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they will not make it 100 years in use. I know this for a fact...

You forgot to tell these people... http://entertainment.howstuffw...

for what it's worth for GP and anyone else who's interested, 1 lb thrust = 4.45 Newtons. I like this analogy I found online: If you were floating in space with a bag of baseballs and you threw one baseball per second away from you at 21 mph, your baseballs would be generating the equivalent of 1 pound of thrust. If you were to throw the baseballs instead at 42 mph, then you would be generating 2 pounds of thrust. If you throw them at 2,100 mph (perhaps by shooting them out of some sort of baseball gun), then you are generating 100 pounds of thrust, and so on.

Slightly tongue in cheek comment, but who knows when it comes to the Chinese! I am guessing they are really looking to use all the blood to offset some of their energy needs by using some sort of technology like this: http://electronics.howstuffwor... Almost the Matrix in real life:)

I like the idea of a self-driving car, but I still don't understand how the self-driving car finds a parking space, or gets eased into place in the garage for maintenance. How does it find it's way around an unexpected hazard, like a downed limb, or washed-out area of the road? How does the self-driving car know that the road is flooded or otherwise undriveable? How does it know that the power is out at an intersection that normally has traffic lights?

There are already self parking cars:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/...

. It shouldn't be a surprise that other animals could be a vector.

The pasteurization of milk didn't come into practice until the late 1800s. Back then, tuberculosis was commonly carried by milk. A low-temperature, long-time (LTLT) process, also known as batch pasteurization, was first developed to kill the tuberculosis pathogen. The incidence of tuberculosis contracted from milk fell dramatically, and in fact it no longer makes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's list of foodborne illnesses

So I decided to fact check:

http://www.peanut-institute.or...
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) has reported that approximately one in 90 people in the United States, or 1.1%, have a tree nut and/or peanut allergy and the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) has stated that it is about 0.6% each."

and

http://health.howstuffworks.co...

"Somewhere around 150 to 200 people die in the U.S. each year because of food allergies. It's estimated that around 50 percent to 62 percent of those fatal cases of anaphylaxis were caused by peanut allergies."

So lower bound is roughly 75 people each year actually die, not just have a permanent psychosis, to peanuts.

Compared to 1/700,000 having an adverse reaction to marijuana.

From TFA, "As it turns out, we live almost in the Goldilocks case, with just a tiny bit of dark energy thrown in the mix ...

Umm...70+% of the universe is "just a tiny bit"?

The energy needed to power vehicles used to come from oil-derivatives (gasoline, diesel fuel). In a way, each car was its own little power plant.

With more and more cars becoming electric — for better or worse — the need for somebody to turn fuel into electricity will increase. That somebody can only be a power company, really... Solar panels remain joke — you need too many of them and making them is rather harmful to Earth. And disposing is a problem too.

So, even if they lose some business to the consumers' ability to generate some share of their own electricity, they'll gain from our increasing total demand for electricity.

Where can I learn how to send smoke signals?

http://adventure.howstuffworks... Well, you did ask... ;)

You haven't worked with Diesel, have you? You know, the engines where ignition is facilitated solely by compression instead of compression and a spark plug? You know... like this?

"Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. "

Um, no.
First, the normal flush pressure comes from the water tank on the back...so EVERYONE would be able to flush at least once. (Actually, in a disaster, that tank isn't a bad source of freshwater, at least for a while.)

Most communities have water tanks above their population, either on a nearby height, or in water towers. This makes the system - at least in the short term, until that tank is drained - impervious to power outage. Even NYC has tens of thousands of rooftop tanks with the same function, but on a per-building level.
GRAVITY, not electricity, produces water pressure that refills that local toilet tank. So until the community tank is emptied, and electric pumps are required to fill that large tank, everyone would be able to flush just fine.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/w...

Nope:

http://home.howstuffworks.com/...

The clear winner in the energy efficiency battle between gas and electric is gas. It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to your stove. According to the California Energy Commission, a gas stove will cost you less than half as much to operate (provided that you have an electronic ignition--not a pilot light).

8B T/yr, times $2.22/T.

I think a problem with a potential downside of $17,760,000,000 is, well, a problem.

Weren't these machines banned in Europe over health concerns from radiation exposure? I know that these are prisoners but shouldn't the health effects of such a machine be studied prior to deploying stuff like this out into the world? http://science.howstuffworks.c...

All this report shows is the the grid can handle a few EVs it says nothing about handling a lot of EVs.

Some quick googling shows lots of similar articles and studies. The utilities don't seem to be worried. My guess is that they are happily anticipating becoming the energy provider for transportation in addition to their current business. And, if BEV takes a decade to become commonplace they have a full decade to upgrade the grid.

"As the power grid stands right now, it can already handle millions of electric vehicles without bringing any further power plants online."
( http://science.howstuffworks.c... )

"Kjaer is less concerned about transmission or generation being overtaxed, as long as consumers are taught to charge their plug-in cars at night, during off-peak demand periods, to smooth the load. "
( http://www.scientificamerican.... )

"Doggett is CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas – which oversees the state’s electric grid. On Tuesday he told lawmakers on the Senate Natural Resources Committee that he doesn’t believe even widespread adoption of electric vehicles would have any negative effect on the transmission system."
( https://stateimpact.npr.org/te... )

"“Surprisingly, we found that in general, the electric utility infrastructure is already prepared to meet the President’s 2015 challenge. Our research revealed that utilities will not likely need to upgrade or expand transmission or generation capacity in the next ten years specifically to meet electric demand from EVs at projected adoption rates."
( http://www.forbes.com/sites/pe... )

And here is a paper from Southern California Edison which doesn't seem too worried about the impact of BEV on their grid:
http://newsroom.edison.com/int...

You seem to have a problem with unlimited spending. The problem with campaign spending limits is that it becomes a Freedom of Speech issue. By limiting the amount of money that can be spent one is limiting the amount of communication that can be done. This is from a supreme court ruling;

A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today's mass society requires the expenditure of money.

What is your alternative? It is easy to point out problems and much more difficult to come up with solutions.

the ratio between diesel and gasoline powered cars will be relatively constant.

No, "cracking" has been in-use for over a century:

http://science.howstuffworks.c...

A very long time ago HowStuffWorks had an article I took as filler: http://computer.howstuffworks.... and even snubbed the thought of paying to view what one wants me to see, but it may be upon us. At which point I'll ignore anybody who request a credit card to participate pretty much what I do now.

Damnedest thing I found this with: a penny a page to view site:\howstuffwork
The \ was an accident and required.

How is this not just a one cylinder engine? Based on the description, that's what it sounds like.

Why don't they just scale down (massively) from diesel electric locomotives and be done with it?

I have no interest in a 50 HP car, nor do most US buyers. Not useful.

It only takes about 15 hp to keep a car at highway speeds. 50hp would really be overkill. That might be enough to keep a semi going on the highway...

Then you put a 100(leaf)-300(Model S) electric motor in it, which given the RPM range of electric motors combined with the whole '100% torque at 0 RPM' means that, no matter the horsepower, electric vehicles tend to be very 'zippy' up to almost their max speed.

Usually it's the cathode that degrades with time. The hardest thing on a lithium ion battery is charging it to 100% and discharging it to 0%. All of the materials are recyclable. See http://www.mecheng.osu.edu/nlb...

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/... discusses how they're recycled.

I did not know that medicine was about believing...

It's called the placebo effect, and it's quite unreasonably effective.

So, I'll start believing that i do not have the flu. Let's see if this works.

It will! That's an effect called regression to the mean.

Firmly believing you don't have the flu will, in all likelihood, cure your flu in two days to two weeks!

In the Scrabble universe?
http://www.howstuffworks.com/l...
http://www.scrabblefinder.com/...

p.s. pay more attention to the spelling, the Z is important in scrabble.

Because "bounds checking" is no silver bullet - it's an artificial limitation that DOES slow things down, unlike seatbelts and airbags, which have infinitesimal impacts on vehicle performance.

That's not true. Safety features like seatbelts, airbags, roll cage, etc. add an appreciable amount of weight to the car. "some hypermilers take it to the extreme, removing important safety features like rearview mirrors or even the car's airbags."

Either that, or you're too stupid to program successfully in C.

Apparently so are the OpenSSL developers, and all the other people who have been bitten by bounds errors over the years. Too bad there's no operating system written by perfect beings.

Let's see: Jesse Ventura, a Navy SEAL, was waterboarded, and says it's definitely torture. Apparently the SEALs used to use waterboarding in their counter-interrogation training, but stopped as the inability of anyone to tolerate it was damaging morale. The linked article says the mean-time-to-failure was 14 seconds.

Hitchens was waterboarded, and said it's definitely torture.

Rather uniquely, Oliver North claims to have been waterboarded and says it's not torture. Personally I'd like him to spend a few seconds at the hands of the guys Hitchens went to. I suspect he'd change his mind rather quickly.

Sean Hannity volunteered to be waterboarded, but backed-out. He maintains it's not torture, and points to North.

Granted, 2-strokes can be and usually are annoying and a source of serious pollution. They don't have to be, though. I drive a direct injection 2-stroke, and while it still does burn oil, [t]he amount of oil is so small that it has no noticeable effect on emissions, and it has none of the pass-through problems with oil as in a carbureted 2-stroke. It is a rather silent, efficient, low-cost and comparatively eco-friendly means of transportation. So, while carbureted 2-stroke scooter engines are annoying, that does not mean that all scooter suck.

My perception in having visited Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Grenoble, Firenze is that a fair amount of the road pollution comes not from cars but from Vespas and similar scooters and small-engine motorcycles. Lots of people living within these cities rely on such vehicles, and just judging from my nose, they are big contributors to smog.

I'm not sure about this, but I think those vehicles burn oil by design as part of their operation. The lubricating oil is mixed with the gasoline before it enters the piston.

Nevertheless, $100k is a lot of money. Would the passengers have been willing to pay more for the tickets so that their loved ones would have a slightly better idea where they crashed? Probably not.

No, $100k is not a lot of money. Consider just the fuel cost: 10 hours flying time by a Boeing 747 consumes 36,000 gallons of fuel. That's around $100k or more.

I misspoke by using the words "self discharge."

Lithium Ion batteries lose a fixed amount of capacity every year, regardless of usage.
The only way to slow this process is refrigeration, which slows the chemical reaction that reduces capacity.

Even howstuffworks mentions it.

I've know a lot of really food engineering managers.

Obviously you meant "good" here, but it made me pause: is there a correlation between food and good managers? I've been reading more than a handful of materials (e.g. Peopleware ) which have mentioned eating together as a helping to build strong teams (arguably the most important job of a manager). A number of companies have caught on, from the big (like Google) to startups (one of my favorites, The Omni Group here in Seattle even has a full-time kitchen staff who are listed by name on their about us page).

Obviously, it's not a catch-all solution; heck, I suspect it's more correlation (that is, the managers who get their teams to eat together are more likely to care about their teams) than causation. But still gave me a pause.

No he's saying the water from the oil and gas wells. Do you think that's the same table as what the locals are drinking? They're drinking oil?

Perhaps you should alleviate some of your own ignorance before you accuse me of it.

It's all connected, and even if it's not pure in that particular place, it's not independent of the rest.

Your lack of understanding how ground water works is your shortcoming, not mine.

Such a high price would have implied the size of the entire Bitcoin economy was worth 1.47e15 dollars.

For comparison, that would be about 140 times more dollars than there are.

Scroll down, look for the M2 number. (More recent data, with less explanation)

You have no clue on what you are talking about. Take a look at the number of guns in the US vs the number of exports from the EU. There's no way in hell the US get's it's guns from the EU. US gun manufactures have focused more on guns for personal protection, http://science.howstuffworks.com/5-most-popular-guns.htm#page=1. Also the H-K rifle isn't from Germany. It's was designed by HK's US branch since the German R&D failed at their initial attempt with the DoD. Look at HK's press release, it states that the gun, MR556A1 was designed and will be made in Newington, New Hampshire. It will only contain some parts from Germany. The Columbus,GA team scrapped the German's initial attempt and simply based the MR556A1 on the AR-15 platform only keeping the short-stroke gas piston system derived from the Heckler & Koch G36. Customers can purchase a new upper receiver, buffer, and drive spring to refurbish existing AR-15s into an HK416.

Also let's be real here, how many people are being killed by sidearms in modern warfare vs bombs, cruise missiles, missiles from drones, and heavy weapon fire from tanks and armored personal carriers.

AC said: Two links to Huff Post in one comment? You have no credibility.

Yeah, actually, it's not about the links, AC, it's about the content of the pages which those links point to.

And this one's for you:

How does the Internet work?

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet.htm

How is ice forming in the summer?

Damn yo, you really need to invest in one of those new "combo refrigerator/freezer" thingies...

http://home.howstuffworks.com/freezer.htm

I don't own a 3D printer but I would imagine that cooking parchment would work.

http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/tools-and-techniques/parchment-paper-questions.htm

Simply tape it down to the plate and print on it. In theory (yes, my theory) that should allow you to easily remove the ABS and it shouldn't stick to the paper. Of course, I disclaim any and all liability should this fuck up your machine or project.

http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182#authcontrib
-----
Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they're designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
"There's growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study's lead author, told Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides. ...
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the countryâ(TM)s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And thatâ(TM)s not just a west coast problemâ"California supplies 80% of the worldâ(TM)s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.
----

This has been so obvious for many many years to the organic faring community... It is just another negative externality of conventional farming practice, and another example of market failure to account for systemic risk.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162375-whos-killing-the-bees-new-study-implicates-virtually-every-facet-of-modern-farming

In general, safety studies are almost never done (including for human health) on *combinations* of chemicals (including human medicines). And studies of health effects of individual chemical's health affects often ignore secondary, tertiary, and further breakdown products.

The future of agriculture is probably indoors powered by cheap electricity (from fusion and solar) and managed by robots (including probably pollination).
http://www.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/issues/farm-indoors.htm
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHA

You're talking about a time when there were no "rice burners" on the road to stick. Before Detroit caved itself in via unions.

Yes, back then the italians and the brits made cars that handled while America built land yachts with live axle rear suspension that, as stated, are headed straight for the nearest ditch. Yes, literally all of the American sports cars had suspension no more advanced than a pickup truck — they had features like "stiffened sidewalls" for handling... wow! And I do mean wow.

Of course, Ford has continued this tradition. The live axles are gone, except for the Mustang. That will finally go IRS (a couple of special models aside) for 2015, the same year it gets the Ford Fusion grille that really bones the look of the car. I think it looks fine, but it doesn't really look like a Mustang from the front. Also, many of our large cars are now FWD, which is shit. It's okay for little peanut cars, but it's not reasonable to expect the same wheels to do steering and acceleration when the car is large.

American cars have been shit since forever. The only American production car which was provably better than the competition is probably the Model T, which seems a bit of a turd until you realize what a tank it is. And it was horribly complex to operate... The only thing we've done better than the others is the muscle car, and we've already discussed how they are ditch-seeking missiles.

Just be careful your head gets better than a 300 millisecond exemption the next time you implement Darwinian selection this way. :-)

Early this am. I was riding in a truck that nearly took out an owl that swooped right down from a tree beside the road right in front of us. We had just pulled away from a stop sign, might have been doing 20. Any faster and the bird would have been a grill ornament.

I've walked 20 miles along a heavily traveled state highway to a nearby city, once or twice before. Aside from such hazards to foot travel as gulleys, potholes, bottles, tires, and other impediments, I counted dozens of dog, cat, deer, opossum, raccon, fox, snake, turtle, etc. carcasses as well dozens of bird fatalities of numerous species. Very depressing, but my main focus was avoiding joining them. Played hell on my feet, though.

I was trying to get some hard numbers here, with not much luck, but I did find this website that, although it seems to have a pro-industry spin, has probably close to realistic ratios for various forms of bird fatality, although I might question the raw numbers. Seem low to me.

I also came across what appears to be a rare kamikaze deer cue shot twofer with human injuries.

Life is a struggle, indeed.

Engineers know how to tunnel through limestone, they created dedicated machines for it, here is an article: http://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/tunnel4.htm and here is an example where it was used: http://midwest.construction.com/midwest_construction_projects/2013/0729-deep-below-indianapolis-a-race-to-control-waste.asp

Nuke 'em from orbit... it's the only way to be sure....

That said, non-nuclear EMP weapons are possible, at least in theory. http://www.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm
A simple Google search for "non-nuclear EMP" reveals that the Internet thinks that most of the conventional nuclear-armed nations have them already, and apparently Israel thinks Syria has them, and the UN thinks that the Russians sold them to the Koreans....

This is, to me, the best solution:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/plasma-converter.htm

From my memory there is large portion of tax revenue that the government gets from refined petroleum products that does not come from oil companies but instead is paid by the consumer when they purchase it at retail. When I worked at a gas station in college in the late 90's we had a chart by the registers showing the aproximate percentages of the cost of fuel went, and while I can't find a similar chart I did find this which seems to be fairly similar to what I remembered. There are substantial costs but the various state and federal fuel taxes add up quickly. The federal + state gasoline tax in my state is 47 cents per gallon and for diesel it is 53 cents per gallon. Wikipedai has a very nice chart detailing these. So it would seem reasonable that the amount of tax the government gets from oil is greater than the profits big oil gets. Now this is various state and local governments in addition to the federal one but is my understanding that this is where that statement comes from.

Then I realised, 24 hour sunshine...

Only from a stoner who's listened to the dark side of the moon played one too many times... :^(

http://science.howstuffworks.com/dark-side-of-moon.htm

Chance of dying in a car accident, per 10,000 miles: 1 in 6,000.

Chance of dying in a jump: 1 in 1,000,000.

Source: http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm

I'm almost absolutely positive that you've done nothing to improve anyone's life either

It's not important who I am. I make no claims of being too smart. We are talking statistics here. The number of geniuses who have enriched humanity and at the same time engaged in risky sports is *already* very, very low, compared to the number of similar geniuses who refrained from, say, street racing, or bungee jumping. It's matter of public records, and I offered a few examples already. There are several causes of this effect.

One of the simplest causes: reading books can make you smarter; but climbing mountains can make you only stronger. This would be a benefit only to a neanderthal society. Take Archimedes' Death Ray, for example (let's assume the legend is true. Technically, it does work.) Imagine two armies today: one is a high-tech US Army, and another belongs to Genghiz Khan, and is 10x larger, and each warrior is 10x stronger physically. Which army will win, on average?

The artists may provide lyrics, but they are the ones who put the songs under copyright via ASCAP or BMI, not the labels

In most cases the artists are required by the contract to transfer the copyright to the labels. So the artists are technically infringing copyright when they post lyrics to the songs that they themselves have written.

There are also plenty of cases where the labels force websites to take down copyrights and the artists response is "We wish they hadn't done that, but we have absolutely no control over it" -- the band Jucifer is one such example.

See also:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-royalties2.htm

In most music publishing agreements, there is a requirement that the songwriter assign the copyright of the written song to the publisher. This is known as a "transfer of copyright," or simply "assignment." This, in effect, transfers ownership of the song to the publisher in exchange for the payment to the songwriter of royalties in amounts and time intervals agreed upon in the publishing contract. Typically, song copyrights are held by the music publishers, while sound recordings are controlled by the record companies.

Ethanol and synthehol: http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovations/synthehol.htm
Story from 2009: http://io9.com/5434752/real+life-synthehol-will-get-you-buzzed-but-never-drunk
Trekkie: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Synthehol

In other news, most fireplaces are inefficient anyways.
http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/heating-and-cooling/fireplace.htm

Currently home builders have little incentive to put an efficient stove into their buildings. At least in my neck of the woods. This is just a step in that direction: Efficient wood burning devices that pollute less.
Joseph Elwell.

Wood burning stoves and fireplaces are not the same thing.

In other news, most fireplaces are inefficient anyways.
http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/heating-and-cooling/fireplace.htm

Currently home builders have little incentive to put an efficient stove into their buildings. At least in my neck of the woods. This is just a step in that direction: Efficient wood burning devices that pollute less.
Joseph Elwell.