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it made it into Physics World, the mag of the IoP (body for professional UK physicists) - http://physicsworldarchive.iop.org/index.cfm?action=summary&doc=6%2F9%2Fphwv6i9a26%40pwa-xml&qt= and the NewScientist - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13918902.000----with-a-boson-at-the-tories-cocktail-party-.html and is cited at least once at arxiv.org - http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0103023v2

The problem is not one of sexism, but ageism. You could double the numbers of women in science just by getting back all the ones that have had to leave the field because they got pregnant after their second post-doc and took time off to raise a family. There's no way back in because _who's_ going to hire a 43 year-old when they can get more from a 30 year-old who still has the best years of their life to produce research? Your competitors don't. Yet, it takes the better part of a decade to train people up at a cost to society and we let them just slip away.

There's a report on the Institute of Physics site detailing the results of a major survey.

The other end of the spectrum is that trying to get girls into physics in high school is too late. You need to get to them before the age of 13, otherwise society is already telling them how "different" they are for having an interest in science.

My 2p

The problem is not one of sexism, but ageism. You could double the numbers of women in science just by getting back all the ones that have had to leave the field because they got pregnant after their second post-doc and took time off to raise a family. There's no way back in because _who's_ going to hire a 43 year-old when they can get more from a 30 year-old who still has the best years of their life to produce research? Your competitors don't. Yet, it takes the better part of a decade to train people up at a cost to society and we let them just slip away.

There's a report on the Institute of Physics site detailing the results of a major survey.

The other end of the spectrum is that trying to get girls into physics in high school is too late. You need to get to them before the age of 13, otherwise society is already telling them how "different" they are for having an interest in science.

My 2p

It could be possible that the right type of fabric could reduce air friction. Although water and air turbulence is different, scientists have found that dolphin skin is faster underwater than smooth steel-hulled craft.

Weight reduction is more valuable to fuel efficiency than reducing wind resistance. Both are important, but the biggest hit on fuel economy is generating momentum from a stop. Reducing weight reduces the energy required to put a car in motion. A BMW is going to spend more fuel going 0-30 than wind drag at 60+.

Then there's also the advantage this design would have for active aerodynamics. With a fabric skin, the body could dynamically reshape itself to create downforce only when needed, etc.

Seth

They could, either via sufficiently complicated Feynman diagrams or if their magnetic moment isn't zero (as it has to be). Anyway, the cross section should be orders of magnitude smaller than the weak ones. About the GP's quote on SN1987A, there is still some controversy. There actually were some events recorded at the Mont Blanc experiment more than four hours before the Kamiokande, Bakun and IMB detections. If you don't disregard any of the data, you have a time spacing between the first and the last SN1987A neutrinos of almost 4.5 hours. This points to either a high mass difference between the three mass eigenstates or a possibility of breaking the equivalence principle (or, more remotely, the possibility of tachyonic movement).

...already exist. This one is backed by the DPG and IOP.

I did some googling and found David Wiltshire's home page which had links to his recent publications. That brought me to this full article which I am guessing is the one that corresponds to what was discussed in the original /. article here.

I had a couple courses in astronomy and cosmology way back in my college days. That said, I can't begin to understand the details. I'm hoping someone with more knowledge and experience could elaborate. Is he really onto something that can dispense with the need for dark energy? And, if he is, am I correct in thinking this would be Nobel-Prize-Candidate-Worthy?

Though I don't have a copy of either in front of me at the moment, I believe this topic is covered in either The Electric Sky by Don Scott or The Electric Universe by Wal Thornhill and Dave Talbott. You might want to pick up a copy. Other interesting reads include Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened, and Arp's Seeing Red. Though they're on slightly different topics.

My understanding is that there is a drift of electrons toward the sun. Yes, a drift. It doesn't take much. Electrical motion is often a very slow process (especially in "dark" currents; IE, currents not in "glow" or "arc" mode) on the order of a few centimeters per hour?

But, in the meanwhile, here are some links to a few abstracts / articles that deal with various bodies as unipolar inductors.

From links found at Plasma-Universe.com:

(Cosmic electric currents and the generalized Bennett relation)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1988Ap%26SS.144...73C

(Unipolar Induction of a Magnetized Accretion Disk around a Black Hole)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AstL...29..153S

(A force - free field theory of solar flares I. Unipolar sunspots)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1981ChA%26A...5...77Y

(Electric current in a unipolar sunspot with an untwisted field)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990GeoRL..17.2273O

(Sheath-limited unipolar induction in the solar wind)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1975Ap%26SS..36..177S

(Establishment of a Lunar Unipolar Generator and Associated Shock and Wake by the Solar Wind)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1967Natur.216..340S

(Unipolar Induction in the Moon and a Lunar Limb Shock Mechanism)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1969Moon....1....7S

(The Earth as a unipolar generator)
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0022-3727/11/5/020

(Io, a jovian unipolar inductor)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1969ApJ...156...59G


I might also point out a great repository of peer-reviewed papers on various subjects related to plasma cosmology:

http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/papers.html

Plasma Physics from Laboratory to Cosmos--The Life and Achievements of Hannes Alfvén
Cosmology in the Plasma Universe: An Introductory Exposition
Introduction to Plasma Astrophysics and Cosmology
Birkeland and the Electromagnetic Cosmology
The Evidence For Electrical Currents in Cosmic Plasma
The Role of Particle Be

Being "raised" as a scientist myself, I understand why articles like this are written. Most science is done "in the dark", outside of anyone's understanding, and it needs flashy press releases that color everything up a bit to make sure they will get some media attention and, through that, better chances on funding.

But the point is, there is hardly any "big breakthrough" in science. Everything goes in small steps, sometimes a new mechanism is discovered, the effect of which to scientific progress can only be understood later on. And I am not sure about you lot, but I am pretty numbed down by all the "new treatment against AIDS/cancer/obesitas" discovered. They give false hope, First of all, most of these fancy press releases end up being only vaguely connected to some cancer-involved protein. Secondly, if it would actually have an effect in-vitro, there is at least 10 years between discovery and the possible release needed to filter out all chances on side effects etcetera.

So, let's be realistic. Give your amazing color pictures to the press department, make a nice story of why this is new and can lead to something, but stop making claims that are outside of the direct expectation of the research you're doing. It just hurts the credibility of researchers in general.

Here you are. It's old, and unfortunately if you want to read the paper you'll have to go look up a paper copy: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0031-9155/19/2/089/.

Searching for radiation beneficial also gives a bunch of hits, though most of them are pretty shady. Radiation homeisis is another good search term (that turns up a lot of shady stuff). There have been some stories on Slashdot too, if you search here.

Here's an ask the expert type thing that puts it well: http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q5871.html.

The effects from low level radiation are so subtle (in either direction) that the studies are always right around the limit of statistical significance, and you tend to get conflicting results. So really there's evidence both ways. It's definitely not accurate to say that all radiation is definitely bad for you.

If I may suggest some more modern papers, then I would point to these ...

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006A&A...454..201G

These are Birkeland Currents in space -- where the mainstream says they should not be.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/njp7_8_263.pdf

The idea that DNA might have electrical roots is nothing new to EU Theory. In fact, it's to be expected within their theory.

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2504&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

This is actually a validation of one of Hannes Alfven's predictions, from what I've been told.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12652-milky-way-keeps-a-light-grip-on-speedy-neighbours.html

These galaxies are quite filamentary.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/06_releases/press_060106.html

Another filament where we didn't expect it.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7155/abs/nature06003.html

Once again, a filament. You know, there is more than one way to make a repeating flash of light, as happens for pulsars. Is it a rotating beacon with a bowshock? Or, is it two stars electrically connected? People need to think very carefully about what holds these filaments together. Also, how does the filament remain illuminated for 30,000 continuous light years all at once?

There are multiple explanations for these things that people are not taking into consideration ...

Commercial fusor devices can generate on the order of 109 neutrons per second ...
whos not reading the links?

And Bussard's claim:

These four definitive tests showed true Polywell potential well trapping of ions at ca. 10 kV well depth (with a 12.5 kV drive), with total DD fusion neutron output of ca. 2E5 nts over a period of about 0.4 msec; giving an average fusion rate of about 1E9 fus/sec - over 100,000 times higher than the results achieved by Farnsworth/Hirsch for DD at such low energies, and 100x higher than their best with DD even at 150 kV (Ref. 3)


If you can buy a commercial fusor with 1E9 neutrons/sec driven at 12,5kV then please provide a link to it. Otherwise it's irrelevant as we are talking about "at comparable drive conditions".


Where is the math? The charge density in the core can't be significantly far from equilibrium.

That does not mean one can assume that the charge distribution is uniform.

If his math is correct we would get much larger yields from the pure fusor devices.

Have you been following research on multiple potential well formation then? Yoshikawa has some very interesting simulation and experimental results. He goes as far as noting:

The results strongly suggest that the high neutron production rate should be attributed to not only the well depth but also the unstable behaviour of the potential, i.e. the intermittent peaking of the density in the centre region. A numerical simulation reveals that IEC possesses a favourable dependence of fusion reactions on the injected ion current for the application to a neutron source or a fusion reactor.

  He's not alone in looking at the effects of multiple potential well formation on fusor efficiency either. People at Illinois University, University of Wisconsin, and LANL are all quite interested.


The biggest loss in high energy plasmas is from Bremmstrahlung radiation from electrons, the ions thermalize via ion-electron collisions. Even Bussard claim that. Non equilibrium systems make it worse by having low energy electrons, and this pushes the probability of colliding with one up...
Oh I don't have my calculations handy, but i could dig them out. They are not publishable because its been published more than once or twice.


And what ion and electron density and velocity distributions would you have used? Calculating Bremms for a plasma with oscillating density distributions is quite device specific. All the harder when virtual cathode and anodes come into play. You can't just average it out and then say good enough. You most certainly can't go dismissing experimental results on such a basis. Even if the experimental results are just for a 0.4msec pulse, that's interesting enough results to maybe see how the confirmation test goes. Thankfully it's been funded so we should get some experimental data to work out what the density and velocity distributions might look like in a year or so.

And also, a link to the actual paper: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0022-3727/40/19/052/

Plans for nuclear power in the UK seem to be taking an interesting turn. Greenpeace UK recently looked at proposed sites for new reactors in the UK and found that four proposed site may be unsuitable owing to the risk of sea level rise: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/reports/the-impacts-of-climate-change-on-nuclear-power-station-sites. The South Texas reactor site is one of 14 currrent or decommisioned civilian power reactor site in the US that are located in tidal regions. With a 2014 start date, a 40 year reactor life and a 20 year decommisioning phase, the South Texas reactor site could be subject to 5 meters of sea level rise: http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/2/2/024002/erl7_2_024002.html. That raises serious questions about the wisdom of siting the new reactors close to the present reactors and it might make more sense to seek an inland source of cooling water.

Another location issue pertains specifically to Texas. Texas wind power has been growing very rapidly and may easily meet anticipated demand. Wind costs about $1.30/Watt to build while the nuclear plant, at this early phase, is anticipated to cost $2.20/Watt without modifications that come up in the licensing process or construction delays that genrally plague large projects.

South Texas may not be the best place to test the waters on new nuclear generation.

use entangled photons to peer beyond the event of a black hole

I have experience is simulating elastic wave in solid (homogeneous) media. I've successfully used second order finite difference to simulate Lamb waves for a 2D case. My work was based on that by Lee and Staszewski http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0964-1726/12/5/018/s ms3_5_018.pdf I've also heard of people using spectral elements for this. http://lsec.cc.ac.cn/~cjxu/SEM_mem.html P.S. I'm a /. lurker. Only created an account to post this, hope it helps.

The New Journal of Physics, http://www.iop.org/EJ/njp is an open access journal.

The article is here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/nj p7_8_263.html

Something that bothers me about the article is this paragraph (which has no references, though he claims this to be a well-known problem):

"Self-organization of any structure needs energy sources and sinks in order to decrease the entropy locally. Dissipation usually serves as a sink, while external sources (such as radiation of the Sun for organic life) provide the energy input. Furthermore, memory and reproduction are necessary for a self-organizing dissipative structure to form a `living material'. The well known problem in explaining the origin of life is that the complexity of living creatures is so high that the time necessary to form the simplest organic living structure is too large compared to the age of the Earth. Similarly, the age of the Universe is also not sufficient for organic life to be created in a distant environment (similar to that on the Earth) and then transferred to the Earth."

Emphasis mine.

Sounds a little like this guy's been buying into "Intelligent" design a little too much...

Strangely, the rest of his article doesn't look terrible to me. I do not do plasma physics--slept through that class--but I do publish scientific articles for a living.

The New Journal of Physics, http://www.iop.org/EJ/njp is an open access journal.

The article is here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/nj p7_8_263.html

Something that bothers me about the article is this paragraph (which has no references, though he claims this to be a well-known problem):

"Self-organization of any structure needs energy sources and sinks in order to decrease the entropy locally. Dissipation usually serves as a sink, while external sources (such as radiation of the Sun for organic life) provide the energy input. Furthermore, memory and reproduction are necessary for a self-organizing dissipative structure to form a `living material'. The well known problem in explaining the origin of life is that the complexity of living creatures is so high that the time necessary to form the simplest organic living structure is too large compared to the age of the Earth. Similarly, the age of the Universe is also not sufficient for organic life to be created in a distant environment (similar to that on the Earth) and then transferred to the Earth."

Emphasis mine.

Sounds a little like this guy's been buying into "Intelligent" design a little too much...

Strangely, the rest of his article doesn't look terrible to me. I do not do plasma physics--slept through that class--but I do publish scientific articles for a living.

The problem for SETI is that no radio signals could penetrate the glowing plasma shell. Nor would any intelligent life forms be aware of the spectacle of the universe that we are privileged to witness.

Quantum levitation by left-handed metamaterials
Ulf Leonhardt and Thomas Philbin
Provisionally scheduled for August 2007

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1748-3190/2/3/001 Theres the abstract. Full text costs money apparently.

I know this is /. and actually reading the article is unusual, but *I* did and came upon this:

I would LOVE to see THAT happen!

<dream>Whenever a program crashes, just open the debugger, run it backwards until it gets "weird". Run it forwards and backwards again to isolate where it's broken. Of course, there are some problems with asynchronous signals (disk I/O, keyboard, mouse, etc.) but I can dream, can't I?</dream>

But seriously, could this just be something thrown in to help get more funding or is it an actual possibility?

What I meant was that the simplest SUSY extensions to the SM include five particles which are all Higgs bosons. You did not contradict that.

Actually I did contradict that. Models with just two Higgs doublets are not SUSY i.e. you can construct models with two Higgs doublets and no SUSY whatsoever. Just adding an extra Higgs doublet does not mean that you have added SUSY. If SUSY does exist then you need at least two Higgs doublets but the reverse: if you find two Higgs doublets there must be SUSY is not true. It is true that the major motivation for adding 2 higgs doublets is SUSY but not always. I think there is a paper out there which uses a 2HDM model to explain the light neutrino masses...in fact here is the link

On a more pedantic note you only actually add 4 Higgs bosons with a two doublet model because the SM already includes one!

The buzz around the experimental community that I have picked up is that we should see SUSY quite quickly at the LHC, or else not at all.

It is completely dependant on the SUSY model. My personal belief is that, if SUSY is observed in nature, it will not use any of the breaking mechanisms the theorists have come up with (SUGRA, GMSB or AMSB). There is no real motivation to assume any of these breaking mechanisms is correct. It is just a matter of practicality since we cannot mentally cope with ~126 free parameter phase space which generic soft SUSY-breaking gives. So I really don't think you can say that we should see it soon or not at all. It is true that we will likely probe more phase space at the start of the LHC run due to the increase in energy but since there is only one (if any) "true" SUSY model you cannot really play the odds with a single data point!

The method of recording nuclear tracks is a solid is an old one but it has the advantage that the recording material can be placed very close to the reaction. This has lead to the discovery of very short lived particles that might be long sought axions in a recent accelerator experiment: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/34/1/009. The plastic detectors used in the SPAWARS experiment can be placed close to the electrode so that background is a smaller part of the overall signal. Their method of electrode fabrication is also impressive. It seems to work just about every time.
--
Get solar power for what you pay your utility now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Apparently god does not like Higgs Boson particles!
Is this a hint of gods existence?

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1126-6708/2006/03/05 7/jhep032006057.pdf

Similar issues were raise in the article. You can judge for yourself here: http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/2/1/014002 /erl7_1_014002.pdf.
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Solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

So here it is...

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0957-4484/18/9/0957 05/

OK, the actual paper's here (full text freely available).

As far as I can tell this has nothing to do with standard processors and everything to do with FPGAs.

It seems what they propose is: Instead of the FPGA configuration bits being done with gates on the silicon wafer, why not perform configuration by configuring the metal-to-metal interconnects? After all, if the metal layers are thick compared to the interconnects between them, you can blow connections you don't need like blowing a fuse. By removing the FPGA configuration bits from the silicon wafer, they can save a lot of space, leading to higher speeds and lower costs.

They have a clever way of arranging such a system, which should be easy to fabricate.

What Moore's law is supposed to have to do with this I don't know.

Michael

Abstract. We investigate the dynamics of toast tumbling from a table to the floor. Popular opinion is that the final state is usually butter-side down, and constitutes prima facie evidence of Murphy's Law ('If it can go wrong, it will'). The orthodox view, in contrast, is that the phenomenon is essentially random, with a 50/50 split of possible outcomes. We show that toast does indeed have an inherent tendency to land butter-side down for a wide range of conditions. Furthermore, we show that this outcome is ultimately ascribable to the values of the fundamental constants. As such, this manifestation of Murphy's Law appears to be an ineluctable feature of our universe.

This story is completely incorrect. The paper of Jain and Singh, available at http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/34/1/009 does not claim that the axion has been found. They simply report the observation of a couple of narrow resonances which can be interpreted as a signature of new particles. The scientific interpretation of these resonances is unclear at this point. In fact, astrophysical bounds completely rule out that one of these resonances is the so-called axion. I work in this field, so I know. I have no idea how the press is getting the idea that this means the axion has been found. It is *not* based on scientific facts.

Yet another slashvertisement for New Scientist claptrap. Will the pseudo science crap ever stop? If I wanted to read that shit I'd go there, PLEASE stop posting it here.

"New" Scientist? If this is the new science I don't want anything to do with it.

At least they do not claim to be scientists, just "New Scientists". New Scientist = euphemism for Pseudo Scientist.

Give us some real science please. You won't find it at New Scientist, nor will you find it in Nature.

You can find real science in publications like those overseen by the following organisations: ACS, RSC, AIP, IOP, AMS, Elsevier, etc., etc...

See the difference? Probably not...

I'm highly sceptical about articles making optimistic claims about space elevators, of which there have been several of late, usually involving carbon nanotubes. Most of the time the theoretical strength of a cable constructed from carbon nanotubes is used, but this ignores the fact that the cable will inevitably have construction defects, as it would need to be about 10^5 km long. A decent analysis is provided in a recent paper I read: http://www.iop.org/Select/abstract/-group=subject/ -groupval=100/0953-8984/18/33/S14

They most certainly have not used DT in their first plasma, especially considering they were performing their intitial pumpdown/coil cooling/safety interlocks, etc. in February. (Paper) Once you put tritium in the system, it's never coming out -- and you've just made your site a regulated nuclear facility. Not to mention that you will likely need to do subsequent repairs remotely.

EAST will certainly help out with discovering (and engineering solutions to) the unique handling of superconducting coilsets. These are a necessity for a fusion reactor; they will also help gain insight for operation of ITER.

Sorry, too busy to respond to this properly right now but you would actually blanket a fusion reactor in something that would breed Tritium (something like Lithium). You can actually do a little research before blindly claiming that thorium is our only hope and come across the abstract to this article:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0029-5515/43/8/306/
by googling "fusion blanket material"

My only problem with your comment is that you mix some true with some half truth (which could lead someone to believe your blanket comments).

What you do say that is very important is: fusion is hard. Fission works great and new ideas for reactors are making it even better (pebble bed reactors make for a nifty solution too). The problem right now is that ignorant people are good at keeping the public afraid of fission because so many lies about its dangers have been spread.

If fusion can be made possible lets not ruin it in the same way before it even starts by spreading misinformation about what exactly its problems are.

(disclaimer: I'm a grad student in applied physics with a plasma physics focus... so i'm pretty biased)

In early tokamaks, the confinement times of energy and particles were seen to be much lower than what was anticipated from theory and also much lower than what is needed for fusion. The reason for this is attributed to anomalous transport of particles and energy across the magnetic field lines (which are intended to prevent this) due to various instability modes in the plasma.

Also, early tokamaks could not be heated to anywhere near the temperatures required for fusion since they used exclusively inductive current drive to heat the plasma, which is ineffective beyond ~1 keV. Auxiliary heating methods such as wave heating with electron cyclotron, ion cyclotron or lower hybrid waves and neutral beam injection were then adopted in order to further heat the plasma beyond the ohmic limit. Initially these were observed to further reduce the confinement time from the ohmic limit. Later the ASDEX tokamak observed an increase in the confinment time back to ohmic levels with auxiliary neutral beam heating. This regime of operation is referred to as H-mode. It required the auxiliary heating power to exceed a certain minimum threshold. http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v49/i19/p1408_1

Additionally, it has been roughly observed that the confinement times in tokamaks scale with the plasma parameters such as plasma current, toroidal magnetic field, plasma volume, etc. ITER was designed using a database of other tokamaks, their parameters and their performance, in order to scale the machine to the desired performance http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0029-5515/32/2/I11. Superconducting magnetic systems will allow ITER to have long pulse durations like Tore Supra (> 6 minutes) with better plasma performance than any of the big tokamaks now (JT-60, JET, DIII-D, T-15).

As I am so strongly directed to get my facts right, and within this spirit, I should point out a few things. Though even Heisenberg put forth energy-time as well as position-momentum in his original description (as well as angle-action), Pauli noted in 1933 that there isn't any operator that is canoncally conjugate to the Hamiltonian, provided the Hamiltonian is bounded from below (which means they are not complementary variables in the strict sense that I have been taken to task). For what it is worth, Bohr considered them all "complementary quantities."

Now my anonymous critic points out that you derive it from the Schroedinger equation, but that is only one way. Forty-five years ago Ahranov and Bohm summarized this issue very nicely and it has been a topic of study even longer. A good, recent, review paper on this topic can be found by Busch.

As for the issue of the time operator, that is an interesting topic of study as well, and not so cut-and-dried as my combatitive friend would have you to believe. As an example with relation to quantum field theories, one can look at Wang et al.. I would not be a quick as my self-confident friend that there is not a time operator to be found.

The microwaves are absorbed by water molecules and little else. Each water molecule has a cross section for absorption -- basically, there is some probability that a given quantum will be absorbed by each molecule it passes. The cross section is relatively small, which means that the depth to which a typical microwave will penetrate before being absorbed is relatively large. The absorption of microwaves into your food (or your brain) is relatively inefficient. As a result, the energy radiates through the volume fairly evenly and is absorbed throughout the volume.

This is in contrast to higher frequency radiation, such as infrared, which is absorbed much more efficiently. As a result, the energy carried by the radiation is almost completely dumped at the surface.

This is part of why microwaves are able to cook more quickly than a traditional oven. You don't have to wait for heat to diffuse from the surface to the inside of the food. As you point out, the process is not completely uniform -- as you penetrate deeper into an absorptive medium, the amount of energy reaching that depth does decrease. The rate at which the energy decreases is characterized by optical depth.

The optical depth of pure water is a couple centimeters at 2.45 GHz and will increase a bit since foods / brains are not pure water. If the optical depth is 5 cm, about 60% of the radiant microwave energy will be deposited in the first 5 cm, 60% of the remaining in the next 5 cm, etc.

If you have access to the IoP Physics Education journal archives, there is a nice article about the physics of microwave ovens. If not, I can at least back up my claim of a 2 cm optical depth for pure water (first paragraph of section 2).

Anyway, I completely agree that this guy is a moran. My point was only that you can't just say, e.g., that since I'm hit by much higher power visible/IR radiation when I step outside, there is obviously no danger. High intensity microwave radiation is not something that occurs naturally on Earth and it has characteristics that are different from "natural" Earthly electromagnetic radiation. That said, when you do the more complex analysis, you find there is no rational basis for concern.

The microwaves are absorbed by water molecules and little else. Each water molecule has a cross section for absorption -- basically, there is some probability that a given quantum will be absorbed by each molecule it passes. The cross section is relatively small, which means that the depth to which a typical microwave will penetrate before being absorbed is relatively large. The absorption of microwaves into your food (or your brain) is relatively inefficient. As a result, the energy radiates through the volume fairly evenly and is absorbed throughout the volume.

This is in contrast to higher frequency radiation, such as infrared, which is absorbed much more efficiently. As a result, the energy carried by the radiation is almost completely dumped at the surface.

This is part of why microwaves are able to cook more quickly than a traditional oven. You don't have to wait for heat to diffuse from the surface to the inside of the food. As you point out, the process is not completely uniform -- as you penetrate deeper into an absorptive medium, the amount of energy reaching that depth does decrease. The rate at which the energy decreases is characterized by optical depth.

The optical depth of pure water is a couple centimeters at 2.45 GHz and will increase a bit since foods / brains are not pure water. If the optical depth is 5 cm, about 60% of the radiant microwave energy will be deposited in the first 5 cm, 60% of the remaining in the next 5 cm, etc.

If you have access to the IoP Physics Education journal archives, there is a nice article about the physics of microwave ovens. If not, I can at least back up my claim of a 2 cm optical depth for pure water (first paragraph of section 2).

Anyway, I completely agree that this guy is a moran. My point was only that you can't just say, e.g., that since I'm hit by much higher power visible/IR radiation when I step outside, there is obviously no danger. High intensity microwave radiation is not something that occurs naturally on Earth and it has characteristics that are different from "natural" Earthly electromagnetic radiation. That said, when you do the more complex analysis, you find there is no rational basis for concern.

Eggs "cook"* at much less than 100C. Just because you boil them to cook them, doesn't mean they require boiling to cook.

I'm currently looking for answers on what actual minimum energy is needed to cause the egg to harden.

An article I can't access (not going to pay) is

"How long does it take to boil an egg? Revisited" D Buay
European Journal of Physics

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0143-0807/27/1/013/

* Cook is defined as an irreversable chemical reaction pervading the entire material, the nature of which is dependent on the material but substantially equivalent to that obtained by heating in boiling water, and *not* necessarily "hot enough to serve with toast for breakfast".

I would just tell you to Google yourself, but you're being annoying, so here:

It was actually smallpox.

Whenever a large population of non-immunes exists, epidemics happen.

The model does not aim to predict the emergence of new strains of influenza, but it does suggest that a short-lived general immunity to the virus might affect the virus's evolution.

The model takes into account the effects of specific immunization against viral strains, but also infectivity randomness and the presence of a short lived strain-transcending immunity recently suggested in the literature.

A pandemic is possible when an influenza A virus makes a dramatic change (i.e., "shift") and acquires a new H or H+N. This shift results in a new or "novel" virus to which the general population has no immunity... Since, by definition, a novel virus is a virus that has never previously infected humans, or hasn't infected humans for a long time, it's likely that almost no one will have immunity, or antibody to protect them against the novel virus. If the novel virus is related to a virus that circulated long ago, older people might have some level of immunity.

Most of this seems really obvious to me, but what the hell do I know...

• http://ej.iop.org/links/q02/iKLoM1SRDYaTEfvY62LGwg /njp5_1_127.pdf

• http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=about/1367-263 0/1

• http://ej.iop.org/links/q02/iKLoM1SRDYaTEfvY62LGwg /njp5_1_127.pdf

• http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=about/1367-263 0/1

In this paper, we have considered the theoretical foundations of the hydrino hypothesis, both within the theoretical framework of CQM, in which hydrinos were originally suggested, and within standard quantum mechanics. We found that CQM is inconsistent and has several serious deficiencies. Amongst these are the failure to reproduce the energy levels of the excited states of the hydrogen atom, and the absence of Lorentz invariance. Most importantly, we found that CQM does not predict the existence of hydrino states! Also, standard quantum mechanics cannot encompass hydrino states, with the properties currently attributed to them. Hence there remains no theoretical support of the hydrino hypothesis. This strongly suggests that the experimental evidence put forward in favour of the existence of hydrinos should be reconsidered for interpretation in terms of conventional physics. This reconsideration of the experimental data is beyond the scope of the current paper. Also, to understand properly the experimental results presented by Mills et al , it would be helpful if these were independently reproduced by some other experimental groups.

http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/blr.html

> If they had something strange happen during an experiment they should have left it at that and write
> a paper called something like "Something strange happened during blah blah blah...", then describe in
> detail the setup of the experiment and the results, then wait for peer review

Have done:

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0963-0252/12/3/312

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?isn umber=27155&arnumber=1206739&count=18&index=5

http://www.edpsciences.org/10.1051/epjap:2004168

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=JAPIAU000096000006003095000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR L&_udi=B6TGS-47C8N0P-B&_coverDate=12%2F19%2F2002&_ alid=308918281&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_c di=5262&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1 &_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=82d2cdf37641d3ec848f 070de1f6a1d2

How about 100 GB of storage capacity for the cost of a memory card ? Magnetic microchips used in cell phones could make them fully functional video cameras. In addition, the chips are non-volatile, so startup lag will become a not-so-fond memory. They use much less power than electronic chips. They can be made much smaller, possibly as small as a few atoms. The examples they have already fabricated "use no silicon and require no multilayer processing and so can be manufactured at very low cost on flexible substrates, while offering non-volatility, radiation hardness and several hundreds of MHz of bandwidth" . They're talking about plastic chips. Pretty impressive.

The technology, which is still being developed, can be classified as "nanotech" and is called "magnetic domain-wall logic" and is based on spintronics. Lots of folks are working on this because many believe that spintronics will allow for great advances in areas from quantum computing to DNA based molecular electronic devices. This particular development is important because it represents the first actual construction of logic gates, which are the basis of computing. So far the group has produced a "NOT gate" and a "11-stage serial shift register / digital frequency divider" in a 200nm design rule. They have also demonstrated the transfer of magnetic information without the use of magnetic fields. This paves the way for hybrid chips with both electronic and spintronic components. Such "3D chips" could contain many times the amount of information possible with current electronic chips. They will run cooler, with short "nanowire" pathways, and have the potential to surpass the performance of silicon chips. Moore's Law marches on.

billy - wonder if the "$100 laptop" guys have their phone number?

The HP press release is meant to announce the publication of their paper in the journal Nanotechnology. For those without access to the journal, this paper was originally released as an HP tech report in 2004.

Nothing sinister here.

I've seen recently a plan to use small robots to turn moon dust into solar panels so electrical power should be plentiful. Use molecular dissociation in high energy plasma, such techniques could eventually lead to generalized device to break down any molecules into pure atmoic components. Here's a link to a paper on breaking O from SiO2. nice pure silicon in the offing too... the gold can be reused. http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0022-3727/34/11/316 Evaluation of the composition, the pressure, the thermodynamic properties and the monatomic spectral lines at fixed volume for a SiO2-Ag plasma in the temperature range 5000-25 000 K W Bussière and P André Laboratoire Arc Electrique et Plasmas Thermiques, Université Blaise Pascal-CNRS, Phys. Bât. 5, 24 Avenue des Landais, F 63177 Aubiere Cedex, France Received 11 October 2000 Print publication: Issue 11 (7 June 2001) Abstract. The pressure, the composition, the internal energy, the heat capacity and several monatomic spectral line intensities are calculated at constant volume for a plasma composed of SiO2 and Ag for several initial dens ities and in the temperature range 5000-25 000 K at thermodynamic equilibrium. We show that with a small quantity of material in the plasma we obtain a high pressure. From the heat capacity and composition calculation, we deduce that the main reactions are the ionization of Ag, the dissociation of SiO2 to SiO with further dissociation and ionization of Si and O in the considered temperature range. Furthermore, with the monatomic spectral line calculation, we deduce that the oxygen spectral line has a behaviour rather different from those emitted by Ag and Si.

But anyways. Coming soon is mainstream Optical Fibre Microphone technology [example link only]. The most sensitive yet made,yada yada. It works by the expansion and contraction of fiber optics. The ones I've heard about are best looped around large objects. Around the perimeter of a large evil skyscraper would be perfect. With signal processing, you get a very detailed audio monitor which can trilocate all occuring conversations concurrently within its very large range.

So what will stop non-governmental bodies erecting such microphones? I think the best way would be the government trying this sort of ploy, stirring up public interest, and then the government legislating that this sort of surveillance is illegal. Currently as far as I understand it, private bodies can video the public environs as much as they like. The new possibilities of these microphones need to be addressed.