Slashdot Mirror

I *love* the fact that astrophysical predictions are classified on Slashdot as "Troll". That's pretty interesting. It's a sign of the times that predictions no longer mean anything to mainstream astrophysical enthusiasts.

Anyways, I have some more details about what will be found at the bottom of Victoria crater. It's technically called a fulgamite (not a fulgarite). Fulgamites are superficially glassified, whereas fulgarites are underground tubes of glassification.

The formations in Victoria crater (and in thousands of other craters and canyons) a glassified mounds of debris. In CJ Ransom's experiments where a plasma gun is shot at various types of soil, the charged probe gathers material from the area surrounding the dark mode release of electrical energy and shoots it into the air. The shallow crater that forms gradually grows larger as more and more material is sucked in to the center of the plasma vortex.

If the energy is high enough, the material will be swept into the center of the vortex and then re-deposited below the discharge zone, where the heat would tend to glassify the surface, leaving it partially solidified. That's why the formations on Mars don't move around in the "wind" -- they're covered with a crust of tiny ceramic beads that have been fused together.

These sand dunes will look very similar to those observed at Endurance Crater ...

Endurance Crater "Dune" Field

One interesting aspect to these "sand dunes" inside the craters on Mars is that they all -- without fail -- exhibit identical morphology, from the polygonal formations to the trailing tendrils that look like they rise right out of the ground, rather than resting on top of it. Not one NASA commentator has remarked on that fact, despite being presented with, literally, thousands of examples from orbit and from Spirit and Opportunity.

There is a similar structure in the Argyre Planitia crater -- a giant, glassified, polygonal mound with ribbon-like structures, frozen in place:

Argyre Planitia

Argyre Planitia is 900 kilometers in diameter.

Once NASA discovers that these formations are hard rather than soft, they will likely call them "pachydermal weathering". But, in the process of coming to this conclusion, they will completely ignore the fact we can also generate these structures in the laboratory using a plasma gun. My guess is that they will also likely gloss over the morphology of the glassified "dunes", which Wallace Thornhill discusses on his www.holoscience.com site towards the bottom of this page.

As I've stated before, if NASA wants to prove to itself that water activity is responsible for these structures, it might have some success. However, there is no doubt that they are demonstrating a preference for one interpretation over electrical interpretations as the electrical interpretation would undermine their contention that impact craters are the results of explosions resulting from physical collisions. To accept that electrical plasmas are involved would force them to accept that bodies in space can acquire and trade charge -- a fact which they should have learned from the Deep Impact mission, which Wallace Thornhill also accurately predicted in great detail.

I have some more details about what will be found at the bottom of Victoria crater. It's technically called a fulgamite (not a fulgarite). Fulgamites are superficially glassified, whereas fulgarites are underground tubes of glassification.

The formations in Victoria crater (and in thousands of other craters and canyons) a glassified mounds of debris. In CJ Ransom's experiments where a plasma gun is shot at various types of soil, the charged probe gathers material from the area surrounding the dark mode release of electrical energy and shoots it into the air. The shallow crater that forms gradually grows larger as more and more material is sucked in to the center of the plasma vortex.

If the energy is high enough, the material will be swept into the center of the vortex and then re-deposited below the discharge zone, where the heat would tend to glassify the surface, leaving it partially solidified. That's why the formations on Mars don't move around in the "wind" -- they're covered with a crust of tiny ceramic beads that have been fused together.

These sand dunes will look very similar to those observed at Endurance Crater ...

Endurance Crater "Dune" Field

One interesting aspect to these "sand dunes" inside the craters on Mars is that they all -- without fail -- exhibit identical morphology, from the polygonal formations to the trailing tendrils that look like they rise right out of the ground, rather than resting on top of it. Not one NASA commentator has remarked on that fact, despite being presented with, literally, thousands of examples from orbit and from Spirit and Opportunity.

There is a similar structure in the Argyre Planitia crater -- a giant, glassified, polygonal mound with ribbon-like structures, frozen in place:

Argyre Planitia

Argyre Planitia is 900 kilometers in diameter.

Once NASA discovers that these formations are hard rather than soft, they will likely call them "pachydermal weathering". But, in the process of coming to this conclusion, they will completely ignore the fact we can also generate these structures in the laboratory using a plasma gun. My guess is that they will also likely gloss over the morphology of the glassified "dunes", which Wallace Thornhill discusses on his www.holoscience.com site towards the bottom of this page.

As I've stated before, if NASA wants to prove to itself that water activity is responsible for these structures, it might have some success. However, there is no doubt that they are demonstrating a preference for one interpretation over electrical interpretations as the electrical interpretation would undermine their contention that impact craters are the results of explosions resulting from physical collisions. To accept that electrical plasmas are involved would force them to accept that bodies in space can acquire and trade charge -- a fact which they should have learned from the Deep Impact mission, which Wallace Thornhill also accurately predicted in great detail.

Interesting photos from that link:

Original photo

Context photo

As noted by one of the posters on that site, the photo is taken on a huge slope...

The article didn't have a larger image because then you'd see that the puddles aren't on the crater floor, but actually on a
huge slope

Read more in this forum

Yes, D* has been used "live" for the first time.

However, both rovers received a fresh load of mission s/w a couple of months back which enables a variety of fabulous new functions, including "go and touch" (as opposed to the original "touch and go") - go and touch enables the drive planners to instruct the rovers "move 12.4 metres forwards, turn 30* left, forward 70cm, approach the rock in front of you, deploy the IDD (robot arm holding a variety of instruments, spectrometer, close up camera, the RAT (grinder) and brush, etc; deploy the Mossbauer spectrometer, take reading in situ for 18 hours".

It also enables them to build their own route maps. One problem is that on featureless plains, it needs landmarks to assess how far it's travelled -- thus the newly developed "drunken sailor" manouever, designed to make clearly visible tracks that can be used to triangulate the on-board navcom. thing.

It makes for really cheap entertainment.

RS

Some that I've been to (these are all excellent):
Arizona Science Center (Phoenix, AZ)
St Louis Science Center
Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose, CA)
The Exploratorium (San Francisco)

Some I have yet, even though I live in the area:
Children's Discovery Museum (San Jose, CA)
The Intel Museum (Santa Clara, CA)
Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA)

If you're looking for geeky museums, the SF Bay Area probably has more of them in a smaller radius than anywhere else in the USA.

People really still drag themselves to a stadium through all that traffic when HDTV exists?

I'd guesstimate that over 90 percent of HDTV telecasts show the game from the center field camera. Most of the time, you see nothing but the pitcher, catcher, batter, and home plate umpire from a behind-the-pitcher point of view (no porn joke intended). When the ball is hit, the camera follows the ball. Sure, those are usually the most important things happening at the moment, but a lot more is going on off-camera. Also, the limited view of any camera shot does not give a good perspective of the amazing speeds, distances, and skills displayed in a big league ballgame.

Some of the things you miss when watching a game on HDTV instead of at the ballpark:

• A perspective of just how shallow Mark Kotsay (Oakland Athletics) positions himself in center field (to prevent bloop singles) and how skillful he is when running down a drive hit over his head (he actually takes his eyes off the ball and finds it again before the ball comes down).
• A perspective of just how tall and intimidating Randy Johnson is (6'10", 95-100MPH) on the pitcher's mound (10" high, 60'6" away from home plate).
• The beauty, coordination, rhythm, and skill of both middle infielders working together on a 6-4-3 double play (the tv camera follows the ball and shows one player briefly at a time).
• The off-camera action when a hit-and-run is being attempted: runner(s) going as the ball is being pitched, a middle infielder (which one depends on the batter and the pitch) covering second base, a weakly-hit ball going through the infield area vacated by the infielder covering the stolen base attempt.
• The sound and mood of an entire impatient New York ballpark when Alex Rodriguez ($25 million salary) boots yet another ground ball at Yankee Stadium.
• An HDTV center field camera does not do justice to the sight (and sometimes sound) of a 100MPH Rich Harden (Oakland A's) fastball and a swing that's quick and accurate enough to hit it. At the ballpark, that pitch looks impossibly fast. A swing that can hit it looks like an optical illusion.

Well, it didn't burn the entire surface of the earth, just a small part of it. To be able burn the entire surface of the earth, someone would have to have thousands of them.

so if i ride over something on my bike (50psi in the tyres) I'll be exerting more pressure ?

We're playing with chemicals

eating toxic foods

Turing was an heroic genius betrayed by society. He stood on the shoulders of another underrated genius of the 20th century, Godel

I like this quote from Hofstadter, talking about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

"Just as we cannot see our faces with our own eyes, is it not inconceivable to expect that we cannot mirror our complete mental structures in the symbols which carry them out? All the limitative theorems of mathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally."

Personally I belive mathematics is so stunningly successfull because the mind is a mathematical artifact that emerges from the rythmic interactions inside our brain and nervous system. ( It also explains why humans have a universal love of music. ) But no matter how firmly my "internal dialoge" tells me that death will bring nothingness, my mind still considers itself seperate from my body and belives it is imune to the second law of thermodynamics. My mind long ago dismissed the idea of a God that "just is" as logically redundant, I prefer the notion that I "just am" because I emerged from a universe that "just is".

As for TFA: If someone can't find deep philosophical questions in computer science, they either have no "soul" or they don't understand it.

When I did my BSc in computer science as a 30yr old in the late 80's, there was hardly a mention of philosophy. The AI component completely ignored the basic questions of what is "consiousness" and "intelligence", just as the physics component avoided the metaphysical aspects of quantum theory.

OTOH: They did teach us the names behind the concepts and made attempts to give historical context to people like Ada Lovelace.( The "Pacal" language is also a tribute to a mathematician). Philosopical "clues" are scattered everywhere in the IT world, an educated person should have no problems following them, iff they are interested! And isn't that what a degree is all about: To give the student a "body of knowlage" in the form of facts and concepts so they can go on to ponder or research their own questions, even in "unrelated" displinces like science and philosophy?

Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future.

When our results concerning the instability of nonperiodic flow are applied to the atmosphere, which is ostensibly nonperiodic, they indicate that predictions of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long range forecasting would seem to be non-existent.

Okay, you basically proved my point, with your tensorial shorthand of 2x2=1+3. That is not simple vector addition, at least not in my book.

And since qubits ARE representations of SU(2)...

And you don't need to understand SU(2) to understand entanglement. A state like |0,0>+|1,1> represents a pair of entangled bits and you can do interesting stuff with such a state without the need to understand SU(2). For example such a state is useful in quantum teleportation. Understanding quantum teleportation requires nothing more than understanding how a simple linear operator acts on a fairly small basis.

BTW I'm not sure what methods you're referring to that use redundancy to work around the no-cloning theorem. Maybe you're just talking about quantum error correcting code. These don't really use redundancy but instead distribute qubits over several underlying qubits in places that the Hamiltonian for external interaction can't see them. Eg. you find some elements of the Hamiltonian matrix that are zero in some basis and smuggle the qubits into the corresponding space.

BTW, what do you think of this applet

What is your field of research?

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/curves.htm

http://www.exploratorium.edu/climate/global-effect s/data1.html

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Oh, the energy comes from somewhere indeed. There is an aluminum spike and a copper spike inserted into a tree. A tree has water with several dissolved compounds (including acids and salts) flowing through it. The tree's sap acts as an electrolyte, while the spikes are the anode and cathode in a simple aluminum/copper battery, similar to this gradeschool science experiemnt. The spikes will be consumed in the reaction, thus the tree is not generating any power at all. The fluctiations in voltage would be related to a changing internal resistance within the tree. Considering the amount of energy it takes to make aluminum, this fits under the "nothing to see here" category.

Just to throw in my two cents, the interesting portions to me was all about this:

A day after the exercise, children were asked to recall the story and the characters in it. The findings showed that 90 per cent of the group that used the first program had good or excellent recall of the story.

It doesn't seem like the researchers are testing reading ability, they're "just" testing memory. And of course you're going to have poor memory when you have multiple distracting events going on as well. It looks like either the headlines were sensationalized, misunderstood, or the researchers are comparing apples to pomegranates.

Here is an interesting sumamry of what regions of the brain are involved in reading and language. Slide #6 of this brain dissection is an illustration of the subdivisions that play significant roles in memory. Reading and memory may share some overlap, but to test one does not always involve testing the other.

So, I guess we won't be using thep pringle-can macro lens to look at the server hosting the pringle-can macro lens site, unless we want to look at a charred, burned out hulk that used to be computer chassis...

Here is a pringle can antenna.
This is a pringle can pinhole camera.
Another pringles project, a pencil holder.
A bunch more uses for pringle cans are available here.

Here you go.

From the Science of Cooking

An egg white is about 10% protein and 90% water. It's the proteins that cause the egg white to solidify when you cook it. Egg white proteins are long chains of amino acids. In a raw egg, these proteins are curled and folded to form a compact ball. Weak bonds between amino acids hold the proteins in this shape--until you turn up the heat. When heated, the weak bonds break and the protein unfolds. Then its amino acids form weak bonds with the amino acids of other proteins, a process called coagulation. The resulting network of proteins captures water, making a soft, digestible gel.

Not so hard, was it?

What is Acrylamide? It is just a chemical that food manufacturors put in French Fries and Chips.

I always thought Nagasaki gets less attention than it deserves. You always hear about the Hiroshima anniversary, but rarely hear about the Nagasaki anniversary.

So let me remedy that with a link to the San Francisco Exploratorium's exhibition of restored photos taken shortly after the attack, Remembering Nagasaki.

I could swear I've been to this exact spot during one of my frequent walks on the beach... in a fish-eye view kinda way.

Everybody knows that in situations like that you're supposed to KEEP MOVING for a long ways after freeing yourself so that you don't sink back into similar muck nearby, but those nerds apparently missed that life lesson. :)

I guess I mean: does this really mean anything important to a scientist, or is it just eyecandy for the taxpayers?

They have teams. Nothing is done because of individual interest. It is a huge beuracracy, you have managment like any business, that directs the scientists.

Well, yes and no. One of the scientists I work with at Cornell University is in the Atmospheric interest group of the MER project. The science team is broken up into interest groups such as Atmospheric, Geology, Soils, Long Term Planning, etc, which allows for parallel planning. Every day there is a Science Operations Working Group meeting, at which the agenda is decided - plans are merged and different courses of actions are argued. But don't think for a moment that there's never been anything done by MER simply because a single scientist thought it was important. Professor Squyres once called in on a day he wasn't even working to make sure panoramic cameras got some good images of the micrometeorite impact.

I think it would be cool if places like NASA let scientists pick thier projects.

I worked at JPL as an intern, and then as an operations staff worker for MER, and I can say that the people there are certainly not all working on projects that they did not choose. In fact, many were hired to work on a specific project, and while they usually move on afterwards, it's not like they are often stuck working on some project they hate. Indeed, many scientists/engineers work for NASA for such low pay precisely because they are working on something much more interesting to them than they would in industry for twice the money.

And it would make people feel like they are contributing to discovery, rather than living a mundane dilbertesq life.

Anyone working for NASA that feels that way is doing something wrong - when I was at JPL we had our share of management problems and budget issues, but it was anything *BUT* dilbert. Most of the coworkers are as crazy as you, the ideas that are being worked on even crazier... The pioneer feeling doesn't seem to really fade... even if what you are working on has been done before many times, it's still new, because it's innnnn spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!.

Come to think of it, why don't they run NASA like sourceforge.

Because most people aren't rocket scientists? Because spreading around responsibility too thinly is the surest way to see that nothing gets done (or no one is held accountable)?

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see the NASA change to be more agile, more risk-taking and more "open ended" in some ways - but lets get real, this is the government. (insert typical slashdot statement about writing to senators or voting your opinion - doesn't change the fact that most people in the country simply do not CARE about this at all).

Not to diminish the awesomeness of the Excellent Piece, it is so compact it fits in a room.

The 1st one was by Fischl and Weiss, they made "the way things go" a decade ago.

except here

http://www.tcfilm.ch/pop_lauf1e.htm

Theres lasted about 20 mins and had chemical reactions and fire and all the honda devices were ripped from a few of Fischl& Weiss's work
and heres a 2001 one from MIT http://www.exploratorium.edu/webcasts/ganson/

I think NASA watches debris in space larger than a baseball, but it's simply not feasible to track anything smaller. Unfortunately, things even as small as a fleck of paint pose a dangerous threat to the shuttles and anything else in orbit.

One of those orbiting flecks of paint impacted a window of the Challenger back in the 1980s. It left a noticeable gouge.

Article on Meterorites with picture of paint fleck impact
UFO -4: High Speed Collisions

Any insight into this shot yet?

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/jpl-images/web/op portunity/pancam/2004-12-19/1P155450047EFF38EVP255 7L4M1.JPG

Look in the bottom right corner. Looks like a pool of water to me. And this is supposedly a picture from Mars. Just a thought...

(don't bother submitting it as a story, I already tried.)

The question is rather, is the spirit stoned?

OR

is the spirit just stuck?

OR

Has there been to much to drink?

The question is rather, is the spirit stoned?

OR

is the spirit just stuck?

OR

Has there been to much to drink?

The question is rather, is the spirit stoned?

OR

is the spirit just stuck?

OR

Has there been to much to drink?

It's taken me forty minutes to write all this out. Why do I do this to myself?

Mine:
The people who speak out about a bias in the media and sciences do so by reacting to the percieved bias, thus making themselves guilty of the thing they complain about, whether their compaints were valid or not.

Yours:
Not at all. I claim bias in the media because they state as settled fact things very much in dispute, like Global Warming, they report the claims of left leaning groups as fact and the claims of the right as "claims from the right wing thinktank.....". And so on and so on.

Everything is in dispute. I can spuriously dispute anything you, or anyone else, says just because I don't like it. Dispute is cheap, even the dispute of think tanks. It is true, of course, that I can invent spurious theories. Research is expensive however, and the people who believe global warming is real tend to have fewer vested interests than those who think it is not.

I was speaking in general there, for starters. That is a trend that provides a lot of the right's energy, the perception that they are somehow discriminated against unfairly. But their reactions to it are often filled with the same kind of discrimination. That's the core process that fuels Fox News, and other like-minded groups and sources.

Global warming is a difficult matter to make conclusive arguments about, since of course we have only one planet and cannot infalliably see into the future. But it *is* possible to look at the composition of our atmosphere, and compare it to measurements taken some time ago, and see that there's quite a bit more carbon dioxide in it now than previously, check here.

The biggest area of debate these days, or at least the one I hear the most about, is the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design argument, which is very bitterly-fought these days, and has the most junk science proping it up.

Further, there are more and more junk studies out there, produced to confuse the issue, usually without sufficent scientific backing and funded by heavy polluters. This tactic is being used more often, and these studies tend to be pounced upon, disproportionately, by the current U.S. administration against all other evidence.

But here's what I consider to be most telling: What is it that makes global warming a controversial issue? What is the connecting logic that equates increased CO2 emmisions to a left-wing agenda? There is a lot of support for global warming, and although it is not *completely* proven, there are many more scientists who think it is wisely cautious to reduce emissions levels than those who think, damn the tiller, full speed ahead.

Mine:
Doesn't this at least cause you to examine your own beliefs?

Yours:
Not a bit. What do clostered ivory tower intellectuals know about the real world?

Your words are telling. I was saying that *everyone* needs to examine their own views, and was hoping to spark something of that in yourself by saying it. Self-examination is, in this age, just about the only route to truth that could be considered remotely objective.

Also, your word "cloistered" implies an ivy wall, but in fact I don't see much reason to assume they are all that separate from "real" people. Getting a job in academia, especially these days, isn't all that different form getting a job elsewhere, and that's the only way I can see someone thinking them separate from the rest of the world. They still have the same television news shows to choose from, the same newspapers to pick from, the same websites to browse. Old cliches about them being away and apart haven't been true for a long time, not since the creation of mass media at least.

Yours:
And I don't trust their paid for research anymore than I buy into the NSF's when it is on a political subject. Both are pushing a political agenda and trying to gain respectabil

Do you want proof that the tipping point exists? Do you want proof that the tipping point is a problem? Do you want proof that the tipping point has been reached? Do you want proof that the problem is imminent? Do you want proof that no other affect will appear which counteracts the tipping point?

The bottom line is that there is a proponderance of evidence that the vast change in industry and global human activity has impacted our environment. Lakes are poluted, the oceans are polluted, even harmful chemicals are spreading through the arctic.

Species are dying, there is no question that these things are real. The only question is... what is going to happen?

Finally, if the majority of humanity feels that the environment is important, then to preserve their interests (the planet), regulations must be established to prevent those who do not share their interests from attaining immense profits from destructively exploiting the planet.

So as long as the scientists are out for debate on global warming, the government should treat it as seriously as if it were real... whether it is real or not.

If you don't care, and again, I think that is a legitimate position, you should not be refuting the science and pretending that it is in the best interest of those who do care, but you should simply state "I don't care!"

Do you want proof that the tipping point exists? Do you want proof that the tipping point is a problem? Do you want proof that the tipping point has been reached? Do you want proof that the problem is imminent? Do you want proof that no other affect will appear which counteracts the tipping point?

The aurora borealis, or northern lights, occur due to charged particles entering the Earth's magnetic field, being guided to the magnetic poles.

If the magnetic field flips, what about the auroras? Will we have (weaker) auroras all over the place while the field changes?

You might as well mod your dishwasher with a plexiglass window in front, and neon lights that catch the water sprays while it's running.

i wouldn't be surprised if someone has already don that :P

I wonder if it will get to 2 Columbus Circle before this beautiful building gets an awful facelift.

Hockey has some pretty sweet physics too.

A newton is a measure of force, the gram is weight.

There is a definite trend of US politics having a detrimental effect on science.

This trend is actually at least half-century old. There is at least one known case of a Nobel prize lost by Americans due to politics. It's the case of Linus Pauling attempt to break the gene code. Pauling would most likely do what Watson & Crick did later, but he had no access to the X-Ray photos of the DNA crystal done by Maurice Wilkins & Rosalinde Franklin. He was in the "land of the free", the photos were in the good ol' UK. Pauling wanted to go to UK to see the photos, but was denied passport according to the infamous McCarran Act. That's how the USA lost the race for at least one Nobel. However, there were more less direct cases like this - Maccarthyism destroyed the status of America as the worldwide recognized icon of liberty, gained in 1930's. The brain drain surely continued aftewards, but the scientists coming to the USA were coming for the dollars, not freedom.

vostok co2, methane, temp data

This exhibit has been at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco forever. Iirc there are recipes for square-wheeled carts in the Exploratorium Cookbook, a guide to building science exhibits and projects. See also, "An Amusing Property of the Catenary" "...the catenary, this marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance between rebellion and obedience, is God's own signature on earth. I think it pleases Him to see them raised.'' Quoted from Mark Helprin - Winter's Tale. (Copyright (C) 1983 Mark Helprin).

I'm guessing you have no kids. Further, I'm guessing you've never heard the problems when you ASS-U-ME something.

Trust me, a damaged/destroyed item nets the child an appropriate punishment.

So, try to hold your tongue before jumping to conclusions.

"Patented" ?

I hope the patent doesn't read "a device that display the local time in 24h39m-periodical-day-areas, otherwise this will just prevent others to use other obvious solutions (I indeed hope there won't be idiotic things such as DST on Mars colonies... where I do not plan to move, BTW).

Check out this link. A guy at the Exploratorium (the sysadmin?) wrote this page. You plug in how big you want the Sun to be (e.g., 1 inch diameter), and it gives you the scale of the sizes/orbital radii for the planets, the size of a light year, speed of light, and others. I used it in a talk I gave. If you make the Sun the size of a golf ball, Pluto is a grain of sand at the other end of an (American) football field, and the nearest star is another golfball 450+ miles away!

I suspect there are no restriction enzymes. Its extracting total genomic DNA from pea (with options for chicken liver) the DNA will appear as a smear on the gel regardless of digestion. Its probably extracting DNA by ethanol precipitation looking at the slimey mass of DNA going yuck , then running out a premade DNA ladder (ie mix of DNA of known sizes which would make a much nicer result). Coupled with that there are problems storing the enzymes (I can't think of any that could take prolonged room tempreature storage).

Its not quite what it says on the story, its not DNA sequencing its just a DNA seperation kit using the bog standard ethanol prep which you can do with washing up liquid, salt and a bottle of (80%) Polish vodka. The electrophoresis step is quite nice using a battery to provide the DC current. However the kit is nothing you could not make yourself (Most of Molecular biology is really quite low tech the main requirement is getting pure reagents to do it with)

Thats not to say its not a cool gift/toy, at the very least the Centrifuge, and Electrophoresis chamber could probably be reused by the budding geekling

here is the link to the actual product.

"A pigeon can fly at a cruising speed of 65km/h, 100km/h when pushed," said Mr Andreef. "But native falcons fly at up to 250km/h."

Wow. I realise they won't be going at 250kph for very long (presumably during a swoop down from above) but that's a fantastically fast speed for something of flesh and blood...

"The terminal velocity of a falling human being with arms and legs outstretched is about 120 miles per hour (192 km per hour) - slower than a lead balloon, but a good deal faster than a feather!" (from falling feather)

So I guess until someone straps a jetpack on their back and power-dives, no human will ever experience it...

Simon.