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was a plane doing a night flight with a huge array of big leds as in air writing
Now THAT would be cool

This was featured on Future Weapons on Jan 22nd: http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/future-weapons/e pisodes/episode-guides.html

The episode was very interesting. If you aren't familiar with the show it is very good, and the host is one heck of a sniper. He drums it up a bit, and is a little over the top, but the guy can shoot so you have to show some respect.

I watched it too. I was wondering if anyone else was going to pick up on that. See http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/future-weapons/w eapons/zone2/arsenal-2.html for a very little write-up. It looks very strange when it first launches, as it does a cork-screw thing before locking and shooting off.

I saw an episode of Future Weapons where they had a company developing a gps guided artillery round fired from a tank. Their biggest hurdle was getting the electronics to survive. These things only go 1/10th of the distance that this rail gun is talking about so I would think it's a pretty big hurdle.

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/future-weapons/w eapons/zone1/excalibur.html

add the basis of the technology that makes this possible and yeah, you've definately got a potent weapon/delivery system that's accurate within a meter.

Les Stroud talked about this on an episode of Survivorman; what you're supposed to do to avoid rabbit starvation is eat the entire rabbit, from top to bottom, bones, eyes, brains, etc (but not the fur).

Check out "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel sometime. The host does and works on some of the dirtiest jobs you've ever seen. http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/dirtyjobs/splash .html?dcitc=w99-502-ah-0079

there was a watch repair booth at the grocery store and an old man (as I remember him) sat there all day with his loupe repairing watches. My mom would drop me at his booth and I would just stand there, fascinated.
I thought that was so freaking cool, to work on such tiny things like watches.
I had a Mickey Mouse watch that broke and I got to watch him repair it.

I was inspired by him (and other repairmen) to take stuff apart and see "what makes it tick"..
Another thing that was common when I was a kid, there were handymen repair shops where you took just about anything that was broken and the nice man would fix it. Toasters, vacuum cleaners, TV's, radios, whatever.

That's what I wanted to do when I grew up, be a handyman, to just fix broken stuff.
Now I'm older, have arthritis in my hands, my eyes aren't so good anymore, there's just no way I could do this sort of work anymore. That sucks because that's what I love to do more than anything, fix things, work on stuff..

My favorite TV show is "How it's Made"

Which is better, a lifetime of worrying about blood sugar or a weakened immune system? Diabetes patient who gets married can't have a traditional wedding cake.

Pancreas transplant is only used for patients who have a failed pancreas so it would really be their last hope.

Speaking of "no charge" I'm fairly sure I read that the particle discovered was actually a chain of carbons trailed by a hydrogen (a metaphoric "caboose"). That would make the particle NEGATIVE in nature! I might be wrong about this, as what I'm reading is called an anion and you guys are all talking axion's (and probably AM wrong about this, I've been out of particle physics now for a solid 6 years and my brain has moved on to less complex tasks...) Anyway, interesting read if you haven't already:

http://dsc.discovery.com/

That reminds me of something...

I think of Steve Ballmer and Linus Torvalds in a barren setting, brandishing staff-like weapons and dueling each other to the death.

With that Star Trek (TOS) "fight song" ringing in my ears.

[da-di dah, dah, dah, dah, da di-di da, dah...]

Jeff Corwin would know what I mean...

Scottie Chapman and Kari Byron

There's a (probably urban myth) story about someone nicking power from the UK national grid by putting a huge coil in a shed directly under the power lines that hung over his garden...

Yeh, urban legend, the myth busters did that one a while ago, though its one of the "lost" episodes, and managed to pull only a few millivolts with 100lbs of wire from a set of transmission lines (See here, is the "Free Power" one). While their experiment was typical of their normal stuff (done quickly and not the most scientific), I doubt a normal individual could gain anything worthwhile from attempting it either. The coil would have to be enormous and very close to the lines themselves to get anything, and you would end up spending more building it that you would recover in electric bills for many years.

Tm

In case you haven't heard, dead zones (without oxygen) in the oceans are increasing rapidly.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4624359/
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/53803.html
http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceancolor/scifocus/ocea nColor/dead_zones.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1501AP_Dead _Zone.html
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2006/2006-10-19 -03.asp
http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.as px?linkid=59371
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/20/deadzone_ pla.html?category=earth&guid=20061020143030

Look at the upper center of the picture.

Compare the last sentence of this article to the last setence of Discovery's article on chinese sinkholes:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/18/sinkhole_ pla_02.html

"I didn't figure there would be that much scientific value," he said. "It is interesting history."

WTF?

It took me several scans of the linked website to notice the photo foolishly placed in what is rapidly becoming the de facto column for advertisements.
Here is a link to the full sized photo for those interested
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/17/meteorite _tec_zoom0.html?category=technology&guid=200610171 10000/

Note to website developers: If you use 'standard' layouts like this, don't bury information in places people have grown accustomed to seeing adverts !

...that anyone would presume that any single institution could provide all of the information and references on any given topic. Aside from such thinking being the the characteristic trait of pompousness, it's also dangerously fallacious. We're not talking about elementary school here, where no amount of additional information will help someone learn 2+2. Tertiary education is all about moving beyond the basics and exploring the limits, and those limits are constantly being expanded by different people in geographically seperated locations all over the world. Sure, we could probably make the information available in hardcopy to every school, everywhere, but we've already developed a more efficient infrastructure for transferring information, and it's called the internet.

The internet is so successful because it virtually (no pun intended) removes the limits of any one individual or institution, and removing limits is just another way of saying that it extends capabilities. Realistically, no single institution can provide all existing resources. At the very least, this helps to minimize redundancies. Want to find out if a fly's brain could control a plane? A quick Google search will tell you it's already been done.

Is learning impossible without internet access? Of course not. But the capacity for education that it presents is the very reason there are significant efforts to make cheap laptops available in third world countries. It could be argued that the internet was the most important tool in revitalizing India, Russia, and possibly China.

Sure, people will spend a lot of time browsing MySpace or Facebook or whatever new hip site the kids are looking at these days, but the plethora of information available online -- even just including freely available resources -- dwarfs just about any single institution, almost by definition since the net is a collective. And by using information which is available online, institutions are able to free up money to be spent on other things, which only enhances the experience for their students.

Moreover, learning is "make[ing] network connections to outside sources" by definition. Learning, in an institutional setting, is an efficient way of discovering more about the world around you than you could possibly do on your own in a reasonable period of time, which is why people pay thousands of dollars for the experience.

In a special called Brainman on the Discovery Science channel, a camera crew followed around a savant named Daniel Tammet. He was "only" able to count to about 22,514 decimal places in about 5 hours. For Akira Haraguchi it is a case of memorization, but for Daniel Tammet the digits somehow appear in his mind. I think Daniel was also able to tell if a number was prime or not. I'm not positive about this, but IIRC some scientists at Stanford university quizzed him using a known way to tell if someone is either calculating the digits in their head or if it is just based off memorization. Of course he passed the test. Since there are probably inaccuracies in my comment, I would suggest checking out Brainman on Discovery sometime.. it is a great special.

There is also the XM982 Excalibur, still in development, which is a smart round with GPS guidence. Which means it can literally shoot around a mountain, instead of over it. Current range is 40-57 km. I learned about it on Futureweapons

The story goes that scientist conected an EKG machine and watched for signs of brian patterns. When the plant apeared excited they interpreted it as emotion. I didn't think it was actualy true but i found a few posts about it.

Mythbusters actually took a shot at this one (episode 61). They tried hooking up both a polygraph (as the original guy did) as well as an EKG machine. What they found is that there initially appeared to be a response, but once they isolated themselves from the plant they were testing, the apparent response went away. Kinda dumb, but somewhat interesting.

If you're interested, you can get it here or wait for it to be on Discovery again.

"Adam: I'd also like to answer an unasked question here -- we're NOT gay! We're both happily married, and we're not even remotely gay.

Jamie: It's true: We're both quite happily heterosexual, thank you very much. Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

Transcript from an online chat Nov 2004:
http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/chat /transcripts/04nov10/04nov10_02.html

"I saw them try the old "frozen ice bullet" thing without ever mentioning the word "sabot"; yes, it's a myth but they could have made it work, after a fashion, if they knew anything about guns."

As it happens, the ice bullet was the very first episode after the pilots. So they were still basically operating "blind" without fan feedback at that point. Once the shows started airing they very quickly found out that they needed to be more exhaustive in their tests to quiet people like you. ;-)

FWIW, they've used sabots several times in other episodes, for the [frozen] chicken gun and other cannon-related episodes. Adam doesn't really know much about guns. (Although I suspect he's gotten better since the show started.) Jamie does.

Lots more info on the crew and their history can be found here.

discovery.com (website for discovery channel) notes in an article "The X-rays suggest Mag died in her 30s or 40s, which would have been a fairly long human lifespan for the time" at http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050117/catm ummy.html

Various tourism articles also point at lifespan indicators, such as touregypt.net at http://www.touregypt.net/magazine/mag11012000/magf 1.htm which states "Egyptian life span was short (average 40 years or so)"

However I'd like to note (and probably where your uncited proof comes from is that in every era we have evidence of the occassional person living well into their 90s) The best example is the commonly held belief that Ramses lived into his 90s "In Year 67 at around 92 years of age, Ramesses was called to join the gods.", which you can read at http://www.egyptologyonline.com/ramesses_the_great .htm but again on the same site you can read about how the person buried in KV55 only lived somewhere between 23-24 years of age" so it doesn't seem that kings were particularly prone to longevity either http://www.egyptologyonline.com/kv55_further_exami nations.htm

So no I wouldn't agree that persons living in ancient egypt were living on average to the same life span as we are today. Additionally I would try to not get too confused between the difference between an outlier and the average age. (We have people today living past 100 years of age, which is considered an outlier by today's lifespan average.)

Also for the record, Even though ancient egypt was around in times of 3100BC (all the way to 395AD), it only became a province of the roman empire in 30BC. So it's pretty weak to compare ancient egyptians to romans.

What country are you calling undeveloped? Australia has Steve Irwin, John Howard, kangaroos, almost 200 acres of arable land...

... Ok, maybe you have a point there.

Adam & Jamie on the Discovery Channel's MythBusters just had a show last night where they showed all sorts of ways to defeat some of the newer, high tech devices. Fingerprint scanners were pretty much busted, including one really high tech fingerprint scanner that the company said had never been broken into, EVER,. . . which Adam & Jamie broke into within about 10 minutes using three different techniques! They also found ways around heat sensors (a piece of glass), sonic motion detectors (a bedsheet, or walking really slowly), and breaking into a safe with an underwater explosion,... Quite an interesting episode,...

Has anyone seen the MythBusters episode where they train some goldfish to follow a path from one end of the tank to another? Just thought I'd mention, kindof disproves their "3 second memory". Supprised no-one has mentioned yet.

Sorry, cable TV has already tackled the first one. Discovery Channel has a show called http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/ittakesathief/it takesathief.htmlIt Takes A Thief. Two thieves select a house, ask the homeowners permission to break in, set up cameras when they get permission and go to town. Since they have the homeowners permission, they fix all damages and they return everything, it's perfectly legal. Same thing if Consumer Reports asked permission of the homeowners or set up a test home that they owned.

one study found they were as bad at reacting as someone who had a BAC of the legal limit

MythBusters, episode 33.

Well I can't get more detailed information, but on Episode 25: Brown Note of MythBusters they dissected this myth. I may be a computer scientist, not a physicist, but they sure answered this myth well enough for me: busted. Adam felt discomfort, but no bowel movements, pain, or other serious issues. Just didn't feel normal. He was surrounded by woofers and able to function normally.

This seems like as good a place to post this, as it's mildly amusing, so, here goes.

I remember this show on the Discover Channel called Extreme Engineering. Each episode consists of some crazy, infeasible idea with a lot of computer animation showing how it would be built. Essentially all of them were excessively complicated solutions for problems that could be solved in a far easier fashion.

Examples include a trans-Atlantic tunnel, a bridge across the Bering Straight, and a "pyramid" city made of spherical nodes connected by tubes.

Oh, and, of course, Boston's Big Dig.

Episode 53: Exploding Pants

I could find no mention of that in their episode guide.

Ack, I meant 500BC. And ... this was really the least of my points. It was so long ago and full of prophecy. All that was predicted is that a King would be born (via Astrology), a super king. Jupiter (the King of Planets) and Saturn lined up in Pisces to signal a Super King would be born, or ultimate Messiah. The astrologers (the wise mise, most likely according to an interview in a Discovery Channel bit) didn't associate Jesus with this star. They said "A messiah was born" and Jesus happened to be born at that same time. It's not like the wise men could search some database to see who was born around then. Jesus went to Jerusalem. Wise men appeared and asked:

Matthew 2: 1-2: "Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him."

And Jesus probably spoke up (but who knows). At this same time, Jesus probably was exposed to the grandness of religion via the brand-new, shiney, golden-door temple in Bethlehem. Did God zap him with religious information? No, he studied it so you might infer that he found some interest in it.

So this is where faith falls in (and probably many times before). Jesus could have stepped up as the King of Kings because of his interest in religion after visiting Bethlehem. I'm probably bias in believing or stating this.

The Discovery Channel had a wonderful show on last season about these very crabs called The Deadliest Catch. It was definitely worth watching.

didn't the mythbusters do a story on this?

That's almost true, but I remember some of the original DVD players costing upwards of around one thousand when they first came out.

Betamax, VCR, VCD, DVD, HD-DVD/Bluray have or will be prohibitively expensive at first. That's why for the first few months the only people who have them are those who have homes that appear on certain cable tv programs from certain cable tv channels who drop at least five grand on just the surround sound system, another five to ten grand on the video projector, about ten to twenty on the room and furnishings (heck, probably more!) and by that time it's not much to spend another thousand bucks on a Bluray or HD-DVD player.

Then they drop in price.

That's almost true, but I remember some of the original DVD players costing upwards of around one thousand when they first came out.

Betamax, VCR, VCD, DVD, HD-DVD/Bluray have or will be prohibitively expensive at first. That's why for the first few months the only people who have them are those who have homes that appear on certain cable tv programs from certain cable tv channels who drop at least five grand on just the surround sound system, another five to ten grand on the video projector, about ten to twenty on the room and furnishings (heck, probably more!) and by that time it's not much to spend another thousand bucks on a Bluray or HD-DVD player.

Then they drop in price.

The DiscoveryHD channel has a program, "Predators of the Great Barrier Reef" which shows a natural enemy to the worlds reef population, the Crown Of Thorns Starfish. These starfish are demolishing the reefs at a very fast rate. During the show, they discuss the fact that certain sea animals (fish, eels, sea-snakes) have venom which can help with pain management and possibly cure some illnesses. http://dhd.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?ep isode=0&cpi=110507&gid=0&channel=DHD

Dogs can be trained to respond to their master's voice. Dolphins actually communicate with one another using names that aren't assigned by humans, which takes a lot more intelligence.

Mythbusters actually tackled this one not too long ago (episode 49). If I recall correctly, the final verdict was "Plausable." On most modern jets, the electronics and navigation equipment are shielded, so cell phones and electronics won't interfere. They showed that by taking a device that simulated cell phone frequencies and cranked it up on a private jet on the ground, and the avionics didn't even blink.

But when the wiring wasn't shielded, some of the devices did move the needles, which could cause an issue on some older (or presumably cheaper) airplanes. Also, since you never really know what frequencies devices may start using tomorrow or what kind of output they'll have, the airlines probably decided to ban all electronics just in case.

Frankly, I don't blame them. I'd rather them err on the side of their planes not falling out of the sky.

However, if they use their own equipment (or, in the case of wi-fi, equipment whose frequencies are known) that is well-tested and verified not to interfere with the avionics, I don't see any reason for them not to install it and use it. Will they charge for it? Of course! They have to recoup the cost of testing and installation, plus some of that equipment is specially designed to be used in the air, not just your cheap Linksys router from Newegg.com. And yes, of course, they want to make some money off of it too. Blame relatively cheap air fares or chalk it up to greed, but I don't see anything wrong with it. If you don't want to pay for it, just don't use it.

Oh, by the way, I wouldn't try to get around this rule if I were you. If I recall correctly, doing so is a felony offense.

For once, saying "I have a shitty job." would be a good thing.

I believe that Mike Rowe may have beaten you to the punch.

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/dirtyjobs/splash .html?clik=dsc_leftnav

Last I checked, Brightcove had deals with Sony/BMG, Discovery, Tribeca Film Festival, MTV/Viacom's The N, plus a syndication offering with Reuters that lets you put news stories directly on your own webpage.

Not to mention their Commercial Preview, which allows anyone to upload and host high quality video in customized video players TODAY!

Okay, for full disclosure, I work for Brightcove. However, it's more true to say that Internet TV is just getting warmed up. The announcments give us a taste for what is to come when this format really explodes over the next 1-3 years

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/epis ode/episode_12.html

Called in the Mythbusters, eh?

A while ago, Mythbusters did a "free energy" show. They collected a bunch of plans from "the Internet", built the devices, and tested them.

One of the devices that surprised me was a 50' long aerial, attached to some simple circuitry. The aerial absorbed RF energy, and the electronics converted it into a somewhat useful DC power supply. I think it was producing somewhere around 1 volt, no idea how much current, indoors. IIRC, they said it was "almost as good as a AA battery".

So, not only is is possible in theory, it's possible in practice. But it's still wildly impractical.

I think it's episode 24 (http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/epi sode/episode_06.html).

This is commonly mentioned on the Science Channel.

http://tlc.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?ep isode=0&cpi=111185&gid=0&channel=TLC

I wondered this as well, and a NPR story revealed the unstickable substance at the end of the report. I believe it won't bond to an incomplete form of the same bacteria. I'd verify this with a non-audio link but I couldn't find one.

The Discovery Channel site claims the discovers are working on an release enzyme.