Slashdot Mirror

• DCA and a related chemical TCE were both found to play a prominent role in creating liver cancers with DCA accelerating the growth rate of liver cancer

• Later research found that DCA and its metabolites may have different roles in the cancer process and that dose-response is very non-linear because DCA inhibits its own metabolism.

• DCA has such serious side effects on the human nervous system that in a recent study 15 out of 15 test patients had to be taken off experimental DCA treatment because of toxic neuropathy and the study was terminated early.

• DCA has been found to prevent and reverses pulmonary high blood pressure

I can't validate this, but a senior US researcher published a paper about 30 years ago which showed that almost every resource mankind requires on Earth is practically unlimited... providing we can find an energy source to replace hydrocarbons (which he referred to as CHx).

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio .jsp?osti_id=5045860&query_id=1

Since you asked...

The paper he mentioned in the talk: http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio .jsp?osti_id=20516096

An IEEE publication on a related topic: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arn umber=1495587

And finally a recent PhD thesis on a related subject: http://edt.missouri.edu/Fall2004/Thesis/MeyerR-120 904-T282/research.pdf

But then again, this is slashdot so we're all free to discuss without watching the video, reading the paper or otherwise knowing what were talking about.

Sandia have already done much of the calculations on the energy requirements for launch.

And the concept of folding the damn things up for launch has already been mentioned. Heat shielding is again perfectly possible - you can dump the heat shield once you're out of the atmosphere.

Why exactly do you think they can't make the components for this to weigh 1/16th of an iPod Shuffle? Have you done any calculations, or do you just automatically think it is impossible?

A patent for "A single element detector acts as an array"

Instead of using micro mirrors, the Los alamos team used an LCD which were more mature at the time. And Instead of using random modulation they used a progression of zenike polynomials and thus achieved much more control over the data compression.

What we always do when we run out of one thing is to substitute another. When we run out of liquid petrolium, we will substitute agricultural wastes. http://www.changingworldtech.com/ If we could do that now, we would no longer need to import oil.

The oil from turkey guts thing seems a little over-rated right now but at the present cost of oil, it is profitable. We also have many energy from waste projects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy We can also depolymirize coal. http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio .jsp?osti_id=10158212

I'm not remotely worried about running out of oil. I am, however, worried about greenhouse gasses. Fortunately, some of the oil substitutes are carbon neutral. In that regard, running out of oil might be a good thing.

-sulphur is used in a millitary version of thermite called thermate. Im trying to find an independant explanation from why,though it seems it is to lower the melting point of the steel being cut, ie forming a eutectic, making it cut better

- potassium permangenate is used as an oxidising agent in some thermate/ite as well (perhaps mixed with something else to help ignite it?), hence K and Mn

- flourine may be present in the from of polytetraflouroethylene (teflon?) as a base for another oxidising agent according to this report http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/1344-QDsu 9M/webviewable/1344.pdf p120. According to it (a report on techniques for decommisioning nuclear reactors, which investigated thermite with additives):

"These characteristics show that the composition of the mixtures using polytetraflouroethylene as a base has a heat output 2.5 to 5.0 times higher than that of a mixture based on thermite."

- 1,3-diphenyl propane was recorded in "abundance" by the EPA not prof jones. They suggested the possible source as burning polyvynyl choloride compounds, although they admitted they had never before picked it up in ambient sampling such as this(which would suggest that there was at least SOMETHING decidedly strange about the fires in the towers, given the ubiquitous nature of PVC in modern buildings. )

As to the claims of partially evaporated steel, it is not him claiming this it is one Dr. Barnett in the NEW YORK TIMES! he was part of the initial (official) fema investigation, which reported on this anomoly, and recomended investigation into how it could occur, yet none was ever done (officially at least, I guess Prof jones took it up unofficially instead)

it is good to see someone who's objections are based on (what would be to you) logical reasoning (and, it seems, decent scientific knowledge), even if you dont have (m)any of the facts available, rather than the plain denial I see in most people. Should you wish to discuss it further with me, I'd be happy to talk to you on (oh no, eeeevill) msn messenger: hmmmmm_really At hotmail. Ive been looking into it for a while so I can steer you past the disinfo and crazy people and to the meat of the problem (and trust me, its as meaty as a triple bacon meat lovers pizza hold the cheese, base and sauce)

(oh buy the way, I know you havent read his paper on the collapses, or at least his subsequent presentation in which he shows the results of the analysis showing these elements, since you would have read his explanations for why they are there. It would seem a bit... perhaps hypocritical... to pick on the agenda of someone else, while "debunking" their work without actually reading it, wouldnt you say? (nor even reading the initial FEMA investigation it is partly based on it seems))

for anyone interested, all this is outlined in the pdf I linked earlier, But I'll link it again:

pdf showing thermate residue

recommended pre-reading (this is the paper that the pdf is a follow up on)

Bleh... First of all the article is talking about digital computers and not analog. Technically speaking if you include analog computers then MIT wasn't the first. Brookhaven National Laboratory actually built a game called Tennis for Two using an analog computer. Essentially, it was Pong.
http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/videogame.html

Yes, it predicted a number of cool particles, and sure enough, there they are. It also craps out more and more lately. Neutrinos oscillate, huh? Uh, well, we'll fix that later. Gravity... yeah. That's a bitch. I know! More free variables! We're at 19 now, what's 10 more?

This whole thing smacks of turn-of-the-20th-century Newtonians trying to cobble together a decent explanation for black-body radiators. They tried all kinds of tricks--turns out they didn't work, because the system is not Newtonian. Newtonian physics was awesome for predicting meso-scale behavior, but it's a dog at small and large scales. Similarly, I think, the Standard Model was super-dynamite for a good number of years, but to hang on to it through all these issues should be a red flag that something else might be a better explanation. Kuhn, here we come.

...that a film like Tron was conceived while playing the first video game ever created.

ehhh, not quite. Space War preceded Pong, and the table tennis game at Brookhaven preceded even Space War.

However, Pong was the first widely popular video game and the first home game.

http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/videogame.html Pretty interesting bit of history. In fact it's really interesting as to how close the United States actually came close to owning the patent on video games.

I'm sorry if my original post sounded arrogant or accusatory. I'm honestly interested in knowing more about this technology. I'm happy to be corrected when I'm wrong, but it really helps to have sources to check.

With regard to flux, as far as I can tell, no one has reported a Fusor-style setup with a flux higher than 1E8 neutrons/second or perhaps 1E10 neutrons/second (example, example). Assuming an operating distance of 1 m, that's less than 1E5 n/(cm^2 s).

By comparison, modern reactor setups achieve 2E15 n/(cm^2 s) flux, and spallation sources can achieve 1E17 n/(cm^2 s) (see Fig 1 here). This is why I characterized a Fusor as "low flux." The flux of a Fusor is useful for some things, but for most applications of neutron beamlines, it is too weak. (Of course, more than flux matters: energy distribution also matters.)

From what I know, Fusors are great for studying some aspects of fusion reactions and maybe conducting experiments on neutron properties. I've also heard of using it for neutron interrogation (example), where you irradiate a sample and see what happens (for instance for characterizing nuclear samples, material identification, bomb detection). So, yes, it is a neutron source. However, it is not competitive with high-flux sources, and is (I think!) too weak for neutron scattering, diffraction, and imaging experiments. This is why I claimed that a fusor was not a general-purpose neutron source.

This is also why no Fusor sources are listed on any "worldwide neutron source" lists, as far as I can tell:
http://neutron.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/links.html
http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/nsources.html
http://www.neutron.anl.gov/facilities.html
http://neutron.neutron-eu.net/n_users/n_where_the_ facilities/n_worldwide
http://www.sciner.com/Neutron/neutron_facilities_w orldwide.htm

With regard to the universities you mentioned, it looks like the PULSTAR at North Carolina State is a reactor. The TRIGA at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is also a reactor. If those were not what you were referring to, then I apologize.

To recap: I relent and agree that a Fusor is indeed a viable neutron source. However, I would like to point out that its flux is much lower than other sources, making it unsuitable for many types of neutron beamline experiments. If I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me.

I'm sorry if my original post sounded arrogant or accusatory. I'm honestly interested in knowing more about this technology. I'm happy to be corrected when I'm wrong, but it really helps to have sources to check.

With regard to flux, as far as I can tell, no one has reported a Fusor-style setup with a flux higher than 1E8 neutrons/second or perhaps 1E10 neutrons/second (example, example). Assuming an operating distance of 1 m, that's less than 1E5 n/(cm^2 s).

By comparison, modern reactor setups achieve 2E15 n/(cm^2 s) flux, and spallation sources can achieve 1E17 n/(cm^2 s) (see Fig 1 here). This is why I characterized a Fusor as "low flux." The flux of a Fusor is useful for some things, but for most applications of neutron beamlines, it is too weak. (Of course, more than flux matters: energy distribution also matters.)

From what I know, Fusors are great for studying some aspects of fusion reactions and maybe conducting experiments on neutron properties. I've also heard of using it for neutron interrogation (example), where you irradiate a sample and see what happens (for instance for characterizing nuclear samples, material identification, bomb detection). So, yes, it is a neutron source. However, it is not competitive with high-flux sources, and is (I think!) too weak for neutron scattering, diffraction, and imaging experiments. This is why I claimed that a fusor was not a general-purpose neutron source.

This is also why no Fusor sources are listed on any "worldwide neutron source" lists, as far as I can tell:
http://neutron.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/links.html
http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/nsources.html
http://www.neutron.anl.gov/facilities.html
http://neutron.neutron-eu.net/n_users/n_where_the_ facilities/n_worldwide
http://www.sciner.com/Neutron/neutron_facilities_w orldwide.htm

With regard to the universities you mentioned, it looks like the PULSTAR at North Carolina State is a reactor. The TRIGA at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is also a reactor. If those were not what you were referring to, then I apologize.

To recap: I relent and agree that a Fusor is indeed a viable neutron source. However, I would like to point out that its flux is much lower than other sources, making it unsuitable for many types of neutron beamline experiments. If I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me.

Add beer and watch the fur fly.

Add beer and invent the bubble chamber.

"Rather, there is an equibrium between young trees that are storing carbon and old dying trees that release the carbon as they are broken down."

assuming static growth yes this is true. However growth in North America is increasing at an amazing rate. By definition this means that it is sequestering more Carbon. Increased growth is not just in area, but also in the quality and rate of growth in existing plant life.

In fact one of the key suppositions in Mann's proxy data was that warm climate was indicated by larger (wider) tree rings. And that this was not only indicative of greater warmth, but also increased CO2, in other words Mann grants that a warmer climate with more CO2 increases plant growth, i.e. is good.

"Do you have a reference for that?" shallow search: Possible aerosol cloud effects now range from no effect to a near total masking of the alleged manmade greenhouse effect Consumer Alert, a 501 (c)(3) organization

DOE: ."We show that GHG signal uncertainties are associated with errors in simulating the current climate in uncoupled and coupled climate models, the possible omission of relevant feedbacks..."

cloud effects "statement on feedbacks omits an important assumption about the largest positive feedback in the models considered in IPCC 1995--that water vapor in the upper troposphere is assumed to amplify the warming from the minor greenhouse gases.(17) Both theoretical (18) and observational (19) research suggest that this assumption is flawed. Indeed, the feedback may be negative."

Another consequence is that one cannot even calculate the temperature of the Earth without models that accurately reproduce the motions of the atmosphere."Indeed, present models have large errors here--on the order of 50 percent. Not surprisingly, those models are unable to calculate correctly either the present average temperature of the Earth or the temperature ranges from the equator to the poles. Rather, the models are adjusted or "tuned'' to get those quantities approximately right. "

You can find sideline references in many articles, but there are few direct articles because it is such a politically heated subject.

"what was it? 2 to 7 degrees C over the next 100 years?"

Yes it was, and a review of the high end models. Namely HadCM2, CGCM1, ECHAM4/OPCY3, GFDL and HadCM3. the spread of these for the next 100 Years was 2 to 7 degrees C. More importantly the same models show these same models showed warming of 1.5 degrees C in the 20th century. The 20 the century being over we have this data. These same models were off by 300% (actual warming in the 20th century North America), actual NA warming was approx 0.5 Degrees C. The majority of which occurred before 1940, and the majority of industrially produced CO2.

Agreed the debate is about how much, and how much of it is influenced by man (anthropogenic). More importantly the second debate is whether this is a bad thing or not. Fortunately we have real data for this. i.e. Life has flourished in all previous warm climates, and reduced during global cold climate. Cold climate increases fossil fuel usage, and is much more dangerous to animals, plants, and humans. While warm climates reduce fossil fuel usage, is beneficial to animals plants and humans. The only exception is Deserts. But of course that effect is due to the lack of moisture, not temperature.

Though an interesting effect is that we see the majority of day time temperature highs in desert while areas on equvalent latitudes, with large plant growth and water see much less warming. Showing that the thermal inertia of water has a dramatic effect.

In 1977 the United States announced the successful underground detonation of an atomic weapon made from civil plutonium - in 1962. In a Department of Energy publication on weapons nonproliferation it says "Virtually any combination of plutonium isotopes -- the different forms of an element having different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei -- can be used to make a nuclear weapon." The report goes on to say "While reactor-grade plutonium has a slightly larger critical mass than weapon-grade plutonium (meaning that somewhat more material would be needed for a bomb), this would not be a major impediment for design of either crude or sophisticated nuclear weapons." It even evaluates how the ability of the organization building the weapon affects the scenario - " At the lowest level of sophistication, a potential proliferating state or subnational group using designs and technologies no more sophisticated than those used in first-generation nuclear weapons could build a nuclear weapon from reactor-grade plutonium that would have an assured, reliable yield of one or a few kilotons (and a probable yield significantly higher than that)."

That's a bad thing, but what really worries me is that the management of the Sellafield plant are probably right that the missing material was not removed from the facility. They are using the plutonium in the creation of Mixed OXide fuel (MOX), a mixture of plutonium- and uranium oxide fit for normal nuclear power plants. The process involved includes various complicated cutting, soaking, and moving activities which must be done remotely due to the extreme radiation hazard. Due to the reactions of the various substances involved, this process also results in accelerated and unusual state changes in the materials. So they're not really sure what happened to the stuff - where it may be lying around or how much of it has turned into what - even though it is still under their control. There wasn't an accounting error - they can't account for the stuff because their accounting system doesn't work. They don't understand the process well enough to predict the outcome. And that scares me.

The "Cold" in Cold fusion relates to the fusion phenomenon occuring at temperatures way colder than current (working) fusion reactors work at.

Normal thermonuclear fusion reactors operate at around 100 million degrees Celsius. (see abstract at http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio .jsp?osti_id=7146984)

In the sun, at extremely high densities, thermonuclear fusion is able to take place at much colder temperatures, around 15 million degrees Celsius. (see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/p rocyc.html#c1)

Cold fusion refers to fusion taking place at temperatures almost a million times colder than that - around room temperature, 25 degrees Celsius.

An interesting cold fusion product is available from Clean Energy Technologies Inc. A news article about is found here: http://www.padrak.com/ine/CFARNOSIX.html.

HTH.

If you want to change the world's energy cycles you're going to need something with at least 20 times the productivity of standard farm crops, like the UNH biodiesel-from-algae thing.

The "UNH biodiesel-from-algae" thing is in part based on a DOE study that ran from 1978 to 1996. You can read the close-out report here.

The UNH web pages glosses over a number of real show stoppers. Consider this quote from the UNH web page;

"There are solutions to these problems, but for the purpose of this paper, we will focus instead on the potential such ponds can promise, ignoring for the moment the methods of addressing the solvable challenges remaining when the Aquatic Species Program at NREL ended."

Ok, you go ahead and focus on promises. I'll read the NREL paper. When I do this I learn about how it's damn near impossible to maintain homogenous "pond" species because invaders drift in and quickly displace whatever I'm trying to milk for oil (at one point they gave up and tried to see what they would get from whatever happened to grow.) I find out I need truly staggering quantities of CO2 to get it to grow (coal-fired power plant scale supply.) I find out that small variations in temperature stifles production or kills the crop. I learn that solar efficiency averaged 10%, less than the best solar cells.

That UNH thing is typical of so many advocates; spin all the parameters in the best possible light to prove the alternative is viable, and conclude that current practice is sheer stupidity.

There are two solutions to the soot problem. There are diesel oxidation catalysts that get rid of much of the problem (cost ~$500/car), or soot filters that get rid of almost all of the problem (cost ~several $1000's per car).

You can also combine the two.

I think if biodiesel begins to take off, we can expect soot-reducing technologies to come down in price.

If not for that, and Toyota Siennas and Subaru Outbacks do not tow trailers, I'd have something else - probably a minivan of some sort. Our other vehicle is a Toyota Corolla (Pontiac Vibe actually, rebadged Toyota) which gets used for 80% of our driving (literally), so we're not suffering that much for mileage.

What cracks me up (not really, it's frustrating) though is that US Manufacturers that do sell diesels do not do it for mileage purposes, but only for larger trucks that require heavy load capacities. They only sell large diesels. I'm assuming it's to do with the available diesel fuel and emissions. Checkout this study by Cummins (1 of the big 3 diesel engine companies in the US) on building a light diesel for the Durango. I'd love to see a smaller diesel motor such as this combined with a hybrid setup like GM is working on.

As an alternative to the above, I think that California has a good idea with mandating hydrogen pumping stations by 2010. I think the use of hydrogen in vehicles is being hampered by a chicken and egg type of problem, there will be no vehicles w/o the fuel, and no fuel without the vehicles. I think this will remove that for car manufacturers, and hopefully the public will latch on and buy.

To the parent poster - what do you drive with a 5.7L engine that's not a block - a Corvette, or something from Daimler-Chrysler with the Hemi?

So, basically, the current nuclear economy goes: Uranium Ore get refined, used in plant, produces spent rods, rods (can) get recycled. I rustled up a page on Uranium Deposits, which I can try to figure out the max amount of energy we can pull out of them, and that guide.

It looks like from some of the DoE literature that all plutonium is coming from spent rods too. So that can be taken into account too.

This is the kind of things I like to know when people start telling nuclear power is the way to go. I wish I wouldn't have dozed so much in college physics :)

the karma. But I have been on slashdot for over 4 years now and this is the first story I have seen about my old University.

Point of interest:
One of our Profs got the (joint) Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for Buckminsterfullerene - the third form of solid carbon. My final year project was based on the stuff. Woo!

Yay to Sussex - it is a lovely place and some of the happiest times of my life. Any campus with 8 seperate bars has to be a cool place to spend a few years.

I think there might be potential health risks to radio frequency radiation. But not enough to be concerned about.

I would ask each of those parents if they heard anything about the Plowshares project. Back in the 1960s the US government allowed this project to explore the economic potential of nuclear excavation on Nevada soil, among other places. Who knows how many other toxic or radioactive projects have existed or been in direct contact with the public. Anyone who thinks that WiFi, cell phone, TV and radio signals are harmful needs to look around them. I'm sure they can find something far more dangerous to their children than a little RF. How about each of those SUVs passing them by at 30 mph only 5 feet away as they stroll down the sidewalk.

I quoted from the beginning of the paper. Further down, it seems that all roads, even "smooth" ones, have small bumps. I think that rather than smooth road they meant "typical US highway". See http://www.osti.gov/hvt/2001-01-2071.pdf.

This article made me think "hey, what about regerative shock absorbers?" Not "natural vibrations", but anyway ... it was being studied (PDF), as of 2001 anyway. That paper says that based on experiments, "the average vehicle on the average road driving at 45 mph might be able to recover up to 70% of the power that is needed for such a vehicle to travel on a smooth road at 45 mph". Anyone know of more current research or implementation plans?

It's packed with information covering everything from the very first game ever made (Spacewar, student Steve Russell while at MIT) onward.

I thought the first videogame was "Tennis for Two".

Space War had a high-resolution dot display (not raster pixels, not vectors - dots). You can play it if you download a copy of MESS. It wasn't a prototype or experiment - it was a very popular game, with a tournament league and ongoing development.

Space War wasn't actually the first video game either, though - that's believed to have been a Pong-like game played on an oscilloscope display. The first actual Pong game was Baer's, playable on a TV set with the Odyssey - Bushnell just commissioned an arcade version (from you know who). I'm not particularly sure if Bushnell is the "father" of anything (what's people's obsession with identifying one originator, anyway? Plain old hero worship?), but he obviously did a lot to popularise coinop video games. Mixed blessing though that is. ;)

is the term you are looking for. Fuel is apparently still too cheap to make them worthwhile for things like cars; people would rather pay for the extra gas. AFAIK, even heavy trucks are still not using turbocompounding to squeeze the extra few percent out of their diesels. This is odd, because I read about Caterpillar designing a near-adiabatic diesel with turbocompounding around a decade ago, yett there's nothing on the market (but at least they're talking about it).

So nuclear bombs are not the same as atomic bombs. They are way more 'dirty'.

"The United States conducted 215 atmospheric (includes 5 underwater) tests from 1945 to 1963." - U.S. Department of Energy, Office of the Press Secretary

Sorry, I can't find the reference to the distance it covered off hand. I heard it on news reports (TV not web).

It is nonetheless simple logic with the jetstream going from west to east. I will keep looking for the ref.

All though Spacewar often gets credit as the first video game in 1962, William Higinbotham an employee at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, NY had a working Pong-like game in 1958.

Designed from an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope, Brookhaven Lab was promptly besieged by players who waited on line for hours to get their chance to play.

Higinbotham never patented his device.

Definitely. This is why ISI and publishers including Elsevier put so much effort into lobbying congress, through the Software Information Industry Association, to cut funding to the PubScience database project. They've got their sights set on PubMed (as distinction from PubMed Central), next.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but do you really think they'd admit just how much firepower we have? One of the prime issues in the missle defense system is not the threat of a superpower like Russia, but rogue states like Iraq, India, or even China developing long range weapons capable of reaching and causing mass-destruction in the U.S. Never mind the merits of that, but in light of the potential threats of such nations, do you really think the *real* answer as to how much firepower we have is just going to be right there available to everyone in the world? "Hey, guys, come and get us, this is all we've got!"

Sure, "all we've got," according to those numbers is still quite a bit; I just doubt, in the interest of national security, that the actual figure is anywhere near that.

The US nuclear arsenal is less than 3,000 megatons of explosive yield. Russia's nuclear arsenal has been estimated to have a comparable yield. While this is enough, if properly targetted, to kill a large proportion of the humans on Earth, it isn't remotely enough to "destroy all life on Earth". As a point of reference, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens has been estimated to have released 450 megatons of energy.

jabber wrote:
We've all seen nuclear power fail,

What are you referring to?

The reason there is a bad reputation in the nuke industry is cost-cutting, pure and simple.

The nuke industry has the best safety record of the entire American power industry.

Running equipment to the point of failure, minimal staffing, letting inspections slide...

?!?

with a set of nuclear anchors bolstering the grid in times of peak demand - and selling the power abroad in low demand.

You're, um, going to ship the excess power out of the country? Wouldn't that be kind of expensive? Since nuclear is a base power technology, how about if we build just enough plants to cover the base demand and use gas turbines and solid oxide fuel cells (they convert natural gas directly to electricity) for medium and peak power.

Here are a couple of excellent resources for learning about nuclear power:

The nuclear energy option : an alternative for the 90s Bernard L. Cohen
(used to be called Before its too late : a scientist's case for nuclear energy)

The war against the atom Samuel McCracken