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This is already happening. Behold PLOS Biology, the Biology journal of the Public Library of Science. This has been around for some years and was started up by Michael Eisen of the Eisen lab at Lawrence Berkeley. As Slashdot history will attest, I found the original introduction of the PLOS to be insipiring and in fact it led me to take up my current career in natural language processing (because someone has to search through all that science!). I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Eisen at a presentation he made at VANBUG recently, and he was very enthusiastic about hearing that NLP people are interested in working on searching and managing open science information, so I again urge you to help out projects like the PLOS (not just Biology, although that's the only current journal).

Aerogel pics (including the crayon image).

More aerogel pics.

Cheers.

In other words, 6% of the contiguous US land area would have to be covered with windmill farms.

I'm don't claim to be an expert, but that's what it sounds like. Here's a reference within the paper itself that references the 6% figure again:

The amount of windy land available for power class 4 and above is approximately 460,000 square kilometers, or about 6% of the total land area in the contiguous United States. The potential average power from areas with class 4 and higher, which are suitable for development with advanced wind turbine technology, is estimated at 500,000 MW.

(The sizing assumptions fromt he study: 50-m hub height, 10 D x 5 D spacing, 25% efficiency, and 25% power losses.)

Another interesting figure:

Figure 4 shows the contribution that the wind energy of each state could make to meet the total electrical needs of the nation, assuming a moderate land exclusion scenario. North Dakota alone has enough potential energy from windy areas of class 4 and higher to supply 36% of the total 1990 electricity consumption of the 48 contiguous states.

How much does each windmill cost? (I don't know.) How much would a million of them cost?

The AWEA document includes basic information on cost. One of the charts tables shows a 1.65mW rated 71m diameter turbine to cost $1.3M in 2000. They give a capital cost estimate of building a class 4 50MW wind farm at about $1M/MW, with an annual power production (assuming 35% capacity factor) of 150M kWh.

Here's a 2001 study of Comparative Cost Of Wind And Other Energy Sources [PDF]. Citing a table from the California Energy Commission's 1996 Energy Technology Status Report (CEC calculations do not include subsidies or environmental costs), Wind is about even w/ coal (4.0-6.0c/kWh) and *much* cheaper than nuclear (not sure why the CEC's number differs so much from those floated by the Uranium Information Centre). Once externalities [PDF] are figured in of course, wind power is much cheaper than coal.

What would be the effect of taking that much energy out of wind patterns? Would rainfall in the region be affected? Regional temperatures? Flowering plant pollination rates?

I agree, the most common environmental problems seem to those affecting birds and aesthetic, etc. While I don't think that larger climactic changes are a significant concern at the scales we're talking about, it would be nice to see some numbers/empirical research. I haven't, however seen any such portential issues cited it anywhere, from the ANL's Wind EIS's concerns, the UCS, or any of the various reports I've read (I've done searching on Google and Citeseer), which you might expect to see if there were problems. What I have seen shows local net-positive effects in wildlife from reduced emissions in states implementing large-scale wind power. It might be worth doing more research on how Denmark is doing (they're at over 10%+ of their power being generated vy windmills, and aiming for 40-50% by 2030).

I haven't done enough research to actually nail down the numbers of whether it would be able to completely replace coal, but from the research I've done, wind power is actually something that is pretty close to viable in the US (unlike solar) and certainly very viable in other countries.

Of course getting rid of burning coal is great, but our oil consumption problem is really a totally different can of worms (w/ about 45% of the 20.0MMBD last year being gasoline).

Get this support into Inkscape plus the Xfig library of premade objects and more export/import file types I might think about switching.

The item I like about Xfig is I can create template objects quickly and easily and add them to it library of objects. The last time I tried to make an object for Dia I just gave up.

Now if Inkscape could export to the .xfig format and Xfig to the proper .svg format that would be great! Using both tools would save me sometime.

Well I still happen to use Xfig and would find it handy if I could use both tools together without exporting/importing item and losing the ability to scale the object. Not sure if thats on the roadmap but I would love to see it added.

There are serious investigations into making cache optimized algorithms. For example, the matrix transposition and array index bit reversal algorithms have been investigated in two papers. Also, Bailey's 4-step and 6-step FFT algorithms are also cache efficient. The latter example shows that a complex algorithm such as a FFT can be made cache efficient with the sacrafice of only a few extra computations. Perhaps it would be prudent to use a hybrid ray-tracer/polynomial renderer to section each portion of the screen into regions that will only access a particular portion of memory. In fact, texture mapping is a lot like that. But I propose that we section the geometry into sections that are localized in memory. This will require more computation in the form of checking which ray goes where but it might be possible to create a viable ray tracer/polygon renderer that produces images of ray tracing caliber. By polygon renderer I mean the renderers that we currently use in gaming.

Some references about cache efficiency.

You mean Bioremediation? There's already gobs of research being done in this area. :)

The geobacter project does exactly that for Uranium waste. This was also mentioned back in October:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10 /1 2/2057227&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=191

Other links about bioremediation:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
USGS's site on bioremediation

They also addressed climate change from a relatively broad range of perspectives a couple of years ago. See this report.

Of course, if we all go gray goo, there won't be anyone left to pay a claim to. :-)

I work in the Arkin group, and Leor is a friend of mine.

Here is the reference and the PDF of the actual article that the research featured in the Wired report is based off of:

PDF: http://tinyurl.com/yu5ur

Leor S. Weinberger, David V. Schaffer, Adam P. Arkin. "Theoretical Design of a Gene Therapy To Prevent AIDS but Not Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection". 2003. Journal of Virology. 77(18). 10028-10036.

---

~taltman

While playing with laser-tag (tm) equipment in college, we found that white wall paint does a very good job at reflecting infrared.

A study on infrared reflective materials: "... conventional white paint has a reflectance for the radiation from fire of 30% or less."

Tellurium is about $14/lb. Gallium, by comparison, is about $1000/lb, which is why gallium-arsenide photocells, which can reach 30% efficiency, aren't widely used.

World production of tellurium is only about 100 metric tons. Gold production is 25 times larger. Tellurium is cheap because it is produced as a byproduct of copper smelting. Nobody mines tellurium directly at present. So there may be a supply problem if demand increases substantially.

oops!! mea culpa! That site is rather preposterous, sorry! I merely looked for a site showing an isotope separation facility and didn't read the rest of the site. Here is something right more respectable I think.

http://www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av/

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has come up with a proof of concept nanotech conveyor belt. When an electrical current is applied, a carbon nanotube acts as a conveyor with Iridium atoms. They are moved up and down the tube without losing a single one. Read more here.

A step closure to that assembler. :D

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has come up with a proof of concept nanotech conveyor belt. When an electrical current is applied, a carbon nanotube acts as a conveyor with Iridium atoms. They are moved up and down the tube without losing a single one. Read more here.

A step closure to that assembler. :D

[ancient Greeks] calculated the distance between Earth and the Moon within +- 10 meters using trigonometry on shadows.

Aren't magnets used to produce enriched uranium? What more proof do we need?
:)

The interconnect is exactly what I was pointing at. The Cray interconnect isn't any faster then the cross connect fabrics used by other applications like the G5 supercluster. Those Infiband switches have the same bandwidth (96GB/s) and nearly the same latency (8.1 microseconds for the Cray vs 4.5-10 microseconds for the Infiband switches and are considerably cheaper! The fact is comodity systems have caught up with Cray and their solution is looking expensive and less scalable.

I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like he's doing forward ray-tracing on the whole scene. Conventional ray-tracing traces the light rays backwards, i.e from the camera/eye out into the scene and finally back to the light(s). The only problem is that it doesn't really do caustics or diffuse lighting well. POVray faked caustics in version 3 (IIRC), and Radiance has done excellent diffuse lighting using a monte-carlo simulation for about a decade. In recent years photon maps have also developed. These apply forward ray-tracing to selected areas, usually selected refractive and reflective surfaces. The impact points for the photons are recorded and then used in a regular renderer (either scan-line or ray-tracer) as an additional source of light.

Again, it sounds like this guy wants to do this to the whole scene, and to a very high degree of precision. I'm not sure why. Any decent ray-tracer would get a 99% solution in a fraction of the time. Hell, in good hands even scan-line renderers can get a 90% solution even quicker, just look at all the motion-picture visual effects (and whole movies) rendered with Pixar PRman. Most effects don't even need a good ray-tracer to look realistic to most people. Unless he's rendering something more interesting than shiny balls and a mirror, or going to do something interesting with the trillions of photons (near-real-time camera-independent renders?), I really don't see the point. It's still kinda interesting though, if only because of the scale of the work. It might lead somewhere, you just never know.

Another big impact for these lasers on science is that there is no heat transfer from laser to a meterial being analyzed. Of course, being a laser, it can also be used in all sorts of machining or surgical procedures, and the low heat dissipation is an added benefit.

"It takes alkynes to make a world"

It's clear from comments in multiple threads that misconceptions abound about open access and the "author pays" model for funding scientific publication. As a founder of Public Library of Science, a SF-based non-profit open access publisher, I would like to respond to these collective comments.

The biggest misconception is that the shift to open access is about a shift from "reader pays" to "author pays". While it may be easy to explain the difference between the two systems that way, the reality is that in either system, the money comes from the same place - the funding agenencies, universities and other research institutions that sponsor scientific research. In the current system they pay indirectly by providing acquisition funds to libraries, covering personal subscriptions in grants, and paying page charges for many journals. Under open access they would pay directly.

So the real question is not WHO pays, but rather how should these organizations pay publishers for the valuable services they provide? Should they use an outdated system in which an invaluable public resource - the published scientific and medical literature - becomes the exclusive private property of publishers and in which huge numbers of people are needlessly denied access to the latest scientific and medical knowledge? Or should they use a system that pays publishers a fair price for the services they provide, but where the finished product is freely available to all?

Evoking images of starving graduate students reaching into their own wallets to pay a greedy publisher for the right to publish the results of their many years labors misses the point completely, because these students will benefit tremendously from open access - not only because they will have something very few of them have today - comprehensive access to the literature that impinges upon their work - but also because the information will be far more useful once it is freed from the artificial barriers that make it difficult to search (very little of this literature is currently indexed in google) or use in other ways.

We obviously have to make sure that authors who do not have access to funds to cover publication costs are still able to publish their work. But this is not that difficult. Consider a scientist at a poor university in a developing country for whom a $1,500 publication charge would be a true hardship. If they publish their work in a fee-for-access journal - e.g. Nature - the global scientific community subsidizes this publication through their subscriptions to Nature. They do this willingly, because they want to read what this scientist has to say. This desire and willingness to subsidize their publication costs won't go away with a switch to open access. Open access journals like PLoS Biology already waive publication costs for authors who can not afford them, and we fully expect to be able to do this in perpetuity.

What's more, most of the scientists who can not afford to pay the costs of publishing in open access journals work at institutions that can not afford subscriptions to very many journals. Today, such authors end up in the absurd position of publishing in journals that they can not read! Those concerned about the lack of egalitarianism in publishing should be far more concerned about the tremendous and worsening imbalance in access to the published literature. Open access fixes this immediately!

Finally, some have expressed the concern that open access will degrade the quality of scientific journals by providing publishers with an economic incentive to lower their standards and publish papers simply to collect a publication fee. While there may indeed be journals that adopt such a strategy, potential authors will quickly realize this, and will be reluctant to publish their work in a journal with such a reputation. Any journal with an interest in attracting the best papers has to maintain an appropriately high standard no matter what their econonmic model.

Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
University of California Berkeley

Co-Founder, Public Library of Science

Yeah, that would suck for all those people living under the earth's crust.

PS: Ca-48 half-life 6e+18 y abundance 0.1874%

Feel free to contribute your "codes" into a contribution system(PDF whitepaper).

There are more resource on an "open source" microgrid. In this system, you will get more than a name mentioned in the credit section.

Feel free to contribute your "codes" into a contribution system(PDF whitepaper).

There are more resource on an "open source" microgrid. In this system, you will get more than a name mentioned in the credit section.

Ya ya, I'm being silly.

You're being silly, but the tin-foil hat crowd is going to have a field day with this baby. Consider the links that they'll find to their planet-killing Nemesis object:

* Highly eccentric orbit with a period ~10k years. They'll make up a mass extinction event to match the planetoid's period, you watch.

* According to this article, Sedna is the reddest object found in the solar system except for Mars. Watch the Nemesisians find deep significance in this fact -- we could start a pool to guess when they start calling it "blood red".

* In the "just enough facts to be dangerous" department, they'll point out that its size can't be determined directly -- that it depends on assumptions about the planet's albedo. If it's darker than expected, then it'll be bigger than expected. Ergo, the scientists are conspiring (as usual) to make it smaller than Pluto. Their "scientific" conclusion: it's the brown dwarf companion to Sol that they've been predicting all along.

Interestingly (to me at least), I submitted this story as soon as I saw it... and it was rejected almost as quickly. I suspect the editors were looking for a submission without tinfoil hat references -- a laudable goal. But even if we Slashdotters are gathered to discuss the real science, our less-informed Internet brethren haven't had much to talk about since the Martians quit shooting down spacecraft...

• 98.90 % C-12
• 1.10 % C-13

If this has turned into a bitch-fest, I apologize, as that was not my intent. With any teacher that I respect, you would be absolutely right. But this one was... different.

It sounds like it's destined to come back down but why should we just splash it down in the ocean somewhere? To bring it down the current plan is to send a U.S. $300 million space tug that would launch on a Delta2, grab Hubble and trash the telescope into the Pacific. But if they're going to go to all the trouble of sending up a Delta2 why not send up a payload that could bring the Hubble back in one piece so it could go on display? Maybe wrap it in an aerogel blanket and outfit with some parachutes. And then gently bring it back down. Then have it on display at the West Coast Smithsonian. This would be a much more suitble fate to a telescope that has done so much to bring space back to Earth and turned a lot of people on to all the amazing things the lie out there.

Actually, every message Sagan claimed was "hidden" in the value of pi is in fact there... since the digits of pi are apparently an infinite, random sequence.

Somewhere in the binary digits of pi is the sequence encoding for every book ever published (including the copyrighted ones), every CD or DVD ever pressed (again, including the copyrighted ones), indeed, every valid DVD encoding, including the one that portrays your life story, except that you're always drawn as a Krazy Kat-style cartoon character...

Given that the research that page cites was retracted and that the rest of the site reads like an X-Files fanfiction:

"The described disc was clearly an antigravity levitating aerial weapons platform in the U.S. arsenal, possibly a Lockheed X-22A two-man discoid craft, the real DarkStar, (of which the unmanned drone X-22 DarkStar is a front "cover" aircraft program to disguise this manned antigravity fighter disc.) Further, it appears that the real DarkStar manned discs come equipped with the latest Neutral Particle Beam weapons, which take apart the target at the molecular level. ET craft do not incinerate humans. Only human military fighters are so deployed. So this report does not deal with any extraterrestrial event."

I would be more than a little suspicious of anything you read there.

See also the other reply discussing the movie-promotion aspect of the story.

I would ignore moving from medicine to computers right now, for reasons I'm sure other posters will mention in detail.

The next big technological revolution will be synthetic biology, harnessing the power of organic processes in the same fashion that computers harnessed the power of inorganic logic circuits.

Especially if you already have done classes in organic chemistry, human enzyme pathways, and genetics, you have the base to begin to move into this evolving industry. The first large international conference on synthetic biology will occur in June at MIT.

Aerogel anyone?

Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.

9/11 deaths: 3,000.
Chernobyl deaths: 44.

I'm not sure where you get the 44 deaths from but the long term death toll is likely to be much higher. I'm not sure what the most accepted figure is but 44 isn't even close. This page, for example, suggests 47 000. Unless someone can provide links to a more definitive study, I think one order of magnitude higher than 9/11 is about right.

If they can find a way to make this cheapely the aerogel window could revolutionyse insulation technology and save billions.

Here are a bunch more pictures of aerogels in various experiments, including pictures of magnetic and photoluminescent areogels.

Here's a link.

Assuming you have the right autoclave. Go here for some recepies.

Silicon dioxide is actually very common. Actually it's a form of quartz. Unless I am mistaken it's the same stuff they put in the little white packet that comes with your hard disk to keep condensation from forming in the antistatic bag...

Regardless, the cost of Aerogel is in its manufacture, not its ingredients. Aerogel is actually just a crystalline structure that forms when SiO2 molecules are suspended in ethanol. The trick is figuring out how to get the ethanol out and replace it with air after the lattices form. This process is called supercritical drying and involves pushing liquid CO2 though the structure at very high pressures. Actually the entire process of how to make the stuff can be found here. It's suprisingly simple. Besides the supercritical drying bit, it seems almost like something you could make yourself.

Some awesome pictures;
"The Flower"
"Six Aerogel Nanocomposites"
"Magnetic Aerogel"
"Photoluminescent Silicon on Silica"
"Carbon Nanostructure in Aerogel"

General Info / Main

Some awesome pictures;
"The Flower"
"Six Aerogel Nanocomposites"
"Magnetic Aerogel"
"Photoluminescent Silicon on Silica"
"Carbon Nanostructure in Aerogel"

General Info / Main

Some awesome pictures;
"The Flower"
"Six Aerogel Nanocomposites"
"Magnetic Aerogel"
"Photoluminescent Silicon on Silica"
"Carbon Nanostructure in Aerogel"

General Info / Main

Some awesome pictures;
"The Flower"
"Six Aerogel Nanocomposites"
"Magnetic Aerogel"
"Photoluminescent Silicon on Silica"
"Carbon Nanostructure in Aerogel"

General Info / Main

Some awesome pictures;
"The Flower"
"Six Aerogel Nanocomposites"
"Magnetic Aerogel"
"Photoluminescent Silicon on Silica"
"Carbon Nanostructure in Aerogel"

General Info / Main

Some awesome pictures;
"The Flower"
"Six Aerogel Nanocomposites"
"Magnetic Aerogel"
"Photoluminescent Silicon on Silica"
"Carbon Nanostructure in Aerogel"

General Info / Main

"Researchers at the University of New Mexico, lead by C. Jeff Brinker and Doug Smith, and at other institutions have become increasingly successful at eliminating the supercritical drying step used in aerogel production by chemically modifying the surface of the gel prior to drying. This work lead to the founding of Nanopore to commercialize lower-cost aerogels." ...

A few years later, Kistler left the College of the Pacific and took a position with Monsanto Corp. Shortly thereafter, Monsanto began marketing a product known simply as "aerogel". Monsanto's Aerogel was a granular silica material. Little is known about the processing conditions used to make this material, but it is assumed that its production followed Kistler's procedures. Monsanto's Aerogel was used as an additive or a thixotropic agent in cosmetics and toothpastes. Very little new work on aerogels occurred throughout the next three decades. Eventually, in the 1960s, the development of inexpensive "fumed" silica undercut the market for aerogel, and Monsanto ceased production.
--- source

Heat islands are areas which are hotter than their surroundings because they absorb and hold heat better; for instance, asphalt absorbs more heat than vegetation, and retains and re-radiates that heat for hours even after the sun goes down. Heat islands can (and do) change local thermometer readings completely independent of any regional or global climate effect.

Here is a good intro to heat islands. The home page has pointers to other data, such as causes and remedial measures. And yes, this was all on the first page of a Google search for "heat island".

Heat islands are areas which are hotter than their surroundings because they absorb and hold heat better; for instance, asphalt absorbs more heat than vegetation, and retains and re-radiates that heat for hours even after the sun goes down. Heat islands can (and do) change local thermometer readings completely independent of any regional or global climate effect.

Here is a good intro to heat islands. The home page has pointers to other data, such as causes and remedial measures. And yes, this was all on the first page of a Google search for "heat island".

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...