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There were some interesting questions asked and lots of people are sceptical.

Here is the free pre-print: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0607706

What, like http://xxx.lanl.gov/ (safe for work)?

Not really an issue. Frequently they contain a copy that is effectively the same as the final published copy and often better because you stick in colour figures, and don't have a page limit. Take a look at the comment field and you'll see most have been submitted/resubmitted/accepted for publication or link to a better version. http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/astro-ph/new. In fact I only count 3/38 that aren't (and one of those is too long for a journal).

So efforts to promote science to the general public by making the product of science available for the general public (improving scientific education, etc) are "government censorship" while locking things in overproced journals (Acta Chemica has a $1300/year price tag) is not? They look more and more like the RIAA every day.

Publishing is fundamentally a service industry. What the publishers provide is some task (e.g. binding copies to dead-tree format) that is difficult. With the advent of the interweb many of these tasks (e.g. shipping copies around the world) have become much easier. There is still a market for publishers of science and music (e.g. Special editions, bound works, and stuff that is "better than free") but rather than chase those niches the publishers have chosen to attack their own readers and authors.

This is especially hilarious when you consider the difference. Odd as it may seem, compared to this group, at least the RIAA has some leg to stand on. The RIAA is trading stuff that is typically not shared wheras the entire process of science is based upon sharing things freely and widely. That is how everything works from peer review to the spurring of new developments. At least the RIAA hires their music editors and producers while most editors of scientific journals are paid by their home universities and do this task for free in order to spur the exchange of information. Similarly most musicians are paid by the music producers while most authors of scientific papers are not paid by the publishers in any way rather its the other way around because the authors have to pay for subscriptions to read their own work.

This excange starts to look less and less fair all the time. Especially since more and more people are seeking out papers online rather than in the dead-tree forms.

Viva XXX and PLOS.

I guess it's a bit of a symantics issue, whether it's a prediction or a post-diction. It's true that this "prediction" was made after the cycles themselves were observed in the temperature. However, the theory itself makes no reference to these observations, that is it doesn't use them for calibration (it's calibrated with observations of the sun only). The theory, instead, is that there is an oscillation in brightness that should be present in the Sun and other stars that hasn't been considered before. Ehrlich calculates the frequencies of the oscillation for the Sun (using only the solar model which is calibrated to observations of the sun without any reference to the paleotemperature record) and lo-and-behold the n=2,3 and 4 modes lie right on top of the three broad peaks in the fourier amplitude spectrum of the paleotemperature record. I don't think he can say exactly what the amplitude of the oscillation would be (a typical problem with modeling variable stars), though he does demonstrate that the oscillation would grow in time (i.e. it's unstable). The fact that the periods of this variation line up with the periods in the Earth's temperature is, at the very least, quite striking. In a sense, the periods could easily have been predicted by this theory before they were observed. If you're interested, you can see a pre-print for his article at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0701117

At risk of being called a troll ---> I am going to do a decent kind open discussion of what is known. This usually gets called troll on this forum. ---> It isn't troll rest assured!

There has been developing a serious discussion in the IEEE and in other groups of scientists who work with really hard science that cosmology as we have been generally told is just wrong. In particularly the electrical engineering technology provides accurate scalable and reliable methods and models to predict what is going on in the universe. These methodologies and quite well proved models run directly cross of a favorite theory of many scientists. The Einstein Theory of Special Relativity is the primary theory that runs cross of these results. Every time the SR theory is tested it fails. As the IEEE types theories are tested they not only predict what will be seen before hand, they do it every time.

There is a set of mathematically determined equations known as the Maxwell Equations which are standard engineering tools. These have never been found wrong. They are as close to "Facts" as we have in science. They are the basis of this new work in cosmology. Special Relativity is conversely a theory that reliably and always fails. If a decent respect to science is given, Special Relativity is a busted theory. This isn't disrespect of General Relativity. General Relativity is pretty good. It isn't 100% but it is pretty good. No disrespect of those who like Special Relativity is intended here. They just need to take a look in the context of good scientific methodology and trash the bad thinking. In all fairness these guys have a lot to contribute if they will let go of the mistakes of the past.

The Nebular Hypothesis for stellar formation etc, is also a completely busted theory. It simply has no data to stand on. We now have a strong mechanism for the formation and development of the universe. It is the EM Force. We even have good reason to believe that the G force is actually related and produced by the EM Force and is not a unique force.

The relationship to the weather in space and on the earth is as connected as the electrical circuits in your house are to the lights in your house. To assume some disconnect or that the systems are in fact different systems is mistaken. The parent of this post is a pretty good posting, but it makes the mistaken assumption that these systems are disconnected. A considerable appreciation for the fact that the parent poster has at least begun the disconnect from the old broken theories of the past is in order though. It is very hard to imagine the scale and complexity involved. I would hope that maybe some good scientific thinking will begin to start and with respect for the fact that the reality is at best poorly understood and we have many past mistakes blinding us to what is going on.

When one considers the absolute fact that mathematics is a MODEL OF REALITY and not reality then one has to understand that null or nullity is the answer. This really should not be weird to C++ types. They hit this creature all of the time as an error that requires a try/catch.

To understand this you need simply to start with a reaction. This is that famous widget thing from Accounting so don't get messed up here. Supposing you take 1 of something and react it against 1 of another. This is division of 1 by 1. Try reacting a Billion of something against 1 of it. Now that is always 1,000,000,000/1. A little factor here comes into play called vector. I know the math types out there who have died and become GOD will object but you always get this fraction because all reactions are many divided by the fewer. Its a natural law that seems to have been forgotten in math. Now try reacting 1/2 of something against a 100. This is a fiction. Because the smallest number of something you can ever have in the real world is 1. If you don't have 1 of it, you have none of it. Another model limitation that got forgotten in math. All natural math is integer math. Computer types should understand this! So lets try a reaction where we react a billion of something against none of it. This is 1,000,000,000/0. The model answers back with that natural law limitation that there is no reaction. NULL is the answer. There is no address to dump a non-reaction.

The reality is that this professor is right but I really wish he wouldn't try to invent a new term for it. Try the famous computer science C++ solution that has been around for years NULL! Its right! Its right for the very same reason it has been showing up for years in C++. Now this leads to a very serious reality. Those who have been hanging out in their Floating Point approximation world are going to have to realize that it is an Approximation --- Literally a close error but not the truth. I don't hate floating point math, but what we need to do is understand this.

There are profound conclusions this leads to. It limits reaction predictions in math. This eliminates -- (For those who don't understand -- I mean entirely wipes out) the Cosmological conclusions about the Speed of Light being a limit on velocity. It eliminates the illogical conclusions of the age of the Universe and sorry for those trucking the load for Special Relativity, but it clobbers them in the teeth and removes the entire calculation set that infers the Big Bang. Of course had you checked with the IEEE - cosmology section and their discussions you might have found out that the science had departed and gone somewhere else a long time ago. The electrical universe is but one of the things that arrives fully fledged if you accept NULL. (non reaction with nothing) Cosmology is but one science area that really gets hit in the face by NULL. There are a lot of others.

Social network analysis has been done to death, not only by computer scientists but also by physicists and anyone else who thinks they have jurisdiction over network analysis. Large-scale models of processes spreading in social networks have already been done. The one that comes to mind is EPISIMS done at the LANL. They combined various sources of demographic, traffic and other data for the city of Portland to build a real-world simulation of an epidemiological outbreak (check the site for some nice animations of small pox spreading) They're currently working on other cities including Chicago I think. There's also a TON of work on the web as a social network, including influence maximization models (google scholar search for Jon Kleinberg -- he was also featured in NYT a while ago) and pretty much any application you can think of.

Depends what they mean by "doesn't pose a danger". I note that 0.1uCi is more than three times the maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium (source: http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/84.html )

Once they have it on a mass-spec then seperating one isotope from another is a doddle. They seem quite certain that the material was Polonium as opposed to other materials so I guess some tests have been done. Note that this incident is now classified as terrorist originated nuclear contamination so we are no longer talking just about the metropolitan police and UCL. The other hitter is the radiation level Po210 burns much faster with different byproducts (209 goes to lead and bismuth, 210 just goes to lead). Ironically, although Po209 is much more stable, it is much harder to produce.

The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 1011 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10-11 microcuries/cm3.

From: there

Soluble in acidic environment.
Apparently he was repeatedly invited by by an unkown russian person to drink tea....
A little sourness in tea with a few milligram of metal dissolved.

Ah, but LLNL != LANL.

All scientific works ever written. This is work done by scientists for the betterment of mankind and to have it locked away from the public behind electronic library access fees is absurd. The public has a right to academic works, not just academics.

When "the public" pays me to referee papers by other astronomers, and "the public" pays the page charges for the papers I write ($110 per page, by the way), and "the public" pays the editors and typesetters of the journals, then "the public" might assert a right to those papers.

Just to forestall the inevitable responses, no, the federal government is not paying my salary, and no, it hasn't paid for the page charges of my most recent publications. The NSF and NASA do support a great deal of research in astronomy, of course, and grants from those agencies do pay for good fraction of the publications in this area.

On second thought, almost all recent work in astronomy and physics is freely available to public at the LANL preprint archive site, so maybe this whole discussion is moot....

This article from LANL says it will run Linux. Imagine a Beowolf cluster of those...

try http://xxx.lanl.gov/

I don't, no. But I still think it's hookum. And so do these peeps. Dark matter is a popular idea right now, that doesn't make it the right idea. I'll believe in dark matter when someone brings some back to Earth for show-and-tell day.

from the journal article,
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0606279
a glance at the intro reveals that they have analyzed *one* eclipsing binary star system in M33 and derived a distance that was greater than that obtained by Hubble. Until this measurement is repeated on other stars in M33, preferably by different groups, this remains a suggestive but in no way definitive measurement.

space.com and the submitter are a little too enthusiastic...

This whole article is misleading. The new research has very little to do with our knowledge of the size and age of the universe.

(And, yes, I am an astronomer).

Stanek and company have used measurements of one eclipsing binary system to determine the distance to M33. This is a good way to measure distances, as it avoids the perils of even a short "ladder" of methods. They find a distance modulus of 24.92 +/- 0.12 mag to the binary. You can read their paper on astro-ph at

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph?papernum=0606279

Go to Table 7 of their paper, in which they compare their distance to previous measurements. There are 12 previous values, measured by several techniques (only 2 of the papers use Cepheids). The range of those previous values is 24.32 +/- 0.45 to 24.86 +0.07/-0.11. Their new distance is inconsistent, at the 1-sigma level, with 6 of the 12 others; thus, it is consistent with 6 of the 12 others.

Yes, it's true that the HST Key Project distance to M33, computed using Cepheids, is smaller than the new distance by an amount well outside the quoted uncertainties. But that's not a big deal, by itself. M33 is only one of a number of galaxies which serves to calibrate secondary distance indicators, which may in turn be used to find the Hubble constant. A small change in the distance to M33, even if true, would not make any major change to H-nought.

Recall that M33 is close enough to us that its radial velocity is NOT caused by the expansion of the universe, but instead by the gravitational forces of the galaxies in the Local Group. The press release's statement

The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value.

is absolute nonsense. One cannot USE the Hubble constant and radial velocity of M33 to calculate its distance. The radial velocity of M33 is -179 km/sec, so "using" the Hubble costant to determine its distance would yield a negative distance. Phht.

This is a very nice, and very very worthwhile scientific project -- I have followed the DIRECT team's efforts for years, and encourage them to keep going! -- but the press release tries too hard to make it into some sort of breakthrough with profound immediate results.

Sigh.

I have a different experience with national labs. The bureaucracy was not too bad at PNNL, and friends at Oak Ridge have never complained about it.

On the other hand, a lot of Los Alamos employees have complained about it.

You could visit potential employers and ask people there about the work environment, office politics, etc. That would probably also give you the best feel of your possible future co-workers.

Do you have any preference for which part(s) of the country you would like to live in?

Actually the data is amazingly transperent right now, fifteen minutes on google links after searching for "cd4 gp120" you'll find enough data about HIV infections of CD4 T killer cells to make anybodies head spin. As most research is government funded the data is pretty much available, try looking at the HIV sequence database over at Los Almos National Laboratories, all kinds of geek toys, FAQs and tutorials there. you can even run polypeptide and nuecleotide sequences against the HIV genome. The hard part about a HIV vacine is that the part of the virus the body sees is covered in sugars so the immune system doesn't respond to it!

Actually the data is amazingly transperent right now, fifteen minutes on google links after searching for "cd4 gp120" you'll find enough data about HIV infections of CD4 T killer cells to make anybodies head spin. As most research is government funded the data is pretty much available, try looking at the HIV sequence database over at Los Almos National Laboratories, all kinds of geek toys, FAQs and tutorials there. you can even run polypeptide and nuecleotide sequences against the HIV genome. The hard part about a HIV vacine is that the part of the virus the body sees is covered in sugars so the immune system doesn't respond to it!

How does it compare to ?

The fake elements originated at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, NOT LANL. (See http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020720/fob5r ef.asp) And the mustang story is largely false, although the mainstream press did not make a big deal out of the fact that the story originally reported turned out to be untrue. (See http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php?fuseaction=home .story&story_id=1453). Also keep in mind that that LBL, Argonne, Brookhaven, etc... do minimal amounts of classified work compared to LLNL, LANL, and SNL. Even PNL and ORNL do significantly less than the big three. So if LANL, LLNL, and SNL tend to have more security incidents, then one cannot ignore that a stellar record from a laboratory that does no classified work means very little in comparison.

Please get your facts right. It's that sort of uninformed, incorrect rhetoric and accusation that got LANL in the press-generated hot water it currently finds itself in. Are you a politician?

US military uses Plan 9 for many of its services. Their new GPS system that was used in Iraq was based on it. Basicly it was a system there you could where everyone is with about 1.5s delay. Kinda of making real war more video game like - except people actually get hurt and die. :( The US government hires numerous Plan 9 developers. Most notably, Ronald G. Minnich.

Here's another article which goes into much more depth on the use of quantum computing by the brain; it is not a study but rather a paper.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/9505374

If you wanted a much shorter version focusing on just memory, see:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9912120

This isn't anything new-- quantum theories to explain memory have been around for quite some time; since the 1980s I think. But it's only been lately that there have been studies that have actually quantified and identified this.

You should be able to find a lot more on Google / PubMed.

Here's another article which goes into much more depth on the use of quantum computing by the brain; it is not a study but rather a paper.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/9505374

If you wanted a much shorter version focusing on just memory, see:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9912120

This isn't anything new-- quantum theories to explain memory have been around for quite some time; since the 1980s I think. But it's only been lately that there have been studies that have actually quantified and identified this.

You should be able to find a lot more on Google / PubMed.

During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposition and used it to show how genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on or off. She developed theories to explain the repression or expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Encountering skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953. Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as researchers demonstrated the mechanisms of genetic change and genetic regulation that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition of her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; to date, she has been the first and only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

First if anyone wants to do the looking up or proving get with it. I am just going to shoot the stuff out there and let others have fun with it.

The "red shift" stuff that is gospel to the Special Relativity crowd argues that the shift in frequency of light is due to distance. Electro-optics says it is nothing but an optical effect and means nothing. (It's called doubling down etc....) It is routinely done as the electro optics guys stock and trade. Believe who you will the electro-optics industry does this routinely. The astronomical observations including the triangulated locations for objects in the universe (They have to be close to do this) show that red shift does not mean distance or velocity.

The IEEE has gotten so sick of the "rubber constants" and "Plastic Theories" of the Einstein type cosmologists that they have opened up whole group of Electrical Physics types who discuss the nature of the universe. http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html "IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society."

The Plasma Physics technology which is a stock and trade industrial science and is fully scaleable in math models makes clear that the cosmology explanations of the big bang and such are just silly. The most graphic example of this was the recent Stardust mission which was supposed to bring back comet ices etc and brought back pretty crystals. The predictions of the big bangers and the gravity universe model were just wrong. The electrical predictions were dead on. Of course somebody will accuse me of being troll. I am not. The accuser will be a troll. I am merely pointing out good science and some goofed up science. Get a life if you cannot stand a scientific discussion.

Yes, neutron beamlines are great for study of transmutation and nuclear properties.

All this stuff about the "commercial benefits" is a cartoonish beard for A-bomb research.

I think that's an exageration. At the facilities I've worked at, the research has been heavily geared towards science. Some facilities do indeed use the beams to study materials and designs for next-generation nuclear power plants, but not for weapons. Unlike Los Alamos, the SNS is optimized for academic research. In fact one of its "selling points" is accessibility to scientists (due in part to the fact that it's not a weapons lab).

Also, I'm not sure that "A-bomb research" has benefitted from fundamental studies in transmutation and decay rates recently. Modern advances in nuclear weaponry seem to come from engineering the bomb design, and have nothing to do with new insights from fundamental studies.

the most obviously valuable use of a high-density, high-energy neutron beam is studying heretofore under-investigated fission reactions and adding significant digits to heretofore over-investigated fission reactions.

That kind of research is probably much more useful to the medical isotopes community than it is to the weapon design community.

The US certainly does research on nuclear weapons, but I don't think the SNS is intended to be part of that infrastructure.

Hey cool, a friend of mine designed their Web site when he was working at Los Alamos. Small world.

I'd provide a link to his Web site but I doubt he feels like getting Slashdotted.

I think it's amusing that an established publication (Britannica) is worried about another established and peer-reviewed publication (Nature) making favourable comparisons with Wikipedia. We should now see Britannica write about the similarities between Nature and the arXiv!

The Chile is the official state vegetable and they can get pretty hot, err, picante. More info here

So I thought that NM might have a low rate of cancer mortality especially prostate (because I know more men versus women who like hot chiles). Well my quick search uncovered no such pattern. It seems that NM ranks fairly high in mortalilties from cancer. I can only think this is so because of the number of *poor* in rural areas and lack of medical care available.

That and we have LANL and people LIVE there! Also White sands missle range. I'm surprised this whole state isn't all glowy at night.

It makes typical astronomers very uncomfortable when it is mentioned that this is precisely the expected form of an interstellar-scale Birkeland current.

    http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/elec_currents.ht ml

These were predicted by Alfven, and have since been detected indirectly by noting self-segregation by mass of interstellar medium ion Doppler shifts.

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

Similar structures have been noted in radio-telescope images, albeit not with such textbook-perfect structure.

    http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/plasma.universe. intro.html

The reason typical astronomers are uncomfortable with this is that the very active field of plasma dynamics is almost entirely neglected in their education. Most are ill-equipped to evaluate or contribute to work involving real-world plasma interactions. They are handicapped not only by this neglect, but by having been taught, early on, an entirely unphysical, if mathematically elegant, substitute for plasma dynamics under which all these phenomena are supposed to be impossible.

Plasma dynamics, as a field of study, is fundamentally hard because the mathematics that describe actual, natural phenomena is entirely untractable. Practitioners depend on fiendishly difficult scaled-down high-voltage laboratory vacuum-chamber experiments, and absolutely enormous computer simulations. Astrophysicists, by a natural process, are strongly self-selected from among those with a distaste for laboratory work, and a preference for abstract, elegant mathematical constructs, so it's hardly surprising to find them disinclined to fill in the gaps in their education. Instead, certain sorts of evidence are just considered impolite to mention in their company.

(Incidentally, it is precisely this phenomenon which makes press releases about "geysers" on Enceladus -- and two-mile-wide "lava tubes" on Mars and the moon -- especially comical.)

It makes typical astronomers very uncomfortable when it is mentioned that this is precisely the expected form of an interstellar-scale Birkeland current.

    http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/elec_currents.ht ml

These were predicted by Alfven, and have since been detected indirectly by noting self-segregation by mass of interstellar medium ion Doppler shifts.

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

Similar structures have been noted in radio-telescope images, albeit not with such textbook-perfect structure.

    http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/plasma.universe. intro.html

The reason typical astronomers are uncomfortable with this is that the very active field of plasma dynamics is almost entirely neglected in their education. Most are ill-equipped to evaluate or contribute to work involving real-world plasma interactions. They are handicapped not only by this neglect, but by having been taught, early on, an entirely unphysical, if mathematically elegant, substitute for plasma dynamics under which all these phenomena are supposed to be impossible.

Plasma dynamics, as a field of study, is fundamentally hard because the mathematics that describe actual, natural phenomena is entirely untractable. Practitioners depend on fiendishly difficult scaled-down high-voltage laboratory vacuum-chamber experiments, and absolutely enormous computer simulations. Astrophysicists, by a natural process, are strongly self-selected from among those with a distaste for laboratory work, and a preference for abstract, elegant mathematical constructs, so it's hardly surprising to find them disinclined to fill in the gaps in their education. Instead, certain sorts of evidence are just considered impolite to mention in their company.

(Incidentally, it is precisely this phenomenon which makes press releases about "geysers" on Enceladus -- and two-mile-wide "lava tubes" on Mars and the moon -- especially comical.)

It makes typical astronomers very uncomfortable when it is mentioned that this is precisely the expected form of an interstellar-scale Birkeland current.

    http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/elec_currents.ht ml

These were predicted by Alfven, and have since been detected indirectly by noting self-segregation by mass of interstellar medium ion Doppler shifts.

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

Similar structures have been noted in radio-telescope images, albeit not with such textbook-perfect structure.

    http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/plasma.universe. intro.html

The reason typical astronomers are uncomfortable with this is that the very active field of plasma dynamics is almost entirely neglected in their education. Most are ill-equipped to evaluate or contribute to work involving real-world plasma interactions. They are handicapped not only by this neglect, but by having been taught, early on, an entirely unphysical, if mathematically elegant, substitute for plasma dynamics under which all these phenomena are supposed to be impossible.

Plasma dynamics, as a field of study, is fundamentally hard because the mathematics that describe actual, natural phenomena is entirely untractable. Practitioners depend on fiendishly difficult scaled-down high-voltage laboratory vacuum-chamber experiments, and absolutely enormous computer simulations. Astrophysicists, by a natural process, are strongly self-selected from among those with a distaste for laboratory work, and a preference for abstract, elegant mathematical constructs, so it's hardly surprising to find them disinclined to fill in the gaps in their education. Instead, certain sorts of evidence are just considered impolite to mention in their company.

(Incidentally, it is precisely this phenomenon which makes press releases about "geysers" on Enceladus -- and two-mile-wide "lava tubes" on Mars and the moon -- especially comical.)

Actually, NAMD is already being used to simulate the entire ribosome:

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php?fuseaction=home .story&story_id=7428

That's an ever bigger simulation, but then they're running on ACSI Q.

Ground-based telescope systems are actually important, contrary to popular /. opinion. For example, Swift takes about a minute to slew its Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) to a gamma ray burst (GRB). When Swift first triggers on a GRB, it sends that information to the ground, which is then sent throughout the world to astronomers and robotic telescope systems alike. Those robotic systems are then observing the GRB (provided that it's night and not raining at the telescope's location) within a few seconds of Swift triggering on the GRB. Thus, they are able to observe the *early* optical and infrared afterglow, while Swift is still slewing to the GRB.

There are also cataclysmic variable surveys, transient surveys, and other uses of the robotic systems when they're not pursuing GRBs. These are far easier and cheaper to develop and deploy than space-based telescopes. Each mission has it's limitations, but there is good science to be done by each. Thinking Telescopes has more information about robotic systems and the software behind them.

So yes, the days of a professional astronomer staring through a telescope to study the stars is probably long over. But that does not mean that ground systems are obsolete or outdated. Hell with the budget cannibalization going on at NASA, astronomers are going to loose the largest means of space based missions: Explorers. So when we can't launch into space, we'll build on the ground or make balloon experiments to observe in energies that are blocked by the ozone (amazingly enough, these are still done).

And the picture they use in the bloody article is a RADIO telescope! Radio really isn't affected by contrails or climate change! The biggest concern is in the optical to infrared ranges, where the moisture and clouds do the most damage to light (diffraction, reflection, etc). Radio and microwave suffer most from cell phones, gps units, radio and television broadcasting, etc. That's why radio observatories are out in the middle of *no where*.

Biological simulations.

Protein folding, modeling cell machinery, and simulations of other biological systems at the molecular level. Think about the number of calculations involved in modeling the interactions between a few million atoms in something as simple as the ribosome. Now imagine adding the water and solute environment that surrounds these sorts of molecules. Oh, you could ignore the water and do the simulation in a vacuum, but let's remember that a driving force in protein conformation is hydrophobicity. And if you want to try this over time, say even a few nanoseconds, then start multiplying baby.

So yeah, there are some good uses.

Los Alamos has a very robust summer internship program that is entirely focused on the student learning something new, rather than be oriented towards what the student can produce. www.lanl.gov/education

I started there the summer after my freshman year, and I loved every moment of it. There's a reason why this summer is going to be my fourth one there.

Try here. Way cool place to spend the summer. It looks like they even hire high school students for internships.

Wrong.
All the article claims is that the Evesdropper's location will be undetected. The fact that someone is attempting to eavesdrop will still be detected, and there are several well known proofs of security of this fact.
FTF Press Release
"Quantum cryptographic protocols are so secure that they can not only discover tapping but also where and how much information is leaking out. Now, using telecloning, the identity and location of the eavesdropper can be concealed."
Quantum cryptography is absolutely secure as long as the laws of quantum mechanics are true. And even if the laws of quantum mechanics are false, one can still do secure cryptography from some very weak assumptions (it follows from violating Bell's inequalities and no-signalling) see this

For those that are interested in this, Jacob Bekenstein (the author of the first relativistic MOND paper ~2 years ago) has a paper on the preprint server today about the possible measurable effects of MOND in the solar system.

A galaxy is modeled as a stationary axially symmetric pressure-free fluid in general relativity. For the weak gravitational fields under consideration, the field equations and the equations of motion ultimately lead to one linear and one non- linear equation relating the angular velocity to the fluid density. It is shown that the rotation curves for the Milky Way, NGC 3031, NGC 3198 and NGC 7331 are consistent with the mass density distributions of the visible matter concentrated in flattened disks. Thus the need for a massive halo of exotic dark matter is removed."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/1 0/1052224&tid=160&tid=14
http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0507/050 7619.pdf

"... the intrinsically linear Newtonian-based approach used to this point [in the study of the motion of Galactic Bodies] has been inadequate for the description of the galactic dynamics and Einstein's general relativity should be brought into the analysis within the framework of established gravitational theory."

I guess that most Dark Matter proponents haven't yet read this important paper that debunks the need for Dark Matter. Ah, if you get the math wrong you need Dark Matter... if you don't you don't!

...if there's a spike in the "forest" for NGC 7319 in its quasar's spectrum, I can't see it.

Data with higher S/N shortward of Lyman-alpha emission would be useful, since this is where Ly forest absorption is seen in many QSOs. Our spectrum, very noisy here, does not show such features.

One critical thing not discussed in their paper is the effect of gravitational lensing on their statistics. This makes the alignment seem more improbable than it actually is. Twenty years ago, such an omission would be excusable. But since this is now standard material, and is in fact a standard part of the debunking of the alignment significance, it kills much of their credibility to pass over it in silence.

That's why detractors blather on about "fortuitous voids" and other question-begging deux ex machinae instead of simply pointing to the Lyman notches and pronouncing "I told you so!" (can you see them missing the chance if they had one?).

Lyman alpha forest voids are not obscure rarities, but part of the greater clustering versus emptiness structure of the universe. The point is enough of the Arp/Burbidges objects have been debunked from possible consideration. The now established claim is simply that Arp and the Burbidges can't identify quasar/galaxy assocation from photographs alone, and the statistics are not as freakish as they repeatedly assert. They can try, but the burden on them is to explain why General Relativity, the correct prediction of the cosmic microwave background, and the correct prediction of cosmic deuterium abundance should be rethought for the sake of ambiguous photographs?

You might also want to grab a copy of this image, ...

And while you're filling in your point, can you address the issues of why these are enough to rethink the issues I mentioned? Something other than amateur histrionics about probabilities that you have no idea how to calculate in the first place?

Implicit argument from authority. Can you say logical fallacy? If you really want to prove this point, come up with some statistics showing that you're right, preferably through a randomized selection process of journals. As it stands, your claim that journals demand exclusive distribution rights is laughable due to contrary evidence. That's not the point. The point is that even the personal subscriptions are way too expensive.

Not really. The journal market is very small. A journal can hope for 20,000 institutional subscriptions if they're very successful. This is very low volume, which drives up the cost of publishing. Many journals also use archival quality paper and good ink. And they do this four to twelve times a year. Moreover, the personal subscription market is much smaller. Most people interested in state-of-the-art research in a field are going to have access to library copies of journals.

The other word used is BEAM (Biology Electronics Aesthetics Mechanics) from Mark Tilden's early efforts (circa 1990-4) from isn't explicited junk / recycled focused.

Which is why we don't let terrorists play with nukes.

I'm actually currently working on a project to detect radioactive materials (even shielded) at border crossings and other ports of entry. The cool part: it's all doing using cosmic particles already raining down on us.

Ok, that's enough self promoting for today.

This is a really neat demonstration of the power of microlensing for planet finding. Though it's not the first, nor even the second, planet to be found this way (see for example http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0505451 and http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0505451), it really does show how microlensing can find small planets pretty far away from their host stars. It'll be a very good technique for determining the frequency of planets as small as the Earth. As for finding life on the microlensing discovered planets (using the future Terrestrial Planet Finder mission [http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_index.cfm ] for example to search for biosignatures in their spectra), it'll be very difficult. The majority of these planets are going to be very far away from us (where there is the highest probability of finding a lens) and, by selection, they're going to have a second bright star very close by on the sky that will be difficult to coronagraph out. The microlensing planets are really all going to be one-shot deals where you have no hope of following them up in the foreseeable future. I think planets found by transits (the upcoming Kepler mission [http://kepler.nasa.gov/]) or by astrometry (the upcoming Space Interferometry Mission [http://sim.jpl.nasa.gov/]) will be much better bets for searching for life.