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Don't follow a link with punctuation, it breaks the link. Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You are mistaken about the technical capacity of wind power. It can supply many times our current energy consumption. Solar has a thousand time greater technical capacity than that. And, according to your link, it is already cheaper than nuclear power and will get cheaper still. And, you have not really addressed the point about natural gas, which is that it is cheaper than nuclear power now, when decisions are being made about future generation. A fair few existing nuclear power plants will close owing to low natural gas costs and the effect of new renewable generation on average clearing price. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/R...

Not worth upgrading then. Sounds like many power plants are on the edge of economic obsolescence now. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/R...

It turns out that natural gas and renewable energy are making a lot of nuclear plants uneconomic. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/R... This situation is bound to accelerate as renewable energy gets even cheaper as projected. (see appendix B) http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy10o... So, it is time to fully fund decommissioning before that happens over the next seven to twelve years.

We don't have to produce intelligence artificially. We can just copy an existing one. If sub-synaptic connectome mapping and neural emulation can be made precise enough to accurately emulate the functioning of an entire human brain on a substrate that operates at several million times the speed of our natural biological wetware, we can quickly instantiate a population of human intelligence replicas that can each experience a lifetime of human cognition in an afternoon. I bet they would have the time and gumption to figure out how intelligence works. Given their ability to reconfigure their substrate, such intelligence would most likely transcend anything we're capable of understanding in a very short time. Those of us marooned in meat-time would then hope to become the treasured bonsai of these recursive, exponentially expanding intelligences. All it takes is full-brain MRI resolution down to, oh, 100 nm and the ability to accurately emulate the function of interconnected cortical neurons.

The Machine Stops, 1909, E. M. Forster: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.e...

That has food that is just called food and comes in tubes. It also effectively describes the modern world. Its amazingly prescient. Definitely worth reading.

Technically recoverable resources don't become economically recoverable if there is no demand at the higher price. It is clear that substitution is already proceeding at the current price. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf Thus, even the economically recoverable resource is dwindling faster than it is being used. Citing experts on a subject they did not address is an indication that your comprehension of the subject is weak.

I work for a university in central Illinois that does a large amount of bee related research. (Full disclosure: I'm not one of the researchers. I do the repair work on their instruments from vacuum pumps to mass specs. The guy in the shop across the street does even more work for those groups. We get to talk to them a lot about their work, and bees are an interest of mine. see below for the reasons.)

Though there is thought that the neonicotinoids may be related, it's probably not the whole story. (see: http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/3231/page=1/list=list and http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/73513/page=1/list=list for some insight by two of our researchers). Most of the ones I've talked to think it's a combination of factors.

Agriculture here uses large amounts of the neonicotinoids, and the bee declines started before they were being used.

Just from my own observations (I kept bees along with my dad when I was a kid), the declines in bee population were happening here in Illinois long before the neonicotinoids were fielded. I was amazed at the drop in the numbers of wild bees here in the early nineties. The stress of varroa mites was likely a big part of that. Some other diseases are thought to have been involved as well.

The EU has largely restricted the neonicotinoids so we should have some comparison data in a few years.

I work for a university in central Illinois that does a large amount of bee related research. (Full disclosure: I'm not one of the researchers. I do the repair work on their instruments from vacuum pumps to mass specs. The guy in the shop across the street does even more work for those groups. We get to talk to them a lot about their work, and bees are an interest of mine. see below for the reasons.)

Though there is thought that the neonicotinoids may be related, it's probably not the whole story. (see: http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/3231/page=1/list=list and http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/73513/page=1/list=list for some insight by two of our researchers). Most of the ones I've talked to think it's a combination of factors.

Agriculture here uses large amounts of the neonicotinoids, and the bee declines started before they were being used.

Just from my own observations (I kept bees along with my dad when I was a kid), the declines in bee population were happening here in Illinois long before the neonicotinoids were fielded. I was amazed at the drop in the numbers of wild bees here in the early nineties. The stress of varroa mites was likely a big part of that. Some other diseases are thought to have been involved as well.

The EU has largely restricted the neonicotinoids so we should have some comparison data in a few years.

Good and bad points, Andro. Plenty of felons get jobs

Oh I didn't say they couldn't get jobs, well paying ones? Doesn't sound like it. Ex-cons certainly are more willing to work for less pay. However when you have people underemployed or underpaid, recidivism certainly is a possible outcome. Your example of the luggage thieves, if they were getting paid better, they'd probably be a bit less likely to be stealing on the job. Pay people well enough. But don't take my word for it: http://news.illinois.edu/news/12/0730wagepremium_ClaraChen.html

Evidently, some organizations prefer felons.

Perhaps so, they might be willing to work for less pay, given their ex-convict status, makes them perhaps a slightly more desperate than average workforce.

I don't have any issues with giving people job skills at all, I just don't trust that the motives behind the people doing the training are 100% altruistic. They want a labor force that can be easily manipulated to work long hours for cheap. Ex-convicts fill that role nicely, as do H1B workers and new graduates.

What's the difference between an office with beds, a gym, a cafeteria(as seen as some sprawling corporate campuses) and a prison?

Author of the article here. Michael Simeone from the University of Illinois asked for my data and code so that he could experiment with some D3 visualizations. He did a little bit last night, and I thought I'd share the results.

Author of the article here. Michael Simeone from the University of Illinois asked for my data and code so that he could experiment with some D3 visualizations. He did a little bit last night, and I thought I'd share the results.

It does depend on the size of the installation. $0.70 per KW capacity. Generally, customers who need more power need more grid service, including the spinning reserve you mention. And, since solar provides power at the highest demand periods, it costs those types of costs rather than increasing them. Though a bit more random, even wind is capping the expense of gas by putting the less efficient peakers off line to the extent that nukes are close because they can't compete. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf

Here in the US, wind power is putting nuclear power out of business. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf So, your cost estimates may be a little off.

Wind power sometimes puts the wholesale price of electricity down to zero in Texas. http://cleantechnica.com/2011/10/20/wholesale-price-of-electricity-drops-to-0-00-in-texas-due-to-wind-energy/ So natural gas may simply be acting a the medium through which wind discourages nuclear power. This has been the case in the Midwest. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf Wind power has cut off the top of the gas generation price curve and forced a reactor to close down there through the subsequent lowering of the wholesale electricity price. Gas can still be expensive if the less efficient turbines are used. Wind lowers demand for those.

No tornadoes here either. (Ohio Valley, Central Ohio). We don't get any natural disasters... I guess God figures that living in Ohio is punishment enough.

Are you sure?

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/tornadoes-wreak-havoc-in-the-o/62353

Destructive storms tore through the Ohio Valley Friday producing numerous large and devastating tornadoes and carving a path of destruction that left dozens of people dead.
There was a total of 107 tornado reports across 11 states on Friday. At least 39 people were killed by the massive tornado outbreak.

And don't forget about the floods:

http://mrcc.isws.illinois.edu/1913Flood/awareness/materials/TalkingPoints1913.pdf

Heavy rainfall, equivalent to two to three months
worth, fell across the Ohio Valley between March
23 and March 27th of 1913. The resulting runoff
produced cataclysmic floods and damages never
before seen over such a large area extending
from Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania,
New York, and later communities along the Mississippi River

Maybe that was just a freak 100 year storm.... but it was 100 years ago.

In the Midwest, wind power is helping to shut down nuclear power. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf

In 2013 Q1-3, solar is the second leading source of new generating capacity. http://solarindustrymag.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.13358

You seem to have assumptions that are misleading you.

There's an interesting case study on Chapel, Charm++, Liszt, and Loci in:

Exploring Traditional and Emerging Parallel Programming Models Using a Proxy Application
presentation
paper

Nice post. I think that the tire example is a little off though. Lots of plants are leaking tritium without fixing the problem.

Also, I think that this really pins the issue of thinking of power as baseload and the problem of nuclear waste together. Eliminate the "baseload" mindset, and the waste problem stops getting worse. Economics seems to be helping with that. Baseload used to be cheap but inflexible. Now it is just inflexible. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf

Old nuclear power is uneconomical as well. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf

Nuclear power has a negative learning curve. France is trying to move away from it. You can read about the opportunity cost of building new nuclear power plants here. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly Even existing nuclear power is turning out to be uneconomical. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf

No, wind power's effect on wholesale electricity prices is indeed a threat to nuclear power as detailed here. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf

I think you have a lack of understanding of electricity markets that will be hard for you to remedy with doing some reading.

Margo T. Oge, who oversaw the creation of the ethanol credit program at the E.P.A., says..."The last thing we wanted in implementing this program is to get price increases for the consumerâ.

For those who wonder what exactly Tokolosh is getting at, here are the US corn prices 2001-2012:

1. US Calendar Year Average Corn Price Received
   for the 2001 - 2013 Calendar Year(s)
   Year Corn ( $/bushel )
   2001 1.89
   2002 2.13
   2003 2.27
   2004 2.47
   2005 1.96
   2006 2.28
   2007 3.39
   2008 4.78
   2009 3.75
   2010 3.83
   2011 6.01
   2012 6.67

Data from http://farmdoc.illinois.edu/manage/uspricehistory/USPrice.asp

> I smell a startup about to try for some more funding!

I rather smell some pretty bad science in your post.

Near field component of an RF field can be either magnetic or electric: it depends from the source type (electric dipole vs. current loop) and its polarization. IIRC some useful discussion on the topic can be found here. The near field becomes negligible with respect to the propagating wavefield at a distance of a few wavelengths: if indeed they use 2.4 GHz for their device, either it isn't a near field device, or it does not work at 2.4 GHz.(I will resist to the temptation of posting my thoughts about the security of NFC technology here...)

I don't know where you found that water has a 2.4 GHz absorption band (Wikipedia ? ham radio literature ?!? I am curious...). To my knowledge water in the liquid state has a somehow broad absorption resonance at around 15 - 20 GHz. By the way, if water should resonate at 2.4 GHz, microwave ovens would burn meat on the surface, leaving the rest cooked rare! As a reference look at this paper: RF attenuation is easily estimated from real and imaginary parts of the dielectric constant.

Flesh is a lossy dielectric body, and cannot be approximated with a poorly conducting metal surface, as you do when you write "this largely comes down to thermal effects in the skin and other surface layers". RF absorption inside the human body cannot be neglected, except maybe in the spectrum window between far infrared and UV-B regions.

51 (no more a radio amateur, since when I wanted to become a physicist...).

• "The Machine Stops", by E. M. Forster. Covers the collapse of a technological society. Written in 1909, 12,000 words, copyright expired, and still relevant, readable, and worrisome.
• Doug Engelbart's demo, 1968" Today, you can do this on your phone. This is where it all began - point and click, editing, search engines, the first mouse, hyperlinks, networks, online collaboration.

Right you are. Internal resistance is between 300 and 1000 ohms. By Ohm's law,d 1k Ohm load on a 5v source will draw 5mA, and a 300 Ohm load will draw 16.67mA. Nowhere near enough to cause death. Stopping the heart takes about 100mA, and causing the heart to enter ventricular fibrillation requires 500-1000mA. Higher currents will again stop the heart. A stopped heart is actually easier to treat than fibrillation, since CPR can keep it going. Assuming a low internal resistance across the heart about 30v DC is required for sufficient current to stop the heart. So if you take 6+ USB chargers, wire them in series, and THEN touch the outputs to salty wet skin you might die.

If it got to the point where it objectively, undeniably mattered, ... then they'd be a bit more careful with their online activity

To quote Shel Silverstein, "... but by then, it was too late..."

At least in my state, you don't have the right of way to cross unless the drivers have time to slow down for you:
http://dps.illinois.edu/universitypolice/pedestrian.html

On a bicycle or running, that's pretty much going to require you to stop and look both ways. A car doesn't have to yield unless you were already in the intersection early enough for the car to then react and slow down. If you aren't in the intersection yet, a car can zoom right by even if you were about to take your first step or pedal - so be careful!

Yes, i think that's commonly true, but it's true for pedestrians, runners, and cyclists, alike. I'm saying cyclists aren't second-class crosswalk users in this regard, which i think was implied, if unintentionally, by your earlier post. For legal purposes, they are pedestrians.

Yes, definitely be careful!

At least in my state, you don't have the right of way to cross unless the drivers have time to slow down for you:
http://dps.illinois.edu/universitypolice/pedestrian.html

On a bicycle or running, that's pretty much going to require you to stop and look both ways. A car doesn't have to yield unless you were already in the intersection early enough for the car to then react and slow down. If you aren't in the intersection yet, a car can zoom right by even if you were about to take your first step or pedal - so be careful!

Inferior device? Nonsense. I happen to prefer Apple's "walled garden" to Google's "walled garden", but the world beyond those walls is often more interesting than what's contained within.

It's just his slides, anyway You can watch Simon give his lecture here.

Probably because it's coming from the News Bureau which generates releases for publications with general readership. There's probably something better if you dig into the homepages for the individual researchers and labs. Paul Braun's group, which created the electrodes, has some PDF articles. William King's page has a list of publications, but no links or documents.

NCSA Mosaic FTW.

If you can run it, you're proficient with running VMs as it won't run in a 64-bit OS.

The Machine Stops

Interesting - failure of user space in this way is exactly why we have zero-days.

Operating system kernels are no less vulnerable to attacks than user-space applications. I believe attackers don't usually attack the kernel because plenty of easier-to-exploit user-space applications exist with vulnerabilities in them.

I would like to see this happen - but several things make it improbable:

1. Von Neuman architecture. As long as data and instructions exist in the same space - poorly written apps will allow abuse of it.

Machines with separate code and data memories may be more difficult to exploit, but exploitation is still possible. This paper describes one such attack.

2. Complexity of current software. The more complex the software, the more likely a bug will exist in it that allows #1. Given how programmers stitch together preexisting modules without understanding what is being done on the underlying system - I only expect that to continue expanding.

It should be instructive that Java was supposed to be that sandboxed layer...and it has so many zero-days it looks like swiss cheese.

Now - how would we avoid that and make an unhackable userspace?

For memory safety errors (buffer overflows and their ilk), there are a number of solutions to the problem coming out of the research community. Control-flow integrity looks extremely promising with less than 10% overhead on average (although the number of programs tested is still too small). Other techniques can handle non-control data attacks, but they incur more overhead. I think the question going forward is how can we reduce the overhead of automated defenses, and which set of defenses give us the right performance/protection tradeoff.

For a list of papers on the subject, you might want to check out my memory safety menagerie.

Being self-taught has its advantages, but unfortunately school costs too much. A good CS school (UIUC) costs just under $200k for four years if you're not a resident of the state. Pay my tuition and I'd come out of there in four years with a PhD (12 semesters including summers).

I've been tracking http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ for some time now -- a University managed site that uses Bayesian analysis of all of the available polls to come up with their estimates. I tend to think that Universities are less likely to biased in their poll meta-analysis in the first place, and of course I'm a big fan of Bayesian analysis for large multifactorial problems with many levels of conditional and marginal probability. Anyway, this site is a lot less ambiguous -- it currently calls it for Obama at the level of 99.6% probability, with an expected electoral vote count of almost 303 for Obama (where "EEV" isn't an integer valued function but rather reflects the expected mean outcome of many "elections" held assuming that there is some sort of unbiased iid process underlying the poll noise). Romney's numbers are dropping, fairly rapidly, over the last week -- it looks like Obama is very likely to be 99.9% likely to win going into the actual election on Tuesday.

You won't see this on the major news stations, of course, as they long ago gave up any pretence at objectivity in the election, and besides, if the election were statistically certain going into Election Day (as this one appears to be) it might actually influence the outcome, just as the stations that persist in claiming that Romney HAS a chance, or HAS "momentum" (whatever the hell that means outside of the context of physics in an environment where his polling numbers are almost without exception going down) are trying to influence the election, just as the stations that make the opposite claim for Obama are trying to influence the elections.

The other nice thing about the election analytics site is that it also predicts the cumulative outcome of the Senate and House races. The Senate race currently suggests that Obama will win by enough to have some coattails to catch and help out in close races there, although the House races appear to be a lock at this point. We'll see if any house races end up as surprises -- possible if Obama beats 300 EV by a substantial margin, possible if the fact that the election is "over" in many states and districts causes the Republicans to just stay home and not bother to vote "only" for a congressional candidate where a lot of democrats show up to ride the Obama wave home.

rgb

Very confusing

Sugar cane makes 14% photochemical efficiency

Bullshit. We're not going any farther until you demonstrate that.

"One of the most efficient crop plants is sugar cane, which has been shown to store up to 1% of the incident visible radiation over a period of one year."

I support biofuels as well but don't confuse theoretical limits or lab experiments with practical reality. Give your source.
=Smidge=

Doppler Effect on light waves http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/Bima/doppler.html

This was already done by UIUC -- they have "caves" in the Beckman Institute that already do this, and I believe they even played Quake II in there.

Beckman Institute Cave link: http://isl.beckman.illinois.edu/Labs/CAVE/CAVE.html

Quake II in cave: http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/caveQuake/

Murray Leinster predicted the internet in the March 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction in a story titled A Logic Named Joe (full text at the link).

Forster predicted "internet" social networking and remote shopping in 1909. http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

1972 PLATO IV Touch-Screen Terminal: The University of Illinois' PLATO IV terminal, part of the PLATO educational computer systems the school started developing in the '60s, had an infrared touch plasma panel that allowed students to answer questions by touching the screen.

Nope, lawyers don't asphyxiate in space:

http://business.illinois.edu/broker/startrek.htm

After reading the technical paper that the author will be presenting next month I learned that the direction and magnitude of the break on a knuckleball is in fact randomly distributed within a range depending on the pitcher. The pitcher literally doesn't know what the direction or size of the break will be when pitched at a certain speed inside of a larger range than a non-knuckleball pitch.

In fairness to SoupGuru, he wasn't just plain wrong about how it is not the trajectory that is being processed by the batter but indicators as to what the trajectory will be. SoupGuru simply guessed the wrong indicators. From the hitter's perspective, the lack of an identifiable spin on a knuckleball certainly changes the heuristic that they depend on to hit successfully..

After reading the technical paper that the author will be presenting next month I learned that the direction and magnitude of the break on a knuckleball is in fact randomly distributed within a range depending on the pitcher. The pitcher literally doesn't know what the direction or size of the break will be inside of a larger range than a non-knuckleball pitch.

Nathan has a conference paper with a lot more detail about the physics. PDF here: http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/ProcediaEngineering34KBall.pdf

Many of the issues in these threads are discussed in the excellent book Where is Everybody?, which provides fifty solutions to Fermi's Paradox of why the Universe is not teeming with intelligent life.

However, you make an excellent point regarding the recent Heliopause discoveries, which occurred well after Stephen Webb's book came out in 2002. You might want to get in touch with the author and share your insight. I couldn't find an email address for him.

There's only one solution I can think of to the issue of RF transmissions being masked by the Heliopause. And that would be altering the spectrum of the Sun in a recognizable pattern.

For example, shooting a large (like, ridiculously large) amount of nuclear waste into the Sun might cause an alien spectral analysis to show an unexpected band of ionized depleted Uranium along with other elements in spent fuel. If that band appeared and disappeared yearly in a prime number or Fibonacci sequence, an alien astronomer with our level of technology or greater would be able to deduce:

1. The length of the Earth year and, I presume, the distance from the Sun to the Earth if they have their own Kepler mission.

2. The fact that Earth has achieved fission but not fusion nuclear power and related technologies.

3. That Earth has not yet annihilated itself through the discovery of nuclear technology.

4. That Earth is ready to receive a strong, directed communication that can penetrate the Heliopause.

5. What form of communication should be used to send the signal to Earth given the technology it possessed at the time the signal was initially transmitted. Perhaps that would involve altering their own star's spectrum if RF is impossible.

And many other facts.

However, there is a problem. No one seems to have done this yet. If it were possible, surely we would have seen such a beacon by now in all of our spectral analyses of all of the stars visible to us in the Universe.

Unfortunately, that would support solution number 50 in Webb's book: The Rare Earth. Sad, but apparently true at this time.

If we are going to propagate throughout the Galaxy, as we must do anyway to ensure survival within the next billion years before the Sun boils off the Earth's atmosphere, it looks like our civilization will be the one that solve's Fermi's paradox.

Yes, heaven forbid your employees take 10 minutes off from their monotonous cubicle hellholes to communicate a little with friends and family. It's not like studies have shown that more worker breaks increase productivity or anything. Henry Ford actually told his workers to work less because they got more done.

Apparently the term "nano-scale" means that your manufacturing process has features measured in nm. Even if that is 400 nm or 1000 nm it seems. Example: https://nano-cemms.illinois.edu/materials/3d_printing_full Quote 1: " . . . incredibly thin polymer layers (on the order of 400 nm) . . . " Quote 2: "This activity demonstrates the basic challenges of nanoscale engineering and manufacturing."

" It is a chilling, short story masterpiece about the role of technology in our lives. Written in 1909, it's as relevant today as the day it was published. Forster has several prescient notions including instant messages (email!) and cinematophoes (machines that project visual images)."

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

I am not an astronomer but here is some info based on some basic understanding and our friend Google. Maybe someone else can contribute more.

Short answer:

1) We can see some things on the moon, especially some mirrors we left there, I think we can see the lunar lander too.

2) Just watch this video it rocks. You can match the light from a telescope against the light seen absorbed or emitted from atoms and molecules in the laboratory to tell what is out there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4yg4HTm3uk&feature=related

Long answer:

First of all, we have indeed gone back and taken closeups of the Moon lots of times. You can see the lander. Also, NASA left mirrors called retroreflectors on the moon that reflect light back to you from any angle, and you can bounce a beam of light off them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/04-15MoonLight.asp

Regarding your main question, when light strikes an atom it may be absorbed or reflected. If absorbed, an electron of the atom is boosted into a higher energy state and when that electron drops back down it emits light of a given wavelength that matches the drop in energy of that electron. It works similarly with molecules made of lots of atoms.

If you spread the light you get from the telescope through a prism, you can see the spectrum of the light and it will show lines at wavelengths matching these electron transitions, so you will see lines representing the elements or molecules that are out there.

If you are looking in the microwave part of the spectrum you may see a microwave emission that comes from the vibration and rotation of asymmetric molecules like carbon monoxide.

And there are nebulae out in space that are being irradiated by ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars, which emit their own characteristic wavelengths, these are emission nebulae.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_nebula

So you can do experiments in the lab to see what wavelengths are absorbed and emitted by a given molecule, and try to match that to the wavelengths you see in the telescope.

Anyway, apparently for the buckyball molecules C60 and C70 (that's 60 or 70 carbon atoms in each spherical molecule) there are certain peaks in the spectra seen at energy levels 3.7eV, 4.7eV, and 5.7eV. These actual energy levels are in fact due to physical properties of the molecules, for example the difference between the C60 and C70 spectra has to do with the difference in shapes, one is a soccer ball and the other is a rugby ball.
(Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9401055)

Apparently when they discovered C60 (buckminsterfullerene) in 1991 they were found characteristic emission lines in the infrared part of the spectrum that matched C60 and no other known substance.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0009261491902455

Finally there seems to be a characteristic spectrum you get when these balls start stacking to make ordered arrays like pyramids or what have you. That's what they found. I guess they could see what shape the substance is in the lab with a scanning-tunnelling microscope (hey that's a pyramid) or maybe just theorize what a pyramid of buckyballs should look like, and then they happen to find the same wavelength in a telescope. Maybe the process was just the reverse of what I just described and they finally figured out what that wierd spectrum was.

This page explains a lot about how astronomers can tell what kinds of atoms and molecules are in space:
http://stars.astro.illinois.e