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Every single country in the world that has ever industrialized has experienced steep declines in population growth as its citizens become wealthier and more educated. This trend is already very noticeable in the up-and-coming Asian and BRIC countries.

Indeed, but it is unclear when this will happen to populous African countries such as Nigeria and Tanzania. Nigeria could rise from 150 million today to 425 million by 2050, Tanzania could rise from 50 million today to 300 million by 2050, pushed by fertility rates of over 5 births per woman.

Sub-Saharan African population will rise from around 800 million today to 1.5 to 2 billion by 2050. This should push world population to over 10 billion by 2050.

There would have to be a very dramatic political/cultural change in Africa to achieve widespread industrialzation to reduce fertility rates.

Perhaps some good governance might help.

Afterbirth: Study asks if we could derive benefits from ingesting placenta "They say this possibility does not warrant the wholesale ingestion of afterbirth, for some very good reasons, but that it deserves further study..."

The word "chimera" means it is cross species; the chimeric monkey being a mosaic of varied monkey species cells.

Your vast knowledge of greek literature (or alternately the AD&D monster manual) does not apply here. The term just means the animal has two distinct genetic pools.

The original article specifies that: The chimeric monkeys were born after the researchers essentially glued cells from separate rhesus monkey embryos together. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/cp-wfc010412.php

Yes. There is no single solution. Insects and pathogens evolve resistance to sprays and to genes. This has been happening since evolution began, and will continue to happen. The problem isn't any one technique, it is an over reliance on any one technique, and that we need ever improving integrated pest management practices that incorporate a wider range of defenses.using differing modes of action.

That's what drives me up the wall with all these people here and all over the internet thinking this is more 'proof' that genetic engineering is somehow bad. It has nothing to do with the plant being GE or not. Look at wheat and hessian flies. No genetic engineering there, but the pests still built up a resistance to the wheat's defense. There's a reason breeders are still breeding insect resistant varieties of various crops. Pests and pathogens developed resistance to the last generations. The Red Queen's Race is run in agriculture too, just faster.

Over at EurekAlert is a summary of some new autism research. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uom-rra103111.php The summary says ... "Research reveals autistic individuals are in fact superior in multiple areas. Scientists must stop emphasizing autistics' shortcomings." This guy is saying that our society is diverse enough that there are niches for autistics to fill which fit their skills well. I'm not sure if he's saying that this is new because of how different our society is compared to our deep past. Maybe autistics would have been eaten or starved in the deep past.

Many people here (myself included) have wondered how this is even supposed to work. In the original article, the inventor claimed:

[He was] emphasizing his system is “subcritical.” This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the same state...

In which case it's not clear at all how he's generating so much energy from such a small amount of weakly radioactive material.

So I went to the guy's website (laserturbinepower.com) and read a very short article called "thorium trigger". It claims:

Nikola Tesla, who did a lot of experimental work with Electromagnetism, suggested that some type of ray may trigger radioactive decay. Others have taken up this idea and have proposed various ideas about what the rays could be. Some suggest neutrinos, since they are associated with nuclear reactions and are detected by their triggering a nuclear reaction. If neutrinos or some other agent trigger nuclear decay, an increase in the presence of this agent would accelerate nuclear decay....

The required intensity parameter zf _O (1) can be achieved with a laser, but the small temporal duty cycle is disqualifying. For example, the requisite intensity could be supplied by a Ti : Sapph laser with a pulse length of 100 fs (1013 s) at a repetition rate of 1 kHz (103 s1).

There was also some more material on a page marked "cars":

One small problem, Cadillac has no intension to build [a nuclear car] until the year 6000! The second problem is the the Cadillac design is based on a REACTOR which would weigh over 5000 lbs. not very practical...

Laser Power Systems is developing a power system that weighs only 600 lbs. producing 250 H.P. with hopes of producing cars in the next 2 to 4 years.

Presumably he means that this does not use a reactor.

It appears he's relying on some effect of accelerated decay, where decay is sped up by a laser, without any nuclear chain reaction (not even a subcritical one).

I googled for "accelerated decay" and found that this effect has not been demonstrated in a laboratory. Although a few independent researchers claim they have observed the phenomenon during their experiments, the most recent claim of accelerated decay was rebutted by the Lawrence Livermore Lab, here.

This appears to be snake oil.

If Slashdot impresses you, try EurekAlert.

The 'Science of Sport' blog wrote about this in 2009 : http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/11/oscar-pistorius-gets-10-second.html Back then, two scientists hired to look at the case found that the artificial limbs would take 10 or more seconds off his 400 meter time. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/smu-opa111709.php

Consume this with your RSS reader.

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

ahh yeah. how about don't do that. start here. Then just browse and follow your interests, wherever it may take you.

I read http://www.eurekalert.org/. Fantastic stuff.

Your concept of evolution is individualistic while evolution may be much more "concerned" with a species rather than an individual. You also put human sexual practices in line with distant relatives like Elk rather than nearer relatives like Bonobos.

Think about the advantages a child would have multiple fathers. Not possible? In many pre-agricultural societies, there was the concept of partable parenthood which meant that any child had multiple biological fathers, which even if a misunderstanding of biology, is very adaptive. If something happens to one dad, the other feels obliged to step in.

Here's an example:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/uom-mfp111010.php

As you already know not all drugs are the same, so lumping all the illegal drugs together is silly. Drugs certainly do kill people.

Marijuana might be relatively safe[1], but many other recreational drugs are not.

There are good reasons why many legal drugs require prescriptions.

[1] And even then it'll likely be not as safe once legalized since
1) mass farms would grow them using phosphate fertilizers and so they'd have more polonium in them than the "organic" sort. Having ash containing polonium stuck in your lungs is bad for you. Maybe marijuana might not concentrate polonium as much as tobacco, but who wants to find out the hard way? ;)

2) Philip Morris et all will include their additives...
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/ohs-orp072403.php

If our planet was just a few units further or closer to the sun there would be no life on this planet. Which again leads me back to, its based on how long you are exposed to that radiation and the frequency of that radiation. the point is that individuals are still divided over whether there there is damage done or not, doesn't mean radiation from your phone doesn't cause activity to where it is pointed. People wake up and think for yourselves, each generation is the succesive's one guinea pig. Once the lobbying has been done and enough people have died I suppose then the truth will be out. In the interim, i use a wired connection when talking on my cell phone, I don't keep it in my lap and I don't quickly dismiss individuals who say they are sensitive to wifi signals either. Think for yourselves.

for the person pedantic enough to pic on my grammar and punctuation i was on my iphone but just for you...i'll keep writing this way. take that stick out your ass. if i was a world renowned physicist who couldn't speak english much less write and was posting on here would that make u take me less seriously? if you answered yes, we have nothing less to discuss.

Not strictly true. Even highly trained drug sniffing dogs have been shown respond to their handlers expectations as much as to actual smell of drugs. See this reference for example.

Wanna bet the author of this story is a "green scientist" ?

With electrophysiology as a specialty I presume.

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As for the article... Whenever someone says something like "per day" and doesn't say how many days would that be - take that with a LARGE grain of salt. Iodized, if you like.

In this case... 1.2 to 1.3 × 10^17 becquerels of iodine-131 per day in Fukushima seem like a lot, particularly compared to Chernobyl's "1.76 × 10^18 becquerels of iodine-131" FOR WHOLE 10 DAYS IT BURNED.
Holy SHIT! Fukushima has been "on" since March 11th! That would mean that it is somewhere around 1.68 - 1.82 × 10^18 becquerels of iodine-131 by now!
THAT IS MORE THAN CHERNOBYL! QUICK! EVERYONE! PAAAANIIIC!!!

Except... From the site of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization mentioned in the article as the source of data:

“The estimated source terms for iodine-131 are very constant, namely 1.3 x 10^17 becquerels per day for the first two days (US station) and 1.2 x 10^17 becquerels per day for the third day (Japan),” the institute said in a German-language statement posted on Wednesday on its website.

“For cesium-137 measurements, (the US station) measured 5 x 10^15 becquerels, close, while Japan had much more cesium in its air. On this day, we estimate a source term of about 4 x 10^16.”

Note that the level measured IN JAPAN on the third day is lower than the level measured IN THE USA on the second day.
As in - readings are getting MUCH LOWER. And, it is the statistic for ONLY TWO DAYS at the beginning of the Fukushima incident. And we all know what they say about extrapolations.
Particularly the ones done from only two points.

Also, the Deutsche Welle article describes the whole "how many Chernobyls is that" thing a bit more conservatively as "at 20 percent of Chernobyl for iodine, and 20-60 percent of Chernobyl for cesium".

silicon is a 3-layer material, whereas molybdenite is monolayer

Huh? A MOS transistor is three-layer: Metal, Oxide, Semiconductor, no matter what is the semiconductor.

this is not intended to be a replacement for silicon but rather a supplementary component for transistors. check out the illustration and notice the caption, "This is a digital model showing how molybdenite can be integrated into a transistor."

so not to worry, everyone who has invested their life savings in sand is perfectly safe.

And actually, it appears that MoS2 over a silicon substrate is exactly what they're proposing. I knew I should have looked at the blowup first.

Public release date: 12-Jun-2003

Natural selection's fingerprint identified on fruit fly evolution

Researchers at the University of Rochester have produced compelling evidence of how the hand of natural selection caused one species of fruit fly to split into two more than 2 million years ago. The study, appearing in today's issue of Nature, answers one of evolutionary biologists' most basic questions--how do species divide--by looking at the very DNA responsible for the division. Understanding why certain genes evolve the way they do during speciation can shed light on some of the least understood aspects of evolution.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/uor-nsf061203.php

My comment: Natural selection is scientific fact. Evolution by natural selection is the theory.

until no one else could replicate the results. ... but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no serious scientist) chases that particular dream anymore.

This is simply not true. There are many scientists who were able to get similar results -- Navy researchers got a paper published in Naturwissenschaften in 2007, and reported further significant results in 2009 .

As a matter of fact, the American Chemical Society hosted a 2-day conference on the subject at their 239th meeting last year in San Francisco.

"Years ago, many scientists were afraid to speak about 'cold fusion' to a mainstream audience," said Jan Marwan, Ph.D., the internationally known expert who organized the symposium. Marwan heads the research firm, Dr. Marwan Chemie in Berlin, Germany. Entitled "New Energy Technology," the symposium will include nearly 50 presentations describing the latest discoveries on the topic. ...

"The field is now experiencing a rebirth in research efforts and interest, with evidence suggesting that cold fusion may be a reality." Marwan said. He noted, for instance, that the number of presentations on the topic at ACS National Meetings has quadrupled since 2007.

What happened is that to avoid the seemingly near-religious 'skepticism' displayed yourself and others, the actual scientists working on the subject had to refer to their results as "anomalous heat" and refer to the field as "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (LENR) to avoid controversy.

So while you are busy deciding if anyone is replicating the results or if the field is worth looking into, a great deal of serious scientific effort has gone into the field for the last 20 years.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-01/uoc-cct010611.php

Yuppie! They've got the models to prove it:

Climate change to continue to year 3000 in best case scenarios

The study, to be published in the Jan. 9 Advanced Online Publication of the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first full climate model simulation to make predictions out to 1000 years from now. It is based on best-case, 'zero-emissions' scenarios constructed by a team of researchers from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (an Environment Canada research lab at the University of Victoria) and the University of Calgary.

The Northern Hemisphere fares better than the south in the computer simulations, with patterns of climate change reversing within the 1000-year time frame in places like Canada.

That's a pretty good model.

Who cares about 30 years of data when they can forecast out 1000 years!

Looks to me that after we drown because of rising sea levels then the sea level will go back down. Darn - and I want some ocean front property. Maybe this will drive the price down. Maybe it will drive the price up. Maybe can we use the model on the stock market? I hate to admit that probably some of my tax money funded this.

is "would this happen without patents".

I can agree on that. And science studies have shown that progress would "happen" without patents; Promoting Intellectual Discovery: Patents Versus Markets.

Drugs simply won't happen without patents

But, besides the above science link, I totally disagree with this. There are alternatives to pharmaceutical patents. Governments fund drug reseach too. The US's National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars developing and testing Taxol, a drug used to treat breast and other cancers. The NCI then sold all the exclusive rights to the use of the research for FDA approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). How much did BMS pay? A fraction of NCI's costs. Add how much money did BMS make? In 2000, BMS bought the rights in 1988-9, BMS made almost $1 Billion. Besides that, answering the question Do drug companies do more marketing or research? is answered as thus: Drug industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing than on research and development. Beyond that, Economists say copyright and patent laws are killing innovation; hurting economy. Thomas Jefferson once said "inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Falcon

I'm a nerd

Now are you? I actually found this interesting! Plus that is why we have comments...to explain this (later on...) to the rest of us. Moderation is gold.

You want something recent and boring?

Maybe high tech barter could make use of algorithms like those used for organ transplant networks to match those who have and those who want. The problem is similar: find a chain of exchanges, not too long, so that you end up with the item you want.

This isn't new, except for the part that says quickly.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS cells) have been around for at least 4 years now

These guys are short-cutting the process of DNA makes RNA makes Protein, by directly providing the required mRNA, rather than inserting new required genes into adult somatic cells and then waiting for them to make the RNA and transform, as was done before.

The phrase "inherently fallible" is part of the headline of this recent Eureka Alert regarding Biometrics. Original work by the National Research Council.

Just because you repeat it many times does not make it true.

Neither will denying facts make them false. You can blindly deny our incomplete knowledge all you want, but it makes you look like the idiot...

but to imply that there was some fundamental error or shortcoming in the understanding of flight over the past 60 years does not do justice to the way that modern science and technological understanding develop.

Okay, how's this:

"the performance of insect wings, when tested under steady conditions in wind tunnels, is too low to account for the forces required to sustain flight"

It is only in the past few years that the fact that "flapping wings generate additional forces during stroke reversals." was determined as a solution to the problem.

"the source of extra lift remains unknown." ... "An intense leading-edge vortex was found on the down-stroke, of sufficient strength to explain the high-lift forces. The vortex is created by dynamic stall, and not by the rotational lift mechanisms that have been postulated for insect flight"

When did the "hindsight" issue crop up? Only after the full 60 years or maybe it was after 2 hours with a paper and pencil back in the 1950s when someone said "hey, bees fly pretty slow compared to our jets - what's up with that?"

It's easy to recognize that something doesn't add-up. That's worlds away from having a plausibly-complete understanding of exactly how it DOES in fact work. Einstein certainly knew where General Relativity broke down, but he wasn't able to come up with a solution for it, and he had well more than "2 hours with a paper and pencil".

I see now it's not in-fact hindsight in your case, but unadulterated ignorance, which just happens to be pro-(omnipotent)-scientists rather than the more common opposite. I suppose you'd have been claiming we had a complete understanding of insect flight 15+ years ago, when there were many fundamental blanks in the equations. I'm sorry I wasted my time.

If you or anyone else are interested in the topic and would like to edify themselves rather than blindly tear-down others, here are a couple jumping-off points:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v384/n6610/abs/384626a0.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/50/18213.full

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uosc-lev030108.php

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/apr/featphysics

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5703/1960

At what point was the drug bought,

!988-89 after all the testing needed was done.

how much did BMS pay for other compounds that didn't work out?

That does not matter. It was BMS's choice to pay for those, and in return BMS wrote off those costs. They were tax deductible.

These kinds of royalty payments aren't unusual if a compound is bought before it has gone through any kinds of trials.

The NCI did all the research, paying with taxpayer dollars, to get FDA approval as a drug. That is after all those trials was done, with taxpayer money.

The reason that compounds are cheap before trials is that most of them turn out not to work. Google for headlines about pharmaceutical companies buying the rights to drugs from small companies. Note how much is being paid for them. Note how many of them there are. Now, Google for drug approvals and see how many of those compounds that were licensed 8 years ago are on the market.

And again all those costs are income tax deductible. Besides drug companies spend more on marketing than on R&D. Those expenses are tax deductible too.

You repeat about companies buying pre-trial candidates however all trials for Taxol were already done by the NCI.

Falcon

US.

Those taxes do not cover the NCI's expenses. So in effect the US government gave BMS a subsidy.

It could be sold at $35 million as a down payment, with the agency expecting to recoup the investment only if the drug turns out to be viable to bring to market.

As I already stated, and you replied to that post, the $35 Million was the royalty payment, stretching over years and years. If it had only been the royalties for the year 2000, BMS would have paid less than 3.5% in royalties. 35 divided by more than 1000. But it's not just 1 year. And that would have been just profits not the revenue on the drug. BMS had the rights to Taxol for more than 10 years.

Figure out what they paid in taxes due to sales of that drug, then your argument is more convincing. They could have easily paid $400 million (or more) in taxes,

It is impossible to calculate the taxes BMS paid on Taxol. Income taxes are not done that way, they are done by subtracting all expenses from all revenue. That includes marketing and research and development on all other drugs. And guess what?... Drug companies spend more on marketing than on R&D. And not all drug research leads to anything that can be sold. So $100 million spent on research for a dud drug is tax deductible.

The rest of your post, not much though, is just as much rubbish and is addressed above.

Falcon

If you cared about brain damage you wouldn't keep a cat. Seriously.

Don't forget, 70% of American's think that nanotechnology is inherently morally reprehensible. And the numbers are even higher if you sample highly religious people. So either the general public has absolutely no idea what the word nanotechnology means or (and this is a scarier thought in my opinion) a significant majority of American's are against a technology are against any technology that promises to significantly enhance the human body.

Manual Centrifuge, retail pricing: $73. Four tubes, clamps to a table.

Salad Spinner: $32
Combs, Glue, miscellaneous: $5
Labor: $20/hour
Call it $50.

Personally, I think that the metal centrifuge will likely last decades while the spinner would be lucky to last 2 years. I'm not sure of the spinner's ability to stand up to sanitizing bleach solutions, and you can't autoclave it. Add in the ability to spin 4 tubes over 1, the centrifuge provides more capacity, longer life, higher spin speeds (950 vs 3k RPM), a proper handle, and easier sanitization over the improvised device.

It's a neat project for the students, not something that's going to revolutionalize the developing world.

you are one of the 0.025% of people who can talk on the phone without being distracted http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/uou-fdw032610.php [eurekalert.org].

Probably not, but I am one of the 99% of people that can do basic math.

Except that, as has been posted here before, people are terrible at self-assessing their skill. I know, I know, you are different: you are not overestimating yourself, you are one of the 0.025% of people who can talk on the phone without being distracted http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/uou-fdw032610.php.

I know for a fact that I cannot multitask. However, I believe myself to be particularly good at self-evaluation. I know about psychology, and I read slashdot: I can adapt my self-assessment. I'm a scientist and I don't have a large ego about my regular cognitive skills, I am the typical absent-minded professor type. However, I didn't really realize how poor I was at multitasking until my late 20s, and I am particularly bad at it. I had a couple of near accidents (nothing that would have been severe), but I understand probability and statistics. I know that if I continued to drive distracted, with overwhelming probability I would eventually cause an accident. So I stopped sampling.

This does not describe most people. Many are overconfident and unable to recognize their own deficiencies. Even more don't understand that taking a small risk enough times basically ensures that the low-probability outcome will eventually happen.

I don't want those people deciding what's safe, because you know what, they won't realize they have a problem until they get in an accident. And the first time, they will attribute it to bad luck. My mother in law rear-ended someone while changing the radio station and shrugged it off: bad luck, could happen to anyone.

There are too many people on the road for them to be learning what's safe and what's not by trial and error. No thanks.

Can someone tell me why I would want a multitasking phone yet this study says it adversely affects brain learning?

I don't follow your line of reasoning, but find it fascinating.

Can someone tell me why I would want a multitasking phone yet this study says it adversely affects brain learning?

Spotting 100% is easy: you just need a machine with a blinking light that says "PTSD". Unfortunately that puts a lot of healthy people in therapy.

Nobody expects Wired to figure that out, but the original press release (scavenged from the array of irrelevant links) doesn't say, either.

I assume that the actual article (in the Journal of Neural Engineering) actually says something about it. Anybody got a subscription?

Ahh, we can melt through that with a small self contained probe that is RTG powered. It could be designed it to melt its way in, and climb down the hole as it goes. I don't see that as hard.. It could then release a probe or a number of gliders to roam about. The gliders could even be powered by their own small RTG's which would allow them to be driven!

As far as communications fhrough the ice well there is research in this area like this that utilize high loss. Take this article for instance: "Underwater communications gradually improves."

The robots will talk - in effect, using ultrasound - at distances of up to 5km apart.

Also, if you look at the Seagliders.. "Seaglider monitors waters from Arctic during record-breaking journey under ice."

One operated for 25 weeks, spending 51 days and traveling more than 450 miles under the ice, before being collected Feb. 26 by the Danish Navy.

Seagliders autonomously find shallow areas in ice in order to surface. Do we know if all of the ice on Europa is 3 kilometers thick? No. Maybe there are shallower, and warmer areas....

And lastly again, we can do a Europa mission in which we first get an orbiter first to identify shallower areas of ice, then we land on surface with a lander and take samples, then in a later mission we try to melt down into the water. We can do this if we wanted to. The only problem is that our agencies would rather focus on Mars. Why is that again?

What ill effects, exactly, do you fear?

Well, I'm not sure. The effects of porn might well be negligible.

The internet certainly makes porn rather easier to get than it has been in the recent past; but I'm not sure that it is something to get all that worked up over. Heck, the ability to afford enough rooms that the kids don't have to watch their parents, and the whole family doesn't have to watch the livestock, is a fairly recent innovation, on the historical scale.

Given the lack of sexual education our society seems to have, can't watch their parents and livestock might be a better description.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/uoia-ssa011609.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6263690.stm

It's at best 56% - of people that don't know what the fuck they are talking about.

God does not exist.

And if you gave it a second's thought before you popped off at the mouth maybe people would trust you to pop-off with your pistol, but no, you're a fucking idiot.

That is not a report of consensus, it is a compilation created by a few scientists. Here is a survey that tries to establish a consensus. It is not the only one, there are others. All the surveys that show any type of consensus are very conservative in the questions they ask.

Well, MIT's got a 3-year head start.

Rensselaer has been making them as light as paper for a couple years now.

Or even just use other existing technology to boost efficiency in their LiON battery idea.

But who knows, maybe they're content with reinventing the wheel without building on existing tech.

The mortality rate early on, in certain groups and certain places seemed higher than for typical flu. And the outbreak in Mexico was particularly bad. But it crossed my mind that if air pollution were a contributing factor to the mortality rate, there would be no incentive for local governments to report that. There are even studies showing that arsenic (e.g. from air or water pollution) effect the immune system and cause H1N1 outbreaks to be particularly severe.

A while ago I worked out how much energy it would take to remove 100 ppm of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The area of the earth is ~5.1 x 1014 square meters; air pressure is ~100,000 N/m2. The force would be ~5.1 x 1019 and the mass (force/acceleration of 9.8 m/sec2) is ~5.2 x 1018kg or 5.2 x 1015 t. One ppm would be 5.2 x 109 t and 100 ppm would be ~520 billion tonnes. It takes ~100kWh to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/uoc-cd092908.php Removing 100 ppm of CO2 from the air would take 52000 billion kWh or 52,000 TWh, or since a year is about 8700 hours, about six TW years. A TW is about twice the installed power in the US. It would take a 1000 1GW nuclear reactors 6 years to bring the CO2 level back to the level of 1960 if no new CO2 was being added. The problem is what to do with the CO2? Liquid CO2 has a density of 1.1. As liquid, this much CO2 would occupy ~470 cubic km. It would cause a real problem downwind if it blew out of storage. We know that oil stayed in the ground for millions of years. It takes ~50 times as much energy to convert CO2 to synthetic oil as it does to capture it. So to convert 100 ppm of CO2 to synthetic oil would take ~300 TW-years. If we are already feeding 15 TW into making synthetic oil, we could dedicate another 15 TW into making more and pumping it back into empty oil fields. It would take two decades at this rate to bring the current CO2 level back to that of 1960. We might be able to take the CO2 level down far enough to get the earth to go into an ice age (for those who like to ski). For the details on the energy cost of making synthetic oil see www.htyp.org/dtc

My understanding is that the main argument in favor of medical patents is that the cost of FDA approval is so insanely high compared to the production cost once things are approved.

While the research and development to bring a drug to the market may be expensive, pharmaceutical businesses spend more on marketing and sales than on research.

This is a sore spot for me, the National Cancer Institute spent $183 Million to develop Taxol yet Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) only paid $35 Million for exclusive rights to Taxol. By 2000 it "achieved global sales of almost $1.6 billion". BMS was saying the wholesale price for Taxol was $6.09 per milligram yet a generic maker was able to make it for $.07 per milligram. That is more than $6 per milligram profit.

Falcon

Diesel IS more efficient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-stroke_engine#The_Otto_cycle

Comparing the two formulae it can be seen that for a given compression ratio (r), the ideal Otto cycle will be more efficient. However, a diesel engine will be more efficient overall since it will have the ability to operate at higher compression ratios. If a petrol engine were to have the same compression ratio, then knocking (self-ignition) would occur and this would severely reduce the efficiency, whereas in a diesel engine, the self ignition is the desired behavior. Additionally, both of these cycles are only idealizations, and the actual behavior does not divide as clearly or sharply. And the ideal Otto cycle formula stated above does not include throttling losses, which do not apply to diesel engines.

Using the diesel cycle with other fuels has gotten >50% thermal efficiency in the lab, which is DAMN good IMHO.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/uow-ga073109.php

Height wasn't something that was that useful until relatively recently, in fact for a long time it was probably more of a liability than a benefit.

Also think about long legs for running, height advantages on the battlefield like leverage and bearing down on your opponent. Even though this study is modern, it appears that having taller relative height garners respect.

Some anti-virus might actually be useful here. Cats been hacking humans for centuries.