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I lost my appetite for imported Chinese products long ago.
OTOH http://news.discovery.com/human/cow-dung-medicine-spiritual-india.html, tastes vary.

"This will end the market for carbonated fizzy drinks," predicted the facility's bullish director Om Prakash.

About the only thing missing are the sharks with frickin laser beams.

I don't see why that couldn't happen; http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/swimming-in-syrup-minimyth.htm

Location is everything when it comes to small earthquakes.. Might not be an issue in TX but would be an issue in other areas. http://news.discovery.com/earth/small-earthquakes-big-problem-120518.html

Perhaps she's referring to these results I got from Google:

N. Carolina aims to outlaw warming

Arizona legislates Women into a state of perpetual pregnancy

I don't know the validity of the articles. It's just what I found.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/09/17/2229257/warp-drive-might-be-less-impossible-than-previously-thought
Then RTFA at
http://news.discovery.com/space/warp-drive-possible-nasa-tests-100yss-120917.html

It is only less than a week old.

According to DiscoveryNews, Slashdot has been dying since 2008.

The picture in TFA looks like it could be the prototype of a vulcan ship!

That is exactly the first thing I thought when I saw that (and the second thought was, wait... is that a football?).

The picture in TFA looks like it could be the prototype of a vulcan ship!

You're off by 30,000 years:
http://news.discovery.com/history/prehistoric-movies-120608.html

They better permanently put that thing in "airplane" mode or they've got problems! In case you missed the Mythbusters episode that thoroughly tested this, devices with RF broadcasting capabilities of almost any kind can make instruments spin and go generally crazy from even 25+ feet away. What stops it in reality is the EM and RF shielding in the cockpit door. See the problem? You bring an ipad into the cockpit, that plane's going down.

Huh? In the Mythbusters episode _I_ remember seeing on this, they had some monstrous frankenstein antenna hooked up to a PC spamming crazy amounts of EMF and got...a whole lot of nothing.

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/db/transportation/cell-phones-interfere-plane-instruments.html

HERE is the article I was referring to.

If you want Cherokee Purples, why not grown them yourself? Tomatoes are the easiest thing to grow and the CP is fairly forgiving. My first year growing anything at all, I was able to get a few CP's from my plant, and I knew nothing. Still no nothing, but more than I did back then.

If you are limited on space, may I suggest Raybo's InnTainers (PDF warning). If you are not growing inside, you may skip all the waterproofing steps. If nothing else, this will give you a rough idea as to how to make your own, even if you don't follow Raybo's steps to the letter. I just set one 18 gallon tote inside another rather that all the steps he uses. Sure, his are better, but mine were easier and more idiot proof. With this, you can grow two plants per container that will even work on an apartment balcony or home deck.

Also, THIS is worth a look.

http://news.discovery.com/human/uk-government-study-homeopathy-worthless.html

>I don't need to show you anything.

Well, fuck you too.

--
BMO

Some of them might. Satellites need fuel to stay in the right place, and to keep themselves pointing in the right direction (solar panels at the Sun, antennas at the Earth). It's called station keeping. Sometimes otherwise functioning communications satellites run out of fuel, and end up being useless because they're pointing the wrong way. Refuelling them can give them a new life. If there's still fuel but the thrusters or reaction wheels break, you have the same problem. That might be fixed by swapping these out. Micrometeoroid damages your solar panel wiring? If it's on the outside, perhaps a flying soldering iron can fix it.

Obviously these are just ideas, you have to be able to get to the satellite first, and take up a fixed position relative to it even if it's rotating (see out-of-fuel above). That's what they're doing here. Then you have to grab it. There's some interesting work being done by Jon Goff and co. over at Altius Space Machines in essentially using static electricity to grab things in space, or electroadhesion. That seems pretty viable as well. Now we need satellites that are easier to fix up in space, or fancy tools to work on existing ones. All in all this is looking quite promising, although there's still a ways to go before we're sending robot mechanics up there.

It meshes with the theory that women choose older men as partners because they are in a better position to care for offspring, but will try to have affairs with younger, sexier men. A man's sperm is separate from his ability to care for a child I suppose.

Cue hundreds of slashdot commenters with some vein of "She's been cheating on me with the gardener I just KNOW it!"

Well there is research that shows that women are attracted to different men when they're ovulating than they are when they're not. Link here

Exactly. The "bananas" you see in supermarkets are a genetic monstrosity; basically all clones of the same individual, thanks to human meddling over the last 7000 years. It doesn't get more GM than that. So, where do you draw the line?

The fact is that a massive number of genetic mutations in a population within a few generations from something like ionizing radiation or some other agent does not lead to greater fitness, but almost inevitably to lesser fitness; deleterious morphological changes (ie. malformed wings, eyes, internal organs) and increase in various cancers.

That is not a fact, that is a scaremongering theory that was popular directly after the Chernobyl incident. A quarter of a century later we have quite a lot of facts rather than FUD to look at.

Wildlife Thrive in Chernobyl's No-Go Zone
Despite Mutations, Chernobyl Wildlife Is Thriving
Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation
Wildlife thriving after Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster – study

Yes, individuals might die and suffer horribly. (It might be hard to find bad mutations since they are often eaten at early age.) but the benefits from having a zone humans avoid outweighs this when we look at population strength.
If the Chernobyl disaster is any indication then the Fukushima disaster is a blessing for Japanese wildlife and the result we will see in a couple of decades is not a "population much less fit to related populations outside the environment that caused this."

I do hope that they back it up with a PIN, making it full three-factor authentication. While biometrics are useful in being unique identifiers, they are not secrets. An attacker could use the gummi bear fingerprint technique using latent fingerprints extracted from a stolen card...

In addition, The Mythbusters also fooled fingerprint scanners using the same techniques as the Schneier link (above), and also with a photocopy of a fingerprint:

• A 3-D thumbprint imprinted on a latex strip to be worn over someone else's thumb.
• A 3-D thumbprint imprinted on ballistics gel, which has the same viscosity and density as human tissue.
• A photocopy of a scanned image of Grant's thumbprint.

laptops there in NASA.. http://news.discovery.com/space/live-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-120802.html

Or, if you happen to be a New Yorker, Times Square!

http://news.discovery.com/adventure/ye-shiwen-doping-scandal-olympic-swimming-120801.html

Jonathan Dugas, adjunct professor of exercise physiology at Loyola University in Chicago, has openly doubt the Chinese girl's achievement being "natural"

And this is what Mr. Dugas has said:

"âoeThe differences in the athletes at that level are very small,â Dugas said. âoeTo suggest she was much slower and then sped up so much at the end, it goes against everything that we know about how athletes pace themselves at that level.â
 

Considering that SETI couldn't even raise $2 million a year, I'm thinking we need to offer more incentives on this one. A $1 billion donation gets you a nice tote bag. $2 billion gets you the mug.

It's my understanding that this boson was not discovered before LHC because it was too massive to produce in a lesser accelerator; however, the top quark was produced at Fermilab some years ago, and it has a larger mass (Higgs @ 125GeV, top quark @ ~171GeV). Does anyone understand why this is? I know I am missing something here...

The top quark is easy to detect, as its most common decay channel is fairly distinctive. But 99.999% of the Higgs decays are into things that are indistinguishable from other by-products of the collisions that generated the Higgs boson in the first place. Fermilab and the other colliders definitely would have generated many Higgs bosons, however they just couldn't amass the volume of data required to pick the Higgs decays out of the background. The LHC wins here not because of its energy, but because of its sustained luminosity.

In fact, Fermilab has published plots that do show small bumps at the Higgs boson mass - but in themselves, the statistical significance is not nearly enough to make a discovery.

Two decades ago (before it went to shit) ...

Seriously, when I submitted that I was staring down ~10 hours of "Swamp Brothers," "Swamp Loggers" and "Gator Boys." Seriously. Now NatGeo is following suit ... am I just getting curmudgeonly? How is this happening?

Everyone fears what is different from themselves, or what they have accepted as a social norm. It's an evolutionary trait that allows humans to live and work in groups, and allows primitive tribes to keep sick individuals from infecting the rest of the tribe.

Eventually most of us learn to ignore this trait as our higher thinking can do a better job of perceiving what is a threat and what is not. Apparently these individuals perceived this man's uniqueness as a threat on some level, so they attacked him. It doesn't excuse this behavior, but that's what happened.

There was a very good episode of the TV show Head Games about this topic. They had some actors do things that go against our social norms, like refusing to stand in line. Those actors were nearly physically assaulted.

Because sprites are connected to lightning, and lightning plays a key role in many theories concerning how life first developed on Earth, it stands to reason that the existence of sprites on other planets (both in our own solar system and others) may be something to look out for when searching for signs of alien life, according to Dubrovin.

Is Yoko Ono already named after something ?

Of course one could name these mysterious Jamaican anal seeking parasites or perhaps a sub species of this little monster called Toxoplasma gondii Yoko Onous . Be careful where you sit down in Jamaica!

We're at a stage in the computer industry where innovation is the LAST thing we need. What we need is bug fixes and "refinement". . . . Apple isn't redesigning OS X every 2 years. They're tweaking it an making it better.

Agreed. I keep hearing these lies:

Apple is successful because it's innovative? Apple never came up with anything.

• - The Apple ][ was not the first PC
• - The Macintosh xeroxed Xerox (they didn't invent it either, though)
• - OS X is Unix
• - The iPod was not the first MP3 player.
• - The iPhone was not the first smart phone.
• - The iPad was not the first tablet computer.

Apple's strength has always been its execution. Steve Jobs's biography makes it clear that his talent was refining, refining, refining --- long beyond the patience and courage of most corporate leaders.

As Derek Sivers said, ideas are just multipliers:

It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.)

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Explanation:

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.

The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas.

I'm not interested until I see their execution.

Microsoft used to be great but lost its way? It can become better again? Microsoft is great in size alone. It has never been innovative or, like Apple, good at execution. Which of any of their products in their entire history was new? Or which of any of their products won out because, like Apple, they executed best on an idea already out there? No, the reason Microsoft has been successful is because of the lucky break IBM first gave them, which Microsoft cemented with a variety of techniques, none of which were (a) innovation or (b) execution.

Neither innovation nor execution have ever been part of Microsoft's culture. John Sculley tells this story:

Well, I'll tell you a great story that a friend of mine told me. I won't tell you his name because I think he wouldn't like it. But he was doing business with both Apple and Microsoft, doing peripheral products for one of their products in each company. And he was at an Apple meeting. He goes in at the Infinite Loop, in their headquarters in Cupertino. Everyone's sitting around talking in the room. In walks Johnny Ives, head of design, the room goes quiet. Everyone waits to hear what Johnny Ive has to say. Why? Because they know Johnny speaks for Steve. Design is at the top of the priorities at Apple. Some days later he was up at Microsoft. Goes in. This is with the Zune group, a large group of really smart people in the room talking with each other. No designer walks in because there is no such thing. And the meeting then goes into people negotiating with each other. "Well, I'll support your feature if you'll support mine."

--- How do Apple's and Microsoft's corporate cultures reflect their products?

That could change some day at Microsoft (anything is possible) but it won't under Steve Ballmer's watch.

Innovation is not the reason any of the leading tech companies are the leading

the company has announced an international campaign to promote legal marriage equality for same-sex couples, called "Legalize Love."

FTA:

Some news reports said the 'Legalize Love' campaign would push for worldwide legalization of same-sex marriage, but a Google spokesman called that inaccurate. The campaign's focus is on human rights and employment discrimination, he said.

Google has spoken out before on same-sex marriage issues, most prominently when it came out in 2008 against California's "Proposition 8" ban on same-sex marriage.

2 Percent of Americans Identify as Gay

Comparing the Lifestyles of Homosexual Couples to Married Couples

Move to the Pacific Northwest. That's what my wife and I did.

http://www.weather.com/weather/hourbyhour/graph/USOR0275

No concern of heat or dry or hurricane or earthquake or tornado ...

http://news.discovery.com/earth/megaquake-schedule-pacific-northwest.html

You may not have any concern, but you should. The Megaquake is coming; it's only a matter of when, not if.

The PNW also has to worry about fire and flood, depending on where you situate.

If you don't have a "all infrastructure will be down for the next 6 months" emergency plan and live in the PNW, it's going to really suck when something bad happens. Just hope that it's not in your lifetime.

No, the Mythbusters were never locked up, not even when they used a cannon.

Thank you.

I know I can rest confident of being right. For what any reason you would troll me anonymously with an so blatant ad hominem attack? ;-)

But, just for the records, we're living in what may be the ending of a Interglacial Era. These Warming Eras is believed to last about 10 to 100K years, while the Ice Eras are of variable time frame - at least, is what Discovery tells me. :-)

Of special interest would be this article: http://news.discovery.com/animals/antarctica-dinosaurs-paleontology-110218.html

The South Pole (Antarctic may be too much for you) was, once, a Temperate Forest.

Anyway, and for your information:

There have been at least five major ice ages in the Earth's past (the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Karoo Ice Age and the Quaternary glaciation). Outside these ages, the Earth seems to have been ice-free even in high latitudes.[30][31]

30. ^ Lockwood, J.G. (November 1979). "The Antarctic Ice-Sheet: Regulator of Global Climates?: Review". The Geographical Journal 145 (3): 469–471. JSTOR 633219.
31. ^ Warren, John K. (2006). Evaporites: sediments, resources and hydrocarbons. Birkhäuser. p. 289. ISBN 978-3-540-26011-0.

Information copied and pasted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

http://news.discovery.com/human/genetics-neanderthal-110718.html

Specifically, the LRO mission demonstrated that the moon itself is a source of radiation, so burying yourself in it is probably a bad idea, unless it doesn't go to any real depth, and you are willing to seriously dig down.

http://news.discovery.com/space/moon-radiation-gamma-rays.html

-- Terry

We are the only species we know for sure can (and has) changed our behavior specifically because of conscious consideration for the large-scale and long-term effects of what we were doing before.

assuming this is true, so what? conscious choice, unconscious choice, it's all still a product of nature. nature created our conscious choice -- in fact we recently discovered a way in which nature itself makes physical choices with our genes (it's speculated that it's responsible for our intelligence) http://news.discovery.com/human/ancient-human-brain-neanderthal-120506.html. it's a tool we use, the same way primates use tools to groom themselves. there is really no such thing as artificial. we use the word to distinguish what humans do apart from what the rest of nature does (like "artificial hearts"), but the line that separates the two is also drawn by humans (in the end, a heart is merely a centralized device that pumps blood, organic or not), so after removing the bias there is nothing left but the natural. it is, really, "just what happens."

a lizard regrows its tail, you say it's natural. man replaces his limbs with prosthetics or walking aids like crutches and canes and you say it's artificial. bullshit. it's just as natural for an asteroid to hit our moon as it is for us to leave a vehicle on it. it's all natural. this is what humans do, by nature. any choice we make, or action we take, conscious or not, is by our nature.

i'll tell you what's unnatural: that which is impossible. it's impossible for us, in our current physiology, to just get up off the ground and fly without help of inventions. we can't do it, and we can't choose to do it. to do it would be unnatural. this is why people pay money to see david blaine levitate only to find out he's standing on the toes of one foot with his back to you. it's not unnatural to levitate using an Osprey jet, or even one of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-3Ql7G7qRc. all laws of physics are still being observed.

also, the portion i quoted from you is just plain false. here's one example that is easy to find if you're looking for it. http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Birds/Archives/2010/Animal-behavior-and-warming.aspx

if another earth-like planet is evolving humans on it (i.e. all things being equal), then having seen it done before, it would be quite reasonable to expect them to develop cities, and to pollute and overpopulate them before (if ever) finding a permanent way to cohabitate without doing damage. as it is, damaging our environment is just what we do.

Hey, I'm all for the observation that humans are a part of the natural world -- except for when it's used to dismiss human agency.

boo hoo, but this is just plain wrong. i realize this may be an ego-bruising viewpoint compared to what they teach in church, but you sound an awful lot like a girl i knew who tried to argue with me (almost to the point of screaming) that humans weren't animals but some higher form of life outside the taxonomy of living things. she was wrong, and so are you. we're homo sapiens sapiens, we do what we do because it's our nature to do so, and it's not subject to our biased opinions of ourselves. simply imagine a non-human viewpoint and it becomes obvious. if nature didn't evolve human agency (or any other animal's agency), then what do you think causes it? whatever it is, i'm sure it's good for a laugh.

Don't tell this guy

http://news.discovery.com/space/warp-drive-black-hole.html

It's the only logical explanation - obviously the radiation was the direct result of an advanced race dropping out of FTL within the Sol system.

You guys and your wacky theories...

As stated below, we meant to type spectacularly. :-)

But let's bite the bait and play little with my foolish:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/29/asteroid-near-misses-earth-space-rocks_n_1553252.html

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news174.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120315225625.htm

http://news.discovery.com/space/asteroid-impact-hazard-2040-120228.html :-)

Agreed. Judging from this, it looks like there might be some significant scoring on the capsule. Hard to tell if that's normal. Like you said, re-entry is a bitch.

Actually, Moon Express is doing something along those lines in their GLXP mission. It won't be dedicated to Earth observations, but it will be a telescope on the moon, which will still be pretty cool.

1.7% funny, 98.3% ???

surely the crap spewed into the atmosphere by continuous seismic events must far outweigh your "graphed" metrics.

You mean volcanoes?

http://news.discovery.com/earth/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate-110627.html

No, no, not at all.

Follow up: I can understand this from the Daily Telegraph, but Discovery channel is repeating it...

http://news.discovery.com/earth/hot-wind-farms-120429.html

Expect it to be on Fox News with the next 20 minutes.

"common theories of stellar evolution predict that the sun was only 70 percent of its current brightness when it first lit its fusion engine 4.5 billion years ago. The sun has been steadily growing brighter since then and will continue so into the future, eventually evaporating away Earth's oceans."

So the conclusion of scientists is that the earth is continually getting warmer. Okay, go that...

"In some simulations, methane and carbon dioxide combine to make a photochemical smog that would have chilled Earth even further."

Wait, I thought CO2 was that all-warming all covering gas. You know, the one that is less of a green house gas than water. But is hyped as the big difference.

http://news.discovery.com/space/was-earth-a-migratory-planet-120418.html

Granted, I would like to see what affect a few super volcanoes might have in blanketing an ice-covered earth with ash. I'd wager that would also resolve the issue more simply.

Must also add this is the first time I've heard Immanuel Velikovsky's in a print article in years.

That said, I tend toward leaning toward a catalysmic world model. I think the fact that we see such a record of impacts on the moon, and other planetoids while at the same time not seeing many in this day and age point to a more dynamic past. Combined with the fact that there is a bunch of debris instead of a planet between Mars & Jupiter.

It'll be interesting when people start getting this surgery as a performance enhancing drug.

Though, I worry about the "drive by" hackings.

Ok.. I just updated Wikipedia. The Universe is now 13.5 billion years, it was at 13.7.

Hah, that's extra funny considering the summary's 13.5 billion number came from misquoting the Discovery article's link to an older article (by another group even) titled The Universe is Precisely 13.75 Billion Years Old. You and the submitter might hit it off nicely--you'd at least be able to talk about your remarkable lack of attention to detail.

I'm pretty sure you're joking about editing Wikipedia, but really you have no idea what you're talking about. Being confused by time dilation is for undergraduate physics majors. The world is unintuitive. You get over it after a while; all that matters is that you can make accurate predictions about it, and time dilation does not violate that ability no matter how much cognitive dissonance it causes you.

It says the universe is precisely 13.75 billion years old, not 13.5 billion years old.

Actually, you're both wrong. What you read is a link to a different, unrelated article that's 2 years and 2 months old. I looked at the articles and papers, and I don't think any claim about the age of the universe is ever made.

I think this is instead the most accurate measurement of the distance between here and very far away galaxies, and of the distances between those galaxies. But I may be wrong on that. RTFA

A lot of great inventions were accidental.

Quite so. Vulcanized rubber and Teflon, are two classic examples.

Top Ten Accidental Inventions

A lot of great inventions were accidental.

Quite so. Vulcanized rubber and Teflon, are two classic examples.

Top Ten Accidental Inventions

A lot of great inventions were accidental.

Quite so. Vulcanized rubber and Teflon, are two classic examples.

Top Ten Accidental Inventions

Or, to spin this thread the other way round (and being completely off-topic), the only thing left of the actual pigeon is the brain: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041018/brain.html