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Mod parent up. Biology is just not that simple.

That's actually not true. For example, see how the DRD4 gene could impart a propensity for risky behavior. This study was performed almost a decade ago. I have no doubt that further studies would reveal specific genes that could be manipulated to entirely change the behavior of a person.

Actually in the case of Trump, research offers some insights. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...">Narcissists often take over leaderless/rudderless groups. Their relentless self-absorption provides a focus to a group that has lost its way. However people tend to become disenchanted with narcissists once they get to know them.

So the Trump phenomenon represents a loss in faith in the Republican party's leadership, and a test of that leadership's ability to convince the base it knows what it's doing.

On the Democratic side you have a mirror phenomenon with Bernie Sanders. Although Sanders does not display the personal self-aggrandizement you'd expect from a narcissist, his single-minded fixation on the billionaire class provides a similar focus for loyalists who feel the party has lost its way. That's infuriating to Democrats who are basically happy with the pragmatic center-left orientation of the party.

I suspect this is what you get in a two-party system where the parties have fought themselves to a stalemate. When neither party can deliver much to it's most ardent supporters, they start casting around for drastic medicine.

So females have exclusive skills and knowledge that males don't?

Every woman I know mentions men's inability to change the toilet paper.

Even our fantasies are different, as I summarize in this submission

The issue the researchers wanted to solve was this: Though there are numerous theories about deviant sexual fantasies, science had never described what was a typical fantasy versus what was "unusual."

Not surprisingly, the study confirms that men have more fantasies and describe them more vividly than women. The study also tells us that a significant proportion of women (30% to 60%) evoke themes associated with submission (e.g., being tied up, spanked, forced to have sex).

Importantly, unlike men, women in general clearly distinguish between fantasy and desire. Thus, many women who express more extreme fantasies of submission (e.g. domination by a stranger) specify that they never want these fantasies to come true. The majority of men, however, would love their fantasies to come true (e.g. threesomes).

As expected, the presence of one's significant other is considerably stronger in female fantasies than in male fantasies. In general, men in couples fantasize much more about extramarital relationships compared to women.

One of the most intriguing findings has to do with the significant number of unique male fantasies, for example, regarding shemales, anal sex among heterosexuals, and the idea of watching their partner have sex with another man. Evolutionary biological theories cannot explain these fantasies, which, among males, are typically desires.

There are differences, and there's no denying it. And the dynamics are a lot more complex than first appearances would have us believe. Example - Shoshana Roberts - the woman walking around New York getting the catcalls, then death threats when she posted the video.

Some of the men, the politest interpretation is that they're mentally disturbed. Others are peacocking to show their street buddies that they're "da man" by being so openly rude and sexually suggestive. They're building up their dysfunctional egos at women's expense. The rest? Shoshana is making no eye contact, not looking at them, not acting in any way like she wants to interact with them ... do these guys even realize how counter-productive, how much they look like losers, doing this?

They probably do. So why DO they do it?

It is time to allow multiple cables into a home. There is simply no excuse for allowing one company to control cable access.

We tried that already. http://www.newswise.com/images/uploads/2009/08/26/Broadway%20and%20John%20St%20Manhattan%201890.jpg

here ya go, Manhattan in 1890:
http://www.newswise.com/images/uploads/2009/08/26/Broadway%20and%20John%20St%20Manhattan%201890.jpg

Just not true: http://www.newswise.com/articles/which-costs-more-obesity-or-smoking (interestingly, obesity costs even more, but both cost more than for a normal weight non-smoker).

But in fact if it *was* true that would be MORE justification for insurance companies to charge higher rates. By getting cancer and/or dying earlier (which, yes, statistically is true) smokers may still be on private insurance of a corporate health plan instead of Medicare. Insuring a smoker costs more, end of story.

“Vaccines are one of the great public health achievements of the last couple of centuries,” Dr. Buttenheim said. “They protect us from diseases that used to routinely kill hundreds of thousands of children in the United States and still kill hundreds of thousands globally.

Sounds reasonable, until...

Nationally, because of generally widespread vaccination coverage among children, vaccine-preventable childhood diseases that once caused substantial disease burdens and death in the United States remain rare occurrences. Measles once infected four million people and killed 4,000 of them each year, mostly young children. With high measles vaccine coverage over several decades, endemic measles was eliminated in the United States as of 2000. The current routine childhood immunization schedule is estimated to prevent 42,000 deaths and 20 million cases of disease and to save $14 billion in direct medical costs per U.S. birth cohort.

I'm sorry but these numbers don't add up to the concern expressed in the article. This is one doctors opinion who's own statements don't match the articles own numbers. Seems like a bit of BS to scare people into thinking that their tax dollars are going to be paying for sick kids. Anyone have any numbers on the cost of these vaccinations in the US?

The protein structures behind memory are beginning to be understood:

(Discovery of mBDNF) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3747716.stm
(CaMKII association) http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/25/9170.abstract?sid=e8ce0965-4b50-4ee4-913b-16d422f25230
(RNA handling of the proteins) http://www.newswise.com/articles/making-memories-how-one-protein-does-it

We're now very close to understanding how memories form and are activated.

Some physicists think that we will be able to distinguish a change of state eventually [...]. Some do not.

Meanwhile, there is a group of physicist are in a superposition of the state thinking that FTL is and is not possible... they pertain to the class of String Theorists.

Paradoxically, the nature of their thinking state is totally opposite to quantum mechanics: any attempt to get an answer from their part will NOT result in a collapsing of their thinking state into one of the defined choices, but rather in setting the mind of the asking person into an indeterminate and fuzzy state (i.e. the "decoherence of the observer" effect).

Furthermore, in deep contrast with the normal quantum entanglement (on which the super-decoherence was observed), the above mentioned sub-system of String Theorist are believed as becoming more stable as the number of scientists in the group increases - in other words, a successful conversion of a new scientist to the group (will require an O(0) effort - i.e. constant, even if non-negligible) is most likely to result in a supra-linear increase in the stability of the so called "group coherence" and their capacity to influence the outside world.

Notes of caution for the young and adventurous - a short term exposure of an external observer may result in an assessment of the "thinking state" as being "incoherent", even if a longer period of observation will most likely note that the discourse and argumentation show patterns that are stable and that strongly resembles rationality and method. The external observer is warmly advised to refrain from searching for the "method behind the madness" under the risk of a fate worst than "living in the basement of their Mum" - see the reference to the "observer decoherence" effect above.

I'm not a man, I'm a woman.

I'm glad you are healthy. But not all vegetarians/vegans are healthy on their chosen diet; going veg*n is not "one-size-fits-all". Lierre Keith is one such individual; her health was destroyed by being vegan for 20 years.
Here's the experiences of a couple other women:
http://crunchychewymama.blogspot.com/2010/01/why-im-not-vegetarian-anymore.html
http://voraciouseats.com/2010/11/19/a-vegan-no-more/

I'm not against vegetarian diets, I eat a good number of vegetarian meals myself, I just cook meals that (a) taste good, and (b) are healthy. I believe people can be healthy on a vegetarian or omnivorous diet. However, I don't find the vegan diet to be "healthy".

By reading your posts, it seems you think perhaps you are the only one on slashdot that grew up on a farm. And I grew up on a farm too. My background is very rooted in agrculture. My family grew crops (primarily wheat and milo), raised livestock (primarily cattle and sheep), and ran a grain elavator. My family also hunts. I know very well where my food comes from.

I like meat. It's natural to eat meat. It's not natural to eat grains; and the eating of grains has allowed the human population to explode.

Most pasture land is unfit for crops. Too sandy, rocky, hilly, etc. It would be impossible to get a tractor or combine around this land. A diet that includes some meat is actually a more efficient use of land. http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/534100

As far as feeding the world's hungry, Western societies sending grain to them actually worsens the problem. It ends up hurting the local economy of an already ailing country even more, and makes the farmers there unneeded so there's even more people in need.

Meat is a fetish? Um... whatever floats your boat! I guess Lady Gaga did wear that meat outfit...

I'm curious, what do you eat if you don't eat meat and don't eat monocrops? Do you grow all of your own food?

Regardless of any particular case, it's true that we still don't understand human consciousness all that well. Also, I've read about some theories (only thing I could find with a quick Google search is here) that suggest that your brain and consciousness is not as unified as we tend to think.

According to some of these theories, for example, the reason people sometimes sleepwalk may be that enough of their brain is actually awake to perform certain tasks while other parts of their brain remain asleep. When you're really tired and feel a little disoriented, it may be that other parts of your brain are already asleep. One article I read even suggested that schizophrenia is really a form of severe sleep deprivation-- that there are parts of a schizophrenic's brain that basically *never* sleep even when the schizophrenic himself is asleep in conventional terms.

Similarly, as we all know, parts of the brain are highly specialized. That's why someone can, for example, have brain damage in the part of the brain that recognizes faces, and from then on out, they won't recognize anyone that they know. They might be otherwise completely normal, but a patient with damage in a certain part of the brain won't recognize his own mother.

And then along those lines, we all feel ambivalent sometimes. We want two different things. Addicts want to quit, but they don't quit. People believe two contradictory ideas at the same time. There's a theory that part of the reason these things happen is that it's literally two different parts of your brain fighting it out. Even though you think you're a single person, a unified consciousness, you actually have something like a small society of brain tissue that argues and makes power plays and even has peace-makers who try smooth things over between the warring parties, and your consciousness is the result of the interplay.

So given all that, I don't find it hard to believe that someone in a "vegetative state" might have some parts of their brain still operating. Depending on what exactly the damage is, it seems like you might have quite a lot of brain function left, while still not having enough to amount to what we'd consider a "conscious being".

But you are incorrect that they did it for intel, since that is also not possible.

Where's the study or even a valid argument supporting this claim.

Ok. Studies and reports on them:

http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=20647
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/519416/
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/9/21/21847/9403
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-09/new-study-finds-torture-negatively-affects-memory

And further valid arguments supporting those claims:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30721458/print/1/displaymode/1098/
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/torture-is-more-than-just-harsh-tactics/
http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Dbq-Usefulness-Torture/132993

And at least one example of how this is a slippery slope that leads to nothing good:
  http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/
If nothing else, please Please read about this person!

Do further googles (or wiki searches) for Maher Arar
Then just keep in mind there is NOTHING at all that happened nor will happen that would prevent you or anyone else you know from being in that persons shoes, by a random throw of the dice.

Sure that is an extreme case, but it is cases like that where I can honestly say I would support the usage. If anything, allowing these terrorists to come to a US Court sets a precedent where the usage of information gathered by torture becomes acceptable in a criminal investigation.

That is until they* come into your home at night, haul you and your wife/gf/S.O./whatever away to different prisons in another country and torture you for your terrorists connections for 9 months.
You are doing exactly everything required to qualify as a terrorist suspect under our current methods of determining who is or could be a terrorist, so it is not at all as far fetched as your extreme example is.

[*] They being all of the sociopaths that work their way into positions of power and dominance due to their personality requiring it, whom you are willingly and gladly giving permission to torture anyone and everyone (since that is our current definition of terrorist suspect)

Diet with Some Meat Uses Less Land than Vegetarian Diets - http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/534100

Myth #1: Meat consumption contributes to famine and depletes the Earth's natural resources. - http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstruths/mtvegetarianism.html#1

Animal farming is an efficient use of land - http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html#link1

Depends on your definition of "basic" in "basic engineering". The Apollo moon walkers said it was a huge problem, it sticks to everything. They have some plans to use magnets maybe to solve this problem.

    All I can say is good luck with that. They need to send a few cheap rovers up there first to see if their magnet dust sucker can keep all the movable bits protected. I live and work on a farm, so I deal with equipment outside in just "normal" dirt all the time, it's a major hassle as it is, so I can't imagine electrostatic cling microscopic and highly abrasive dirt, and trying to deal with that remotely on huge scales.

      I know they *want* to, and are planning expeditions and so on regardless, I just am not convinced yet that anything very complex that has to do complex moving actions can last very long in that electric dusty environment. Very simple things that don't require moving parts, sure, but long term mechanical factories? Not sure.

    The military has a very hard time keeping their gear running in Iraq, the sandy dust gets into everything and just wears it out really fast, and that is with constant hands-on maintenance. You can only seal stuff so much before you can't use it, if you are talking mining and refining and forging and smelting and extruding and fabbing and..all of that..that's a lot of stuff to protect from contamination.

    Basically,anything you put on the lunar surface becomes charged, and the dirt sticks to it. Even solar panels would eventually become so covered in dust they wouldn't work, and there's no moving parts there.

    We'll have to see what they come up with. I think it's a spiffy idea, but want to see the "basic engineering" solve that problem, because if they can come up with more robust seals, etc, to make things more dustpoof, that's hundred billion buck industry right here on earth. We have to replace..no idea, a lot, maybe small hundreds of "sealed bearings" per year around here, especially on the fans in the broiler houses, they just don't last, and that dust they get exposed to isn't even electrostatic, just normal litter dust, and those have to run in not as a severe temperature swings as on the moon.

It's not that the research doesn't tell us anything; it tells us the obvious, but it tells it based on data rather than subjectivity. It doesn't tell us how to solve the problem however. There's been a lot of research on this cell phone and driving safety issue in recent years. The research seems to be common sense. I find that I can often predict when a person is speaking on a cell phone just by observing their driving behavior. They have more difficulty than most negotiating turns, getting moving at red lights, etc. The research indicates the obvious; something needs to be done about people driving and using cell phones. Maybe you're right that laws are not the answer. Maybe technology is the answer. The research I've seen does not suggest that the answer is new laws as you suggest.

This study (reported in the October 31 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE), also found that an individualâ(TM)s odor signature remained constant even with major changes in diet. The scientists said, "genetically-determined odortypes persist regardless of diet, even though dietary changes do strongly influence odor profiles of individual mice."

"Dark Matter and Dark Energy both felt like big hacks to me."

To you, perhaps. Problem is, at least in the case of Dark Matter, it's real and we've observed it.

Dark matter is a pretty reasonable hypothesis, my main objection is that in the 90-some years since it's inception

No matter how many times you say that, you're still wrong.

Modifying gravity doesn't appear to consistently explain all the gravitational behavior we observe.

In fact, it actually *can't*. Once again, I cite the Bullet Cluster and MACS J0025 results. As this researcher put it, "Nevertheless, the most straightforward interpretation is that there is indeed unseen mass.", and "It does add something new, and that is that whatever that mass is, it is not collisional." Incidentally, his position is that CDM is still not the answer, and that the real solution is a combination of MOND plus some sort of non-interacting mass (eg, WIMPs). But given whatever is there is a) invisible, and b) collisionless, that proves that there's *something* out there that qualifies as dark matter, even if you're unwilling to believe that it is the sole explanation for the missing mass problem.

In summary: for those of you complaining that dark matter resembles aether: you're wrong. It exists. It's existence has been demonstrated in real results. No one credible is denying this fact any longer.

Great. So now somebody has an incentive to cut off my fingers.

NewswiseScience News.

(The link from the Rockefeller University main page is currently broken).

The supercomputers which were alloted award hours appear to be on:

Blue Gene
Cray XT4
Cray X1E
and NERSC HPC which doesn't have a convenient Wikepedia link, but comprises AMD Opteron processors.
This is according to this Newswise report.

Toshiba has been running 320 slice CT scans for some time now. See here and here. The 256-slice version of the scanner has been running for atleast 6 months now. See here

"Soft drinks sweetened with High Fructose Corn Syrup are up to 10 times richer in harmful carbonyl compounds, such as methylglyoxal, than a diet soft drink control. Carbonyl compound are elevated in people with diabetes and are blamed for causing diabetic complications such as foot ulcers and eye and nerve damage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

Soda Warning? New Study Supports Link Between Diabetes, High-fructose Corn Syrup
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/532433/

Diabetes fears over corn syrup in soda. New Scientist (04 September 2007)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19526192.800-diabetes-fears-over-corn-syrup-in-soda.html

Theresa Waldron Sugary Sodas High in Diabetes-Linked Compound
http://www.healthfinder.gov/news/newsstory.asp?docID=607536

Bantle, John P.; Susan K. Raatz, William Thomas and Angeliki Georgopoulos (November 2000). "Effects of dietary fructose on plasma lipids in healthy subjects". American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 72 (5): 1128-1134.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/72/5/1128

Whey Protein and Fructose, an Unhealthy Combination. Enerex Botanicals. Retrieved on 2007-1-17.
http://www.enerex.ca/articles/whey_protein_and_fructose.htm

Jurgens, Hella; et al. (2005). "Consuming Fructose-sweetened Beverages Increases Body Adiposity in Mice". Obesity Res 13: 1146-1156.
http://www.obesityresearch.org/cgi/content/abstract/13/7/1146

Faeh D, Minehira K, Schwarz JM, Periasamy R, Park S, Tappy L (July 2005). "Effect of fructose overfeeding and fish oil administration on hepatic de novo lipogenesis and insulin sensitivity in healthy men". DIABETES 54 (7):1907-1913. PMID 15983189
http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/54/7/1907

Microbes that live off of radiation: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/524387/

To illustrate these effects and their gross values I point people towards the Boxing Day (Dec 26,2004) Quake and tsunami. This event is supposed by the geophyical people to be the product of a subduction event. Had it been such an event, the uplift of the Sumantra area of the southern Asian region would have caused the corresponding drop in sea floor. The uplift is about equal to lifting the entire continental US by about 20 feet. The net world wide sea level drop would have been about 2 feet. It didn't happen.

By 2025 it is estimated that light trucks and cars (i.e. average Joe vehicles) will account for 45% of the US oil consumption.

You're way behind the times; they already do. The US burns about 9 million barrels/day of motor gasoline out of a hair over 20 million total.

Lightweight SUV class vehicles have been demonstrated using plain gasoline to acheive fuel economy beating today's compact and subcompact cars. By 2025 it is estimated that light trucks and cars (i.e. average Joe vehicles) will account for 45% of the US oil consumption.

Setting aside the question of why you drive a Suburban while touting light SUV-class stuff (hypocrisy?), the SUV form factor is inherently draggier than a car. The same powerplant technologies that can make a 40 MPG SUV can make an 80 MPG car. You know, like the Daimler-Chrysler ESX3, the GM ParadiGM and the Ford whateveritwas.

Hogwash. Do some research to at least validate part of your namesake.

Done long before you ever thought to ask. (More here).

Take it from the horse's mouth: 2005 ethanol production was only ~4 billion gallons. Production this year isn't even projected to reach 6 billion gallons.

Cellulosic ethanol has so much resource available to it only someone ignorant of the reality would make such a statement. Apparently this includes you. Cellulosic ethanol utilizes paper sludge, grasses, agricultural waste (of which we produce about one billion tons/year) that currently is generally burned or dumped into landfills. Waste biomass along can produce approximately 25-30 billion gallons of ethanol per year at current level of conversion technology.

I've read The Billion-Ton Vision. It projects a whole 10% of transportation fuels will come from biomass in 2020 (see the sidebar in the first page of the introduction, page 18).

How many people can actually use E85 when ethanol is only 10% of transportation fuel? That's the proof that the whole flex-fuel vehicle thing is a scam. The auto companies are getting CAFE credits for guzzling monsters that can run on E85, without there being enough ethanol to run more than a small fraction of them.

Production of ethanol loses about 50% of the energy right off the top; it disappears into the process either as metabolic losses of the yeast or process heat in hydrolization or distillation. That's energy that can be used productively if you aren't wedded to the idea of using liquid fuels. There are other ways to use biomass, such as carbonization. Direct-carbon fuel cells (a variant of molten-carbonate fuel cells) can convert charcoal to electricity at up to 80% efficiency, and the off-gas from carbonization is combustible and can run engines. With a scheme like that, you can do a lot more than just offset some fraction of oil consumption; you can:

• Provide all transport energy.
• Between carbonization and wind, provide most scheduled electric generation requirements now provided by gas and coal.
• Manufacture excess charcoal for use as a carbon-sequestering soil amendment (search for "terra preta de los indios", or start reading here).

Ethanol is a very lossy way of making biomass suitable for even lossier internal combustion engines. It's a dead end.

By using industry standard breeding and cropping practices, by 2050 using switc

I was listening to CBC Radio One yesterday morning to a discussion of the original 1930's King Kong movie, and it was mentioned that an original inspiriation for the movie was when a giant Komodo Dragon was brought to New York and died soon thereafter.

Let's see if I can find a reference for this. Ah, here we go...

"Elements of the 1933 Kong movie are based on the 1926 real-life expedition of William Douglas Burden, a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History," says Mitman, an expert on how animals are portrayed in popular culture.

"Burden traveled to Indonesia to film and capture the Komodo dragon, which he thought was the closest living relative of dinosaurs," he says. "When Burden brought back two live Komodo specimens and housed them in captivity in the Bronx Zoo, they died. Meridan Cooper, producer of the 1933 film version of Kong, wrote at the time, 'I immediately thought of doing the same thing with a giant gorilla.'"

The same correspondence indicates that Burden attributed the Komodo dragon's death to civilization. "This is why Cooper chose the Empire State Building and modern airplanes to kill off Kong. They were fitting symbols of civilization and the machine age that many feared were destroying nature," Mitman says.
He adds that the film's enduring appeal (the current one adds to the 1976 version and the 1933 classic original) might be linked to the restorative properties of an unspoiled, natural landscape.

I think this is probably the most significant observation so far in this story.

The implications of 3d inkjet printing are perhaps more in the questions inspired than in what is produced at this time. What will be the effect of open source hardware? What happens when a desktop peripheral as economical as your printer manufactures custom computer circuitry, solar cells and batteries as cheap as wallpaper? A desktop peripheral printing all the circuits needed for it's own next generation. Or when distributors ship a product as software, with the end user supplying the raw material. No distribution costs and instant delivery of a physical item. Or when autonomous robots fitted with accelerating computational intelligence design and manufacture THEIR own next generation.

These are all potentials the inkjet has demonstrated. In a jag of hardware hacking, the humble inkjet printer is being transformed into a crude replicator. It's still a hack, and we will wait a bit for a consumer device, but here is a quick tour of recent twists of inkjet technology.

ANY material that can be powderized, (and that means practically everything) can serve as the medium instead of ink.

It's already old news that working solar cells, lighting, even batteries have successfully emerged from the humble inkjet. And of course, printed circuits.

Researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack at Brandeis University are using 3d printing technology and software to autonomously design and fabricate robots.
or
Google Search

Printing on cloth to create wearable intelligence Original article
or
Google Search

Google news search for "mag-beam" returned http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/507649/ and http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mag_beam_p ropulsion_system.html?14102004 with a sci-fi looking picture.

Froogle search for "mag-beam" did not match any products. :)

Well, it isn't linear, for one thing.

Neither is my car's alternator. But linear should be in the ballpark, and it's an order of magnitude off. And you haven't even spoken to my observations about the variety of compositions, temperatures and spins, and in particular to the complete absence of systematism amongst them.

Valles Marineris is way to big to be carved by lightening.

Cloud-to-ground lightning, I agree. (And by the way, Konqueror spellchecks within web forms starting from the version which comes with KDE 3.2, hint, hint). But how about body-to-body? What's the charge on a comet? What's the charge on a planetisimal the size of Pluto, and how many of them have wandered in past Mars so far? Something for the asteroid defense guys to consider. An event to watch from the comfort of something like Hubble, rather than on the ground.

On the other hand, while you causually dismiss erosion and tectonics, you probably should step up to the plate and explain the Grand Canyon on Earth (erosion-caused) and the Himilays (tectonics).

No worries. Remember that you asked for this, and that sacred cows make the tastiest barbeque. (-:

A bunch of the carving in the Canyon was done in perhaps a week or few with [RB Scarborough, Cenozoic Erosion & Sedimentation in Arizona, Arizona Bureau of Geology and Mineral Technology, 16 Nov 1984] a single or few rushes of water from a "fossil" lake or lakes with several times the size of Lake Missoula - of which mighty Lake Powell is a mere shadow and the beaches above it silent witnesses - in the Colorado Plateau area, which is possibly also responsible for the severely flat peneplane above it, and was followed up by a series of large flows (one pegged at "up to 15 million cfs"), which did a lot of the "slotting" which we observe today. The sudden removal of so much material (plus the water) may even have triggered uplifting in the area.

Slow and steady won't do it, and we've collectively known that for a long time [ED McKee, RF Wilson, WJ Breed, and CS Breed, "Evolution of the Colorado River in Arizona," Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 44 (1967), 1-67] and it's caused a fair bit of headscratching since [RJ Rice, "The Canyon Conundrum," Geographical Magazine 55, 1983, pg 291]. The Havasupai Indians even have a legend about it, although where they got it from is still an open question.

Have a look at the floods at Milford Lake, Coralville Lake, Burlingame Canyon, Providence Canyon and Tuttle Creek Reservoir [Archer, AW, J Kinser, SC Grant, JR Underwood, PC Twiss, RR West, KB Miller. 1993. Geology of the recently formed Grand Canyon of Manhattan. Department of Geology, Kansas State University, Manhattan] for much smaller but contemporary (and so better documented) examples of similar erosion. The prehistoric flooding of the Altay Mountains was also pretty spectacular, requiring water up to 1900m deep to produce the observed landforms [Baker, VR, G Benito, and AN Rudoy. 1993. Paleohydrology of late Pleistocene superflooding, Altay Mountains, Siberia. Science 259:348-350].

A thing to remember in connection with the origin of this discussion on Mars is that there's a good deal more obvious water available on Earth to do these things with, and none no Mars, nor an atmosphere which would support it, and there hasn't been for a very long time.

There are marine fossils right up near the top of Everest, a big hint that the many-miles-up peaks were once on a sea floor - or at least had sea floor dumped on them before they hardened - and haven't been subducted in between times.

And while you're at it, you can use your lightening "theory" to explain the Tharsis Bulge on Mars.

Why?

Have a careful look at VM. Flat bottom, steep sides, side-canyons crossi

Hydrogen isn't necessarily generated through electrolysis. There are various chemical reactions that may be used to generate hydrogen--mostly from fossil fuels, however.

Really interesting ways for the future might involve some bioengineering. Bacteria already exist which produce hydrogen from water. Another article here. The best part is that these bacteria are perfectly happy being fed wastewater, which helps to solve another one of our environmental problems.

I fully expect that with some genetic engineering we will have some very cost-effective hydrogen producing microbes in a matter of years--not decades. Alternately, we might just produce the enzymes (hydrogenases et al.) and use them act directly.

Yes, biosourced hydrogen would require some significant infrastructure--but so does shipping millions of barrels of oil halfway around the world, refining the stuff and separating it into hundreds of different products. I also don't foresee massive fluctuations in the price of sewage due to world events.

How on earth is this offtopic?
In a discussion about mammoths (who have trunks) a joke was made about them using them to breathe underwater.
How is it then OT to mention that trunks may have been used for this purpose?

In 97' I worked at Samsung's fab in Austin, Texas as a chemical technician, troubleshooting and maintaining the pumps that sent liquid chemicals up to the fab. I also pushed a lot of drums and hooked up tanker trucks of sulfuric and other nasties to the hungry fab.

As the average slashdotter knows, every chip is composed of multiple layers, each masked and etched, bathed in various acids and bases and then neutralized and cleaned before the next layer can be applied.

Then these waste chemicals are pumped out, neutralized (in theory) and diluted before being dumped into the same waste water stream that eventually hits streams, rivers and ground water.

There's a whole lot of water indirectly consumed in the manufacturing process - but a whole order of magnitude more water consumed and dumped to dilute the hopefully neutralized (ie, salts) waste products.

So I believe the numbers - kgs (ie, liters!) of water per MB does not set off my bullsht detector.

To me, it also brings into question the whole drive of chip research. It's all focused on performance. There are some articles on research into environmentally friendy chips. But when did you hear of a chip marketed as enviro-friendly? We're tempted into buying the another chip just a tick faster but not even given the choice. For consumers to even be able to make the choice for a more sustainable product we have to have the information.

But companies don't even want us to know what we're injesting - that isn't important to them and is contrary to their creation of demand for more stuff. Why would we think they would tell us something against their own short-term interest?

Cocaine on the other hand, is not physiologically addicting. You'll miss and crave the hit it gives you, but you have to go through the sweats and shakes. You might start using it again, you might even take to crime to do it, but you'll do it through conscious choice.

In that respect, EverQuest's nickname of EverCrack is quite appropriate. You'll miss playing it. You'll miss the good feelings and memories that you associate with playing it. But you should be able to come off it quickly, and with no harmful effects in the short or long term, if you want to.