Slashdot Mirror

The deer pisses out the Cs-137 just like the other isotopes of Cs they consume normally when eating mushrooms.
Only over a considerable amount of time, it is not like: oops I accidentally ate some Cs-137 and now need to go to pee quickly. As long as they eat the mushrooms they have a higher level ...

Heavy metals just don't work the same way as organic molecules. Of course not. They accumulate in the kidneys and leaver, or wander into the bone marrow ... or in this case, no idea why you neglect it: in he nervous system. I told you now several times that Cs is a potassium "ersatz". Everywhere where the body usually uses potassium, cesium is displacing it and thus cesium is bioaccumulated, in everything that is eating it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... scroll to: "Health and safety hazards"

Interesting read, too: accumulation of cesium in human bones: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/a...

No idea where you got your misinformation about cesium from. It is an alkali metal, obviously it acts everwhere where other alkali metals act.

Leslie Corrice's Hiroshima Syndrome is the best all-round source. Corrice's site is an amazing work, he has collected into one place facts as they became known, and news coverage of the events. He is particularly attuned to distortions, exaggerations and certain scenarios that have been delivered to the press chosen for their dramatic description despite a laughably low probably. And unlike just about everyone else, he strives to segregate his news reporting from his own commentary.

Some no-hype and anti-hype information sources compiled by The Actinide Age,

What actually happened, written clearly by a radiation professional and teacher, Les Corrice ... Putting Health Risks from Radiation Exposure into Context: Lessons from Past Accidents Professor Geraldine Thomas, Imperial College London, April 2011 ... Also quoted in New Scientist ... The D-shuttle project comparing negligible radiation doses internationally in 2014, and its published open access paper ... Real-time radiation monitoring network for Japan. See if you can find a reading higher than this ... Internal radiocesium contamination of adults and children in Fukushima 7 to 20 months after the Fukushima NPP accident (all below detection limit in 2012) ... in Proceedings of the Japan Academy ... Radiation dose rates now and in the future for residents neighboring restricted areas (after 2012, will not cause detectable health impacts) ... in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ... Will Boisvert confirms that wild claims of Japanese thyroid cancers in 2015 are based on bad science. Dr Jonathan Kellogg summarises the academic criticism ... Tim Worstall confirms that wild claims of a single Tepco worker developing radiation cancer is mere anti-nuclear opportunism ... Articles on the mental health impacts of long term evacuation in Medical News Today and Tech Times, and the cited 2015 Lancet study ... Ocean contamination in 2012(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and in 2015(Scientific Reports) --- already comparable to natural radioactivity ...

The article highlights an interesting idea. However, one concern is that most sunscreens (except total blocks like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide-pasty stuff) are composed of biologically active compounds that absorb photons. They degrade quite quickly in a hot environment (typical advice is reapply every 2 hours in the sun-mostly for wearing off). For most cosmetically acceptable sunscreens they would need an environmentally protective device to keep them from degrading quite quickly. You probably shouldn't leave sunblock in a car on a hot day, or use them past expiration as they are in the unusual group of topicals that really do loose potency.

To get to your comments... Well, I'm not so sure Google is the best way to get medical info, but here's what I came up with (I'm not a dermatologist, but I am an MD).

These studies looked to see how much of the TiO2 penetrated the skin and got into blood (none to very little), but only after relatively short exposures (paywalls ahead):
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/a...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...

This one looked at "sub-chronic" exposure (2, 4, and 8 weeks):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Lastly, this one looked at the effects from TiO2 in makeup and while TiO2 wasn't toxic to cells, hitting it with UV radiation caused some free radical formation, whatever that means for tumorogenesis:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Bottom line: Sunblock is probably safe and at this point is definitely better for you than constant sunburns.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/dsj/11/0/11_11-DS4/_article

I made a diagram (derived from a diagram in an earlier publication) that presents this data (and metadata) loss really well: Research Data and Metadata at Risk: Degradation over Time as part of a paper I co-authored on this subject, Facilitating Data Sharing in the Behavioral Sciences.

Jurassic. Park.

so in other words?

What could possibly go wrong....

Last line of the summary:

Not only did the fitness levels increase to nearly modern-day levels, but also some of the altered lineages actually became healthier than their modern counterpart.

So yes, one hopes this doesn't get out of the Level 4 Bio Lab.

500 million years ago there were no warm blooded animals, and most life was aquatic. Whereas today, its rare (but not un-heard of) to find an e.coli strain that can live for long outside the gut of a warm blooded animal, clearly this was not the case in the Cambrian.

Chances are this gene is from a time when water born e.coli were the norm.

The Ontario Science Centre in the mid-1970s was wicked cool. The glimpses into the future were all there for you to touch and play with. (The Philips Coffee Machine was one of my favorites). Sadly, science museums have devolved into environmentalism and global warming preaching which by comparison is about as much fun as watching the organic, free-range, fair-trade grass grow.

Check out the Miraikan in Tokyo, or the Exploratorium in San Francisco to see a Science Museum that doesn't hit you over the head with environmentalism. Just say away from the California Acadmy of Sciences in San Francisco since just about every exhibit in that museum talks about how whatever that exhibit is about is dying because of climate change.

http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/csf/27/4/27_173/_article/-char/en Are you sure GM food is good for humanity? Without enough unbiased testing, how can you know?

Disagrees with who?

Certainly not me. Did you read my comment properly? Why do you call me a "climate denier"? Because there is some disagreement among the scientists? There is, you know. Denying that is what is denying reality.

"They can talk a good talk, but fail in the actual doing of the science."

Okay. Here is an exercise for you. Read this paper (there is a link to the whole article on the abstract page), and tell me what significance it has for existing greenhouse models. This paper came from NOAA via NASA instruments.

Then tell me with a straight face that it is all cut and dried.

I have located an even more recent paper, written by a scientist working for NOAA (a reputable scientific body), using NASA's own data, that shows that the lower stratosphere is not in fact cooling as the greenhouse models call for. Rather, it is warming. Which in turn means the greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed...

Interesting paper. Of course, it doesn't say (or even imply) that "greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed." The stratosphere cools as CO2 increases because the "emitting layer" moves higher into the troposphere, so it emits less long wave radiation because temperature decreases with altitude in the troposphere. Because that radiation normally warms the stratosphere, the stratosphere cools. But other factors can warm the stratosphere, like anthropogenic methane and water vapor. Also, increased ozone warms the stratosphere, which is why the paper you cited actually suggests that "the reversing trend may relate to a possible recovery of stratospheric ozone concentration."

In reality, global circulation models (GCMs) are validated in a more robust fashion than examining a single variable in a single paper. After running an initial condition ensemble to average away the weather, and a multi-model ensemble to average away non-systematic errors, GCM output is compared to paleoclimate reconstructions and instrumental records (though the mean climate can't be independently verified because of model "tuning"). The GCM response to forcing events such as volcanic eruptions can be compared to reality. The CO2 sensitivity implied by the GCM can be compared to independent estimates from the last deglaciation. Chapter 8 here is a good source for background information concerning climate models and their evaluation.

I could go on about this for hours, pointing out reams of data and studies that do not support the idea of man-caused global warming... but I have already made my point: the plain FACT is, nowhere near "all" our evidence points to man-caused global warming. There is a great deal of counter-evidence, and much of the evidence on the "pro" side is now under suspicion because of some questionable practices used.

Maybe you understand the physics behind these arguments better than I do, but the overwhelming majority of the evidence I've seen says that abrupt climate change is happening because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases like CO2. Considering that this conclusion has been subjected to extensive independent verification, I also don't see any reason to be concerned about any questionable practices that have been floating around the tabloids. The few stories that weren't complete nonsense simply showed that scientists are human-- that countering the never-ending deluge of misinformation from nonscientists is stressful enough that they need to vent to each other privately via email.

I can sympathize. If every one of these climate skeptics put as much energy into getting a graduate physics education as they do into reading crackpot blogs and hurling insults at me online, maybe I'd have more time to work on my actual research...

"many studies have been done that show that all the data we have points to global warming being influenced by C02 emissions."

That is off-topic, but since you have gotten away with it and even been modded up, I will answer briefly:

Not "all" data we have points to warming being "influenced" by CO2 emissions. Most of it probably does, but that is pretty irrelevant, since this is such a broad statement it really belongs in a horoscope, not a discussion about the science. You might as easily and as accurately say "all data we have points to global temperature being influenced by the sun." That's really pretty meaningless.

But I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that what you really meant was "all the data we have points to global warming being increased by man-made CO2." Is that a fair assessment of what you intended to say?

Because if so, it's nonsense. "All" the data we have points to nothing of the sort... though some of it does. We actually have a lot of data that does not point to that conclusion.

For just one example, the greenhouse warming models called for atmospheric warming that was not showing up in real temperature measurements, as it would have to if the greenhouse (including CO2) warming models were even halfway correct. More recent data suggested that the troposphere was indeed warming (score 1 for the "warmers") in a manner closer to what would be expected... but that inevitably led to a cooling higher up, in the lower stratosphere.

I have located an even more recent paper, written by a scientist working for NOAA (a reputable scientific body), using NASA's own data, that shows that the lower stratosphere is not in fact cooling as the greenhouse models call for. Rather, it is warming. Which in turn means the greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed, don't really explain what is going on, and will have to be reworked to fit real-world data... yet again. Take that 1 point that was awarded away... again.

The paper is SOLA, 2009, Vol. 5, 053056, doi:10.2151/sola.2009014, "Recent Stratospheric Temperature Observed from Satellite Measurements", by Quanhua Liu and Fuzhong Weng. Mr. Liu was working for the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation, Camp Springs, Maryland. His email is Quanhua.Liu@noaa.gov (which is listed in the paper so I am not "talking out of school" here, but I don't recommend bothering him over laymans' questions.) The abstract and a link to the full paper can be found HERE.

I could go on about this for hours, pointing out reams of data and studies that do not support the idea of man-caused global warming... but I have already made my point: the plain FACT is, nowhere near "all" our evidence points to man-caused global warming. There is a great deal of counter-evidence, and much of the evidence on the "pro" side is now under suspicion because of some questionable practices used.

There is a very nice exhibit like this at The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. White and black billiard balls are used. The first 8 balls are the address (to different stations around the room), the next 8 balls are the character you want to send. A kid arranges the balls in one of the sending stations and then releases them into the internet. The balls flow through several 'routers' (contraptions that look like they are based on old telephone technology). The balls flow to the destination (to which the kid has run over to and is waiting for his balls to arrive) and then the character is displayed. My 6 year old played this for a long time and would have played it all day.

There is a picture here at the bottom of the page. There is also contact information. I'm sure you could get a detailed description of its construction if you wrote them an email.

Good luck!

See, for example, http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jea/14/Supplement_I/14_S18/_article for a study in Journal of Epidemiology showing what I wrote. There are more.

http://shippai.jst.go.jp/en/Detail?fn=0&id=CA1000621

Many contributing causes for that crash.

One of the biggest problems is that their prophet is held up to be the model of behaviour--the most perfect man, and is to be emulated in all things, (and there is no expiration date on this stuff). So, when an approximately 50 year old man (who happens to be the prophet of islam) "marries" a 6 year girl, and has sex with her when she is 9, those present day restrictions are pretty hard to enforce in an Islamic country because it is well documented that Mohammed did it. And if he did it, then it must be ok.

Yes, it is ok. Women age differently, some of them achieve maturity very early and are perfectly capable of sexual relations with full understanding of it at the age of nine. Hazrat 'Aisha, the mother of all believers, was a daughter of the closest friend of the Prophet and the first male follower, first Khilafa of Islamic state, Abu Bakr Siddiq.

She later became a single greatest female collector of the Ahadith (number 4 among all collectors, male and female) - stories about the life of the Prophet, sal Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam. She was known for her bright sharp mind, education and independent scholarly opinion. That disproves the theory that her early relationship with the Prophet, sal Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, carried some kind of physical/psychological trauma usually associated in the West with such relationship.

Figure 6 in this peer-reviewed paper shows that "age of menarche" happens in 1% of Japanese athlete girls at the age of 9. If we extrapolate this data to the population of Arab girls in 7th century, we get around thousand of 9-years girls ready for marriage.

Pedophiles are obcessed w/ young girls and boys. There is no indication of such obcession in this particular case.
'Aisha, radhi Allahu anha, was an exception among his wives. He, sal Allahuu 'alaihi wa sallam, married mostly mature women, his first wife, Hadidja, radhi Allahu anha, was 40 at the age of their marriage (he was 25).

The age of 9 is unusual for consummation of marriage, no doubt about that, but so was the life of the person we are discussing, the most influential man in history (Michael H. Hart).

He was a Prophet, for crying out loud, don't you think that the Creator of all living and what not, could arrange ANYTHING for him without ANY harm to the people involved? (that argument won't work on atheists of course, but it will give you a gist of why 1.3 B people of the world have absolutely no problem with this overrated obsession of the Western media).

Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported.

In Japan, this spin isn't likely to make much difference. Once a serious problem is discovered in a product, the Japanese public tends to assume that all of them have the problem and refuse to purchase or use it.

This attitude has brought no small number of major Japanese businesses to their knees, including (recently) Mitsubishi heavy industries.

Apparently the blog story was stolen from New Energy Times: Arata-Zhang LENR Demonstration, May 22, 2008

Yoshiaki Arata works for the Welding Research Institute of Osaka University. He is not a physicist, apparently.

Old story: He's been reporting this kind of thing since before October 13, 2006: A New Energy caused by "Spillover-Deuterium". Quote: "Intermittent operation over a period of two years using this structure proved the complete reproducibility of these results."

I hope no Slashdot reader invests in this. Would it be too much to ask Slashdot editor Scuttle Monkey to do a little research before he posts stories?

This is not the first complaint about Scuttle Monkey: Who is Scuttle Monkey?

Maybe this can be a starting point!

Is at http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jhts/33/3/33_142/_article. You will need to be able to read Japanese, but at least it's the actual research.

Apparently it was published in the Journal of High Temperature Society in the Feb and March issue of 2008. However their website doesn't seem to have those issues online.

If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here and here. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then, except for a very vague patent application to be found here.

It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...

If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here and here. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then, except for a very vague patent application to be found here.

It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...

"So I guess the question was, was the Titanic "safe" by the standards of that time-period?"

It was considerably safer than anything else around when it was launched.

"Would the parts have been considered sub-standard then?"

No. What is termed "brittle fracture" in steel ship hulls continued to be a problem until well into the 1940s, with US-built WWII "liberty ships" being especially prone to it:

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.war.world-war-ii/browse_thread/thread/198c71d65a05e535

http://www.kudzumonthly.com/kudzu/jun02/OldSteel.html

http://shippai.jst.go.jp/en/Detail?fn=0&id=CB1011020&

"I wonder what the standards/testing were back then"

People didn't know that steel can become brittle at low temperatures then, so testing procedures wouldn't have shown any problems.

"I'd imagine that one positive result of the titanic sinking would have been a stronger focus on such things leading to the present."

The wreck of the Titanic lies in extremely deep water, so nobody knew that brittle steel was a factor in her demise until the 1990s, when technology capable of examining the wreck in detail and retrieving hull plates and rivets from such extreme depths became generally available. Many changes were made as a result of the Titanic's sinking, some of which had a profound effect on safety, but they were obviously based on factors that those investigating the incident could obtain from witness testimonies and ships' logs, which was the only source of information they had.

http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/elex/4/3/77/_pdf

This is not exactly the work referenced in the original article, but it is very likely related to it. Anything that requires a cell of isotopically weird (carbon 13) acetylene sounds fun to me.

The crucial element appears to be a highly stabilized laser that is used in the receiver as a local oscillator to recover (by optical heterodyne detection) a UHF RF carrier that carries the actual QAM.

I had read speculative/theoretical statements about optical heterodyne detection years ago (probably around '94). It might've taken this long to get a stable (and monochromatic) enough local oscillator to demonstrate it in a potentially useful state.

Only someone who can hold a boiling flask of sulfuric acid without dropping it (because he knows what happens if he does) will succeed in a lab, and that not something you learn of the internet.

Knowing what happens is important. That info is also online. The MSDS for almost anything is online. The accidents from oversizing a reaction or under cooling to where it can no longer be controlled is online. Studying accidents is a way to learn the unexpected can and does happen. In the science room a small amount of Sodium in a beaker of water is impressive. Scaled up, it is outright dangerous. (Provided 2 links in grandparent). Other reactions that got out of control are online for your learning. For example, in the making of plastic, if someting downstream breaks and the chemicals are diverted to a reaction chamber, and the reaction is too big, people die.

http://home.att.net/~d.c.hendershot/papers/ccps10-02.htm
http://www.acusafe.com/Newsletter/Stories/0500News-Phillips.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/03/27/plant.fire.03/index.html
http://shippai.jst.go.jp/en/Detail?fn=0&id=CC1000179&

Many of these events that were under reported in the 1960's is now online as well for study. The claim of dumbed down relates to cable tv science. Online the real data is out there if you care to find it.

One more thing: why is the base covered with 3m of regolith? Is that a number you researched? I ask because I recently read an article that radiation on mars would kill all live up to 7m below the surface. I guess the moon has more radiation, being closer to the sun and having no athmosphere at all (well, not anything significant anyway). But since I can't find the article anymore, I might be wrong.

Gaah, I seem to have to post a link to this paper on every article about the moon: G. De Angelis, J.W.Wilson, M.S.Clowdsley, J.E.Nealy, D.Humes and J.M.Clem, 'Lunar Lava Tube Radiation Safety Analysis'.

"After 6 m of depth no effects of radiation due to or induced by GCRs [Galactic Cosmic Rays] in both quiet and disturbed scenarios are observable in the simulation, and after far less than 1 m no effects of radiation due to or induced by SPE [Solar Particle Event] particles are observable. ... with roof thickness of the order of 1-2 m, the doses are well below the montly, annual and career limits given by NCRP 132."

Hope that answers your question.

A Hands-On Model of the Internet Balls roll, and the workings of the Internet are revealed. Data coming and going over the Internet, whether text or images, is represented by a series of 0s and 1s. The series is divided into small chunks called "packets." An array of 0s and 1s called an "IP address," which represents the destination of the data is included in the header of each packet. The Internet exchanges data by delivering these packets from network to network. We have provided white and black balls to represent the 0s and 1s in the packets. In the exhibit, you can create your own packet of white and black balls and release your packet onto the Internet.

As does the fact that it's outside the Van Allen belts.

No, actually that doesn't matter -- as long as you're on the surface of the moon, you'll be fine. All you need is a a storm shelter located beneath a 5 m layer of regolith (e.g. in a lava tube, or tunnel excavated into a crater wall); actually, 2 m will likely be more than enough to keep you well below the recommended limits in all but the most violent solar storms.

See Giovanni De Angelis et al., "Lunar Lava Tube Radiation Safety Analysis", Journal of Radiation Research, Vol. 43 (2002). And you'll be pleased to here that you can download the paper.

Dictionaries are annoying. They usually post the scifi definition. The machine that I see is a bipedal robot. Obviously it needs some type of programming for it even to be controlled by remote control. It's practically impossible for anyone to try and control such a machine manually. Personally I would go for the open pino platform. The website has plans for a bipedal robot and it's completely open source. This system just appears to use an open source operating system. I would want to build the open pino system and then add my own electronics. http://www.symbio.jst.go.jp/PINO/OpenPINO/open_pin o.html

will be weapons. Think of the results. Gangs working together to create a better gun. Countries working to build better bombs. A whole new realm of coperation will be fostered. Errrr... Perhaps not. On a more serious note. Here is another open source robot. It's nice knowing that it isn't the only one. http://www.symbio.jst.go.jp/PINO/

This is not the first controlled-not gate for a quantum computing system but rather the first in this solid state system.

Other implementations of a controlled-not gate (or its close relative, a controlled-phase gate) include:

Caltech Quantum Optics implemented a controlled-phase gate between photons using a strongly coupled atom in a cavity.

Serge Haroche's group implemented a controlled-phase between an atom and a photon using microwave cavities and atomic Rydberg states.

NIST Ion Storage Group: implemented a two qubit gate (which could be turned into a controlled-not) and a four qubit gate using trapped ions.

NMR quantum computing has been implemented by various groups including the biggest quantum computation to date, factoring 15, done by Isaac Chuang's group (IBM and now MIT.)

A proof of principle implementation of a controlled-not in the linear optics quantum computing scheme has been implemented at the University of Queensland.

I'm leaving out quite a few other cool experiments: but the above links should give you a good idea of the what early steps have been taken in quantum computing.

Have a look at this Libre Hardware/Software design: PINO Bipedal walking Robot -- and Free as in Freedom from top to bottom.

have a look at Open Pino for anyone interested in a Free Software implementation of a Robot - as well as Free (as in speech) design.

Who would buy a "stop them at the router, stop them at the blah blah" (remember that quote?) product from Sony?

For two cool Free Software approaches to robots see Fujitsu's project or even better, the Open PINO Platform

There's no such thing as the "Sony Pino". Pino is from Kitano Symbiotic Systems Laboratory

The Sony robot is the SDR-4X. It's a lot more capable (it can actually walk right now), and a lot more expensive (though neither robot is being sold yet).

I'd rather go for the Pino and the GPLd Open Pino Platform Pino
The platform is far more impressive.

Anyone interested in an Open Robotics system PLEASE ignore this SONY-BS and have a look at this: Open PINO platform

For example, the PINO

they're missing either a CCHIO or a BEE

and they have funny Engrish. This is dangerously close to being an exact quote: All our concept are belong to GNU

A great many of the Japanese humanoid robots are powered by Linux. For example, the PINO microhumanoid from the ERATO Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project runs on RT Linux. I saw that one at IJCAI this year, very nice. Of course, the most famous of 'em all, Honda's P3, runs on Solaris. I hung out at the P3 facility at Honda in north Tokyo for a while while staying at Sony. They have a bunch of SPARC rackmounts stored in their backpacks, and run off a remote radio link controlled by UltraSparc stations sitting on a table a ways away.

I am constantly amazed how Slashdot can get its underwear bundled up in a wad over almost trivially insignificant, highly redundant facts.

The article referenced in this post is a bit short on information, but readers can get a more detailed view of the story from this article.

The technique involved is refered to as resonant hole burning. Rufus Cone and his optical group at MSU have been working on many applications of this technique for years, including optical storage and stabilization of diode lasers (how's 20Hz linewidth for stabilization of a diode laser?) highly accurate clocks, metrology and so forth. Cone has a link to a nice power-point presentaion on his web page.

Cone and his group have been using crystalline materials, while this Japanese group is using glass. The advantage of glass is that the storage medium can be tailored to a specific shape. This abstract, published by the Active Glass Project, indicates other interesting research, including the up-conversion of photons using glass.