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The original article, which both MSNBC and Yahoo linked to when reposting it on their sites, was on LiveScience.com.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/051021_nano_ light.html

This article has an image of the new bulb.

One of the links after the article:

The smallest fridge
http://www.livescience.com/imageoftheday/siod_0504 27.html

from dictionary.com 5. Archaic. A chariot, carriage, or cart. I think this qualifies, although maybe on a technicality. Surely if you put the worlds smallest motor on it, you'd have the worlds smallest motor car. I think that it's not as sensasionalist as you make out.

Humbled? More like excited this stuff is actually coming true! Even more excited after reading the world's smallest refridgerator article. I bet I can get my aging XP2200+ up to a good 10Ghz with that thing. Extreme overclocking, here I come!

So now we have the world's smallest car, which could be driven by the world's smallest robot. What happens if we put the world's smallest motor in the car? Maybe he could use it to transport the world's smallest refrigerator, and write about his adventures with the world's smallest fountain pen.
It's a small world after all.

So now we have the world's smallest car, which could be driven by the world's smallest robot. What happens if we put the world's smallest motor in the car? Maybe he could use it to transport the world's smallest refrigerator, and write about his adventures with the world's smallest fountain pen.
It's a small world after all.

So now we have the world's smallest car, which could be driven by the world's smallest robot. What happens if we put the world's smallest motor in the car? Maybe he could use it to transport the world's smallest refrigerator, and write about his adventures with the world's smallest fountain pen.
It's a small world after all.

So now we have the world's smallest car, which could be driven by the world's smallest robot. What happens if we put the world's smallest motor in the car? Maybe he could use it to transport the world's smallest refrigerator, and write about his adventures with the world's smallest fountain pen.
It's a small world after all.

So now we have the world's smallest car, which could be driven by the world's smallest robot. What happens if we put the world's smallest motor in the car? Maybe he could use it to transport the world's smallest refrigerator, and write about his adventures with the world's smallest fountain pen.
It's a small world after all.

Those models do not "predict" global warming. They show a trend towards warming with an increase in atmospheric CO2. However to call these models "the most accurate" is quite a stretch. I ask you to look into the quality of these models and ask simple questions, such as, "do you accurately model the largest heat sink on the planet, or are your oceans just a thin slab of water that is basically a rigidly driven model that doesn't adjust to changes realistically." Ask if they solve their fluid model for all variables, or do they just solve for two of the three (pressure and temperature, but not volume). I can go on for hours about how completely inaccurate these models are.

But I don't have to. The models show that CO2 causes an increase because the modelers set up the model so that CO2 holds more heat in the model. Good golly, what a shock.

On the other hand, we have data that all of the inner planets are now heating up. The Twin MER rover teams were shocked at how warm the Martian winter was this year on Mars. They never expected their rovers to make it through the winter, yet both survived without a problem. In just the 30 years since the Viking missions, the temperature of Mars has increased substantially. In fact, it's done so by very nearly the exact same percentage as the temperatures seen on Earth. Similar remote measurements of Venus have shown the same increase.

Now, unless you want to claim that Dick Cheney is secretly driving his SUV's on Mars, that means the cause of the rise in temperature must be mainly external. And, oh look, here's a study that's found just that.

Science is hard, Climatology is very hard. We have no hard evidence to support anthropogenic global warming theories. We have computer models. The same people on this list who would scoff at the idea of a computer predicting the weather one week in advance, will accept, without the slightest hesitation, the prediction of a computer 100 years into the future. And, no, don't give me the "it's climate, the little changes disappear into climate" because that's bullshit. It's been disproven time and time again. The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300%. That's not a minor mistake, that's not within one standard deviation, that's a wild-ass guess that was totally wrong.

Trillions of dollars and Millions of lives will be lost if the "we should take action just in case" crowd wins. Some of the best estimates say that cutting CO2 by 50% will cost 1.5 BILLION LIVES by 2100. Are you so eager to pull the trigger?

(The article is appropriately titled -- "Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms")

Well, as I stated, it was just a theory. I wanted to see what thoughts others would come up with. And I succeded: some very useful and interesting facts have been produced.

Re wind turbines: quite easily - They pull energy from wind, therby slowing it, and at least disturbing it. Here's the result of a little googleing: http://www.livescience.com/environment/041109_wind _mills.html

Thank you, to everyone who added details to this thread. You have made for an interesting discussion. Mod up the lot of you!

Hurricane names??!! Why submit a lame story on hurricane names when you could have read about the world's smallest robot?

"offering a range of electronic-age valet services"

I read valet as escort, and escort as call-girl, and call-girl as hooker.

TFA is not loading, but if this looks anything like this recently unveiled robot... come on, it's a sex bot. They always talk about how the robots will cook, clean, watch children and the elderly. But, cut through the BS, and lets be honest. It's a sex bot that everyone is really waiting for. People want a Real Doll that can actually "perform".

Sure, they'll make robots to do everything. But, I don't think I'm being careless in saying that every technilogical advancement had sex as its goal, and as its pioneering breakthrough.

The average person knew about the net not when Amazon founded a virtual bookstore, not when eBay opened an online auction, not when news organizations and research because infinitely easier online... The average person knew about the net when their friends, kids, or spouse started downloading porn.

The average person will not really get into robots, until they can really "get into" robots, if you know what I mean. After all, aren't all of our most expensive toys those which we either can have sex in or which can get us sex? Geeks are not excluded from that statement with their computers. God knows we have enough combined porn on our harddrives to make Seymore Butts look like an amature... and what old school geek didn't have at least one of the original Leasure Suit Larry games.

When robots can have sex, you'll see one in every home. That doesn't mean they'll all be sex bots, but I think sex bots will usher in more acceptance, especially since such bots will ultimately make the key breakthroughs in human interaction. Realistically, sex is the ultimate 1-on-1 test of a robot. I think humans may just not be comfortable with a thing until it can be connected to intimately. I dunno if that's because we instictually have to mark our territory, or because in the end, sex is an ultimate emotional bond. I suppose both statements may be true, especially depending on the sex of the person.

For that matter;

Why would any Democracy want its electronic voting systems on a closed-sourced, unaccountable, private companies software?

I think the answer is that companies can get politicians to NOT act in the best interest of their people. I can understand using Microsoft to some extent because it is in the workplace -- but when you get a highly developed technology infrastructure, shouldn't you have tech grads creating software for the country? I mean, how much resources would it take to adapt an open source word processor that was "good enough" in respects to Word and that would be used by a few million government employees. The costs with these numbers are huge--this is without mentioning the security of the OS.

On the other hand, certain things are better with "off the shelf products." GPS and 3D cards in computers are off-shoots of Al Gore's push to make the military push more of its technology to the economy. Recently the US Military tapped NASCAR Engineers to design a new combat vehicle http://www.livescience.com/technology/050913_milit ary_vehicle.html. There is a lot of savings to using consumer products. Ford makes a lot more vehicles than the military, so they get more economies of scale. It seems the Military always spends 90% of the money to make something 10% better.

So, I'd be hard-pressed to give an absolute answer that would say it makes sense for governments to do all "roll your own" or all "off the shelf" products. The places where it seems the government should be sponsoring creating the technology themselves, is when business has no incentive to make something secure or in making it cheap and efficient. I don't think it is much of a stretch to say that Election credibility and accurate voting are an issue of national security. There is a built in incentive, given the lobbyist and fundraising aspect of our current government model, for corruption. I suppose a government could pay a University $200 Billion to produce a voting kiosk and somehow the machines would constantly re-elect the thoughtful politician who approved funding increases...

So, perhaps what I'm saying is that it isn't whether open or closed is always better -- it's that decisions made by un-corrupted people will usually be better. In this case, nobody was paying this government to make bad decisions, so they went with open source.

We can cover 1.4% of the world's land mass with direct nuclear effects, but urban populations cover about 3%. There are 24,000 cities with populations of 5000 or more. The death toll would be staggering if such a war happened, but it would not mean the end of even human life.

The Earth's magnetic field doesn't flip very often, so there's not much hard evidence what the results will be.

The data I had was fom chats with a geology prof, and is old now. I found this interesting article, just written http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050825_e arthcore.html - not much meat, but new data to me.

Given that the magnetic field is generated by some combination of the spinning inner core and the circulating outer core, if the field is reversing that might indicate that the angular momentum of something in the core is changing. There are various models based on some pretty strange assumptions, and I'm not geologist enough to call BS on any of them. The inner core is likely one large extremely pure crystal - magnetic or not? If the Earths surface magnetic field is reversing, does that mean significant eddy currents in the outer core are shifting? The pole would move if that happened, as the solid mantle and crust are relatively light weight.

In any case, the resaerch in this area isn't hyper-politicized like global warming, so it seems to be moving quickly. Cool stuff.

Wow, you said it much better than I.

Even Live Science can't get it right:

"Charles Darwin's theory of evolution -- that natural selection caused gradual biological changes over time"

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/ap_050901_evo _polls.html

Personally, I love how anti-creationists ignore the scientific consensus of a belief in God.

(Hey you brought consensus up, not me!)

What I find really interesting are these types of statements in light of the fact that two thirds of scientists believe in God. Even in biology (where belief rates are lowest), 59% believe in God!

How about New Scirntist's coverage? Or LiveScience.com?

No bugmenot required, and they're science sites.

Slashdot gets more retarded every day, I swear.

(this post's mind-reading captcha="resorts")

Here's some intersting facts about fossils:

• Dinosaur Fossil Found in a Mammal's Stomach
• Some fragments of DNA were found in supposedly 80 million year-old dinosaur bones. This means that the dinosaur bones are only a couple of thousand years old.
• There is a serious lack of transitional fossils. For evolution to occur, practically every fossil would be transitional. Most of the fossils that have been labeled as transitional are simply varieties of a particular kind of creature.
• Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
• There is no evidence of direct ancestor-descendant relationships.
• The Cambrian explosion happened at the same time all over the world, not in one isolated spot as evolution would suggest.
• We have approximately 250,000 different fossil species to date.
• Sharks have not changed for millions of years.
• Crocodiles have not changed for millions of years.
• Kingdom, Order, Class, Family, Phylum, Genus, Species. It can be shown by the fossil record that all Phylums of mammals existed during or before the Cambrian period.
• The earliest bird fossils to date go back to the Jurasic Period, being approximately 150 million years old.
• Most dinosaur fossils can be carbon dated to around 15,000 BC.
• Other dating methods are based on several assumptions. Here are a few for radioactive dating methods:
  1. The rate of decay of the radioactive material has been constant for billions of years.
  2. The animal has not been altered in any way over time.
  3. We know how much of that radioisotope that the animal had when it died.
• If you have an unknown substance dated in three different labs using the same method, you will get three greatly different results.

That's quite an improvement, seeing as we all already have a roughly 1 in 7 chance of dying of cancer!

Now this from the same source of credible and informative articles.

That's a Japanese scientist in the sidebar with a female robot! So I must ask whether the robot, which does look strikingly human, also has a fully functioning artificial vagina.

The caption to this image:
... The circles represent the position of each spherical particle, and the central color of each circle represents the degree of positional fluctuation of each colloidal particle...
Um, uncertainty principle, anyone? How can you measure velocity and position of a microscopic particle?
Of course I'm kidding. I know that we're talking about above-atomic-size particles here... and that measuring positional fluctuation is not measuring velocity, because velocity includes a direction.

So what! We had one in SF a few weeks back (technically on loan from Davis):
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/corpse_flower _050530.html

But then again, I guess this is a big deal in cow country....

Uh, was I the only one who got the wrong article on the "magnetic pulse gun" link? It should be here.

I believe this link better describes what the Z Machine has to do with rails guns.

George W Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney

These names are already in use by some slime-mold Beetles. Read more here

Okay, firstly, I am not a follower of any major religion, and I have not read the bible, so that is the purpose of this question...

After reading that article, and then reading another article advertised on the same page here I was starting to feel as if i would be surprised if we DIDN'T find evidence of life on mars. Anyway, I was just wondering what remifications such a finding would have on the bible followers. Is there any reference in the bible as to whether life on other planets exists. Almost every scientific discovery is met with religous opposition, so I was wondering if anyone had any opinions from the religous area. Does the bible say anything about life on other planets?

LiveScience report that a new analysis of the December earthquake that caused disastrous tsunami waves to strike Asia and Africa. The report finds it was three times more powerful than earlier measurements suggested. This would make it the second largest earthquake ever instrumentally recorded...

From AQFL.