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For a skeptic you don't put a lot of effort into research:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/global-cooling-was-a-myth.html

Based on the relativity theory though, humans are pretty much earthbound, Mars at best. 1 light year = guess what?

To achieve anything significant in the universe, it's pretty obvious it needs to be broken.

All of our theories, laws and measurements are earth based and earth bound.

Now Einstein's theory is probably 100% on planet earth in our current physics model, but I'ma laugh if you say it applies to a place in space thousands of light years away. It very well may, but neither you nor I can prove that, and pixelated images from a space telescope aren't going to reverse that chain of thinking.

Also Einstein wasn't aware of the physics picture we have going on right now with quantum mechanics and subatomic particles.

I think the goal is to ultimately evolve our physics model to compensate for new discoveries and hopefully utilize them.

Also, in regards to not knowing what your talking about...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html

there's some food for thought in regards to shit nobody knows what they're talking about... including... YOU!

Lastly, there's a more than a few links on this from various places...

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/would-einsteins-theory-of-relativity-be-proved-false/187145-11.html

It's all speculation at this point, I'm certainly not saying it's going to be broken by a long shot, but as I stated at the top, it needs to be to coincide with all those sci-fi movies and keeping an open mind never hurt anyone.

I'd take a one size fits all cure for cancer before this shit though.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/01/kinect-used-to-create-holograp.html

I read the last part of that URL as "Kinect used to create holocrap", which actually does make some sense!

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/01/kinect-used-to-create-holograp.html

The wear and tear on the body is such that even if you can increase the lifespan to a theoretical 150 years you wouldnt be very healthy for the last 90 or so years. You also need something that adresses the wear on the body. Our hearts arent made for 150 years of use and we build up various plaques and toxins in our bodies as time goes by. Even if we all lived under controlled and ideal circumstances the last seven decades would be pretty much seven decades of being eighty.

Actually, there's some research that strongly suggests that there's only a finite amount of aging going on. What's happening in aging might not be "the body's self repair process falls behind entropy", as commonly thought. Instead, aging would be "the same tradeoffs which favor reproductive success in youth exact a cost later in life"; after some finite time, you've paid those costs in full and aging stops, leaving only a constant risk of disability and death per year instead of the ever-growing one postulated by the "falling behind on entropy" model. In this view, there are still some specific things that actually do wear out with age because they aren't constantly replaced (tooth decay and cornea clouding / cataracts are the obvious ones), but general health doesn't suffer the same fate.

See New Scientist's The end of ageing: Why life begins at 90 (behind a paywall, sadly), which references a demographic study where annual mortality rates became constant above age 93 (Greenwood and Irwin, Human Biology, 1939), a study confirming the same pattern in fruit fly populations (Carey and Curtsinger, Science vol. 258 p. 457 and p. 461, 1992), and an exploration of a mathematical model of mutation which concluded that a mortality plateau is inevitable, not a mere special case (Rose and Mueller; PNAS vol. 93 pp. 15249-15253, 1996). (Of note: Rose is the author of the New Scientist article, with all the confirmation bias that implies.)

Also, the research into aging suggests there are only a handful systemic problems that actually cause it (accumulation of crosslinked proteins; declining telomerase production causing cells to stop dividing; etc.), and if those systemic problems were addressed we could largely arrest the aging process. Aubrey de Gray's TED talk is pretty much mandatory viewing on that front.

It's worth keeping in mind that if metabolism and entropy inevitably led to cell death after 100 years, then human beings as a species would have already died out: sperm and egg cells are metabolically active cells that contain DNA that's millions of years old, and there's no time machine that allows a pristine copy of the germline DNA to be copied forward from conception to adulthood without at least a childhood's worth of accumulated error. Likewise for our mitochondria, pseudo-cells that they are, with their own mtDNA separate from the DNA of the nucleus, exposed to the entropic ravages of the Krebs cycle firsthand without a nuclear membrane to protect it; our bodies pass these pseudo-cells on from mother to child unchanged, without even giving their mtDNA a de-methylation/re-methylation spring cleaning like mammalian nuclear DNA receives. But they thrive in the germ cell line, generation after generation, even as they suffer and decline in the somatic cell lines. There must be a difference in upkeep, some cost that evolution is willing to pay for the germline but unwilling for the somatic lines, that allows the germline mitochondria to remain healthy and "young" for millions of years.

Patent the wheel?

Already been done

There's been a case where they suspect the guy died from an overdose:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/09/how-chilis-can-kill.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1063598/Aspiring-chef-dies-hours-making-ultra-hot-sauce-chilli-eating-contest.html

From what I understand the guy had eaten chilis before with no problems.

Maybe he was allergic to something else. Or was unlucky to suddenly become allergic to chillis.

If neutrinos were faster than c, the neutrinos from SN1987A would have arrived "five years sooner," while they were measured arriving "3 hours before the dying star's light caught up" as expected...

You are making the assumption that the neutrinos from SN1987A were excited to the same or higher energy level by the supernova that the LHC neutrinos were excited to. My bet is this assumption is false.

If neutrinos were faster than c, the neutrinos from SN1987A would have arrived "five years sooner," while they were measured arriving "3 hours before the dying star's light caught up" as expected...

GPS does a lot more than you might think. Jamming the signal has the likelyhood of causing all the ATMs to stop functioning. So nobody can get any money.

An article that was on slashdot previously.

IT WAS just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning. At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused. Problems persisted for another 2 hours.

It took three days to find an explanation for this mysterious event in January 2007. Two navy ships in the San Diego harbour had been conducting a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites across a swathe of the city.

1. This is supposedly empirical formula - it offers no insight.
2. I see no explanation what that (i) stands for (gamma_i in original)

Others have supposedly mixed oil and water,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3408-oil-and-water-do-mix-after-all.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3408-oil-and-water-do-mix-after-all.html

Old news -- maybe you youngsters can't remember:

yes they do

1. In the 70's it was global cooling. In the 80's it was the ozone.

The "Global Cooling" meme that came about in the 70's was drastically overstated by the press. Peer review showed the fault in Global Cooling theory very shortly after Time and Newsweek ran with the story. If you look at the climate research of the 60s and 70s, you'll see that papers predicting warming outnumbered cooling by nearly 7 to 1. (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s.html. Ozone depletion was actually acted upon by outlawing certain CFCs and refrigerants. What a surprise! Ozone levels started stabilizing in the years that followed.

2. Assuming climate change is occurring, and assuming it's man-made, why is it really all that bad? Yes, change always has some short-term negative consequences, but long term, isn't a warmer earth better than a cooler earth? For instance, there's a lot of land at high latitudes that could become arable if it were just a little warmer. Don't just tell me all the negatives. Acknowledge that there are positives, but convince me that the negatives outweigh the positives.

We may see far northern and southern regions becoming arable. But at the cost of losing the current world "breadbaskets". That means famine and drought; at least until the world's farms have time to relocate. We've seen clearly how people are willing to go to war over Oil. How do you think they'll respond when the resource in question is food and water? Large scale famine is never a good thing. War, despotism, and genocide always follow in its wake. Sorry, I won't take that bet.

3. What is the cost of trying to counter global warming? Sure, if we had infinite resources, most people would agree that we should throw some of them at the problem. But if the "solution" means putting more regulations on businesses in the middle of a recession which add costs that otherwise could go to employment or expansion, spending money that we don't have and adding even more to a debt that already puts the nation on the verge of bankruptcy, isn't the cure worse than the disease?

Is there a cost? Absolutely. But if you prefer, look at it as an investment. There is a truth here: alternative energy will someday power the world. Europe, Asia, and parts of South America are already putting their research and manufacturing capabilities to this task. Who do you want leading this initiative (and pocketing the revenue)? Germany? India? ... China? Personally, I'd like to see the the bleeding edge research done by American universities, design done by American engineers and entrepreneurs, manufacturing done by American factories with the social and economic benefits shared by American businesses, shareholders, and laborers.

But that's just my opinion.

High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents. "Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.

Source, 2007.

Here is a little research into the subject that backs me up. As I said, it's not as simple as you'd like it to be.

Considering that the distance between 2 or more synchronized antennae becomes part of the radio telescope itself, the RadioAstron gives me chills just thinking about it, some astonishing science should come out of this bad boy.

September 16th, 1995 - Death of the Personal Computer?

After more than 15 years of predicting the death of the PC and being wrong, I see we've moved on to predicting the death of PC related retailers. I greet this new line of reasoning with similar skepticism.

I'm at work, so I can't look up the axriv paper, but New Scientist goes over it pretty well in layman's terms.

I'm subscribed and read science magazines/books, and the topics/articles I enjoy the most are the ones at the edge of human knowledge, those unlikely to have any commercial values. Have you been drinking grapefruit juice again?

Here's a map. Both the Australian and Eurasian waves mated with the Neanderthals in the Middle East. Australians and Melanesians (1st and 2nd wave) also mated with the Denisovans in Borneo. I wonder how they pinned the place down so precisely -- Denisovans lived all over South East Asia.

Similar hypotheses have been suggested based on genetic evidence which suggested that humans and neanderthals interbred. See http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/may/first-genetic-code-of-neanderthal-reveals-inbreeding66724.html. In both cases, the work has been done by Chris Stringer who seems to focus a lot on this hypothesis. Stringer is a very respected anthropologist who was responsible for formulating a lot of the now accepted ideas about how homonids spread from Africa in successive waves of migrations.

In addition to that, we know that the ancestors of the Melanesian population interbred with the Denisovan hominids. To add more interesting stuff to the cauldron, it appears that the Neanderthals not only interbred with H. Sapiens but with the Denisovans as well. Stone-age interspecial threesome man!

Speciation has been observed, but I'll concede the point that it hasn't been observed in dinosaurs .

No modpoints left, so I just wanted to thank you for this one. It's pure gold :)

>> And Evolution is still a theory because fossil can only prove a species existed not that it turned into another. That can't be proven empirically.

Gravity is still a theory, too.

Speciation has been observed, but I'll concede the point that it hasn't been observed in dinosaurs.

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/04/robot-rights.html
""If artificial intelligence is achieved and widely deployed (or if they can reproduce and improve themselves) calls may be made for human rights to be extended to robots," the report says. Warming to its theme, it goes on to say that such rights "would likely include" social responsibilities such as voting and paying taxes."

Also:
http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/TheRightsofRobots.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece

So, yes, your comment on "slavery" is very insightful.

By the way, more on this topic: http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2007/07/renewable-energy-bad-nuclear-power-good.html

"No mention of how strong a magnet."
You win a prize for asking the correct question.

It is a TMS. so we are talking about a MRI level magnetic fields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation

here is a slightly better article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128284.400-powerful-magnets-hamper-our-ability-to-lie.html

It's not dead, initial results from the LHC are inconsistent with the simplest model of SUSY, but do not yet rule out other models which have higher energies for s-particles.

The point that is often made is that a single volcanic eruption absolutely dwarfs mans CO2 emissions such that they become irrelevant.

That is not factually true.

Volcanic eruptions can enhance global warming by adding CO2 to the atmosphere. However, a far greater amount of CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by human activities each year than by volcanic eruptions. T.M.Gerlach (1991, American Geophysical Union) notes that human-made CO2 exceeds the estimated global release of CO2 from volcanoes by at least 150 times.

According to the USGS, volcanic eruptions emit 130 M ton of CO2. According to newscientist, human CO2 emissions are in the 26.4 G ton range in 2007.

They are looking for Radon gas on Mars. They are doing it to detect water but there is a better use. Radon detection is used to find Uranium. It is kind of the hard way of doing it but... If there are deposits of Uranium on Mars this would stifle the doom sayers that believe shielded containers of radioactive material (that have been used for years to send radioactive material into space) are not safe.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3968-radon-leaks-could-reveal-water-on-mars.html

http://www.earthexplorer.com/2009-11/Detecting_Deeper_Deposits_of_Uranium.asp

This is not just putting a cable in orbit. Consider a long list of stability problems inherent to any project of this type. Everything from Harmonic vibration, to Coriolis effect, to shear from solar winds and complex interactions with the ionosphere. It might take a month to lift a cable car safely. Okay for raw materials, not so great for people or perishables.

Also imagine you have a 45,000 mile long antenna that extends out into the solar wind. Can you imagine the kind of voltages and currents that this thing will induce? The mind boggles.At its base you would need huge superconductors to draw charge off the cable to allow it to function at all. Of course there would be the up side in that it would generate enough power to operate itself and a fair part of the country the base was located in, It would just be an incredibly expensive and challenging endeavor.

None if this is to say we shouldn't pursue this end, it would transform what was possible for humanity. Just don't have illusions to how difficult, or complicated this undertaking would be. It would demand our best and brightest working for decades.

Verizon does NOT use Paxfire to redirect search requests through proxies.

The full list of ISPs we've observed doing this proxying is Here.

You'd be very popular in these places, all of which could produce more food on their own if government was not taxing and subsidizing and regulating food in the world:

Swaziland: HIV patients 'eat dung to make drugs work'

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/out_of_food_zimbabweans_eating_cow_dung/

Food Prices Fuel Egypt Unrest

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence

Food price jumps protested in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco

Egypt and Tunisia: rocked by the global food crisis

Hunger in Syria, Libya and Yemen

Ukraine to control food prices

Rising food prices increase squeeze on poor - Oxfam

As Food Prices Spike, Azerbaijanis Endure Border Chaos To Shop In Iran

For dummies: The impact of the global food crisis on Azerbaijan - in pictures

Estonia Raises Inflation Forecast on Global Food and Fuel Prices

Nigeria: food price up as inflationary rate drop

High food prices 'caused Niger hunger'

Mexico: Food prices reach record high

China's food price inflation hits 14.4% in June

Lithuania and Latvia catching up with Estonia

Food prices rise, wages donâ(TM)t

China food prices spike as floods ruin farmland

Brazil: Food Prices Surge and Head Toward Dangerous Levels

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Stockpiling as Russian food prices soar

Food prices have soared most in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina

Thousands protest against high food prices in Delhi

India: A spike in food prices is especially painful for the poor

I bet it would get pretty personal for you if you came to these places and started spouting your socialist views on how cheap food is that your government is subsidizing farmers and then paying farmers to destroy it

Swaziland: HIV patients 'eat dung to make drugs work'

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/out_of_food_zimbabweans_eating_cow_dung/

Food Prices Fuel Egypt Unrest

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence

Food price jumps protested in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco

Egypt and Tunisia: rocked by the global food crisis

Hunger in Syria, Libya and Yemen

Ukraine to control food prices

Rising food prices increase squeeze on poor - Oxfam

As Food Prices Spike, Azerbaijanis Endure Border Chaos To Shop In Iran

For dummies: The impact of the global food crisis on Azerbaijan - in pictures

Estonia Raises Inflation Forecast on Global Food and Fuel Prices

Nigeria: food price up as inflationary rate drop

High food prices 'caused Niger hunger'

Mexico: Food prices reach record high

China's food price inflation hits 14.4% in June

Lithuania and Latvia catching up with Estonia

Food prices rise, wages donâ(TM)t

China food prices spike as floods ruin farmland

Brazil: Food Prices Surge and Head Toward Dangerous Levels

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Stockpiling as Russian food prices soar

Food prices have soared most in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina

Thousands protest against high food prices in Delhi

India: A spike in food prices is especiall

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers.html
I'm curious what you thought the relation was.

Nobody actually cares about HD, even if they think they do, except a few geeks and a lot of MPAA profit-center members. People have been taught through very careful advertising that the way to distinguish HD from other things is to look for the letters "HD" and that seven twenty of your Peas is vastly inferior to ten eighty of real HD. If you were to tell the average viewer that the difference between DVD and VHS is that DVD is HD, they would probably agree. There are a million stories like this.

Personally even on my decent 42 inch 1080p display I prefer non-HD streams because HD looks weird. I prefer for the background to be a soft blur instead of a crisp detail of unimportant shit that takes my attention away from the action. In video games, for some reason I don't have this problem and really enjoy the enhanced resolution.

I think patent law says anything can be patented with only the most cursory of oversight.

eg, the austrlian man who patented the wheel. Apparently there have been 30,000 patents granted by the US office concerning slight improvements on the wheel.

More details and video here

Try Nature and Science to start.

Or one can always go to New Scientist. You won't find anything in great depth there, but you will find starting points to look up and find good and recent research.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

I've thrown all the feeds from each of these sites into Google Reader. In no particular order:

wired.com
slashdot.org
spectrum.ieee.org
scientistscanvas.com
arxiv.org
techcrunch.com
techdirt.com
news.discovery.com
physicsworld.com
newscientist.com
physorg.com
nationalgeographic.com
scienceblog.com

I have plenty more. Any RSS feeder app works. You get some repeats but there's a constant stream of science news.

.
Some sites that are helpful:

Science News

Science Daily

New Scientist

This is the best website for science news for reasonably educated but not specialized people: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Science News has a website - http://www.sciencenews.org/ and a weekly magazine which are always good, if overly sober, though the magazine doesn't have near enough content to cover everything that happened that week.

New Scientist is a weekly mag that has drifted towards Omni or PopSci lately ('IS SENSATIONAL THING TRUE? (...no)'), but will still keep you up to date on most happenings including things you might miss online. http://www.newscientist.com/

Scientific American is a monthly mag that's a bit too political but has some good articles: http://www.scientificamerican.com/

Then there's Discover Magazine, which is a step down from either but has some good blogs: http://discovermagazine.com/

Live Science is a further step down, a good site for training wheel science: http://www.livescience.com/

I won't recommend the mag Science, because even though it's The Magazine, it's not suited for the dabbler.

My balanced suggestion is add the news feeds for all of these to your RSS reader (like Google Reader), click on what looks interesting, and subscribe to New Scientist in print or on Zinio and read it every week.

Their news feed is a good start. http://feeds.newscientist.com/science-news

Beat me to it. Of course there's also the New Scientist website.

Sorry but there are none now, early in the formation of the earth-moon system there would have been debris, but after a billion years would be either ejected or become part of earth or moon.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13836-did-earth-once-have-multiple-moons.html

Funny that third stage of Apollo 12 was found orbiting as moon.

Don't be dumb; there's an infinite number of molecules out there that can be made from the elements on the periodic table. For instance, carbon nanotubes have only been discovered relatively recently, and have all kinds of interesting and useful properties, yet carbon the element has been known since ancient times, and is probably one of the first elements named and understood by scientists when they first invented chemistry. More recently, it's been discovered that you can make nanotubes with boron and boron nitride, which have very different properties from the carbon variety (BN tubes are insulators, whereas carbon tubes are conductors).

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13143-boron-nanotubes-could-outperform-carbon.html

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's an untold number of "metamaterials" out there waiting to be discovered, things which don't occur in nature in any significant quantity, have all kinds of amazing properties, and are made from simple elements that we've known about for ages (boron and nitrogen aren't exactly new discoveries).

Your maths is quite a bit off.

We have only 3 primary color channels (4 if you count rods separately, 5 if also counting tetrachromats), not "65000". We can't see 1 million different intensities simultaneously either -- while the human eye does have an enormous dynamic range, this adaptation takes a while (minutes). At any one time, we can see maybe 300-1000 distinct intensity levels per color channel. This only requires 10 bits to represent per channel. Even your 125 Mpixels is an exaggeration, because we have roughly 125 million sensor cells total, not 125 per color channel!

This then works out to 125*10^6 cells * 10 bits * 30 Hz = 38 Gbps, which is a lot, but is almost 7 orders of magnitude less than your estimate!

In practice, even 38 Gbps is overestimating things substantially -- the cells in the retina have a trade-off between temporal resolution ('framerate') and dynamic range, so we can't simultaneously get 10 bits of intensity detail and 30 Hz of temporal resolution. Additionally, the image on the retina isn't focused very well, reducing the actual image detail quite a bit, especially near the edge of our field of view.

Whatever the real raw bandwidth is, the optic nerve transmits only about 8.75 Mbps per eye!

We could also use sugar beets and get better results than using corn, but the beet people don't have as powerful of a lobby as the corn people do. Personally I would like to see biomass to gasoline or diesel as it doesn't require special bacteria or enzymes. You can use switch grass as input or any other carbon based material. Bio gasoline or diesel also can be transported using conventional pipelines and doesn't result in the massive drop in mileage that alcohol fuels do. Finally ethanol does carry some baggage with it that may be worse than that from gasoline or diesel according to this article from the New Scientist.

Actually, what they (Church and Jacobsen) are proposing, long term, is to create bacteria/cells/whatever that use a different DNA coding -- meaning they wouldn't be able to exchange DNA with anything that uses "natural" DNA coding, meaning anything already alive, even viruses. Basically a built-in firewall to prevent cross-contamination in either direction. Pretty ingenious, really. If you look at the "Changing the genetic code" diagram here you'll get the idea. Of course, I suspect we'd find that we'd soon get new viruses that also used this new coding, and contaminated these new cell lines.