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Actually, the speed of light has been broken for many years. Light has been sped up to many times the speed of light, and now, electricity has been sped up to 4 billion kph.

Wasn't this about the imminent breakdown of the Internet??? Btb. What would Al Gore think of this?

Blast the thief with a vomit-inducing dose of microwaves. I'm sure there must be a way to build one of those.

How about fly-eating robots? http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96366.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96379

During the height of the invasion of Afghanistan the government used taxpayers' money to buy up all the satellite images from the private, commercial satellite Ikonos. This allowed them to avoid the problems if they had just tried to censor it. Now they're trying to censor it straight out. The argument _then_ was that they needed to censor it to protect troop movements -- a valid argument. However there has been no release of this years old data which would allow us to evaluate whether what we were being told at the time was a lie or not.

And how do you know their ATM's are secure?

An "up close and personal" supernova might have been responsible for the Cambrian-Ordovician mass extinctions and glacial age, some 0.5 billion of years ago. The massive pulse of gamma ray turned the ozone layer into a brown nitrous dioxide layer.

In turn that (A) allowed UV radiation from the sun to cook a lot of organisms. Yes, including those under water. _And_ (B) affected the climate so massively, that the Earth was turned into a cosmic ball of ice for an awfully long time. _And_ (C) must have caused one hell of a nitrous acid rain.

So I'd say you _really_ don't want to see one up close and personal.

Some reading on this topic:

http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/headates /earlier.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/dispatch/story/0,12 978,1053475,00.html

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94198

(On the other hand, _if_ there's a God, you have to give the guy some credit. This is a much more clever way to devastate a planet than just a flood. Very efficient too.)

I knew this sounded familiar. Its even at New Scientist.

Mini nuclear reactor could power apartment blocks

With that said, I don't know how similar these two technologies are. But, smaller reactors seem to be an active area of research.

"Wired reports that the People's Republic of China has announced plans to build 30 new nuclear reactors by the year 2020, and by 2050 have almost as much nuclear power as the entire world produces today."

Not that I would ever question China's resolve on such an undertaking, but this wouldn't be the the first time China has made such a claim. One might even wonder what their political structure will look like in 50 years, let alone suspect the resolve to stay the course they're outlining for this massive project. Not that China would ever tell us something that wasn't true, right?

I think the most interesting thing about this signal is as follows:

...What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. "It just boggles my mind," Korpela... says.
New Scientist

I'm not sure how the act of first observing this signal is able to determine the starting frequency of the observed signal, unless (as already stated somewhere above) there is some kind of artifact resulting from the observation equipment. The article states however that the signal has been observed several different times (and I would assume using different detectors). If this is the case then my tiny mouse like brain can only think of 4 other possible explanations:

(1) Some type of faster than light communication between transmitter and reciever (I think Unlikely)
(2) Elaborate Practical joke (those crazy SETI folk)
(3) Seperate observations starting at the same point in the frequency drift (again unlikely given an oscillation at 37 hertz per second)
(4) Alien Magicological techniques.

I think that this fact coupled with the fact that the signal is at one of the main frequencies that Hydrogen readily absorbs and emits energy, makes this signal particularly interesting.

So they are either (a) covering something real up, or (b) covering up their mistake and thereby making themselves look worse or (c) just really badly botched the PR side of things, which doesn't bode well for anything that might happen legitimately in the future.

Am I the only one who finds it quite normal to make a official statement when a previously announced milestone[1] is reached, no matter what the result is.

Therein saying that nothing was found - only one signal was found at all, and the signal looks strange but doesn't match what one would expect from "ET" (an artificial signal).

And then, when it gets twisted and hyped up, and what else, you take a more conservative stance to avoid any repeated "misunderstanding" and say "nothing special to see here, move along"?

Really, read the original article again. They make quite clear that they didn't found what they are looking for. Just that what they found looks interesting by itself, because they don't have a ready explanation for it.

I think the signal only got mention, because it was the only location left of 200 which got still a signal and so was the only intersting part left to elaborate on. There are only so many words to say "nothing found".

Maybe I am not paranoid enough, but for me that sounds of a standard case of "oh, people misunderstood what we wanted to say, let's stop it before it gets ugly". Or maybe it's because I see such misunderstandings every day due to my job.

[1] Finish of an analysis of an revisit of 200 locations SETI separated out as interesting.

I quoted from this in the last /. topic about this signal - I'd like to hear what he has to say about this article from New Scientist which says:

The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second. What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. "It just boggles my mind," Korpela says.

I can understand they don't want to say there's aliens YET but come on - something weird is there...

In the spirit of the "Wow!" signal, I hereby declare this to be the "wtf?" signal.

Folks, we're not alone any more. Once you get the data file, plot it as a function and get a best-fit polynomial approximation for (it's not terribly complex). Take the second derivative.

Now, notice that there are lots of places where the new graph will almost touch zero (coming within 4% of mean) then reverse direction, but in other places the line continues right across zero like a typical sine curve. Also note that the zero-crossings and near-zero-crossings are at almost regular intervals.

Next, assign an arbitary "zero" to those places where the graph reverses direction suddenly, and "one" to the actual roots. String those zeros and ones together.

Starting at 11.32 seconds into the signal, I got a string of 11 ones then a zero, then 13 ones and a zero, then 17 and a zero, then 19, then 23, then 29, then 31, then 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on until the resolution falls off at about 43.87 seconds.

You heard it here first, Slashdotters. We're not alone anymore! I'm literally trembling while I type this. WE HAVE NEIGHBORS!!!

I'm not sure what the name of the data file meant, but I guess we'll know more when their server comes back online.

BTW #1, why do I want to subscribe to Slashdot (grin)??? This SETI potential-find was first posted on Matt Drudge's website very early this morning with a link to the NewScientist article that was "Drudged" vice Slashdotted almost immediately.

BTW #2, there are actually a bunch of candidate signals

--
I believe the SwiftVets and also ...

I sent in this article - very cool read and makes me wish for FTL travel!

New Scientist is reporting that the signal "also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope...*snip*

...There are other oddities. For instance, the signal's frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. "The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that's rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet," Korpela says.

Palestine, more water to draw on? Check out this New Scientist article (and weep).

for speed of gravity, see Kopeikin et al, on www.arxiv.org (eg. gr-qc/0310065 and references therein); note that there has been criticism of this paper, I can't judge who's right.
But it seems that John Baez is convinced by Kopeikin's result, and I'd trust Baez' word on this.
I don't know of any measurements of the speed of the strong and weak force. This is certainly extremely difficult, since they are short-range interactions (acting within nuclei only, 10^-15m and shorter, see here ).
I'm not aware of any problems with the standard model: the particles mediating the weak interaction (W+,W-,Z) are massive, hence the speed of the weak force should be smaller than c. The force between quarks is mediated by "gluons" which are predicted to be massless, hence the speed shoud be c.

Betting on the greatest unsolved problems in the universe is no longer the preserve of academic superstars such as Stephen Hawking. From Thursday anyone will be able to place bets on whether the biggest physics experiments in the world will come good before 2010.

For two weeks, British-based bookmaker Ladbrokes is opening a book on five separate discoveries: life on Titan, gravitational waves, the Higgs boson, cosmic ray origins and nuclear fusion.

"We've taken bets on life on Mars before," says Warren Lush, Ladbrokes' novelty bets expert, "and we wanted to provide something completely different." The initiative follows an approach from New Scientist, and the full 10-page feature, Monsters of the Universe appears in the print edition of the magazine.

Bookies' odds are not straightforward probabilities. They also take into account how much the company can afford to lose in case they have to pay out. For example, Ladbrokes reckon the odds of finding the Loch Ness monster alive and well are 66-1, so anyone betting $1 would win $66 if it turned up.

But these apparently low odds reflect the fact that thousands of people have placed bets on Nessie, rather than the likelihood of the monster's existence. To work out the odds on the physics experiments, Lush consulted physicists and astronomers. He expects "the odds will spark debates".

Cosmic rays

Ladbrokes say the most likely conundrum to be cracked is the origin of cosmic rays - high-energy particles from outer space which continuously bombard Earth. No one is certain where they come from or what gives them energies 10 million times greater than the most powerful man-made particle accelerator.

Working on the problem are physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina. Utilising 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, it has been running since January 2004. Ladbrokes are offering 4-1 that the mystery will be solved by 2010.

They are also giving good odds on a successful hunt for the missing Higgs boson which, particle physicists believe, is responsible for giving everything in the subatomic world its mass. And it is one of the key reasons for building the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC should be complete by 2007 and Ladbrokes put the odds of finding the Higgs before 2010 at 6-1.

"I'd be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1," says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. "I've been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers' money on us finding it, so I'd better put my money where my mouth is."

Power bet

Ladbrokes are more bullish about the chances of nuclear fusion becoming a commercial reality than most physicists. The bookie reckons the odds of a fusion power station turning on by 2010 are 100-1. Meanwhile, physicists are still wrangling over where to build ITER, the first fusion reaction designed to churn out 10 times more power than it guzzles.

Serious betters might want to take a 500-1 punt on the LIGO detectors finding gravitational waves - tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by colliding black holes and massive imploding stars.

"I will certainly have a flutter," says Jim Hough at the University of Glasgow in the UK and a member of the LIGO team. He is confident that LIGO will catch a gravitational wave before 2010. "I would have put the odds between 2-1 and 10-1."

According to Ladbrokes, the rank outsider is the Cassini spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn. On Christmas Day, Cassini will release the wok-shaped Huygens probe on a 20-day journey towards Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Ladbrokes has set the odds of finding intelligent life on Titan by 2010 at 10,00

Betting on the greatest unsolved problems in the universe is no longer the preserve of academic superstars such as Stephen Hawking. From Thursday anyone will be able to place bets on whether the biggest physics experiments in the world will come good before 2010.

For two weeks, British-based bookmaker Ladbrokes is opening a book on five separate discoveries: life on Titan, gravitational waves, the Higgs boson, cosmic ray origins and nuclear fusion.

"We've taken bets on life on Mars before," says Warren Lush, Ladbrokes' novelty bets expert, "and we wanted to provide something completely different." The initiative follows an approach from New Scientist, and the full 10-page feature, Monsters of the Universe appears in the print edition of the magazine.

Bookies' odds are not straightforward probabilities. They also take into account how much the company can afford to lose in case they have to pay out. For example, Ladbrokes reckon the odds of finding the Loch Ness monster alive and well are 66-1, so anyone betting $1 would win $66 if it turned up.

But these apparently low odds reflect the fact that thousands of people have placed bets on Nessie, rather than the likelihood of the monster's existence. To work out the odds on the physics experiments, Lush consulted physicists and astronomers. He expects "the odds will spark debates".

Cosmic rays

Ladbrokes say the most likely conundrum to be cracked is the origin of cosmic rays - high-energy particles from outer space which continuously bombard Earth. No one is certain where they come from or what gives them energies 10 million times greater than the most powerful man-made particle accelerator.

Working on the problem are physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina. Utilising 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, it has been running since January 2004. Ladbrokes are offering 4-1 that the mystery will be solved by 2010.

They are also giving good odds on a successful hunt for the missing Higgs boson which, particle physicists believe, is responsible for giving everything in the subatomic world its mass. And it is one of the key reasons for building the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC should be complete by 2007 and Ladbrokes put the odds of finding the Higgs before 2010 at 6-1.

"I'd be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1," says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. "I've been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers' money on us finding it, so I'd better put my money where my mouth is."

Power bet

Ladbrokes are more bullish about the chances of nuclear fusion becoming a commercial reality than most physicists. The bookie reckons the odds of a fusion power station turning on by 2010 are 100-1. Meanwhile, physicists are still wrangling over where to build ITER, the first fusion reaction designed to churn out 10 times more power than it guzzles.

Serious betters might want to take a 500-1 punt on the LIGO detectors finding gravitational waves - tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by colliding black holes and massive imploding stars.

"I will certainly have a flutter," says Jim Hough at the University of Glasgow in the UK and a member of the LIGO team. He is confident that LIGO will catch a gravitational wave before 2010. "I would have put the odds between 2-1 and 10-1."

According to Ladbrokes, the rank outsider is the Cassini spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn. On Christmas Day, Cassini will release the wok-shaped Huygens probe on a 20-day journey towards Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Ladbrokes has set the odds of finding intelligent life on Titan by 2010 at 10,00

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96331

Actually, the link in the summary is wrong. Here's the actual article.

... really. Here's a link stating that cigarettes are greater polluters than diesels. It makes it hard to really focus on what the greater ill is. Are our vehicles really greater polluters than our industries (seems unlikely in the Third world)? Are fossil fuels truly the great satan or might they actually be the most efficient source of energy we currently have despite their imperfections? Or perhaps there are more dangerous and ubiquitous polluters closer to home as this article suggests.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94567

that's many ways to spell viagra!

No, RFID won't be effective for satellite monitoring. This GPS implant might, however.

By coincidence, I had just read the New Scientist's article about this, which is the source of the BBC article, but in much more depth and with many more details,

The Earths Magnetic field keeps all kind of nasty radiation from hitting the surface.
So it's always been a bit of a puzzle why there's no correllation between magnetic reversals (where the magnetic field weakens, fades, then reappears with swapped poles) and mass extinctions.
After all, one would think that floods of radiation washing across the Earths surface would be unhealthy, no?

But now it appears that when the magnetic field weakens, the solar wind induces a magnetic field in the ionosphere that's pretty much as effective at stopping high energy particles and cosmic rays as is the original field.

Here's an article about it in New Scientist from a few months ago.
New Scientist

A sotry on newscientist a long while ago about a robot that learned to fly.

A genetic algorithm that judged the fitness rate of how high the robot was able to get for each generation of code.

Robot learns to fly

I thought of a very light weight helicopter with rotors that can hardly support thier own weight, but get straightened out by the G forces. Also the spin up speed for the rotors would be long, as the gearing system would strain the small motor.

However, when airborn with high enough rpms, small twists to the frame could give agile peformance.

About how useful this (cool looking) bot is: I expect to see some 'ferrying' a few grams of this and that between dorms on cold days at uni! :-)

Two articles that are on this topic

cleanliness causes asthma

Lack of Protective parasites causes asthma

I won't reproduce my earlier post here, but this links to an article on one of the lakes with volcanic CO2. Cheers!

I have read a great deal of his stuff, and his critics too. I am not talking about his THEORIES though, I am talking about his OBSERVATIONS, specifically concerning the planets in the solar system.

I checked into a few of his planetary findings (including Saturn's now missing ring spokes), and they checked out as advertised. Mars' ice caps are dissapearing rapidly, and had a 3 month long global dust storm a few years back. Solar activity is insane.. more sunspots in the last 40 years than the previous 1150. There's stuff like this described for every single planet. I haven't checked them ALL out myself yet, but the claims have been disturbingly true so far...

>For one it's extremely expensive to build miles of solar panels. Not only that, the technology is improving all the time - we probably had something like 2.5% efficiency 15 years ago, now we have 10-15% and we'll be up into the low 20's hopefully soon.

Actually, it looks like it could be 50% soon..

>To add to all that, the problem of getting the supply anywhere is very hard. You can produce megawatts of the stuff, but it's all coming out as low voltage DC when everyone needs high voltage AC. That means you need huge inverters, which are very inefficient.

True, especially in the context of the parent post, but if everyone had these high-efficiency solar cells mounted on their roofs it would be less a problem.

Hey, maybe this has something to do with the DOE's current re-evaluation of cold fusion...or the much-discussed sonofusion results...

> I appreciate what you're saying, but I can't get past the fact that we haven't had any real breakthroughs since the birth of the Atomic and
Computer ages 40-50 years ago. Great stuff like the Internet is just the deployment of stuff that was invented more than 30 years ago.

Breakthroughs?

We have monkeys which can use a neural interface to control a robotic arm. Some of us (myself included) have PDAs in our pockets which can quickly access data from a world-wide information network. We have a complete transcript of the human genome, and scientists all over the world are working on turning that data into useful knowledge and applications. Private companies are on the verge of offerring paid rides into space for thousands of dollars, which will undoubtedly soon be followed by airline-like suborbital flights between continents. As we speak, we have robots crawling around on an alien world.

I'd go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Let's remember the heroes who died that day. I think it's very sad something like a little glue can cost lives in the blink of an eye. What a horrible mistake. There is an interesting article on the safety upgrades for the spring 2005 launch.

Here's an article about pollution due to vehicles from the New Scientist. It shows that diesel produces about 33% less greenhouse gases than gasoline. As for the other negatives of diesel, who says we can't do better? People don't drive diesel cars in America because it isn't important enough to care about the benefits of diesel. Diesel cars are so popular in Europe because of how expensive fuel is and running a diesel car is more efficient.

Actually, I happen to like cars quite a bit, but I also see the value of city life. I don't advocate forcing people riding bikes everywhere either. Let's just look at simple logistics. You have to drive many miles to get to a store in the suburbs. You could walk, take public transportation, or drive a short distance to the same store in the city. The thing is that driving in the city is not a necessity, it can be done if you want to or not.

And about moving to the city, you don't seem to understand what city life is all about. City life isn't about living in Manhattan on the 50th floor of a high rise appartment. City life isn't about what you watch on TV or in movies. Most people who live in cities either live in apartments, row homes, doubles, or singles. One size doesn't fit all. No one forces you to live in any one kind too! You can live with your half acre of ground or you can live on a street with nothing more than a sidewalk or you could even live on a street with both. I know it seems like a bizarre idea since most people only know what they see on TV. The fact is that housing is incredibly diverse in most cities, especially ones in the Northeast. Just find your neighborhood and you'll be happy.

As for the whole train option, you seem to miss the point. Mass transit helps to lessen pollution because of economies of scale. If you get your electricity from nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, etc. power, electric trollies are an excellent option. Riding a bus, subway, or train can lessening traffic and take advantage of having one engine power 40 people instead of 40 engines. The whole point of mass transit is that if you have a place you go everyday, like work, then you take the same bus, train, trolley, or subway everyday. You'd then have a car when you want to get somewhere on your own time. You could even take your car to work everyday and this is more desirable because the drive would probably be shorter.

I'm not saying everyone needs to ride bikes and take public transportation. I'm just saying that if more people lived closer to where they work or could easily take public transportation to where they work, then the need for fuels goes down greatly. If more people could easily walk places instead of being forced to drive, the need for fuels go down. My whole point is that people need choices. Choices don't exist when you live out in the middle of the suburbs and have to have a car to get anywhere.

Thought you might find this interesting...

SB

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96240&lpos=related_article1

I think we can assume that if they thought the results of such a study would be positive they would be pouring money at it, in the hope of being able ditch that embarassing `images are very like themselves' study.

First, your lifetime may end up longer than you expect right now (read up on physical immortality). Second, we've made quite a lot of progress and are starting to get along with each other. And when we can finally cure stupidity, expect this to made much much simplier.

You Fiend! Making people type "www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992461" when you could have just linked there! The horror, the horror! ;-)

"Under the DMCA, you have a theoretical right to fair use. But this ruling shows that if you provide a tool for fair use you can't use it."

From NewScientist

For those of you who are not a molecular biologist, there is a particularly well written and approachable source of background information on prion disease available. Deadly Feasts is an excellent primer on the subject of prion disease and the history of the prion as a medical research mystery. It's very well written, but don't read it if you want to keep eating beef.

There is also an online interview with Richard Rhodes the author of that book, which comes with the same caveat.

The book was written several years ago. More recent information about current research and such is available at New Scientist.

From a New Scientist article about the research:

Control mice that received a brain injection without the lab-made prions did not develop prion disease after 670 days. But animals that received the synthetic prions started showing the wobbly gait, ungroomed fur and rigid tails that are the clinical signs of rodent prion disease after 380 days.

Extracts from the brains of those diseased animals were injected into normal mice which started getting sick after, on average, only 154 days. That suggested the starting number of synthetic prions was low, but improved after one cycle of replication in a mouse brain, says Legname.

As another poster has already pointed out, long incubation periods are a feature of prion diseases. That's part of what makes them so difficult to study.

I wonder what kind of effect this has on the body. Think about it, it's a pretty constant stream of blood flowing, as opposed to a stop/start of a pulse. Sure, there's several (I'd say at least... 5 or 6)* pulses per minute, but if I remember seeing video of a cellular level for vessels, it looked more like a semi-congested LA highway rather than a smooth flow. My guess is you'd probably need some sort of batteryless implant that would measure blood pressure as well.

* Very technical here.

And there will be even less nukes in the coming years.

And yes, it is fairly important to be able to nuke somebody before they can nuke us. The US has enemies, and defending America is the top priority of the US Government. Space travel isn't the big concern most Americans have today.

They're talking about communications where if someone is snooping on the conversation you will know it. This is done using entanglement. Here's a real world example:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94914

I believe people are already doing this with fiber optics. You can detect very accurately if someone is tapping a fiber optic channel.

I don't know why this article wasn't posted with the main story, but here it is {much longer than the other articles}