealing US aircraft plans and making it their own.

Like the Soviet version of the US Space Shuttle with more than a passing similarity. Side-by-side you can see the differences but in isolation, without the CCCP insignia and red flag, most people would think the Buran was the Space Shutte.

Why not?

On one day, the Milky Way became 2x as thick as previously thought.

On another day, the estimated number of stars tripled.

And on a 3rd day, there's 30x as much entropy as previously thought.

So, why shouldn't astrophysicists come out next week and say that the Universe is actually younger (or older) than we once thought?

So they used noisy data to try and algorithmically guess what was hidden behind a bunch of "fog" and got a giant bubble, and now their conclusion is "there's a giant bubble!" and not "Maybe we have a systematic error in our analysis..."? To be fair, it's possible there is a giant bubble, I don't know the math here, but it seems... suspect.

Anyway, this article sounds way cooler.

The guy who posts a link to actual research on the subject gets modded flamebait while the guy who makes unsupported claims, some of which are contradicted by that very research which was linked to gets modded insightful.

Some of the possibilities are:

(A) The guy making unsupported claims has a lot of sock puppets with mod points.
(B) Slashdot is filled with people that don't care about the facts.
(C) Slashdot is the victim of an organized astroturf.

Wow. I'm hurt Mr. Anonymous.

NO, I don't have any sock puppets. I don't have that sort of time.

But as for links, here a few:
Study links more hurricanes, climate change or
Warming doubles number of hurricanes both referring to this paper but containing their own research, too.
Then there is this: Research Meteorologists See More Severe Storms Ahead: The Culprit -- Global Warming

There is a very clear link between storms, hurricanes and increased atmospheric temperature. I actually thought it was common knowledge by now, so I didn't bother posting links. As to why or who modded the other guy flamebait, I don't know, but the idea that I'd spent extra time creating and logging in with sock puppets is so hilarious from my perspective, that it almost made me smile.

Yes, it seems the manned mission is 2020. Articles refer to China state media.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/breakingnews/195665/china-to-launch-next-lunar-space-mission
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3747/moist-moon-hinders-chinas-lunar-telescope
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100910/sc_afp/chinaspacemoon

It's questionable whether that is a landing mission or whether the landing missing is 2025.

If you call hundreds of billions ridiculously minute, then maybe.

BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.

Add to that the excessive cost of litigation filed against each and every nuclear powerplant that was built in the late 60's and 70's. When the court gives you an order to hold up on construction and weather effects destroy what little you've built to date, you then have to go through the additional costs of getting the permits to demolish what you've built, the cost of demolition and disposal, and the new cost to rebuild what you had to destroy because it now doesn't meet code. Case in point, the Perry Nuclear Powerplant, reasonably familiar to me as I was living in the Cleveland area from '77 through '97. Took them 9 years to build it while navagating through a swamp of litigation, and they only did half the project, as they determined that the added expenses of finishing the 2nd reactor wouldn't be cost effective due to said litigation.

Thorium fueled reactors seem to be safer and all around better to build than plutonium/uranium reactors, plus there's no nuclear explosives involved.

"The point behind organic food is that it's better for the environment, not healthier to eat."

No. No it's not. Organic Food ExposedContrary to popular belief, organic farming, due to it's inherent inefficiencies, is not even close to being sustainable. They need far more land than the Earth can provide, and far more organic material for fertilizer.

And you are absolutely delusion if you believe that organic food is not being billed as being healthier to eat -- they are most certainly doing this, despite the fact that study after study shows that the pesticide levels in non-organic food are nowhere near high enough to cause us harm. It is simply technophobia -- people are afraid of things that they don't understand and therefore want to turn the clock back 150 years on farming.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I want to dispel the myths about natural vs. unnatural. First of all, the definition of the terms are absolutely meaningless, everything that we could ever possibly refer to as unnatural STILL comes from nature. The space shuttle is 100% natural by this definition -- every single piece of that machine came from the Earth and was processed by human beings (who also, consequently, rose from a soup of organic molecules on Earth). If we are going to define "natural" as being unmolested by humans, where do we draw the line? If the plant is cultivated by humans can we still call it natural? How about if we pluck it from the ground, or off of the branch? What if we squeeze the juice out of the fruit to drink it? If we can still call all of these things natural, there is no basis to call any other food product unnatural. This is not even to mention the fact that most of the plants and animals that we eat have been extensively genetically engineered over the centuries through artificial selection. Even if there were a reasonable definition, why would we assume that natural is better anyway? There are plenty of bad things in nature, box jellyfish venom for instance. Are we to assume that box jellyfish venom is less harmful than potassium benzoate, on the grounds that the one was produced through natural selection and the other through human intervention? The whole thing is absurd on its face.

I eat organic for 2 reasons, one is I don't want my body filled with the left over amounts of pesticides (in the case of fruit and veg)

You are deluding yourself if you think organic == no pesticides, or if you think pesticides == cancer:

Scientists are unable to test these chemicals directly on humans, so they use rats instead. To establish the maximum dose considered to be safe for humans, they find a dose that's completely safe for rats. Then they divide it by 100. Testing by Australia's national regulator, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, shows that pesticide levels measured in food are either well below the recommended maximum dose or are completely undetectable.

People live about 80 years longer than rats: that's 80 years longer for pesticide cocktails to accumulate and wreak havoc. Even so, it turns out that a lifetime's consumption of synthetic pesticides is a drop in the ocean compared to the natural pesticides we consume from the plants we eat. Plants have evolved a vast pharmacopeia of chemical weapons, and we consume many of these 'weapons' daily: caffeine in coffee, solanine in potatoes and psoralens in celery, to name just three.

From a very lengthy article that probably won't be read or dismissed as casually as this current study.

I'm explaining why there are ratioanal reasons in the UK to favour UK organic farmers.

Read the entire article I linked to, as well as here. There is no rational basis to support organic farming anywhere.

(although they do get higher export prices for export crops)

Which highlights another problem, one in common with the FairTrade line of thinking. Higher export prices means more farmers in poor areas will switch to those crops and export more, leaving local people priced out and hungry.

IF CHEMICAL PESTICIDES ARE hazardous to health, then farm workers should be most affected. The results of a 13-year study of nearly 90,000 farmers and their families in Iowa and North Carolina -- the Agricultural Health Study - suggests we really don't have much to worry about. These people were exposed to higher doses of agricultural chemicals because of their proximity to spraying, and 65 per cent of them had personally spent more than 10 years applying pesticides. If any group of people were going to show a link between pesticide use and cancer, it would be them. They didn't.

A preliminary report published in 2004 showed that, compared to the normal population, their rates of cancer were actually lower. And they did not show any increased rate of brain-damaging diseases like Parkinson's. There was one exception: prostate cancer. This seemed to be linked to farmers using a particular fungicide called methyl bromide, which is now in the process of being phased out. According to James Felton, of the Biosciences Directorate of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who also chairs the study, "The bottom line is the results are coming out surprisingly negative. It's telling us that most of the chemicals we use today are not causing cancer or other disease."

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/1567/organic-food-exposed?page=0%2C2

The point behind organic food is that it's better for the environment

Wrong.

Organic Food Exposed

...many agricultural scientists estimate that if the world were to go completely organic, not only would the remaining forests have to be cleared to provide the organic manure needed for farming, the world's current population would likely starve.

How can that be counted as better?

The Sunday Express is hardly our fair isle's most reliable newspaper.

I tried to find a second source and I thought I had one:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/818

But then saw the 2006 date. Fooey!
       

Ok folks, this planet, the Earth, is a death trap for all life on it. At some point in the future, everything on this planet will be killed off. That is a fact, not some depressing vision, but FACT.

An asteroid hit is the least of our problems. Don't get me wrong, we need to watch for them and have long term plans of action to shift the inbound rock enough that it doesn't hit us. We'll need a backup plan should that shift effort not work well enough. We also need to search for asteroids in the "hard to find" regions of our sky to prevent another 20 day notice asteroid event like last year. That isn't quick enough to address.

We have to get off this rock if we, as a species, want to survive. The further away from here, the better. Sadly, many of the things that will kill the Earth will also kill Mars and most of the solar system.

There is already a star pointed at us that **will** send high energy gamma rays AND **will** destroy all life here when it goes supernova http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1878. It is a matter of time and will probably happen before the Sun becomes a red giant and boils away all water on Earth, before expanding beyond Earth's current orbit.

We need to take the first steps to get off this rock and find alternative travel methods beyond normal propulsion (throwing stuff out the back to move forward) to get to other star systems. There is no viable method of propulsion to get us or anything to another star system currently. Ion, solar wind, etc are pure fantasy and CANNOT GET ANYTHING TO ANOTHER STAR SYSTEM in 1,000 years.

A note on geography: upstate New York is not NYC. It's the rest of the state, some of it is far enough away from the light polution that there is a chance see stars. There's small chance of seeing even the moon, let alone the milkyway in any major US city.

It's a shame. There's no good reason we have to spend good money shining light up into the sky, rather than keeping it on the ground where we paid for it to be. In a lot of areas a good case could be made to put the streetlights on timers and cut out after 11pm or midnight.

Duck? Nothing! I wanna see a plane collide with a Haast's Eagle or a Argentavis magnificens! (But it may take a while for genetic engineering to bring them back.)

Bet you anything they'd do a damn sight more damage!

There will always be "Global Warming" septics as long as those choose not to pay attention to what is really going on around them.

I found this link and article very interesting on the fact that the oceans absorb much of the CO2 we dump into the atmosphere.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2508/experts-call-urgent-action-ocean-acidification

CO2 is still a climate change problem but the effects are more distributed throughout our ecosystem than many realize. I have to wonder though, what will it take for people to realize the damage we are doing to our environment and when will we start doing something about it or will we just continue to dick around until it is too late and we trigger another ice age or something even worse.

Right site, wrong link. Try here.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2514/major-study-proves-cloud-seeding-effective

SYDNEY: A 45-year Australian trial is the best evidence yet that could seeding - the practice of artificially inducing clouds to make rain - really works.

Since the mid-20th century scientists have attempted to produce rain by dispersing chemical substances into the clouds and stimulating precipitation. However, until now, there has been little concrete scientific evidence that cloud seeding is effective.

"This is the first time that an independent analysis of cloud seeding data over several decades has shown a statistically significant increase in rainfall," said Steven Siems, a meteorologist from Monash University in Melbourne and leader of the study.

Significant finding

The Monash team, in conjunction with renewable energy firm Hydro Tasmania, analysed monthly rainfall patterns over the hydroelectric catchment area between May and October from 1960 until 2005.

As they detailed in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology the analysis revealed higher levels of rain in the parts of the catchment where the rain making technique was used than in those where it was not.

"A number of independent statistical tests showed a consistent increase of at least five per cent in monthly rainfall over the catchment area," said Siems.

For the could seeding technique, the researchers select clouds using specialist weather radar technology that allows them to see all the tiny processes that take place within them.

Once clouds for seeding are chosen, minute particles of a silver compound are dusted into them by light aircraft to stimulate rain formation.

Super-cooled water

Anthony Morrison, a climatologist at Monash and co-author of the study, explained that these silver particles cause super-cooled water in the clouds to freeze. As these particular clouds are so high in the atmosphere that they are below freezing point, the frozen drops recruit water and get heavier causing them to fall from the clouds as rain.

However, the researchers caution that the result may be due to the unique clouds in this part of Tasmania and would be difficult to reproduce elsewhere.

"Clouds over the Southern Ocean are different to any other clouds", Siems told Cosmos Online. "They are really loaded with super cool liquid water." Just as important, he said, is the remoteness of the location: "the air in the Southern Ocean is exceptionally clean with virtually no pollution."

And the researchers are still at a loss to precisely explain how the technique was successful.

"They're really not comparable to clouds that have been seeded anywhere else in the world," said Morrison. "Further field measurements of cloud microphysics over the region are needed to provide a physical basis for these statistical results."

Despite the caveats, other experts are excited by the results.

"At long last there is scientific backup for the [cloud seeding] hypothesis that has been suggested over the years," commented Roger Stone, director of the Australian Centre for Sustainable Catchments at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba.

However, while the study is a breakthrough, he noted that cloud seeding does not work in all locations and specific techniques have to be developed for each region.

"For example, in Queensland the conditions are highly different. It has to be the right time and exactly the right cloud for it to work," he said. "The key is to get a very good weather radar."

Let it snow

Paul Johnson, a spokesperson from Snowy Hydro, who are conducting similar experiments to artificial induce snowfall in Victoria's Snowy Mountains, said the results were promising. "It's another indicator that supports our preliminary data and backs up what the experts said in the beginning. That we would see an increase in snow."

Because of the unusual nature of

...Wildfires are pretty tough out there, so why not use this method?

Correct link by the way: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2514/major-study-proves-cloud-seeding-effective

Found correct link: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2514/major-study-proves-cloud-seeding-effective

I never get jokes

Maybe you're demented.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2428/sarcasm-useful-detecting-dementia